![]() (It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.) As a result, slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony. These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef and pork, and–starting in the 1690s–rice. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. The Southern Coloniesīy contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, most of these emigrants paid their own way to the colonies–they were not indentured servants–and had enough money to establish themselves when they arrived. ![]() Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Penn’s North American holdings became the colony of “Penn’s Woods,” or Pennsylvania. In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New World. Most of the Dutch people (as well as the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans) who were living there stayed put. The English soon absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed it New York. In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York. Meanwhile, Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was too restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Island, where everyone–including Jewish people–enjoyed complete “liberty in religious concernments.” To the north of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a handful of adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire. Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven (the two combined in 1665). With the help of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.Īs the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they formed new colonies in New England. Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 to found Plymouth Colony. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and (later) enslaved workers.īut unlike Virginia’s founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and he hoped that his colony would be a refuge for his persecuted coreligionists. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to Virginia in many ways. In 1632, the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in 1619. It was not until 1616, when Virginia’s settlers learned how to grow tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive. The Jamestown colonists had a rough time of it: They were so busy looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves. ![]() They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 and headed about 60 miles up the James River, where they built a settlement they called Jamestown. In 1606, just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant. Historians still do not know what became of its inhabitants. Mysteriously, by 1590 the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. The first English settlement in North America had actually been established some 20 years before, in 1587, when a group of colonists (91 men, 17 women and nine children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on the island of Roanoke. In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the London Company (later the Virginia Company) and the northern half to the Plymouth Company.
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