THE THIRTEEN COLONIES AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1607–1750
Between the founding of Jamestown (Virginia) in 1607 and the founding of Georgia in 1733, a total of 13 distinctly different English colonies developed along the Atlantic Coast of North America. Every colony received its identity and its authority to operate by means of a charter (a document granting special privileges) from the English monarch. Each charter described in general terms the relationship that was supposed to exist between the colony and the crown. Over time, three types of charters—and three types of colonies—developed:
The Chesapeake Colonies
In 1632, King Charles I subdivided the vast area that had been the Virginia colony. He chartered a new colony located on either side of Chesapeake Bay and granted control of it to George Calvert (Lord Baltimore), as a reward for this Catholic nobleman’s loyal service to the crown. The new colony of Maryland thus became the first of several proprietary colonies.
Maryland
The king decided to establish proprietorships rather than granting more colonial charters to joint-stock companies because he believed the new arrangement would give him almost total control. It was hoped that a loyal proprietor like Lord Baltimore could be trusted to faithfully carry out the king’s policies and wishes.
The first Lord Baltimore died before he could fulfill his twin ambitions of achieving great wealth in his colony while also providing a haven for his fellow Catholics. Control of the Maryland proprietorship passed in 1632 to his son, Cecil Calvert—the second Lord Baltimore—who set about implementing his father’s plan in 1634.
Act of Toleration. To avoid the intolerance and persecution of their Puritan enemies, a number of wealthy English Catholics emigrated to Maryland and established large colonial plantations. They were quickly outnumbered, however, by Protestant farmers. Protestants therefore held a majority in Mary- land’s representative assembly. In 1649, Calvert persuaded the assembly to adopt the Act of Toleration, the first colonial statute granting religious freedom to all Christians. However, the statute also called for the death of anyone who denied the divinity of Jesus.
Protestant revolt. In the late 1600s, Protestant resentment against a Cath- olic proprietor erupted into a brief civil war. The Protestants triumphed, and the Act of Toleration was repealed. Catholics lost their right to vote in elections for the Maryland assembly. In the 18th century, Maryland’s economy and society was much like that of neighboring Virginia, except that in Maryland there was greater tolerance of religious diversity among different Protestant sects.
Virginia
Meanwhile, the first of England’s colonies, Virginia, struggled with a number of problems in the late 17th century, including a rebellion against the colonial government.
Economic problems. Beginning in the 1660s, low tobacco prices, due largely to overproduction, brought hard times to the Chesapeake colonies, Maryland and Virginia. When Virginia’s House of Burgesses attempted to raise tobacco prices, the merchants of London retaliated by raising their own prices on goods exported to Virginia.
Political problems and Bacon’s Rebellion. Sir William Berkeley, the royal governor of Virginia (1641–1652; 1660–1677), adopted policies that favored the large planters and used dictatorial powers to govern on their behalf. He antagonized backwoods farmers on Virginia’s western frontier because he failed to protect their settlements from Indian attacks. Nathaniel Bacon, an impoverished gentleman farmer newly arrived from England, seized upon the grievances of the western farmers to lead a rebellion against Berkeley’s government. Bacon and others resented the economic and political control exercised by a few large planters in the Chesapeake area. He raised an army of volunteers and, in 1676, conducted a series of raids and massacres against Indian villages on the Virginia frontier. Berkeley’s govern- ment in Jamestown accused Bacon of rebelling against royal authority. Bacon’s army succeeded in defeating the governor’s forces and even burned the James- town settlement. Soon afterward, however, Bacon died of dysentery and the rebel army collapsed. Governor Berkeley brutally suppressed the remnants of the insurrection.
Lasting problems. Although it was short-lived, Bacon’s Rebellion, or the Chesapeake Revolution, highlighted two long-lasting disputes in colonial Virginia: (1) sharp class differences between wealthy planters and landless or poor farmers and (2) colonial resistance to royal control. These problems would continue into the next century, even after the general conditions of life in the Chesapeake colonies became more stable and prosperous.
Labor Shortages
The Chesapeake colonies grew slowly. Retarding their growth in the early decades were an unhealthy climate and a high death rate due both to disease and Indian attacks. Another factor slowing the development of families was an imbalance between the number of men and women. Most of the early settlers were men brought from England and Scotland to work in the tobacco fields. The tobacco industry required extensive labor which initially was not available. To solve the labor shortage, various methods were attempted. Chief among them were indentured servitude, the headright system, and slavery.
Indentured servants. Under contract with a master or landowner who paid for their passage, young people from the British Isles agreed to work for a specified period—usually between four to seven years—in return for room and board. In effect, indentured servants were under the absolute rule of their masters until the end of their work period. At the expiration of that period, they gained their freedom and either worked for wages or obtained land of their own to farm.
Headright system. As another method for attracting immigrants, Virginia offered 50 acres of land to (1) each immigrant who paid for his own passage and (2) any plantation owner who paid for an immigrant’s passage.
