American History: A Survey

Starting with Jamestown in 1607, English settlers began to establish colonies lining the Chesapeake Bay. The Virginia colony expanded quickly, with Maryland shortly behind. The “headright“ system of granting each new colonist a parcel of land helped encourage Europeans with the means to sail to the Chesapeake Bay, and many found their fortunes farming tobacco, the only lucrative North American crop the English had yet found.

The Chesapeake settlement was a socially stratified society from the start; the earliest colonists were often either younger sons of aristocrats and rich merchants, who had money but no land, or struggling members of the lower class. The earliest governors in Jamestown led a strict system of “communal“ labor, in which men were conscribed to work on farms owned by the Virginia Company. These men received little personal reward but were harshly punished for disobedience. Colonies of later years allowed more personal freedoms, but indentured servitude was commonplace until the 1670s, when the first Africans were transported for labor. In Maryland, the Catholic founder Lord Baltimore envisioned the colony as a haven for Catholics, but tensions soon rose as Protestants became the majority.

Indigenous populations that were promised a western boundary to white settlement soon saw English newcomers invading more of their land. The earliest and wealthiest settlers, who owned most of the land directly by the bay, began to restrict the rights of newcomers and recently released indentured servants. By the late 1600s, Virginia had an aristocracy not unlike the one they had left back in England. The tensions among the white settlers came to a head in 1676 with Bacon’s Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon was wealthy but arrived in Virginia late and settled in the backcountry west of the Chesapeake settlement. Governor Sir William Berkeley saw Bacon as a threat to the tense peace the Virginians had cultivated with the natives, and refused to grant him the privileges of the tidewater elites. Bacon gathered the support of poor backcountry settlers who also felt rejected by Virginia leadership, and launched attacks on local Indigenous tribes in an attempt to claim more land. Berkeley and his government saw this as an attempt to undermine their authority, and panic ensued about what to do with the former indentured servants who were growing in number and posed a threat to the elite classes. This rebellion was a major factor in the decision to import larger numbers of enslaved Africans.

In contrast to the financial motivations of the Chesapeake colonies, New England’s first settlers had religious reasons to migrate. By the early 1600s, puritan separatists were fed up with persecution in England; many moved to other countries such as the Netherlands. One congregation chose to go even further, mounting a plan to sail for the New World. In 1620, the Mayflower left Plymouth, England with a group of 100 colonists led by William Bradford. Two months later, they arrived on Cape Cod and established the Plymouth plantation. The settlers arrived midwinter and faced a harsh season, losing nearly half their population. In 1621, they fared a little better with the help of the local Wampanoag, a rare moment of positive cultural exchange between colonists and the native population.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, colonial populations along the eastern seaboard continued to grow. The new populations brought new ideas and ways of life to the American colonies, yet each region remained a distinct entity with separate laws and economies. By the dawn of the 18th century, the character of colonial immigration had changed: English people were restricted from emigrating in an attempt to preserve the country’s declining population. Settlements from other countries began to take hold in the New World, most notably French and German Calvinists who settled primarily in Pennsylvania, where the Quaker government was tolerant of their beliefs. The German group became known as the Pennsylvania Dutch; their descendants still populate the area today and have preserved many of their traditional practices of simple living and devotion to God.

Despite the influx of people from different backgrounds, the distinct character of each colonial region remained largely similar throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Puritan ideals guided New England society even as more non-puritans moved there. Due to the favorable climate, New Englanders had a much longer life expectancy than people in other colonies or even in Europe, and the birth rate was high. This helped preserve family units and close-knit villages, each centered around a village church, as well as the strict patriarchal society dominant in Europe. They abandoned the English practice of handing land down to the oldest son, however. When a father died, each son received a portion of his land. Over several generations, this meant that individuals held ever-smaller parcels of land, and many began establishing new settlements outside their hometowns. New settlements meant new churches and new outsiders, which led to diversification of the strict puritanical beliefs on which New England was founded.

In the colonies further south, the mortality rate remained high well into the 18th century, and birth rates were relatively low. Far more men than women remained in many of the colonies outside New England, which aided those women in gaining more independence than they had in Europe. Women married early but could choose from many men for husbands and were often left with large plantations to manage when their husbands (who often were older) died. In addition, the frequency of early deaths meant that blended families were common.

Increasing populations resulted in more complex colonial economies. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, a divide emerged between the economies of the South and the North. Both depended primarily on agriculture, but the means by which they produced and traded this agriculture differed greatly. The northern farmers produced various crops on a small scale, but conditions were not ideal for large-scale industrial farming. Instead, commercial manufacturing ventures like the Saugus Ironworks in Massachusetts emerged, as did many small-scale warehouses for production of goods. In the South, large farms—some acting as standalone towns—were the norm. Southern planters exported the valuable staple crops tobacco, rice, and indigo (a plant used to make blue dye) to other colonies and overseas. Although African people were enslaved throughout the continent by the 18th century, the practice flourished in the South to the point that colonies like South Carolina had more Africans than Europeans. Landowners saw enslaved people as a stable source of mass labor, one that did not produce the same class tensions as importing white indentured servants. Slaves staged occasional uprisings but had no hope of a full-scale revolution.

In addition to economic expansion, 18th-century America experienced changes in common belief systems. The Great Awakening, an early- to mid-18th century Christian revival period, was primarily centered in New England; charismatic preachers like John Roberts gained thousands of followers with their message that the population had strayed too far from God. Around the same time, European Enlightenment ideas began to reach the American colonies. Colleges like Harvard were established in the 18th century. Although most colleges were run by churches and were officially meant to train religious leaders, newly fashionable topics like science and law were regularly explored at these colleges. Wealthy colonists clamored to become amateur scientists, and many, such as Ben Franklin, made important contributions to the understanding of the natural world.