The Colonial Period--Trends and Themes of the Era
• Spain dominated the early years of European exploration of the New World, with France a distant second. England did not get seriously involved in the New World until nearly a century after Columbus landed.
• After England defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, the balance of power in the New World (and in Europe) shifted. After initial hardship in the colonies, English settlements showed the New World could bring profit and offered religious freedom. A quick buildup of colonial settlements began along the east coast of North America and continued through the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries.
• Under its mercantilist economic policy, England created laws ensuring that its colonies existed primarily to enrich the mother country. England did not enforce these laws too strictly, employing a policy of “salutary neglect,” for fear of alienating the colonists and thereby helping France’s interests in the New World.
• After the 1763 French and Indian War, England no longer worried about France as a threat, but faced huge war debts. England believed the colonies should bear the brunt of the debt because the war was for their benefit. England ended salutary neglect to the colonist’s dismay and anger.
Effects of Colonization on the Natives
Colonization had a disastrous effect on the native population. War, slavery, and starvation claimed many lives, but disease, especially smallpox, had the most devastating effect. In Mexico, the native population plummeted from 25 million in 1519 to 2 million by 1600. European settlement physically displaced numerous tribes, setting in motion the sad fate of Native Americans throughout American history.
The Spanish, however, provided the Native Americans of the Great Plains with an unintended gift: horses. During the conquistadors’ expeditions into the Southwest, some horses escaped and formed large herds on the Great Plains. Within a few generations, Native Americans in the plains region became experts on horseback, expanding their hunting and trading capabilities and dramatically transforming Native American culture.
The Early English Colonies
Because England got such a late start in the colonization game, they couldn’t just set up their colonies wherever they wanted. Spain dominated South America, Mexico, the West Indies, the American Southwest, and Florida. The French held sway along North America’s major waterways. In addition, the dense forests and occasionally hostile Native American tribes prevented English settlers from moving westward past the Appalachian Mountains. The early English settlements were therefore concentrated along the eastern coast of North America.
There were three types of British colonies: royal, proprietary, and self-governing. Each type had its own characteristics.
• Royal colonies were owned by the king.
• Proprietary colonies, such as Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, were basically land grants from the British government. Individuals were awarded huge tracts of land that they would then supervise and govern, usually in return for political or financial favors. These colonial governors reported directly to the king.
• Self-governing colonies, including Rhode Island and Connecticut, formed when the king granted a charter to a joint-stock company, and the company then set up its own government independent of the crown. The king could revoke the colonial charter at any time and convert a self-governing colony into a royal colony.
The SAT II test will focus on the particularly important English colonies of Jamestown, Plymouth, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Jamestown
Nearly twenty years after the failure of the English settlement at Roanoke, two separate joint-stock companies set out to found settlements along the Atlantic seaboard. In 1606, England’s King James I authorized a charter granting land in what was then called Virginia (but stretched from modern-day Maine to North Carolina) to the Virginia Company of Plymouth and the Virginia Company of London. Colonists, considered employees of their respective companies, journeyed to America in 1607. The Virginia Company of Plymouth failed miserably, and its settlement in Sagadahoc, Maine was abandoned within two years. The Virginia Company of London was more successful, though in the New World, success was something of a relative term.
Jamestown’s Early Years
The 105 original Jamestown colonists were all men. Jamestown was a business venture, not a place to raise a family. The colonists took this ethic to heart and focused all their efforts on getting rich, neglecting to tend to any sort of agriculture. As a result, more than half of the colonists died of malnourishment and starvation within the first year. Only 38 colonists remained when reinforcements arrived in 1608.
Captain John Smith, one of the surviving original colonists, soon emerged as a prominent leader. In 1608, Smith organized work gangs to ensure the colony had food and shelter and made rules to control sanitation and hygiene. During the winter of 1608–1609, only twelve of 200 men died. Smith also excelled in diplomacy, maintaining friendly ties with the nearby Powhatan Confederacy. But when Smith was wounded in 1609 and returned to England, the colony staggered toward collapse. Out of a population of about 500 colonists in Jamestown in September 1609, 400 died by May 1610. Relations with the nearby Native Americans deteriorated, and in 1610 the first Anglo-Powhatan War erupted.
Tobacco, Money, and Success
In the end, Jamestown was saved—not by gold or silver—but because it had the perfect climate for growing tobacco. John Rolfe, an Englishman who married the Powhatan leader’s daughter, Pocahontas, introduced to the colony West Indian tobacco, a salable strain with many advantages over local varieties. From 1616 to 1619, Jamestown’s tobacco exports grew nearly twenty-fold. Sensing the possibility for great profit, the Virginia Company dispatched money and supplies and awarded land grants to anyone able to pay for his own passage to Jamestown, or for the passage of another laborer.