Slavery. The first Africans to come to Virginia arrived in 1619 aboard a slave ship operated by a Dutch trader. At first, Africans were not held as slaves for life but had roughly the same status as white indentured servants. Moreover, the early colonists were struggling to survive and too poor to purchase the Africans who were being imported to provide slave labor for sugar plantations in the West Indies. By 1650, there were only about 400 African laborers in Virginia, and not all of them were held in permanent bondage. In the 1660s, however, the Virginia House of Burgesses enacted laws that discriminated between blacks and whites. Africans and their offspring were to be treated as lifelong slaves, whereas white laborers were to be set free after a certain period.
Development of New England
Strong religious convictions helped sustain the Puritans in their struggle to establish the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. At the same time, Puritan leaders tended to be intolerant of anyone who questioned their religious teachings. A common method for dealing with dissidents was to banish them from the Bay colony. These dissidents formed the nucleus for the founding of several colonies in New England, which would ultimately develop into Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Rhode Island. Roger Williams went to Boston in 1631 as a respected Puritan minister. He believed, however, that the individual’s conscience was beyond the control of any civil or church authority. His teachings on this point placed him in conflict with other Puritan leaders, who ordered his banishment from the Bay colony. Leaving Boston, Williams fled southward to Narragansett Bay, where he and a few followers founded the settlement of Providence in 1636. The new colony was unique in two respects. First, it recognized the rights of the Native Americans and paid them for the use of their land. Second, Williams’ government provided for complete religious toleration by allowing Catholics, Quakers, and Jews to worship freely. (In addition to founding Providence and later Rhode Island, Williams also founded one of the first Baptist churches in America.) Another dissident who questioned the doctrines of the Puritan authorities was Anne Hutchinson. She believed in antinomianism—the idea that faith alone, not deeds, is necessary for salvation. Banished from the Bay colony, Hutchinson and a group of followers founded the colony of Portsmouth in 1638, not far from Williams’ colony of Providence. A few years later, Hutchinson migrated to Long Island and was killed in an Indian uprising. In 1644, Roger Williams was granted a charter from the English Parliament, which joined Providence and Portsmouth into a single colony, Rhode Island. Because this colony offered religious freedom for all, it served as a refuge for people of various faiths.
Connecticut. To the west of Rhode Island, the fertile Connecticut River Valley attracted other settlers who were unhappy with the Massachusetts authorities. The Reverend Thomas Hooker led a large group of Boston Puritans into the valley and founded the colony of Hartford in 1636. The Hartford settlers then drew up the first written constitution in American history, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639). It established a representative government consisting of a legislature elected by popular vote and a governor chosen by that legislature. South of Hartford, a second settlement in the Connecticut Valley was started by John Davenport in 1637 and given the name New Haven. In 1665, New Haven joined with the more democratic Hartford settlers to form the colony of Connecticut. The royal charter for Connecticut granted it a limited degree of self-government, including election of the governor.
New Hampshire. The last colony to be founded in New England was New Hampshire. Originally part of Massachusetts Bay, it consisted of a few settlements north of Boston. Hoping to increase royal control over the colonies, King Charles II separated New Hampshire from the Bay colony in 1679 and made it a royal colony, subject to the authority of an appointed governor.
Halfway Covenant. In the 1660s, a generation had passed since the founding of the first Puritan colonies in New England. The new native-born generation showed signs of being less committed to religious faith and more interested in material success. How was the Puritan church to remain strong if younger people failed to become members? In an effort to maintain the church’s influence and membership, a halfway covenant was offered by some clergymen to those who professed limited religious commitment. In other words, people could now take part in church services and activities without making a formal declaration of their total belief in Christ.
Other ministers rejected the halfway covenant and denounced it from the pulpit. Nevertheless, as the years passed, strict Puritan practices were weakened in most New England communities in order to maintain church membership.
New England Confederation. In the 1640s, the various New England colonies were constantly faced with the threat of attack from the Native Americans, the Dutch, and the French. Because of the civil war then being fought in England, the colonists could expect little assistance. Therefore in 1643, four New England colonies (Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven) formed a military alliance known as the New England Confederation. The confederation was directed by a board comprised of two representatives from each colony. It had limited powers to act on boundary disputes, the return of runaway servants, and dealings with the Native Americans. The confederation lasted until 1684, when colonial rivalries and renewed control by the English monarch brought this first experiment in colonial cooperation to an end. It was important because it established a precedent for colonies taking unified action toward a common purpose.
King Philip’s War. Only a few years before its demise, the confederation helped the New England colonists cope successfully with a dire threat. A chief of the Wampanoags named Metacom—known to the colonists as King Philip— united many tribes in southern New England against the English settlers, who were constantly encroaching on the Native Americans’ lands. In a vicious war (1675–1676), thousands on both sides were killed, and dozens of towns and villages were burned. Eventually, the colonial forces managed to prevail, killing King Philip and virtually ending Native American resistance in New England.
Restoration Colonies
New American colonies were founded in the late 17th century during a period in English history known as the Restoration. (The name refers to the restoration to power of an English monarch, Charles II, in 1660 following a brief period of Puritan rule under Oliver Cromwell.)
The Carolinas
As a reward for helping him gain the throne, Charles II granted a huge tract of land between Virginia and Spanish Florida to eight nobles, who in 1663 became the lord proprietors of the Carolinas. Eventually, in 1729, two royal colonies, South Carolina and North Carolina, were formed from the original proprietorship.
