2. Chapter 8: New England During the Seventeenth Century, the social and economic pressure within England that generated the Chesapeake colonies also spawned the colonization of a region to the north named New England New England farms, workshops, counting houses, and gristmills-as well as churches and schools constituted the puritans’ effort to glorify God During the 1530s, Queen Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, had rejected the Catholic pope to become the head of an independent Church of England A system of church courts gave the crown a vehicle to extort revenue and to punish dissidents Puritans sought to recover the original, pure, and simple church of Jesus Christ and his apostles Puritans wished to strip away church ceremony and formulaic prayers as legacies of papacy They longed to experience the “New Birth”: a transforming infusion of divine grace that liberated people from profound anxiety over their spiritual worthlessness and eternal life
3. Chapter 8: New England The puritan movement especially appealed to residents of the most commercialized area in England: the southeast, particularly London, East Anglia, and Sussex Puritans came from all ranks of English society, including a few aristocrats, but most belonged to the “middling sort” of small property holders Puritans held that men honored God and proved their own salvation by working hard in their occupation Puritans denounced conspicuous consumption and covetousness and urged generous donations to spread the gospel In 1604, King James I declared the Puritanism as well agreeth with monarchy as God and the devil The Puritan emigrants followed French and English marines, Fishermen, and fur traders who had visited the New England coast during the summers
4. Chapter 8: New England The first Puritan emigrants consisted of 102 Separatists, subsequently called the Pilgrims In 1620 they crossed the Atlantic in the ship Mayflower to found a town named Plymouth on the South shore of Massachusetts Bay By 1640 the expanding settlements spawned new colonies The religious and the economic were interdependent in the lives of people who saw piety and property as mutually reinforcing During the 1620s and 1630s the English middling sort had economic cause to consider emigrating across the Atlantic At the same time, the depression of the cloth industry deepened, threatening to ruin hundreds of Puritan cloth-makers English people could more cheaply, easily, and certainly improve their material circumstances by moving to the nearby and booming Netherlands, which welcomed skilled immigrants
5. Chapter 8: New England English culture expected all adults to marry and divided their labors into male and female responsibilities Men conducted the heaviest work Women maintained the home and its nearby garden and cared for the numerous children The New English understood marriage as both romantic and economic New English women lived in closer proximity than did their Chesapeake sisters In New England, women could more readily and routinely visit to borrow, lend, help, and talk Women played a leading role in the oral circulation of news and opinion that determined the standing of men, as well as women, in the community Endowed with good ships and skilled marines, New England merchants developed profitable and far-flung transatlantic trading networks of growing complexity
6. Chapter 12: Middle Colonies Until mid-century, the English neglected the intervening mid-Atlantic coast, despite its advantages More fertile and temperature than New England, but far healthier than the Chesapeake, the mid-Atlantic region was especially promising for cultivating grain, raising livestock, and reproducing people The English neglect enabled the Dutch and Swedes to establish their own small colonies By conquering New Netherland, Charles and James meant to strengthen England’s commerce by weakening its principal rival, the Dutch Empire The conquest also initiated the development of a new cluster of English colonies- the middle colonies, defined by their setting between New England and the Chesapeake Possessing Europe’s most efficient merchant marine and fishing fleet, the Dutch dominated the carrying trade of Northern and Western Europe, the North Seas Fisheries, and Arctic whaling
7. Chapter 12: Middle Colonies The combination of republican government, religious toleration, naval power, colonial trade, and a manufacturing boom endowed the Dutch with the greatest national wealth and the highest standard of living in Europe By 1650 the Dutch reaped most of the profits taken in European commerce with China, India, Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean In 1614 Dutch traders established a year-round presence on the upper Hudson by founding Fort Nassau, later relocated and renamed Fort Orange, with an associated village called Beverwyck Upriver the Dutch were too few, and too dependent upon trade, to intimidate their native neighbors, the formidable Iroquois Five Nations The upriver respect for Iroquois power contrasted with the Dutch treatment of the Hudson River Indians, a disunited set of Algonquian-speaking bands The Dutch counted on the high quality and low prices of their goods to attract Indian trade
8. Chapter 12: Middle Colonies Dutch relations with the Indians were far worse in the lower Hudson Valley, where the growing numbers of colonists clashed with the local Algonquians In contrast to English women, Dutch wives kept their sisters maiden names, which reflected their more autonomous identity by law The English succeeded as colonizers largely because their society was less successful at keeping people content at home Poorer and more disaffected, the seventeenth-century English prevailed in emigrating to colonize the Atlantic seaboard of north America Any trade open to the merchants and mariners of the mother country was equally open to the colonists The expansion of transoceanic trade had powerful multiplier effects upon the English and colonial economies Provisioning ships for long voyages encouraged commercial agriculture, while overseas markets stimulated demand for English manufactures, especially cloth and metal goods
9. Chapter 12: Middle Colonies King Charles II meant to eliminate New Amsterdam as a base for Dutch shippers who traded with Virginia, to capture the valuable fur trade conducted on the upper Hudson Fearing the destruction of their town and property, the intimidated Dutch refused to fight, obliging the enraged Governor Stuyvesant to surrender The imposition of English common law eroded the opportunities for Dutch colonial women to hold, manage, and dispose of property By conquering New Netherland, the English replaced the Dutch in their alliance and trade with Iroquois Five Nations, particularly the Mohawk Obliged to make a humiliating peace, the Iroquois accepted French Jesuit missionaries in 1667 The Iroquois traditionalists acted from a renewed confidence in Albany as a source of trade and a base for allies Peter Stuyvesant, in 1664, standing among residents of New Amsterdam who are pleading with him to surrender to the British who have arrived in warships to claim the territory for England
