Britain and Its Colonies

Britain and its Colonies

The England that Queen Elizabeth bequeathed to the Scottish King James I in 1603, like the colonies it would plant, was a unique blend of elements. The language and the people themselves mixed Germanic and Latin ingredients. The Anglican Church mixed Protestant theology and Catholic rituals. And the growth of royal power paradoxically had been linked to the rise of English liberties, in which even Tudor monarchs took pride. In the course of their history, the English people have displayed a genius for “muddling through,” a gift for the pragmatic compromise that defies logic but in the light of experience somehow
works.

THE ENGLISH BACKGROUND
Dominated by England, the British Isles included the distinct kingdoms of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. England, set off from continental Europe by the English Channel, had safe frontiers after the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603. Such comparative isolation enabled the nation to develop institutions quite different from those on the Continent.
Unlike the absolute monarchs of France and Spain, the British rulers had to share power with the aristocracy and a lesser aristocracy, known as the gentry, whose representatives formed the bicameral legislature known as Parliament.

By 1600 the decline of feudal practices was far advanced. The great nobles, decimated by the Wars of the Roses, had been brought to heel by Tudor monarchs and their ranks filled with men loyal to the crown. In fact the only nobles left, strictly speaking, were those who sat in the House of Lords. All others were commoners, and among their ranks the aristocratic pecking order ran through a great class of landholding squires, distinguished mainly by their wealth and bearing the simple titles of “esquire” and “gentleman,” as did many well-to-do townsmen. They in turn mingled freely, and often intermarried, with the classes of yeomen (small freehold farmers) and merchants.

ENGLISH LIBERTIES
It was to these middle classes that the Tudors looked for support and, for want of bureaucrats or a standing army, local government. Chief reliance in the English counties was on the country gentlemen, who usually served as officials without pay. Government, therefore, allowed a large measure of local initiative. Self-rule in the counties and
towns became a habit—one that, along with the offices of justice of the peace and sheriff, English colonists took along to the New World as part of their cultural baggage.

In the making of laws, the monarch’s subjects consented through representatives in the House of Commons. Subjects could be taxed only with the consent of Parliament. By its control of the purse strings, Parliament drew other strands of power into its hands. This structure of powers served as an unwritten constitution. The Magna Carta (Great Charter) of 1215 was a
statement of privileges wrested by certain nobles from the king, but it became part of a broader assumption that the people as a whole had rights that even the monarch could not violate.

A further safeguard of English liberty was the tradition of common law, which had developed since the twelfth century in royal courts established to check the arbitrary power of local nobles.Without laws to cover every detail, judges had to exercise their own ideas of fairness in settling disputes. Decisions once made became precedents for subsequent decisions, and over the years a body of judge-made law developed, the outgrowth more of practical experience than of abstract logic. The courts evolved the principle that people could be arrested or their goods seized only upon a warrant issued by a
court and that individuals were entitled to a trial by a jury of their peers (their equals) in accordance with established rules of evidence.

ENGLISH ENTERPRISE
English liberties inspired a sense of personal initiative and enterprise that spawned prosperity and empire. The ranks of entrepreneurs and adventurers were constantly replenished by the younger sons of the squirearchy, cut off from the estate that the oldest son inherited according to the law of primogeniture (or firstborn). At the same time the
formation of joint-stock companies spurred commercial expansion. These entrepreneurial companies were the ancestors of the modern corporation, in which stockholders, not the government, shared the risks and profits, sometimes for a single venture but more and more on a permanent basis. In the late sixteenth century some of the larger companies managed to get royal charters that entitled them to monopolies in certain areas and even government powers in their outposts. Such companies would become the first instruments of colonization.

For all the vaunted glories of English liberty and enterprise, it was not the best of times for the common people. During the late sixteenth century the “lower sort” in Britain experienced a population explosion that outstripped the ability of the economy to support so many workers. An additional strain on the population was the “enclosure” of farmlands where peasants had lived and worked. For more than two centuries, serfdom had been on the way to extinction as the feudal duties of serfs were transformed into rents and the serfs themselves into tenants. But while tenancy gave people a degree of independence, it also allowed landlords to increase demands and, as the trade in woolen products grew, to “enclose” farmlands and evict the human tenants in favor of sheep. The enclosure movement of the sixteenth century, coupled with the rising population, gave rise to the great number of beggars and rogues who peopled the literature of Elizabethan times and gained immortality in Mother Goose: “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark. The beggars have come to town.” The needs of this displaced peasant population, on the move throughout Great Britain, became another powerful argument for colonial
expansion. The displaced poor migrated from farms to crowded towns and cities. London became a powerful magnet for vagabonds. By the seventeenth century the English capital was notorious for its filth, poverty, crime, and class tensions—all of which helped persuade the ruling elite to send idle and larcenous commoners abroad to settle new colonies.

