Lesson Plan

Empire and Identity in the American Colonies

Photo caption

Benjamin Franklin’s Join or Die cartoon, one of the first visual sources of colonial union (and disunion), appeared in the May 9, 1754 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette.

Library of Congress.

By the mid-18th century, British colonial settlements on the east coast of North America had become part of a vast colonial empire, abutting other European empires and territories occupied by numerous Native American tribes and confederations. The British had developed their empire for political and economic purposes over the previous century, seeking to protect the colonies from European rivals and profit from their colonies’ products and commerce. Around 1750 many nations and peoples were engaged in a contest for North America – and some of these competing parties came together at the Albany Conference that took place in June and July of 1754 under British auspices.

In this lesson students will examine the various visions of three active agents in the creation and management of Great Britain’s empire in North America – British colonial leaders and administrators, North American British colonists, and Native Americans. Students will assess the identities and relationships of these groups in the context of the Albany Conference of 1754, where they came together at the behest of British officials seeking greater colonial unity in anticipation of a war with France for North American territory.

Guiding Questions

How was power distributed between the colonial administrators in London and the colonists and American Indians of North America ?

What were the short and long term effects of the Albany Plan?

Learning Objectives

Analyze the social, economic, and political tensions that marked North America in the eighteenth century.

Examine primary sources to determine the nature of the British imperial system in North America and the relationships of the rival groups it contained.

Evaluate the different perspectives of British colonial leaders, North American British colonists, and American Indians.

Lesson Plan Details

Background

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the British Empire in North America was in the midst of great change once again. The British and other European powers with imperial ambitions competed on the North American continent while they fought with one another in Europe and Asia. Native American nations became entangled in those European colonial wars that were waged in North America; they also fought to keep their homelands clear of European settlers. The growing prosperity of the colonists in general and the colonial merchants in particular led to the tightening of British colonial regulations and helped to make the often diverging interests of imperial administrators and British settlers more obvious. The contest with the French and the increased number of settlers moved the British administration away from its earlier view of North America as a collection of commercial outposts. The Board of Trade and its American officials described North America as a continental dominion: “a hierarchical imperial state with political and military, as well as economic interests,” according to historian Timothy Shannon. These developments opened up the issue of how various groups sought to resolve their identity in the expanding British empire in North America. What form should the empire take? What did it mean to be a Briton? What rights (and obligations) did a colonist have?

When the British organized a conference in Albany in the summer of 1754, many of these different groups and competing agendas rose to the fore, but few envisioned the world wide war that would soon begin. The Albany Congress laid bare the colonists’ and Indians’ reactions to the expansion of British power in North America. By 1754 Britain’s grip on the colonies appeared to have broken down: French troops had occupied the Ohio valley, cutting off British access to the continent’s interior while the Indians in New York had declared the Covenant chain alliance broken, threatening a full-scale collapse of Indian trade and diplomacy in northern colonies. Colonial governments, long accustomed to managing on their own, resisted cooperation with each other or with the Crown. Colonial administrators called for greater authority to handle this crisis of the empire, taking advantage of various recent plans for reform of colonial organization in Great Britain and the colonies. The Board of Trade in London called for a meeting in Albany. The Congress was actually two meetings: an Indian treaty conference and an intercolonial conference. Various colonial politicians including New York’s Governor James DeLancey and Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin were just as busy scheming at the meeting for their own particular interests as addressing a broader imperial vision for the British. While women, enslaved people, and indentured servants were numerous among the colonists, their perspectives were not present at the Albany Congress.

The conference produced as its enduring legacy, the Albany Plan of Union, which can be found on the EDSITEment-reviewed Avalon Project. This lesson in its largest sense asks students to develop a clearer understanding of the context of Britain’s imperial expansion and the Albany Congress. The idea of colonial union broached by Franklin and others at the Congress had its origin not in a native or colonial penchant for political federation but rather in a long struggle to define the limits of local and centralized power in the British Atlantic empire.

