2.3: Regions of British Colonies
2.3: Explain how and why environmental and other factors shaped the development and expansion of various British colonies that developed and expanded from 1607 to 1754.
In the last set of notes, we went over the European colonization of the Americas in general but now, we’re going to focus specifically on the British colonies in North America, not just in general, but also how each of these colonies developed into distinct unique colonies.
The colonies can be divided into five distinct regions: The New England Colonies, Middle Colonies, Chesapeake Colonies, Southern Colonies, and British West Indies
New England
The New England colonies were first settled by Pilgrims in 1620 who were unhappy with the Church of England. Pilgrims were extreme Puritans and first landed in Plymouth Bay with the ship The Mayflower. This colony would later merge with the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691. Because Pilgrims and Puritans were farmers, they came to the Americas in search of religious freedom, land, and economic opportunities.
Later in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was chartered and settled by about 11,000 Puritans under Governor John Winthrop with the goal of building a model religious community based on Puritan beliefs. These Puritan beliefs were based on the idea of predestination, that people were already predestined for heaven or hell, and that only male church members could vote. Some of their other values included democratic town meetings and for their economy, they focused on shipbuilding, fishing, whaling, lumbering, and iron making. Most of these people came into the Americas in large families and despite cold winters, they enjoyed long lives.
Middle Colonies
The colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware all had good farmland and produced grains for bread, ships, lumber, and furs. Because New York and New Jersey were close to the sea and had tons of rivers, they developed an export economy based on producing and selling crops. This created an elite class of wealthy merchants. At first, New York was settled by the Dutch by Henry Hudson who sailed up the Hudson River and discovered it, but later in 1664, the English would get NYC from them.
Another important Middle Colony is Pennsylvania, founded by William Penn in 1681, a Quaker and a pacifist, in “Penn’s Holy Experiment”. Quakers were a peaceful group of religious dissenters from England who believed in no oaths, no military service, and were accepting of Native Americans. As a result, Pennsylvania was a diverse colony accepting of most religions. Instead of expelling natives whenever they needed land, Pennsylvania mostly negotiated with them, unlike New England and Virginia.
Chesapeake Colonies
Jamestown, Virginia, was the first English settlement in the colonies and was established in 1607. Because many died of starvation or disease and because most settlers were men coming to make money, families weren’t common originally. After tobacco production was discovered however, many indentured servants started coming from Europe, greatly increasing the population of what would later become the Virginia and Maryland colonies. By 1700, these two colonies were first and third out of the thirteen British colonies in terms of population. In both of these colonies, tobacco farming was king. Virginia was mainly established after the success of Jamestown while Maryland was founded by Lord Baltimore in 1634 because he wanted to make money and make a peaceful haven for Catholics that were being persecuted in England. Here, tensions between Catholics and Protestants led to the passage of the Act of Toleration in 1649, which promised toleration for all Christians but not other religions.
Southern Colonies
At first, Carolina was one unified colony before it was split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1712. Georgia would later get its own charter in 1732. For North Carolina, it was settled by a large number of migrants from Virginia who didn’t like the Church of England or were religious/political dissenters. For South Carolina, it was heavily populated with black slaves because England wanted it to be the colony to provide food (rice, indigo, tobacco) to the colonies in the West Indies. For Georgia, it was the last of the thirteen colonies created and England wanted it to be used as a defensive buffer against Spanish Florida and French Louisiana. Here, philanthropists such as James Oglethorpe helped those in debt and reformed debtor prisons. While he tried banning slavery in Georgia at first, it was legalized in 1750 after settlers kept coming with more slaves. In these southern colonies, there were large plantations and many slaves that grew rice and tobacco and the land was mostly rural.
British West Indies
In the British West Indies, the British established their first permanent colonies in the Caribbean. Because these places are warm for most of the year, they had long growing seasons and tobacco became the primary cash crop grown. But by the 1630s, sugarcane took its place as the most profitable. Because the production and growing of sugar requires a lot of labor, this led to an extreme spike in the demand for African slaves. By 1660, this demand led to the majority of the population on the island of Barbados being black. Due to this large population of slaves, the plantation owners enacted harsh slave codes which controlled their behavior and defined them as chattel, or property.
In summary, the British colonies in North America developed into unique societies due to their location and the people who migrated there. However, they all shared a common feature: democratic systems of governance. Due to the distance between Britain and the colonies, the crown allowed the colonies to create their own systems of government, resulting in mostly democratic structures. For instance, Virginia had the House of Burgesses which was an elective representative assembly with the power to pass laws and levy taxes. New England had the Mayflower Compact which organized the government based on a self-governing church congregation model. The Middle and Southern Colonies also had representative bodies, but these were largely controlled by wealthy merchants and planters who dominated the legislature.
