Hi I’m John Green, this is Crash Course US History,
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and today we're going to tell the story of how a group of plucky English people struck a blow for religious freedom,
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and founded the greatest, freest and fattest nation the world has ever seen.
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[Libertage]
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These Brits entered a barren land containing no people,
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and quickly invented the automobile, baseball and Star Trek and we all lived happily ever after.
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Mr. Green, Mr. Green, if it is really that simple, I am so getting an A in this class.
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Oh, me from the past, you're just a delight.
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[Theme Music]
Jamestown, Virginia: The First Successful English Colony
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So most Americans grew up hearing that the United States was founded by pasty English people
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who came here to escape religious persecution.
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And that's true of the small proportion of people who settled in the Massachusetts Bay
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and created what we now know is New England.
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But these Pilgrims and Puritans, there's a difference, weren’t the first people
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or even the first Europeans to come to the only part of the globe we didn't paint over.
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In fact they weren’t the first English people.
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The first English people came to Virginia.
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Off topic but how weird is it that the first permanent English colony in the Americas was named
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not for Queen Elizabeth’s epicness but for her supposed chastity.
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Right anyway, those first English settlers weren't looking for religious freedom, they wanted to get rich.
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So the first successful English colony in America was founded in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.
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I say "successful" because there were two previous attempts to colonize the region.
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They were both epic failures.
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The more famous of which was the colony of Roanoke Island set up by Sir Walter Raleigh,
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which is famous because all the colonists disappeared leaving only the word "Croatoan" on carved into a tree.
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Jamestown was a project of the Virginia Company,
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which existed to make money for its investors, something it never did.
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The hope was that they would find gold in the Chesapeake region like the Spanish had in South America,
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so there were a disproportionate number of goldsmiths
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and jewelers there to fancy up that gold which of course did not exist.
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Anyway, it turns out that jewelers dislike farming --
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so much so, that Captain John Smith who soon took over control of the island once said
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that they would rather starve than farm.
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So in the first year, half of the colonists died.
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400 replacements came, but, by 1610, after a gruesome winter called "The Starving Time,"
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the number of colonists had dwindled to 65.
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And eventually word got out that the new world’s 1 year survival rate was
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like 20% and it became harder to find new colonists.
The Headright System, Indentured Servants, and Slavery in Jamestown
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But 1618, a Virginia company hit upon a recruiting strategy called the headright system
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which offered 50 acres of land for each person that a settler paid to bring over.
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And this enabled the creation of a number of large estates,
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which were mostly worked on and populated by indentured servants.
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Indentured servants weren't quite slaves, but they were kind of temporary slaves.
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Like they could be bought and sold and they had to do what their masters commanded.
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But after seven to ten years of that, if they weren't dead,
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they were paid their freedom dues which they hoped would allow them to buy farms of their own.
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Sometimes that worked out, but often either the money wasn't enough to buy a farm,
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or else they were too dead to collect it.
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Even more ominously in 1619, just 12 years after the founding of Jamestown,
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the first shipment of African slaves arrived in Virginia.
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So the colony probably would have continued to struggle along,
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if they hadn't found something that people really loved: tobacco.
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Tobacco had been grown in Mexico since at least 1000 BCE,
Tobacco Plantations in the Virginia Colony
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but the Europeans had never seen it and it proved to be kind of a
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"thank you for the small pox; here's some lung cancer” gift from the natives.
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Interestingly King James hated smoking.
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He called it “a custom loathsome to the eye and hateful to the nose"
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but he loved him some tax revenue, and nothing sells like drugs.
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By 1624 Virginia was producing more than 200,000 pounds of tobacco per year.
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By the 1680s, more than 30 million pounds per year.
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Tobacco was so profitable the colonists created huge plantations with very little in the way of towns
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or infrastructure to hold the social order together, a strategy that always works out brilliantly.
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The industry also structured Virginian society.
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First off, most of the people who came in the 17th century, three-quarters of them, were servants.
Class Structure in the Virginia Colony
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So Virginia became a microcosm of England:
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a small class of wealthy landowners sitting atop a mass of servants.
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That sounds kind of dirty but it was mostly just sad.
