VirginiaTime Pages Virginia
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: The colonial periodThe purposes of the representatives of the Virginia Company of London, who landed at present-day Jamestown in May 1607, were not only to colonize but also to Christianize, to open new areas for trade, and to guard against further inroads by the Spanish, who already had colonized what is now Florida. Hunger, poor shelter, hostility from the indigenous peoples, and rampant disease plagued the company’s early years, but, while the settlement tottered constantly on the brink of dissolution, a tobacco industry was established by John Rolfe and a representative assembly was convened. Rolfe’s marriage in 1614 to Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, brought temporary peace between the indigenous populations and the English; however, after the death of Pocahontas and her father, a war broke out between the two groups. In 1624 the company’s charter was revoked, and Virginia was established as England’s first royal colony. In the following years new settlements were made, and local administrative systems were developed. The governorship of Sir William Berkeley—begun in 1642, interrupted from 1652 to 1660 by Puritan rule in England, and ended in 1677—marked the solidification of the colony. The many anti-Puritan supporters of Charles I who fled to Virginia after the king’s death in 1649 added an important element to the population, much of which consisted of indentured servants of European or African descent. The first Africans had been taken to Virginia in 1619, but race-based slavery began to grow rapidly only after the 1660s. Soon the institution was protected by Virginia law, and the number of slaves in the colony rose steadily until the American Revolution (1775–83). (For a more detailed account of the nature of slavery in the colonies, see race: The history of the idea of race.) In 1676 a rebellion of colonists led by Nathaniel Bacon, though short-lived, led to Berkeley’s recall and signaled a growing desire for more self-government among the colonists. This sentiment intensified during the century that followed, when England attempted to govern fairly but did not allow the inhabitants of its American colonies the full rights of the English at home. In 1699 the colony’s capital was moved from Jamestown to Williamsburg. The next several decades were a period of expansion as well as of internal strengthening. Virginia had the largest population of any American colony, and, as tobacco crops wore out the soil, Virginians began to move steadily westward in search of new land. Settlers from the Tidewater region spilled over into the Piedmont, across the Blue Ridge, and, by the 1740s, into the Ohio country beyond, there running afoul of French ambitions for that region. For decades the popularly elected assembly of colonial Virginia, the House of Burgesses, led the way in opposing royal prerogatives in the colony, and, following England’s prohibition of westward expansion in 1763, a concerted drive to rationalize rebellion began. On the eve of the American Revolution, Virginia had more than 120,000 residents, many of them persons of considerable sophistication and learning, and a stable—if narrowly based—economy. MassachusettsTime pages Massachusetts
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: Prior to 1685 there were two separate colonies within the boundaries of present-day Massachusetts. The area around Plymouth and Cape Cod, settled by the Pilgrims, was known as Plymouth colony, or the Old Colony. By the mid-1640s its population numbered about 3,000 people. The colonists who traveled to the New World on the Mayflower were a small group of Separatists who had fled to Holland from England to practice their religion without official interference. Economic hardship and a desire to establish an identity free of Dutch influence prompted them to seek out America. The Pilgrims were never granted a royal charter; their government was based on the Mayflower Compact, a document signed by 41 male passengers on the Mayflower five weeks before their arrival in the New World. The compact was hardly democratic, since it called for rule by the elite, but it established an elective system and a basis for limited consent of the governed as the source of authority. The Old Colony was rapidly overshadowed by its Puritan neighbour to the north, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Puritanism was persecuted in England because it sought ecclesiastical reform within the Church of England structure (rather than the Separatists’ dissociation from it). They were not advocates of religious tolerance, as other Protestant groups and radical thinkers discovered. Many with differing religious views—including Roger Williams of Salem and Anne Hutchinson of Boston, as well as unrepentant Quakers and Anabaptists—were banished, and a few were executed. The Massachusetts Bay Colony expanded rapidly. By the mid-1640s it numbered more than 20,000 people, and it began absorbing settlements in Maine and New Hampshire. The government of the colony was based on a providential interpretation