Jews

Jews have been a part of the American story as long as any other European group. Indeed, even if the speculation that Christopher Columbus himself claimed Jewish ancestry is incorrect, it is certain that six Jewish mariners accompanied him on his famous voyage to the Americas in

An 18th-century Jewish synagogue (Library of Congress)

1492. Jews remained on the vanguard of European settlement in the New World throughout the 16th century as Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal came to new colonial outposts. Most of these were maranos, who, because of religious persecution, outwardly professed the official Catholicism of their nations but secretly maintained their Jewish belief and practice. Others of Jewish ancestry who did convert permanently were known as Conversos. Always tenuous, the maranos’ situation became untenable both in the New World and in the Old as the Inquisition proclaimed a series of autos-da-fe to root out and put to death false converts. Fearing for their lives, Latin American Jews fled to the relatively tolerant Holland and to Dutch possessions in the Americas.

North America’s first Jewish population arrived as 23 people fleeing from the Portuguese reconquest of Brazil from the Dutch. They came ashore at New Amsterdam on September 7, 1654. Owing to influential friends in Holland, the Dutch West India Company ordered that the refugees be granted asylum over the strong objections of Governor Peter Stuyvesant. By the time England took control of New Amsterdam in 1664, renaming it New York City, the Jewish community had become an integral part of the small city’s commercial and social life. The beginning of the 18th century saw the community grown to 100, and other developing trading centers in British North America began to develop small Jewish communities of their own, particularly in Newport, Charleston, Philadelphia, Montreal, and Savannah.

Although the majority of Jews in colonial North America were Sephardic (of Iberian origin), a small but increasing number of Ashkenazic Jews began to trickle in from the Germanic and Slavic parts of Europe. Strife developed between newcomers and the more established Sephardim over the form of religious services and the control of community organizations, although it was not until the 19th century that the Sephardic Jews would lose control over the American Jewish community.

American Jews remained a highly mobile and cosmopolitan minority in the 18th century, and, with strong family and business contacts in both the British and Dutch spheres, they played an important role in the mercantile life of the early Americas. Although Jews generally were not allowed to vote or participate in the political process, anti-Semitism was relatively tame in the wide-open social environment of the colonies. Influential Jews like Aaron Levy of Philadelphia and Gershom Sexias of New York traveled in the most elite of colonial circles.

Further reading: Eli Farber, A Ti-me for Flatting: The First Migration, 1654-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

—Matthew Taylor Raffety

Johnson, Anthony (d. 1 670) planter One of the first African people in British North America, Anthony Johnson took advantage of the somewhat ambiguous legal condition of African people in the early colonies to become a successful planter. Before 1660 most black people in Virginia apparently were considered servants for a limited number of years rather than slaves in perpetuity. Details of his early life are sketchy, but he arrived in Virginia in 1621, was purchased as a bound laborer for a fixed number of years, and worked producing tobacco.

Fortunately surviving the 1622 Indian rebellion, Johnson received additional good luck when “Mary a Negro Woman” arrived on the Bennett plantation where he worked. In 1625 Mary was the only woman living on the plantation; at some point she and Anthony married. Sometime between 1625 and 1650, both Anthony and Mary gained their freedom and assumed the surname “Johnson.” By 1653 the Johnsons were living at Pungoteague Creek in Northampton County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. They had built a small estate consisting of at least 250 acres and numerous cattle and hogs.

Beginning in 1653 Anthony Johnson appears more often in official records. That year a fire destroyed a large part of his plantation. Anthony and Mary, who by this time had two sons and two daughters, sought relief from the county court. The court agreed that the fire was devastating and exempted Mary and the two daughters from taxation for life. Significantly, their race did not factor into the court’s decision, and it appears that the court considered Mary and the daughters the equals of white women in the country. Later in 1653 Anthony reappeared in court in a dispute over a cow. He challenged John Neale, an important planter, for ownership, and although the disposition of the case is not known, the court did order an investigation rather than finding for Neale based on his word as a white man.

Shortly after the Neale incident, Johnson again found himself in a legal conflict. John Casor, one of Johnson’s black laborers, claimed that he was being held against his will, although actually he had entered the colony as an indentured servant. Another local planter, Robert Parker, took up Casor’s cause and, through the threat of legal action, convinced Johnson and his family that Casor should be free. Johnson subsequently freed Casor, who immediately went to work on Parker’s farm. A few months later Johnson, obviously still troubled over Parker’s interference in the matter, sued in the Northampton County court. The court found for Johnson in this matter and returned Casor to the Johnson farm, presumably for the remainder of his life. Sometime in the middle 1660s the Johnson family moved northward to Somerset County, Maryland.

Anthony Johnson died in 1670, but his family remained successful. Mary negotiated a 99-year lease on their farm, and the family remained close. Little else is known about the Johnson clan except that several of his sons married white women and that one son, John, died in 1706 leaving no heir.

During the last decades of the 17th century, Virginia and other southern colonies passed laws that redefined the status of Aerican Americans, making them and their offspring slaves for life. White racism increased accordingly. Anthony Johnson had lived most of his life in an era when racism was less harsh and opportunities for black people were greater.

