AP U.S. History 1.7: Causation in Period 1

A historically defensible claim takes a position about a cause, an effect or an extent (how much something changed), so someone could argue against it, and evidence from the period supports it. Use that test: does the statement argue a cause, an effect or an extent? Columbus sailed in 1492 argues none of them, so it is a fact, not a claim. The voyages changed Native societies more deeply and more quickly than they changed European ones is a claim: it takes a position you could test.

To judge what the voyages changed, start with what was there before. In 1491 North America was home to many distinct and increasingly complex societies, shaped by how people adapted to and transformed very different environments. Maize farming spread north from present-day Mexico into the Southwest and supported irrigation and settled towns. In the dry Great Basin and on the western Great Plains, many people lived largely mobile lives. In the Northeast, the Mississippi River Valley and along the Atlantic coast, mixed farming and hunting supported permanent villages. In the Northwest and present-day California, the riches of the ocean fed some settled communities.

So a claim that Europeans arrived in an empty land, or met one kind of people, fails before it starts. The evidence contradicts it.

Contact changed Europe too. European expansion into the Western Hemisphere set off intense competition among European states, for wealth, for land and for the spread of their faith, and it changed European societies from within.

The competition shows two years after Columbus's first voyage. On June 7, 1494, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas because, it says, "a certain controversy exists" over which newly found lands belonged to each crown. They agreed, "for the sake of peace and concord," to a line "three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands." Spain could claim lands west of the line and Portugal lands east of it, which later gave Portugal its claim to Brazil.

Other rulers were not part of that bargain. England and France sent voyages of their own. By the late 1500s England's queen, Elizabeth I, was Protestant and Spain's king was Catholic, so the race for land was also a contest between faiths.

Inside Europe, American crops such as maize and potatoes fed a growing population, and gold and silver from American mines carried Europe from feudalism toward capitalism. By the end of the period, English rulers were chartering companies of investors to pay for colonies rather than sending royal expeditions.

Source: Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494 (Avalon Project).

In the Americas the effects came faster and were far more deadly. Contact among Europeans, Native Americans and Africans produced the Columbian Exchange, the movement of plants, animals and diseases between the hemispheres. Diseases such as smallpox, which Native peoples had never met, spread in widespread epidemics that devastated Native populations. Europeans also brought crops and animals not found in the Americas, such as wheat, horses, cattle and pigs.

The Spanish Empire built new economic and social orders on top of those losses. Under the encomienda system, Spanish colonists forced Native people to work on plantations and in mines. Spain also imported enslaved Africans to labor in plantation agriculture and mining, bought from European traders who partnered with some West African groups that practiced slavery. A caste system carefully defined the status of Europeans, Africans, Native Americans and people of mixed ancestry.

The grant Ferdinand and Isabella gave Columbus on April 30, 1492, already pointed this way. It sent him "to discover and subdue some Islands and Continent in the ocean," and named him admiral and viceroy over what he conquered. Discovery and rule were planned together.

Source: Privileges granted to Columbus, 1492 (Avalon Project).

Contact also set different worldviews side by side. Europeans and Native Americans held divergent views about religion, gender roles, family, land use and power.

Take land and power. English charters treated the monarch as able to grant land across the ocean. Elizabeth I's 1584 charter licensed Walter Raleigh to find and hold "remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince, nor inhabited by Christian People." In the charter's terms, land held only by non-Christians was open to an English claim. Many Native societies saw land as something a community used and shared, not as property a distant ruler could give away.

Religion and family differed too. The 1606 Virginia charter hoped to bring "the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility." Those words are the English view: they treat Native peoples as lacking true religion and civilization. Many Native peoples held their own religious beliefs, often tied to the natural world and to particular places. In many eastern Native societies women did most of the farming, and some traced family through the mother's line; in English families, land and name usually passed through the father.

A defensible claim about worldviews names the issue, shows both sides' views, and points to an effect, such as conflict over land.

Sources: Charter to Raleigh, 1584 (Avalon Project); First Charter of Virginia, 1606 (Avalon Project).