PARLIAMENT AND THE STUARTS
With the death of Elizabeth, who never married and did not give birth to an heir, the Tudor family line ran out and the throne fell to the first of the Stuarts, whose dynasty would span most of the seventeenth century, a turbulent time during which the English planted their overseas empire. In 1603 James VI of Scotland, son of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, and great-great-grandson of Henry VII, became James I of England—as Elizabeth had planned. A man of ponderous learning, James fully earned his reputation as the “wisest fool in Christendom.” Tall and broad-shouldered, he was bisexual, conceited, profligate, and lazy and possessed an undiplomatic tongue. He lectured the people on every topic but remained blind to English traditions and sensibilities.Whereas the Tudors had wielded absolute power through constitutional forms, James promoted the theory of divine right, by which monarchs answered only to God.Whereas the Puritans hoped to find a Presbyterian ally in their opposition to Anglican trappings, they found instead a testy autocrat who
promised to banish them. He even offended Anglicans, by deciding to end his cousin Elizabeth’s war with Catholic Spain.

Charles I, who succeeded his father James, in 1625, proved even more stubborn about royal power. He disbanded Parliament from 1629 to 1640 and levied taxes by decree. In the religious arena the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, directed a systematic persecution of Puritans but finally overreached himself when he tried to impose Anglican worship on Presbyterian Scots. In 1638 Scotland rose in revolt, and in 1640 Charles called Parliament to raise money for the defense of his kingdom. The “Long Parliament” impeached Laud instead and condemned to death the king’s chief
minister. In 1642, when the king tried to arrest five members of Parliament, civil war erupted between the “Roundheads,” who backed Parliament, and the “Cavaliers,” who supported the king.
In 1646 Royalist resistance collapsed, and parliamentary forces captured the king. Parliament, however, could not agree on a permanent settlement. A dispute arose between Presbyterians and Independents (who preferred a congregational church government), and in 1648 the Independents purged the Presbyterians, leaving a “Rump Parliament” that then instigated the trial and execution of King Charles I on charges of treason.
Oliver Cromwell, the tenacious commander of the army, operated like a military dictator, ruling first through a council chosen by Parliament (the Commonwealth) and, after forcible dissolution of Parliament, as lord protector  (the Protectorate). Cromwell extended religious toleration to all Britons except Catholics and Anglicans, but his arbitrary governance and his stern moralistic codes provoked growing public resentment. When, after his death in 1658, his son proved too weak to carry on, the army once again took control, permitted new elections for Parliament, and in 1660
supported the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, son of the martyred king. Charles II accepted as terms of the Restoration settlement the principle that he must rule jointly with Parliament. By tact or shrewd maneuvering, he managed to hold his throne. His younger brother, the duke of York (who became James II upon succeeding to the throne in 1685), was less flexible. He openly avowed Catholicism and assumed the same unyielding stance as the first two Stuarts. The people could bear it so long as they expected one of his Protestant daughters, Mary or Anne, to succeed him. In 1688, however, the birth of a son who would be reared a Catholic finally brought matters to a crisis. Leaders of Parliament invited Mary and her husband, William of Orange, a Dutch prince, to assume the throne jointly, and James fled the country.

By this “Glorious Revolution,” Parliament finally established its freedom from royal control. Under the Bill of Rights, in 1689,William and Mary gave up the royal prerogatives of suspending laws, erecting special courts, keeping a standing army, or levying taxes except by Parliament’s consent. They further agreed to hold frequent legislative sessions and allow freedom of speech in Parliament, freedom of petition to the crown, and restrictions against excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments. The Act of Toleration of 1689 extended a degree of freedom of worship to all Christians except Catholics and Unitarians, although dissenters from the established church still had few political rights. In 1701 the Act of Settlement ensured Protestant succession through Queen Anne (r. 1702–1714). And by the Act of Union in 1707, England and Scotland became the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