See also Johnson, Mary.

Further reading: T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

—Brian McKnight

Johnson, Mary (d. 1672?) planter An African immigrant to Virginia, Mary Johnson experienced bondage in the 17th century before racism hardened

In British America. Little information about Mary’s early years has survived, but probably she had been forced by slave traders to march to the Atlantic coast of Africa while chained with other captives. She was branded and forced to endure the brutal Middle Passage across the Atlantic aboard the Margrett and John. Brought against her will to Virginia in the spring of 1622, Mary’s age upon arrival is unknown. She was taken to Richard Bennett’s large TOBACCO plantation on the James River.

Although Africans were scarce in the colonies, Mary met Anthony and married him, in fact if not by English law. The couple enjoyed a 40-year relationship and raised four children, whom they baptized in the Christian faith. It is not known how the couple made the transition from bondage to freedom, but they left Bennett’s plantation seeking land of their own. The Johnsons settled on Pungoteague Creek in a small farming community that included black and white families. By 1650 the Johnsons had accumulated an estate of more than 250 acres, on which they raised cattle and pigs, but in 1653 fire ravaged the plantation. Local authorities helped by granting the Johnsons’ petition that Mary and her two daughters be exempt during their lifetimes from local taxes levied on people who worked in AGRICULTURE. The wives and daughters of planters had traditionally been granted this exemption, but race was beginning to become a factor and black women were normally denied this privilege. In the 1660s the Johnsons moved to Maryland in search of fresh land. Anthony found work as a tenant on a 300-acre farm that he named Tonies Vineyard in Somerset County, but he died shortly after the move. Mary wrote her will in 1672, and she then disappears from the historical record. Mary Johnson lived at a time when white racism was more benign, and African Americans enjoyed a better opportunity to exercise personal rights, such as individual freedom and property ownership.

See also African Americans; Johnson, Anthony; women’s STATUS AND RIGHTS.

Further reading: Carol J. Berkin, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996).

—Caryn E. Neumann

Johnson, Samuel (1 696-1 772) minister, educator Anglican priest, philosopher, and educator, Samuel Johnson was born on October 14, 1696, in Guilford, Connecticut, the second child of Mary Sage and Samuel Johnson, Sr., a farmer and operator of a mill. By age five Johnson was studying Hebrew, and at the local grammar school he learned Greek and Latin. He graduated from the Collegiate School at Saybrook in 1714 and became a tutor at his alma mater that moved in 1716 to New Haven, where it is now Yale

University. He received the Master of Arts degree in 1717. Three years later Johnson was ordained and installed by the Connecticut Congregational Association as minister of the nearby West Haven Church. In 1722 he and several ministerial associates created excitement at Yale’s commencement by announcing their conversion to the Church of England. After Johnson’s Episcopal ordination, he was assigned to the Stratford parish. He organized a regional convention of Anglican clergy, campaigned for the appointment of an Anglican bishop, and established a rectory school where he prepared numerous young men to study for the priesthood.

Simultaneously, Johnson continued his scholarly activities. He was especially interested in encyclopedias. His publications reflected the ideas of the enlightenment. Johnson’s scholarship won him an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1743 and the presidency of King’s College (later Columbia) in New York City in 1754. He implemented an unusually broad curriculum and initiated a building program. He resigned the presidency in 1763 and returned to Stratford, where he again became the rector of its Anglican Church.

His family life was often tragic. In 1725 he married Charity Floyd Nicoll, a New York widow with two sons and a daughter, and they had two sons. After she died in 1756, he married Sara Beach in 1761. During the next two years he lost through death his second wife, a son, two stepchildren, and a grandson. He died in Stratford in 1772.

Further reading: Joseph J. Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696-1772 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973).

—John B. Frantz

Johnson, Sir William (1715-1774) superintendent of Indian affairs

As superintendent of northern Indian affairs, Sir William Johnson served as the main linchpin between the Six Nations of the Iroquois Indians and the British Empire during the middle decades of the 18th century. Soon after migrating to North America from Ireland in 1738, Johnson cultivated relations with the Mohawk, the eastern nation of the Iroquois, through involvement in the local Indian trade. Johnson proved an extremely effective middleman: He appropriated Indian dress and mastered their political etiquette. After the death of his first wife, a German indentured servant, he became intimately involved with two tribal women, with whom he had two sets of children. He took Molly Brant, the sister of Chief Joseph Brant, as his common-law wife. His ease at adopting Indian customs won him friendship and respect. He received the Indian name Warraghiyagey (“one who does much business”) as a mark of esteem, yet Johnson was first and foremost an agent of empire whose political and cultural loyalties remained firmly rooted in Anglo-American society. Throughout his career Johnson fashioned a British-Iroquois alliance that served imperial interests: namely, to promote a cost-effective fur trade, to facilitate colonial accumulation of Indian lands, and to enlist Indian political and military support against the French.

