Chapter 4. American Legal History Timeline to 1699
American Legal History Timeline: From early European Settlements to 1699
| 1565 | St. Augustine, Florida, founded as the first lasting Spanish colony (and first permanent European colony) on mainland North America. |
| 1585-7 | Roanoke Island, NC: attempted English settlement of 91 people recruited by Walter Raleigh failed; when Raleigh returned in 1590 the island was deserted. |
| 1607 | Jamestown, Virginia, founded as first lasting English colony on mainland North America. Only 32 of 105 original settlers survived the first year. The Virginia colony was at first a “corporate” colony, because it was founded by a royal grant to a company, the London Company of Merchant Adventurers. This company lost its charter in 1624 (see below). |
| 1608 | Quebec founded as the first lasting French colony on mainland North America |
| 1609 | Henry Hudson, an Englishman working for the Dutch, explored the river in New York that would be named for him. This began Netherlands’ claim on the region, which became New Netherlands in 1624. |
| 1618 | Headright system begun by the Virginia Company in order to attract more settlers. The Company offered 50 acres of land to each new settler that came to Virginia, plus an additional 50 acres for each individual accompanying the head of household (family members or servants). Settlers already in Virginia received 100 acres each. Also, settlers could get an additional 50 acres for each person for whom they paid the cost of the trans-Atlantic passage. Those with money could amass large plantations, with those whose passage had been paid in this way usually becoming indentured servants. Maryland would adopt a similar system by 1640. |
| 1619 | The House of Burgesses, the first legislative assembly in America, met in Jamestown, Virginia. It consisted of 22 burgesses representing 11 “plantations” (or distinct settlements). |
| 1619 | A Dutch ship delivered twenty Africans to Jamestown, Virginia, for sale as servants. These were the first Africans known to have come to English North America. Their precise status is unclear, but Virginia settlers probably considered them to be indentured servants, because most settlers were unfamiliar with slavery as a distinct legal status. Nonetheless, this is usually considered as marking the origins of slavery in mainland America. |
| 1620 | Plymouth Bay Colony established, marking the founding of Massachusetts as the second of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. The Mayflower ship landed at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with 101 colonists, and after a few days 41 men signed the Mayflower Compact, by which they agreed to govern themselves. |
| 1624 | New Netherlands founded as first Dutch colony on mainland North America, on Manhattan Island (New York), by the Dutch West Indies Company. |
| 1624 | Virginia was made a royal or crown colony, by revoking the London Company’s charter and appointing a royal governor as the colony’s chief executive. The legislative assembly (known in Virginia as the House of Burgesses) was also at first abolished, but by 1634 it began meeting again and would continue to meet annually down to the Revolution. |
| 1630 | Massachusetts Bay Colony founded in the Boston area, by a royal grant to the Massachusetts Bay Company, which was led by John Winthrop. With 900-1000 settlers, this was the largest single migration from England of the seventeenth century. One-third died in the first year, but after that the colony grew quickly. In 1691 Massachusetts Bay was merged with Plymouth Bay to create the colony or Province of Massachusetts. |
| 1632-4 | Maryland founded by a group of mostly Catholic settlers, marking the founding of the third of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. Maryland is considered as the first “proprietorial” colony, because it was founded by a personal land grant from King Charles I to Lord Baltimore, who thus became Maryland’s “proprietor.” |
| 1636 | Rhode Island founded by Roger Williams, marking the founding of the fourth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. (At first there were two separate colonies of Providence and Rhode Island, but these were merged in 1644.) Williams was banished from Massachusetts for his call for religious freedom and the separation of church and state. These policies, unique among the colonies, were implemented in Rhode Island and confirmed by the colony’s royal charter of 1663. Rhode Island and Connecticut were also unique among the colonies to have governors who were elected by the local population, rather than being appointed by the king or a proprietor. |
| 1639 | Connecticut founded, at first as two separate colonies: settlers from Massachusetts founded Hartford, while others from England founded New Haven. The two were merged as the royal colony of Connecticut in 1662. 1639 thus marks the founding of the fifth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. The first five of these later states were all founded as colonies between 1607 and 1639 (two on the Chesapeake Bay and three in New England), in the early years of the Stuart dynasty before the English Civil War. |
| 1649 | Maryland’s Toleration Act passed. It granted freedom of worship to all Trinitarian Christians: “no persons professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth be anyway troubled…in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof.” But it also punished with death anyone who denied either the Trinity or Jesus’s divinity. While Maryland’s proprietor and some settlers were Catholic, they were a minority, and eventually the Protestant majority repealed this act, at first only briefly in the 1650s, and then permanently in 1692. |
| 1640-1659 | English Civil War & Commonwealth Periods |
| 1660-1688 | Restoration Period in England (Stuart Kings Charles II & James II restored). This period saw the founding of the next six of the colonies that would later count among the thirteen original U.S. states (so that a total of eleven of these states trace their foundations to 1681 or before). |
| 1660 | Navigation Act: required exclusive use of English ships for trade with the colonies, and that colonial products be exported only to England. |
| 1663-1670 | Carolina founded by a grant from King Charles II to a group of eight loyal supporters, thus making it a proprietorial colony, and beginning a new wave of colonial settlements. In 1729 this colony was divided into North and South Carolina, so that 1663 may be taken as the date for the founding of both the sixth and seventh of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. John Locke helped to write Carolina’s original charter, which, though never fully applied in practice, shows the tenor of the times and of Locke’s thinking, in that it included several ranks of hereditary lords and allowed for slavery. |
