Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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Religion played a crucial role in shaping northern colonial settlement. In Canada, the Catholic Counterreformation added a missionary zeal to early French exploration and colonization. French Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, helped to win acceptance among the native Indians of the Canadian interior for the few French soldiers, traders, and settlers there-whose interest was in trade more than land. At the same time, the impact of Protestantism in England played a major part in motivating the settlement of Puritan New England, and later the Quaker exodus to Pennsylvania.

The Founding of New England

As the French slowly established a presence in Canada, radical Puritans-followers of John Calvin with a passion to purify the English church and society-fled persecution and "corruption" in England, planting settlements between Maine and Long Island. The first New England settlers, the Separatists or "Pilgrims," were humble English farmers and craftworkers who first sought refuge in the Netherlands. Concern for their children prompted them to found the Plymouth colony in 1620.

A larger and more important wave of Puritan migration first reached the shores of what became the adjacent colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Led by John Winthrop, an English landowner and gentleman, this group of Puritan migrants were wealthier and more prominent than the Pilgrim Separatists. They differed, too, in still believing the Church of England could be purified from within. Hence, settlers of the new Massachusetts Bay Colony shared a compelling vision to make their settlement a model for social and religious reform back in England.

New England Communities

Despite the differences, the New England colonies were more notable for their similarities. The distinguishing features of early New England society included rapid population growth through natural increase, tight knit communities committed to stability and order, large families headed by patriarchal fathers, reliance on subsistence agriculture and widespread land ownership, a rough economic equality and an absence of bound labor.

Strengthening the stability of early New England society were the shared commitment to Puritanism, Congregational churches whose members had to demonstrate a "converted" heart and life, and a strong tradition of self-government at both the town and colony level. In all of these respects, New England contrasted strikingly with the early American South.

Despite its coherence and order, early New England did not lack conflict. Devout New Englanders could fight fiercely over the proper application of Puritan convictions, and even expelled dissenters like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. On occasion, tension between white and Indian settlements erupted into violent confrontations-the Pequot War and Metacomet's War.

The Middle Colonies

The Middle Colonies shared with New England comparable agrarian economies, systems of free labor, and patterns of rapid population growth. Unlike New England, however, all of the Middle Colonies were ruled by proprietary governments, like Maryland and South Carolina. Representative government was therefore weaker, and civic life more embattled-a situation compounded by ethnic and religious diversity.

In New York, for example, Dutch Calvinist settlers, whose residence in that colony dated from its founding by the Netherlands in 1624, were joined by English Anglicans and Puritans, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, Scandinavian Lutherans, and African Americans, both slave and free. New Jersey, granted to a pair of proprietors who divided their holding, was even more complicated.

Relations between whites and Indians in the Middle Colonies also developed differently. While the Puritans sought to subdue the New England tribes, New Yorkers conciliated the powerful league of the Iroquois in order to maintain a competitive edge over the French for the fur trade. And for many decades, Quaker Pennsylvanians coexisted peaceably with the Lenni Lenapes.

Pennsylvania's Quakers practiced tolerance toward not only native Americans but also religious dissenters. Yet like the Puritans, Quakers hoped to create a religious utopia, based on remarkably egalitarian ideals. Pennsylvania's economy grew rapidly, anchored by the trade flowing through the thriving port town of Philadelphia-soon to be commercial and cultural center of British North America. Yet prosperous, religious Pennsylvania still was rent by political strife.

Adjustment to Empire

The later Stuart monarchs, Charles II and James II, attempted to centralize England's American empire. Their efforts created serious disruptions of political life in every northern colony except newly established Pennsylvania. The crown's experiment in centralization, the Dominion of New England, ended with the Glorious Revolution in 1688: James II was replaced on the throne by William and Mary. New England weathered these years of political instability without severe internal turmoil, although Massachusetts came under crown authority. New Yorkers, however, responded with violence and vicious political infighting in the wake of Leisler's Rebellion.

The dismantling of the Dominion greatly reduced the tensions between England and its colonies. For more than half a century, English monarchs gave up efforts to impose a strict, centralized administration on America. The virtual self-rule enjoyed by the colonies reflected the reality that these outposts of English civilization had matured into firmly rooted societies.

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