American Political History

In 1690 a man stepped off a ship in Charles Town and made himself governor of Carolina by overthrowing the governor — and the strangest part was that he was one of the colony’s own proprietors. This is the story of how the most carefully designed society in colonial America became one of the most ungovernable: the Grand Model the colonists refused to accept, the Barbadian faction called the Goose...

Before Carolina grew rich on rice, it grew rich on a commodity pulled out of the southern interior: people. Deerskins were the steady business, but slaves were where the money was — and the colony had something its neighbors did not, a short sea road to the Caribbean sugar islands that would buy human beings in any number. This episode follows the Indian slave trade as a market: how Carolina’s bot...

Three ships left England in 1669 to plant a colony designed in a London drawing room. Eight months later, only one of them reached the Carolina coast — the other two wrecked or scattered along the way. This episode is the founding of Charles Town: the battered voyage, the seventy-nine-year-old governor nobody was sure of, and the second attempt to plant a town by that name on a coast where the fir...

Before he was the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution or the intellectual father of the Declaration of Independence, John Locke was a thirty-seven-year-old physician who had published nothing — and who, in 1669, sat down at his patron’s direction and wrote the most ambitious constitution in the history of English colonial America. The proprietors called it the Grand Model. This episode tells th...

The institution was ancient and universal. The machine was new. This episode traces how the specific apparatus of Atlantic slavery — industrial, permanent, hereditary, and racial — was assembled and carried west until it reached the Carolina coast. It begins not in Africa but in a Mediterranean that Europeans were being pushed out of by Ottoman power, follows a caravel down the African coast to th...

Before we can understand what Carolina became, we have to understand the thing the Barbadians carried onto its shore — and it is far older and far stranger than the story usually told. This episode steps back from the colony to look at slavery itself: an institution practiced on nearly every inhabited continent, by nearly every civilization in recorded history, and experienced by almost none of th...

To understand Carolina, you have to leave it — and sail to a single small island in the eastern Caribbean. Carolina was not really founded from England; it was the child of Barbados. And Barbados, in the middle of the seventeenth century, became the richest piece of ground in the English-speaking world on the strength of one crop. This episode sits with the planter and follows his arithmetic: why...

After Bacon’s Rebellion, a certain kind of Virginian gave up on the Chesapeake and looked south — to a coast the advertisements called empty, warm, and waiting. It was none of those things. It was the contested ground between the English colonies and Spanish Florida, where the French had already been massacred and the Spanish had held Saint Augustine since before Jamestown existed. This is the ope...

The season ends on the water. Virginia is split in two, and the war turns on a single captured ship; then Jamestown burns, Bacon dies of disease in a swamp at twenty-nine, and an old governor hangs so many men that the King himself is said to recoil. The revolution fails — and then the season comes due. This finale answers the question it opened with: why does 1676 look so much like 1776 — the sam...

This is the scene the season has been building toward. Nathaniel Bacon comes down the James River with five hundred armed men; Governor William Berkeley, able to raise barely forty, throws open the gates of Jamestown and meets him on the steps of the statehouse — where the old governor tears open his shirt, bares his chest, and dares the rebel to shoot. Bacon wants one thing: a commission, in writ...

It did not begin with a manifesto or a meeting. It began with an unpaid debt and some stolen pigs — and from that squalid little quarrel on the Virginia frontier, a chain of killings unwound that no one could stop. A debt, a beating, a dead herdsman. A militia that emptied its muskets into the wrong cabin in the dark and killed fourteen of the colony's own allies. A siege, a flag of truce, an...

In 1492, no one in the Old World had ever tasted a potato, smoked tobacco, or drunk a cup of chocolate — and no one in the Americas had ever seen a horse or a stalk of wheat. Then the wall between the two halves of the world came down, and what rushed through remade the diet of every continent, built and toppled empires, and decided which colonies grew rich and which ones starved. This episode goe...

