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Founding the English Mainland Colonies

Jamar McRae Hudson County Community College US History Professor M. Gordon November 30, 2011

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Founding the English Mainland colonies, many English Men and Women risked their lives coming to the new world because they wanted their shot at wealth, prosperity and religious freedom. I will be detailing the events of the colonization of the English Mainland colonies and also shedding light on the hardships of what colonist went through; such hardships as the Indian raids, disease, drought, famine and being in a new place that you know nothing about. The seventeenth century saw thousands of English men and women risk the dangers of the Atlantic crossing, the hardships of frontier life, the threat of violence from other settlers and local Indians, and the often overwhelming sense of isolation that were all part of the colonizing experience. What motivated them? Many left England to escape discrimination and harassment because of their dissenting religious views. Puritans, Catholics, and Quakers all felt compelled tp resist demands for allegiance to the Church of England. These English religious radicals were not alone in seeking freedom of worship. Jews, French Protestants, and German Pietists also came to America to escape prosecution.1 Colonist recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, and reports to government, church or trading company officials. These accounts dramatize the hardships and risks that settlers confronted and testify that many did not survive. Ships carrying colonists sank in ocean storms. Diseases unknown in England decimated settlements. Poor planning and simple ignorance of survival techniques destroyed others. Conflicts with local Indian populations produced violence, bloodshed, and atrocities on both side. And though colonist lived far from the seats of power in Europe, the rivalries between English, French, Dutch, and Spanish governments spilled across the ocean, erupting in border raids and full-scale wars throughout the century.2

McRae 3 By the end of the century, twelve distinct colonies hugged the Atlantic coastline of English America. The thirteenth, Georgia, was founded in 1732. Although each colony had its own unique history, climate and geography produced four distinct regions: New England, the middle Colonies, the Chesapeake, and the Lower South. The colonies within each region shared a common economy and labor system, or a similar religious heritage, or a special character that defined the population, such as ethnic diversity. And by the end of the century, certain institutions emerged in every colony. Whether its founders had been religious refugees or wealthy businessmen, each colony developed a representative assembly, established courts, and built houses of worship. Carolinians may have thought they shared little in common with the people of Connecticut, but both sets of colonists were subject to English law, English trade policies, and English conflicts with rival nations. Separate, yet linked to one another and to what they affectionately called the Mother Country in crucial ways; between 1607 and 1700 the colonies transformed themselves from struggling settlements to complex societies.3 Fears of financial ruin had prevented any Englishman from following in Raleighs footsteps. But English entrepreneurs had developed a new method of financing high-risk ventures the joint stock company, investors joined together and purchased shares in a venture. Any profits had to be shared by all; likewise, any losses would be absorbed by all. In 1603 both the Plymouth Company and the London Company asked King James 1 for a charter to settle Virginia. The King agreed to both requests. The Plymouth Company chose a poor site for its colony, however. The rocky coast of Maine proved uninviting to the settlers, and Indian attacks soon sent the survivors scurrying home to England. In December 1606, the London Company (now calling itself simply the Virginia Company)sent its colonist far to the south of the ill-fated

McRae 4 Maine colony. Here, near the Chesapeake Bay, they would create the first successful English colony in America.4 The formation of Maryland, as Virginians spread out along the river ways of their colony, searching for good tobacco land, plans for a second Chesapeake colony were brewing in England. The man behind this project was not a merchant or entrepreneur, and profit was not his motive. George Calvert, a wealthy Catholic who a wealthy Catholic who King Charles 1had just made Lord Baltimore, was motivated by a strong concern about harassment and discrimination against Englands dwindling number of Catholics. He envisioned a religious refuge in America for members of his faith. Calvert acquired a charter from the king that granted him a generous tract of land east and north of Chesapeake Bay. Here, he planned to establish a highly traditional society, dominated by powerful noblemen and populated by obedient tenant farmers. Calvert died before a single colonist could be recruited for his Maryland. But his oldest son, Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, took on the task of establishing the colony. To Calverts surprise, few English Catholics showed any enthusiasm for the project. When the first boatload of colonists sailed up the Chesapeake Bay in 1634, most of these two hundred volunteers were young Protestestants seeking a better life. Calvert wisely adopted the head right system developed by the Virginia Company to attract additional settlers. The lure of land ownership, he realized, was the key to populating Maryland. Calverts colony quickly developed along the same lines as neighboring Virginia. Marylanders turned to planting the profitable staple crop, tobacco, and joined the scramble for good riverfront land. Like the Virginians, these colonists used trickery and violence to pry acres of potential farmland from resisting Indians. By midcentury, the Chesapeake colonies could claim a peaceful existence. The political crises that shook England during the mid-seventeenth century sent shock waves across the Atlantic Ocean

