The document summarizes the English colonization of North America, focusing on Virginia, New England, and Carolina. It describes the founding and early struggles of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. It then discusses the Puritan pilgrims who founded Plymouth in 1620 and larger Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s. The document also outlines the establishment of Carolina in the 1670s, the division into North and South Carolina, and the development of the plantation system focused on rice and indigo production by the 1760s.

1. The English in North America Richard Ustick

2. American Colonies 6 - Virginia With the Spaniards in the South and the French to the North, the mid-Atlantic seaboard remained open to English colonization during the 1580’s. Virginia named after Queen Elizabeth I, a supposed virgin. After war with Spain in 1585, England lacked a means to finance and govern an overseas colony. To improve social and economic situations, it was suggested that the idle and larcenous poor could be sent to the new colony in Virginia to raise commodities for transport to and sale in, England. 1585 – Sir Raleigh sent a hundred men to Roanoke, assuming protection from Spanish discovery and attack due to location and shoals. However the shoals made it difficult to land supplies or load commodities and the soil was poor.

3. American Colonies 6 - Virginia 1587 – Second group of colonists sent with the first English families. Colonists destined for Chesapeake Bay but dropped off at Roanoke. John White, the leader, returned to England, seeking more supplies and reinforcements. When he returned to Roanoke, the colonists had disappeared. In 1607, English attempted settlement in Chesapeake Bay. Indians saw little value in European interaction except for weapons and metalwork. The colonizers felt obligated to subvert the native culture and transform the Indians into lower-class English people, lest the lower-class colonists turn Indian and attack the colony. English meant to Christianize the Indians by absorbing them as economic subordinates.

4. American Colonies 6 - Virginia In 1604, a peace treaty with Spain reduced the danger of Spanish attack on Jamestown. In the initial 104 settlers for Jamestown, only 38 were alive 9 months later. In 1608-09, Captain John Smith commanded the colony and forced the colonists to work six hours a day in the fields. He received complaints and was exiled. That following winter, many starved. The Disney movie Pocahontas is inaccurate and exaggerated.

5. American Colonies 6 - Virginia In 1610, Captain George Percy attacked a village of natives, killing 65 and burning the village and crops. They took the chief’s wife and children as captives, and en route back to Jamestown; they threw the children into the bay and shot them. In 1613, Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas was captured. She was indoctrinated by the English, became a Christian, and married a colonist in 1614. The Virginia Company brought Pocahontas and her husband John Rolfe to England to gain support for the colony. She died of disease in England in March 1617. Later 1610’s, Virginia Company gave up trying to directly control the land and laborers. The planters learned how to raise tobacco in 1616 which became the chief export of the colonies. On March 22, 1622, the Indians destroyed outlying plantations, killing nearly a third of the colonists in Virginia.

6. American Colonies 6 - Virginia Colonists waited until just before the corn harvest to attack and destroy the Indian villages and their crops, which would deprive the natives in the winter and spring of their crops, leaving to starvation and exposure. In May 1623, the English pretended to offer peace. After the negotiations, the 250 Indians were poisoned and killed by swords. April 18, 1644, another attack was staged by the Indians and killed 400 colonists, but this was a smaller proportion of the larger colonial population. 1646, Opechancanough was captured and taken to Jamestown and shot by an angry soldier. The tobacco boom came too late to save the Virginia Company from bankruptcy and foreclosure. In 1624 the crown terminated the company charter and assumed control of Virginia. 1632 – Crown set aside 12 million acres of land at the head of the Chesapeake Bay as a second colony, named Maryland, after the queen of the new monarch, Charles I. Most colonists that went to Maryland were Protestant, not Catholic, as Lord Baltimore had hoped. Many were radical Protestant.

7. American Colonies 8 – New England New England colonists were different from their Chesapeake counterparts. Chesapeake settlers were poor and short-lived indentured servants, New England contained middle-class who paid their own way across the Atlantic. In England, labor was cheap but land was scarce. New England was the opposite. Church and state were united in early modern England, and law demanded everyone support the official Church with taxes and attendance. The crown rejected the Catholic Pope and set up their own church, which was influenced by the Crown. Radical Puritans became known as “separatists”. They wanted to withdraw into their own independent congregations. Offering a strict code of personal discipline and morality, puritanism helped thousands of ordinary people cope with the economic and social turmoil that afflicted England during the 1600’s.

