Lesson video

Hi, welcome back.

I'm Miss Cussworth.

And thanks for coming to the second lesson, looking at who lived in British America.

So, today we are going to be looking at planters, servants, enslaved people and puritans.

So a broad range of different people, and they lived in British America, especially along the east coast.

So you remember that last lesson we focused on Pocahontas and the Powhatan people who were Native Americans people who had lived in America before it was even called America.

We then briefly looked at their experience of the English colonists coming over to Jamestown, and we're going to to be looking at some groups that we didn't look at last time so we're going to be thinking about indentured servants and don't worry.

I'll explain what that means.

And we're going to be looking at briefly at enslaved people who lived in Virginia.

So you remember that last time we talked about British America and what it was.

And we looked at Jamestown so the settlement that the the English setup on Powhatan land and that wasn't the only settlement though, as you can see, it was only a small part of this big red landmass.

It was followed, not that long after by a settlement called Plymouth in Massachusetts so a bit further north.

And then you started to see colonies being set up in the Caribbean.

So one here in Barbados, and for next lessons in this inquiry we're going to be looking at Barbados, then up here again in Massachusetts, a settlement called Boston, you might have heard of the city of Boston in the United States.

And then later in 1955.

The island of Jamaica was colonised by the British.

So those are obviously all of the different places but just to give you a bit of a flavour of what was going on around this time so while Jamestown, Virginia might have been the first.

It definitely wasn't the last.

So what I want you to have a think about is: Why might people have travelled to America in the 1960s.

in the 1600s? The journey was very different to what it was in the 1960s in that in the 1600s, you were going to go on a ship that would have taken weeks and weeks.

There was no mechanical power to the ship you were just relying on the winds.

It was a dangerous journey, there was often a shipwreck, disease, many people actually died on the journey.

So I want you to have a think, bearing in mind the journey was very dangerous.

Why might people have travelled to America in the 1600s? To these colonies that were not necessarily doing particularly well.

So, I'm going to ask you to pause the video and write down, why might people have travelled to America in the 1600s.

Okay, welcome back.

Hopefully you've got some things written down.

So I just took a guess at what I thought maybe you would have written down.

I thought maybe to make money, right? They might have gone to America to make money and that was definitely a really key consideration.

Some people may have gone for a better life and we'll see that later when we look at one of our indentured servants.

Maybe people wanted more freedom you might have heard about the Puritans were who we're going to talk about later.

They saw going to America as a chance to have greater freedom, especially in religion.

But for some people, they have no choice.

And that's especially the case when we're looking at enslaved people who were taken from Africa over to America so lots of different reasons why people travelled to America in the 1600s.

The reason I got you to think about that was because, as we're looking at these different groups of people, or these different individuals, I always want you to be comparing thinking about, in what ways are they similar, and in what ways are they different.

So all of these different groups went to America apart from obviously the Native Americans who already lived there.

But the reasons why they went to America was sometimes really different.

So we're going to be having a look at planters, servants and enslaved people in this next section.

I want us to or you to, we can do it together really to make this table, and to keep notes so that as we go through we're going to be together, filling this table in about these different groups who lived in Virginia.

So pause the video, create this table maybe in your exercise book or on a piece of paper, and it doesn't have to be different colours at the top, and then when you have created the table unpause the video and we'll get started with the lesson proper.

Okay, welcome back, so you should have done the table.

If you've not.

Pause the video finish it off, and then we can get started.

So planters.

Now we're going to be looking in particular, at a man called John Rolfe, and we're going to be having a little bit of a look at his story and some of it might actually be familiar to you from our lesson that we did last time.

So, last lesson we looked at the Powhatan chieftain, and the arrival of the English and you remember that the English created this area called Jamestown, after King James, and they created a colony there.

And the many people who ran Jamestown were what's called a planter or that was the name that they call themselves and that they went by.

So, John Rolfe was one of those men, and he was born in Norfolk in England, in 1585, and he became a businessman, and he wanted to challenge Spain's control of the tobacco industry now you probably know tobacco is something that you put in cigarettes or in pipes and you smoke it.

And at this time it was becoming increasingly popular, but it was Spain, who really had like tight control over that industry and John Rolfe had this idea that he was going to challenge the Spanish and he was going to start growing tobacco and become very rich.

So, in 1609 he left England for Jamestown and he took his wife whose name was Sarah.

Now the colony Jamestown at this time, it was struggling, it was not doing well.

In fact, people were often dying, they were starving, they were struggling.

And so it needed supplies and people to stop it from failing from disappearing in a similar way to Roanoke the colony that disappeared.

However, many of the ships that travelled from England in this kind of supply party, they didn't reach in Jamestown, they never got there.

And sadly Sarah Rolfe, so his wife, and their child died before the ship arrived in Jamestown.

