Week 2 · Chapter

Chapter 2 — Colonization & Empire

U.S. History to 1877 Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~45–55 minutes · Objectives 1 and 2 · Read it first this week, before the lecture and the slide deck.

In plain language

This week is about how four European powers built colonies in North America, and what that meant for the Native nations who already lived there. An empire is a country that rules lands and peoples far beyond its own borders. A colony is a settlement planted on that distant land and run, at first, from back home. You will read two real documents: a king's charter, which is a written grant of rights, and the Mayflower Compact, a promise a group of settlers made to one another. You will also learn to tell a claim a document supports from a claim that reaches past it.

Why you already care about this

Picture a merchant in London in 1606, reading a paper someone has slid across the counter. It invites the merchant to buy a share in a voyage across the ocean. The paper promises land, trade, perhaps gold, and the king's own approval. If you were that merchant, you would have to decide whether to put your savings into a place you will never see.

Now picture the people who already live in that place. Nobody hands them the paper. Nobody asks whether the land is theirs to give. The deal is real, it is signed, and they are not in it.

That gap, between the people who wrote the founding papers and the people those papers affected, runs through this whole week. You will meet it in Virginia in 1606 and 1607, and again at Cape Cod in 1620. Your job is the one you started in Week 1: read each document for who made it, when, and why, and for what it leaves out.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

define empire, colony, and charter, and compare how Spain, France, the Dutch Republic, and England built colonies;
source the First Charter of Virginia and the Mayflower Compact by origin, date, type, and host;
put St. Augustine, the Virginia charter, Jamestown, and the Mayflower Compact in order and measure the gaps;
tell a claim that shows what a source says from one that goes beyond it;
explain trade, alliance, war, and dispossession between colonists and Native nations.

Hook to keep: a founding paper speaks for its signers, not for everyone.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 taught you what history is and the four moves of historical thinking. You used them on the first meetings between the Americas and Europe, up to 1607.
This week: empire, colony, and charter; four empires compared; the First Charter of Virginia; Jamestown; the Mayflower Compact; three English colonial regions; and trade, alliance, and war between colonists and Native nations.
How they connect: every document this week gets the same four moves you practiced in Week 1, in the same order.
Where we're going next: Week 3, Colonial Society & the Origins of Slavery, looks at labor in the colonies and how colonial law built slavery that passed from parent to child.

Week 1 gave you the four moves of historical thinking. Sourcing asks who made a source, when, why, and for whom. Contextualization places it in what was happening around it. Close reading asks what it says and what it leaves out. Corroboration checks it against other sources. Week 1 also ended with St. Augustine, founded in 1565, and Jamestown, founded in 1607. This week starts at that edge and moves forward.

1. Define the week's words: empire, colony, and charter

Think about a coffee chain that opens a new shop in a city far from its headquarters. The new shop has its own manager. Its menu, its prices, and its rules still come from the main office. The shop belongs to a larger business that reaches well beyond its home town.

Spain, France, the Dutch Republic, and England each ran overseas holdings in a similar way, with far higher stakes. Here are the definitions you will use all term:

An empire is a state that rules lands and peoples beyond its own borders.
A colony is a settlement planted on distant land and governed, at first, from the home country.
A charter is a written grant of rights from a ruler, stating who may settle where and with what powers.

The comparison has a limit, and it is an important one. A coffee shop rents its space. A colony took land that other people already lived on and governed. That is why the word dispossession matters this week: taking a people's land from them, by force, by pressure, or by bargains made on unequal terms.

Spain was already in North America before any English colony. In 1565 Spain founded St. Augustine, in Florida, on Timucua land. You met it in Week 1, and it stays the older settlement all week.

Misconception check. Students often think a colony was empty land that settlers filled. That is tempting, because maps from the period often show colonies as blank spaces with a European name. But every colony in this chapter sat on land Native nations already lived on and governed. The cure is to ask, of every colony, whose land it was before the charter.

2. Compare four empires: missions, furs, and farms

Imagine three businesses that all open branches in the same faraway region. One wants to recruit members to its organization. One wants to buy a local product and ship it home. One wants to move its own workers in to stay. Each would treat the people already living there very differently.

Four European powers built colonies in North America, and historians usually compare them by what each one wanted. The descriptions below are standard historical usage, taught in words.