8. American Colonies 8 – New England Captain John Smith explored the coast in 1614 and named it “New England” because he claimed the climate and soil replicated the mother country. The first Puritan emigrants consisted of 102 separatists, called the “Pilgrims”. In 1620 they crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower to found a town named Plymouth on the south shore of Massachusetts Bay. They came across an abandoned village with cleared fields. That winter, half of the newcomers died, but after that winter, good crops and more emigrants stabilized the colony. In 1630 a larger Puritan emigration began. Their leader, John Winthrop represented a group of wealthy Puritans who obtained a royal charter as the Massachusetts Bay Company. The leaders of the company relocated themselves to New England. They converted their commercial charter into a self-governing colony, and established a republic.

9. American Colonies 8 – New England Puritans saw social and economic situation in England as punishment from god, and sought to live apart from sinners and the eye of the Official Church of England in New England. They could purify their churches, supervise one another, and enact a code of laws derived from the bible. Successful ocean passage was seen as an act of God. Most 1600’s English emigrants were poor young single men who lacked prospects in the mother country, and gambled as indentured servants in the Chesapeake area. Most New England colonists paid their own way and emigrated as family groups. New England environment demanded more labor and provided smaller rewards, but permitted longer and healthier lives.

10. American Colonies 8 – New England To make farms, the colonists had to cut clearings in the forest, chop firewood, erect fences, build barns and houses, plow and plant fields, harvest crops and construct mills, all from scratch by hand labor. Families relied on themselves instead of servants or slaves. New England marriage was both romantic and economic. Puritan ministers dwelled on the wife’s duty to submit to her husband, they also upheld his duty to behave kindly and generously. During the 1640’s, New England developed fishing trade.

11. American Colonies 8 – New England New England maintained that they had a divine mission to create a model society in America. Whenever cattle and children sickened and died, the New English suspected witchcraft and hung those who were convicted. They were not burned. No puritan wished to believe that misfortune was random and without supernatural meaning, for that would confirm their helplessness and isolation in a world without god.

12. American Colonies 11 – Carolina Established during the 1670’s, named after King Charles II Colonists worried most about slaves and Indians joining together. In treaties, the colonists insisted upon the return of all fugitive slaves as the price of peace and trade, and would pay bounties to Indians who captured and returned runaways, at the rate of a gun and 3 blankets. Incentives to move to the Carolina colony at the risk of Spanish attack included religious toleration, political representation with power over public taxation and expenditures, and large amounts of land. The wealthiest men, former West Indians, known as the Goose Creek Men, dominated the assembly and council of Carolina, to the dismay of the Lords Proprietor, who felt ignored and defied.

13. American Colonies 11 – Carolina In 1691, the Lords Proprietor modified the Albemarle Sound colonists by establishing “North Carolina” as a distinct government, a division which left Charles Town as the capital of “South Carolina”, dominated by Goose Creek Men. In 1729, the crown obtained the authority of government to the Carolinas, title to all ungranted lands, and rights to collect taxes Carolina’s early leaders concluded that they key to managing the local Indians was to recruit them as slave catchers by offering guns and ammo as incentive. Creek Indians felt insulted in the late 1740’s when it was discovered that the Carolina traders offered the Cherokee better prices for their deerskins. Creek Indians regarded prices as a measure of political respect.

14. American Colonies 11 – Carolina Colonists paid more for killed runaway slaves than deerskins. Carolina became the leading colonial producer of tar. During the 1690’s, Carolina developed rice as a staple, as well as indigo. In 1724, legislation required the planters to bear firearms to church, to deter blacks from rebelling on a Sunday. By 1760 the low country of Georgia and South Carolina had largely replicated the West Indian plantation system. The vast lands of Carolina and Georgia provided more room for common opportunity than did the confined West Indies.