2.3 The Regions of British Colonies

Puritans came to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s in a 'Great Migration' of about 20,000 people, mostly families. Their leader John Winthrop urged them to be a 'city upon a hill', a model Christian community. Because they came as families and the climate was healthy, the population grew quickly through births.

The thin, rocky soil and long winters made large plantations impossible, so New Englanders combined small family farms with fishing, timber, shipbuilding and Atlantic trade. Towns held town meetings, where the town's men (at first mostly church members) made local decisions, an early form of self-government.

Puritans did not believe in religious freedom for others. Dissenters were punished or expelled: Roger Williams founded Rhode Island in 1636 with religious toleration and separation of church and state, and Anne Hutchinson was banished in 1638 for challenging ministers' authority.

New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware had fertile soil and a longer growing season. Farmers grew wheat and other grains for export, earning the region the nickname 'breadbasket'. Philadelphia and New York became busy ports.

This was the most ethnically and religiously diverse region, with English, Dutch, German, Scots-Irish and other settlers. William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a Quaker colony with religious toleration and a relatively fair policy toward the Lenape, at least at first.

Virginia and Maryland (founded in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics) grew tobacco for export. Tobacco needed lots of land and labor, and early settlers died young from disease, so the population grew mainly through immigration. Most early migrants were young men.

At first, planters relied on indentured servants, usually poor English people who agreed to work for four to seven years in exchange for passage. Under the headright system, a planter received 50 acres for each person whose passage he paid, which rewarded importing laborers. After Bacon's Rebellion (1676), an uprising of frontier settlers and former servants angry about land and Native policy, and as fewer English servants came, planters shifted to enslaved African labor.

The Carolinas were founded in the 1660s, and many early settlers of South Carolina came from Barbados and brought its slave system with them. Planters grew rice, using the skills of enslaved Africans from rice-growing regions of West Africa, and later indigo, a plant used for blue dye. South Carolina had a Black majority by the early 1700s. Georgia, founded in 1732 as a buffer against Spanish Florida and a fresh start for poor English people, at first banned slavery but allowed it from 1751.

In the British West Indies, islands like Barbados and Jamaica grew sugar, the most profitable crop of all. Enslaved Africans made up the large majority of the population, and brutal work and disease meant very high death rates.