Spain built around missions and mines. A mission is a religious settlement where priests worked to convert Native people to Christianity. Spanish mines were worked by forced Native labor.
France and the Dutch Republic built around the fur trade: the exchange of beaver and other furs, trapped by Native hunters, for European goods such as metal tools, kettles, cloth, and beads.
England built around settler farms and towns, which brought many families and needed large amounts of Native land.

The fur trade changed what a colony needed. A fur post could not run without Native hunters, so traders needed Native nations as partners and allies. The New Netherland Institute describes how furs reached the Dutch post at Fort Orange through Mohawk country. A farming colony needed something else: the land itself.

Worked example — what each colony needed. You sort the four empires by their main aim, then ask what each aim required from Native nations.

Spain: missions and mines. It needed Native people's labor and their conversion.
France: the fur trade. It needed Native hunters and allies.
The Dutch Republic: the fur trade. It also needed Native hunters and allies.
England: settler farms and towns. It needed Native land.

In words: two empires depended on trade with Native nations, one depended on Native labor, and one depended on Native land. Each pattern harmed Native nations differently, and none of them asked first.

Misconception check. Students often think the colonies were all the same kind of place with different flags. That is tempting, because the word colony covers all of them. But a mission, a fur post, and a farming town wanted different things from the people around them. The cure is to ask what each colony needed: labor, trade, or land.

3. Read the First Charter of Virginia: what its makers wanted

Think about the paperwork for a new business. Before anyone opens the door, someone writes down who owns it, what it may do, and what it promises to deliver. That paper tells you what the owners wanted before the first customer walked in.

England's first successful colony started with that kind of paper. In 1606 King James I granted the First Charter of Virginia to a group of investors. The charter calls them adventurers, a word that then meant people who risked money on a venture. In paraphrase, it names the London group's settlement the first Colony.

Worked example — sourcing the charter. Walk the first move one question at a time.

Who made it: King James I of England.
What it is: a royal charter, a grant of land and powers to the investors of the Virginia Company.
When: its own last lines date it to the tenth day of April in the fourth year of the king's reign, which is 10 April 1606. The Avalon Project's heading gives the same date.
Where you read it: the Avalon Project keeps the text.
Whom it was for: investors in England, not anyone living in Virginia.

Now read closely. The charter states a religious motive. You will see this phrase all week:

"in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness"

That phrase describes the people of Virginia as living "in Darkness", which is the charter's view of them, not their own account. In the lines that follow, the charter goes on to call them by insulting terms of its time. This course quotes only the pinned phrase, and our own voice never adopts that language.

The charter wanted something else too. In paraphrase, another clause gives the colonists the right to dig for gold, silver, and copper, and keeps a fifth of the gold and silver for the Crown. Profit and religion sit side by side in the same document.

The reading in one plain sentence: the charter shows the aims of the king and his investors, religion and profit; it is not evidence of what the people on that land wanted.

Misconception check. Students often think every colony was founded for religious freedom. That is tempting, because the story of the Pilgrims is told so often. But read Virginia's charter: it names spreading Christianity and digging for gold and silver, and religious freedom never appears. The cure is to read each colony's own founding document before deciding why it was founded.

4. Follow the charter to Jamestown: Powhatan land and the Chesapeake

Picture two towns that each claim to be the oldest. One has a sign at the edge of town, and the other has a sign too. The only way to settle it is to check the founding records.

The charter turned into a settlement fast. In 1607, through the Virginia Company, a joint venture company of investors, England established Jamestown, its first permanent colony in North America. The National Park Service says the English built their fort on the hunting land of the Powhatan Indians.

Worked example — two gaps. You subtract each earlier year from the later one.

Charter to colony: 1607 − 1606 = 1 year. The settlement followed its charter by one year.
St. Augustine before Jamestown: 1607 − 1565 = 42 years. St. Augustine is the older settlement by 42 years.

The land around Jamestown belonged to a paramount chiefdom, a set of tribes under one chief who ruled above the other chiefs. Its paramount chief was Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called Powhatan. The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation's museums count between 30 and 35 tribes under his rule. One of them, the Pamunkey, was the largest tribe in that chiefdom in 1607, the National Park Service reports. The Pamunkey are a federally recognized tribe today, and other Virginia tribes, among them the Mattaponi and the Chickahominy, also trace their history to that chiefdom.

The Chesapeake region around Jamestown grew tobacco for sale in England. At first the work was done by servants bound to labor for a set number of years. Over time the colony relied more and more on enslaved Africans. How colonial law turned that slavery into a status passed from parent to child, and tied it to African descent, is next week's subject, so this chapter names it and stops there.