So, here they are, after their ship had been destroyed like rowing their way over to Jamestown, and when men like John Rolfe arrived, they started creating plantations, tobacco plantations and that's what you can see people growing here.

Now a plantation is sort of similar to a farm.

It's where though, instead of maybe growing food or raising animals for people to eat, you tend to grow like one particular crop.

And the idea is that you'll growing crop and then you'll sell it to make money, so a plantation is kind of like a big farm that normally only grows, or focuses on growing one thing, and in this case people were growing tobacco, because I knew if they could grow it and sell it back to England they would be making a lot of money, and people started making these plantations, up and down the river and started when they were selling the tobacco back to England started to become very rich.

Now, John Rolfe married Matoaka who we know as Pocahontas.

And as the English took more and more control like we talked on this last one of Powhatan land there started to become a conflict.

And over time, the English colonists, they destroyed much really of the Powhatan way of life.

So, at first, here's a kind of marriage to Pocahontas that created some kind of unity at sight between the English and the Powhatan people.

But that didn't last as the English kind of kept on going further and further and taking more and more of the land.

And so those are the things you might want to put into your table in a moment.

The fact that he travelled from England to Virginia and he went there really to farm tobacco.

Set up a plantation, and maybe a bit similar to this would have looked relatively similar to this we think he became very wealthy.

He married Pocahontas.

And I would like you now to put some of that information here into your table.

So I'm going to ask you to pause the video, and fill in that column of your table, about John Rolfe, and his life.

Now, I've given you some information with me here, but I've also.

on the website, there's like a reading sheet that will have more information that you could use.

Okay, so get to work filling this in, I'm sure you're going to do a good job.

And then when you're ready, unpause the video, and we can go through some answers together.

Okay, hopefully if you're seeing this you've done your column, you've filled in some things.

This is what I've put down, you might have had different things that you've taken from the reading, anything similar to this, give yourself a tick, and we'll move on and we'll have a look at the role of indentured servants.

So we're going to look at the the story of one particular indentured servant whose name was Richard Frethorne.

However, there were a lot of people like Richard whose stories we don't really know so well.

But they travelled in large numbers at first to Virginia.

And many of them were quite similar to Richard, in the sense that they were young, and they were from poor families.

And he travelled to Virginia to work on a plantation, as an indentured servant.

Now, if you're an indentured servant, you can see an example of an indenture here it's where you effectively sign a contract to say you will work as a servant with very little freedom for a set number of years, often it's seven years.

And why people did that was sometimes they were really pushed by people at home to do it.

Perhaps they thought it was a way to start a new life.

And that's, we think what happened to Richard Frethorne that he was thinking if he went to Virginia, he could start a new life for himself, one that was much better than his life in London.

And they had their journeys paid for them so that was part of the deal you signed a contract to work for free for seven years, and they would pay for your journey and then when they got there they would give you some food, some clothes and somewhere to live.

But sadly things didn't work out too well for Richard Frethorne, and he wrote letters home telling of his hunger and his bad treatment.

And we have, we know about his story because his letters survived.

So, in those letters he wrote: "I have nothing to comfort me, "nor is there nothing to be gotten here "but sickness and death.

"except [In The Event] that one had money "to lay out in some things for profit." So what he's saying here is, he's really sad that he he doesn't have anything to comfort him.

The only thing he can find is sickness and death.

And that's the case for maybe him and the people who are around him apart from those who already had a bit of money.

Who could lay out some things for profit and I'm thinking the year about a few maybe people like Rolfe and having a bit of money to set up a plantation growing some tobacco, making some money, but that wasn't an option for everyone.

And he says: "But I have nothing at all.

"No, not a shirt to my back but two rags "my cloak is stolen by one of my fellows." And then he says: "I've eaten more in one day at home "than I have allowed me here for a week." So, for people like Richard Three.

Frethorne, I'm sorry, and other indentured servants.

I want you to make some notes on their experience, and I've got the experience of planters here.

But I want you to think about people like Richard Frethorne, maybe you want to say his name e.

g.

Richard Frethorne and his experience, make some notes.

So I'm going to ask you to pause the video.

Make those notes.

Okay, so maybe you've got his name.

Maybe you've got the fact that indentured servants generally tended to be people from poor backgrounds, and they were young.

In their teenage years often more sometimes, 12, 13, 14.

They weren't necessarily adults.

They worked for free in return for the journey.

And they were badly, often badly treated as we can see from his letter.

So, on plantations, you would have had the planters people like John Rolfe for kind of running it, you would have had indentured servants, because these plantations needed workers, lots of people to work there.

And then, after some time of Virginia and Jamestown being set up you would have also had a number of enslaved people.

And that's what we're going to be looking at now.

So enslaved people.

