Page 114 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Read the Document Legal Statement by Pedro Hidalgo, Soldier, Santa Fe (1680) 4.1

Spain's North
American empire
4.2
0 250 500 miles
0 250 500 kilometers
4.3
CALIFORNIA
Mississippi R.
San Francisco Miwok
(1776) San José (1777) Colorado R. Ohio R.
Monterey (1770) Alta St. Louis 4.4
San Antonio de Padua (1771)
San Luis Obispo Ute
(1772) Chumash
Santa Barbara (1782) Los Angeles (1781) Navajo Santa Fe Wichita
San Gabriel (1771)
Creek
San Juan Capistrano (1776) Ipai San Xavier Pueblo Quapaw Chickasaw
LOUISIANA
San Diego (1769) del Bac NEW Choctaw 4.5
MEXICO Comanche Lower Creek
Lipán Tonkawa St.
Apache Hasinai Augustine
Pima TEXAS New Orleans FLORIDA
San Antonio
PACIFIC Rio Grande
OCEAN Coahuiltecan Gulf of
Monterrey Mexico
map 4.2 THE SpaNiSH BordErlaNdS, c. 1770 in the eighteenth century, spain’s North American
empire extended across what is now the southern United states from Florida through texas and New Mexico to
california.

fiercely preserved much of traditional German culture, they were eventually forced to
accommodate to new social conditions. Henry Melchior Mühlenberg (1711–1787), a
tireless leader, helped German Lutherans through a difficult cultural adjustment. In
1748, Mühlenberg organized a meeting of local pastors and lay delegates that ordained
ministers of their own choosing, an act of spiritual independence that has been called
“the most important single event in American Lutheran history.”
The German migrants—mistakenly called Pennsylvania Dutch because the
English confused deutsch (meaning “German”) with Dutch (“a person from
Holland”)—began reaching Philadelphia in large numbers after 1717. By 1766, persons
of German stock accounted for more than one-third of Pennsylvania’s population. Even
their most vocal detractors admitted the Germans were the best farmers in the colony.
After 1730, Germans and Scots-Irish pushed south from western Pennsylvania
into the Shenandoah Valley, thousands of them settling in the backcountry of Virginia
and the Carolinas. The Germans usually remained wherever they found unclaimed
fertile land. By contrast, the Scots-Irish often moved two or three times, acquiring a
reputation as a rootless people.
Wherever the newcomers settled, they often found themselves living beyond the
effective authority of colonial governments. To be sure, backcountry residents petitioned
for assistance during wars against the Indians, but they preferred to be left alone. These
conditions heightened the importance of religious institutions within the small ethnic
communities. Although the stimulus for coming to America may have been a desire Quick Check
for economic independence and prosperity, backcountry families—especially the Scots- Why did the new German and
Irish—flocked to evangelical Protestant preachers, to Presbyterian and later Baptist and Scots-Irish immigrants to America
Methodist ministers, who not only fulfilled the settlers’ spiritual needs but also gave these move west after they arrived in the
scattered communities a moral character that survived long after the colonial period. colonies?

Native Americans stake Out a Middle Ground

During much of the seventeenth century, various Indian groups who contested the
English settlers for control of coastal lands suffered terribly, sometimes from war, but
more often from contagious diseases such as smallpox. Indians and white settlers found
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