Which of the following claims does the excerpt make about changes that occurred as a result of the new interactions in the Atlantic Region?

On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Spain to find an all-water route to Asia. On October 12, more than two months later, Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas that he called San Salvador; the natives called it Guanahani.

For nearly five months, Columbus explored the Caribbean, particularly the islands of Juana (Cuba) and Hispaniola (Santo Domingo), before returning to Spain. He left thirty-nine men to build a settlement called La Navidad in present-day Haiti. He also kidnapped several Native Americans (between ten and twenty-five) to take back to Spain—only eight survived. Columbus brought back small amounts of gold as well as native birds and plants to show the richness of the continent he believed to be Asia.

When Columbus arrived back in Spain on March 15, 1493, he immediately wrote a letter announcing his discoveries to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who had helped finance his trip. The letter was written in Spanish and sent to Rome, where it was printed in Latin by Stephan Plannck. Plannck mistakenly left Queen Isabella’s name out of the pamphlet’s introduction but quickly realized his error and reprinted the pamphlet a few days later. The copy shown here is the second, corrected edition of the pamphlet.

The Latin printing of this letter announced the existence of the American continent throughout Europe. “I discovered many islands inhabited by numerous people. I took possession of all of them for our most fortunate King by making public proclamation and unfurling his standard, no one making any resistance,” Columbus wrote.

In addition to announcing his momentous discovery, Columbus’s letter also provides observations of the native people’s culture and lack of weapons, noting that “they are destitute of arms, which are entirely unknown to them, and for which they are not adapted; not on account of any bodily deformity, for they are well made, but because they are timid and full of terror.” Writing that the natives are “fearful and timid . . . guileless and honest,” Columbus declares that the land could easily be conquered by Spain, and the natives “might become Christians and inclined to love our King and Queen and Princes and all the people of Spain.”

Excerpt

I have determined to write you this letter to inform you of everything that has been done and discovered in this voyage of mine.

On the thirty-third day after leaving Cadiz I came into the Indian Sea, where I discovered many islands inhabited by numerous people. I took possession of all of them for our most fortunate King by making public proclamation and unfurling his standard, no one making any resistance. The island called Juana, as well as the others in its neighborhood, is exceedingly fertile. It has numerous harbors on all sides, very safe and wide, above comparison with any I have ever seen. Through it flow many very broad and health-giving rivers; and there are in it numerous very lofty mountains. All these island are very beautiful, and of quite different shapes; easy to be traversed, and full of the greatest variety of trees reaching to the stars. . . .

In the island, which I have said before was called Hispana, there are very lofty and beautiful mountains, great farms, groves and fields, most fertile both for cultivation and for pasturage, and well adapted for constructing buildings. The convenience of the harbors in this island, and the excellence of the rivers, in volume and salubrity, surpass human belief, unless on should see them. In it the trees, pasture-lands and fruits different much from those of Juana. Besides, this Hispana abounds in various kinds of species, gold and metals. The inhabitants . . . are all, as I said before, unprovided with any sort of iron, and they are destitute of arms, which are entirely unknown to them, and for which they are not adapted; not on account of any bodily deformity, for they are well made, but because they are timid and full of terror. . . . But when they see that they are safe, and all fear is banished, they are very guileless and honest, and very liberal of all they have. No one refuses the asker anything that he possesses; on the contrary they themselves invite us to ask for it. They manifest the greatest affection towards all of us, exchanging valuable things for trifles, content with the very least thing or nothing at all. . . . I gave them many beautiful and pleasing things, which I had brought with me, for no return whatever, in order to win their affection, and that they might become Christians and inclined to love our King and Queen and Princes and all the people of Spain; and that they might be eager to search for and gather and give to us what they abound in and we greatly need.

When two people meet for the first time, each takes stock of the other, often focusing on differences. Scholar Martha Minow warns that difference always “implies a reference: difference from whom? I am no more different from you than you are from me. A short person is different only in relation to a tall one; a Spanish-speaking student is different in relation to an English-speaking one. But the point of comparison is often unstated.”1 By identifying unstated points of comparison, we can examine the relationships between those who have the power to assign labels of difference and those who lack that power.

