When is Thanksgiving? Colonizing America: Crash Course US History #2

Hi I’m John Green, this is Crash Course US History,

and today we're going to tell the story of how a group of plucky English people struck a blow for religious freedom,

and founded the greatest, freest and fattest nation the world has ever seen.

[Libertage]

These Brits entered a barren land containing no people,

and quickly invented the automobile, baseball and Star Trek and we all lived happily ever after.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green, if it is really that simple, I am so getting an A in this class.

Oh, me from the past, you're just a delight.

[Theme Music]

So most Americans grew up hearing that the United States was founded by pasty English people

who came here to escape religious persecution.

And that's true of the small proportion of people who settled in the Massachusetts Bay

and created what we now know is New England.

But these Pilgrims and Puritans, there's a difference, weren’t the first people

or even the first Europeans to come to the only part of the globe we didn't paint over.

In fact they weren’t the first English people.

The first English people came to Virginia.

Off topic but how weird is it that the first permanent English colony in the Americas was named

not for Queen Elizabeth’s epicness but for her supposed chastity.

Right anyway, those first English settlers weren't looking for religious freedom, they wanted to get rich.

So the first successful English colony in America was founded in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.

I say "successful" because there were two previous attempts to colonize the region.

They were both epic failures.

The more famous of which was the colony of Roanoke Island set up by Sir Walter Raleigh,

which is famous because all the colonists disappeared leaving only the word "Croatoan" on carved into a tree.

Jamestown was a project of the Virginia Company,

which existed to make money for its investors, something it never did.

The hope was that they would find gold in the Chesapeake region like the Spanish had in South America,

so there were a disproportionate number of goldsmiths

and jewelers there to fancy up that gold which of course did not exist.

Anyway, it turns out that jewelers dislike farming --

so much so, that Captain John Smith who soon took over control of the island once said

that they would rather starve than farm.

So in the first year, half of the colonists died.

400 replacements came, but, by 1610, after a gruesome winter called "The Starving Time,"

the number of colonists had dwindled to 65.

And eventually word got out that the new world’s 1 year survival rate was

like 20% and it became harder to find new colonists.

But 1618, a Virginia company hit upon a recruiting strategy called the headright system

which offered 50 acres of land for each person that a settler paid to bring over.

And this enabled the creation of a number of large estates,