Virginia: 1607-1644

In 1606 James I supports new English efforts (the first since Raleigh) to
establish colonies along the coast of America, north of the Spanish-held territory in
Florida. A charter for the southern section is given to a company of London
merchants (called the London Company, until its successful colony causes it be
known as the Virginia Company). A company based in Plymouth is granted a
similar charter for the northern part of this long coastline, which as yet has no
European settlers.

The Plymouth Company achieves little (and has no connection with the
Pilgrim Fathers who establish a new Plymouth in America in 1620). The London
Company succeeds in planting the first permanent English settlement overseas -
but only after the most appalling difficulties.

In April 1607 three ships sent out by the London Company sail into
Chesapeake Bay. They continue up a broad waterway, which they name the James
river in honour of their king, and a few weeks later they select an island to settle
on. They call their settlement Jamestown. But to the territory itself they give a
more romantic name, honouring England's late virgin queen - Virginia.

More than 100 English settlers attempt to make their home in 1607 on the
island of Jamestown. A year later disease, privation, hunger and attacks by local
Indians have reduced their number to less than forty. But the hardship has
produced the first notable leader in British colonial history.
 John Smith is one of seven men appointed by the London company to serve
on the colony's council. His energy, his resourcefulness and his skill in negotiating
with the Indians soon establish him as the leader of the community.

Smith soon becomes involved in a famously romantic scene (or so he claims

many years later, in a book of 1624). He is captured by Indians and is about to be
executed when Pocahontas, the 13-year-old daughter of the tribal chieftain, throws
herself between victim and executioner (or so Smith maintains). Smith is initiated
into the tribe and returns to Jamestown - where Pocahontas becomes a frequent
visitor, often bringing valuable information about the Indians' intentions.

Four more ships reach Jamestown in 1609. The number of settlers is up to

500 when Smith is injured, later that year, and has to sail home to England. During
the next winter, in his absence, there is appalling famine - the 500 are reduced to
60. They are joined by another group (survivors of a shipwreck in Bermuda), but
only after further reinforcements arrive, in 1610, is it finally decided to persevere
with this difficult attempt at colonization.

The town of Williamsburg, first called Middle Plantation, is founded in

1633. By mid-century (in spite of an Indian attack in 1644 which kills 500
colonists) Virginia is at last secure. Ten or more counties, on the English pattern,
have their own sheriff, constable and justices.

Pilgrim Fathers: 1620-1621

 The most famous boatload of immigrants in north American history leaves
Plymouth in September 1620. Thirty-five of about 102 passengers in the
Mayflower have sailed once before from England to live according to their
Christian consciences in a freer land. They were part of a Puritan group which
moved in 1608 from Boston in Lincolnshire to Holland, famous at the time for
religious toleration. Now, in spite of the dangers involved, they want to be even
more free in a place of their own.

Their sights are set on New England, the coast of which has been explored in
1614 by John Smith, the leader of the Jamestown settlers. His book A Description
of New England, naming and describing the region, has been published in 1616.

The journey lasts eight weeks before they make their first landfall, on the tip
of Cape Cod. It is not until mid-December that the little group selects a coastal site
suitable for their village. They name it Plymouth, echoing their port of departure
from the old world. To their surprise there appear to be no Indians in the vicinity.

New England winters are notoriously severe and the pilgrims have, in a
phrase of the time, 'all things to doe, as in the beginning of the world'. Only half
the group survive that first winter and spring. Of eighteen married women, just five
are alive when the first harvest is reaped in 1621.

The survivors thank the Lord for nature's bounty in the ceremony of
Thanksgiving, with the local Indians sharing in this first annual celebration. A
large indigenous fowl, the turkey, makes an admirable centrepiece. The settlers
have found it living wild in the forests of New England.

These pioneering families become known to their contemporaries as the Old

Comers (they are first referred to as Pilgrim Fathers in 1799, and are more often
known now in the USA simply as the Pilgrims). The ritual of Thanksgiving is not
the only great tradition which the pilgrims bequeath to modern America. Their
example of self-reliance becomes a central strand in the American ideal. It will be
fully maintained by other English communities establishing themselves, just ten
years later, further north in Massachusetts.

