UNIT II: The First Colonies
Virginia Settlement
The first English settlers in America came to work for private companies which had been
granted trading charters by the English Crown, such as the Virginia Company. The leaders of
the Virginia Company were for the most part wealthy and wellborn commercial and military
adventurers eager to find new outlets for investment. In 1607, they founded Virginia, the first
British colony in North America.
The early years of the Jamestown settlement were hard ones. The settlers failed to grow
enough food to feed themselves. They were too busy dreaming of finding gold as the Spanish
conquerors had done in Mexico. And then the settlers began to die. Some died in Amerindian
attacks, some of diseases, some of starvation. By April 1608, out of total of 197 Englishmen
who had landed in Virginia, only fifty-three were still alive.
Yet new settlers continued to arrive. The Virginia Company gathered homeless children from
the streets of London and sent them out to the colony. Then it sent a hundred convicts from
London’s prison. Such emigrants were often unwilling to go. However, some others sailed
willingly. For many English people, these early years of the 17th C were a time of hunger and
suffering. Virginia offered poor people the possibility of farming their own land to feed their
families, something that in Europe only rich people could afford.
The colony survived and flourished by developing tobacco as a cash crop for the colony; it
served as a beginning for the colonial state of Virginia.
Puritan New England
“Pilgrims” are people who make a journey for religious reasons. But for Americans the word
has a special meaning. To them it means a small group of English men and women who sailed
across the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1620. The group’s members came to be called the
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Pilgrims because they went to America to find religious freedom. Sometimes Americans call
them the Pilgrim Fathers. This is because they see them as the most important of the founders
of the future United States of America.
In England, reform-minded men and women had been calling for greater changes to the
English national church since the 1580s. These reformers, who followed the teachings of John
Calvin and other Protestant reformers, were called Puritans because of their insistence on
“purifying” the Church of England of what they believed to be un-scriptural, especially Catholic
elements that lingered in its institutions and practices. The conflict generated by Puritanism
had divided English society, because the Puritans demanded reforms that undermined the
traditional festive culture. During the 1620s and 1630s, the conflict escalated to the point
where the state church prohibited Puritan ministers from preaching. In the church’s view,
Puritans represented a national security threat because their demands for cultural, social, and
religious reforms undermined the king’s authority. Unwilling to conform to the Church of
England, many Puritans sought refuge in the New World. Thousands of Puritans left their
English homes not to establish a land of religious freedom, but to practice their own religion
without persecution. Puritan New England offered them the opportunity to live as they
believed the Bible demanded. In their “New” England, they set out to create a model of
reformed Protestantism. Yet those who emigrated to the Americas were not united; some
called for a complete break with the Church of England (Pilgrims), while others remained
committed to reforming the national church (Puritans).
Plymouth: The First Puritan Colony
In 1620, the first group of Puritans to make their way across the Atlantic was a small
contingent known as the Pilgrims. They founded Plymouth Colony in present-day
Massachusetts. The governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, was a separatist, a proponent of
complete separation from the English state church. On board the Mayflower, which was bound
for Virginia but landed on the tip of Cape Cod, Bradford and 40 other adult men signed the
Mayflower Compact, which presented a religious (rather than an economic) rationale for
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colonization. When a larger exodus of Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in
the 1630s, the Pilgrims at Plymouth welcomed them and the two colonies cooperated with
each other.
The early years were relatively peaceful between the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the people who
had inhabited the land for centuries. Several American Indians were crucial in helping the
Pilgrims survive in the new land teaching them how to farm and fertilize the soil. However this
peace would not last.
The 13 Colonies Chart