South Carolina. In 1670, in the southern Carolinas, a few colonists from England and some planters from the island of Barbados founded a town named for their king. Initially, the southern economy was based on trading furs and providing food for the West Indies. By the middle of the 18th century, South Carolina’s large rice-growing plantations worked by African slaves resembled the economy and culture of the West Indies.
North Carolina. The northern part of the Carolinas developed differently. There, farmers from Virginia and New England established small, self-sufficient tobacco farms. The region had few good harbors and poor transportation; therefore, compared to South Carolina, there were fewer large plantations and less reliance on slavery. North Carolina in the 18th century earned a reputation for democratic views and autonomy from British control.
New York
Charles II wished to consolidate the crown’s holdings along the Atlantic Coast and close the gap between the New England and the Chesapeake colonies. This required compelling the Dutch to give up their colony of New Amsterdam centered on Manhattan Island and the Hudson River Valley.
In 1664, the king granted his brother, the Duke of York (the future James II), the lands lying between Connecticut and Delaware Bay. As the lord high admiral of the navy, James dispatched a force that easily took control of the Dutch colony from its governor, Peter Stuyvesant. James ordered his agents in the renamed colony of New York to treat the Dutch settlers well and to allow them freedom to worship as they pleased and speak their own language.
James also ordered new taxes, duties, and rents without seeking the consent of a representative assembly. In fact, he insisted that no assembly should be allowed to form in his colony. But taxation without representation met strong opposition from New York’s English-speaking settlers, most of whom were Puritans from New England. Finally, in 1683, James yielded by allowing New York’s governor to grant broad civil and political rights, including a representative assembly.
New Jersey
Believing that the territory of New York was too large to administer, James in 1664 gave to two friends, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, that section of the colony located between the Hudson River and Delaware Bay. In 1674, one proprietor received West New Jersey and the other East New Jersey. To attract settlers, both proprietors made generous land offers and allowed religious freedom and an assembly. Eventually, they sold their proprietary interests to various groups of Quakers. Land titles in the Jerseys confusion. To settle matters, the crown decided in 1702 to combine the two Jerseys into a single royal colony: New Jersey.
Pennsylvania and Delaware
To the west of New Jersey lay a broad expanse of forested land that was originally settled by a peace-loving Christian sect, the Quakers.
Quakers. Members of the Religious Society of Friends—popularly known as Quakers—believed in the equality of all men and women, nonviolence, and resistance to military service. They further believed that religious authority was found within each person’s private soul and not in the Bible or any outside source. In the 17th century, such views seemed to pose a radical challenge to established authority. Therefore, the Quakers of England were widely persecuted and jailed for their beliefs.
William Penn. William Penn was a young convert to the Quaker faith. His father had been a victorious admiral in the service of the king. Although the elder Penn opposed his son’s religious beliefs, he respected his sincerity and upon his death he left his son considerable wealth. In addition, the royal family owed the father a large debt, which was paid to William Penn in 1681 in the form of a grant of land in the Americas for a colony which he called Pennsylvania, or Penn’s woods.
“The Holy Experiment.” Penn wanted to test ideas he had developed based on his Quaker beliefs. He wanted his new colony to achieve three purposes: provide a religious refuge for Quakers and other persecuted people, enact liberal ideas in government, and generate income and profits for himself. He provided the colony with a Frame of Government (1682–1683), which guaranteed a representative assembly elected by landowners, and a written constitution, the Charter of Liberties (1701), which guaranteed freedom of worship for all and unrestricted immigration. Unlike other colonial proprietors, who governed from afar in England, Penn crossed the ocean to supervise the founding of a new town on the Delaware River named Philadelphia. He brought with him a plan for a grid pattern of streets, which was later imitated by other American cities. Also unusual was Penn’s attempt to treat the Native Americans fairly and not to cheat them when purchasing their land. To attract settlers to his new land, Penn hired agents and published notices throughout Europe, which promised political and religious freedom and generous land terms. Penn’s lands along the Delaware River had previously been settled by several thousand Dutch and Swedish colonists, who eased the arrival of the newcomers attracted by Penn’s promotion. Delaware. In 1702, Penn granted the lower three counties of Pennsylvania their own assembly. In effect, this act created Delaware as a separate colony, even though its governor was the same as Pennsylvania’s until the American Revolution.
Georgia: The Last Colony
In 1732, a thirteenth colony, Georgia, was chartered. It was both the last of the British colonies and also the only one to receive direct financial support from the home government in London. There were two principal reasons for British interest in starting a new southern colony. First, Britain wanted to create a defensive buffer to protect the prosperous South Carolina plantations from the threat of invasion from Spanish Florida. Second, thousands of people in London and other cities were being imprisoned for debt. Wealthy philanthropists thought it would relieve the overcrowded jails and prison ships if debtors could be shipped to an American colony to start life over.
Special regulations. Given a royal charter for a proprietary colony, a group of philanthropists led by James Oglethorpe founded Georgia’s first settlement, Savannah, in 1733. Oglethorpe acted as the colony’s first governor and put into effect an elaborate plan for making the colony thrive. There were strict regulations, including an absolute ban on drinking rum and the prohibition of slavery. Nevertheless, partly because of the constant threat of Spanish attack, the colony did not prosper.