of the royal charter granted by King Charles I, which was transferred to the new settlement by its governor, John Winthrop. The exhortation by Winthrop, “For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty uppon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us,” underlines the strength of conviction of the Puritan mission. The Puritans essentially established a theocracy, with close ties between the government and the clergy. The leaders felt comfortable not only in establishing patterns of government by interpreting the colony charter but also in interpreting the will of God for the people. However, the arrangement fell short of its purpose. When in 1634 Winthrop refused to call a meeting of the General Court, the freemen demanded to see the charter. He acceded, divulging his infringement on the rights of the legislature, and a bill was quickly passed that vested governmental power in the freemen. The Puritan government often operated as an independent state, to the point of minting its own money and even conducting its own foreign affairs. Great Britain, after neglecting the colony for many years, revoked the company charter and in 1691 set up a royal colony that united Massachusetts with the former colonies of Plymouth and Maine and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. In this new Massachusetts, the franchise was given only to those who owned property or paid taxes. Continued lack of interference from Great Britain allowed the colonists to gain a tradition of self-reliance and self-government. Maine remained a part of Massachusetts until 1820, when it was established as a separate state. New HampshireTime Pages New Hampshire
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: The English colonyThe New Hampshire region was included in a series of grants made by the English crown to Capt. John Mason and others during the 1620s. A fishing and trading settlement was established in 1623, and in 1629 the name New Hampshire, after the English county of Hampshire, was applied to a grant for a region between the Merrimack and Piscataqua rivers. The towns of Dover, Portsmouth, Exeter, and Hampton were the main settlements. From 1641 to 1679 the region was administered by the colonial government of Massachusetts. Following territorial and religious disputes between Massachusetts and Mason’s heirs, New Hampshire became a separate royal province in 1679. Bitter boundary feuds with Massachusetts and New York over the part of the New Hampshire grant that became Vermont continued almost until the American Revolution.Benning Wentworth held the post of colonial governor from 1741 to 1767, the longest tenure of any royal governor in any of the colonies. In 1767 the colony took its first census and reported about 52,700 people. By 1772 the state was divided into five counties, to which five others have been added since 1800. New Hampshire soldiers played an active part in the colonial wars between Great Britain and France from 1689 to 1763. By the end of the colonial period the seat of government was at Portsmouth, and there were 147 chartered towns in the province. MarylandTime Pages Maryland
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: In 1608 the English explorer Capt. John Smith sailed into Chesapeake Bay and stayed for several weeks to map the shoreline. With reference to the countryside around the bay, Smith exclaimed, “Heaven and earth seemed never to have agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation.” In 1632 Cecilius Calvert was granted a charter for the land as a haven in which his fellow Roman Catholics might escape the restrictions placed on them in England. The first governor of the proprietary colony, Leonard Calvert, the younger brother of Cecilius, landed the founding expedition on St. Clements Island in the lower Potomac in March 1634. The first settlement and capital was St. Marys City. Aware of the mistakes made by Virginia’s first colonists, Maryland’s settlers, rather than hunt for gold, made peace with the local Native Americans and established farms and trading posts, at first on the shores and islands of the lower Chesapeake. The field hands included indentured labourers working off the terms of their passage and, after about 1639, African slaves. The most important crop was tobacco. Roads and towns were few, and contact with the English-model manor houses was largely by water. The Calvert family provided for religious freedom in the colony, and this was formalized by the General Assembly in 1649 in an Act Concerning Religion, later famous as the Act of Religious Toleration. It granted freedom of worship, though only within the bounds of Trinitarian Christianity. One of the earliest laws of religious liberty, it was limited to Christians and repealed in 1692. Commercial disputes with Anglican Virginia and boundary quarrels with Quaker Pennsylvania and Delaware did not affect this tolerance. Puritan ascendancy in England (1648–60) caused only brief turmoil. A 1689 rebellion by Protestants overthrew the proprietary officers, leading to an interval of crown rule in the royal colony of Maryland (1692–1715). During that