American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

white immigration to Jamaica slowed, while out-migration grew. About 10,000 in 1690, the white population declined to 7,000 by 1713. Meanwhile, slave imports surged, swelling the black population to 55,000, eight times larger than the white numbers, a ratio greater even than the three-to-one of Barbados.

by the end of the century it became the English colony most dominated by great planters and their slaves. By 1713, Jamaica was producing more sugar than Barbados and had become the wealthiest and most important colony in the English empire.

Between 1640 and 1700 the English West Indies imported about 260,000 slaves, but sustained only 100,000 alive in 1700.

Although an economic success, the West Indies was a demographic failure that manifested a society in consuming pursuit of profit and with a callous disregard for life. At the end of the seventeenth century, white emigrants from the West Indies, particularly Barbados, carried the seeds of that society to the southern mainland by founding the new colony of Carolina.

At least a third of the early Carolinians began as indentured servants, procured in either Barbados or England.

In 1691 the Lords Proprietor mollified the Albemarle Sound colonists by establishing “North Carolina” as a distinct government with its own assembly and deputy governor.

Drawn into the slave trade by degrees, the natives could not know, until too late, that it would virtually destroy them all.

“They say, the Europeans are always [w]rangling and uneasy and wonder why they do not go out of this World, since they are so uneasy and discontented in it.”

The Carolina gun and slave trade had triumphed over the Spanish mission as an instrument of colonial power.

The Carolina Indians dwindled from a catastrophic combination of disease epidemics, rum consumption, and slave raiding.

Many owners entrusted the roaming cattle to the care of black slaves, who had previous experience as herdsmen in Africa. In Carolina the black herdsmen became known as “cowboys”—apparently the origin of that famous term.

The English economist Arthur Young considered rice as second only to sugar in the calculus of empire: “The sugar colonies added above three millions [pounds sterling] a year to the wealth of Britain; the rice colonies near a million, and the tobacco ones almost as much.”

Enjoying a protected market within the empire for both rice and indigo, Carolina planters became the wealthiest colonial elite on the Atlantic seaboard—and second only to the West Indians within the empire.

Named Georgia, in honor of King George II,

the new colony appealed to a group of London philanthropists and social reformers, known as the Georgia Trustees.

They hoped to alleviate English urban poverty by shipping “miserable wretches” and “drones” to a new southern colony, where hard work on their own farms would cure indolence.

Their 1732 royal charter awarded the new colony to the trustees for a period of twenty-one years, after which Georgia would become a royal colony.

Until 1752, 90 percent of the colony’s funding came from Parliament, making Georgia the first colony financed by British taxpayers.

Moreover, black slavery made manual labor seem degrading to free men, which discouraged exertion by common whites, who aspired, instead, to acquire their own slaves to do the dirty work. Consequently, slavery threatened to corrode the labor discipline that the Georgia colonists needed to redeem their characters and please the trustees.

Georgia was the first and only British colony to reject the slave system so fundamental and profitable to the rest of the empire.

Such reasoning made sense in an eighteenth-century empire where liberty was a privileged status that almost always depended upon the power to subordinate someone else.

Rejecting the reformist vision of the trustees, Georgians soon made a plantation society that virtually replicated South Carolina.

While producing the appearance of white equality in a shared hegemony over black slaves, the plantation system increased the real inequalities of wealth and power between white men.

Compared with the Spanish, French, and Dutch rulers, the English monarch exercised little power over his colonists, primarily because of the persistent reliance on a proprietary system of colonization.

Throughout the empire, propertied Englishmen cherished legislative control over taxation as their most fundamental liberty.

The New England colonies were a special case. Leading Puritans formed the Massachusetts Bay Company to secure a colonial charter, which they carried across the Atlantic to establish a virtually independent colonial government. Without the benefit of any charter, Puritans or their dissidents founded the adjoining colonies of Plymouth, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. In 1663, Rhode Island and Connecticut belatedly obtained royal charters; Plymouth never so succeeded.

By virtue of their especially indulgent charters, the New England colonies were virtually independent of crown authority. Answering to no external proprietors, the New English developed republican regimes where the propertied men elected their governors and councils, as well as their assemblies, and where much decision-making was dispersed to the many small towns.

