AP US History
Course Outline / Chapter 3
2. America and the British Empire, 1650 – 1754
A. Chesapeake Country
1. General Information
 1632 – King Charles I subdivided the area known as the Virginia Colony.
 He chartered a new colony along Chesapeake Bay and granted control of it to George Calvert
(Lord Baltimore) for his loyal service to the crown.
 The colony of Maryland thus became the first of several proprietary colonies, which were
designed to give the king more control.
 Grew slowly –
a. Due to unhealthy climate and high death rate due both to disease and Indian attacks.
b. Imbalance between the number of men and women.
c. Most early settlers were men brought from England and Scotland to work in the tobacco
fields.
 Required an extensive labor force due to the tobacco industry. Methods used to meet these
needs were indentured servitude, the headright system, and slavery.
2. Maryland
 The first Lord Baltimore died before he could fulfill his two ambitions of achieving great wealth
for his colony while also providing a haven for his fellow Catholics.
 Control of the Maryland proprietorship passed in 1632 to his son, Cecil Calvert (the second Lord
Baltimore) – whom set continued on with his father’s plan in 1634.
 To avoid the intolerance and persecution of the Puritan enemies, a number of wealthy English
Catholics emigrated to Maryland and established large colonial plantations. However, they were
quickly out-numbered by Puritan farmers.
 Puritans held a majority in Maryland’s representative assembly.
 Act of Toleration – was the first colonial statute granting religious freedom to all Christians
(1649). This statute also called for the death of anyone who denied the divinity of Jesus.
 Protestant Revolt –In the late 1600s, Protestant resentment against a Catholic proprietor
erupted into a brief civil war. The Protestants won, and the Act of Toleration was repealed.
Catholics lost their right to vote in elections for the Maryland assembly.
3. Virginia
 Economic Problems
a. low tobacco prices, due to overproduction = hard times to the Chesapeake colonies.
b. When Virginia’s House of Burgesses attempted to raise the price of tobacco, the merchants
of London retaliated by raising their own price on goods exported to Virginia.

Political Problems and Bacon’s Rebellion
a. Sir Wm. Berkeley, the royal governor of Virginia, adopted policies that favored large planters
and used dictatorial powers to govern on their behalf.
b. He antagonized small, backwoods farmers because he failed to protect them from Indian
attacks.
c. Nethaniel Bacon, an impoverished gentleman farmer, seized upon the grievances of the
western farmers to lead a rebellion against Berkeley’s government.
d. Bacon and others resented the economic and political control exercised by a few large
planters in the Chesapeake area. He raised an army of volunteers and conducted a series of
raids and massacres against Indian villages. Bacon’s army was successful in defeating the
governor’s forces and even burned Jamestown.
e. Berkeley’s government in Jamestown accused Bacon of rebelling against royal authority.
f. Bacon later died of dysentery and the rebel army collapsed.