period the Church of England was formally established. In 1715 Maryland once again became a proprietary colony of the Calverts, who had converted to Protestantism. Maryland nonetheless remained a haven for dissidents from sectarian rigidity in other colonies. By the 1660s the Protestant majority in Maryland came to resent the colony’s Roman Catholic leadership in St. Marys City. As the population centre shifted to the north and west, the capital was moved to Protestant-dominated Anne Arundel Town (now Annapolis) in 1694. In 1729 Baltimore was founded. Maryland’s dominant “country party” early resisted British efforts to make the colonies bear more of the costs of government. Frederick county repudiated the Stamp Act in 1765, and in 1774, the year after theBoston Tea Party, a ship loaded with tea was burned at an Annapolis dock. The long-standing dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania over their common border was settled in 1767 when Great Britain recognized latitude 39°43′ N as the legal boundary. The boundary was named the Mason and Dixon Line for its surveyors. Thereafter, this line came to be regarded as the traditional division between the North and the South. ConnecticutTime Pages Connecticut
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: In contrast to many of the other New England areas, relations between Native Americans and the early settlers in Connecticut were good. Trading posts were established along the Connecticut River by the Dutch from New Amsterdam and by the English from the Plymouth colony, but the first permanent European settlers in the state came from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the middle Connecticut River valley during 1633–35 (Hartford, founded by Thomas Hooker) and to the Saybrook–New Haven coastal strip during 1635–38. In 1665 the Connecticut River settlements and the New Haven colony were united, and the general outline of the state emerged, although its borders were not finally demarcated until 1881, more than 200 years later. The New Haven colony was unsuccessful in an attempt to settleDelaware Bay, and the united Connecticut colony, despite its charter provisions, lost its claim to a strip of land extending westward to the Pacific Ocean. Rhode IslandTime Pages Rhode Island
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: The Narragansett welcomed Roger Williams, a refugee from Massachusetts Bay Colony, and sold him the land to found Providence in 1636. Williams, a pioneer of religious liberty, believed in the separation of church and state and had been banished from Massachusetts for his beliefs. His settlement was the first place in America where government ruled “only in civil things,” and it attracted other dissenters. Williams helped Anne Hutchinson and her followers, likewise exiled from Massachusetts, to purchase Aquidneck (later Rhode) Island, where they founded Pocasset (Portsmouth) in 1638. These early settlements were unstable and full of intensely religious individualists. In 1639 William Coddington and eight other prominent families left Portsmouth to found Newport on the southern end of Aquidneck Island. Providence experienced two secessions within its first five years, including one which led to the establishment of Shawomet (Warwick) in 1643 by Samuel Gorton. These internal struggles were made worse by a century-long effort by the neighbouring colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut to dismember and extend their authority over Rhode Island. These surrounding colonies denounced Rhode Island as “Rogues’ Island” and tried to extinguish it by purchase, invasion, royal commission, fiat, fraud, and intimidation. At different times Plymouth claimed Aquidneck Island; Connecticut claimed most of Rhode Island south of present-day Warwick; Massachusetts claimed the Cranston-Warwick area; and various fraudulent land syndicates, supported by Massachusetts and Connecticut, claimed all the land once owned by the Narragansett. In 1643 the neighbouring colonies formed a military alliance called the United Colonies of New England (or the New England Confederation), pointedly excluding Rhode Island’s towns and denying the validity of the purchases that Williams had made from Native Americans. As a result, Williams rushed toEngland and in 1644 secured a parliamentary charter for his colony that sought to join the communities of Providence, Newport, Warwick, and Portsmouth under one patent to become one colony, called Providence Plantations. However, Coddington blocked the merger until 1647, when a loose confederacy was established; he refused to accept even this form of government and secured a patent in 1651 that made him governor for life over the islands of Conanicut and Aquidneck, which included the settlements of Portsmouth and Newport. Williams and John Clarke (the latter representing island opponents to Coddington) traveled to England and had Coddington’s commission rescinded. Williams returned to the colony, and Clarke remained in England as its agent. After the restoration of the monarchy (1660) in Britain following the Commonwealth period, the charter for Rhode Island was considered invalid, and Clarke obtained a second charter in 1663, which guaranteed the “lively experiment” of Rhode Island. The charter was retained until 1842, when it was replaced by a state constitution. |