The first meetings between Europeans and the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas2 illustrate Minow’s argument. Historians Peter Carroll and David Noble describe those encounters:

[On] an otherwise ordinary autumn day shortly after sunrise, the Arawak inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands noticed strange ships sailing on the horizon, much larger than their dugout canoes. As these ships moved closer and closer, they saw strange-looking people with light skins aboard, making odd gestures. The Arawak youths stood at the banks hesitantly, and then some of the braver men began swimming toward the mysterious boats.

These strangers offered the Arawak red-colored caps, glass beads, and other curious trifles. In exchange, the Arawak brought parrots, cotton skeins, darts, and other items. Then the strangers drew out swords, which the Arawak, in ignorance, grasped by the blades, cutting themselves. It was a symbolic act, this inadvertent drawing of blood. For the Arawak and the strangers looked at the world from opposite angles, and both were fascinated by what the other was not.3

To the Arawak, the newcomers were so obviously different in language, dress, and color that the Arawak doubted that the Europeans were human beings. “They believe very firmly,” wrote Christopher Columbus after his first voyage to the Americas, “that I, with these ships and people, came from the sky.”4 Other Indigenous Peoples reacted in similar ways to their first encounters with Europeans.

Columbus and other Europeans had their own misconceptions. They mistakenly believed that the Arawak were “Indians.” Carroll and Noble write:

This misconception originated in Columbus’s basic error (which he himself never realized) in thinking that in sailing westward from Europe he had reached the Indies [in Asia], which were the true object of his voyage. To Columbus, it was literally inconceivable that he had found previously unknown lands. Like other Europeans of his time, he believed firmly in the completeness of human knowledge. What he saw, therefore, he incorporated into his existing worldview, and the Native Americans thereby became, to the satisfaction of most Europeans, simply Indians.5

In describing the “Indians,” Europeans focused not on who they were but on who they were not. They then went on to describe what the Indigenous Peoples did not have. Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the Americas are named, described the “Indians” as neither Muslims nor Jews. He noted that they were “worse than heathen; because we did not see that they offered any sacrifice, nor yet did they have a house of prayer.” John Winthrop, an Englishman who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, justified his claims to the Indigenous Peoples’ land by arguing that they did not mark their ownership of it in ways that Europeans recognized. He wrote that they “enclose no land, neither have they any settled habitations, nor any tame cattle.”6

To many newcomers, the Indigenous Peoples were not only “backward” but also dangerous. In historian Ronald Takaki’s words, “They represented what English men and women in America thought they were not—and, more important, what they must not become.”7 Colonial leaders warned that colonists must strictly adhere to the laws and moral guidelines that defined their communities; otherwise they would allow themselves to become “Indianized.” Increasingly, “to be ‘Indianized’ meant to serve the Devil.” It also meant to be “decivilized, to become wild men.”8 After all, the English viewed "Indians" as people living outside of “civilization.”

Such ideas were rooted at least in part in religious beliefs. As Carroll and Noble point out in their description of Spanish explorers,

Europeans in the age of Columbus saw themselves as Christians, the most spiritually pure people in creation. This ethnocentric idea found reinforcement in the ideals of the Roman Catholic Church, which claimed to be a universal spiritual community. Yet this ideology clearly excluded such religiously different people as Muslims, against whom Christians had waged holy wars for centuries, and Jews, who remained outsiders throughout European society. Believing in a single unitary religion, members of the Catholic Church viewed [nonbelievers] as suitable either for conversion to the true faith or worthy only of death or enslavement. Such religious attitudes shaped the Europeans’ relations with Africans as well as Native Americans.9

Such attitudes were not limited to Europeans who were Catholic. They were shared by Protestants as well.

Relations between the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and the Europeans were also shaped by the fierce competition among European nations for wealth and power. As Europeans took control of more and more of the Americas, millions of Indigenous People were killed. Countless others were pushed into the interior of both continents. Still others were forced into slavery. 