Misconception check. Students often think Jamestown was the first European settlement in what became the United States. That is tempting, because Jamestown is called the first so often. But it was England's first permanent colony, and Spain's St. Augustine was 42 years older. The cure is to keep the word English attached whenever you call Jamestown first.

5. Read the Mayflower Compact: a covenant at Cape Cod

Imagine the people in a new apartment building meeting in the lobby before anyone has a key. There is no landlord on site yet. They agree on quiet hours, on who takes out the recycling, and on how they will settle arguments. They sign a sheet and tape it by the mailboxes.

That sheet is not a city charter, and it is not the law of the land. It is a promise among neighbors. The Mayflower Compact is a covenant of that kind: a promise made in 1620 by settlers aboard a ship off Cape Cod.

Worked example — the four moves on the Compact. This is the week's Primary Source Workshop document, so take the moves in order.

Sourcing: settlers headed for the northern parts of Virginia, as the Compact puts it in paraphrase, signed it at Cape Cod. Its own text dates it to the eleventh of November 1620, which is 11 November 1620. It is a covenant, a solemn agreement in which people bind themselves to one another. The Avalon Project keeps the text.
Contextualization: the ship had landed north of Virginia, outside the area the settlers' permission covered. The Pilgrim Hall Museum explains that some passengers questioned their leaders' authority, and the agreement answered that question.
Close reading: read the signers' central promise. They agree to

"covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation"

A civil body politic is a group of people who have agreed to form a government for themselves. The Compact goes on, in paraphrase, to promise obedience to the fair and equal laws the group would make. That is self-government: people making and obeying their own laws.

Corroboration: the Pilgrim Hall Museum's page prints the same agreement in modern spelling and notes that the original document is lost, so its wording comes to us through William Bradford's writings. It also gives a second date, 21 November 1620, which it marks New Style, the calendar England later adopted. Two hosts, two dates, one day.

The settlers founded Plymouth, the English colony they built after signing the Compact, on the homeland of the Wampanoag, the Indigenous people of southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. The Pilgrim Hall Museum notes that Wampanoag communities, Mashpee and Aquinnah among them, live in the region today.

The reading in one plain sentence: the Compact shows its signers agreeing to form a civil body politic and obey their own laws; it is evidence of one local agreement, not of a national constitution.

Misconception check. Students often think the Mayflower Compact was a constitution for a nation. That is tempting, because it is old, signed, and about government. But it is a short covenant among one group of settlers, made to govern one new town. The cure is the apartment-lobby test: a promise among neighbors, not the law of a country.

6. Separate what a source shows from what goes beyond it

Think of a receipt you get from a café. It shows that someone bought two coffees at a certain time. It does not show why they bought them, who drank them, or whether the coffee was good. A receipt is strong evidence of the purchase and weak evidence of anything else.

You can draw the same line with every document, the way historians do. A claim shows what the source says when the source itself supports it. A claim goes beyond the source when it reaches past what the document actually says, often to a cause.

This course uses an illustrative set of statements to practice the line, the evidence-claims set. It was written for this course and describes no real person. Two of its items are about the Compact:

Item 3: the Mayflower Compact says its signers combined into a civil body politic. This one shows: the text says exactly that.
Item 4: the Mayflower Compact created American democracy. This one goes beyond: the text records one agreement among its signers and says nothing about what caused later governments.

Worked example — sorting the two claims. Ask one question of each claim: does the document itself say this?

Item 3: yes, the signers "combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick". Key: shows.
Item 4: no, the Compact says nothing about later governments or their causes. Key: goes beyond.
Count: 1 claim shows and 1 goes beyond, so 1 + 1 = 2 claims sorted.

A caveat worth keeping: a claim that goes beyond a source is not always false. It may be a question worth asking. It needs other evidence, and one document rarely settles a cause.

Misconception check. Students often think that if an early event came before a later one, the early event caused it. That is tempting, because the Compact came early and self-government came later. But coming first is not the same as causing. The cure is the receipt test: what does this document show, and what would you need other evidence for?

7. Compare the regions: New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake

Think about three neighborhoods in one city you know. One is full of families who attend the same church. One is a mix of people from many places and faiths. One is spread out along a river, with big farms far apart. They share a mayor, yet daily life in each is very different.