The profits produced by tobacco saved Jamestown and ensured the settlement’s success.
As the colony grew in size, its members began to desire a better system of government. In 1619, the colonists formed a general assembly, the House of Burgesses. The House of Burgesses was the first representative government in the New World, though its power was limited because the Virginia Company could still overrule its actions. That same year, the first Africans were brought to Jamestown. Originally working as indentured servants, by the 1640s most Africans were bought and sold as slaves.
Jamestown’s House of Burgesses, formed in 1619, was America’s first representative government.
The year 1622 was a tragic one for Jamestown. A second war with the Powhatan tribe, a slump in tobacco prices, fraudulent practices by local officials, and high death rates from disease, all conspired to transform the normal rigors of colonial life into extremely hard times. Under this strain, the joint-stock company collapsed and James I revoked its charter, making Virginia a royal colony in 1624.
Plymouth Plantation
In 1620, 102 settlers sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower, having procured a patent for settlement from the Virginia Company of London. These colonists agreed to send lumber, fish, and fur back to England for seven years before they could assume ownership of the land. Most of these settlers were Separatists from England, who wanted to separate from the Anglican Church (the Church of England). These Separatists had originally left England for the Netherlands to escape religious persecution. The voyage to the New World offered an even greater escape.
Separatists renounced the Church of England and established their own self-governing congregations. Among the Separatist groups are Pilgrims, Quakers, and Baptists. Separatists are distinct from Puritans, who originally wanted to “purify” the Anglican Church without separating from it.
In November of 1620, the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Bay, outside the bounds of the British possession of Virginia. Since they had no legal right to settle there, the leaders of the Pilgrims, as the Separatists who came to the New World were called, insisted that all males sign the Mayflower Compact, which established the colony of Plymouth Plantation as a “civil body politic” under the sovereignty of James I of England.
The Mayflower Compact is often described as America’s first example of true self-government.
The Pilgrims were unprepared for the harsh New England winter, and about half of the settlers died by March 1621. Those who survived owed their lives to the aid of some English-speaking Native Americans, who taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn. After that terrible first winter, Plymouth quickly grew and prospered. Within a few years, the colony expanded into Cape Cod and the southeastern part of modern Massachusetts.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony
During the first half of the seventeenth century, religious and political oppression in England grew worse. In 1628, the Puritans struck a deal with the English government, under which the Puritans would leave England and settle north of the Plymouth Plantation on the condition that they would have political control of their colony. The Puritans wanted their colony to be a theocracy, and emphasized religion over trade. In 1630, under the leadership of John Winthrop, who had been elected governor, about 900 Puritans traveled to Massachusetts. These Puritans eventually settled at the site of modern-day Boston. Winthrop’s colony was a community based on the Bible. He saw Massachusetts Bay as “a city upon a hill,” a beacon of religious righteousness that would shine throughout the world. As happened in most settlements, the colonists were unprepared for the first winter and almost one-third of the settlers died. But by mid-1631, the colonists had put the worst behind them and the Massachusetts Bay Colony began to thrive.
Government of Massachusetts Bay
The Massachusetts Bay colony was initially run by a General Court that allowed membership only to landholding Puritan men. After public outcry, all Puritan freemen, regardless of wealth or holdings, were allowed entrance. As the number of settlers increased and the General Court became too large, the settlers established a representative government, electing two representatives from each district to the General Court.
Religion and Massachusetts Bay
The Massachusetts Bay Colony operated according to a system called congregationalism, in which each independent church congregation served as the center of a community’s political and social life. Only those individuals with good standing in the church could participate in government.
Some inhabitants, however, broke with the Puritan leaders over the strong relationship between church and state. One such dissenter was Roger Williams. Unlike those in power, who believed that there must be legal separation but substantial cooperation between church and state, Williams argued that total separation was necessary. He feared that without separation the state would corrupt the church. In 1635, Williams was banished from Massachusetts. He eventually established the colony of Rhode Island in 1647, where the government renounced the Church of England and permitted religious freedom. Another dissenter was Anne Hutchinson, whose religious teachings were taken by some to be attacks on Puritan religious codes. Hutchinson found support in Henry Vane, who had become governor of the colony after Winthrop left office. But Winthrop staunchly opposed Hutchinson and succeeded in ousting Vane from office. In 1637, Hutchinson and her followers were banished; most of them settled in Rhode Island.
The Colonial Economy: Mercantilism
Beginning around 1650, the British government pursued a policy of mercantilism in international trade. Mercantilism stipulates that in order to build economic strength, a nation must export more than it imports. To achieve this favorable balance of trade, the English passed regulatory laws exclusively benefiting the British economy. These laws created a trade system whereby Americans provided raw goods to Britain, and Britain used the raw goods to produce manufactured goods that were sold in European markets and back to the colonies. As suppliers of raw goods only, the colonies could not compete with Britain in manufacturing. English ships and merchants were always favored, excluding other countries from sharing in the British Empire’s wealth.