Massachussetts and New England: 1629-1691

The success of the Plymouth settlers soon causes other Puritans to follow
their example. The situation at home adds a further incentive. England is
undergoing a recession; and William Laud (bishop of London from 1628,
archbishop of Canterbury from 1633) is trying to impose the episcopalian form of
Christianity on the country by force. Economics and conscience pull in the same
direction. America beckons.

In 1629 a Puritan group secures from the king a charter to trade with
America, as the Massachusetts Bay Company. Led by John Winthrop, a fleet of
eleven vessels sets sail for Massachusetts in 1630. The ships carry 700 settlers, 240
cows and 60 horses.
 Winthrop also has on board the royal charter of the company. The enterprise
is to be based in the new world rather than in London. This device is used to justify
a claim later passionately maintained by the new colony - that it is an independent
political entity, entirely responsible for its own affairs.In 1630 Winthrop selects
Boston as the site of the first settement, and two years later the town is formally
declared to be the capital of the colony.

This concept chimes well with the settlers' religious attitudes. They are
Congregationalists, committed to the notion that the members of each church are a
self-governing body. The towns of Massachusetts become like tiny city-states -
each with a church at its centre, and with the church members as the governors.

This is oligarchy rather than democracy, but it is an oligarchy based on

perceived virtue rather than wealth or birth. All male church members have a vote.
But a man may only become a church member on the invitation of those already
enjoying this exalted status. Since God's approval is not to be devalued, his elect
remain a minority in each community.

The Massachusetts system proves an extremely efficient way of settling new

territory. A community, granted a tract of land by Winthrop and his governing
body in Boston, immediately becomes responsible for making a success of the new
enterprise - building a church and houses while bringing the surrounding land into
cultivation.
 Standards of education and literacy are high in the colony (the university of
Harvard is founded as early as 1636). The appeal of Massachusetts proves so great
that in the first eleven years, to 1640, some 20,000 settlers arrive from England.

In subsequent decades, as the population grows and colonization extends

further afield, regions evolve into separate colonies. Connecticut emerges in 1662,
and New Hampshire in 1679. In a reverse process, the original settlement of
Plymouth becomes absorbed within Massachusetts in 1691. (Vermont and Maine
remain part of Massachusetts until 1791 and 1820 respectively).

Rhode Island is an exception within New England, going its own way very
early (from 1636) because of the religious intolerance in self-righteous
Massachusetts. It is founded by Roger Williams, a clergyman banished by the
Boston authorities for his radical views.

Williams establishes the town of Providence on land which he buys from the
Indians (itself a novelty among English settlers). He welcomes persecuted sects,
such as Anabaptists and Quakers, and turns Rhode Island into a haven of tolerance.
In this respect the small colony prefigures Pennsylvania. But meanwhile New
England's immediate neighbour to the south and west attracts English attention.
This region is being colonized by the Dutch.

Dutch in America: 1624-1664

In 1621 the States General in the Netherlands grant a charter to the Dutch
West India Company, giving it a monopoly to trade and found colonies along the
entire length of the American coast. The area of the Hudson river, explored by
Hudson for the Dutch East India Company in 1609, has already been designated
New Netherland. Now, in 1624, a party of thirty families is sent out to establish a
colony. They make their first permanent settlement at Albany, calling it Fort
Orange.

In 1626 Peter Minuit is appointed governor of the small colony. He

purchases the island of Manhattan from Indian chiefs, and builds a fort at its lower
end. He names the place New Amsterdam.

The Dutch company finds it easier to make money by piracy than by the
efforts of colonists (the capture of the Spanish silver fleet off Cuba in 1628 yields
vast profits), but the town of New Amsterdam thrives as an exceptionally well
placed seaport - even though administered in a harshly authoritarian manner by a
succession of Dutch governors.

The only weakness of New Amsterdam is that it is surrounded by English

colonies to the north and south of it. This place seems to the English both an
anomaly and an extremely desirable possession. Both themes are reflected in the
blithe grant by Charles II in 1664 to his brother, the duke of York, of the entire
coastline between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers.

