Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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system that tied the valley into an imperial commercial network that stretched throughout the Atlantic. English farmers exploited the fertility of the bottomlands to turn the region into a breadbasket for empire, raising wheat and a myriad of other crops for export to the other mainland colonies, Europe, and, most importantly, the Caribbean. This transition introduced new plants, animals, and diseases to the valley, and redefined how human farmers managed the region’s landscape.
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In 1639, Captain David Pieterszen de Vries, acting on behalf of the Dutch West Indies Company, sailed his fluyt up the Connecticut River to call upon Governor John Haynes of the newly established Connecticut Colony. De Vries’ mission was to warn off the English, who by 1639 had planted four towns along the southern Connecticut River in lands that the Dutch considered their own by right of exploration. The Dutch had strengthened their title by purchasing these lands from the conquering Pequots with the (likely coerced) approval of the local Wangunk Indians and their sachem, Sowheage. Governor Haynes could have responded to de Vries’ accusations by pointing out that the English had also been granted land for their towns by local Indian communities eager to break the fur trade monopoly of the Pequots. Hartford, for example, had been founded upon lands provided by Wahginnacut, sachem of the local Podunks, while Sowheage himself had also sold lands to the settlers of nearby Wethersfield.
Instead, Haynes chose another tack. The governor upbraided de Vries and his Dutch countrymen for having left the lands of the Connecticut Valley “lying idle.” “It was,” Haynes insisted, “a sin to let such rich land, which produced such fine corn, lie uncultivated.”1 Implicitly, Haynes criticized not only the Dutch West Indies Company’s decision to curtail agricultural settlement for fear it might disrupt the corporation’s monopoly on the fur trade, but also the Indian system of agriculture that had supported the peoples of the valley for centuries. For Haynes and most of his fellow English colonists, proper agriculture required plowed fields, livestock to produce manure, and fences all around. The Indians’ failure to exploit their lands in accordance with such a model supposedly invalidated any title they may have otherwise claimed to their homelands and invited—perhaps even required, in the view of Puritan leaders—their dispossession by new settlers.2 The English may have first come to the valley to exploit the opportunities offered by the fur trade, but they would stay to become farmers.
Just as John Winthrop had, in 1633, bemoaned his fellow colonists’ continued addiction to “foreign commodities,” de Vries predicted that the Puritans of the Connecticut Valley would, despite the strict religion of their leaders, maintain a taste for many of the imported luxuries they had enjoyed in the commercial world of old England.3 During his short visit in Hartford, de Vries witnessed an English trading ketch arrive carrying, among other imports, a cargo of wine from the Portuguese Madeira islands. When a servant of the town was shortly afterward discovered to have overindulged in this luxury, he was sentenced to be flogged for his drunkenness. Horrified by what he considered an excessive punishment, De Vries interceded on the servant’s behalf and convinced Haynes to forgo the whipping. De Vries later warned the English governor “that it would be impossible for them [the colony’s Puritan authorities] to keep the people so strict, as they had come from so luxurious a country as England.”4
These two factors, the region’s rich soils and its inhabitants’ desire for imported goods, ensured that the Connecticut Valley remained firmly tied to Atlantic markets even following the failure of the fur trade. Writing a little over a decade after de Vries’ unsuccessful mission to Hartford, Captain Edward Johnson of Massachusetts observed that although the valley had originally been settled because it was so “fitly seated for a Bever trade with the Indians,” the decline of that trade had already encouraged enterprising settlers to shift their focus and “caused them to live upon husbandry.”5 Although this new focus on husbandry—a mixed agricultural system combining raising field crops with keeping livestock—initially aimed merely at subsistence, English farmers had by the time Johnson was writing already begun to export their agricultural surpluses beyond the valley.
In this, the new English settlers of the valley followed the example of the region’s Indian agriculturalists, although the cultural chauvinism of men like Haynes likely prevented them from appreciating the fact. Agricultural commodities had flowed from the valley for time immemorial. The River Indians exported corn, squash, and dried beans to their nonagricultural neighbors farther north and to coastal communities which specialized in exploiting marine resources. Indeed, the earliest English colonists in the valley depended on these surpluses to provision their own poorly planned efforts at settlement. But over time this reliance shifted toward a desire to dispossess the Native communities of the valley. As fur supplies declined, English merchants instead demanded land in exchange for their goods and Native leaders—facing devastating mortality from disease, stiff and sometimes hostile competition from rival nations, and the intimidating power of expanding English settlements—often saw trading away land as the best path forward for their communities. English traditions of agriculture replaced Indian practices. New crops were planted and, in time, the English began exporting the products of their own fields: apple cider to quench the thirst of neighboring New Englanders, flaxseed to supply the linen industries of Ireland and Britain, wheat and other grains to feed the slave plantations of the West Indies. Indeed, by 1660, one knowledgeable merchant was able to declare to the King’s Council for Foreign Plantations that the provisioning trade of New England, of which the produce of the Connecticut Valley made up an important part, was “the key to the Indies, without which Jamaica, Barbadoes and ye Charibby Islands are not able to subsist.”6 From a Native American trading nexus supplying the regions all around, to a production site for empire sending its produce into an Atlantic marketplace, the ecology of the valley shaped and was shaped by the economics of trade.
Native Agriculture
Maize had spread to the Connecticut Valley around 1000 AD, a relatively short six hundred years prior to the arrival of the first Europeans in the region, and disseminated throughout southern New England at roughly the same time. Indian women adopted this new crop and planted it in their fields alongside earlier arrivals—multiple species of beans and squash.7 Throughout the region, Native communities enjoyed broad diets. Native women raised crops and collected wild plant foods like berries, nuts, and tubers, while men hunted for game and fished. Along the coast, plentiful shellfish further expanded Native diets. The arrival of maize roughly paralleled a period of mild climatic warming in the northern hemisphere known as the Medieval Warm Period. Together, warmer temperatures (which in turn produced longer growing seasons for both cultivated and wild food plants) and the arrival of an important new dietary staple led to a gradual increase in the human populations of New England as a whole.8
This period of agricultural plenty proved fleeting. Within four centuries, warmer temperatures gave way to a period of global cooling—the Little Ice Age—that would stretch from roughly the mid-fourteenth to the early nineteenth century. By the end of the fourteenth century, lower average temperatures in the spring and autumn had shortened the agricultural growing season to the point where most communities throughout southern New England were forced to abandon cultivating crops. Even in communities where women continued to plant and tend to their fields of maize, squash, and beans, they cut back significantly on the amount of land planted and on the amount of time and labor spent in tending crops relative to their efforts at collecting wild plants and game. Only in the Connecticut Valley—where the waters of the Connecticut River and its larger tributaries acted to moderate local temperatures and slightly extend the growing season—did communities remain committed to a largely sedentary and agriculturally centered lifestyle. Elsewhere, New England communities returned to cultivating crops only as average temperatures rose (slightly) at the turn of the sixteenth century. As the earliest European explorers pushed into New England in the mid-sixteenth century, then, they encountered many Native communities that had only just recently readopted farming to supplement their continued reliance on hunting and foraging.9
The villages of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Connecticut Valley took advantage of their climatically fortuitous placement to become a breadbasket to the rest of New England, trading their surplus agricultural produce to communities living to their north, east, and west. Native traders