The history of colonial America in 5 objects
The millions of people who inhabited colonial America left traces of their lives behind—from George Washington’s bed to a young girl’s needlework.
Colonial America spans just over 170 years, from the first English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 to the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the American Revolution in 1783. The millions of people who inhabited colonial America–from Native Americans to European settlers, immigrants, and enslaved people–left behind material traces of their lives, including a double portrait of a mother and child, beloved needlework of a young girl, and an official document that defined a nation. These objects tell the stories of the lives of colonial Americans, both ordinary and extraordinary.
Faces of early America
Done between 1671-74, this double portrait of Elizabeth Clarke Freake and her baby Mary (above) is one of the finest surviving limner paintings from colonial America. Limner painters, like this anonymous artist who produced this work, referred to as the Freake Limner, were common in early America. Limners, which derives from the word “illuminate,” were itinerant artists who traveled from town to town producing portraits of varying quality, leaving a visual record of many of the inhabitants of colonial America.
Some limners had little training and knowledge of European convention, producing humbler, more affordable portraits. Others, like the Freake Limner, were skillful painters who were commissioned by the colonial elite, capturing material wealth through intricate details of fabric and textures. The Freake Limner shows his skill in the range of textures across the canvas, from the smooth skin of mother and child to Elizabeth’s prominent gold jewelry, and the clusters of black and red ribbons adoring her expensive lace sleeves. Modern X-radiography shows that the Freake Limner reworked this painting from the original. He seems to have added baby Mary around 1674, shortly after her birth, and updated the clothing to ensure that Elizabeth remained in the height of fashion.
The repainting, combined with the lush details of this double portrait, betrays a wealthy sitter. Elizabeth was the wife of John Freake, a successful merchant and attorney who was also painted by the Freake Limner. Together, the Freakes were one of the wealthiest families in Boston. As the Worcester Museum of Art points out, the Freakes built their wealth on the trade of both goods and people, profiting immensely from the transatlantic slave trade.
(Stolen from Africa, enslaved people arrived in colonial Virginia in 1619.)
A material remnant of the Middle Passage
America was built on slave labor, and the first ship of enslaved Africans arrived in colonial Virginia on August 25, 1619. Wrought-iron leg shackles, like this example, housed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, were commonly referred to as bilboes, and were used to shackle enslaved people, both during transport on slave ships and up until abolition.
Bilboes were commonly used in English prisons and imported to the colonies. In 17th century Boston, for example, magistrates ordered their use as punishment similar to stocks. But the device became strongly associated with the transatlantic slave trade, where it was a fixture.
The restraint was placed around a person’s ankles and locked into place. It was often fastened to the floor of a slave ship, preventing movement and, therefore, mutiny. Slavers typically used bilboes to shackle two enslaved people together. The use of bilboes was brutal and widespread. When the Henrietta Marie, a wrecked 17th-century slave ship, was excavated off the coast of Florida in the 1970s and 80s, the team discovered 80 pairs of bilboes, likely used to shackle 160 people being transported to colonial America.
Extant bilboes like this one are a material reminder that America was built on labor forcibly extracted from enslaved people.
Childhood practice
This charming sampler was made by Sarah Prince Fenn in 1775 when, as she proudly noted on the object, she was 12 years old and seven months. Samplers like Sarah’s, depicting the alphabet, numbers, and decorative motifs like flowers, were commonly produced by well-to-do young women in colonial America. (The American History Museum notes that the earliest sampler produced in what is now the U.S. was made by Loara Standish in the Plymouth Colony in the 1640s.)
This sampler shows a girl learning the work of womanhood: her elaborate blue and white flowers worked from silk thread are a charming display of her growing skill. Her alphabet, however, is a persistent reminder of her young age. Sarah has reversed the letters “V” and “U”. The letter “J” is also missing, a common omission in early samplers since “J” was not part of the early Latin alphabet.
Sarah stitched this sampler as talk of the opening salvos of the American Revolution were no doubt filling her own home. Sarah’s father, Benjamin Fenn, Sr., and her brothers, Benjamin Jr. and Daniel, fought for independence. Her father, second-in-command of the Connecticut militia, was a high-ranking member of America’s burgeoning military. The war would have had a direct impact on young Sarah: in a surviving letter written in 1779, her brother Benjamin recounts the brutal British raids along the Connecticut coastline where the Fenn family lived. The attacks left numerous cities in ashes, including New Haven, Fairfield, and Norwalk. Though her sampler is a childhood object, war looms in the background.
Roughly seven years after Sarah finished this sampler, she married Theophilus Miles and later gave birth to three children. She died on May 15, 1790.
Fit for a commander
As Sarah Prince Fenn worked on her sampler in Connecticut, George Washington rode to Boston. He had recently been named the command-in-chief of the Continental Army in a unanimous vote by the Second Continental Congress. Shortly after, Washington acquired “a Field Bedstead, Curtains, Mattresses, and Blankets, etc. etc.” The order for the field bedstead came in October 1775, months after he took command of the fledgling and disorganized American army. The newly minted general, now charged with leading the largest army he had ever commanded, needed campaign furniture that befit his status, including this bedstead.
The bed was portable—the frame, headboard, and canopy were easily broken down into a small, easy-to-transport size so that it could follow Washington from camp to camp. Though the design was ingenious, it wasn’t plainly utilitarian: Washington had the hanging linens imported and were the most expensive element of the design.
Campaign furniture like this, common among British officers, was meant to provide an always traveling commander with a piece of the comforts of home, in this case Washington’s plantation, Mount Vernon, along Virginia’s Potomac River. This bedstead accompanied Washington as he moved up and down the east coast, from battle to battle, camp to camp. Though many of Washington’s things are still stored and displayed in museums across the U.S., from his dress sword to clothes and even his dentures, his bedstead seems a humbler object to have survived more than two centuries, evidence of a small comfort in an otherwise long war.
A treaty long in the making
Signed in 1794, the Treaty of Canandaigua was an agreement struck between a newly independent United States and the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (referred to by the French and British as the Iroquois League). The agreement, which ceded even more of the Confederacy’s land to the U.S., was decades in the making, its foundation laid even before the American Revolution.
Composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was influential and its lands vast: in the early 1700s, their power expanded across present-day New York State into Canada and south to Kentucky, Virginia, and the Carolinas. As a reward for the Confederacy’s loyalty during the French and Indian War, King George issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, defining the boundaries of the American colony, demarcating land west of the border as Haudenosaunee. Defiant and eager to settle on the land, colonists crossed the line, an action that had lasting repercussions.
The American Revolution placed immense pressure on the Confederacy, each tribe unsure of whom to trust even though they allied themselves with the British during the French and Indian War. Ultimately the war fractured the confederacy, which was likely formed in the 15th century, as the Oneida and Tuscarora joined the American side and the rest of the Haudenosaunee League aligned with the British. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant raided colonial towns. Washington responded by ordering Major General John Sullivan to burn the principal towns of the Seneca and Cayuga nations to the ground. The Sullivan Expedition left hundreds of Seneca and Cayuga people dead and thousands of refugees camped outside of British forts with little to shelter them from the New York winter.
The Treaty of Canandaigua, seen here with the signatures of Thomas Pickering, Washington’s agent, and dozens of Haudenosaunee leaders, was the direct result of years of conflict between the two nations. The treaty defined the borders of the two nations, with the Haudenosaunee ceding much of their land to a newly formed U.S. increasingly focused on expanding its borders. It was the beginning of a pattern that would define this country: westward expansion at the expense of America's Indigenous people.