New Amsterdam, and in its hinterland New Netherland, lie exactly in the
middle of this stretch. When an English fleet arrives in 1664, the Dutch governor
Peter Stuyvesant accepts the reality of the situation and surrenders the territory
without a shot being fired. Thus New Amsterdam becomes British and two years
later, at the end of hostilities between Britain and the Netherlands, is renamed New
York. The town has at the time about 1500 inhabitants, with a total population of
perhaps 7000 Europeans in the whole region of New Netherland - which now
becomes the British colony of New York.

The Dutch have recently begun to settle the coastal regions further south,
which the British now also appropriate as falling within the region given by
Charles II to the duke of York. It becomes the colony of New Jersey.

Proprietary colonies: 1632-1732

The granting of New York and New Jersey by Charles II to his brother, in
1664, is typical of the way British colonies are founded along the American coast
south of New England. Whereas the New England colonies are in the hands of
independent Puritan communities, creating their own future as small farmers in a
relatively harsh environment, the southern colonies are given by the British
monarch to powerful aristocrats under whose protection settlers are shipped across
the Atlantic.

The first such grant is that of Maryland to Lord Baltimore in 1632.

Baltimore's concern is to establish a haven for English Roman Catholics, of whom
the first shipload arrives in the colony in 1634.
 The next grant is that of Carolina, given to a consortium of eight proprietors
in 1670. The two parts, north and south, develop rather differently. In the south,
where rice proves a profitable crop, large plantations are established using African-
American slave labour. The north, relying more on tobacco grown in small
holdings, is less prosperous. (The most famous product of the region, cotton, must
await Eli Whitney's invention of the Cotton gin.) The north becomes a separate
colony in 1712, introducing the lasting division between North and South Carolina.

The last of these proprietary colonies is Georgia, granted in 1732 to a group

of British philanthropists. Their aim is to give a new start in life to debtors and to
others with no means of support.

The philanthropic trustees impose various idealistic restrictions - no alcohol,

no large estates, no slaves - which initially prevent Georgia from becoming as
prosperous as its northern neighbours (though the new colony fulfils from the start
a useful subsidiary role, as a buffer zone beween British America and the Spanish
colony of Florida to the south).

While restrictive idealism holds Georgia back, a different sort of idealism

has made the most interesting of the proprietary colonies extremely prosperous.
Pennsylvania, granted to William Penn in 1681, is founded on the principle of
freedom of conscience. Its capital, Philadelphia, soon becomes the leading city of
British America.

Pennsylvania: 1681-1737
 William Penn is a well-connected young man in England when he
profoundly shocks his father, a friend of Charles II, by landing in gaol in 1667 for
attending a Quaker meeting. In this radical Christian group the young Penn finds a
lifelong commitment to the cause of religious liberty. He is able to turn his ideals
into practice thanks to a loan of £16,000 which his father has made to the king.
After the elder Penn's death, the son accepts the grant of a tract of land in America,
in 1681, in discharge of the royal debt.

Penn names the new colony Pennsylvania (Penn's woodlands, in honour of

his father) and sets about putting into effect what he calls a 'holy experiment'.

Colonists settling in Pennsylvania are expected to believe in one God, the

creator of the universe, but that is the limit of religious conformity required. This is
to be a community based on the gentle ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. Its main
city is named by Penn in accordance with this ideal; it is to be Philadelphia, Greek
for 'brotherly love'.

Penn has travelled much in Europe, making contact with other persecuted
Christian minorities - in particular Anabaptist groups in Germany. They too flock
to his colony, forming a significant and early German presence in British America.
They are the group known now as the Pennysylvania Dutch (from deutsch,
meaning German).
 Penn's profound tolerance and common sense is evident when a woman is
brought before him in Philadelphia in 1682 on a charge of witchcraft. He asks her
whether she has ridden through the air on a broomstick. There must have been a
gasp in the court when she answers 'Yes'. Penn's reply is that if she is able to do
this, he knows of no law against it. He recommends that she be set free. The jury
agrees. No more is heard of witchcraft in Pennsylvania but ten years later, in 1692,
some thirty people are executed in Salem on the same preposterous charge (see
Witches of Salem).

Applying the same high but easy-going principles, Penn is the early colonial
leader who has the greatest success in his relationship with the American Indians.

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