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.

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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.

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2 and Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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]

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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:

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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

We are back to Spanish Florida after a long hiatus, with the story of St. Augustine, La Florida after the founding of the city and the slaughter of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline until the construction of the Castillo de San Marcos in the 1670s. The city would almost fail, and in 1607 the Spanish Crown ordered that it be shut down and that Spain withdraw from Florida all together. That order would be promptly rescinded when the English landed at Jamestown.

It is a story of courageous Catholic evangelism, Indian wars, relentless epidemics, and pirates, climaxing in the raid of the dread pirate Robert Searles in 1668. That attack would, ironically, result in a renewed commitment by the Spanish government to sustaining the city which would ensure its long-term survival as the oldest continuing town in the United States.

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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

Carrie Gibson, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America

Michael Gannon (ed), The History of Florida

Susan Richbourg Parker, "St. Augustine in the Seventeenth-Century: Capital of La Florida," The Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014

Diana Reigelsperger, "Pirate, Priest, and Slave: Spanish Florida in the 1668 Searles Raid," The Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014

List of Cuba–United States aircraft hijackings

In March 1663, after 97 years of failed attempts by first the Spanish and then the English to establish settlements in North Carolina, King Charles II granted eight aristocrats a vast territory extending from the coast of today's North and South Carolina to the Pacific Ocean. These eight Lords Proprietor - George, Duke of Albemarle; Edward, Earl of Clarendon; William, Lord Craven; John, Lord Berkeley; Anthony, Lord Ashley; Sir George Carteret; Sir William Berkeley, who was again the governor of Virginia; and Sir John Colleton - would almost unwittingly authorize in their new colony a remarkably free and democratic society of small farmers, rivaled only by Roger Williams' Rhode Island in its respect for individual liberty.

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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

Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729

Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713

George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, Vol. 1

Charter of Carolina - March 24, 1663

Charter of Carolina - June 30, 1665

On July 29, 2024, President Joe Biden visited The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The President referred to LBJ as "master of the Senate," which reminded me of the opening pages of Robert Caro's book of the same name. That introduction is itself a masterful description of the suppression of Black voters in the South, the meaning of voting, the history of the Senate, its historical resistance to civil rights, and LBJ’s role in changing all that. It is also filled with interesting observations about timeless aspects of American politics, and since I enjoyed re-reading it I'm going to read it for you with some annotations along the way. 

Oh, and it turns out that President Biden, who knows a thing or two about the Senate, left a few things out for the audience in Austin.

Finally, I again recorded early in the morning outside in the Adirondacks, so there are a lot of tweeting birds in the background. Non-birdie recording will resume next time.

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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

Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 3)

Remarks by President Biden Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act | Austin, TX

The other volumes in Caro's biography (I highly recommend the first two, and haven't yet read the fourth):

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 1)

Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 2)

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 4)

In the early 1660s, a motley crew of free-thinkers, republican veterans of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, and Quakers would build the freest place in all the English world, the County of Albemarle in northeastern North Carolina. Protected from the north, and incursions by Virginia royalists, by the Great Dismal Swamp, from the east by the treacherous waters of the Outer Banks, and from Indians by the skilled diplomacy of fur trader Nathaniel Batts, the settlers would prosper as small farmers and free tradesmen. Their leaders would include John Jenkins, veteran of Fendall's Rebellion in Maryland, and a dissident Virginian planter and sheriff named William Drummond. Together they would resist attempts by the proprietors to exert control over their land and lives, and would extend the franchise to all free Englishmen in the colony. This is their story.

X/Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast

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

Noeleen McIlvenna, Early American Rebels: Pursuing Democracy from Maryland to Carolina, 1640-1700 

Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729

Albemarle County, North Carolina

Francis Yeardley

Map of Albemarle County in context