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The society was also overwhelmingly male, because male servants were more useful in the tobacco fields,
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they were the greatest proportion of immigrants.
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In fact they outnumbered women 5 to 1.
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The women who did come over were mostly indentured servants,
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and if they were to marry, which they often did because they were in great demand,
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they had to wait until their term of service was up.
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This meant delayed marriage which meant fewer children which further reduced the number of females.
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Life was pretty tough for these women, but on the upside Virginia was kind of a swamp of pestilence,
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so their husbands often died, and that created a small class of widows or even unmarried women who,
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because of their special status, could make contracts and own property, so that was good, sort of.
The Maryland Colony
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OK. A quick word about Maryland.
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Maryland was the second Chesapeake Colony, founded in 1632,
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and by now there was no messing around with joint stock companies.
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Maryland was a proprietorship: a massive land grant to a single individual named Cecilius Calvert.
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Calvert wanted to turn Maryland into like a medieval feudal kingdom to benefit himself and his family,
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and he was no fan of the representational institutions that were developing in Virginia.
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Also Calvert was Catholic, and Catholics were welcome in Maryland which wasn't always the case elsewhere.
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Speaking of which, let's talk about Massachusetts.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony
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So Jamestown might have been the first English colony, but Massachusetts Bay is probably better known.
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This is largely because the colonists who came there were so recognizable for their beliefs and also for their hats.
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That’s right. I’m talking about the Pilgrims and the Puritans.
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And no, I will not be talking about Thanksgiving
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...is a lie. I can’t help myself.
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But only to clear up the difference between Pilgrims and Puritans and also to talk about Squanto.
Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and the First Thanksgiving
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God I love me some Squanto. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
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Most of the English men and women who settled in New England were uber-Protestant Puritans
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who believed the Protestant Church of England was still too Catholic-y
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with its kneeling and incense and extravagantly-hatted archbishops.
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The particular Puritans who, by the way did not call themselves that -- other people did,
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who settled in new England were called Congregationalists
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because they thought congregations should determine leadership and worship structures, not bishops.
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The Pilgrims were even more extreme.
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They wanted to separate more or less completely from the Church of England.
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So first they fled to the Netherlands, but the Dutch were apparently too corrupt for them,
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so they rounded up investors and financed a new colony in 1620.
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They were supposed to land in Virginia, but in what perhaps should have been taken as an omen,
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they were blown wildly off course and ended up in what's now Massachusetts, founding a colony called Plymouth.
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While still on board their ship the Mayflower,
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41 of the 150 or so colonists wrote and signed an agreement called the Mayflower Compact,
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in which they all bound themselves to follow "just and equal laws" that their chosen representatives would write-up.
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Since this was the first written framework for government in the US, it's kind of a big deal.
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But anyway, the Pilgrims had the excellent fortune of landing in Massachusetts with 6 weeks before winter,
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and they had the good sense not to bring very much food with them or any farm animals.
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Half of them died before winter was out.
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The only reason they didn't all die was that local Indians led by Squanto gave them food and saved them.
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A year later, grateful that they had survived mainly due to the help of an alliance with the local chief Massasoit,
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and because the Indians had taught them how to plant corn and where to catch fish,
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the Pilgrims held a big feast: the first Thanksgiving. Thanks Thought Bubble!
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And by the way, that feast was on the fourth Thursday in November,
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not mid-October as is celebrated in some of these green areas we call Not America.
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Anyway Squanto was a pretty amazing character and not only because he helped save the Pilgrims.
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He found that almost all of his tribe, the Patuxet had been wiped out by disease
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and eventually settled with the Pilgrims on the site of his former village and then died...
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of disease because it is always ruining everything.
Governance in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
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So the Pilgrims struggled on until 1691
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when their colony was subsumed by the larger and much more successful Massachusetts Bay Colony.
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The Massachusetts Bay colony was chartered in 1629 by London merchants who,
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like the founders of the Virginia Company, hoped to make money.
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But unlike Virginia, the board of directors relocated from England to America,
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which meant that in Massachusetts they had a greater degree of autonomy and self-government than they did in Virginia.
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Social unity was also much more important in Massachusetts than it was in Virginia.
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The Puritans' religious mission meant that the common good was, at least at first,