Between 1651 and 1673, the English Parliament passed four Navigation Acts meant to ensure the proper mercantilist trade balance. The acts declared the following:
• Only English or English colonial ships could carry cargo between imperial ports.
• Certain goods, including tobacco, rice, and furs, could not be shipped to foreign nations except through England or Scotland.
• The English Parliament would pay “bounties” to Americans who produced certain raw goods, while raising protectionist tariffs on the same goods produced in other nations.
• Americans could not compete with English manufacturers in large-scale manufacturing.
The Navigation Acts severely restricted colonial trade, to the benefit of England.
The colonists initially complained about these strictures on trade. In New England in particular, many colonists evaded the restrictions of the Navigation Acts by smuggling. But although relations between England and the colonies were often full of friction (as in 1684, when Charles II revoked the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter as punishement for smuggling), the two sides never came to any real conflict. Instead, England developed a policy of salutary neglect toward the colonies, which meant that the trade laws that most hurt the colonial economy were not enforced. Threatened by the presence of the French in North America, British officials knew that at some point they would have to clash with the French over the domination of the continent, and they needed the colonists to support them when that time came. The British did not want to alienate their much-needed allies through aggressive trade restrictions.
With the prospect of war against the French looming, the British employed salutary neglect to maintain the colonists’ loyalty.
The Triangular Trade
British mercantilism manifested itself in the form of the triangular trade. Trade routes linked the American Colonies, West Indies, Africa, and England. Each port provided shippers with a payoff and a new cargo. New England rum was shipped to Africa and traded for slaves, which were brought to the West Indies and traded for sugar and molasses, which went back to New England. Other raw goods were shipped from the colonies to England, where they were swapped for a cargo of manufactured goods.
Mercantilism and the triangular trade proved quite profitable for New England tradesmen and ship builders. But in the Southern Colonies, where the Navigation Acts vastly lowered tobacco prices, economies suffered. The triangular trade also spurred a rise in the slave population and increased the merchant population, forming a class of wealthy elites that dominated trade and politics throughout the colonies.
Life in Colonial America
By 1700, more than 250,000 people of European origin or descent lived within what is now the United States. These settlers covered much of the eastern seaboard. Each region of colonization was economically and socially distinct, as each area developed differently based on geography, immigration trends, and other factors.
The New England Colonies
The New England colonies spanned modern-day Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. New England’s economy centered on small farming, fishing, and home manufactures, as well as sea trade and shipbuilding. The region quickly expanded as immigrants streamed in and families grew.
New England economy was based on small-scale agriculture, fishing, home manufactures, shipbuilding, and trading.
Life was fairly stable for New Englanders. They often lived 15–25 years longer than their British counterparts or colonists in other regions, due in part to a better diet. Puritan communities were close-knit, and because all followers of God were expected to read the Bible, they placed great emphasis on education. New England was likely the most literate community in the world.
Religion dominated all aspects of life in New England. In order to vote or hold office, a person had to be a member in good standing of the church. Religious dissenters were subjected to public spectacle or banishment. Fervent religious superstition also fueled New England’s most notorious scandal: the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693.
Beginning with the Mayflower compact, and continuing with the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter, the New England Colonies quickly established a tradition of self-government. By 1641, 55 percent of males in Massachusetts could vote—a much higher percentage than in England. Connecticut developed a similar government with even more voting rights: all male landowners were granted suffrage under the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which in 1639 became the first written constitution in the New World.
The increase in self-government in New England went hand in hand with increased resistance against British authority. In an effort to create a united defense against Dutch encroachment and aggressive Native American tribes, colonists organized the New England Confederation in 1643. England viewed this attempt to unite the colonies as potentially dangerous, but the confederation persisted and even helped to crush a Native American uprising during King Phillip’s War (1675–1676). In the end, infighting among the colonies doomed the confederation.
Then in 1655, four royal commissioners inspecting Massachusetts were treated rudely and urged King Charles II to revoke the colony’s charter. Charles did not comply, but the incident solidified a tradition of antagonism between New England and the mother country. After years of increasing acrimony, Charles’ successor, James II, revoked the Massachusetts Bay charter in 1685 and established the Dominion of New England, which unified all of New England under one royal governor. However, when the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England replaced James II with the Protestants William and Mary, angry colonists forced the royal governor to return to England. By 1691, the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter was reinstated.