SETTLING THE CHESAPEAKE
During these eventful years all but one of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies had their start. They began as corporations rather than new countries. In 1606 King James I chartered a joint-stock enterprise called the Virginia Company, with two divisions, the First Colony of London and the Second Colony of Plymouth. The London group of investors could plant a settlement between the 34th and 38th parallels, the Plymouth group between the 41st and 45th parallels, and either between the 38th and 41st parallels, provided they kept 100 miles apart. The stockholders expected a potential return from gold and other minerals; products—such as wine, citrus fruits, and olive oil—that would free England from dependence on Spain; trade with the Indians; pitch, tar, potash, and other forest products needed for naval use; and perhaps a passage to east Asia. Some investors saw colonization as an opportunity to transplant the growing number of jobless vagrants from Britain to the New World. Others dreamed of finding another Aztec or Inca Empire. Few if any foresaw what the first English colony would actually become: a place to grow tobacco.

From the outset the pattern of English colonization diverged significantly from the Spanish pattern, which involved conquering highly sophisticated peoples and regulating all aspects of colonial life.While interest in America was growing, the English were already involved in planting settlements, or “plantations,” in Ireland, which the English had conquered by military force under Queen Elizabeth. Within their own pale (or limit) of settlement in Ireland, the English set about transplanting their familiar way of life insofar as possible.

The English would apply the same pattern as they settled North America, subjugating (and converting) the Indians there as they had the Irish in Ireland. Yet in America the English settled along the Atlantic seaboard, where the native populations were relatively sparse. There was no Aztec or Inca Empire to conquer. The colonists thus had to establish their own communities in a largely wilderness setting.Describing the “settlement” of the Atlantic seaboard is somewhat misleading, however, for the British colonists who arrived in the seventeenth century rarely settled in one place for long. They were migrants more than settlers, people who had been on the move in Britain and continued to pursue new opportunities in different places once they arrived in America.

VIRGINIA
The London group of the Virginia Company planted the first permanent colony in Virginia, named after Elizabeth I, “the Virgin Queen.”  On May 6, 1607, three tiny ships carrying 105 men reached Chesapeake Bay after four storm-tossed months at sea. They chose a river with a northwest bend—in the hope of finding a passage to Asia—and settled about forty miles inland, to hide from marauding Spaniards.

The river they called the James and the colony, Jamestown. The seaweary colonists began building a fort, thatched huts, a storehouse, and a church. They then set to planting, but most were either townsmen unfamiliar with farming or “gentleman” adventurers who scorned manual labor. They had come expecting to find gold, friendly natives, and easy living. Instead they found disease, starvation, dissension, and death. Ignorant of woodlore, they did not know how to exploit the area’s abundant game and fish. Supplies from England were undependable, and only some effective leadership and trade with the Indians, who taught the colonists to grow maize, enabled them to survive.

The Indians of the region were loosely organized. Powhatan was the powerful, charismatic chief of numerous Algonquian-speaking towns in eastern Virginia, representing over 10,000 Indians. The Indians making up the socalled Powhatan Confederacy were largely an agricultural people focused on raising corn. They lived along rivers in fortified towns and resided in wood houses sheathed with bark. Chief Powhatan collected tribute from the tribes he had conquered—fully 80 percent of the corn that they grew was handed over. Despite occasional clashes with the colonists, the Indians initially adopted a stance of nervous assistance and watchful waiting. Powhatan developed a lucrative trade with the colonists, exchanging corn and hides for hatchets, swords, and muskets; he realized too late that the newcomers intended to expropriate his lands and subjugate his people.

The colonists, as it happened, had more than a match for Powhatan in Captain John Smith, a stocky twenty-seven-year-old soldier of fortune with rare powers of leadership and self-promotion. The Virginia Company, impressed by Smith’s exploits in foreign wars, had appointed him a member of the council to manage the new colony in America. It was a wise decision. Of the original 105 settlers, only 38 survived the first nine months. With the colonists on the verge of starvation, Smith imposed strict discipline and forced all to labor, declaring that “he that will not work shall not eat.” In dealing with mutinies, skirmishes, and ambushes, he imprisoned, whipped, and forced colonists to labor. Smith also bargained with the Indians and explored and mapped the Chesapeake region. Through his efforts, Jamestown survived, but Smith’s dictatorial acts did not endear him to many of the colonists.

