3: Early Colonial Arts, 1632-1734

THE HENRY WHITFIELD House, built in 1639, is the oldest stone house in New England. Surprisingly, its second-story facade is furnished with a cannon port, an opening in the wall for firing a cannon, which faces Long Island Sound and the harbor (fig. 3.1). Built to defend against attacks from sea, rather than raids from the forest, where Native Americans might appear, the cannon port reminds us that relations between European nations in the New World were anything but friendly. When Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Englishmen encountered each other, rivalries erupted.

This preoccupation with defensive fortifications can also be seen in documents from the period. French maps detail British New England's batteries and defenses as well as its coastline and cities. Such maps remind us that the conquest of North America was driven partly by the competition for empire, and war between European nations-not to mention Indian surprise attacks-was always an uneasy possibility.

From a seventeenth-century perspective, English predominance in North America was by no means inevitable. On the contrary, persecution and civil war racked England through much of the seventeenth century as a result of quarrels among Anglicans and Puritans. These religions coexisted more peaceably in the colonies, where they were separated spatially, with the Church of England in Virginia and the Puritans in Massachusetts. But only later did these places become pluralistic and diverse; in these early times, only Rhode Island-a refuge for religious exiles of every stripe---embraced religious tolerance.

As the Spanish consolidated their hold in the South and Southwest, the other European "superpowers" of the sixteenth and seventeenth century- England, France, and Holland-competed with each other on the eastern seaboard. The French dominated the fur trade along the Saint Lawrence River in what is now Canada, extending their influence inland into the regions around the Great Lakes. The English claimed territories from present-day southern Maine to the mid-Atlantic states. The Dutch, who vied with England for control of the seas, had a smaller presence in the Hudson River Valley.

In greedily competing for colonies, each of these European powers was eager to create and control markets for its own goods. Each hoped to increase its wealth by regulating trade, encouraging exports, and limiting imports, a policy that economist Adam Smith later termed "mercantilism." All coveted colonies as exploitable sources of raw materials and as captive markets for finished products to be manufactured in Europe from those raw materials.

Patterns of colonial exploitation differed. The Spanish Crown exercised direct control over its colonies in the New World, doing its utmost to funnel gold and silver back to court. The British Crown, on the other hand, rather than ruling its North American possessions through an imperial bureaucracy, granted large tracts of land directly to individuals and trading companies, resulting in an empire of heterogeneous, locally managed colonies. The Dutch West India Company established successful trading alliances with the Iroquois, but had difficulty persuading Dutch citizens to emigrate to the New World. In 1664, during one of the sporadic Dutch-English wars, English warships entered the main Dutch port, New Amsterdam. The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, surrendered without a shot. The English promptly renamed Stuyvesant's city New York (after the king's brother, the Duke of York), marking the beginning of its predominance along the Atlantic coast. The French, however, would engage the British in battles and territorial disputes throughout the eighteenth century. The British victory in the French and Indian War (1755-63) left Britain with Canada and all French territory east of the Mississippi. The French continued to hold lands west of the Mississippi until 1803, when Thomas Jefferson, the American president, obtained French lands extending to the Rocky Mountains in the Louisiana Purchase.

In this chapter, we shall see how the early colonists maintained their memories of the Old World while settling the new one. We begin with the large view, looking at town maps and general land usage in Spanish and British North America. We then examine Puritan painting in the Massachusetts colony and the local arts of the Spanish Southwest. Next, we turn to a range of architectural styles that distinguished British and Spanish North American building types, as well as objects associated with everyday life (decorative arts, needlework, gravestones), noting the role each played in maintaining family and community. We conclude the chapter by addressing race and slavery. In adapting to North America, the colonists also adopted new labor practices. By cultivating labor-intensive tobacco-a New World plant that ignited a lucrative European trade colonists required ever-greater numbers of field hands. The abundance of land and scarcity of labor led to the importation of African slaves; and the combination of Africans and Europeans, together with indigenous peoples, transformed the New World into a remarkable meeting ground of different cultures, a place of brutal military encounter, extensive commercial exchange, and innovative cultural experiment.

Thumbnail: THE CHARLESTOWN STONE CUTTER , Gravestone of Joseph Tapping, King's Chapel, Boston, Massachusetts, 1678. Slate.