Colonial Times (1585 - 1776) - More American History on the Learning Videos Channel

Come along, take a trip to the past. We've got places to explore. Come along, take a trip to the past. To learn about things you never knew before. Field trips to yesterday. Field trips to yesterday. Field trips to yesterday. Come along, we're on our way. In this program, we're going to visit a time in history before the United States was even called the United States. It's known as the colonial period. We'll visit different places that have been rebuilt to look just like they did in colonial times. We'll talk to people who dressed like people did then and listen to them explain about life in colonial times. The word colonial comes from the word colony. A colony is a settlement in one country that's ruled by a country far away. The 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were ruled by England. You might be surprised to learn that the first attempts to set up an English colony weren't very successful. In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh, a British explorer, tried to establish a colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. It didn't last long. After one year, all the settlers went back to England. A second group tried again in 1587. Because the hundred settlers needed more supplies, the governor of the colony sailed back to England. When he returned to Roanoke, the colony had disappeared. Nothing was left except the letters C-R-O cut into a tree and the word Croatoan carved into a doorpost. Croatoan was the name of a nearby island inhabited by friendly Native Americans. What happened to the colony? Where were the settlers? No one knows. To this day, the mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke Island remains unsolved. Still, the English didn't give up, and finally they succeeded. So let's take a look at the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America. We'll start in the southern colonies at the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown, Virginia. In 1606, some merchants in England formed a private business called the Virginia Company. Their goal was to set up a trading post in the New World. They agreed to pay all the travel costs for any settlers willing to go. More than 120 people set sail for Virginia. In the spring of 1607, they arrived and established a colony they called Jamestown. But the settlers made one big mistake. Instead of planting crops and building houses, they went off looking for gold. They didn't find any. Without crops, food started to run low. Fortunately, Native Americans came to the rescue. Then Captain John Smith, one of the leaders of the colony, took charge and told the settlers that if they didn't work, they couldn't eat. Under his leadership, the settlers began to build Jamestown. Even so, Jamestown fell on hard times, and in 1610, the surviving settlers decided to go back to England. Just as they were ready to leave, three ships loaded with supplies arrived from England and saved the small colony. Five miles from Jamestown is one of the most famous settlements in colonial America, Williamsburg. Williamsburg was founded in 1633 and called Middle Plantation. The name was changed to honor the English king, William III, when the settlement became the capital of Virginia. Virginia was an important English colony, and the colonial governor designed the new capital city to be a center of learning, religion, and government. To keep pace with the growing community, brickmakers worked tirelessly to make bricks for the new building construction, and carpenters made shingles for the roofs. And Williamsburg quickly developed into an important commercial city with manufacturing businesses and many retail shops. Now let's move to New England and visit some of the most famous settlers in colonial America. We know them today as the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims sailed to the New World in 1620 on a small ship called the Mayflower. After a voyage of 66 days, they landed on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. You might wonder why people would leave their families and homes and come to a strange new land where there were no houses or communities or anything. Just wilderness. Well, people came to the New World for all different reasons. To find gold, to find religious freedom, to find a better way of life. I came to the New World because I thought that I could prosper here. I had heard stories of the great wealth of the New World, and I thought, as I lived a poor life in London, I could come to this place and marry a man who owned land and prosper more better here than if I had stayed behind. Years before they sailed on the Mayflower, many of the Pilgrims had left England and gone to Holland. But they wanted a new life in a new land where they could be free to worship the way they wanted. And so they came to New England. One such person was Susanna Winslow. Well, my husband brought me here. We had gone into Holland to live for a few years to join a congregation there that he desired we should join. Indeed, in time, I was brought into the congregation myself and saw that, as my husband said, we might come to a place where we could worship that was not foreign, that was English, but where we might worship as we desired, which was impossible, unlawful in England. So my husband desired we should be amongst the first part of our congregation to come out here. The Pilgrims made their settlement on the site of an abandoned Indian village. The settlement they established was called Plymouth Plantation. Using the raw materials they found around them and with plenty of hard work, Plymouth Plantation slowly grew into a thriving community. Then, just nine years later, another group of English settlers came to Massachusetts, also looking for religious freedom. They were known as the Puritans. The Puritans settled on the Charles River in Massachusetts Bay. They called their first settlement Boston. Connecticut and Rhode Island were also settled by people looking for religious freedom. But they didn't come from England. They came from Massachusetts. Usually it was because of disagreement with the ways of the Puritans. In 1636, after a dispute with other Puritan ministers, Thomas Hooker set up a colony in Hartford, Connecticut. The same year, Roger Williams, another minister, was banished from Massachusetts. He established a settlement in Providence, Rhode Island. Anne Hutchinson, who was also banished for disagreeing with church leaders, founded her own colony in Portsmouth, Rhode Island the next year. Even though the middle colonies were English settlements, the colonists came from many different countries. Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn as a place where he and other Quakers could have religious freedom. Many of the settlers who came to Pennsylvania, which by the way means Penn's Woods, were Quakers from Germany and Holland. New York was originally a Dutch colony called New Netherlands. One Dutchman named Frederick Flipson arrived in the mid-1600s. In 1664, when the English took over the colony, he and other Dutch settlers decided to stay. Flipson, a carpenter and shrewd businessman, changed his name to Phillips so he would sound more English. He went on to establish a farm and trading center known as Phillipsburg Manor. At Phillipsburg Manor, all the agricultural land was farmed by tenant farmers. The tenant farmers and their families lived in small dwellings on the 52,000 acres of Phillipsburg Manor, where they kept cows, oxen, chickens, and sheep. Men worked in the fields, while women worked the farm, and did other housekeeping chores such as cooking and spinning thread. Farmers brought their grain to the gristmill, which was powered by the Pocantico River. There it was ground into flour. From there it was shipped down the Hudson River and loaded onto ships for trade overseas. A community of enslaved Africans also occupied many of the positions at Phillipsburg and kept the manor operating. From inside the large stone manor home, sea voyages were planned for trade purposes all over the world. To find out what home life was like in colonial times, we visited the Emerson family, who lived in York, Maine. Maine was a part of Massachusetts then. Mrs. Emerson, Eunice, was the wife of a deputy sheriff and a jailer in York. Her home was also the town jail. We asked her what a typical day was like. And our first duties are to come down and stir up the fire and begin to cook the breakfast. And then my children are sent on errands to get water, to bring in firewood. If Mr. Emerson has to travel, we must make him something to take with him. You see a sheriff, deputy sheriff, he has to travel a good deal. So our first thoughts usually are making the food, and then Mary Page begins to clean a bit. Later, when the breakfast has been prepared, of course, as we happen to have a prisoner here, since, you know, our duties include taking care of their domestic needs, we provide them with some kind of simple breakfast. So that is how the day begins here. Well, our breakfast will consist sometimes of pie, left over from the day before. Sometimes of fish balls. Since we're a seaport, we have a good deal of dried cod. Sometimes a simple matter of pasty pudding, stirred about, served with some molasses and milk. Occasionally, perhaps a little bit of fried pork and apple. Depends on the season, you see. Oh, well, the largest meal of the day is always the noon meal. And that, of course, is prepared on the hearth. You see the large kettle hanging there now. And it would often be some kind of boiled meat, often a salt meat, of course. And some garden sauce. It must have been strange living in a jail and having to take care of the prisoners. We asked what the prisoners were put in jail for. What crimes did they commit? Oh, well, there are many, many offenses. Our most common cause right now seems to be a debt. About half the people who have been incarcerated here this year have been debtors. Then, of course, there's theft. Occasionally, blasphemy or profane cursing and swearing. I'm not a gossip, of course, so I don't like to talk about local people. But there was Lydia Abbott who'd uttered ten profane curses. And then we do occasionally have someone for assault, public drunkenness. We talked to the schoolmaster who told us what school was like in colonial times. Yes, a typical school day is the children would come into school around 8 o'clock in the morning. At which time they would come into the school and get out their books very quietly. Get out their materials. And they would study their ciphering for the smaller children. Alphabet reading. And whatever lessons were appropriate for the age groups going from the front to the back of the room. They would do that two or three hours. Take a ten-minute break maybe outside for recess. And then come back and do more of the same. Studying mostly by themselves. Arithmetic, reading, and writing were the main subjects. And they would do that until noontime. At which time they would go home for an hour until one o'clock to do chores and lunch. And they'd come back. And they would repeat the process. And, of course, they were studying mostly by themselves because the teacher had to deal with children from first grade right through high school. Just one teacher. So around 4 o'clock they'd go home, 4 or 5, depending on the season. Education was very important. For one thing, the leaders wanted children to be able to read the Bible. And the schools were much different than they are today. Paper was very expensive, so kids wrote on slates using chalk pencils. They also had to learn to write by dipping a feather into ink. Most students in New England used one book. It was called the New England Primer. The Primer taught the alphabet and was filled with Bible stories, prayers, and sayings. Thy life to mend, God's book attend. The cat doth play, and after slay. A dog will bite a thief at night. The eagle's flight is out of sight. The idle fool is whipped at school. In a colonial school, the students helped to do chores. In the school, the daily chores are assisting the teacher any way that he asked. Children will be assigned to take care of the firewood if it's necessary, depending on the season, to fetch water, to do cleaning. Older children would be expected to assist in the studies for some of the smaller children. There were a lot of differences between the New England colonies, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies. In the Middle Colonies, the rich soil and good farmland produced food crops. In the hot, humid South, conditions were good for growing crops like tobacco and cotton. There was less farming in New England, but lots of fishing and shipbuilding. And in every region, crops and other goods were shipped back to England to be sold. That's called exporting. Exporting is sending products from one country to another country for sale or trade. One of the most profitable trade routes in colonial times was the Triangle Trade. It was called that because it formed a big triangle between Africa, the West Indies, and the American colonies. Ships loaded with rum and guns sailed from Boston and New York to Africa. There, the rum and guns were traded for ivory and gold, and also for Africans who had been kidnapped from their villages. From Africa, the ships sailed for about seven weeks to the West Indies, where the Africans were sold as slaves. This part of the trip was called the Middle Passage. In the West Indies, the ships were loaded up with molasses and sent to the colonies where the molasses was made into rum, and the whole triangle started all over again. The kidnapped Africans who came across the Atlantic on the Middle Passage eventually were sold as slaves in the American colonies. By 1750, the slave population of the colonies was more than 250,000. Some slaves lived in cities like Williamsburg. Most worked on the big plantations in the south, where the population was just about equally divided, half black, half white. By the middle of the 1770s, the American colonies had prospered and changed, and the population had grown, from the 120 people who came ashore at Jamestown to over two and a half million people in 13 colonies. But things were about to change even more. The American colonists began to resent being ruled by a country on the other side of the ocean. England didn't want them to be independent, so they sent troops to keep order in the colonies. But the situation continued to grow more and more hostile. In 1770, British troops fired into a crowd of protesters. Five people were killed, including Crispus Attucks, a black sailor. He is considered among the first people to die in the fight for liberty. In 1773, the people of Boston got so angry, they dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor. Finally, in April 1775, a small band of colonial militiamen faced an army of British redcoats at Lexington, Massachusetts. The British advanced and someone fired. It became known as the Shot Heard Round the World. Less than two months later, George Washington was named commander of the Continental Army. The revolution wasn't far away. On July 4th, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia. The 13 colonies were on their way to becoming the United States of America. For more information visit www.fema.gov