1. Find words that Europeans used to describe Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. What do those words imply about how Europeans understood the new people they encountered?
2. What misconceptions did the Arawak seem to have about the Europeans who arrived on Christopher Columbus’s ships? What misconceptions did Columbus and other Europeans have about the Indigenous Peoples they encountered? Why did both groups have so many misconceptions? What effect did these misconceptions have on how Europeans and Indigenous Peoples thought about each other?
3. Sociologist Kai Erikson writes: “One of the surest ways to confirm an identity, for communities as well as for individuals, is to find some way of measuring what one is not.”9 In what ways did Europeans define Indigenous Peoples of the Americas according to that logic? What purpose did such thinking serve for these newcomers to North America? What might be the effects of a negative identity—of defining others by what they are not?
4. Have you ever been defined by what you are not? If so, how did it affect the way you viewed yourself? Why do you think that people so often focus on differences rather than similarities when they meet others for the first time?
5. What factors shape your initial understanding of unfamiliar people, places, and things that you encounter? What happens when you meet a person or group for whom you have no category? How difficult is it to avoid forming misconceptions about the unfamiliar?

Page 2

White Supremacist groups have claimed that Anthony Johnson, a black forced laborer who became free in 17th century Virginia, was the first legal slave owner in the British colonies that became the United States. That claim is historically false and misleading. It is important to note the following regarding Johnson’s life and the beginnings of slavery:

• The development of the institution of slavery in North America was complex. In the 17th century, the enslavement of Africans co-existed with indentured servitude, and laws governing both were in flux.
• Anthony Johnson was, himself, enslaved by an English settler upon being brought to North America.
• When Johnson was brought to North America, status and power in colonial Virginia society depended much more heavily on one’s religion or whether one owned property than it did on skin color or a notion of race.
• For a period of time in the 17th century, some of the enslaved, like Johnson, were able to gain their freedom, own land, and have servants.
• By the end of the 17th century, however, colonies began to make legal distinctions based on racial categories; the legal status of black people deteriorated while the rights of white European Americans increased. Johnson’s descendants, who were classified as black, were stripped of the property they inherited from him.
• A system of slavery in which enslavement was lifelong, hereditary, and based solely on race was established in the colonies in the beginning of the 18th century.

Why are White Supremacists making these claims? They are doing this for several reasons, including to promote denial of the history of chattel slavery and its impact, particularly on Black Americans. For more information, see the following articles:

For at least 400 years, a theory of “race” has been a lens through which many individuals, leaders, and nations have determined who belongs and who does not. The theory is based on the belief that humankind is divided into distinct “races” and that the existence of these races is proven by scientific evidence. Most biologists and geneticists today strongly disagree with this claim. They maintain that there is no genetic or biological basis for categorizing people by race. According to microbiologist Pilar Ossorio:

Are the people who we call Black more like each other than they are like people who we call white, genetically speaking? The answer is no. There’s as much or more diversity and genetic difference within any racial group as there is between people of different racial groups.1

Some historians who have studied the evolution of race and racism trace much of contemporary “racial thinking” to the early years of slavery in the colony of Virginia, in what is now the United States.

When the first Africans arrived aboard a Dutch slave ship in 1619, status and belonging in colonial Virginia society depended much more heavily on one’s religion or whether one owned property than it did on skin color or any notion of race. The stories of two Virginians of African descent—Anthony Johnson and Elizabeth Key—help to illustrate this fact.

Anthony Johnson, who arrived from Africa in 1621, was initially enslaved by a Virginia family from England, but he was permitted to obtain his freedom sometime in the first few decades after his arrival. It is not clear how he did so, but at the time those held in slavery were sometimes granted freedom by their owners, or, more often, they were allowed to farm a plot of their owner’s land, sell the crops, and purchase their freedom from the profits. By 1640, Anthony had married a woman named Mary (who was also enslaved), started a family, and acquired a sizeable farm of his own. When a fire destroyed much of the Johnson plantation in 1653, local officials noted that the Johnsons were “inhabitants in Virginia above thirty years” who were respected for their “hard labor and known service,” and they excused Mary and the couple’s two daughters from paying taxes for the rest of their lives. The ruling allowed the family to rebuild. In issuing the ruling, officials ignored a Virginia law that required that “all free Negro men and women” pay special taxes.

