Religion played a crucial role in shaping northern colonial settlement in North America. In Canada, the Catholic Counterreformation added a missionary zeal to early French exploration and colonization efforts. French Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, helped to win acceptance for French soldiers, traders, and settlers among the native Indians of the Canadian interior. Perhaps most importantly, French colonists, who remained few in number, did not threaten Indian claims to land and political authority.

At the same time, the impact of the Reformation in England played a major part in motivating the settlement of Puritan New England and later, the Quaker exodus to Pennsylvania.

The Founding of New England
While the French slowly established a fur trade, agricultural communities, and religious institutions in Canada, radical Puritans fleeing persecution and "corruption" in England planted more populous settlements between Maine and Long Island. The first New England settlers, the Separatists or "Pilgrims," were humble English farmers and craftsmen who had fled religious persecution in England and settled in the Netherlands. Concerns that their children were adopting Dutch customs prompted them to settle the Plymouth colony in 1620.

A larger wave of Puritan migration first reached the shores of what became the colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Led by John Winthrop, an English landowner and gentleman, this group of Puritan migrants was wealthier and more prominent than the Pilgrim Separatists. They differed, too, in continuing to regard themselves as members of the Church of England. Indeed, members of the new Massachusetts Bay Colony hoped that their settlement would become a model for social and religious reform back in England.

New England Communities
Although the Pilgrim Separatists of Plymouth and the Congregationalists of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut differed in some ways, the New England colonies were more notable for their similarities. The distinguishing features of early New England society included rapid population growth through natural increase, large families headed by patriarchal fathers, reliance on subsistence agriculture and widespread land ownership, a rough economic equality, and an absence of bound labor.

These economic and social factors lent stability to early New England society. So did the shared commitment to Puritanism, the organization of churches, 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.

Despite its coherence and order, early New England did not lack conflict. Devout New Englanders often fought bitterly over the proper definition of Puritanism, while contests between white and Indian settlements erupted into violent confrontations--the Pequot War and Metacomet's War--as expansion proceeded westward.

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, all of the Middle Colonies were ruled by proprietary governments, like those in Maryland and South Carolina. Consequently, representative government remained weaker and civic life more embattled.

Ethnic and religious antagonisms compounded the political strife in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Unlike homogeneously English and Puritan New England, the population of the Middle Colonies included a patchwork of diverse ethnic groups and religious denominations. In New York, for example, English Anglicans and Puritans, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, Scandinavian Lutherans, and African Americans, both enslaved and free, adhering to West African tribal religions joined the Dutch Calvinist settlers who had founded the colony as New Netherlands in 1624.

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 far greater tolerance toward both Native Americans and religious dissenters than did Puritan New Englanders. Even so, both Puritans and Quakers hoped to create religious utopias and representative governments in North America, model societies in which rulers, chosen by popular consent, promoted piety and morality.

Adjustment to Empire
The later Stuart monarchs, Charles II and James II, attempted to centralize England's American empire. Their efforts created serious disruptions of political life in every northern colony except newly established Pennsylvania. The crown's experiment in centralization, the Dominion of New England, ended with the Glorious Revolution in 1688: James II went into exile and was replaced on the throne 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 in the wake of Leisler's Rebellion.

The dismantling of the Dominion greatly reduced the 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. All of the colonies continued to enjoy relative independence under an imperial policy of "benign neglect."