Royal colony. By 1752, Oglethorpe and his group gave up their plan. Taken over by the British government, Georgia became a royal colony. Restrictions on rum and slavery were dropped. The colony grew slowly by adopting the plantation system of South Carolina. Even so, at the time of the American Revolution, Georgia was still the smallest and poorest of the 13 colonies.
Mercantilism and the Empire
Most European kingdoms in the 17th century adopted the economic policy of mercantilism, which looked upon trade, colonies, and the accumulation of wealth as the basis for a country’s military and political strength. According to mercantilist doctrine, a government should regulate trade and production to enable it to become self-sufficient. Colonies were to provide raw materials to the parent country for the growth and profit of that country’s industries. Colonies existed for one purpose only: to enrich the parent country. Mercantilist policies had guided both the Spanish and the French colonies from their inception. Mercantilism began to be applied to the English colonies, however, only after the turmoil of England’s civil war had subsided.
Acts of Trade and Navigation. England’s government implemented a mercantilist policy with a series of Navigation Acts (1650 to 1673), which established three rules for colonial trade:
- Trade to and from the colonies could be carried only by English or colonial-built ships, which could be operated only by English or colonial crews.
- All goods imported into the colonies, except for some perishables, could pass only through ports in England
- Specified or “enumerated” goods from the colonies could be exported to England only. Tobacco was the original “enumerated” good, but over a period of years, the list was expanded to include most colonial products.
Impact on the colonies. The Navigation Acts had both positive and negative effects on the colonies.
Positive effects. (1) New England shipbuilding prospered. (2) Chesapeake tobacco had a monopoly in England. (3) English military forces protected the colonies from potential attacks by the French and Spanish.
Negative effects. (1) Colonial manufacturing was severely limited. (2) Chesapeake farmers received low prices for their crops. (3) Colonists had to pay high prices for manufactured goods from England. In many respects, mercantilist regulations were unnecessary, since England would have been the colonies’ primary trading partner in any case. Furthermore, whatever economic advantages were obtained from the Navigation Acts were more than offset by their negative political effects on British–colonial relations. Resentment slowly developed in the colonies against regulatory laws imposed by the distant government in London. Especially in New England, colonists would routinely defy the Navigation Acts by smuggling in French, Dutch, and other prohibited goods.
Enforcement of the acts. The British government was often lax in enforcing the acts, and its agents in the colonies were known for their corruption. Occasionally, however, the crown would attempt to overcome colonial resistance to its trade laws. In 1684, it revoked the charter of Massachusetts Bay because that colony had been the center of smuggling activity.
Brief experiment: the Dominion of New England. A new king, James II, succeeded to the throne in 1685. He was determined to increase royal control over the colonies by combining them into larger administrative units and doing away with their representative assemblies. In 1686, he combined New York, New Jersey, and the various New England colonies into a single unit called the Dominion of New England. Sir Edmund Andros was sent from England to serve as governor of the dominion. The new governor made himself instantly unpopular by levying taxes, limiting town meetings, and revoking land titles.
James II did not remain in power for long. His high-handed attempts at asserting his royal powers led to an uprising against him. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 succeeded in deposing James and replacing him with two new sovereigns, William and Mary. James’ fall from power brought the Dominion of New England to an end. Massachusetts Bay, New York, and the other colonies again operated under separate charters.
Permanent restrictions. Despite the Glorious Revolution, mercantilist policies remained in force. In the 18th century, there were more English officials in the colonies than in any earlier era. Restrictions on colonial trade, though poorly enforced, were widely resented and resisted.
The Institution of Slavery
Of far greater importance than mercantilism was a colonial institution that became rooted in American society in the closing decades of the 17th century. That was the institution of slavery. The number of slaves grew rapidly, from only a few thousand in 1670 to tens of thousands in the early 18th century. By 1750, half of Virginia’s population and two thirds of South Carolina’s population were slaves.
Increased demand for slaves. The following factors explain why slavery became increasingly important, especially in the southern colonies:
Triangular trade. In the 17th century, English trade in African slaves had been monopolized by a single company. But after the Royal African Company’s monopoly expired, many New England merchants entered the lucrative slave trade. Merchant ships would regularly follow a triangular, or three- part, trade route. First, a ship loaded with barrels of rum would start out from a New England port like Boston and cross the Atlantic to West Africa; there the rum would be traded for hundreds of captive Africans. Second, the ship would set out on the horrendous Middle Passage (horrendous for the Africans who were forced to experience it). Those Africans who survived the frightful voyage would be traded as slaves in the West Indies for a cargo of sugarcane. Third, completing the last side of the triangle, the ship would return to a New England port where the sugar would be sold to be used in making rum. Every time that one type of cargo was traded for another, the slave-trading entrepreneur usually succeeded in making a substantial profit.
- Corporate colonies, such as Jamestown, were operated by joint-stock companies, at least during these colonies’ early years.
- Royal colonies, such as Virginia after 1624, were to be under the direct authority and rule of the king’s government.