The English colonies grew into distinct regions. These descriptions are standard historical usage:

New England is the northern region, settled largely by families in religious communities.
The Middle Colonies were more mixed in religion and in where their settlers came from.
The Chesapeake is the region around the Chesapeake Bay, a tobacco economy of scattered farms, worked first by servants bound for a term of years and then more and more by enslaved Africans.

Worked example — matching a feature to a region. You read each feature and name the region.

Families settling together in religious communities: New England.
The widest mix of faiths and origins: the Middle Colonies.
Tobacco grown on spread-out farms near the bay: the Chesapeake.

Even inside New England, religious community did not mean freedom of worship for everyone. Those communities expected their members to share one faith. Freedom to worship as you chose was not the founding promise of any region here.

Misconception check. Students often picture the colonies as one uniform society. That is tempting, because they later joined together. But in their first decades they differed in religion, in who settled them, and in how they made a living. The cure is to name the region before you describe the colonists.

8. Trace trade, alliance, and war — and order the week's years

Imagine a new neighbor who borrows your tools, trades vegetables over the fence, and then starts building a shed on your side of the property line. The friendship and the dispute are both real. Which one wins depends on what happens to the land.

Relations between colonists and Native nations followed that pattern, on a far larger and far more violent scale. Native nations acted on their own interests. They traded furs and food for metal tools and cloth. They made alliances when an alliance served them. They fought when colonists pressed onto their land.

At Jamestown, the National Park Service reports, the Powhatan Indians sent food in the first hard years, and relations soured as the English demanded more. Opechancanough, then the Powhatan paramount chief, planned a coordinated attack on the English settlements in 1622 because of English encroachment on Powhatan lands. Fighting followed for about ten years. State it plainly: colonization took Native land, and Native nations resisted.

Worked example — ordering the four years. You put the week's pinned years in order, then measure.

Order, earliest to latest: 1565 (St. Augustine founded), 1606 (the First Charter of Virginia), 1607 (Jamestown founded), 1620 (the Mayflower Compact). Each year is later than the one before it, so the list is in order.
Jamestown to the Compact: 1620 − 1607 = 13 years.
Charter to Compact: 1620 − 1606 = 14 years. Check: 1 + 13 = 14 years.
St. Augustine to the Compact: 1620 − 1565 = 55 years. Check: 42 + 13 = 55 years.

In words: Spain's St. Augustine came first by a long way, and England's charter, colony, and Compact all came within fourteen years of each other.

An honesty note on limits: the dates are firm, but the early accounts of these conflicts were written almost entirely by the English. A supportive reader keeps asking whose account is missing, and the readings page points to Native voices speaking for themselves.

Pause and think. Choose one of these two prompts; they carry equal weight.

(a) Think of a founding paper you have signed or followed, such as a lease, a team agreement, or a club's rules. Who wrote it, and who was affected by it without signing?
(b) Think of a place you know well, such as a neighborhood or a town. Whose land was it before its current name, and what kind of source would help you find out?

Misconception check. Students often think Native nations were passive, either helping the colonists or vanishing. That is tempting, because many old stories show them only as helpers. But they traded, allied, and fought on their own terms, and many of them, the Pamunkey and the Wampanoag among them, are here today. The cure is to ask what each Native nation wanted in each meeting.

