In 1672, the settlers of the New Jersey proprietary colony arose in a bloodless rebellion against Philip Carteret, appointed by the proprietors as governor. The wannabe rebels formed an illegal legislature, and installed Captain James Carteret as “president,” putting them in conflict with Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, James’s father. The conflict had to do with taxes, quitrents, and title to land. John Ogden, ancestor of your podcaster, emerged as a key player in the “popular party.” By the summer of 1673, the proprietors, with the help of the Duke of York and King Charles II, had put down the rebellion. James, now virtually disowned by his father, fled to Carolina, but along the way would be captured by the Dutch captain Cornelis Evertson the Youngest, known to his many fans as “Kees the Devil.” James, or one of his resentful allies, would describe the defenses of New York to Evertson, setting up the Dutch reconquest of New York.

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Useful background: https://thehistoryoftheamericans.com/ohhhh-whaddabout-new-jersey/

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

John E. Pomfret, Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary

James Carteret: The Black Sheep (Interesting blog post on James Carteret)

The first English settlers in today’s South Carolina departed England in August, 1669, but would not actually get to the coast of Carolina until April and May the next year. Along the way they would lose ships to hurricanes and incompetence, and get into a firefight with Spaniards and their Indian allies on an island off the coast of Georgia. An unknown number would die on an island in the Bahamas. And, yet, once on the banks of the Ashley River, the first English South Carolinians would lose only 12% of their population in their first 18 months, a record of survival in the first “seasoning” year matched only by Maryland in the 17th century.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website – https://thehistoryoftheamericans.com/the-first-english-settlement-of-south-carolina/)

Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government 1670-1719

L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots 1662-1729

George Bancroft, History of the United States of America: From the Discovery of the Continent

Alexander S. Salley, Jr., Narratives of Early Carolina 1650-1708 (Includes narrative of Maurice Mathews)

Letter from Henry Woodward to Sir John Yeamans, September 10, 1670

J. Leitch Wright, Jr., “Spanish Reaction to Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review, October 1964.

Notwithstanding the promising expeditions of William Hilton and Robert Sandford, by the end of 1666, with the Carolina proprietors waging war with the Netherlands and contending with plague and fire in London, the Carolina project was on the brink of failure. Then the youngest proprietor stepped forward; the venture received new vigor under the leadership of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley.

With his friend and confidant John Locke, Lord Ashley would develop a fantastically – some would say hilariously – detailed plan of government for Carolina that would never be put into effect, but which would inspire and confound historians and even be cited by courts into our own time, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.  This episode is about Ashley, Locke, and those strange Fundamental Constitutions.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

George Bancroft, History of the United States of America: From the Discovery of the Continent

Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government 1670-1719

L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots 1662-1729

Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, March 1, 1669

Jennifer Welchman, “Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, March 1995.

John Locke

Spaniards had been in South Carolina off and on since perhaps 1514, and certainly by 1521. Even in the 1660s Spaniards occasionally came up the coast to trade and visit Santa Helena on Parris Island, which had largely been abandoned to Indians. As late as 1663, however, the English had not explored even the coast of the future Palmetto State. That would change after the granting of the Carolina Proprietary in March 1663. In 1663 and 1666, two expeditions from Barbados, then perhaps the wealthiest corner of the nascent English empire, would explore coastal South Carolina, and set the stage for the first surviving English settlement on that coast, the town of Charleston in 1670. This is the story of those two expeditions, the first by William Hilton, after whom Hilton Head was quickly named, and the second by Robert Sandford, who named the Ashley River.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government 1670-1719

L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots 1662-1729

Alexander S. Salley, Jr., Narratives of Early Carolina 1650-1708 (Includes narratives of William Heaton and Robert Sandford)

Charles Towne

John Vassall

John Yeamans

Cape Fear Settlements

William Hilton

Bermuda Sloop

Henry Woodward

New Jersey is something of a puzzle, especially as a matter of early colonial history.  The future Garden State rates barely a mention in most surveys of American history until it becomes a primary battleground of the American Revolution.  That happens, however, not because of anything in New Jersey that was particularly worth defending in and of itself, but because of its location between the two most important cities in English North America in 1776, New York and Philadelphia.  But even that is puzzling.  One look at the map tells us that New Jersey is fundamentally a big fat peninsula between the two most commercially important rivers of mid-17th century North America – the lower Hudson and the Delaware.  It certainly seems strategic. It is therefore a little surprising that it was not settled in any meaningful way until after most of lower New England, Long Island, New York, Maryland, and Virginia. With few exceptions, the Dutch settled on the east bank of the Hudson, and the Swedes on the west bank of the Delaware.  New Jersey did not come in for meaningful European settlement until after the Duke of York took over New Netherland, and even then took ages to really get off the ground. Why was that?

This episode answers that question!

Selected references for this episode

John E. Pomfret, Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary

The Concession and Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Caesarea, or New Jersey, to and With All and Every the Adventurers and All Such as Shall Settle or Plant There

George Carteret

Ohhhhh! The New Jersey Game Show (SNL)

In recognition of the holiday(s),* this is a revision of one of the podcast’s earliest episodes, Introduction to the Columbian Exchange. The “Columbian Exchange” refers to the interhemispheric transmission of diseases, food crops, populations, cultures, and technologies in the years after Columbus’s famous First Voyage. The term was invented in 1972 by the famous biological historian Alfred W. Crosby Jr. of the University of Texas at Austin. The original episode focuses on the impact of diseases and crops that moved from one hemisphere to the other following 1492. It is replete with interesting factoids!

