Founding More of the Thirteen Colonies
1. The experiences of Jamestown were mirrored in nearly every other English colonial attempt. Colonists
struggled to survive the trip, the first winter, and Indian attacks. The colonies strove to achieve rudimentary
economies, then specialized in some pursuit according to geographical and climatic conditions. Each
colony developed a unique society, but all of the individual attributes created in all of the thirteen colonies
eventually were welded together into the American society. As we focus on each colony, catalog in your
minds the contributions generated by the goals, problems, and solutions each colony faced. Through all the
struggle, a vitality was sown into English American society that is the other major reason besides the defeat
of the Spanish Armada that Spanish culture did not maintain a hold on the future.
The second colonizing attempt from England began the role of religious dissent in American life. Keep in
mind that colonists going to Virginia had to swear loyalty to the king and to the Anglican Church.
Plymouth colony, founded in 1620, was made up of Separatists. This small band of devout folk wanted to
separate themselves from the corruption they perceived in the Anglican Church. You know of them as the
Pilgrims. Originally, they sought religious freedom in the Netherlands, but their children started going
around in little wooden shoes and speaking with a Dutch accent. Still fiercely English, they crossed the
Atlantic planning to settle in the “northern parts of Virginia.”
101 souls sailed, and amazingly only one died compared to Jamestown’s loss of 40. All were sick, however,
when they arrived off Cape Cod in November. Cape Cod is in the extremely northern part of Virginia, and
winter was not far off. Only half of the Pilgrims survived that first winter, their starving times. Their
leader, Governor William Bradford, captured the pathos of this rough start for New England in his history,
Of Plymouth Plantation. He is therefore the first American historian. He traced their quest to survive and
to make a pure church.
2. Money troubles plagued the operation, and the company that backed them went bankrupt in 1626. Two
legacies became clear as a result. First, the honest pilgrims were the only colonists to pay off the debts of
their bankrupt company even though it took them as a community 22 years to do so! That fact reveals that
not only were they convinced that the next world was more important than this world, they were able to
raise their children with the same values. With the debts paid in 1648, the Pilgrims were pioneers of
integrity for all Americans.
William Bradford died in 1657, when the original fifty Pilgrims had grown to 1,360 people. Their noble
failure produced the second key legacy, the Mayflower Compact. Having been blown off course and
finding themselves on the coast of an uncharted wilderness, they gathered in the hold of their little ship and
charted a government. The document they drew up, prayed over, and signed was the first written
constitution in all of English history. Every colony eventually wanted one, and by the time we wrote the U.
S. Constitution, there was a tradition of trying to map perfect government on paper. Plymouth Colony
opened New England to settlement and then was absorbed in 1691 by a large neighbor.
Massachusetts Bay Colony, the neighbor that eventually grew up around Plymouth, consisted of religious
dissenters of a slightly different stripe. The Puritans sought to purify the Anglican Church from within until
their uncompromising doctrinal stance incited persecution of such terrible nature that it sparked a civil war
in England. Before the fighting started, however, many Puritans chose to migrate in an effort to establish a
Utopian community which would “perfectly reflect the wisdom and character of God.” The forerunners of
Massachusetts Bay arrived in 1629 and set up what they called a Bible Commonwealth, a government
whose laws came from the Bible.
3. Then the king, Charles I, disbanded Parliament and instituted policies designed to persecute Puritans. These
policies led to hard economic times for Puritans who lost licenses to practice their professions or charters to
run their businesses. Thus ensued the Great Migration. One thousand Puritans left in 1630 for America.
Between 1630 and 1643 (when the war began going the way of the Puritans), 20,000 swelled the population
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In fact, Connecticut was chartered and founded separately in 1636 as a
place to absorb some of the waves of colonists.
The government of Massachusetts Bay took the path of Virginia, so already an American pattern was firmly
in place. John Winthrop was the Governor of the colony for most of his life upon arrival in America. The
representative assembly of all Puritan colonies was known as the General Court. In order to vote, male
colonists had to be members in good standing of their churches. While not Presbyterian like John Calvin,
himself, Puritan doctrine was infused with Calvinist doctrine. The Puritans saw themselves as working out
a plan foreordained by God. These beliefs led Puritans to strongly value two things: education and hard
work. In order for children to discover and understand God’s plan for their lives, they had to be educated in
order to read the Bible and interpret it correctly. Regardless of what the plan for an individual’s life was, his
calling had to be pursued with all his strength since he did not work for himself but for his Creator. The
Puritan form of Christianity was a quest to purify, learn, and to serve.
A final key point is that Massachusetts Bay Colony was not founded to tolerate other religious views.
Having fled persecution, the Puritan churches (Congregationalists) wanted merely to be left alone to
preserve their version of orthodoxy. The alternative teachings of Anne Hutchison, whose being a woman
teaching men violated the biblical restrictions the Puritans adopted from the New Testament, were debated
in a trial. Hutchison defended her antinomianism, a different interpretation of Christianity, but she was
exiled as a result.
4. She and Roger Williams were two pioneers of American religious liberty. He was a man, of course, but
taught that the church and state should not be in the hands of the same men, which Puritans denied (even
though they had been beaten up and killed by an established church). Roger Williams was also exiled and
founded the colony of Rhode Island, chartered separately by 1663. There, any variety of belief or unbelief
was tolerated. Religious dissenters migrated to Rhode Island and turned it into the most argumentative
place on the continent.
