Early English Migration Map
New England
Different!
• Objective more idealistic
• Freedom of Worship
• More faithfully
reproduced English life in
the New World
• Social life; town life –
more dynamic settlement!
Plymouth Rock - 1620
Plymouth
• First permanent colony in the north
• Pilgrims – religious left-wingers
• Separatists – fled the country
– 1609 to Holland
– 1620 to Americas
• Hit the beach at Plymouth Rock
– Not a successful colony
– Boston much more so
Boston
Massachusetts Bay Colony
Members were Puritans
The most obvious difference between the Pilgrims and the
Puritans is that the Puritans had no intention of
breaking with the Anglican church. The Puritans were
nonconformists as were the Pilgrims, both of which
refusing to accept an authority beyond that of the
revealed word. But where with the Pilgrims this had
translated into something closer to an egalitarian mode,
the Puritans considered religion a very complex, subtle,
and highly intellectual affair," and its leaders thus were
highly trained scholars, whose education tended to
translate into positions that were often authoritarian.
Map – early New England Migration
Land Distribution
• Distinctive “New
England” style
• Compact
communities
• Adjacent
Land Survey Systems
Anyway
• Lots of 5 to 10 acres – house, garden and
orchard
• Very egalatarian
• Assigned by drawing
• Some variation - e.g., proprietor go first
• Town plots and farm plots
• Purpose – communities of small
landholders
Village Green
• Commons (…and the
tragedy thereof)
Sum – advantages:
• Compactness of settlement – social and
cultural values could be maintained
• Quote……
Josiah Holland, 1855 in
History of Massachusetts
“The influence of this policy (community
settlement) can only be fully appreciated when
standing by the side of the solitary settler’s hut in
the West, where even an Eastern man has
degnerated to a boor in manners, where his
children have grown up uneducated, and where
the sabbath has become an unknow day, and
religion and its obligations have ceased to
exercise control upon the heart an life.”
Sum - advantages
• Compactness of settlement
• Protection from Indian attack
• Elimination of land speculation – played
very large role in American frontier history
• Tradition of community planning – carried
to much of the west (e.g., Mormon
communities)
Sum - negatives
• Closed societies, once surveyed and
settled, proprietors often refused any more
newcomers
• Hence, privileged landholding class
• Later arrivals often laborers and renters
• Political power – landowners
Aka… the “Landed Gentry”
1680s – New England
• Settlment comparable to that in the south;
i.e., the lowland areas all occupied,
including coast and fertile interior vallesy;
expansion up into the hills, and across the
uplands – societal differences on less
productive land; but then……….
1675-77: King Phillip’s War
The story: Amazon.com
Great Significance:
1) Coastal indian resistance pretty much
eliminated; repopulated – French and
Indian Wars more in the interior for the
next century
2) New institution – military town on
periphery
Map – early colonies
Map – Colonies 1660
Map – Colonies 1672
Other colonies
• New Netherlands – Dutch
1621 – colony of Dutch West India Company
Settlement policy – feudalistic; large tracts of
land to prominent investors (patroons) –
tenant farmers
New Amsterdam, at foot of Manhattan, focus
of all trade in and out of colony.
1664 – captured by English and “New York”
Map – USA pre 1763
1770 - Economy
1770 - Immigrants
1770 - Settlement
Map – boundaries in new nation