McRae 5 to the American shores. These crises intertwined with local tensions among colonists, or between colonist and Indians, to produce rebellions, raids and civil wars.5 Massachusetts Bay and its settlers, in 1629 a group of prosperous Puritans, led by the 41year-old lawyer John Winthrop, secured a charter for their Massachusetts Bay Company from King Charles 1. Increasing concern about the governments harassment of dissenters, coupled with a deepening economic depression in England, spurred these Puritans to set sail for New England. Advertising the colony as a refuge for many who [God] means to save out of the general calamity, Winthrop had no trouble recruiting like-minded Puritans to migrate. From the beginning, The Massachusetts Bay Colony had several advantages over to clear fields and build shelters. As religious tensions and economic distress increased in England, Massachusetts attracted thousands of settlers. This Great Migration continued until Oliver Cromwells Puritan army took control of England.6 From New Netherland to New York, before 1650, Europes two major Protestant powers, England and Holland, had maintained a degree of cooperation, and their American colonies remained on friendly terms. But a growing rivalry over the transatlantic trade and conflicting land claims in the Connecticut Valley soon eroded this neighborliness. Beginning in 1652,these rivals fought three naval wars as both nations tried to control the transatlantic trade in raw materials and manufactured goods. After each, the Dutch lost ground, and their decline made it unlikely that the New Netherland settlement would be abandoned. King Charles 11 of England wanted New Netherland, and James, Duke of York (later King James11), was eager to satisfy his brothers desires. In 1664 Charles agreed to give James control of the region lying between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers- if James could wrest it from the Dutch. The promise and the prize amounted to a declaration of war on New Netherland. When the Dukes four armed ships

McRae 6 arrived in New Amsterdam harbor and aimed their cannon at the town, Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to rally the local residents to resist. They declined. Life under the English, they reasoned, would probably be no worse than life under the Dutch. Perhaps it might be better. The humiliated governor surrendered the colony, and in 1664 New Netherland became New York without a shot being fired. 7 More than the most dissenting sects, Quakers had paid a high price for their strongly held convictions. Members of the Society of Friends had been jailed in England and Scotland and harassed by their neighbors throughout the empire. Quaker leaders had strong motives to create a refuge for members of their beleaguered church. In the 1670s, a group of wealthy Friends purchased New Jersey from its original proprietors and offered religious freedom and generous political rights to its current and future colonist, many whom were Puritans.8 The Carolina Colony the proprietors plan for Carolina was similar to Lord Baltimores medieval dream. The philosopher John Locke helped draw up the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina, an elaborate blueprint for a society of great landowners, yeomen and serfs bound to work for their landlords.9 Georgia, the last colony, More than one hundred years after the first Jamestown colonists struggled against starvation and disease in Virginia, the last of the original thirteen colonies was established in the Lower South. In 1732, James Oglethorpe, a wealthy English social reformer, and several of his friends requested a charter for a new colony on the Florida border. Oglethorpe did not seek to make a profit from his colony; instead he hoped to provide a new moral life for English men and women imprisoned for minor debts. King George 11 was also anxious to create a protective buffer between the valuable rice producing colony of South Carolina and Spanish Florida. The king inserted a clause in the Georgia charter requiring military service from every

McRae 7 male settler. Thus he guaranteed that the poor men of Georgia would protect the rich men of south Carolina.10 Each of the thirteen mainland colonies had unique and complex reasoning as to why they were formed. But the main things they had in common were the people that risked their lives to come to this new world and establish these colonies in the hopes of land ownership and religious freedom.

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