North CarolinaTime Pages North Carolina
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: Several European explorers made their way to present-day North Carolina. In 1524 the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzanoarrived at the mouth of Cape Fear River. Hernando de Sototraveled through the western mountains in 1540. In 1584 the Englishman Sir Walter Raleigh received a grant from QueenElizabeth I to claim land in North America, and he sent out an exploratory expedition that returned with a report optimistic for potential settlement. In 1585 Raleigh sent a group of settlers to the area, and they established a colony on Roanoke Island; Raleigh named the colony Virginia. Difficulties in obtaining food led many settlers to abandon the island and return to England. A second group of colonists arrived in 1587, but the problem of sustaining themselves forced the group’s leader, John White, to return to England for supplies. Caught in the outbreak of war between England and Spain, White did not make it back to Roanoke until 1590. No colonists were there when he arrived, and the only clues as to their whereabouts were two trees, one of which bore the carved letters CRO and the other the word CROATOAN, which referred to a neighbouring island. White went to this island but found no colonists there. What happened to the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke remains one of the great mysteries in American history. Following the attempts by Raleigh and others to colonize the coastal regions in the 1580s, the territory remained the domain of native peoples for decades. A grant by King Charles I in 1629 for the lands south of Virginia brought the term Carolina into being, but no permanent settlement was made until farmers and traders from Virginia moved into the Albemarle Sound area in the 1650s. This resulted in a grant from Charles II in 1663 that created Carolina, but for years the settlers resisted the ineffective government imposed by the proprietors in England. Between 1712 and 1729 the separate province of North Carolina was ruled by a deputy dispatched from Charleston, which had become the centre of proprietary government. Boundaries between North and South Carolina were agreed upon in 1735 but not completely surveyed until 1821. North Carolina’s growth was hampered by restrictions on shipping tobacco imposed by Virginia, by economic and religious quarrels with absentee proprietors that led to several uprisings, by war with theTuscarora people (1711–13), and by coastal piracy involving Blackbeard (Edward Teach) and others. Unlike other colonies, which had grown up around coastal towns that represented the first settlements, North Carolina had no town until Bath was incorporated in 1705. By 1729, when the colony came under royal rule, several other towns also had been chartered. A turnabout in the colony’s fortunes occurred during the decades of royal rule. The population rose rapidly, settlement spread across the Piedmont, and the wealth and quality of life expanded. A large slave population maintained an agricultural economy based on tobacco and rice and on naval storesfrom the region’s extensive pine forests. Prior to the American Revolution, the beginnings of an intense east-west hostility had grown into several insurrections. In 1768 western North Carolinans organized themselves into the Regulators to defy government policies, and, after being suppressed by the governor’s militia, many moved away from the colony. Hostility to British rule united North Carolinians and forced the flight of the royal governor in 1775. North Carolina quickly joined the efforts to form a new country, three of its citizens signing the Declaration of Independence. During the American Revolution, North Carolinians fought both the Cherokee (who sided with the British) and the British army. Their most noteworthy battles ended in victory at Kings Mountain in 1780, just across the state border in South Carolina, and in defeat at Guilford Courthouse in 1781. South CarolinaTime Pages South Carolina
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: The first Europeans to visit South Carolina, in 1521, were Spanishexplorers from Santo Domingo (Hispaniola). In 1526 Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón founded what is believed to have been the first white European settlement in South Carolina, but this Spanish colony failed within a few months. French Protestants under Jean Ribaut made an unsuccessful attempt to occupy the area of Port Royal (one of the Sea Islands) in 1562. A few years later, in 1566, the Spanish returned and established Santa Elena on nearby Parris Island. It was an important Spanish base until 1587. In 1665 Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, and seven other members of the British nobility received a charter from King Charles II to establish the colony of Carolina (named for the king) in a vast territory between