American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

The ecclesiastical structure of bishops and archbishops remained Catholic except for the substitution at the top of the king for the pope. In seeking reform, Puritans divided over the details. Most remained within the Anglican Church, seeking to capture and reform it, preserving the link between church and state. The more radical Puritans, however, became “Separatists,” determined immediately to withdraw into their own independent congregations.

Offering a strict code of personal discipline and morality, Puritanism helped thousands of ordinary people cope with the economic and social turmoil that afflicted England during the early seventeenth century. Puritanism liberated people from a sense of helplessness by encouraging effort, persistence, study, and purpose.

Beneficiaries of a devastating epidemic that had recently decimated the coastal Indians, the Plymouth colonists occupied an abandoned village with conveniently cleared fields.

In 1630 a much larger Puritan emigration, subsequently called the “Great Migration,” began under the leadership of John Winthrop.

Unlike those of its unfortunate predecessor, the Virginia Company, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company quickly relocated themselves, with their capital, charter, and records, to New England. In effect, they converted their commercial charter into a self-governing colony three thousand miles away from bishops and king.

the company leaders established the most radical government in the European world: a republic, where the Puritan men elected their governor, deputy governor, and legislature (known as the General Court).

In New England, the starving time of adjustment proved far shorter and less deadly than in the Chesapeake.

In 1652, Maine’s poor and vulnerable settlements accepted rule and protection by Massachusetts. In 1665, Connecticut absorbed the New Haven colony. In 1691, the crown issued a new charter for Massachusetts, extending its jurisdiction over Plymouth. That left four colonies in New England: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire.

Puritans suffered psychologically from a growing despair that England’s crown and bishops were retreating from the Protestant Reformation, moving the nation into an overt hostility toward God that would inevitably reap divine punishment in mounting disasters.

Their God was remarkably merciful. During the 1630s, of 198 recorded voyages bearing passengers to New England, only one sank, and the mortality from disease was less than 5 percent, far lower than what indentured servants experienced on a voyage to the West Indies or the Chesapeake—to say nothing of the African slaves bound to the New World.

By the end of the century, servants amounted to less than 5 percent of the New English population.

Nor could the New Englanders afford to buy Africans. In 1700 less than 2 percent of New England’s inhabitants were slaves, compared with 13 percent for Virginia and 78 percent for the English West Indies.

New England possessed an unusually homogeneous colonial population and culture: free, white...

the New England environment demanded more labor and provided smaller rewards, but it also permitte...

New England was a northern and hilly land with a short growing season and faster-flowing rivers and streams, which discouraged the malaria and dysentery that afflicted southern planters.

people who survived childhood could expect to live to about seventy; in the Chesapeake, only a minority survived beyond forty-five.

This healthier, longer-lived, and more sex-balanced population sustained a rapid growth through natural increase, whereas in the Chesapeake and West Indies, only continued human imports sustained growth.

Although not the wealthiest English colonial region, New England was the healthiest, the most populous, and the most egalitarian in the distribution of property.

Although about half the size of most Chesapeake plantations, the average New England farm was significantly larger than most landholdings in England, where few farmers owned so many as fifty acres and where over half the men possessed no land.

New England’s diversified farms were less prone to disruption by the boom-and-bust price cycle than were the southern plantations specializing in a staple crop for an external market.

Compared with those in the Chesapeake or West Indies, social gradations were subtle among the New English, who overwhelmingly belonged to the middling sort. Their modest and diversified farms produced less wealth than did the staple plantations of the Chesapeake and the West Indies, but the New England economy distributed its rewards more equitably among many farmers and tradesmen.

By developing the fishing trade, the Puritans rescued the region’s economy, but at the cost of accepting the presence, albeit limited, of the sort of rowdy and defiant folk whom they had hoped to leave behind in England.

Although important to the New England economy, the codfish never dominated the region in quite the way that tobacco determined prosperity or ruin in the Chesapeake.

Paradoxically, because New Englanders generated many small surplus crops, each of modest value, rather than a single especially valuable staple, the region became the most pervasively commercialized within the empire.

The New English exported more to the West Indies than to the mother country, which did not need what New England could produce (but did demand the West Indian produce that the New English could convey to England in their own ships).

Although few New Englanders owned slaves, their region’s prosperity depended upon a trading system that serviced the wealthier slave-based economy of the West Indies.

In effect, seventeenth-century New England and the English West Indies developed in tandem as mutually sustaining parts of a common economic system. Each was incomplete without the other. New English freedom depended on West Indian slavery.

By 1700, Boston alone had fifteen shipyards, which produced more ships than the rest of the English colonies combined. Indeed, Boston ranked second only to London as a shipbuilding center in the empire.