Teachers might also review some of the following primary and secondary sources related to the Albany Congress:

1. On Albany Congress:

Brief background and the text of the Albany Plan for Union taken from Benjamin Franklin papers, linked from the EDSITEment resource Internet Public Library (IPL).
Text of Albany Plan for Union on the EDSITEment reviewed Avalon Project.

2. Benjamin Franklin, colonial politician and Pennsylvania’s representative

The Pragmatic Innovator on EDSITEment-reviewed resource American Memory is a Library of Congress biography with various images and links
Benjamin Franklin, Reasons and Motives for the Albany Plan of Union on a link from EDSITEment’s Founders Constitution

3. Native Americans

Background on Native Americans and European Contests for Empire on EDSITEment-reviewed Digital History.
A short explanation of covenant chain from the Encyclopedia of New York State

4. Aftermath: The Seven Years’ War

Background on the Seven Year's War on Digital History.
Ostenaco, Cherokee chief, “Blood Tomahawk,” in Shifting Loyalties on the Digital History website.
Governor Glen, The Role of the Indians in the Rivalry Between France, Spain, and England, 1761 linked off the EDSITEment-reviewed website History Matters.

Alibamon Mingow, Chocatow, 1765, "Another Race of White Men Come Amongst Us": Native American Views as British Replace the French in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1765,” as British replace French in the lower Mississippi Valley. From EDSITEment-reviewed History Matters.

Preparation

1. Throughout this unit, students will read and analyze a variety of primary documents. The following materials from EDSITEment resources may be useful to teachers seeking expert advice on the use of primary documents:

Using Primary Sources in the Classroom from Library of Congress Teachers
Document Analysis Worksheets and History in the Raw on National Archives Education
Making Sense of Evidence on History Matters

2. Download or bookmark the various sources and documents the students will use in the lesson. These include:

Selection from British administrator Thomas Pownell’s The Administration of the Colonies – pages 35-38 contained in a separate PDF.
Text of Albany Plan for Union from the Avalon Project and A Plan for a Colonial Union, a series of letters by Franklin to William Shirley, December 1754, from Constitution Society.
Mohawk leader Hendrick’s speech at Albany Congress from History Matters.

Lesson Activities

Activity 1. The Albany Congress and Political Identity

1. Have students examine the following historic map by Emanuel Bowen, A Map of the British American Plantations, 1754, a link on Digital History. Look at the Northeast and the area marked Iroquois:

Ask students to identify the text in the two lines below the word Iroquois. Make sure that you view the map in its largest format – In Internet Explorer use the Zoom Level on the bottom right of the browser frame.
Ask students to locate the boundaries between the British colonies and the Native Americans.
Discuss the lack of boundaries shown on the map.
Discuss how you know what areas “belonged” to the colonists and to the Indians.

Then compare the Bowen 1754 map with a present day map that shows the English colonies in 1750 on EDSITEment’s Learner.org.

How do the borders differ on this map?

2. Students should be familiar with the role of the British North American colonies in the eighteenth century. Either refer them to their textbooks or ask them to read the following: Darla Davis, “To Tax or Not to Tax: 2/5 Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” a link on History Matters.

3. Now divide students into three groups to read the documents below (one document for each group) to provide evidence to help them answer the questions posed below. Each one of these documents is directly or indirectly a product of the Albany Congress, which can be introduced to students with this short explanation of the Congress from the Constitution Society, linked from the Internet Public Library.

Ask the students to annotate evidence such as phrases, words, and concepts that help them to answer the following questions for each set of documents.

What were British colonial leaders, American colonists, and Native Americans each looking for in North America?
What were their political goals?
How did they hope to achieve them?
How did they want political life in America to be organized?
What rules did they want?

Each document will have one sample annotation for a key concept, such as empire, to facilitate the student’s work.

