A variety of motives—political, religious, and economic—contributed to the settling of the Atlantic seaboard. Both labor and capital in England had become fairly fluid by 1600 and were seeking more profitable fields. A sharp rise in prices and living costs made many people restless; the increase in sheep grazing and the fencing in of former common lands drove many from the soil; bold young men, including younger sons of the gentry, losing in peace the occupation which the wars with Spain had given them, looked abroad. Many Englishmen saw that the colonization of the New World might contribute to the power and affluence of their homeland and felt that Spain, Portugal, and other lands should face competition. Finally, the spread of great commercial trading companies assisted in the work.
These companies were chartered by the crown to give England new outlets abroad. The Muscovy Company, for example, founded in 1555, intended to trade with Russia; the Levant Company controlled trade with Venice and the Near East; and the East India Company (1600) covered the Pacific and Indian Ocean coasts. Companies were also organized for Newfoundland, the Northwest Passage, and Bermuda. Most important for America, however, were the two companies for which King James I granted a charter in 1606, one to colonize the American coast anywhere between parallels 34° and 41° north and the other anywhere between 38° and 45° north. Because members of the first company lived in London, it became known as the Virginia Company of London (Virginia Company); as members of the second dwelt in Plymouth, it was called the Plymouth Company. Shareholders in the companies were to provide settlers and capital and were to control production and trade. Government, however, was to remain in the hands of the crown, acting through councils. A guarantee was given to the colonists of all the rights and liberties of English subjects, without any definition of their scope. In return, the grantees were forbidden to draft any orders or make any laws contrary to those of England.
The Virginia Company lost no time in using its powers. Before Christmas in 1606 three ships sailed for Virginia, carrying among others Capt. John Smith, who was to take an important part in the American story, and Bartholomew Gosnold, who had previously visited the New England coast. In the spring of 1607 the three ships sailed to Hampton Roads, christened the James River, landed 120 men, and founded Jamestown. Starvation, disease, and Indian warfare ensued, and, though more ships with fresh settlers arrived, for a time the colony had but precarious life. In the end Virginia took sturdy root: “We hope to plant a nation / Where none before hath stood,” sang a ballad maker among the early adventurers, and they achieved their ambition.
In these years the Virginia Company had achieved a broader legal basis. It obtained two new charters from the crown, one in 1609 and one in 1612. These new grants practically severed it from the Plymouth Company and confirmed to it a great belt of territory 400 miles (640 km) wide extending through the American continent to the Pacific Ocean. The Virginia Company thus became proprietor of the colony of Virginia. At the same time it obtained large rights of government. It could appoint the resident governor, his resident council, and other officers and hold full control of them. The old system of joint-stock management of land and trade was abolished, and private property in land and stores took its place. An able soldier, Sir Thomas Dale, went to Virginia in 1611 with three ships, 300 colonists, and some livestock, and for five years exercised statesmanlike control. During these years the colony took up the cultivation of tobacco with great profit.
Meanwhile, the Plymouth Company had failed in an effort to plant a colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine. Nothing more was done to colonize what is now New England until a group of Separatists, who believed that the Bible was the only test of faith and revolted against all other creeds, turned to this area. These Pilgrims placed themselves in partnership with a group of merchants and other businessmen who agreed to finance the venture. In return for advances of ready money, the colonists promised to labor for seven years, throwing all they produced into a common pool; both profits and land were to remain undivided for that period. Of two vessels dispatched, one turned back, but the other, the Mayflower, set sail on September 16 (New Style; September 6, Old Style), 1620, with about 100 passengers, and reached Cape Cod before the year ended. After much suffering and peril courageously met, the colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, took root. Within 10 years it was prosperously expanding, had separated itself from the partners in England, and had replaced the joint-stock arrangement with private properties and private enterprise.
