Who Were the European Settlers- where did they come from, why did they come, and what did they
make?
By Lauren Pacek, Research Analyst, Friends of Susan Combs
February 10, 2015
Where Did They Come From?
Country
England (Virginia
Company of
London)
England
(Pilgrims)
Timeline
1607
Where they settled
Jamestown, Virginia (first
permanent English
settlement)
Plymouth Bay
Colony, Massachusetts
Number
144
Why they left Europe
To explore and settle
102
New Netherland which
became New York
Delaware Bay and along
the Delaware River
Massachusetts Bay Colony
(Boston and Salem)
10,000
Left England to escape
religious persecution.
Originally went to Holland but
couldn’t find good work so they
went to the New World.
Trade
Holland
1620
Sweden
1630
600
Trade
England
(Puritans)
1630-1640
The Great
Migration
20,000
1642
Virginia
30,000
1675
1682
1683
West Jersey and Delaware
Bay, Pennsylvania
Georgia, Pennsylvania
23,000
France
1685
100,000
Scotch-Irish
Scotts
Northern England
1750-1770
Massachusetts, New York,
Pennsylvania, Virginia,
South Carolina
The frontier/ back country/
mountains
Germany
(Hessian
Mercenaries)
After the
Rev. War
Left England because the
Church of England was trying
to get rid of the Puritan
influence in the church.
English Civil War sent many
English elite to the New World
along with indentured servants
The Quakers rejected social
hierarchy.
First went to Holland and then
England to escape economic
and political hardships
Louis XIV revoked Edict of
Nantes sending Huguenots to
England and then to America
A series of crop failures and
resulting famine.
Wars and other conflicts exiled
many Scotts to America
Mercenaries fought for the
British were taken captive by
the Americans and decided to
stay in America instead of
retiring to Germany after the
war.
England
(Cavaliers &
Servants)
England
(Quakers)
Germany
1620
84,000
74,000
5,000
Why did they come?
Western Europe was very poor in the 15th century. The estimated GDP was $450 at the
beginning of the Christian Era and remained about the same until the 16th century (Kenny and Kenny
2006; Maddison 2001). The Ottomans and Venetians controlled access to the Mediterranean and the
trade routes to Asia. Western Europe needed to find an alternate route to Asia (Schaller et al 2013, 16).
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At the time, a nation’s wealth was measured by its gold and silver reserves. New trade routes and new
lands meant new sources of gold and silver for the royal treasuries of Europe.
Seventy years after Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, Spain established the first
North American colony at St. Augustine, Florida. (Schaller et al 2013, 32). During the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I, England was finally politically stable enough to send out their own expeditions to the New
World (Schaller et al 2014, 53).
Groups of English merchants were creating companies to fund trade expeditions to Eastern
Europe, Asia and the Mediterranean (Schaller et al 2013, 53). In what would become the United States,
the Virginia Companies of London and Plymouth were granted charters to establish settlements (Wolfe
2014b).
New Netherland is now New York but began as a Dutch West India Company trading post to
facilitate trade with local Native Americans, but it was not a priority for the Dutch Republic. People in
the Dutch Republic enjoyed a prosperous economy and religious tolerance, so few citizens settled in the
colony. However attractive land grants and the promise of religious tolerance attracted many Swedish
and English settlers (Schaller et al 2013, 64, 70).
Religious Freedom
Religious freedom was an attractive concept in those years because there was so little tolerance
in Europe. Uniformity of religion was a conviction held by people at the time, which meant everyone
had to worship in the same way. It was believed that heretics not only damned themselves but the
community as a whole (LOC).
The group we now know as the Pilgrims were separatists from the Church of England. They
believed that the church was not a true church and was beyond repair. Thinking like this was illegal and
many Separatists were jailed for their beliefs. The Puritans also believed that the Church of England had
strayed from the original teachings, but they were not as radical as the Pilgrims. The Puritans accepted
that the Church of England was the true church but it needed some serious reforms. Still, the Puritans
faced persecution from the church majority and civil authorities. They were told to conform or be
“extripat[ed] from the earth” (LOC). One Puritan man was sentenced to life in prison, had his nose slit
and had SS (for sower of sedition) branded on his forehead (LOC). The Salzburgers were another group
of religious dissenters who found themselves seeking freedom from persecution. They were kicked out
of their homeland in Salzburg, Austria. In total, 20,000 people fled Austria for London and then
America.
Economic Freedom
The population in England nearly doubled in the years between 1500 and 1650, but the economy
could not grow fast enough to keep up with population growth. Large landowners cut off access to small
farmers leaving little land for grazing and farming. “To English men, land ownership brought respect,
economic independence and political rights” (Schaller et al 2013, 61).
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At around 1610, the Virginia Company allowed settlers to own land and the prospect of
landownership brought tens of thousands of men to the New World, mostly as indentured servants. The
Virginia Company encouraged this new influx of colonists by granting 50 acres to every free adult plus
50 acres for each servant (Schaller et al 2013, 60). In the 1760s people from Northern England, Ireland
and Scotland fled their homelands due to increasing rents and crop failures. They settled in the western
edges of the colonies (Schaller et al 2013).
What did they find?
A Terrible Journey
The voyage across the Atlantic from England to the New World lasted about seven weeks and
was very rough. One hundred or so passengers were packed into merchant ships that were little more
than little wooden ships. The Mayflower transported 102 Pilgrims from Plymouth, England to Plymouth
Harbor in 1620. The ship was estimated to be a mere 113 feet long (a Boeing 777-200LR, used for longdistance travel today, is 209 feet) with the passengers being relegated to a small portion of the ship.
