Colonial America

The experiences in early Colonial America are best described as violent, contentious, and socially fragmented. However, this is not a mutually exclusive point-of-view. While we can surely believe that not every day was bad and every experience negative, we can understand that relations with the colonists and the Native Americans was tense at best. Certainly, ideas were exchanged and each group of people contributed to the other in areas of education and survival but overall, the experience was more dreadful than anything else. As expansion took place, the Native Americans grew increasingly territorial and resorted to whatever means they felt justified to maintain control of their communities, even if that meant murder. As stated in the article about the Chesapeake colonies, we know that Native Americans "murdered serverall of our bretheren and put them to the most cruell torture" (Rushforth 101). Colonists were rightly concerned for the lives as tension between the two groups grew. Even in Bacon's Rebellion, the Natives were treated as second-class individuals. It is written that the intension of the rebellion was to "ruin and extirpate all Indians in general" (Foner 59) because they were basically in the way. These accounts prove that there are two sides to every story and no one group of people is going to be "better" and "above" another. It was inevitable that such tension would occur given the nature of both groups of people. The Native Americans docile nature could not stand up to the overbearing qualities of Euro-Americans and it was only a matter of time before the Native Americans were crushed. This is not to say that they were completely innocent of any wrongdoing; however, it does shed some light on the interaction between the two groups of people, which was contentious and even violent more than anything else.

Works Cited

Foner, Eric. Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History. New York W.W. Norton and Company. 2008.

Rushforth, Brett, et al. Colonial North America and the Atlantic World. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 2008.