First steps in self-government
Both in Virginia and New England the colonists soon began to exercise a certain autonomy. In 1619 Gov. George Yeardley brought out to Jamestown a new plan of government and a momentous step forward was taken. A two-part legislature was created, one part consisting of the governor and his council, named by the company in England, and the other a house made up of two burgesses from each settlement. It was to legislate upon Virginian home affairs, subject to the approval of the governor and the company. During the summer the first true legislature in continental America met in the log church in Jamestown. A little later the Pilgrims, before leaving their ship, adopted the Mayflower Compact. It was not a form of government but an agreement that they would live together in orderly fashion under civil officers of their own selection. On board the ship, John Carver was chosen governor, soon to be succeeded by William Bradford. As soon as they had begun housing themselves, the Plymouth settlers met and consulted upon laws both for their civil and military government resulting in the first New England town meeting.
However, a colony of sturdier individualism, with a bolder degree of self-government, was soon to be established. In the years 1630–42 the “Great Migration” of the Puritans from England to America occurred. These believers in a church purged of old forms and abuses, and a society purified of gross evils, were unhappy under King Charles I, who in 1629 dissolved Parliament for 11 years, and under Archbishop William Laud, who declared war upon them. Two men, John Endecott, who led a body of settlers to Salem, Massachusetts, and John Winthrop, a country squire of great energy, showed special leadership. The crown in 1629 gave a charter to the Massachusetts Bay Company. The Puritans quickly obtained control of it, and Winthrop as governor persuaded the members to decide in favor of transporting company, charter, and a large assemblage of colonists all together to Boston, Massachusetts. At once new groups migrated to this colony of Massachusetts Bay, with Boston as its center. Careful estimates show that by 1641, 300 ships had carried 20,000 settlers to America. This was an almost purely English migration, which included a few aristocrats and many university graduates. Religious zeal animated most of the migrants.
The result was the erection of a church state which fell far short of democracy but cherished a passion for liberty and self-government. Each town of Massachusetts Bay had its own church, minister, and town government and was an independent Congregational community. Voting rights were limited to church members, and the ministers exercised a powerful authority in civil affairs. From an early date the voting freemen elected deputies to sit in the general court, or legislature, where they, the governor, and a small body of his assistants made laws and levied taxes. Thus a self-sufficient commonwealth of oligarchical type sprang into being. Governor Winthrop and others declared that it had absolute powers of self-government under the crown and owed no allegiance or deference to the English Parliament. The dominance of the clergy, however, and the narrowness and harshness of their government aroused great discontent.
A combination of two impulses—the restlessness of men seeking better land and a desire for greater independence in religion and politics—led various elements in New England to establish other colonies. Thus Roger Williams, a stout adherent of freedom and tolerance, helped bring Rhode Island into existence, Thomas Hooker and others founded settlements on the Connecticut River, and the Rev. John Davenport and others established New Haven colony, which expanded along Long Island Sound. The early inhabitants of Maine and New Hampshire were controlled by Massachusetts Bay. All the New Englanders until 1680 practically ruled themselves. They regarded the government in England as sovereign but passed their own laws, traded under their own regulations, and raised their own forces for defense. Their tie with England was one of sentiment, not force, and they developed themselves in full freedom.
Particularly during the years of the Civil War and Commonwealth in England, the colonies profited from the preoccupation of the mother country with its own affairs. The Massachusetts legislature boldly asserted that the laws of the English Parliament did not reach New England. Under Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth, Virginia was permitted to elect its own governor and council as well as burgesses. During the period of civil strife in England, the four colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven in 1643 formed the New England Confederation, which lasted for a full generation. Its primary purpose was defense against Native Americans, the French, and the Dutch, but it also dealt with boundary controversies and provided “mutual advice” on various questions.
Land policy in New England and Virginia
The New England colonies grew by a process of group settlement. The general courts of the various colonies, most notably that of Massachusetts Bay, would make a grant of land to a migrating group, fixing its boundaries carefully. This group would then establish a new town. Its common lands, fencing, grazing practices, and the mode of apportionment of farms were regulated by the general court or legislature, but each town then took control of land allotments and management. The legislature determined who should be admitted to the town as settlers and freeholders. The town meetings, or boards of town proprietors, laid out the land of each settlement as house lots, common fields, meadow and pasture, and ultimately divided it among owners. Inhabitants of each town commonly dwelt together for society and protection and traveled from the town center to till their acres. The typical town was thus closely akin to an English manor, but with no lord of the manor at its head. The town was, of course, the church center, and its pastor was the community leader. Militia service, elections, and taxation were based on the town.