To construct a 150-ton merchant ship required up to two hundred workers, most of them skilled artisans. Shipyards also stimulated an array of associated enterprises: sawmills, sail lofts, smithies, iron foundries, ropewalks, barrel shops, and taverns. In addition, New England farmers benefited from feeding the artisans, victualing the ships, and providing the timber to build them.

By 1700, Boston was the third city in the empire in shipping, lagging behind only London and Bristol. Economic historians estimate that the carrying trade was worth more to colonial New England than all of its own exported produce.

The average New English churchgoer heard about seven thousand sermons in the course of his or her lifetime. To train an orthodox Puritan ministry for so many churches, Massachusetts founded Harvard College in 1636—the first such institution in English America (the Spanish had already established several universities in their colonies).

The most sensational cases involved male sex with animals. In 1642 the New Haven authorities suspected George Spencer of bestiality when a sow bore a piglet that carried his resemblance. He confessed and they hanged both Spencer and the unfortunate sow. New Haven also tried, convicted, and executed the unfortunately named Thomas Hogg for the same crime.

The Puritans emigrated to New England to realize their own ideal of a uniform society—and certainly not to champion religious toleration and pluralism.

Although the orthodox leaders of Massachusetts and Connecticut despised Rhode Island, they benefited from it as a safety valve for discontents who would otherwise fester in their midst.

An Indian field consisted of many small hillocks with maize in the center and squashes, pumpkins, and beans tumbling down the sides. The mix of plants did not seem like proper agriculture to the English, who segregated their various crops in distinct fields. In fact, Indian cultivation was more efficient, producing substantial yields from relatively small amounts of land and labor.

Because the sight of women laboring in the fields struck the colonists as strange, they depicted native women as drudges. Because colonists ordinarily saw Indian men at their leisure in their villages in the warm months, the colonists dismissed them as lazy exploiters of their hardworking women. In fact, the labor of Indian women, although certainly considerable, was less time-consuming and exhausting than the chores of colonial women, who tended larger and more complex houses.

Consequently, the Indians were surprised and offended when colonists abused or arrested natives as trespassers. When the Indians lashed out against this treatment, the colonists saw themselves as unoffending victims obliged to protect themselves against dangerous brutes who could not keep their bargains.

Although wampum had little or no value in England, it was coveted by the Abenaki Indians of Maine, who lived beyond ready access to the cherished seashells of Long Island Sound that could be made into wampum. In return, the Abenaki offered beaver pelts, which were more abundant in northern than in southern New England. The colonists extorted wampum from the southern New England Indians and then shipped it to Maine to procure furs for shipment to England. In great and growing English demand, the furs helped finance the New English debts.

In 1670 the 52,000 New England colonists outnumbered the Indians of southern New England by nearly three to one.

The missionaries sincerely wished to rescue Indians’ lives from the colonists as well as to save their souls from hell, but the missionary effort demanded that Indians surrender their own culture as the price of physical survival.

During the spring and summer of 1676, the Indian allies helped turn the tide of war in favor of the colonists. The allies taught the colonists how to avoid ambushes and how to track down and destroy the rebels in their refuges.

In the late seventeenth century, tourists did not visit Plymouth to see the now celebrated rock (which was then unidentified). Instead, they gaped at Metacom’s skull.

Living on the social margins of New England towns, Indians became largely invisible to nineteenth-century New Englanders, who prematurely declared the natives extinct. Only in the twentieth century did New England Indians gain a measure of recognition that they had persisted through a long ordeal.

In 1686, London imported West Indian produce worth £674,518, compared with £207,131 obtained from all the North American mainland colonies.

Tobacco was valuable to the empire—indeed, more precious than all other mainland produce combined—but sugar was king. Sugar could bear the costs of long-distance transportation (and the purchase of slaves by the thousand) because it was in great and growing European demand to sweeten food and drink.

And the voracious West Indian demand for labor stimulated an explosive expansion in the English slave trade across the Atlantic.

During the seventeenth century, the French and the Dutch lagged behind the English in West Indian colonization. The Dutch focused on their profitable carrying trade and their expensive, and ultimately futile, bid to take Brazil from the Portuguese.

During the mid-seventeenth century, the West Indies became the great magnet for English transatlantic migration. Despite their small size, the West Indies received over two-thirds of the English emigrants to the Americas between 1640 and 1660. In 1650 more white colonists lived in the West Indies (44,000) than in the Chesapeake (12,000) and New England colonies (23,000) combined.

As positive incentives decayed after 1635, masters resorted more frequently and more brutally to punishment. They contemptuously referred to their servants as “white slaves” and applied the whip to drive and punish them—language and measures unthinkable in England. Detecting a plot by their servants to rebel in 1647, the Barbadian planters whipped dozens and executed eighteen.

Inexpensive to make, rum became the principal alcohol sold and consumed in the English empire.