The Middle Colonies
The Middle Colonies included New York and New Jersey, and later Pennsylvania. England took control of New York and New Jersey (then called New Amsterdam and New Sweden, respectively) from the Dutch in 1664. New York was made a royal province in 1685, and New Jersey in 1702. Both colonies were governed by a royal governor and a general assembly. Economically, the colonies relied on grain production, shipping, and fur trading with the local Native Americans.
In 1681, Charles II granted the last unclaimed tract of American land to William Penn. Penn, a Quaker, launched a “holy experiment” by founding a colony based on religious tolerance. The Quakers had long been discriminated against in the Americas and England for their religious beliefs and their refusal to bear arms. Seeking religious freedom, Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Moravians, Baptists, and others flocked to the new colony. Pennsylvania soon became economically prosperous, in part because of the industrious Quaker work ethic. By the 1750s, Pennsylvania’s capital, Philadelphia, had become the largest city of the colonies with a population of 20,000.
The Southern Colonies
Virginia, centered in Jamestown, dominated the Southern colonies, which included the Chesapeake colonies, Maryland, and the Carolinas. The region was more religiously and ethnically diverse than the Middle or New England colonies, harboring immigrants from all over Europe, many Roman Catholics (especially in Maryland), and a large number of African slaves. In the South, families were smaller than in other regions because adult men far outnumbered women. Men, after all, were needed to work on the region’s massive plantations.
Plantations, which produced tobacco, rice, and indigo, influenced all aspects of life in the South. The size of plantations limited the development of cities and a merchant class, which had brought such wealth to New England. Plantations drew many immigrants to the Chesapeake region during the seventeenth century through the institution of indentured servitude. Indentured servants were adult men, mostly white, who bound themselves to labor on plantations for a fixed number of years until they earned their freedom and, with it, a small plot of land. However, once free, indentured servants still had to struggle to survive, and conflict arose between the freed servants and the increasingly powerful plantation owners. These tensions flared in Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Nathaniel Bacon, an impoverished nobleman, accused the royal governor of Virginia of failing to protect the less wealthy farmers from Native American raids. Bacon led a group of about 300 farmers and indiscriminately attacked the Native Americans. The royal governor branded him a rebel, and Bacon led his men to Jamestown, where he occupied, looted, and burned the city while demanding political reforms. Bacon died suddenly the same year, abruptly terminating the rebellion, but tensions between rich and poor remained.
As tobacco plantations grew in size and demand for workers increased, slavery became the preferred source of labor: it proved economically profitable and eased the class struggles. Slavery was officially sanctioned by law in 1660. At this time, fewer than 1,000 slaves lived in Maryland and Virginia. Over the next forty years, that number grew to nearly 20,000. Slavery later spread to the Carolinas, and by the early eighteenth century it was so entrenched in these areas that slaves outnumbered free whites.
Black slaves were increasingly brought to the Southern colonies during the late 1600s to support an economy based on massive cash crops like tobacco, rice, and eventually cotton. By 1660, slavery was officially recognized by law.
Colonial Culture
In eighteenth-century Europe, the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment championed the principles of rationalism and logic, while the Scientific Revolution worked to demystify the natural world. Upper-class Americans, including many of the colonists who would eventually lead the American Revolution, were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideas and embraced reason and science, viewing with skepticism any beliefs that could not be proven by clear logic or experiment. Religion was a prime target for Enlightenment thinkers. The American most representative of Enlightenment ideals was Benjamin Franklin, who devoted his life to intellectual pursuits. Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanac, a collection of proverbs, in 1732. He created the American Philosophical Society in 1743.
The First Great Awakening
Perhaps in response to the religious skepticism espoused by the Enlightenment, the 1730s and 1740s saw a broad movement of religious fervor called the First Great Awakening. During this time, revival ministers stressed the emptiness of material comfort, the corruption of human nature, and the need for immediate repentance lest individuals incur divine fury. These revivalists, such as Jonathan Edwards and the Englishman George Whitefield, stressed that believers must rely on their own conscience to achieve an inner emotional understanding of religious truth. Jonathan Edwards gave an impassioned sermon called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which he proclaimed that man must save himself by immediately repenting his sins.
The Great Awakening was a revival movement meant to purify religion from material distractions and renew one’s personal faith in God. The movement was a reaction against the waning of religion and the spread of skepticism during the Enlightenment of the 1700s.
The Great Awakening is often credited with democratizing religion, since revivalist ministers stressed that anyone who repents can be saved by God, not just those who are prominent members of established churches. For this reason, the movement appealed to all classes and groups. Revival ministers reached out to the poor, to slaves, and to Native Americans. The Great Awakening divided American Protestants, pitting the revivalists, or “New Lights,” against the “Old Lights”—established ministers happy with the status quo. This division resulted in the formation of many new religious congregations and sects, and the founding of universities such as Princeton, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth to accomodate revivalist teachings.