- Proprietary colonies, such as Maryland and Pennsylvania, were under the authority of individuals granted charters of ownership by the king.
The Chesapeake Colonies
In 1632, King Charles I subdivided the vast area that had been the Virginia colony. He chartered a new colony located on either side of Chesapeake Bay and granted control of it to George Calvert (Lord Baltimore), as a reward for this Catholic nobleman’s loyal service to the crown. The new colony of Maryland thus became the first of several proprietary colonies.
Maryland
The king decided to establish proprietorships rather than granting more colonial charters to joint-stock companies because he believed the new arrangement would give him almost total control. It was hoped that a loyal proprietor like Lord Baltimore could be trusted to faithfully carry out the king’s policies and wishes.
The first Lord Baltimore died before he could fulfill his twin ambitions of achieving great wealth in his colony while also providing a haven for his fellow Catholics. Control of the Maryland proprietorship passed in 1632 to his son, Cecil Calvert—the second Lord Baltimore—who set about implementing his father’s plan in 1634.
Act of Toleration. To avoid the intolerance and persecution of their Puritan enemies, a number of wealthy English Catholics emigrated to Maryland and established large colonial plantations. They were quickly outnumbered, however, by Protestant farmers. Protestants therefore held a majority in Mary- land’s representative assembly. In 1649, Calvert persuaded the assembly to adopt the Act of Toleration, the first colonial statute granting religious freedom to all Christians. However, the statute also called for the death of anyone who denied the divinity of Jesus.
Protestant revolt. In the late 1600s, Protestant resentment against a Cath- olic proprietor erupted into a brief civil war. The Protestants triumphed, and the Act of Toleration was repealed. Catholics lost their right to vote in elections for the Maryland assembly. In the 18th century, Maryland’s economy and society was much like that of neighboring Virginia, except that in Maryland there was greater tolerance of religious diversity among different Protestant sects.
Virginia
Meanwhile, the first of England’s colonies, Virginia, struggled with a number of problems in the late 17th century, including a rebellion against the colonial government.
Economic problems. Beginning in the 1660s, low tobacco prices, due largely to overproduction, brought hard times to the Chesapeake colonies, Maryland and Virginia. When Virginia’s House of Burgesses attempted to raise tobacco prices, the merchants of London retaliated by raising their own prices on goods exported to Virginia.
Political problems and Bacon’s Rebellion. Sir William Berkeley, the royal governor of Virginia (1641–1652; 1660–1677), adopted policies that favored the large planters and used dictatorial powers to govern on their behalf. He antagonized backwoods farmers on Virginia’s western frontier because he failed to protect their settlements from Indian attacks. Nathaniel Bacon, an impoverished gentleman farmer newly arrived from England, seized upon the grievances of the western farmers to lead a rebellion against Berkeley’s government. Bacon and others resented the economic and political control exercised by a few large planters in the Chesapeake area. He raised an army of volunteers and, in 1676, conducted a series of raids and massacres against Indian villages on the Virginia frontier. Berkeley’s govern- ment in Jamestown accused Bacon of rebelling against royal authority. Bacon’s army succeeded in defeating the governor’s forces and even burned the James- town settlement. Soon afterward, however, Bacon died of dysentery and the rebel army collapsed. Governor Berkeley brutally suppressed the remnants of the insurrection.
Lasting problems. Although it was short-lived, Bacon’s Rebellion, or the Chesapeake Revolution, highlighted two long-lasting disputes in colonial Virginia: (1) sharp class differences between wealthy planters and landless or poor farmers and (2) colonial resistance to royal control. These problems would continue into the next century, even after the general conditions of life in the Chesapeake colonies became more stable and prosperous.
Labor Shortages
The Chesapeake colonies grew slowly. Retarding their growth in the early decades were an unhealthy climate and a high death rate due both to disease and Indian attacks. Another factor slowing the development of families was an imbalance between the number of men and women. Most of the early settlers were men brought from England and Scotland to work in the tobacco fields. The tobacco industry required extensive labor which initially was not available. To solve the labor shortage, various methods were attempted. Chief among them were indentured servitude, the headright system, and slavery.
Indentured servants. Under contract with a master or landowner who paid for their passage, young people from the British Isles agreed to work for a specified period—usually between four to seven years—in return for room and board. In effect, indentured servants were under the absolute rule of their masters until the end of their work period. At the expiration of that period, they gained their freedom and either worked for wages or obtained land of their own to farm.
Headright system. As another method for attracting immigrants, Virginia offered 50 acres of land to (1) each immigrant who paid for his own passage and (2) any plantation owner who paid for an immigrant’s passage.
Slavery. The first Africans to come to Virginia arrived in 1619 aboard a slave ship operated by a Dutch trader. At first, Africans were not held as slaves for life but had roughly the same status as white indentured servants. Moreover, the early colonists were struggling to survive and too poor to purchase the Africans who were being imported to provide slave labor for sugar plantations in the West Indies. By 1650, there were only about 400 African laborers in Virginia, and not all of them were held in permanent bondage. In the 1660s, however, the Virginia House of Burgesses enacted laws that discriminated between blacks and whites. Africans and their offspring were to be treated as lifelong slaves, whereas white laborers were to be set free after a certain period.
