Dana Huntley - Americas Forgotten Colonial History

1497John Cabot discovers the coast of North America

1587Sir Walter Raleigh attempts and fails at the lost colony of Roanoke Island

1607The successful (barely) plantation of a first permanent English settlement on Jamestown Island

1608Samuel Champlain establishes the colony of New France at Quebec City

1620The self-exiled Pilgrims and company land the Mayflower at Plymouth

1630Massachusetts Bay Colony begins with a Puritan flotilla

1642Parliament and the king come to arms in the English Civil War

1650The Puritan Commonwealth changes colonial migration

1660Restoration of the monarchy turns the New World wheel

1675King Philips bloody War

1682William Penns first colonists arrive in Pennsylvania

1716Settlement begins in the Backcountry

1733The establishment of Georgia completes the thirteen colonies

1744King Georges War: only a prelude

1754French and Indians: the Seven Years War begins

1759Battle of Quebec decides the end of New France

1765The Stamp Act begins Americas march to independence

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Natures God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

WE ALL LEARNED THE SAME NARRATIVE OF AMERICAS COLONIAL FOUNDing. We heard it just as did our teachers, and their teachers before them.

America was first settled by the Virginia Company in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. John Smith was the hero of that early settlement. Then, there was that cool story about the Indian princess Pocahontas. They struggled a long time, but eventually there were lots of plantations and Virginia became the Southern colonies.

The Pilgrims on the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. They had a rough start, but ultimately made a better go of it and celebrated with a big Thanksgiving dinner shared with the native Indians. Other uptight religious Puritans followed them and, lo, the whole place became New England.

There were some Dutch down in New York, and sooner or later William Penn and the Quakers came to build the City of Brotherly Love in Pennsylvania and... swoosh... its 1776 and time to revolt against King George III and be America.

Thats it. Thats the narrative of American colonial history known to one and all.

Yet there are 150 yearssix generations at leastbetween Plymouth Plantation and the mid-eighteenth century; thats 150 years of our national consciousness, virtually unaccounted for in our American narrative. The population colonizing English North America went from a few hundred to 2.5 million; the Atlantic seaboard became thirteen separate colonies, each with their own capital and colonial government. Philadelphia, New York, and Boston blossomed as major British trading ports. How did this happen?

These are decades of American experience that can offer wisdom to us today. With this lost history there are lost answers to the questions of who we are as an American people, and how we came to have the identity and the national consciousness that we do.

In a sense, its rather understandable that we have forgotten this period of our national history. After all, through all those generations we were English and then British colonies. Our families and roots were in Great Britain; it was our common culture and history, commerce and language. The island three thousand miles across the North Atlantic was where our political allegiance lay and our government sprung. Even the clothing fashion of every generation was determined in London.

When our independent colonial will prevailed and the United States of America emerged, it was only natural that we promote our own American identitythe American exceptionalism that allowed us to build a nation with an entirely new concept of government, and inevitably London became less fashionable. Family ties to the old country died out; new waves of settlers from Germany, Scandinavia, and the Mediterranean joined Americas welcoming arms and created a practical multiculturalism unlike the Western world had ever seen. Though Britain and its past remained our cultural wellspring and English its much-desired tongue, the essential Englishness of our early colonial beginnings and its events simply faded into the background.

Near the town of Banbury, Sulgrave Manor was built in the mid-1500s by Laurence Washington. Georges great-grandfather, John Washington, emigrated from here to Virginia in 1656. Open to the public, the Manor flies the American flag in commemoration of our national connection.

We have lost the seventeenth and early eighteenth century from our historyour founding and our maturing as a people. Fewer and fewer people over the generations have been able to make sense of that history. Who, what, when, where, and why were people motivated to make a three-month crossing on the North Atlantic aboard ships most of us wouldnt take out on the Chesapeake, knowing they would never see home or family again, to land on and carve a life in a largely uncharted, sparsely inhabited wilderness? How and why did they build the varied societies that they did here in the New World colonies? How and why did they become America? How did they become us?

The answers lie back in England. It took me decades of traveling the length and breadth of the island of Great Britain to appreciate just how deeply. Almost every town and city in Britain marks its connections to America, from Sulgrave Manor in Northamptonshire that was home to George Washingtons ancestors, to the Market Place in Wells where William Penn preached, to the dozens of towns and villages across East Anglia that lent their place-names to new communities in Massachusetts Bay Colonysuch as Ipswich and Barnstable, Groton and Sudbury, Hingham and Essex.

This narrative isnt a proper history, simply a retelling of the tale. The story unfolds as a rich tapestry of intrepid people motivated to move across the ocean under sail to an unknown, expansive wilderness and an often hostile environment because of climate and a volatile and often violent indigenous people they were displacing.

They were motivated to migrate for economic, political, family, and personal reasons, but the overarching motivation of seventeenth-century migration that stamped its character on the development of our several and united colonies was religion.

It makes a fascinating story, because there is an element of unreality to it. In our generally enlightened and tolerant twenty-first century, we find it difficult to perceive that Christian differences in church belief, practice, and worship liturgy should cause two hundred years of warfare, persecution, torture, and judicial murder. Less pejoratively expressed, we find it difficult to understand how these things should be considered as important as they were. But they were, and the religious convictions of Anglicans, Congregationalists, Quakers, Catholics, Presbyterians, and Anabaptists all reverberate in our national and regional cultures to this day.