| 1663 | Navigation Act of 1663 requires that most imports to the colonies must be transported via England on English ships. |
| 1664 | New York founded as an English colony, by conquest of New Netherlands from the Dutch. New York became the eighth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. |
| 1664 | Lifelong servitude made obligatory for black servants by a Maryland law. Other colonies followed suit. |
| 1665 | New Jersey founded by royal grant to two royal favorites, marking the founding of the ninth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. (Between 1674 and 1702 there were two separate colonies of East and West Jersey.) |
| 1667 | Baptism as a Christian declared not to affect a slave’s status, according to a Virginia law. |
| 1673 | The Navigation Act of 1673 set up the office of customs commissioner in the colonies to collect duties on goods that pass between plantations. |
| 1675 | The Lords of Trade, a committee within the king’s Privy Council that had met sporadically over the seventeenth century, became more active as an office responsible for colonial policy. They began recommending stricter control of the colonies, by enforcing trade laws and by transforming corporate and proprietorial colonies into royal colonies (by revocation of earlier charters). |
| 1675-76 | King Philip’s War (King Philip was the colonist’s nickname for Metacomet, chief of the Wampanoags) erupted in New England between colonists and Native Americans as a result of tensions over colonists’ expansionist activities. This was the largest single armed conflict between Natives and English settlers of the seventeenth century, resulting in about 1000 settlers and at least 3,000 Native Americans killed, including women and children on both sides. |
| 1676-77 | Bacon’s Rebellion: the largest rebellion in colonial American history. Violence broke out on Virginia’s western frontier between Native Americans and poor settlers (mostly white, but including both white and black indentured servants and former indentured servants), who had been encroaching on their land. Virginia’s colonial government, which was dominated by rich planters of the coastal (or Tidewater) region, tried to avoid any further antagonism of the inland tribes. The backcountry settlers, led by Nathaniel Bacon, then rebelled against Virginia’s government, burning its capital Jamestown. The rebellion subsided when Bacon suddenly sickened and died. King Charles II tried to increase control over the troubled colony by sending 1100 royal troops, replacing the royal governor, and conciliating the smaller farmers. But disease ravaged the English soldiers, who were all withdrawn by 1682. In response to this crisis, the Virginia elite turned increasingly to slave labor, rather than relying on indentured servants, and began encouraging settlement on the western frontier. This rebellion reveals the tensions that typically divided poor, land-hungry settlers, and colonial elites. The royal military intervention, which ultimately accomplished very little, was the largest, and indeed virtually the only such interventions in conflicts among the colonists before the Revolutionary period. |
| 1681 | Pennsylvania founded by a grant from King Charles II to William Penn, a Quaker. The Quakers were a dissident sect of Protestants who suffered from second-class status in England, and the creation of this haven for them and other less accepted Protestant groups further increased the religious diversity of the American colonies. This proprietorial colony originally included Delaware, which separated from Pennsylvania in 1776. Thus 1681 marks the founding of both the tenth and eleventh of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. |
| 1682 | Louisiana (the lower Mississippi valley) explored and claimed by the French. |
| 1686-89 | Dominion of New England: King James II merged all of the New England colonies, as well as New York and New Jersey, into a single new colony, in which the colonial assemblies were abolished and the King’s governor and other agents assumed all legislative and judicial powers. |
| 1688 | Germantown Quakers (or Mennonites) protested against slavery. This protest is the first known opposition to slavery in colonial America, but it had no practical effects at the time. From around 1700 Quaker opposition to slavery gradually increased, though this still had little or no effect on Pennsylvania’s laws, which allowed for slavery until after the American Revolution. |
| 1688-89 | English Glorious Revolution (Dec. – Feb.): James II deposed & replaced by William and Mary. English Bill of Rights. |
| 1689 | Dominion of New England overthrown, and then abolished. On news of the revolution in England, in April Americans revolted against New England Governor Andros, who was jailed in Boston. In July, the English government ordered Andros to be returned to England to stand trial. |
| 1691 | Representative government restored to the former Dominion of New England colonies, but now Massachusetts’ new royal charter makes it a royal colony, whose government includes a royal governor and a governor’s council. |
| 1691 | New Hampshire founded as a separate royal colony (it was formerly part of MA), marking the founding of the twelfth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. |
| 1692 | Salem Witch Trials. In May, witchcraft suspects in Salem, Massachusetts, were arrested and imprisoned. By September a special court set up by the governor of Massachusetts had accused 150 people, 20 of which, including 14 women, were executed. By October, the hysteria subsided, remaining prisoners were released, and the special court was dissolved. |
| 1696 | Navigation Act: required colonial trade to be done exclusively via English built ships. The Act also expanded the powers of Vice Admiralty courts and colonial custom commissioners, including rights of forcible entry, and required the posting of bonds on certain goods. |
| 1696 | Board of Trade created from the former Lords of Trade committee, to become a distinct office, overseen by the Privy Council. A small group of eight commissioners that served as an advisory body to the king’s Privy Council, this was the only office in the British government specifically charged with colonial policy. Its recommendations had to be approved by the king and Parliament, but the advice of the government’s only full-time colonial experts was often taken very seriously. |
| 1699 | Woolens Act passed by Parliament to protect British wool industry by forbidding the export of wool or woolen products from Ireland and the American colonies. |