The revisions include thoughts on the human consequences, including to the indigenous peoples of the Americans and Africans swept up in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how we might think about it now.

*I think you know what I’m saying here. To each his own.

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th Anniversary Edition

Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas”

University of Zurich, “Syphilis May Have Spread Through Europe Before Columbus”

This blessedly short episode encapsulates the types of English colonial government in the 17th and 18th centuries, which were chartered corporations, proprietary “counties palatine,” and royal colonies directly ruled by the Crown through a governor and advisors. Technically abstruse as these distinctions may have been, they would become increasingly important starting in the 1670s, and will be useful background for much of what comes next.

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Links to selected English-American charter documents

Charter of Massachusetts Bay, March 4, 1629

Charter of the Colony of New Plymouth Granted to William Bradford and His Associates, 1629

Sir Robert Heath’s Patent for Carolana, October 30, 1629

The Charter of Maryland, June 20, 1632

Charter of Carolina, March 24, 1663

Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, July 15, 1663

Charter for the Province of Pennsylvania, February 20, 1681

Avalon Project 17th Century Documents

David T. Beito’s most recent book, and the subject of this conversation, is The New Deal’s War On the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (buy it through the link!), published by the Independent Institute in 2023.

The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal have now largely passed from living memory.  When I was in junior high school in the 1970s, however, many of the teachers had not only lived through the New Deal but remembered it as an almost sacred moment.  We watched scratchy black-and-white movies in class about the great success of FDR’s New Deal in ending the Great Depression, the soundtrack blaring with “Happy Days Are Here Again.”  David Beito’s book is about the dark side of all that, the almost crazy abuse of American civil liberties under FDR’s administration.  FDR’s Congressional allies, including future Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and Sherman Minton, rifled through individual tax returns and more than 3 million Western Union telegrams to find dirt on outspoken opponents of the New Deal. They proposed criminalizing “false” news. They used regulatory power and private coercion to drive virtually any criticism of the New Deal from the new medium of radio.  And, finally, they put more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps built by the famous Works Progress Administration, and kept them there long after any argument for military necessity had passed.  And that isn’t the end of it by any means!

And please listen to the last part, in which we discuss the frosty even if perhaps unsurprising silence with which academic historians have responded to David’s excellent book.

Listen on Apple, if you prefer, or Spotify.

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In August 1664, an English fleet acting under the orders of James, Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II, materialized off Manhattan and forced the bloodless surrender of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. It is easy – too easy – to conclude that this was inevitable because New England had roughly 17 times the population of New Netherland. It was in fact a foundational move in the construction of the English empire of the 17th century, and the product of the machinations of first cousins in conspiracy with each other: Sir George Downey, the “second” graduate of Harvard College and one of the most devious people in English politics ever, and John Winthrop the Younger, the pious Governor of Connecticut Colony, son of the leader of the Puritan Great Migration, and a stone cold operator of the first order.

In the end, Peter Stuyvesant was out of moves.

[Errata: Harvard’s first commencement was not in the spring of 1642, as I said in the episode, but on September 23, 1642]

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664

Richard Nicolls, Proposed Terms for the Surrender of New Netherland

Grant of March 12, 1664 from Charles II to his brother, James, Duke of York

L. H. Roper, “The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654-1676,” The New England Quarterly, December 2014.

Jonathan Scott, “‘Good Night Amsterdam’: Sir George Downing and Anglo-Dutch Statebuilding,” The English Historical Review, April 2003.

Steve Martin, “Mad at my Mother,” Let’s Get Small.

List of most populous cities in the United States by decade (Very interesting Wikipedia page if you love data and history)

While the English were consolidating their territory on most of the eastern seaboard of North America in the 1600s, Spanish Florida plugged along with its sole city at St. Augustine, with little European population growth. That simple fact obscures remarkable changes in the civil society of the future Sunshine State. From the 1570s, after the Jesuits had given up, until the 1720s, a small band of Franciscan friars, at no time numbering more than around fifty, built a network of wood and thatched missions throughout the region. They converted tens of thousands of Florida Indians to Catholicism, many practicing with such diligence that a visiting Frenchman wrote that the Apalachee were “scarcely distinguishable [in their practices] from Europeans who had been Christians for centuries.” 

The relationship between the Franciscans in Florida and the indigenous peoples was not only different than anywhere in English or Dutch North America, it was different from everywhere else in the Spanish New World, including New Mexico at the same time, and California and Texas in the following century. As a result, the relationship between the Spanish and the Indians of Florida was symbiotic, one of shared religion, trade, and mutual support rather than conquest.

Unfortunately, it would all fall apart when the English Carolinians marched south looking for people to enslave.

Map of Spanish Missions in Florida 1560s – 1720s:

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Michael Gannon (ed), The History of Florida

Wreck of the La Nuestra Senora de Atocha