The History of the United States, 2nd Edition

Columbus's discovery of a New World allowed Europeans to, first, exploit natural and human resources, and later, to write new social, economic, and political scripts for their lives in a place where European ideas of society no longer applied.

The Spanish tapped sources of wealth in the Americas, displaying the most wanton cruelty in obtaining it. By 1600, they had evolved from an extraction society to a settler society. The French attempted extraction incursions and to settle in North America but did not succeed as the Spanish had in the South.

The English joined the great game of extraction and settlement last of all the major European nations. By 1680, settlements around the Chesapeake Bay achieved success with tobacco and the forced recruitment of a workforce of African slaves. Virginia worked its way through what became a typical English pattern: from company colony, to unstable free-for-all, to stable aristocracy.

If the southern English colonies were motivated by economic self-interest, the northern settlements were motivated by ideas. In New England's case, the ideas were religious. The "godly commonwealth" of the first Puritans was succeeded by the same slow tendency toward aristocracy, based on transatlantic commerce rather than commodities, that characterized Virginia.

The broad stretch of coastal territory between the Chesapeake and Long Island had been settled by the Swedes along the Delaware Bay and the Dutch along the Hudson River. Dutch settlements (renamed New York) developed into a major commercial center. Quaker William Penn's Pennsylvania emerged, by the 1750s, with a commercial aristocracy similar to that of New England.

The transition of settlements to stable commercial success would not have been possible without a source of cheap labor. America's immensity of land and lack of labor to develop it required forced migration of laborers: convicts, indentured servants, beggars. But a less expensive and more permanent source of labor was the 11 million Africans who were torn from their homes to be slaves.