Regions of British colonies

Virginia and the Chesapeake

The British founding of the Jamestown, Virginia colony in 1607 established the first of an expanding series of British colonies along much of the contemporary Atlantic coast of the United States. Jamestown’s founders were primarily English gentlemen seeking gold and other mineral wealth, although they would quickly be disappointed by the lack of gold as well as by their immediate needs for food, shelter and safety. Within the first few years of the colony’s existence, the ill-prepared settlers suffered during the “starving times” and also warred with the indigenous Powhatan Confederation. Ultimately, under the strict military discipline enacted by Captain John Smith, the immense wealth generated by tobacco planting, which the colonists learned from indigenous peoples, the introduction of both indentured servitude and slavery, and military victory over the Powhatan Confederation, the Jamestown colony grew and became the Virginia colony.

Today, Maryland is often described as a Mid Atlantic state but it has also been included in the Upper South in previous time periods; during the Civil War era, Maryland was frequently described as a bitterly divided border state that maintained slavery throughout the war. For the colonial period, we will include Maryland with Virginia in the Chesapeake region.

Granted to Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert, and his family in 1632 as a proprietary colony, Maryland would become known for the 1649 Act of Toleration that provided protection for all Christians, including Catholics, but did not extend these same protections to other religious faiths; the Act of Toleration would be suspended during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate government in England and again during much of the later colonial period because of sectarian conflict in Maryland.

New England

The New England colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island were primarily founded by religious dissidents, hence the focus in much of American history of settlers coming to what would later become the United States in search of religious freedom. With the previously mentioned Pilgrims/Separatists and the Puritans, though, our contemporary definitions of religious freedom and toleration are not always applicable; both groups imposed strict religious and moral codes and laws in the Massachusetts colony, leading dissenters such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to flee the colony and establish Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively.

While the AP US History exam will not require you to know all of the doctrinal and theological differences between various religious faiths and denominations, you will need to understand significant religious developments and trends. With the Pilgrims/Separatists and the Puritans, a fundamental tenet was that of predestination, the belief that God had already divined each person’s fate before his/her/their birth and that human beings were powerless to change or redirect this fate. Based upon this Calvinist concept of predestination, society was divided into those who were saved, the elect, and those who were condemned, the reprobate. People who contradicted or rejected these theological teachings, including Anne Hutchinson, were not welcome in the Massachusetts Bay colony. Roger Williams, the religious dissident who helped found the Connecticut colony, advocated for a clearer separation of religion and government, church and state, putting him at odds with the Puritan leadership.

Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, 1644

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An enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state, confounds the civil and the religious…

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New Hampshire was founded in the early 1630s but it was often claimed by Massachusetts until 1741 when King George II proclaimed that New Hampshire was independent of Massachusetts.

As will be analyzed further in upcoming sections, the New England colonies, while permitting slavery, relied less on enslaved Africans for labor than the middle and southern colonies, primarily because New England’s climate and environment was not conducive to plantation style cash-crop agriculture.

Mid Atlantic colonies

For the colonial period, the mid Atlantic colonies, frequently referred to as the Middle colonies, will include Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. The previous Dutch establishment of New Amsterdam was referenced in the previous chapter, but with the British defeat of the Dutch in a series of wars, and the imminent arrival of the British navy, then governor Peter Stuyesvant and the Dutch colonial administration surrendered control of the colony to the British in 1664.

The establishment of the Pennsylvania colony stemmed from the efforts of William Penn and the Society of Friends, more commonly known as the Quakers, a new religious denomination that emphasized pacifism and greater equality amongst all human beings; the Quakers recognized women as equal worshippers in their meetings, emphasized greater respect for indigenous peoples, and became the first American colonial Christian denomination to call for the abolition of slavery. Even though they founded the Pennsylvania (Penn’s Woods) colony, Quakers composed only a small minority of the population; within a few decades of Pennsylvania’s founding, newly arriving settlers discarded Penn’s guidelines about treating indigenous peoples as equals.

Southern colonies

During this part of the colonial era, the southern colonies will include Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; in later units, Virginia will be included in the southern colonies and/or states.

The contemporary states of North and South Carolina were originally one large colony granted to 8 men who had remained steadfastly loyal to the Stuart line of English kings during and after the English Civil War. With the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 under King Charles II, these 8 “Lords Proprietors,” including several who had previously served as governors in the Virginia and New Jersey colonies, were granted the lands that now comprise the Carolinas as rewards for their loyalty. In 1670, the first colonists in the Carolina colony established the port city of Charles Town, today’s Charleston, South Carolina; Charleston would quickly emerge as a vital port in the British North American colonies. Tensions between the southern and northern parts of the Carolina colony, including over the prominence of Charleston to the perceived exclusion of the northern Albemarle region, culminated in the establishment of the royal colonies of North and South Carolina in the 1720s.

The last of the colonies to be founded, Georgia, began as a moral and societal experiment by its founder, James Oglethorpe, where debtors could be rehabilitated through hard work; in Oglethorpe’s original plan, slavery was not permitted in Georgia, but this prohibition would be removed within a few years. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the British government, Georgia could serve as a bulwark against Spanish colonial advances into the Carolinas, particularly given that Spain claimed that its Florida colony extended all the way to what is now South Carolina.

The southern and Chesapeake colonies would all develop plantation-style cash crop agriculture with Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia all exporting large amounts of tobacco and Georgia and South Carolina relying heavily on rice cultivation. All of these colonies increasingly relied on enslaved Africans for this plantation agricultural system.