Chapter Overview

Religion played a crucial role in shaping northern colonial settlement. In Canada, French Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, helped to win acceptance among the native Indians for the few French soldiers, traders, and settlers there, whose interest was in trade more than land. At the same time, the impact of Protestantism in England helped in motivating the settlement of Puritan New England, and later the Quaker exodus to Pennsylvania.

The Founding of New England

As the French slowly established a presence in Canada, radical Puritans,followers of John Calvin,fled persecution and "corruption" in England, planting settlements between Maine and Long Island. The first New England settlers, the Separatists or "Pilgrims," were humble English farmers and craftspeople who first sought refuge in the Netherlands. Concern for their children prompted them to found the Plymouth colony in 1620.

A larger and more important wave of Puritan migration first reached the shores of what became the colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Led by John Winthrop, these Puritan migrants were wealthier and more prominent than the Pilgrim Separatists. They differed, too, in still believing the Church of England could be purified from within. They wanted to make their settlement a model for social and religious reform back in England.

New England Communities

The New England colonies were notable for their similarities. These included rapid population growth through natural increase, tight-knit communities committed to stability and order, patriarchal families, reliance on subsistence agriculture and widespread land ownership, a rough economic equality, and an absence of bound labor.

Strengthening the stability of early New England society were the shared commitment to Puritan, or Congregational, churches (whose members had to demonstrate a "converted" heart and life), and a strong tradition of self-government at both the town and colony level. In all of these respects, New England contrasted strikingly with the early American South.

Early New England did not lack conflict. Devout New Englanders could fight fiercely over theological disagreements. On occasion, tension between white and Indian settlements erupted into violent confrontations.

The Middle Colonies

The Middle Colonies shared with New England comparable agrarian economies, systems of free labor, and patterns of rapid population growth. Unlike New England, however, they had proprietary governments, such as Maryland and South Carolina. Representative government was therefore weaker, and civic life was more embattled,a situation compounded by ethnic and religious diversity.

In New York, Dutch Calvinist settlers were joined by English Anglicans and Puritans, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, Scandinavian Lutherans, and African-Americans, both slave and free. New Jersey, granted to a pair of proprietors who divided their holding, was even more complicated.

Relations between whites and Indians in the Middle Colonies also developed differently. While the Puritans sought to subdue the New England tribes, New Yorkers conciliated the powerful league of the Iroquois in order to maintain a competitive edge over the French for the fur trade. And for many decades, Quaker Pennsylvanians coexisted peaceably with the Lenni Lenapes.

Pennsylvania's Quakers practiced tolerance toward not only native Americans but also religious dissenters. They hoped to create a religious utopia, based on remarkably egalitarian ideals. Pennsylvania's economy grew rapidly, anchored by the trade flowing through the thriving port town of Philadelphia. Yet prosperous, religious Pennsylvania still was rent by political strife.

Adjustment to Empire

Charles II and James II's attempts to centralize England's American empire created serious disruptions of political life in every northern colony except Pennsylvania. The crown's experiment in centralization, the Dominion of New England, ended with the Glorious Revolution in 1688: James II was replaced by William and Mary. New England weathered these years of political instability without severe internal turmoil. New Yorkers, however, responded with violence and vicious political infighting.

The dismantling of the Dominion greatly reduced tensions between England and its colonies. For more than half a century, English monarchs gave up efforts to impose a strict, centralized administration on America. The virtual self-rule enjoyed by the colonies reflected the reality that these outposts of English civilization had matured into firmly rooted societies.