2.3: The Regions of British Colonies

Chesapeake Colonies

  • First colony: Jamestown, Virginia

  • Financed by joint-stock company

    • Investors pooled their wealth to share the financial risk

  • Purpose: profit

    • Mined gold and silver

    • Constructed forts to protect them

  • Famine killed ~half in first 2 years

    • Resort to cannibalism

    • 1612: discovered tobacco

  • John Rolfe experimented with its planting

    • Saved colonies; took hold back in England

  • Most labor done by indentured servants

    • 7-year labor contract

    • Worked to pay off passage and settlement fees

  • Tobacco needed a lot of land…

  • Encroachment upon native land led to retaliation

    • Raided farmers’ settlements

    • Governor William Berkeley dismissed colonists’ concerns

Bacon’s Rebellion

  • Nathaniel Bacon: farmer who was resentful of NA violence and Berkeley’s neglect

    • Led poor farmers + indentured servants

    • Attacked Indians and Berkeley’s plantations

  • Significant impact

    • Elite planters saw a great number of indentured servants

      • Feared uprising

    • Enslaved Africans fit that

New England

  • Settled by Pilgrims in 1620

  • Influx of Puritan settlers

    • Protestants who wanted to purify English Church theology and strictness

    • Pilgrims were Separatists

    • Emigrated to live by their own conscience

  • When they first left England, many settled in Holland

    • Religious freedom

    • BUT. Had trouble making a living as farmers in an urban area

    • So, emigrated to America for economic reasons

  • Family groups

  • ~half killed by disease in first few years

  • Economy: agriculture and commerce

British West Indies and Southern Atlantic Coast

  • 1620s: British established first permanent colonies in Caribbean

    • St. Christopher

    • Barbados

    • Nevis

  • Long growing seasons

  • Tobacco became primary cash crop

  • By 1630s, more profitable crop: sugarcane

    • Spike in demand for Enslaved Africans

    • By 1660, majority pop. on Barbados black

  • Planter elites enacted harsh slave codes

    • Strictly regulated slaves’ behavior

    • Defined slaves as property, or chattel

  • South Carolina: tried to replicate such a society

Middle Colonies

  • NY and NJ

    • By the sea, had rivers and streams

    • Export economy based on cereal crops

    • Diverse population; over time became unequal

  • Urban merchants

  • Artisans, shopkeepers

  • Unskilled laborers, orphans, widows, unemployed

  • Enslaved Africans

  • Pennsylvania founded by William Penn

    • Quaker and pacifist

    • Religious freedom

    • Negotiated with Indians for land, rather than taking it by force

Government

  • Common thread: democratic ways of self-governance

  • Virginia: House of Burgesses

    • Representative assembly

    • Levy taxes

    • Pass laws

  • New England: bound themselves to the Mayflower Compact

    • Organized government on the model of a self-governing Church congregation

    • Concentrated power into town meetings

  • Middle and Southern had representative bodies

    • Dominated by elite

    • Middle: elite merchants

    • South: elite planters