Johnson came to prominence during King George’s War (1774-78) when the New York governor employed him to enlist the services of Mohawk warriors. Johnson’s success raised his profile among imperial officials and facilitated his appointment to the newly created office of superintendent of Indian affairs in 1754. During the Seven Years’ War (1754-63) he employed intercultural skills to prevent the Iroquois from siding with the French. His manorial estate, Fort Johnson, functioned as the diplomatic headquarters of the Anglo-Iroquois alliance. In addition, Johnson recruited warriors from all Six Nations to participate in the war and led a number of campaigns, including the Battle of Lake George in 1755 and the defeat of Fort Niagara in 1759. Military success earned him the title of baronet.

Following the war Johnson participated in strenuous efforts to create a system of regulations for the Indian trade. Financial constraints coupled with a new political climate prevented successful implementation. Johnson also convened peace negotiations with Indian nations who had taken up arms during Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-65). The climax of Johnson’s career came with the Fort Stanwix Treaty (1768), when he renegotiated a boundary line with the Six Nations, separating Indian country from white settlement. Johnson spent the remaining years of his life consolidating his position as a major New York land baron. Close ties with the Mohawk enabled him to become the largest landowner in the Mohawk Valley, and he settled hundreds of tenant families on his estate. In 1763 Johnson built an even larger home, Johnson Hall, and by the time of his death in 1774 he had founded his own community named Johnstown.

Further reading: Gail D. Danvers, “Gendered Encounters: Warriors, Women and William Johnson,” Journal of American Studies, 35, no. 2 (2001); Milton W. Hamilton, Sir William Johnson: Colonial American, 1715-1763 (Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976); Timothy J. Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, no. 1 (1996): 13-142.

—Gail D. Danvers

Johnston, Henrietta Deering (1670?-1729) portrait artist

Henrietta Deering became Gideon Johnston’s (1668-1716) second wife in 1705 in Dublin, inheriting four stepchildren.

Her new husband was a Trinity-educated clergyman deeply in debt who decided to immigrate to North America with the assistance of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1708, they found that a rival clergyman had taken the position Gideon had been promised. Although the family received assistance from Governor Nathaniel Johnson, they kept afloat because Henrietta Johnston was an accomplished, self-taught portrait artist. She quickly attracted the patronage of leading families, who valued her eye for their rich and elegant clothing and possessions. Unusually, she worked in pastels, which were rare in England and unknown in America.

Through these years her husband, who eventually regained his church living, was frequently ill, and the couple lost their only child, Charles, to a childhood fever. Often mocked for being Irish, they formed close ties to the powerful French Huguenot community in South Carolina. In 1711 Henrietta Johnston returned to England to buy art supplies and to successfully petition the society for more support. She also carried samples of Carolina rice to buyers in London. As she returned to North America, her husband traveled to England to enroll his sons and Prince George of the Yamasee Indians in school. While he was gone, Henrietta weathered two hurricanes and the Yamasee War, during which she harbored numerous refugees in the parsonage. Gideon Johnston died in 1716, when his sloop overturned while he was seeing Governor Charles Craven off to England.

As sole support of the family, Henrietta continued to produce portraits, in 1725 following John Moore to New York to answer the commissions of leading families. Significantly, Johnston’s sketches of elite members of Charleston society are frequently their only existing likenesses.

—Margaret Sankey

Jolliet, Louis (1645-1700) French explorer Louis Jolliet is best known for exploring the upper Mississippi River with Jacques Marquette. At age 10 Jolliet entered the Jesuit college at Quebec to prepare for the priesthood. Attracted by the economic opportunities and adventures of the fur trade, he ceased his clerical training and focused on becoming a coureur de bois. For several years Louis Jolliet engaged in trade, exploration, and diplomatic activities. On June 4, 1671, he signed a declaration at Sault Ste. Marie when Simon Daumont de Saint-Lusson secured formal possession of a vast area of land extending from Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean east to west and south to the Gulf of Mexico for French king Louis XIV.

Learning that a great river, perhaps a route to China, existed, Marquette wanted to explore it. In October 1672

Jolliet became partners with six coureurs de bois and traveled to the St. Ignace mission at Michillimakinac to join Marquette. By May 1673 the adventurers began canoeing in the headwaters of the river. Within a month they reached the Mississippi River. Heading south, they occasionally stopped at Native American villages along the shores. In July, worried about possible capture by the Spanish in Florida, the group turned around at the modern-day border of Arkansas and Louisiana after determining that the river flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. This journey secured long-standing Native American-French alliances in the Mississippi Valley.

En route, Jolliet’s diary and maps charting the tributaries of the river were ruined when rapids overturned his canoe, so he recreated both from memory. In New France Jolliet secured grants to pursue fur trading, establishing a company on the St. Lawrence. He also undertook an overland journey to Hudson Bay in April 1679 to assess the threat of English traders to French interests. Refusing the English invitation to join their venture, Jolliet determined that the Hudson Bay area was Canada’s best fur-producing region and speculated that the English consequently would dominate Canadian trade. Jolliet drew maps of the St. Lawrence River and kept an elaborate journal of his trip to Labrador in 1694. Three years later Jolliet was named a hydrography professor at the College of Quebec.

Further reading: Jean Delanglez, Life and Voyages of Louis Jolliet, 1645-1700 (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit History, 1948).

—Elizabeth D. Schafer