New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America

“Originally, the term ‘American’ referred to Indians, the first Americans. By the time of the Revolution, it designated England’s former colonists who were creating a new nation. The colonists who dressed as Mohawk Indians to dump British tea into Boston Harbor in 1774 were not trying to disguise themselves. They were proclaiming a new, American identity.”

The colonists who orchestrated the Boston Tea Party (which actually occurred in December 1773) believed that they were resisting tyranny. Their decision to dress as Mohawks while fighting for liberty has symbolic significance. It reinforces a historical argument that Calloway introduces near the end of Chapter 9: Many colonists were impressed by the degree of liberty Indigenous Americans enjoyed. This quotation supports the idea that Indigenous Americans “imprint[ed]” themselves on Europeans.

“The clash of Indians and Europeans is often depicted as one between hunters and farmers, but in the Potomac Valley, as in many other places, it was precisely the similarities between the two groups’ subsistence cycles and farming techniques that made the competition for the best lands so deadly and made the outcome so catastrophic for Native peoples.”

Europeans and Indigenous Americans developed similar qualities no matter where they came into contact. Life in the Potomac Valley—for example Maryland and Virginia—posed unique challenges. Indigenous Americans helped colonists learn how to grow tobacco, and Chesapeake planters prospered as a result. Tobacco dictated everything, especially in colonial Virginia, where a few emigrant landowners grew wealthy and nearly replicated the English aristocracy in America. Cultivating tobacco required a great deal of labor, which first took the form of indentured servants and later African slaves. Most of all, tobacco depleted the soil; planters always needed more land. The combination of these factors–Virginia’s opulence, surging population, and especially tobacco’s soil-exhausting quality—intensified pressure on Virginia’s Native tribes. Had those tribes consisted of nomadic hunters rather than agriculturalists who valued the land for many of the same reasons Europeans did, the Virginians’ push westward might not have produced such deadly conflict.