One German traveler, Gottleb Mittelberger wrote of his 1750 journey:
During the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror,
vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipations,
boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply
salty food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die miserably.
Children from one to seven years rarely survive the voyage; and many a time parents are
compelled to see their children miserably suffer and die from hunger, thirst, and sickness,
and then cast them into the water.”
A Harsh Climate
The thinking of the time was based on a geography treatise written in the 2nd century AD that
stated all lands on the same latitude would have the same climate. This thinking fails to take into
account the many other factors that contribute a location’s weather. The Chesapeake is along the same
latitude as well-known lands with temperate Mediterranean climates like Greece and Italy (Wolfe
2014a).
This was also the time of the Little Ice Age. Early settlers landed in the American colonies to
find the coldest winters in 1000 years and driest summers in 700 years (Wolfe 2014a). Poor crops led to
increased conflicts over scarce resources between the native tribes and the European settlers (Wolfe
2014a). Massachusetts Bay Colonist, Roger Clap, wrote of his first year in his memoirs:
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In our beginning many were in great straits for want of provision for themselves and
their little ones. Oh the hunger that many suffered, and saw no hope in an eye of reason
to be supplied, only by clams and mussels and fish. We did quickly build boats, and some
went a fishing. But bread was with many a very scarce thing, and flesh of all kind as
scarce (National Humanities Center 2006).
An American Economy
The American colonies were a blank canvas to paint their shared vision of the perfect life. For
the first 50 years, the English crown and Parliament had very little influence over the American colonies
(Cohen 2004). The end of the English Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II (1642-1660) brought
about more and more restrictions on commerce and trade for the colonies. The belief that the purpose of
a colony was solely to benefit the homeland was held by England at the time. American colonists
worked harder and diversified their labor. American manufacturing increased dramatically in the late
1600s and early 1700s.
By 1715 the colonies had become self-sustaining (Cohen 2004) and by 1730 they had laid the
“foundations for the economic development that would become the United States by intensifying old
activities and developing new ones in response to overseas and domestic markets” (Schaller 2013, 159).
Due to the enterprise and commerce of the colonists, the American colonies enjoyed one of the highest
standards of living for the time (Cohen 2004).
A Literate Citizenry
The Massachusetts Bay Colony made a law requiring a public grammar school in every town
with more than 100 households (Schaller et al 2013, 73). New Englanders were quick to found a
university, Harvard, in 1636. Yale was founded in 1701. The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia,
Princeton, Rutgers and Brown were all founded between 1746 and 1766. It was considered essential that
the colonist be able to read. An estimated 80% of New England adult males were literate compared to
60% back in England (Ferguson 1997, 432)
The Boston News-letter, the first successful American newspaper, was founded in 1704 (Schaller
2013, 163) followed by many more in every city. In 1734 one newspaper printer was acquitted of libel
against the governor of New York, “the verdict set a precedent that people had the right to monitor
leaders’ actions and challenge them in print in order to preserve liberty” (Schaller 2013, 191).
Link to The Boston News-letter: http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/firsts/newspaper/
The Age of Enlightenment
The 17th and 18th centuries saw a new way of thinking about man and his environment. The Age
of Enlightenment began with a scientific revolution that favored reason over tradition. These thoughts
were being promoted in the large number of newspapers and coffee houses in the American colonies.
Immanuel Kant, a German Enlightenment philosopher answered the question of “What is
Enlightenment” with it is “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”. “The Enlightenment in
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America is sometimes conveyed in a single phrase, the political right of self-determination realized”
(Ferguson 1994, 368). Again, Kant explained this as overcoming “the inability to use one’s own
understanding without the guidance of another” (Kant 1784).
David Ramsay, in 1789, wrote “The History of the American Revolution”. In it he said, “in
establishing American independence the pen and the press had equal merit to that of the sword”
(Ferguson 1994, 426). John Adams believed that Europe, at the time, was ruled by confederation of the
clergy and the feudal system, while Americans established the colonies “in direct opposition to the
canon and feudal systems”. He argued that European princes and clergymen used the ignorance of the
people to keep them subservient (Ferguson 1994, 435), thus “care has been taken that the art of printing
should be encouraged and that it should be easy and cheap and safe for any person to communicate his
throught to the public” (Adams, 1765). It was at about this time, newspapers started referring to the
colonists as Americans instead of Englishmen (Ferguson 1994, 436).
The pamphlet was the perfect medium to circulate the radical thoughts. The most famous one of
the time was Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine, originally published anonymously in early 1776.
The pamphlet became a rallying cry for independence with what Paine said was, “nothing more than
simple facts, plain arguments and common sense” (Paine 1776).
Link to Common Sense’s original title page: http://www.earlyamerica.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/01/CommonSenseTitlePage.jpg
What Did They Make?
The Declaration of Independence
As Great Britain tried to take more control over the colonies Parliament passed more and more
regulations restricting commerce and taxing the colonists to pay for Great Britain’s debts. It finally got
to be too much.
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and
usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over
these States.
A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit
to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British
brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature an
unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our
emigration and settlement here” (Declaration of Independence).
The American Declaration of Independence was not the first declaration the world had seen. It
was not addressed to the King, Parliament or Great Britain, but to world. It was a declaration of
independence and a declaration of war.
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The Declaration uses phrases that can be found in many Enlightenment era writings but the meat
of the text draws upon the public documents of the colonies themselves- state constitutions, compacts,
and resolutions. The document is a combination of the shared grievances of the thirteen colonies against
the tyranny of a too powerful central government.
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