Environment

Environmental conditions greatly shaped the history of colonial America. The environment offered people both opportunities and limitations. How these people chose to exploit the environment affected the development of their economy and culture. As they pursued their own goals, humans transformed the environment, yet the environment also strongly influenced their societies. At its most basic level, the environment provided Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in North America with the necessities of life: food, shelter, and clothing. Most Native Americans, over thousands of years, developed a way of life that was highly integrated with the environment, which resulted in diverse economies and complicated cultures. European migrants, in contrast, usually attempted to transplant their own economy and culture by extracting natural resources. They strove to transform the environment into commodities and familiar landscapes.

Native Americans did not think of nature as a category separate from their own existence. They adapted their lifestyles to annual cycles and local conditions. Indians used the natural environment in diverse ways, depending on the particular environmental constraints or prospects in their local area. For this reason, housing styles and food production varied tremendously across the North American continent. Almost every indigenous group practiced some farming, and those living east of the Mississippi River depended overwhelmingly on crops of corn, beans, squash, and other cultivated plants. Women generally controlled this agriculture and thus maintained a high degree of social and political power. Various ceremonies and rituals fostered a respect for other forms of plant and animal life; nevertheless, Indians altered local environments to support their lifestyles. They cleared forests in order to plant crops, and they set fires to increase game habitat. Sometimes, they strained certain natural resources to the limit. Such tensions became particularly obvious when Indians entered into the fur trade with Europeans. With the commodification of beaver in the north and deer in the south, Indians depleted these animal populations rapidly in order to acquire the European manufactured goods on which many came to depend. The extirpation (at least locally) of these species caused radical environmental changes. Many Native Americans transformed their culture and religion in response to environmental modifications, particularly those created by colonial expansion, market forces, and the introduction of horses. Thus, the environment in North America and the Native Americans who lived there were both products of historical interaction.

European colonists influenced this history by causing rapid, extreme environmental change. A vast supply of natural resources—fish, lorests, farmland, and fur-bearing animals—encouraged colonization, and Europeans approached the process from an ideology of human dominance over nature. Fish supplied the initial attraction for Europeans to New England, and fishing subsequently developed into a worldwide industry before 1600. The primary fish resources were codfish (from which Cape Cod received its name), sea bass, haddock, herring, Atlantic salmon, lobster, mullet, crab, oysters, clams, and mussels. With access to an enormous quantity of timber, a large shipbuilding industry developed by the 1650s. New Englanders constructed sawmills, shipped white pines to England for ship’s masts, sold wood to the West Indies, and extracted potash, tar, pitch, and turpentine for naval stores.

Establishing a new relationship with the land, New England Puritans tried to make the environment fit human needs rather than fitting themselves into the environment. Wood-frame homes fixed their society in place, and farming transformed the landscape. Women maintained vegetable and herb gardens, while men farmed cash-crops such as wheat and corn. New Englanders practiced row-crop agriculture and created a domesticated world of fields and fences out of the forests. English colonists initially used Indian-cleared land and then began clearing their own acreage for farms and towns. Their livestock (cattle, horses, hogs) consumed and trampled plants that were not adapted to them. Livestock also competed with and drove away native animal species. The colonists’ pattern of establishing permanent settlements exhausted local resources, whereas more mobile Native American societies relieved human environmental pressure and allowed regeneration.

Animal furs provided a profitable commodity. In high demand throughout Europe by the late 1500s, beaver pelts supplied material for hats, winter coats, and castoreum oil that served as a base for perfumes. The beaver fur trade often established the first connection between English and Indians in New England, as well as between the French and Indians in the Great Lakes area. As the fur trade grew, the beaver skin became the primary unit of financial measure.

This sketch shows how early settlers altered the landscape, often by clearing away forests to make way for farming. (Library of Congress)

During the peak of the fur trade era, some 200,000 pelts a year were sold to the European market, with a large adult beaver skin yielding enough fur for 18 hats. The fur trade severely depleted beaver numbers by the early to mid-18th century, and it altered the New England landscape by eliminating beaver ponds and the related meadows around them. Thus, New England’s rich supplies of forests, fish, and furs allowed the Puritans to create a society based on family farms and small towns, along with ports and merchant centers such as Boston.

In the southern colonies, environmental conditions encouraged the development of a different economy and culture. The Virginia Company established its colony in 1607 as a business venture. From the beginning, with surprising disregard for their own subsistence needs, these settlers sought a profit-making product that could be extracted from Virginia and sold in England. Jamestown colonists tried a range of products, such as deerskins, timber, sassafras, silk (with imported silk worms), glassmaking, iron, fruit trees, flax, and hemp, but with little success. Beginning with experiments in 1612, John Rolfe demonstrated that tobacco grew well and could produce profits. This emphasis on a single crop reflected the European drive to control the environment.

Although the Virginia climate and soils provided ideal conditions for cultivating tobacco, attempting to grow the plant in large quantities produced environmental consequences and contributed significantly to the type of society and culture that developed in colonial Virginia. Tobacco leached minerals out of the soil very quickly and was therefore a land-intensive business venture. This feature of tobacco farming encouraged settlement in the river valleys of Virginia. Farmers needed to own hundreds and even thousands of acres so that worn-out land could remain fallow while tobacco planting moved onto virgin soil. Naturally, conflicts with Indians arose, and the Powhatan Indians revolted against English land grabbing with deadly attacks in 1622 and 1644. In addition to being land intensive, tobacco was also labor intensive. The Virginia Company enacted the headright system in the 1610s to encourage immigration. Initially, indentured servants supplied the necessary labor, but Virginia planters switched to African slave labor in the latter half of the 17th century as that labor source became more cost effective.

This need for large landholdings and labor crews produced an almost feudal society in colonial Virginia. Virginia remained overwhelmingly rural, with large plantations and a captive labor force, few towns, a dispersed population living along river banks, and government based in counties rather than in towns. Landed aristocrats in Virginia promoted social cohesion among their ranks and denied competitors access to prime tobacco lands through the ending of INDENTURED SERVITUDE, passing of tobacco quality laws, and institution of government regulation of the industry in 1730. Those who produced high-quality tobacco gained the designation “crop masters” and acquired credit from English and Scottish merchants more easily than did other tobacco farmers.

In the long term, the cultural response to differing environments led to the development of starkly different American identities in the northern and southern colonies. As illustrated by the differences between Indian Natives and colonial settlers and the divergence of New England and Virginia cultures, environmental conditions and human intentions combined to create new societies and shape American history.

Further reading: William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998); Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

—Greg O’Brien and Robert C. Gardner

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