Now at first we think that Africans may have been treated as indentured servants.

But we're not 100%, historians aren't 100% sure but what we do know is that there were a group of about 20 or so people from Africa who arrived on an English ship, and they had been captured from a Portuguese ship, so English and a group of English people had gone out on a ship and have been kind of, it's called privateering, and have basically taken this group of.

They were at the time enslaved Africans who had been helped by the Portuguese and moved them onto their ship, and then took them for Virginia, where they traded them for food.

And the story of John Punch, so he was an indentured servant.

And he was living in sort of the 1640s and his story, gives us a sense that as time went on, the status of black people in Virginia was really starting to change that they were being treated less as indentured servants and more as slaves.

So the story of John Punch is that he and some European indentured servants, I think, one was maybe Dutch and one was British.

They decided that they'd had enough of their bad treatment and they were going to run away they were going to escape and this was relatively common also relatively common was that people were then found.

So he was found and they got sent to like the courthouse.

And what happened to John Punch was different to what happened to the other white indentured servants that he was with.

So they had a number of years added to their contract, whereas it was John Punch it was said that he was going to have to serve for the rest of his life, effectively, making him enslaved.

And so historians have said that the story of John Punch shows us that they started to have enslavement in Virginia, around about this time.

And so these enslaved people were owned by plantation owners and they were forced to work on plantations.

Often, they were taken from Africa, from West Africa, and were taken to Virginia, and were then sold in Virginia, to these plantation owners and forced to work on plantations, often in really awful conditions, and in the sort of the middle of the 1600s, they will be working alongside indentured servants, so you'd have the two groups working alongside each other on plantations, but their treatment would have been often different.

So, I want you to now have a think about maybe the difference, perhaps between indentured servants and enslaved people, and if you're stuck, maybe think about what similarities are there between indentured servants and enslaved people, and anything that you can remember that I've told you about enslaved people.

I'll give you a moment to fill that out.

Okay.

So you might have said something about John Punch, give yourself a tick for that.

And then about their status worsened over time, so we think that although we have records in fact it was John Rolfe, he might have thought seamless in on reading sheet in fact it was John Rolfe who was the person who wrote the letter in 1619, saying or recording that some Africans had arrived in Virginia.

Historians aren't sure if they were 100% sure if they were treated as slaves from when they first arrived.

They might have been treated more like indentured servants.

But over the years, their status got worse, to the point when they stopped being seen as indentured and treated as indentured servants and started to become slaves.

Now the difference there is that when you're indentured servant, as you might remember me saying, you have a set number of years to your contract, and at the end of it you're free.

Whereas if you're enslaved, there's no sense that you will definitely become free, it might happen, but realistically you'll probably be enslaved for the rest of your life.

Enslaved people were African, or descended from Africans.

And they were often like indentured servants very badly treated with violence, punished with violence, punished for very small things, not given enough to eat, not given proper clothes to wear, not given proper places to live or to sleep.

And all of these people, planters, indentured servants and enslaved people would have been working alongside each other, living alongside each other in Virginia.

Now, Puritans didn't live in Virginia.

They lived in a different colony, all together, and we're going to be looking at that in a moment.

So, Puritans.

Puritans were in a place you might remember me talking about that earlier they were further up in America, and they were living in a place that became known as New England.

And these Puritans, they felt that the Church of England was still too Catholic that it hadn't gone through enough of a reformation, and they felt like it was beyond repair.

Not all Puritans felt like that some Puritans felt like they could stay in England, and not like other groups of Puritans felt like it was too much, they had to leave England, right? The situation was beyond repair in England and they just have to go, they had to leave they have to go somewhere else, they had to start again.

They wanted to live in communities of fellow devout, so very religious Protestants.

And so they travelled to what became known as New England.

And an example of a Puritan, we're going to look at the story of Anne Hutchinson.

So she was a really educated Puritan.

She had been brought up by a father who was educated himself, and who gave her much more of an education then the kind of average girl at that time would have received.

So she was very knowledgeable, especially about religion.

And Anne Hutchinson travelled to Boston to escape punishment.

It was very likely that if she had remained in England, that she would have been punished for her religious viewpoints.

So her and her husband, they moved to Boston travelled to Boston in British America to escape punishment.

But once she arrived in Boston.

She got in trouble with church leaders, now this didn't happen right away.

At first people welcomed her and we're very impressed with how much he knew about religion and how passionate she was, then she started having these after kind of church meetings where they would like meet and they would discuss what happened, what happened at the sermon or what had been discussed in church.

And she started to challenge the church elders like the leaders of the church.

She offered to challenge them and would be like: Actually.

I'm not sure if you've got this right about this point in the Bible.

And the men, the church of the elders, they did not like that.

And she got in trouble with that.