The documents are:

Thomas Pownell, British imperial administrator, selection from his 1765 The Administration of the Colonies, pages 35–38. (PDF)
Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan (which was drafted and accepted at the Albany Congress but rejected by colonial assemblies and the British Crown), and excerpts from A Plan for a Colonial Union, Franklin’s 1754 letters to the colonial governor of Massachusetts, written a few months after the Congress.
Hendrick, a Mohawk Indian leader and diplomat, Speech at Albany Congress, "You are Like Women, Bare and Open, without any Fortifications." (PDF)

4. Students in each one of the three groups should read their annotations to the entire class.

5. In a whole class discussion have the students delineate the three authors’ political ideas and their visions of the future of the colonies. How are the three authors’ ideas and visions similar and how are they different, complimentary or antagonistic? The discussion should focus on the following questions:

What are the different concepts of empire being offered?
What are the arguments being made for how empire should work?
Who was making these arguments?

6. Based on their reading of the three documents and the discussion, the teacher and students should construct a chart of the goals of three of the groups of people who occupied and contested the North American continent in the mid-18th century: British colonial officials and interest groups, North American colonists, and Native Americans (sample chart).

First, the teacher should ask students to discuss the colonists and the Native Americans. Construct a three-column chart with these questions:

What did each group want in North America? (e.g., what were their goals, how did they hope to achieve them, how did they want life in America to be organized, what did they want the rules to be, etc.?)
What were some of the conflicts between the colonists and the Native Americans?
What were some of the conflicts between the colonists and the British officials?
What were some of the differences among the colonists such as gender, race, and ethnicity? How might those differences have affected relationships between the colonists and the British officials?

The class should go through the questions above again in a discussion about the British officials and the colonists. Return to the chart.

Assessment

Ask students to write an essay that responds to the following questions, being sure to use evidence from at least three different primary sources (along with secondary sources) to support their answers:

How did British colonial leaders, North American British colonial leaders, and Native Americans want to organize North American society in general and relationships among themselves in particular? On what specific issues did they agree and disagree? What were the principal reasons for disagreement?

Lesson Extensions

1. Have students explore the connection between the visions presented at the Albany Congress and the events that followed it.

How and why did the differing visions of the groups in question produce the outcomes that they did? (the breakdown of the Covenant Chain, the ‘failure’ of the Albany Plan, the French and Indian War, the road to the American Revolution?

You could use direct them to some of the sources listed in the Background Information for Teachers – Step Four.

2. Students could explore the role of Franklin as colonial politician (and other roles) at Benjamin Franklin’s Virtues linked from the EDSITEment website. They might also look at Franklin, The Pragmatic Innovator, on the American Memory website. One important source is the first American political cartoon, Franklin’s "Join or Die" cartoon that appeared in the May 9, 1754 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. The image is one of the first visual sources for colonial union (and disunion)

3. Students could research the role of William Johnson, preeminent cultural mediator in the northeast between Europeans and Native Americans, using the following sources:

Biographies of Sir William Johnson, Indian Superintendent, Early America Review, Fall 1996 linked from EDSITEment-reviewed Internet Public Library. A shorter one on the New York State Museum site, a link on IPL
Another biography can be found on The Three Rivers Website, a link on EDSITEment-reviewed Nativeweb.
Biography of Peter Wraxall, American National Biography linked from IPL
A later Johnson document, “The uncommon increase of Settlements in the back Country”: Sir William Johnson Watches the Settlers Invade Indian Lands (1772) on History Matters.

One possible question for students to ponder would be: How did Johnson mediate between the interests of the British Empire and the Native Americans?

4. Students could analyze the engraving “British Resentment or the French fairly Coopt at Louisbourg” which was commissioned in 1755 by Parliament to show British resentment at the return of Louisburg (linked from IPL) to France – one of the first prints to show the American colonies as part of the British state with depictions of British soldiers, French fops, and American Indians. It is a tableau of empire.