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Until recently, American history texts were resolutely Anglocentric, beginning the immigration story with the first successful English settlements -- at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, in 1620. The British, in fact, were latecomers. In 1565 a convicted Spanish smuggler named Pedro Menendez de Aviles, leading a ragtag army of perhaps 1,500 that included blacksmiths and brewers as well as foot soldiers, built the first permanent European settlement on American soil at St. Augustine, Florida. (The ruins of Menendez's first fort were discovered only last summer.) Thirty-three years later, Juan de Onate established a colonial capital at San Gabriel in what is now New Mexico.
The Spanish, typically more interested in the pursuit of gold than in settlement, easily subjugated the Indians, enslaving those who did not die of imported diseases like smallpox. The 500,000 or so Indian inhabitants of Eastern North America at the time of the first English settlements were not so easily conquered. These resilient and warlike nations -- principally the Algonquin and Iroquois in the north, the Muskoghean and Choctaw in the south -- were happy to trade with the white man and adopt his weapons, but not his Christian faith or his mores. And they would fight to the death to defend their lands from encroachment.
Many of the first immigrants from the British Isles were unwilling voyagers. Long before Australia became the fatal shore for millions of convicts, North America was London's principal penal colony. Others came to the New World as indentured servants, bound into service to pay the cost of their passage for specified terms -- usually three to seven years -- before being set free. During the 17th century, for example, 75% of Virginia's colonists arrived as servants, some of whom had been kidnapped by unscrupulous "recruiters."
And then there were the slaves. In 1619 the Virginia settler John Rolfe made a diary note of a dark moment in American history. "About the last of August," he wrote, "came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars." In Virginia alone, the slave population grew from about 2,000 in 1670 to 150,000 on the eve of the American Revolution. Most of the slaves sailed from West Africa, chained together in dank, fetid holds for transatlantic journeys that often lasted three months or more. The conditions were unspeakable, the mortality rate horrifying: on some ships more than half the slaves died during the passage.
Initially, blacks worked alongside whites in the tobacco fields of Virginia and the Carolinas, but by 1650 field hands were invariably men and women of color. One reason: because of what science now knows is the sickle-cell trait, blacks were often less susceptible than whites to the depredations of malaria. More important, a terrible distinction had been made, first informally but then in legislation: white servants were considered persons despite their temporary state of servitude; blacks were mere property that could be bought and sold.