Key terms

Empire — a state that rules lands and peoples beyond its own borders. (first used: 1. Define the week's words: empire, colony, and charter)
Colony — a settlement planted on distant land and governed, at least at first, from the home country that sponsored it. (first used: 1. Define the week's words: empire, colony, and charter)
Charter — a written grant of rights from a ruler, stating who may settle where and with what powers. (first used: 1. Define the week's words: empire, colony, and charter)
Dispossession — the taking of a people's land from them, by force, pressure, or bargains made on unequal terms. (first used: 1. Define the week's words: empire, colony, and charter)
Mission — a religious settlement where priests worked to convert Native people to Christianity. (first used: 2. Compare four empires: missions, furs, and farms)
Fur trade — the exchange of furs trapped by Native hunters for European goods such as metal tools, kettles, cloth, and beads. (first used: 2. Compare four empires: missions, furs, and farms)
First Charter of Virginia — the royal charter King James I granted in 1606 to the Virginia Company's investors, naming their settlement the first Colony. (first used: 3. Read the First Charter of Virginia: what its makers wanted)
Virginia Company — the joint venture company of investors, called adventurers, that founded Jamestown in 1607. (first used: 4. Follow the charter to Jamestown: Powhatan land and the Chesapeake)
Powhatan paramount chiefdom — the chiefdom of more than thirty tribes in the Virginia tidewater ruled by the paramount chief Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called Powhatan. (first used: 4. Follow the charter to Jamestown: Powhatan land and the Chesapeake)
Mayflower Compact — the covenant that settlers bound for the northern parts of Virginia signed at Cape Cod in 1620, agreeing to form a civil body politic and obey the laws they would make. (first used: 5. Read the Mayflower Compact: a covenant at Cape Cod)
Covenant — a solemn agreement in which people bind themselves to one another to keep promises they have made together. (first used: 5. Read the Mayflower Compact: a covenant at Cape Cod)
Civil body politic — a group of people who have agreed to form a government for themselves. (first used: 5. Read the Mayflower Compact: a covenant at Cape Cod)
Self-government — people making and obeying their own laws through officers they choose. (first used: 5. Read the Mayflower Compact: a covenant at Cape Cod)
Plymouth — the English colony founded in 1620 by the Mayflower settlers on the homeland of the Wampanoag. (first used: 5. Read the Mayflower Compact: a covenant at Cape Cod)
Wampanoag — the Indigenous people of southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island, whose communities live in the region today. (first used: 5. Read the Mayflower Compact: a covenant at Cape Cod)
Evidence-claims set — eight illustrative statements this course wrote about four real documents, each keyed as showing what its source says or going beyond it. (first used: 6. Separate what a source shows from what goes beyond it)
Goes beyond the source — describes a claim that reaches past what a document actually says, such as a claim about causes. (first used: 6. Separate what a source shows from what goes beyond it)
New England — the northern English colonial region, settled largely by families in religious communities. (first used: 7. Compare the regions: New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake)
Middle Colonies — the English colonial region between New England and the Chesapeake, more mixed in religion and in its settlers' origins. (first used: 7. Compare the regions: New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake)
Chesapeake — the English colonial region around the Chesapeake Bay, where tobacco was grown first with servants bound for a term of years and then more and more with enslaved Africans. (first used: 7. Compare the regions: New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake)

Summary

An empire rules lands beyond its borders; a colony is its distant settlement; a charter grants the rights.
Spain built around missions and mines, France and the Dutch around furs, England around farms.
Every colony sat on Native land, so colonization meant dispossession.
The First Charter of Virginia (1606) names religion and profit, not religious freedom.
Jamestown (1607) was England's first permanent colony; St. Augustine (1565) is older.
The Mayflower Compact (1620) is a covenant for local self-government, not a constitution.
A claim shows what a source says, or it goes beyond the source.
New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Chesapeake were distinct regions.
Native nations traded, allied, and fought on their own terms, and many live here today.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative river town has three founding papers: a land grant from 1683, a town covenant from 1691, and a market charter from 1702. Put them in order, find the gap between each pair in order, and check that the gaps add up to the span.
An illustrative town covenant, written for this exercise, records that its signers would meet each spring to choose a clerk. Sort each claim as shows or goes beyond: (a) the covenant says the signers would choose a clerk each spring; (b) the covenant made the town prosperous.
A trading post and a farming settlement are founded near the same river. Explain why the trading post's owners need good relations with the nation that hunts in the area, while the farming settlement's owners are more likely to come into conflict with that nation.
A website prints a seventeenth-century town agreement in modern spelling and gives a date different from the one in another archive. Name three sourcing questions you would ask before quoting it.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

In order: 1683, 1691, 1702. The gaps are 1691 − 1683 = 8 years and 1702 − 1691 = 11 years. The span is 1702 − 1683 = 19 years, and the check works: 8 + 11 = 19.
Claim (a) shows: the covenant itself records that the signers would meet each spring to choose a clerk. Claim (b) goes beyond: the covenant says nothing about prosperity, and a cause like that needs other evidence, such as tax or trade records.
A trading post earns its money from furs that the nation's hunters bring in, so it needs them as partners. A farming settlement needs the land itself, and every new field takes land the nation lives on and uses. Trade gives both sides a reason to keep the peace; farming pushes onto the land, which is where conflict starts.
Who made this modern-spelling version, and from what original? Which calendar or which record does each date come from, and do they name the same day? Is the original document kept anywhere, so the wording can be checked before it is quoted? Each question is sourcing, and the spelling question is the one most often skipped.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week the same method turns to the laws that made slavery inherited.

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