Development of New England
Strong religious convictions helped sustain the Puritans in their struggle to establish the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. At the same time, Puritan leaders tended to be intolerant of anyone who questioned their religious teachings. A common method for dealing with dissidents was to banish them from the Bay colony. These dissidents formed the nucleus for the founding of several colonies in New England, which would ultimately develop into Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Rhode Island. Roger Williams went to Boston in 1631 as a respected Puritan minister. He believed, however, that the individual’s conscience was beyond the control of any civil or church authority. His teachings on this point placed him in conflict with other Puritan leaders, who ordered his banishment from the Bay colony. Leaving Boston, Williams fled southward to Narragansett Bay, where he and a few followers founded the settlement of Providence in 1636. The new colony was unique in two respects. First, it recognized the rights of the Native Americans and paid them for the use of their land. Second, Williams’ government provided for complete religious toleration by allowing Catholics, Quakers, and Jews to worship freely. (In addition to founding Providence and later Rhode Island, Williams also founded one of the first Baptist churches in America.) Another dissident who questioned the doctrines of the Puritan authorities was Anne Hutchinson. She believed in antinomianism—the idea that faith alone, not deeds, is necessary for salvation. Banished from the Bay colony, Hutchinson and a group of followers founded the colony of Portsmouth in 1638, not far from Williams’ colony of Providence. A few years later, Hutchinson migrated to Long Island and was killed in an Indian uprising. In 1644, Roger Williams was granted a charter from the English Parliament, which joined Providence and Portsmouth into a single colony, Rhode Island. Because this colony offered religious freedom for all, it served as a refuge for people of various faiths.
Connecticut. To the west of Rhode Island, the fertile Connecticut River Valley attracted other settlers who were unhappy with the Massachusetts authorities. The Reverend Thomas Hooker led a large group of Boston Puritans into the valley and founded the colony of Hartford in 1636. The Hartford settlers then drew up the first written constitution in American history, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639). It established a representative government consisting of a legislature elected by popular vote and a governor chosen by that legislature. South of Hartford, a second settlement in the Connecticut Valley was started by John Davenport in 1637 and given the name New Haven. In 1665, New Haven joined with the more democratic Hartford settlers to form the colony of Connecticut. The royal charter for Connecticut granted it a limited degree of self-government, including election of the governor.
New Hampshire. The last colony to be founded in New England was New Hampshire. Originally part of Massachusetts Bay, it consisted of a few settlements north of Boston. Hoping to increase royal control over the colonies, King Charles II separated New Hampshire from the Bay colony in 1679 and made it a royal colony, subject to the authority of an appointed governor.
Halfway Covenant. In the 1660s, a generation had passed since the founding of the first Puritan colonies in New England. The new native-born generation showed signs of being less committed to religious faith and more interested in material success. How was the Puritan church to remain strong if younger people failed to become members? In an effort to maintain the church’s influence and membership, a halfway covenant was offered by some clergymen to those who professed limited religious commitment. In other words, people could now take part in church services and activities without making a formal declaration of their total belief in Christ.
Other ministers rejected the halfway covenant and denounced it from the pulpit. Nevertheless, as the years passed, strict Puritan practices were weakened in most New England communities in order to maintain church membership.
New England Confederation. In the 1640s, the various New England colonies were constantly faced with the threat of attack from the Native Americans, the Dutch, and the French. Because of the civil war then being fought in England, the colonists could expect little assistance. Therefore in 1643, four New England colonies (Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven) formed a military alliance known as the New England Confederation. The confederation was directed by a board comprised of two representatives from each colony. It had limited powers to act on boundary disputes, the return of runaway servants, and dealings with the Native Americans. The confederation lasted until 1684, when colonial rivalries and renewed control by the English monarch brought this first experiment in colonial cooperation to an end. It was important because it established a precedent for colonies taking unified action toward a common purpose.
King Philip’s War. Only a few years before its demise, the confederation helped the New England colonists cope successfully with a dire threat. A chief of the Wampanoags named Metacom—known to the colonists as King Philip— united many tribes in southern New England against the English settlers, who were constantly encroaching on the Native Americans’ lands. In a vicious war (1675–1676), thousands on both sides were killed, and dozens of towns and villages were burned. Eventually, the colonial forces managed to prevail, killing King Philip and virtually ending Native American resistance in New England.
Restoration Colonies
New American colonies were founded in the late 17th century during a period in English history known as the Restoration. (The name refers to the restoration to power of an English monarch, Charles II, in 1660 following a brief period of Puritan rule under Oliver Cromwell.)
The Carolinas
As a reward for helping him gain the throne, Charles II granted a huge tract of land between Virginia and Spanish Florida to eight nobles, who in 1663 became the lord proprietors of the Carolinas. Eventually, in 1729, two royal colonies, South Carolina and North Carolina, were formed from the original proprietorship.
South Carolina. In 1670, in the southern Carolinas, a few colonists from England and some planters from the island of Barbados founded a town named for their king. Initially, the southern economy was based on trading furs and providing food for the West Indies. By the middle of the 18th century, South Carolina’s large rice-growing plantations worked by African slaves resembled the economy and culture of the West Indies.
