CHAPTER 3: SETTLEMENT AND
IMMIGRATION
MOTHER OF EXILES
Immigration = central aspect of US history
It is a major reason that the nation’s total population grew
Over the centuries of massive immigration and the struggles of newcomers and Americans to
adjust each other, the view that the nature of the nation was and should be a composite of
many national backgrounds, races and cultures gained popular acceptance
↔ this view continues to face the opposition of those who believe newcomers
should leave their homeland cultures behind and the dilemma of deciding what is
necessary to hold the country and its increasingly diverse population together
Americans core idealism, pride and naivety = embodied in Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New
Colossus”. This is displayed inside the base of the Statue of Liberty
The meetings of newcomers and native-born have also contributed to America’s history of social
disorder
o Contacts, conflicts and mixing of cultures have fueled widespread discrimination,
economic exploitation, anti-foreign movements and debates over equality,
opportunity and national identity
o America = country whose history began with the meeting of Native Americans and
European colonists and continued through the importation of African slaves and
several waves of immigrants, there has never been a single national culture.
Although for centuries a majority of Anglo-Americans made vigorous efforts to
establish one
EARLY ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN EUROPEANS AND NATIVE AMERICANS
- there never has been one American culture
- 1400’s: European explorers and settlers encountered Native Americans
→ Long history of mutual incomprehension and conflict began
- When we discovered the US, it wasn’t empty of course
o there had been 10 million native Americans who used to live there
o one of the problems of the natives were that they spoke more than 100 different
languages, they barely understood all of them so that made it difficult to oppose
against the intruders
3 different levels where things went wrong:
o health: Europeans brought diseases with them. These 2 cultures made one another
sick, physically. 50% off all Europeans that migrated, died of diseases. Contacts
between the Americas and other continents had been so rare that plants, animals,
diseases and human societies evolved into different forms in the ‘new” and the ‘old’
worlds. Europeans and Native Americans caught diseases from each other.
Europeans survived the first contacts better, but for most of the 17th century well
over half of them died from difficulties in adjusting to the new environment.
o Religion: Different views of religion. White people who came to the new world, were
protestant. What kind of protestant? Largely a protestant community, who were
propelled by its religion to go abroad. Religion inspired. Whether your catholic or
protestant, all these Europeans believed in a personal God. Sort personal
relationship we and God. This was unknown to the Natives, they were pantists.
, Someone who isn’t going to reward you if you are nice or good. Pantism breaks that
hierarchy, and treat all living things equally. Europeans saw themselves as centre of
the universe. Every fight between them, has been a fight over land and property
o land/trade: To Europeans land meant something to be sold, bought, etc. American
nature was wilderness. And it was your task as a protestant, to turn this in God’s
garden i.e. to civilize nature. it was for you to claim, to profitable. Natives consider
land sacred something to be worshiped, admired,… They quarrelled over the
different meaning of land.
o The exchange of plants and animals had effects that were just as far-reaching;
horses, donkeys, sheep, pigs and cows were alien creatures to Native Americans.
Potatoes, maize, and tobacco were discoveries to Europeans. The potato played a
key role in the great population growth that brought millions of European and
smaller numbers of Asian immigrants to the US in the 1800’s
-> ongoing fight between Europeans and Native Americans
- not one single contract in that entire history that was not sooner or later broken by the white men
From the very 1st European settlement until today, the main focus in conflict between these
continental culture systems has been landownership
THE FOUNDERS
The people who established the colonies are considered founders rather than immigrants
because they created the customs, laws and institutions to which later arrivals had to adjust
immigrants came from everywhere
St. Augustin, Florida 1565
o less prominent
o The Spanish occupied coastal Florida, the Southwest and California in 1500’s and
1600’s
o The tried to enslave the natives + worked to convert them to Christianity, farming
and sheepherding. Many natives rejected this way of life therefore the Spanish
colonies faced border attacks
1619: 1 S T AFRICAN LABOURERS AS INDENTURED SERVANTS
o (i.e. free people who contracted for 5 to 7 years of servitude)
o scarcity of plantation labour. 1st African labourers were imported as indentured
servants
o import of future slaves, they were originally not imported as slaves. They were
shipped to America as indentured servants i.e. people who were shipped to America,
who did not have the money to have a plane ticket, they were payed to come to
America but there was a deal. They had to work for an American for several years
and afterwards you were free. Sometimes up to 7 years. This lead to free labour in
American houses. Slavery emerged almost naturally. Slavery was there from the
beginning, it was cheap.
o The English established their 1st permanent settlement at Jamestown, Virginia in
1607
Their monarch had no desire to rule distant colonies therefore the Crown
legalized companies that undertook the colonization of America as private
commercial enterprises
1620: PILGRIMS (SEPARATISTS, MAYFLOWER)
, o It is thought that America was discovered by people with a ship called the
Mayflower, but this is wrong. 2 stages i.e. group of protestants mainly from England,
they arrived with a ship called Mayflower in 1620. However that experiment
floundered, the community never flourished because of diseases. It was indeed the
1st organized ‘group trip’ to America, but it never cut root. They basically died within
a generation. Pilgrims were protestants of the most radical stand. They thought that
Europe was rotten to the core, sick and dying. They were separatists i.e. they had
gone to the new world to never come back again. You could compare this to a kind of
Utopia.
o they founded the 1st of the Northern colonies in 1620 at Plymouth, Massachusetts.