Before the rebellion there were two men, and the only way to understand what happened is to understand each of them. William Berkeley had governed Virginia for thirty years — grown it from a starving outpost into a functioning colony, held it loyal through a civil war, and earned a place among the eight Lords Proprietors of Carolina. He was sixty-six, proud to the bone, and the Virginia he had bui...

One hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, a Virginia planter named Nathaniel Bacon led an armed revolt against the colonial government — and the grievances he carried read like a first draft of 1776. Taxation without consent. Corrupt officials. A governing class that protected its own wealth and left the common man to fend for himself on a burning frontier. This is the opening of t...

In the summer of 1689, a rumor ran through Maryland that the Catholics had hired the native nations to murder the Protestants in their beds. It was false. It did not matter. The colony had been founded as a refuge from exactly that fear — the old English conviction that a papist plots in the dark — and now that fear walked into the refuge, picked up a gun, and ended it. This is the finale of the s...

In 1649, Maryland passed the first law in English America to use the words "free exercise" of religion — a narrow, conditional, but genuinely remarkable order that quarreling Christians leave each other in peace. It was a fortification thrown up in a hurry by a Catholic lord losing his grip: the King beheaded, the charter worthless, a Protestant majority filling his colony. And in a bitt...

In early Maryland, the money in a man's pocket was a leaf. Tobacco was the colony's currency — wages, debts, fines, and the minister's salary all reckoned in pounds of cured leaf. A refuge founded for conscience had to pay for itself, and tobacco was how. But the crop was hungry for two things above all: land, and labor. This is the story of the world the refuge was actually made of...

In 1634 — the founding year of Maryland — the ruler of the most powerful native people on the Potomac was murdered by his own brother. The dead man, Wannas, distrusted the English. His killer, Kittamaquund, took his place and welcomed them. The peaceable founding the colony liked to remember sat on top of a killing, and on top of something larger: the English had not arrived in an empty country, b...

In 1638, the colony of Maryland had no laws at all. Lord Baltimore had sent a code across the ocean; the assembly of freemen voted it down. The freemen wrote their own; the proprietor rejected those. The whole standoff turned on a single phrase buried in the colony's charter — that laws were to be made "with the advice, assent, and approbation of the freemen." Did the proprietor wri...

In November 1633, two ships slipped away from the English coast carrying the first settlers of Maryland — and three Catholic priests who had to be smuggled aboard, unsworn, after the King's officers forced the oath on everyone else. The colony founded so Catholics could worship in the open began by hiding its own clergy. This is the story of the bargain at the heart of America's Catholic...

He had been one of the most powerful men in England — Secretary of State to King James, knighted, wealthy, trusted at the King's right hand. Then George Calvert became a Catholic, refused the oath, and walked out of the center of English power to chase a single idea: a place across the ocean where a Catholic could worship without the law closing around him. This is the story of what that idea...

In the small hours of November 5th, 1605, a search party found a man named Guy Fawkes in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, standing among thirty-six barrels of gunpowder meant to destroy the King and the whole of Parliament. The Gunpowder Plot failed. But it confirmed a suspicion two generations in the making — that an English Catholic could not be trusted to keep faith with his King. This is t...

The charter was gone — annulled by a London court in 1684. But a charter is paper, and for a year and a half the loss was an abstraction. This episode is about what happened when it arrived. It arrived as Sir Edmund Andros, royal governor of the Dominion of New England, who landed in Boston in December 1686 with red-coated soldiers and a commission to make laws and raise taxes as he pleased. No as...

In the years after King Philip's War, the Massachusetts Bay Colony reformed itself with everything it had. The ministers had read the war as God's judgment on a backsliding people, and the way back to God's favor was repentance. So the colony searched its own soul, catalogued its sins, renewed its covenants. And while it did, three thousand miles away in Whitehall, a different threa...

King Philip's War lasted fourteen months. More than half of the ninety English towns in southern New England were attacked. Twelve were destroyed. The death rate among the English, per capita, was roughly twice that of the Civil War. The native nations — the Wampanoag Confederacy, the Narragansett, the Nipmuc — lost sixty to eighty percent of their population to combat, starvation, disease, a...