North Carolina. The northern part of the Carolinas developed differently. There, farmers from Virginia and New England established small, self-sufficient tobacco farms. The region had few good harbors and poor transportation; therefore, compared to South Carolina, there were fewer large plantations and less reliance on slavery. North Carolina in the 18th century earned a reputation for democratic views and autonomy from British control.
New York
Charles II wished to consolidate the crown’s holdings along the Atlantic Coast and close the gap between the New England and the Chesapeake colonies. This required compelling the Dutch to give up their colony of New Amsterdam centered on Manhattan Island and the Hudson River Valley.
In 1664, the king granted his brother, the Duke of York (the future James II), the lands lying between Connecticut and Delaware Bay. As the lord high admiral of the navy, James dispatched a force that easily took control of the Dutch colony from its governor, Peter Stuyvesant. James ordered his agents in the renamed colony of New York to treat the Dutch settlers well and to allow them freedom to worship as they pleased and speak their own language.
James also ordered new taxes, duties, and rents without seeking the consent of a representative assembly. In fact, he insisted that no assembly should be allowed to form in his colony. But taxation without representation met strong opposition from New York’s English-speaking settlers, most of whom were Puritans from New England. Finally, in 1683, James yielded by allowing New York’s governor to grant broad civil and political rights, including a representative assembly.
New Jersey
Believing that the territory of New York was too large to administer, James in 1664 gave to two friends, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, that section of the colony located between the Hudson River and Delaware Bay. In 1674, one proprietor received West New Jersey and the other East New Jersey. To attract settlers, both proprietors made generous land offers and allowed religious freedom and an assembly. Eventually, they sold their proprietary interests to various groups of Quakers. Land titles in the Jerseys confusion. To settle matters, the crown decided in 1702 to combine the two Jerseys into a single royal colony: New Jersey.
Pennsylvania and Delaware
To the west of New Jersey lay a broad expanse of forested land that was originally settled by a peace-loving Christian sect, the Quakers.
Quakers. Members of the Religious Society of Friends—popularly known as Quakers—believed in the equality of all men and women, nonviolence, and resistance to military service. They further believed that religious authority was found within each person’s private soul and not in the Bible or any outside source. In the 17th century, such views seemed to pose a radical challenge to established authority. Therefore, the Quakers of England were widely persecuted and jailed for their beliefs.
William Penn. William Penn was a young convert to the Quaker faith. His father had been a victorious admiral in the service of the king. Although the elder Penn opposed his son’s religious beliefs, he respected his sincerity and upon his death he left his son considerable wealth. In addition, the royal family owed the father a large debt, which was paid to William Penn in 1681 in the form of a grant of land in the Americas for a colony which he called Pennsylvania, or Penn’s woods.
“The Holy Experiment.” Penn wanted to test ideas he had developed based on his Quaker beliefs. He wanted his new colony to achieve three purposes: provide a religious refuge for Quakers and other persecuted people, enact liberal ideas in government, and generate income and profits for himself. He provided the colony with a Frame of Government (1682–1683), which guaranteed a representative assembly elected by landowners, and a written constitution, the Charter of Liberties (1701), which guaranteed freedom of worship for all and unrestricted immigration. Unlike other colonial proprietors, who governed from afar in England, Penn crossed the ocean to supervise the founding of a new town on the Delaware River named Philadelphia. He brought with him a plan for a grid pattern of streets, which was later imitated by other American cities. Also unusual was Penn’s attempt to treat the Native Americans fairly and not to cheat them when purchasing their land. To attract settlers to his new land, Penn hired agents and published notices throughout Europe, which promised political and religious freedom and generous land terms. Penn’s lands along the Delaware River had previously been settled by several thousand Dutch and Swedish colonists, who eased the arrival of the newcomers attracted by Penn’s promotion. Delaware. In 1702, Penn granted the lower three counties of Pennsylvania their own assembly. In effect, this act created Delaware as a separate colony, even though its governor was the same as Pennsylvania’s until the American Revolution.
Georgia: The Last Colony
In 1732, a thirteenth colony, Georgia, was chartered. It was both the last of the British colonies and also the only one to receive direct financial support from the home government in London. There were two principal reasons for British interest in starting a new southern colony. First, Britain wanted to create a defensive buffer to protect the prosperous South Carolina plantations from the threat of invasion from Spanish Florida. Second, thousands of people in London and other cities were being imprisoned for debt. Wealthy philanthropists thought it would relieve the overcrowded jails and prison ships if debtors could be shipped to an American colony to start life over.
Special regulations. Given a royal charter for a proprietary colony, a group of philanthropists led by James Oglethorpe founded Georgia’s first settlement, Savannah, in 1733. Oglethorpe acted as the colony’s first governor and put into effect an elaborate plan for making the colony thrive. There were strict regulations, including an absolute ban on drinking rum and the prohibition of slavery. Nevertheless, partly because of the constant threat of Spanish attack, the colony did not prosper.