latitudes 29° and 36°30′ N and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. These eight grantees were known as the lords proprietor of Carolina, and they were free to dispose of the land as they pleased. Following the initiative of the lords proprietor (or their deputies), the English made the first permanent settlement in the region, on the west bank of the Ashley River at Albemarle Point, in 1670. A decade later, the government and most inhabitants moved to a more favourable location on the nearby peninsula formed by the Ashley and Cooper rivers, the site of Charleston today. The colony grew slowly and by 1720 had a population of about 19,000, settled almost exclusively along the coast. Trade with the native peoples and the export of deerskins constituted the major sources of income, complemented bynaval stores (turpentine, tar, and other pine products) after 1710. Conflicts with the lords proprietor over economic support, trade with local peoples, and the authority of the Commons House (the colony’s representative assembly) resulted in the overthrow of proprietary rule and the conversion of Carolina to a royal colony in 1719. In 1729 the colony was divided into two provinces, North and South; Georgia was carved out of the southern part of the original grant in 1731. Under crown rule, South Carolina prospered, and exports ofrice and indigo contributed to its growing wealth. Based on this successful trade, Charleston entered a golden age; it soon was perceived locally as city of refinement and cultural attainment. A flood of Scotch-Irish settlers overland from Pennsylvania caused a population explosion in the inland areas after 1760, and subsequent demands for political representation resulted in a conflict between the plantation owners of the Low Country (coast) and the small farmers of the Up Country (interior) that continued into the 19th century. British troops occupied Charleston during the American Revolution, which, in South Carolina, was largely fought as a civil war between the patriots, who demanded freedom from Great Britain, and the loyalists, who supported the crown. Two major American victories were the battles at Kings Mountain (1780) and Cowpens (1781). New JerseyTime Pages New Jersey
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: Before the Europeans arrived, the Delaware (or Lenni Lenape) Indians had long occupied the region. In 1524 the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was the first European to reach New Jersey. Almost a century passed before colonization began with the arrival in 1609 of the English navigator Henry Hudson, who sent a party to explore Sandy Hook Bay. The first permanent European settlement was established by the Dutch at Bergen (now Jersey City) in 1660. The colony was brought under English rule in 1664, although for the next nine years the Dutch disputed that claim. In 1676 the province was divided into East and West Jersey, the former going to Sir George Carteret and the latter to a group ofFriends (Quakers). The division continued until 1702, when the entire province reverted to the crown. Unlike other colonists, who suffered from the harshness of English rule, the early Jerseyans were of such an independent nature that it was the royal governors who did much of the suffering. Until 1738 a single governor ruled New Jersey and New York. When Lewis Morris took office as the first governor of New Jersey after the separation, one member of the Assembly advised his colleagues on how governors should be treated: “Let us keep the doges poore [i.e., by paying governors a low salary] and wee’ll make them do as we please. New YorkTime Pages New York
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: New York was originally settled as a colony of the Netherlandsfollowing Henry Hudson’s exploration in 1609 of the river later named for him. In 1624 at what is today Albany, the Dutch established Fort Orange as the first permanent European settlement in New York. One year later New Amsterdam was established at the southern end of Manhattan Island. To legalize that settlement, Peter Minuit, the Dutch governor, paid the Indians merchandise worth about 60 Dutch guilders at the time—converted to the legendary $24. Although the Dutch established several settlements along the Hudson, their interest was more in trade than in permanent agricultural development. Thus, while its trading posts prospered and aided the general expansion of its empire, the Netherlands planted no deep roots of permanent colonization in New York. The most likely explanation for this lies in the economic prosperity and social stability of the homeland. The Dutch citizens had no strong economic motivations to move overseas, nor were there sufficient religious or political quarrels to promote any such movement. An English fleet sailed into New York harbour in 1664; Gov. Peter Stuyvesant was obliged to surrender, the citizens and the Dutch government having no will to fight. Although controversy ensued for several years, the colony was firmly in English hands by 1669. Under the English it was renamed New York, for James, duke of York (laterJames II). PennsylvaniaTime Pages Pennsylvania