In Virginia, settlement followed an entirely different pattern. There the colonists spread out widely up the creeks and rivers, soon moving westward as far as the falls of the James River, where the city of Richmond now stands. Partly because tobacco rapidly impoverished the soil, they tilled land in much larger units, known as plantations, with almost no village centers, and they made much greater use of servants—and, significantly, slaves—than did New England. This pattern was unfavorable to social life, cooperation, and communal activities, but it created a spirit of independence equal to that existing farther north. Throughout the 17th century the planters preferred white indentured servants to African slaves, and for a time as many as 1,500 arrived every year. They were mainly English, along with some Scotch and Irish, and in general bound themselves, in return for transportation and support, to work without wages for four to six years. This indenture or redemptioner system became a highly efficient aid to colonization. When they had worked out their terms, the servants moved up the streams, took land, began shipping tobacco from their own wharves, and thus became in turn independent planters or freehold farmers.
The natural political units in Virginia were parishes and counties. Parish institutions were chiefly ecclesiastical, but under the English system they included education; every minister kept a school and the vestry saw to it that all poor children could read and write. Children of prosperous families usually had private tutors. The counties increased in number to keep pace with the steady spread of population. By 1652 Virginia had 13 counties, of which 9 lay on the James River and 2 on the York. The county courts held large powers of local government and tended to come under the control of a few influential families. Until 1636 the House of Burgesses was practically elected on manhood suffrage; thereafter the vote was restricted, and, when Sir William Berkeley became governor under the Restoration, he kept a compliant house in power for 15 years.
Founding of the middle colonies
Henry Hudson’s voyage of 1609 to what is now New York Bay was intended to serve trade rather than colonization. The Dutch wished for cargoes of fur, lumber, and tobacco. However, in 1621 the Netherlands government chartered the Dutch West India Company with power to build forts, to establish a government, and to colonize the land over wide areas, including the American coast. Two years later the heads of the company sent a vessel with 30 families of Walloons, Protestant refugees from the southern provinces of the Netherlands, to the mouth of the Hudson River, where they established the first permanent settlement on the island of Manhattan. More settlers arrived, and in 1626 Peter Minuit “purchased” the island from Indian sachems (variously characterized by historians as having belonged to the Lenape, Delaware, Munsee, or Algonquin people) and founded New Amsterdam as the seat of government for a colony. Fort Orange (now Albany) had been planted up the Hudson two years earlier as a fur trading post. New Amsterdam quickly became a cosmopolitan town, attracting people of various nations and faiths. It had the self-reliant lawless atmosphere of a seaport, full of privateers, smugglers, tavern keepers, and roistering sailors.
For several reasons New Netherland did not grow as vigorously as the English colonies. The Dutch West India Company was at first much more interested in preying on Spanish commerce in the Caribbean and Atlantic than in finding permanent settlers. It was also anxious to develop the fur trade and to share in the tobacco trade. When it turned to settlement in earnest, it adopted an unfortunate method. Beginning in 1629, it granted any patroon who brought out 50 families a great estate on which to settle them as tenants, with certain monopolies, as of milling, in the hands of the owner. This kind of feudalism gave a few great families an unhealthy share of wealth and power. Some small farmers did establish independent farms or boweries here and there, as did interloping Puritans from New England who sifted into Westchester and the northern reaches of Long Island, but they were not numerous. Finally, the governors and councils appointed by the Dutch West India Company, who ruled without any such popular assemblies as Virginia and New England possessed, were harsh, autocratic, and blundering. Far from gaining any popular following, they were generally disliked. The most famous of the governors, Peter Stuyvesant, was also the most headstrong and shortsighted.
It was impossible for England to permit a Dutch colony to break the line of its possessions on the Atlantic seaboard for long. In 1664 a small English naval force obtained the surrender of the New Netherland without firing a shot. The 7,000 inhabitants of the area accepted the new regime without protest. Charles II appointed his brother James, the duke of York, ruler and proprietor of the colony of New York, a domain stretching from the Connecticut River to the Delaware. At once a more liberal regime began. The proprietor sent over a governor with instructions to treat the Dutch inhabitants generously, to permit them to keep their lands, and to make no interference with their language or religion. Immigration was encouraged and settlements thickened. In 1683 Gov. Thomas Dongan summoned a representative assembly for the province of New York.