Royal colony. By 1752, Oglethorpe and his group gave up their plan. Taken over by the British government, Georgia became a royal colony. Restrictions on rum and slavery were dropped. The colony grew slowly by adopting the plantation system of South Carolina. Even so, at the time of the American Revolution, Georgia was still the smallest and poorest of the 13 colonies.
Mercantilism and the Empire
Most European kingdoms in the 17th century adopted the economic policy of mercantilism, which looked upon trade, colonies, and the accumulation of wealth as the basis for a country’s military and political strength. According to mercantilist doctrine, a government should regulate trade and production to enable it to become self-sufficient. Colonies were to provide raw materials to the parent country for the growth and profit of that country’s industries. Colonies existed for one purpose only: to enrich the parent country. Mercantilist policies had guided both the Spanish and the French colonies from their inception. Mercantilism began to be applied to the English colonies, however, only after the turmoil of England’s civil war had subsided.
Acts of Trade and Navigation. England’s government implemented a mercantilist policy with a series of Navigation Acts (1650 to 1673), which established three rules for colonial trade:
- Trade to and from the colonies could be carried only by English or colonial-built ships, which could be operated only by English or colonial crews.
- All goods imported into the colonies, except for some perishables, could pass only through ports in England
- Specified or “enumerated” goods from the colonies could be exported to England only. Tobacco was the original “enumerated” good, but over a period of years, the list was expanded to include most colonial products.
Impact on the colonies. The Navigation Acts had both positive and negative effects on the colonies.
Positive effects. (1) New England shipbuilding prospered. (2) Chesapeake tobacco had a monopoly in England. (3) English military forces protected the colonies from potential attacks by the French and Spanish.
Negative effects. (1) Colonial manufacturing was severely limited. (2) Chesapeake farmers received low prices for their crops. (3) Colonists had to pay high prices for manufactured goods from England. In many respects, mercantilist regulations were unnecessary, since England would have been the colonies’ primary trading partner in any case. Furthermore, whatever economic advantages were obtained from the Navigation Acts were more than offset by their negative political effects on British–colonial relations. Resentment slowly developed in the colonies against regulatory laws imposed by the distant government in London. Especially in New England, colonists would routinely defy the Navigation Acts by smuggling in French, Dutch, and other prohibited goods.
Enforcement of the acts. The British government was often lax in enforcing the acts, and its agents in the colonies were known for their corruption. Occasionally, however, the crown would attempt to overcome colonial resistance to its trade laws. In 1684, it revoked the charter of Massachusetts Bay because that colony had been the center of smuggling activity.
Brief experiment: the Dominion of New England. A new king, James II, succeeded to the throne in 1685. He was determined to increase royal control over the colonies by combining them into larger administrative units and doing away with their representative assemblies. In 1686, he combined New York, New Jersey, and the various New England colonies into a single unit called the Dominion of New England. Sir Edmund Andros was sent from England to serve as governor of the dominion. The new governor made himself instantly unpopular by levying taxes, limiting town meetings, and revoking land titles.
James II did not remain in power for long. His high-handed attempts at asserting his royal powers led to an uprising against him. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 succeeded in deposing James and replacing him with two new sovereigns, William and Mary. James’ fall from power brought the Dominion of New England to an end. Massachusetts Bay, New York, and the other colonies again operated under separate charters.
Permanent restrictions. Despite the Glorious Revolution, mercantilist policies remained in force. In the 18th century, there were more English officials in the colonies than in any earlier era. Restrictions on colonial trade, though poorly enforced, were widely resented and resisted.
The Institution of Slavery
Of far greater importance than mercantilism was a colonial institution that became rooted in American society in the closing decades of the 17th century. That was the institution of slavery. The number of slaves grew rapidly, from only a few thousand in 1670 to tens of thousands in the early 18th century. By 1750, half of Virginia’s population and two thirds of South Carolina’s population were slaves.
Increased demand for slaves. The following factors explain why slavery became increasingly important, especially in the southern colonies:
- Reduced migration: Increases in wages in England reduced the supply of immigrants to the colonies.
- Dependable work force: Large-plantation owners were disturbed by the political demands of small farmers and indentured servants and by the disorders of Bacon’s Rebellion. They thought that slavery would provide a stable labor force totally under their control.
- Cheap labor: As tobacco prices fell, rice and indigo became the most profitable crops. To grow such crops successfully required both a large land area and a large number of inexpensive, relatively unskilled field hands.
Triangular trade. In the 17th century, English trade in African slaves had been monopolized by a single company. But after the Royal African Company’s monopoly expired, many New England merchants entered the lucrative slave trade. Merchant ships would regularly follow a triangular, or three- part, trade route. First, a ship loaded with barrels of rum would start out from a New England port like Boston and cross the Atlantic to West Africa; there the rum would be traded for hundreds of captive Africans. Second, the ship would set out on the horrendous Middle Passage (horrendous for the Africans who were forced to experience it). Those Africans who survived the frightful voyage would be traded as slaves in the West Indies for a cargo of sugarcane. Third, completing the last side of the triangle, the ship would return to a New England port where the sugar would be sold to be used in making rum. Every time that one type of cargo was traded for another, the slave-trading entrepreneur usually succeeded in making a substantial profit.