Irene C. answered • 09/11/21
ESL and History Tutor
The New England colonies of British America were known for their thin, rocky soil, and for the strict form of Protestant Christianity practiced by the dissenters from the Church of England who emigrated to North America and settled in the region in the early 17th century. By that time, the region's indigenous societies (who called it "Dawnland") had already been decimated by the spread of European diseases that marked the Columbian Exchange.
Because the soil of New England was not suitable for intensive agriculture focused on cash crops, the dense English settlements of the region's colonies were based mainly on coastal trade of commodities across the Atlantic and small freehold subsistence farming. As the colonies matured, shipbuilding would also develop as an industry.
Above all, the New England colonies were known for their strict Puritanism, a set of religious doctrines based on the ideas of Swiss theologian John Calvin which focused on the effects of original sin on humanity. The English Puritans had tried to bring these ideas to the Church of England, which had kept many aspects of the Catholic Church even a century after splitting from it. When they felt the Church of England could not be "purified", some Puritans decided to emigrate to North America to build new communities where they could make their vision of a righteous society a reality.
The Southern colonies began with the first landing of European settlers in eastern mainland North America in the 1580s. The colony these English people (perhaps accompanied by other Europeans) attempted to establish may have been absorbed by the surrounding indigenous society. The first permanent English settlement was established at Jamestown in 1607, and after its own precarious start, Virginia became a booming mercantile region based on tobacco cultivation. The first African enslaved people were purchased by Englishman on the Virginia coast in 1619. The soil of this region was rich and well-suited to monocultural agriculture. In the wake of the English Civil War in the 1650s, cavalier aristocrats fleeing the brief English Republic under Oliver Cromwell began to shape Virginia and the new "Carolina" colony into the hierarchical, caste-based social system that has been the region's hallmark. In 1662 the personal status law was changed so that status of children followed the status of their mother -- an enslaved woman could give birth to enslaved children, regardless of the father's status. In the following decades, the concept of "race" would continue to harden, as the aristocrats sought to divide the enslaved Africans from the common British-born whites, especially following Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion in 1676.
These cavaliers were loyal members of the Church of England. But starting in the early 18th century Britons who came from the area around the English/Scottish border began migrating to the southern and middle colonies. They were mostly Presbyterian in religion, and very different in manners and mentality from the English aristocrats. They would settle in the "backcountry", or west, of the colonies from Pennsylvania south to South Carolina. Their subsistence agriculture was less organized and more individualistic than that of the New Englanders', and they relied more on hogs.
The two largest middle colonies, New York and Pennsylvania, were distinct from each other as well as from the other regions of British America. New Amsterdam, founded by mercantile citizens of the cosmopolitan Dutch Republic, was diverse from the time of its beginnings on Manhattan Island. Pennsylvania was another idealistic (or ideological) experiment by English dissenters -- Quakers in the place of New England Puritans. Philadelphia was a smaller port than New Amsterdam, but still a mercantile city. In the 18th century, it flowered as a center of Enlightenment sociability and scientific and philosophical inquiry. By the eve of the American Revolution, it was the largest town in British America.
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