Lasting Problems
a. sharp class differences between wealthy planters and landless or poor farmers
b. colonial resistance to royal control.
B. Growth of New England
1. General Information
 Founded on strong religious convictions and was intolerant of anyone who questioned their
religious teachings. Dissidents were usually banished from the colony.
 These dissidents formed the nucleus for the founding of several colonies in New England, which
would ultimately develop into Rhode Island and Connecticut.
2. Rhode Island
 Founded by Roger Williams, a Puritan minister. He believed that the individual’s conscience was
beyond the control of any civil or church authority. His teachings placed in conflict with other
Puritan leaders, who ordered his banishment form the Bay Colony.
 Leaving Boston, he fled southward to Narragansett Bay, where he and a few followers founded
the settlement of Providence in 1636.
 The new colony was unique 1) it recognized the rights of Native Americans and paid them for the
use of the land. 2) the government provided for complete religious toleration by allowing
Catholics, Quakers, and Jews to worship freely.
 Roger Williams also founded the first Baptist churches in America.
 Anne Hutchinson – another Puritan dissident, who believed in antinomianism – the idea that faith
alone, not deeds, is necessary for salvation. She was banished from the Bay Colony, and founded
the colony of Portsmouth in 1638. A few years later, she migrated to Long Island and was killed
in an Indian attack.
 A few years later, Williams was granted a charter from Parliament, which joined Providence and
Portsmouth into a single colony, Rhode Island.
3. Connecticut
 Settlers came from Massachusetts.
 Reverend Thomas Hooker led a large group of Boston Puritans into the Connecticut Valley and
founded the colony of Hartford in 1636.
 The Hartford settlers drew up the first written constitution in American History, the
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639). It established a representative government
consisting of a legislature elected by popular vote and governor chosen by that legislature.
 A second settlement in the Connecticut Valley was started by John Davenport in 1637 and was
given the name New Haven. In 1665, New Haven joined with the more democratic Hartford
settlers to form the colony of Connecticut.
 The royal charter for Connecticut granted it a limited degree of self-government, including
election of the governor.
4. New Hampshire
 The last colony to be founded in New England.
 It was originally part of Massachusetts Bay.
 Hoping to increase royal control over the colonies, King Charles II separated New Hampshire
from the Bay colony in 1679 and made it a royal colony, subject to the authority of an appointed
governor.
5. Conclusion of New England Colonies
 King Philip’s War
a. Metcom- a chief of the Wampanoags, known as King Philip, united many tribes in southern New
England against the English settlers, who were constantly encroaching on the Native
Americans’ lands. In a vicious war, thousands on both sides were killed, and dozens of towns
and villages were burned. Eventually, the colonial forces managed to win, killing King Philip and
virtually ending Native American resistance in New England.
Restoration Colonies
 Restoration period – refers to the restoration of power of an English monarch, Charles II, in 1660
following a brief period of Puritan rule under Oliver Cromwell.
1. The Carolinas
 Charles II granted a huge tract of land between Virginia and Spanish Florida to eight nobles, who in
1663 became the lord proprietors of the Carolinas.
A. South Carolina – in 1670 a few colonists from England and some planters from the island of
Barbados founded a town names for their king. The economy was based on trading furs and
providing food for the West Indies. By the middle of the 18 th century, South Carolina’s large rice
growing plantations worked by African slaves resembled the economy and culture of the West
Indies.
B. North Carolina – Farmers from Virginia and New England established small, self-sufficient
tobacco farms. The area poor harbors and few large plantations, which meant fewer slaves.
2. New York
 In 1664, King Charles II granted his brother, the Duke of York (James II) the land between
Connecticut and Delaware Bay.
 James sent out a force that easily took control of the Dutch colony from its governor, Peter
Stuyvesant. James ordered that the Dutch inhabitants be treated well and allowed to worship as
they wished and speak their own language.
 James ordered new taxes, duties, and rents without asking for consent from the representative
assembly.
 James insisted that no assembly should be allowed to form in his colony = taxation without
representation.
 In 1683, James gave in by allowing New York’s governor to grant broad civil and political rights,
including a representative assembly.
3. New Jersey
 In 1664, James discovered that New York was too large to administer himself. So he gave two
friends, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, that section of the colony located between the
Hudson River and Delaware Bay.
 To attract settlers to the areas, both proprietors made generous land offers and allowed religious
freedom and an assembly.

Eventually, they sold their proprietary interests to various groups of Quakers, with the two areas
joining as one to create New Jersey.
4. Pennsylvania
 Quakers – Members of the Religious Society for Friends that believed in the quality of all men and
women, nonviolence, and resistance to military service. They believe that religious authority was
found within each person’s private soul and not in the Bible or any outside source. The Quakers of
England were widely persecuted and jailed for their beliefs.
 William Pen – a young convert to the Quaker faith. His father was well liked by the King and had
considerable wealth. The money owed to his father by the crown was paid to William in 1681 in the
form of a grant of land in the Americas for a colony which he called Pennsylvania (Penn’s woods).
 Holy Experiment – Pen wanted his new colony to achieve three purposes: 1) provide a religious refuge
for Quakers and other persecuted people, 2) enact liberal ideas in government, 3) generate income
and profits for himself.
He provided the colony with a Frame of Government (1682 – 1683), which guaranteed a representative
assembly elected by landowners, and a written constitution, the Charter of Liberties (1701), which
guaranteed freedom of worship for all and unrestricted immigration.
He attempted to treat the Native Americans with fairness and tried not to cheat them out of their
land by purchasing it.
Penn’s land was settled by several thousand Dutch and Swedish colonists.
5. Delaware
 In 1702, William Penn granted the lower three counties of Pennsylvania to their own assembly. This
created Delaware as a separate colony even though its governor was the same as Pennsylvania’s until
the American Revolution.
6. Georgia
 Chartered in 1732, it was the last colony to be founded.
 There were two reasons for British interest in starting a new southern colony.
1. To create a defensive buffer to protect the prosperous South Carolina plantations form the
threat of Spanish invasion.
2. Thousands of people in London and other cities were being imprisoned for debt. These debtors
were shipped to Georgia in order to relieve the overcrowded prisons.
 James Oglethorpe founded the first settlement of Georgia in Savannah, in 1733. He acted as the
first governor of the colony.
 He placed a strict ban on drinking rum and the prohibition of slavery.
 The colony never prospered because of the constant threat of Spanish attack.
 When the British government took over control from Oglethorpe, these restrictions were repealed.
 By the time of the American Revolution, Georgia was still the smallest and poorest of the 13 colonies.