Interactions Between American Indians and Europeans, 1607-1754

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how trade, missionary work, and warfare shaped the relationship between American Indian nations and European colonizers across British North America between 1607 and 1754.
• Compare the French alliance system in the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley with the English settler-and-displacement pattern along the Atlantic seaboard.
• Explain the causes, course, and consequences of the Powhatan-Virginia wars, the Pequot War of 1636 to 1638, and King Philip's War of 1675 to 1676.
• Analyze how the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy used its position between French and English imperial rivals to preserve sovereignty and expand its tributary network.
• Use Skill 2.A (Sourcing and Situation) to read a captivity narrative, a colonial-Indigenous treaty, and a colonial inter-imperial plan as historical arguments rather than as neutral evidence.

The first English colonists at Jamestown in 1607 stepped into the territory of a powerful regional confederacy. Wahunsonacock, the paramount chief whom the English called Powhatan, ruled some thirty Algonquian-speaking groups across the Tidewater. The first decade of contact swung between trade, gift exchange, and armed coercion, including the brief political marriage of his daughter Pocahontas to the planter John Rolfe in 1614. Three Anglo-Powhatan wars (1610 to 1614, the surprise attack of 1622, and a final war from 1644 to 1646) ended with the confederacy reduced to tributary status and English tobacco fields advancing west across the Tidewater. The pattern that opens Period 2 is the one the College Board CED frames in KC-2.1.III.F: as English colonists pushed inland to clear ground for agriculture, American Indian nations resisted, and the resulting conflicts were shaped by the way each imperial venture used land and labor.

New England produced two of the most consequential Indigenous-colonial wars of the seventeenth century. The Pequot War of 1636 to 1638 began as a dispute over trade and jurisdiction along the Connecticut River and ended with a Massachusetts and Connecticut militia force, allied with Mohegan and Narragansett warriors, burning the Pequot fort at Mystic in May 1637. Several hundred Pequot women, children, and men died in the fire. Survivors were sold into slavery in Bermuda or distributed among allied nations. A generation later, in King Philip's War of 1675 to 1676, the Wampanoag sachem Metacom (whom English colonists called King Philip) led a broad alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck warriors against the New England towns. Roughly twelve to thirteen English towns were destroyed; thousands of colonists died; Metacom was killed in August 1676. The Indigenous side suffered far worse. Native populations across southern New England fell by an estimated forty to eighty percent through battle, hunger, captivity, and the sale of survivors into Caribbean slavery. The war cleared the land for the agricultural expansion of the late seventeenth century and ended Indigenous political autonomy across most of southern New England (KC-2.1.III.F).

The French built a different system. After Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, New France grew slowly in population but built a far-reaching network of fur-trade alliances with Algonquian nations from the St. Lawrence to the western Great Lakes and with the Huron (Wendat) confederacy in particular. French traders and Jesuit missionaries lived inside Indigenous communities, learned Indigenous languages, and intermarried with Indigenous families to seal trade ties. New France remained a thin scattering of forts, missions, and trading posts rather than a settler colony, and the French generally accommodated rather than suppressed Indigenous religious practice. The CED frames the broader fur economy in KC-2.1.III.E: trade between Europeans and American Indians moved metal tools, firearms, textiles, and alcohol into Indigenous communities and reshaped political and cultural life from the inside.

The most powerful Indigenous polity in eastern North America during much of Period 2 was the Iroquois Confederacy, a league of five (and after 1722, six) nations centered in present-day upstate New York: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, joined later by the Tuscarora. Through the Beaver Wars of the 1640s to 1670s, the Haudenosaunee fought to control the supply of furs flowing east from the Great Lakes, displacing or absorbing rival nations and extending tributary networks across the Ohio Valley. In imperial diplomacy, the confederacy played the French and English against one another, signing the Covenant Chain with New York in 1677 while keeping doors open to French negotiators in Montreal. The 1754 Albany Plan of Union that Benjamin Franklin pressed at the start of the French and Indian War was convened in part to secure Iroquois neutrality. The Haudenosaunee remained a real, independent diplomatic power that imperial planners on both sides had to negotiate with rather than dictate to.

Religion produced a different kind of encounter. In Massachusetts, the Puritan minister John Eliot spent decades translating the Bible into Massachusett, a Native Algonquian language, and gathered Christianized Indigenous converts into Praying Towns, the first of which was established at Natick in 1651. By 1675, on the eve of King Philip's War, fourteen Praying Towns held more than a thousand converts. The towns required residents to adopt English-style dress, settled agriculture, and Puritan religious practice, and they sat as cultural intermediaries between English settlements and the unconverted Indigenous nations on the frontier. King Philip's War tore the system apart: Praying Town residents were rounded up and interned on Deer Island in Boston Harbor through the winter of 1675 to 1676, where many died of cold and disease. Most of the towns never recovered. The episode illustrates the CED point in KC-2.1.III.C, that religious and cultural change inside Indigenous communities produced both real conversions and serious internal divisions, and that those changes did not protect American Indians from the consequences of colonial war.

Indigenous policy was also at the heart of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676. Frontier farmers, many of them former indentured servants who had finished their terms but had been forced onto marginal land farther west, demanded that Governor William Berkeley wage open war on the tributary Indigenous nations of the Tidewater. Berkeley, who profited from the regulated Indian trade and who feared a wider Native war, refused. Nathaniel Bacon, an aggrieved planter, raised an unauthorized militia, attacked the Pamunkey and other Native communities, and then turned on Berkeley himself, briefly burning Jamestown in September 1676. The rebellion collapsed when Bacon died of dysentery a month later, but it demonstrated to Tidewater elites that a coalition of poor whites and free Black people angry over land and Indian policy was a real political threat. The Crown's response, the 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation that resettled tributary Native nations on protected reservations, is one of the documents in this lesson's source set.

A timeline of the four most-tested conflicts of Topic 2.5. Each is anchored to the Key Concept it most directly illustrates.

A side-by-side comparison of the two contrasting imperial systems on the eve of the French and Indian War. The Comparison reasoning process the CED assigns to Topic 2.5 invites students to use the table below as a starting point for argument-building.

Three sources span the lesson. A captivity narrative from 1682 New England gives the English Puritan vantage point on King Philip's War. A 1677 Virginia treaty shows the post-Bacon's Rebellion settlement with the Tidewater's tributary Indigenous nations. The 1754 Albany Plan demonstrates how seriously imperial planners had to take Iroquois diplomacy on the eve of the French and Indian War.

1. (Comparison) Compare the French alliance system in the Great Lakes with the English settler-and-displacement pattern along the Atlantic seaboard. Which factor, the imperial economy or the size of the European migrant flow, did more to produce that contrast, and why?
2. (Causation) Account for the causes of King Philip's War of 1675 to 1676. To what extent was the war a response to specific land disputes, and to what extent was it the predictable result of a generation of Puritan expansion across southern New England?
3. (Comparison) Compare the Iroquois Confederacy's diplomatic position between French and English empires with the position of the Powhatan Confederacy on the Virginia Tidewater seventy years earlier. What structural features made one strategy succeed and the other one collapse?
4. (Continuity and Change) Trace continuity and change in English approaches to American Indian land between Jamestown in 1607 and the Albany Plan of 1754. Identify one continuity and one important shift.
5. (Sourcing and Situation) Read Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative and the 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation as evidence of English colonial attitudes after 1676. What does each source assume about the legal and moral status of American Indians? What does each source omit?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.