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: In March 1681 Charles II of England signed a charter giving any unoccupied regions to William Penn in payment of a debt owed by the king to Penn’s father, Adm. Sir William Penn. The charter, which was officially proclaimed on April 2, 1681, named the territory for Admiral Penn and included also the termsylvania (“woodlands”), at the son’s request. William Penn intended that the colony provide a home for his fellow Quakers (members of the Society of Friends). While still in England, he drew up the first of his “frames of government” and sent his cousin, William Markham, to establish a claim to the land and also to establish the boundaries of what became the city of Philadelphia. Penn arrived in 1682 and called a General Assembly to discuss the first Frame of Government and to adopt the Great Law, which guaranteed freedom of conscience in the colony. Under Penn’s influence, fair treatment was accorded the Native Americans, who responded with friendship in return. When Penn returned to England in 1684, the new Quaker province had a firmly established government based on the people’s will and religious tolerance. GeorgiaTime Pages Georgia
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: A trust for establishing the colony of Georgia was granted a charter by George II (for whom the colony was named) in 1732, long after the large English migrations of the 17th century to North America. The prime mover in obtaining the charter was the English soldier and philanthropist James Edward Oglethorpe, who sought to found a colony where the poor of England could get a new start. He and other trustees encouraged the settlers to produce wines, silks, and spices, and thus relieve England of a dependency on foreign sources. The colony also would serve as a bulwark against the Spanish and French to the south and west. The first English settlement in Georgia was made at Savannah in 1733. Some colonists paid their way; the colony’s trustees paid the expenses of others. Oglethorpe directed the affairs of the colony, primarily its military operations. Essential to the trustees’ utopian plan was a tightly structured settlement system designed to create a population of yeoman farmers living in compact villages and towns and cultivating outlying garden and small farm tracts. Slavery was prohibited in order to avoid the growth of large plantations. Like most such schemes, the colony failed to live up to the trustees’ vision. Their most notable success was the planning and construction of Savannah. Faced with unrest and emigration, the trustees surrendered all power in the colony to the British government in 1752, a year before their charter was to expire. Plantation agriculture, based mainly on the production of sugar, rice, and indigo, took hold. It relied heavily on slavery and became the mainstay of the colony’s economy. DelawareTime Pages Delaware
From the encyclopedia Britanica web page: The Dutch founded the first European settlement in Delaware atLewes (then called Zwaanendael) in 1631. They quickly set up a trade in beaver furs with the Native Americans, who within a short time raided and destroyed the settlement after a disagreement between the two groups. A permanent settlement was not established until 1638—by Swedes at Fort Christina (now Wilmington) as part of their colony of New Sweden; they reputedly erected America’s first log cabins there. The Dutch from New Amsterdam (New York) defeated the Swedes in 1655, and the English seized the colony from the Dutch in 1664. Thereafter, except for a brief Dutch reconquest in 1673, Delaware was administered as part of New York until 1682, when the duke of York (the future James II) ceded it to William Penn, who wanted it so that his colony of Pennsylvania could have access to the ocean. Though Penn tried to unite the Delaware counties with Pennsylvania, both sides resented the union. In 1704 he allowed Delaware an assembly of its own. Pennsylvania and Delaware shared an appointed governor until the American Revolution. Only in 1776 did the name Delaware—deriving from Thomas West, 12th baron de la Warr, a governor of Virginia—become official, though it had been applied to the bay in 1610 and gradually thereafter to the adjoining land. During the Penn family’s proprietorship, members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) came to the northern part of Delaware because it was close to Philadelphia and offered good farmland. Quaker merchants established the town of Wilmington in 1739. Another group of newcomers were the Scotch-Irish, who brought with them their Presbyterian religion and an emphasis on education. In 1743 Francis Alison, a Presbyterian minister, established a school that became the foundation for the later University of Delaware. Southern Delaware was populated largely by English, many coming from nearby Maryland, and by Africans, who were introduced as slaves to clear the land and work the farms. Toward the end of the 18th century, itinerant Methodist preachers found many converts among both black and white inhabitants of southern Delaware. |