Technology

Seventeenth-century English colonizers brought with them the technologies of a preindustrial, agricultural society, many of whose tools and techniques dated to the Middle Ages. Colonial North American technologies were defined by four main characteristics. They were based in handicrafts; tools, houses, and ships were built of wood (iron was too precious); instruments were individually handmade from start to finish (there was minimal division of labor); and artisans drove production. Native Americans relied on canoes for transportation, traps for hunting, furs for clothing, and wooden utensils. English settlers, meanwhile, wielded axes to clear woods for cultivating the land and raising livestock. These practices severely disrupted Native land-use and local ecosystems, but there was also significant cross-cultural technological transfer. Natives taught Europeans new fishing, hunting, and agricultural techniques, while Europeans taught Natives new crafts and traded guns and iron tools to them. Unlike later industrially manufactured goods, most crafts were practiced, and their products used, in the home. This domestic production force included women, servants, and slaves, who acquired many artisanal skills.

The colonists welcomed machines because labor was in chronically short supply. Water power drove sawmills for producing lumber (established in New England from the 1630s), the first “fulling” mills for cotton textiles in the late 1600s, and gristmills for turning grain into flour (especially important in the Middle Colonies after 1700). The king and later most colonies granted patents for inventions, a system with medieval origins that was codified by Parliament in 1623. Towns, meanwhile, offered rewards for the completion of practical projects for civic improvement (like waterworks), as occasionally did colonial legislatures. Probably the best known colonial invention was the lightning rod by Benjamin Franklin (1752), which anticipated the modern relation between sciENcE and technology.

The most important overall factor in technological production was membership in the British Empire. Colonial British America not only lacked a central government to fund and direct technological development but was deliberately maintained as a technological colony within Britain’s system of trade and economics (known as mercantilism). Parliamentary legislation prevented Americans from producing and exporting their own finished manufactures and exploited them instead as a source of raw material, such as lumber for shipbuilding. Britain limited colonial production of certain goods to the initial stages; iron ore, for example, was mined and smelted in North America but sent across the Atlantic for refining. The colonies were producing one-seventh of the world’s wrought and pig iron by the time of the Revolution, when boycotts of British goods and calls for manufacturing self-sufficiency finally loosened the mother country’s technological stranglehold.

See also Acts OF Trade and Navigation; agriculture; ENVIRONMENT.

Further reading: Judith A. McGaw, ed., Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

—James Delbourgo

Teedyuscung (1709?-1763)

Teedyuscung, the son of a woman from the Toms River band of Lenape (Delaware Indians) and a colonist father, was born near Trenton, New Jersey, about 1709. He grew up along the Atlantic shore as a member of his mother’s band, moving with them into the Forks of Delaware in eastern Pennsylvania in 1733. This and several other northern Lenape bands had seasonally hunted in the area bounded by the Lehigh and upper Delaware Rivers known as the Forks since before 1600. This territory had long been a shared resource zone used by the four Native American groups surrounding this region: the Susquehannock, Lenape, Munsee, and Lenope. In 1737 the Pennsylvania colonial government purchased much of the region in a fraudulent land deal known as the Walking Purchase of 1737, a treaty that Teedyuscung signed as a young adult.

Although converted to Christianity and baptized by the Moravians as “Gideon,” Teedyuscung rarely interacted with other converted Indians. Continually opposing the authority of the iROquoiS over his people, he mastered the art of Indian diplomacy and claimed to represent several groups of Natives in the buffer zone along the New York-Pennsylvania border. He acted as a cultural broker with colonial authorities. Teedyuscung allied with the British during the SEVEN Years’ War. In his later life he falsely assumed the role of “speaker” for many Native groups.

Further reading: Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700-1763 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949).

—Marshall Joseph Becker

Tekakwitha, Kateri (Catherine) (1656-1680) candidate for Catholic sainthood

Known by French Catholics as the “Lily of the Mohawks” and the “Genevieve of New France,” Kateri Tekakwitha is one of the first Native American women candidates for beatification by the Roman Catholic Church. Tekakwitha led a short but difficult life. Her Algonquin mother, raised primarily by French settlers, was a Christian, and her father was a Mohawk. Both died in 1660 in an epidemic of smallpox, which left young Tekakwitha badly pockmarked and partly blind. Six years later, a French expeditionary force led by the Marquis Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy burned her village, Ossernenon.

In 1667 three Jesuit missionaries stayed in Tekakwitha’s newly constructed town, exposing her to Christian theology and impressing her with their piety. On Easter Sunday 1676, Tekakwitha converted and was baptized by Father Jacques de Lamberville, a Jesuit. She took the name “Kateri” (a Mohawk pronunciation of “Catherine”) at her baptism. Rebuked by other members of her tribe, who were struggling to maintain their own spiritual beliefs against the onslaught of Christian missionaries, Tekakwitha interpreted their persecution as a testament to the strength of her faith.

Tekakwitha escaped in 1677 to Kahnawake, a community of Native American Christians in Canada. There, she led a life of extraordinary sanctity, dedicating herself to prayer, penitential practices, and care for other people. She took a vow of chastity in 1679. She died a year later, but not without leaving an important spiritual legacy. Devotion to the Venerable Kateri Tekakwitha has spread among Catholics in Canada and the United States, with many making annual pilgrimages to Caughnawaga, where her relics are preserved.

—Billy G. Smith