Another pioneer of religious toleration founded the colony of Maryland. You might guess that Maryland
was founded as a sanctuary for Catholics, and you would be right but for the wrong reason. John Calvert,
Lord Baltimore, did found Maryland as a refuge for Catholics that both the Anglicans and the Puritans
persecuted, but he named it after Mary, wife of King Charles, rather than the virgin Mary. In order to
stabilize his new colony, he tried to institute the feudal system. Most of his colonists, however, were
Protestants bleeding over from Virginia, the most populous colony of all. They were not about to swear
loyalty oaths to Catholics and strove to achieve a second branch of government to check the power of the
Catholic rulers.
The societal clash in Maryland pales in comparison to the background of the colony of New York in that it
was founded by England’s chief commercial rival, the Dutch. Peter Stuyvesant and his Dutch colonists had
come for furs and founded New Amsterdam. He actually succeeded in establishing a form of feudalism
with the institution of patroonships (land for loyalty arrangements). New Amsterdam commanded the best
port on the entire Atlantic coast, but it was not organized enough to resist English encroachment and Indian
attacks. Indian wars lasted from 1642-1646 and slowed economic and societal progress. By 1654, the
Dutch company went bankrupt just in time for Indians to retaliate in 1655. The English picked up the pieces
and absorbed the colony by 1664. New York became the first colony to have deep ethnic diversity. New
York City, at least, remains true to that legacy today.
5. The two Carolina colonies were founded as one colony at first in honor, as their names imply, of Charles the
Second after the Restoration of the monarchy. After the English Civil War and the rule of Oliver Cromwell
as the Lord Protector of England, Parliament caved in during the crisis of Cromwell’s weak son’s rule and
asked the son of the beheaded Charles I back to become king. Eight of the supporters of Charles II were
rewarded with a vast territory that today makes up North and South Carolina and Tennessee. Charleston’s
being founded in what would become South Carolina reveals the extent of these eight proprietors’ gratitude.
The key name to remember with Carolina is not one of the eight but the name of the secretary of one of the
eight. That’s because the secretary was John Locke, the famous doctor-turned-philosopher-and-politicalscientist. He was tapped to write the constitution for the new colony, a document he called the Fundamental
Constitution of Carolina. John Locke established four key precedents for Carolina and thus for America.
He wrote in religious toleration, an easy process for aliens to become citizens, the use of land to attract
settlement and speculative investment, and, most importantly, reverence for English Common Law. This
last effectively said, “All those ideas that exist solely in the heads of English judges that make up the
unwritten constitution of England are now written down in the Constitution of Carolina, and thus
Carolinians are Englishmen with the full rights of Englishmen just as if they were still in England.” One
would be hard pressed to think of a more important legacy, unless one counts the unfortunate fact the
particularly South Carolina became the strongest outpost for slavery in America.
The only rival legacy that gives Carolina a run for its money is the history of the founding of Pennsylvania.
New Jersey was first founded as East Jersey and West Jersey and quickly became an unregulated melting
pot of diverse races, cultures, and religions. While that in and of itself is an important American legacy,
William Penn found the Jerseys far too wild a place to make an adequate refuge for his persecuted Quakers.
Penn, himself a Quaker, chafed under the fact that the Anglicans, Puritans, and Catholics all persecuted this
bizarre sect that rose out of Protestantism.
6. Quakers dispensed with the Bible in that they believed everyone possessed the voice of God inside them,
called the “inner light.” The most bizarre practices of this group included meetings where the congregations
often sat in complete silence waiting for someone to speak about what his (or her) inner light was saying.
Bizarre for the 18th century among religions, Quakers believed in total pacifism, the disallowing of the use
of force for any reason. They were a detached, fiercely independent people.
William Penn’s father had loaned King Charles II money. Penn the Elder died while the king still owed the
money, and after the Restoration William accepted a vast track of forest in America (Pennsylvania means,
“Penn’s woods”) to cancel the debt. Pennsylvania became from the beginning the most “American” of
colonies in that nearly every one of the positive legacies of the other colonies were present in Pennsylvania.
The Quakers even avoided the negative legacy of war with the Indians for a time. Their pacifism created
the friendliest relationship between Europeans and Indians in America. This peace lasted until the
population of the colony swelled with non-Quakers who pushed west, clashed with Indians, and then called
back east for help from the government. When the Quakers said they would not use force, the colony
dispensed with them, although the Penn family would own huge tracts of land well up into the 19th century.
Before losing control of his own colony, William Penn established crucial American legacies. Even in
figuring out the boundary of his land he changed America forever. When two men were hired to determine
where the exact border lay between Pennsylvania and Maryland, the unknowingly provided the barrier
between the North and the South so important for the centuries ahead. Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon did not
know they were surveying the line between slavery and freedom, but the Mason-Dixon line became that
famous divider.
Penn firmly believed that governments were instituted among men in order to improve the welfare of the
masses and to protect the individual from the arbitrary nature of rulers. These attitudes were discussed and
debated in an increasingly diverse colony making Pennsylvania the center of political dispute and therefore
innovation. No better example exists of Pennsylvania’s contribution to America than that it was the place
Benjamin Franklin chose to make his fortune. He went to Philadelphia as a boy, a loaf of bread under each
arm, and wound up the richest man in colonial America. Therefore, Pennsylvania had a thriving economy
for the industrious. To provide the context for just how fast America could grant success, remember that
Benjamin Franklin came to Philadelphia in 1723, just five years after William Penn’s death. The quiet
miracle of English-American vitality was gaining steam.