American History I
Notes from 6/6/01

We talked about the second permanent English settlement, Plymouth Massachusetts. Whereas the Jamestown colony was started by people looking to make money, Plymouth was settled by Puritans, for religious and social reasons. In 1607-08, a small group of Puritan Separatists left the village of Scrooby, in England, and settled in Holland.  (Holland had already developed a reputation for tolerance.)  But the Scrooby congregation began to worry that their children were being tempted and corrupted by the "worldly pleasures" and permissiveness of the Dutch, and they therefore petitioned the Virginia Company for a land patent, to settle in the northern reaches of the Virginia colony.  They were supposed to end up there, but went off course and landed much further north. The Pilgrims, as they became known, had little choice but to remain there, and faced with the uncertainties of settling in a new land, the men reconvened aboard their ship and pledged to one another to form a "civil body politic."

Eventually Plymouth became part of another colony, known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Whereas the early Virginians were mostly young men motivated by dreams of wealth, the first New Englanders came in stable family groups, motivated by the desire to establish their own separate religious communities.  This stability and religious motivation (and the Puritan's healthier lifestyles) meant that the Massachusetts colony would become successful in a relatively short period, attracting thousands of like-minded Puritans over the following several decades.  These disparate origins would persist throughout the colonial period, resulting in the emergence of two very different American communities, with different economies, religions, social institutions and cultures.

I next discussed, one-by-one, the origins of the other English Colonies (beginning with Jamestown in 1607 and ending with Georgia in 1733).  I won't reproduce those notes here; instead you should refer to the summary table on page 60 of the text, and the accompanying discussion.  The basic point was that the formation of the English colonies was a haphazard exercise; the English monarchs followed no clear plan and granted charters or proprietorships for a variety of reasons (some good, some bad).  Whereas the Spanish, French and Portuguese colonization of the New World was funded and largely directed by the royal governments of those nations, the English efforts were largely privately funded and run.  (The English evolved a policy of mercantilism, viewing the colonies as sources of raw materials and seeing colonists as buyers for English manufactured goods as well as goods from other parts of the English empire.  But as we will see next time, mercantilist policies were seldom consistent, and attempts to enforce them (such as the Navigation Acts) were often met with resistance or indifference by New England's growing merchant class.) 

As a result of the haphazard approach, and long periods of "benign neglect" by the English, the thirteen original colonies often had little in common with one another, except their allegiance to the English crown.  Moreover, very strong regional differences emerged, which would persist throughout American history.

We spent some time comparing the three principal regions of the English Colonies -- New England (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut); Middle Atlantic (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware) and Southern (Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia).  Here's the table that was part of the PowerPoint presentation:

I spent some time discussing non-English immigration to the colonies, which began to escalate during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.  These non-English included the Scotch-Irish, who often settled in the less fertile "back-country" along the Appalachian Mountains, from Pennsylvania down to the Carolinas.  They also included Germans, who were mainly concentrated in the tolerant colony of Pennsylvania.  These people came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but almost all sought cheap land and economic opportunity.  Greater ethnic diversity (and the increasing percentage of the population born in North American instead of in England) would ultimately play an important role in the movement towards American independence, since by the 1750's fewer people felt as strong an affinity toward "the Mother Country."  But we will return to that issue next week.  I showed this pie chart of the American population around 1750:

Indeed, the only groups whose numbers were not increasing during the 17th and 18th centuries were Native Americans.  Some of the tribes to have first encountered English settlers, such as the Powhatan, had virtually disappeared by 1700.  The Pequots were nearly destroyed in a particularly brutal war with New Englanders (1636-37), and groups such as the Cherokee and Iroquois had seen their populations more than halved.  Those who had survived into the 1700's were beginning to pursue a "middle ground," which meant continued trade with white settlers without excessive dependency.  It also meant shrewder dealings with Europeans, and as we will see next week, an new generation of Native Americans would play a vital role in the century of imperial warfare (1689-1763) that would set the stage for the American struggle for independence.