1630: PURITANS (REFORMERS, ARBELLA)
o group of people who entered America with a ship called Arbella, they did succeed.
Puritans were also protestants and in overdrive. “Someone who dreads the idea that
someone might be having fun”. The Puritans were no separatists, they went to
America to set an example to create a model society to please God. But they wanted
to return, they wanted to export back to Europe. They wanted to be a model to the
Christian world. Seeds of American imperialism are religious, this is where it all
sprouted in the believe that the world was awaiting to be saved. Humanity’s last
chance of hope. Direct line between puritans and Donald trump i.e. kind of
continuity, religious believe that you must save the world.
o They established the much larger Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630
Founding of middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania)
NEW AMSTERDAM
extreme tolerance and diversity of this city. Even in the early days (east coast) they were
diverse before it became a fact. They spoke 18 languages
The earliest European communities here were Dutch and Swedish outposts of the fur trade
that almost accidentally grew into colonies
Before it became New York, the city had white, red, brown and black inhabitants; institutions
for Catholics, Jews and Protestants; and a diversity that resulted in 18 different languages
being spoken
Although the dominant culture in colonial New York and New Jersey became English by the
end of the 1600s, the English authorities continued the tolerant traditions of the Dutch in the
city
Pennsylvania’s founders
o were Quakers who flocked to the colony after Charles II granted the area to William
Penn, an aristocratic Quaker in 1681 as a religious refuge
THE FOUR WAVES OF IMMIGRATION
THE FIRST WAVE: COLONIAL IMMIGRATION, 1680-1776
the first wave ended in ’76, day that America almost became accidently independent. Who
were they? The biggest ones were the Scots and the Irish (+- 50.000), slaves, Irish were
sometimes slaves too, Germans and 50.000 English convicts. They deserved a second chance.
By ’76 the English dominance of this new world had dwindled to a 52%. Migration was a
problem from day one. By ’76 20% was of African American origin. Independence lasted a
while.
, The founders had come for economic gain and religious freedom, but their descendants gave
the first large wave of European newcomers a warm welcome only if they were willing to
conform to the Anglo-American culture and supply needed labour
Reception that immigrants receives varied according to location
St. Jean de Crévecoeur, immigrant farmer from France, first stated in 1782 the idea that in
America “All individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of man”. He thought that
the white people along the wilderness frontier, like the Native Americans soon descended
into savage barbarism, and he tolerated them primarily because they provide a protective
buffer against the natives
This 1st wave was possibly because after 1660 the Crown opposed emigration from England
and Wales but encouraged it from other nations.
o The Royal African Company was licensed as the supplier of slaves to English colonies
The largest group of immigrants = the Scots-Irish
o With encouragement from the English, their ancestors left Scotland for Northern
Ireland in the 1500s. A quarter of a million of them left Northern Ireland after 1680
because of economic discrimination by the English. Most paid their passage across
the Atlantic by becoming indentured servants. When their term of service was
finished they usually took their freedom dues and settled on the frontier where land
was cheapest. They are the source of the stereotype of frontier folk
The German immigrants aroused more opposition than the Scots-Irish. They believed their
descendants had to learn German if their religion and culture were to survive in North
America. They lived on the frontier like the Germans. They showed little interest in colonial
politics. German prosperity: they were too successful, according to their envious neighbours.
The reception Germans met also varied according to whether they were non-conformists,
reformed Lutherans or Catholics
England sent some convicts and poor people as indentured servants to ease problems at
home while supplying the labour-starved colonial economy, and these people formed an
underclass that quickly Americanized.
Immigration from Ireland include thousands of single male Irish Catholic indentured servants
The Scots followed a pattern more like that of the Germans, using compact settlement,
religion, schooling and family networks to preserve their culture for generations in rural
areas
The first wave of immigration transformed the demography of the colonies. The great diversity of
the peoples in the country led Thomas Paine, the colonies’ most famous political agitator to call
the US “a nation of nations” at its founding. African American slaves were a majority in large
parts of the southern colonies. Most Native American cultures had been forced inland to the
Appalachians or beyond. Non-English peoples were a majority in most coastal towns,
Pennsylvania, the South and parts of all the other colonies
THE SECOND WAVE: THE “OLD” IMMIGRATION, 1820-90
Scandinavian people, Dutch people, Britons, Irish and Jews because of anti-Semitism. US was
attractive because of its great amount of land, availability, fear of religious prosecution,
economic instability.
o But also French Canadians, Chinese, Swiss and Dutch came in large numbers. The
factor that pulled people to the US was an apparently unlimited supply of land,
another was work. The US needed both skilled and unskilled labour.
Other pull factors were: land giveaways such as the Homestead Act of 1862
and the discovery of gold in California
Between 1776-1820: immigration decreased