One of the greatest of all colonial figures presided over the founding of what became Pennsylvania and Delaware. William Penn, son of the prominent English admiral Sir William Penn, had been converted to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in 1667, in his early 20s. He aspired to establish a colony where every race and every sect could find both political and religious freedom. His friendship with the duke of York, and the fact that the king owed a large unpaid debt to Admiral Penn, enabled William Penn to gain control of a great part of the imperial domain assigned to the duke. When the crown gave him a proprietary charter in 1681, he immediately began to advertise for settlers. Publishing a description of Pennsylvania in four languages, he offered newcomers land on very liberal terms: 50 acres free, larger farms at a purely nominal rent, and 5,000 acres for £100. Penn visited his “holy experiment” in 1682. And in that year he laid down a charter of government which provided for a small elective council, to sit with himself as governor and initiate laws, and a larger elective assembly to pass or reject the proposed laws. Within a few years the assembly gained much larger powers and itself proposed legislation. In 1701 Penn granted a new charter that lasted until the American Revolution.
It is not strange that Pennsylvania flourished beyond other colonies. Immigrants flocked in large numbers, from England and Germany especially, to enjoy the religious freedom, the humane criminal legislation, the easy terms for gaining fertile land, and the opportunities for trade and manufacture. Penn had hoped that Philadelphia, his “city of brotherly love,” would always be “a green country town,” with gardens surrounding every house, and it did become a beautiful as well as a prosperous city. Quakerism, softened from its originally somewhat rigid outlines, gave the colony a special atmosphere. It was in Pennsylvania that a number of institutions on which America later prided itself found their first full-scale trial: complete religious freedom, the distribution of land to actual settlers at very low cost, the encouragement of a melting pot of peoples, and the establishment of excellent schools open to all. Because of the high intellectual and moral standards of the Quakers, the cultural level of Pennsylvania soon became one of unusual elevation. It was noted for its libraries, its refined homes, its interest in science, and its architectural taste. When it was only 10 years old, it had the first printing press to be established outside of New England.
Before Penn died, he bought from the duke of York three counties on the Delaware River which became the province and state of that name. Though they shared their governor with Pennsylvania, from 1702 they had their own elective assembly. The other middle colonies also began under proprietors. Maryland had a history of special interest because of its initial status as a refuge for Roman Catholics. Charles I granted the district between the Potomac River and the 40th parallel in 1632 to George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, who was much interested in colonization. His son, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, almost immediately succeeded to the grant and resolved to establish a colony where his fellow Roman Catholics could find peace. Early in 1634 the first shipload of Roman Catholic settlers chose a site at St. Marys on a tributary of the Potomac near its mouth. Actually, Protestants soon constituted a majority of the settlers, for the Roman Catholics preferred to stay in England. To meet this situation, Cecilius Calvert persuaded the assembly which he called to pass an act of religious toleration in 1649. Unfortunately, this act was repealed before many years.
Though Maryland profited from the proximity to Virginia, which gave it protection and trade, it had a troubled history. The Protestant settlers were irked by Calvert’s bestowals of land, offices, and favors on his relatives and Roman Catholic friends. They were also irritated by the very limited authority that he allowed his assembly. Friction over religious and economic questions culminated in hostilities in 1654, the Protestant small farmers finally winning their main objectives. When William and Mary came to the throne in England in 1689, the Calverts lost control of Maryland; however, when a new Lord Baltimore embraced Protestantism in 1715, the family regained its rights.
Meanwhile, the future New Jersey had undergone some confusing and unprofitable changes of name and jurisdiction. The duke of York, the original proprietor, had given the lands between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to two friends, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, as the province of Nova Cesaria, or New Jersey. To bring in more settlers, they drew up a charter or set of “concessions and agreements” which largely anticipated Penn’s liberal ideas. That is, they offered generous terms for acquiring land, complete freedom of conscience, and a popular assembly. In 1674 Berkeley sold his half share to two Quakers, who took the southwestern part of the future state. In 1680 Carteret’s widow sold the northeastern half to a new body of proprietors. Ultimately, in 1702, the crown took over both sections.