And she was eventually put on trial and you can see here, and kind of an illustration of her trial, and although she defended herself very well in her trial and said, "I'm not not saying anything "that's wrong here." She was found guilty, and she was forced to.

She was exiled it was called, and she was forced to leave Boston, and she eventually ended up having to move to somewhere that's now very near New York.

And so, Anne Hutchtinson is an example of a puritan.

Now you should have, sorry, on your table, information about planters, information about indentured servants information about enslaved people, and then I'm going to ask you to do this part on Puritans on your own.

So here we have Anne Hutchinson, you might want to write her name down on your table, and a little bit about her story: Why did she go to America? Why did she leave England? What was her experience when she was there? Why did she get in trouble for example? So pause the video now to fill out your section on Puritans.

And then when you're done unpause the video, and we will look at the questions that we're going to answer.

Okay, so word on forgetting that done that in your table.

This is where you would have had for Enslaved people and then for Puritans you might have lots of different things about Anne Hutchinson about her experience about why she'd moved because she wanted to have more freedom in her religious life she wants to live among this kind of godly and devout community.

So we come to the questions, and there are five of them as usual.

The first one: What was Virginia? So it was a place, give me any more information about it, where it was for example.

What was grown on many plantations in Virginia? What crop? what did John Rolfe for example grow? By the mid 1600s who lived in Virginia? Give me some names of some different people or some different groups.

Where did Puritans set up colonies? Maybe you want to go back to the map that I showed you at the beginning, and why did Anne Hutchinson travel to America? So as normal, pause the video here, answer your questions, give it your best shot, use the reading that's on the website, go back through parts of the video, try not to read full sentences, and I will see you once you have done that and we'll go through the answers together.

Okay, so what was Vigi.

What was Virginia? Sorry.

You might have said a place in America, give yourself a tick there if you put that there, that's definitely right.

Or you have been in a bit more detail, Virginia was this sort of area around the first successful English colony in America, Jamestown, so just a bit more detailed.

It was the name the English gave that part of the world.

Obviously there were people who were already living there they would have had their own names for it the Powhattan people would have called it something different before the English arrived.

What was grown on many plantations in Virginia? Hopefully you've got tobacco give yourself a big tick.

And you might have just added a bit more detail: Sent to England sold there, it made many plantation owners rich.

By the mid 1600s who lived in Virginia? Give yourself a tick if you put any of these different groups, Native Americans, planters, servants and slaves.

This is a little bit more of a detailed answer: A variety of different groups lived in Virginia by the mid 1600s.

Firstly Native Americans such as Powhatan peoples.

They were however increasingly being threatened by English colonists who took their land for plantations.

But I don't want you thinking that they disappeared completely, because I think sometimes it's easy to do because we then focus on the experience of the planters or the indentured servants, or the enslaved people, although their numbers were much reduced by the English be in taking their land and being violent towards them.

Powhatan people still lived in the area, and in fact still live in that area today.

Indentured servants are like Richard Frethorne worked on those plantations, and then increasingly as time went on, enslaved people who were from Africa or were descended from Africans, because some people who were enslaved were born into slavery in Virginia.

Where the Puritans set up colonies? You could have put Boston or New England, those both would have been good answers give yourself a tick.

You might have said in a full sentence at first puritans set up colonies in Massachusetts so that was their kind of name of the area eventually became the name of the state.

The first colonies were Plymouth and Boston, this area became known as New England.

But it's still known as that today.

Why did Anne Hutchinson travel to America? If you put she was Puritan or for religious reasons, give yourself a tick, a good answer would be: Anne Hutchinson travelled to New England because as a Puritan she was scared of punishment in England, because New England, and then New England had a Puritan community, maybe you put something about she wanted to live among other very devout Protestants or kind of very committed Puritans.

So this is our extension activity for today.

I have written a number of different statements.

And next to those statements, I would like you to write down who it is referring to.

So, All lived in Virginia.

I want you to write down out these people who lived in Virginia and is it a similarity or a difference? So they all lived in Virginia.

That's a similarity.

And you might put Powhatan people planters, indentured servants, enslaved people.

The next one's.

apologies that I'd like to do is: Owned the plantations, worked on the plantations.

So is that similarity or is it a difference? And I would like you to write down who is that referring to.

So you might want to write out each sentence.

And then right down who it refers to whether it's a similarity, or a difference.

Is it talking about something that's the same or something that's different.

And that's the extension activity.

So have a go at that.

I think I'm feeling confident that you can get these answers, all right.

But if you want to just end the lesson there, make sure you do the End of lesson quiz to check your understanding and thank you for joining me for this lesson.

Next time we're going to be moving on and looking at different parts of British America, We're going to be looking at the island of Barbados and who lived there.

So, see you for that.

Bye.