Historians T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes offer one explanation for the successes of African Americans like the Johnsons:

The foundation of liberty in mid-century Northampton—for whites as well as blacks—was property. Without land and livestock, without the means to support a family, no one could sustain freedom. Property gave men rights before the law; it provided them with an independent identity that translated into a feisty self-confidence in face-to-face contacts. Indeed, in this [rudimentary] social system, in which people placed extreme emphasis upon personal independence, upon material gain, and upon aggressive competition, property became the only clear measure of another man’s worth. And while the great planters of the Eastern Shore exploited dependent laborers, they also recognized the prerogative of almost everyone to take part in the scramble for wealth. It had not yet occurred to them to cut the Johnsons [and other people of African descent] out of the game.2

Like Anthony Johnson, Elizabeth Key was also able to secure her place as a free member of seventeenth-century Virginia society. She was born in Virginia in 1630, the daughter of an enslaved African woman and a British man who served in Virginia’s House of Burgesses, the colony’s legislature. After her father’s death in 1636, Elizabeth’s godfather, a prominent politician, took the child into his home.

At first Key’s godfather treated her as an indentured servant, but in time he sold her to a judge in Northumberland County, Virginia, who considered her his permanent slave. When the judge died in 1655, Key sued his estate for her freedom. She claimed that she was an indentured servant who had been sold wrongfully into slavery. Her enslavement was wrongful, she argued, because her father was an Englishman and under British law (which then ruled the colonies), she inherited his status in society. He was a free person and therefore so was she. And, finally, she provided a certificate of baptism as proof that she was a Christian, which meant under British law that she could not be enslaved. In 1662, the House of Burgesses was both Virginia’s legislature and its highest court. When it ruled in Key’s favor, she became a free person.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the success of Elizabeth Key, Anthony Johnson, and other Virginians of African descent, Virginia’s laws and traditions began to change in the 1660s. The House of Burgesses began to pass laws that favored people of European descent and restricted the freedom of those of African descent. Shortly after Key’s case was settled, the same lawmakers who decided that she had been wrongfully enslaved passed several new laws that prevented any other person of African descent from making a similar argument. One of the new laws stated that whether the child of an Englishman and an African woman was slave or free was to be determined solely by the mother’s status. If she had been enslaved, her child was a slave. Slavery was now a “permanent” and inheritable condition for people of African descent. Another law reinforced that idea by declaring that conversion to Christianity did not make an enslaved person free. In the spring of 1670, Johnson died and left 50 acres of land to one of his sons. In August, an all-white jury ruled that the colony could seize the son’s inheritance because he was “a Negro and by consequence an alien.” These laws and rulings ensured that white property owners would have a permanent work force—one bound to them by law, custom, and, increasingly, race.

1. What qualities gave someone status and power in seventeenth-century Virginia? How had that changed by the 1670s? Why might the Virginia legislature have restricted the freedom of people of African descent? What role do you think economics played in these new restrictions?
2. Were Anthony Johnson and Elizabeth Key included in Virginia’s universe of obligation during their lifetimes? What people and institutions played a part in defining the colony’s universe of obligation?
3. What do you think the jury meant when it labeled Anthony Johnson’s son an “alien”? Where does that label place Anthony Johnson’s family in relation to Virginia’s universe of obligation? What consequences might a person who is labeled an alien face?
4. What do the stories of Anthony Johnson and Elizabeth Key suggest about the role of law in creating the “other”? How might laws about the “other” give legitimacy to discrimination?
5. What questions does this reading raise for you about the notion of race and its effect on society? How does it complicate your understanding of the history of racism and slavery in North America?  

Which of the following was a similarity between the encomienda system and slavery in the Spanish colonies?

Which of the following best describes the economic system that supported the Native American villages discussed in the second paragraph of the excerpt *?

Which of the following most immediately resulted from the Columbian Exchange?

Which of the following best explains a historically accurate aspect of immigration during the 1990s that the excerpt does not address?