Imperial bureaucrats believed that the proprietary colonies should first be converted into royal colonies and then consolidated into an overarching government like the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain.

During the seventeenth century, crown officials gradually converted a few proprietary colonies into royal colonies. Such conversion primarily meant that the king, rather than a proprietor, appointed the governor and council,

A German visitor observed that the Dutch “love nothing so much as they do their freedom.”

The combination of republican government, religious toleration, naval power, colonial trade, and a manufacturing boom endowed the Dutch with the greatest national wealth and the highest standard of living in Europe.

Beginning with Henry Hudson in 1609, Dutch merchants annually sent ships across the Atlantic and up the Hudson River to trade for furs with the Indians.

Skilled at pioneer farming in heavily forested Sweden and Finland, the colonists adapted quickly to the New World and introduced many frontier techniques that eventually became classically “American,” including the construction of log cabins.

Thanks primarily to this religious tolerance, New Netherland became the most religiously and ethnically mixed colony in North America.

Blessed with a booming economy and a higher standard of living, the 1.5 million Dutch had less reason to leave home than did the 5 million English, who were suffering through a painful economic transition and bitter religious strife.

The Dutch lacked the masses of roaming poor who became indentured servants in the tobacco and sugar colonies established by the English in the Chesapeake and West Indies. And the tolerant Netherlands did not generate a disaffected religious minority such as the Puritans who founded New England.

The English succeeded as colonizers largely because their society was less successful at keep...

unlike France, England permitted its discontented freer access to its overseas colonies and greater incentives for settling there.

To maximize their own profits, the tobacco and sugar planters preferred Dutch shippers, who charged 33 percent less than their English competitors.

According to the mercantilist view, the government had every right, indeed the duty, to shape the economy to serve its needs for more revenue, ships, and men for use in war to drive other nations out of overseas markets. Assuming a chronic state of economic war, mercantilism considered all other nations as competing for the same limited quantity of trade.

The Dutch colony of New Netherland became the English colony of New York; New Amsterdam became New York City; and Beverwyck and Fort Orange became known as Albany.

In principle, King Charles II and the Duke of York wanted to strengthen crown control over all of the English colonies, the better to tax their growing commerce. In practice, however, the Stuart brothers compounded the political complexity of the empire by awarding new proprietary colonies in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas to reward English aristocrats and gentlemen, as payoffs for political favors and cash debts.

In 1664 the Duke of York granted the lands between the Hudson and the Delaware rivers as a distinct new colony called New Jersey. He awarded New Jersey to two English noblemen to further his political interests, but in 1673 and 1682 they sold out to two sets of investors, one Scottish and the other led by English Quakers.

English Quakers primarily colonized West Jersey, while East Jersey became especially multiethnic.

West Jersey’s Quaker proprietors included William Penn (1644–1718), who developed a grand ambition to procure his own, larger colony. To cancel a debt of £16,000 owed to Penn’s late father, Admiral William Penn, the king agreed in 1680 to grant the younger Penn 45,000 square miles west of the Delaware River as the colony of Pennsylvania (“Penn’s Woods”). In 1682 the Duke of York also assigned to Penn the old Swedish-Finnish-Dutch settlements on the lower Delaware River (the future colony and state of Delaware).

Numbering about fifty thousand in Great Britain in 1680, the Quakers called themselves simply the Friends of God, but their opponents called them Quakers, because one had said that they quaked before the power of God.

In contrast to the Puritan emphasis on sacred scripture, Quakers primarily relied on mystical experience to find and know God. The Quakers sought an “Inner Light” to understand the Bible, which they read allegorically rather than literally. More than a distant divinity or an ancient person, their Jesus Christ was fundamentally here and now and eternal: the Holy Spirit potentially dwelling within every person. Anyone truly awakened by that Spirit could thereafter live in sanctity.

Considering women spiritually equal to men, Quakers established parallel men’s and women’s leadership for their meetings.

Pacifists, the Quakers refused to bear arms. Uneasy with slavery, most sought at least its amelioration, and some became the first people to urge its abolition.

In founding a colony, Penn meant to enhance rather than to sacrifice his fortune. In promising a “Free Colony,” he did not offer free land, for he meant to profit by selling real estate and by collecting annual quitrents.