History concepts and overview

¶ … English Colonies

Many Europeans viewed America as the New World. To them this was a world full of new expectations, opportunities and, for others, the chance of a new beginning. The success, or failure, of the early settlers was largely dependant on the motives and expectations that they brought with them, but also on the way in which they dealt with the problems awaiting them in their new land. Just as with the Spanish settlers of the 16th Century, the inhabitants of the first permanent English colonies, at Jamestown in Virginia and Plymouth in New England, came to America with differing motives and an individual set of expectations. Records appear to suggest, however, that in pursuit of their opportunities, the colony at Jamestown adopted an approach that was similar to that of the Spanish, unlike their counterparts in Plymouth.

Those who traveled to America did so for a wide variety of personal and economic reasons. Among the most common were, the desire for wealth, the quest for political or religious freedom, the setting up of trade routes, and the claiming of land on behalf of their native countries. The Spanish came, initially, to the New World in the hope of creating a trade route with the East, but concluded that America was a source of wealth in itself. The first Spanish settlers in America were interested only in exploiting the American stores of gold and silver, and the discovery of these riches made Spain one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth. This empire, however, was built upon the murder of native populations and the destruction of native cultures. In addition, while the earliest Spanish ventures in the New World had operated independently, by the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish monarchy had taken control over the governance of local communities, forbidding the Spanish colonists from governing themselves (Brinkley, 1993).

In the early years of the seventeenth century, the London Company (later to become the Virginia Company) sent a group of settlers to colonize Virginia. They reached the American coast in the spring of 1607, sailed into Chesapeake Bay and up a river they named the James, and establishing the colony of Jamestown. For seventeen years, one wave of settlers after another attempted to make Jamestown a habitable and profitable colony, without much success (Virtual Jamestown). The colony became a place of misery and death, and the London Company was facing economic disaster. The initial colonists ran into serious difficulties from the moment they landed, because like the Spanish, the Jamestown colonists had no system of leadership or self-government (Brinkley, 1993). Additionally, with the colony being, primarily, a business enterprise, the London Company was desperate for a profit on their investment. For this reason, they encouraged the colonists to focus their energy on futile searches for gold and iron, rather than on developing the land and growing food. The company also had little interest in creating a family-centered community, and they sent virtually no women to Jamestown. The settlers, therefore, could not establish real households and had difficulty feeling any sense of community. In January 1608, with the colony at Jamestown almost extinct, Captain John Smith took control and imposed work and order on the community. He also organized raids on neighboring Indian villages to steal food and kidnap natives. However, still less than half the settlers survived the first few years of the colony and the London Company (now renamed the Virginia Company) was forced to send more settlers and large quantities of supplies to the struggling colony (Brinkley, 1993). The savior of Jamestown, however, was the discovery of tobacco, which they were able to trade to Europe and guarantee the colony's success. The expansion of the colony required more labor and, in similar fashion to the Spanish, the Jamestown settlers resorted to exploiting the native Indian population, in addition to importing African slave labor (Brinkley, 1993).

The settlers who first colonized New England set sail from Plymouth, England in September 1620, aboard the Mayflower. Unlike the Jamestown and Spanish colonies, the Plymouth settlers were not primarily driven by economic success and trade, but by a search for religious freedom. Known as the 'Pilgrims', they chose a site for their settlement in a place John Smith had labeled "Plymouth," on a map he had drawn during an earlier exploration of New England. Because Plymouth lay outside the London Company's territory, the settlers were not bound by the company's rules so, while still aboard the ship, the Pilgrims drew up an agreement called the Mayflower Compact, which established a civil, and democratic, government (Ayers, 1999). Two of the important principles within the Mayflower Compact; that the people would vote about the government and the laws; and that the people would accept whatever the majority chose; would later become important tenets of the American Constitution. On December 21, 1620 they stepped ashore at Plymouth Rock. Just as in Jamestown, the Pilgrims' first winter was a difficult one, with Half the colonists perishing from malnutrition, disease, and exposure. But, unlike the Jamestown and Spanish settlers, the Plymouth colony had sought and maintained good relationships with the local Indians. It was mainly due to the assistance of the natives, who showed the Pilgrims how to gather seafood and cultivate corn, that the colony was able to survive (Brinkley, 1993). After the first autumn harvest, the settlers invited the natives to join them in a festival, the original Thanksgiving (Ayers, 1999). The Pilgrims could not create rich farms on the sandy and marshy soil around Plymouth, but they developed a profitable trade in fish and furs. New colonists arrived from England and, although the Pilgrims were always a poor community, they were content to be left alone to live their lives in peace, with a large degree of self-governance.