In 1609 the Virginia Company moved to reinforce Jamestown. More colonists were dispatched, including several women. A new charter replaced the largely ineffective council with an all-powerful governor whose council was only advisory. The company then lured new investors and attracted new settlers with the promise of free land after seven years of labor. The company in effect had given up hope of prospering except through the sale of land, which would rise in value as the colony grew. The governor, the noble Lord De La Warr (Delaware), sent as interim governor Sir Thomas Gates. In 1609 Gates set out with a fleet of nine vessels and about 500 passengers and crew. On the way he was shipwrecked on Bermuda, where he and the other survivors wintered in comparative ease, subsisting on fish, fowl, and wild pigs. (Their story was transformed by William Shakespeare into his play The Tempest.) Most of the fleet did reach Jamestown, however. Some 400 settlers overwhelmed the remnant of about 80. All chance that John Smith might control things was lost when he suffered a gunpowder burn and sailed back to England. The consequence was anarchy and the “starving time” of the winter of 1609–1610, during which most of the colonists, weakened by hunger, died of disease or starvation. A prolonged drought had hindered efforts to grow food. By May 1610, when Gates and his companions made their way to Jamestown on two small ships built in Bermuda, only about 60 settlers remained alive. During the winter of 1610, as starvation grew pervasive, desperate colonists consumed their horses, cats, and dogs, then rats and mice. A few even ate the leather from their shoes and boots. Some fled to nearby Indian villages, only to be welcomed with arrows. One man was executed for killing his pregnant wife and feasting on her remains. In June 1610, as the colonists made their way down the river toward the sea, the new governor, Lord Delaware, providentially arrived with three ships and 150 men. The colonists returned to Jamestown and created new settlements upstream at Henrico (Richmond) and two more downstream, near the mouth of the river. It was a critical turning point for the colony, whose survival required a combination of stern measures and not a little luck. When Lord Delaware returned to England in 1611, Gates took charge of the colony and established a strict system of laws. Severe even by the standards of a ruthless age, the new code enforced a militaristic discipline needed for survival.When one laborer was caught stealing oatmeal, the authorities had a long needle thrust through his tongue, chained him to a tree, and let him starve to death as a grisly example to the community. Desperate colonists who fled to join the Indians were caught and hanged or burned at the stake. The new colonial regime also assaulted the local Indians. English colonists attacked Indian villages and destroyed their crops. One commander reported that they marched a captured Indian queen and her children to the river, where they “put the Children to death . . . by throwing them overboard and shooting out their brains in the water.” Over the next seven years the Jamestown colony limped along until it gradually found a reason for being: tobacco. The plant had been grown in the West Indies for years, and smoking had become a popular habit in Europe. In 1612 John Rolfe had begun to experiment with the harsh Virginia tobacco. Eventually he got hold of some seed from the more savory Spanish varieties, and by 1616 the weed had become a profitable export staple. Even though King James dismissed smoking as “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs,” he swallowed his objections to the “noxious weed”when he realized how much revenue it provided the monarchy. Virginia’s tobacco production soared during the seventeenth century. Tobacco was such a profitable crop for Virginia planters that they could afford to purchase more indentured servants, thus increasing the flow of immigrants to the colony. Meanwhile John Rolfe had made another contribution to stability by marrying Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan. Pocahontas (a nickname usually translated as “Frisky”; her given
name was Matoaka) had been a familiar figure in Jamestown almost from the beginning. In 1607, then only eleven, she figured in perhaps the bestknown story of the settlement, her plea for the life of John Smith. Smith had gotten into trouble when he led a small group up the James River in search of a northwest passage. When the Englishmen trespassed on Powhatan’s territory, the Indians attacked. Smith was wounded and captured. Others in his scouting party were tortured and disemboweled. Smith was marched to Powhatan’s village, interrogated, and readied for execution. At that point, according to Smith, Pocahontas made a dramatic appeal for his life, and Powhatan eventually agreed to release the foreigner in exchange for muskets, hatchets, beads, and trinkets.

Schoolchildren still learn the dramatic story of Pocahontas intervening to save Smith. Such dramatic events are magical; they inspire movies, excite our imagination, animate history—and confuse it. Pocahontas and John Smith were never in love. Moreover, the young Indian princess saved the swashbuckling Smith on more than one occasion. Then she herself was captured. In 1614 the Jamestown settlers kidnapped Pocahontas in an effort to blackmail Powhatan. As the weeks passed, however, she surprised her captors by choosing to join them. She embraced Christianity, was renamed Rebecca, and fell in love with John Rolfe. They married and in 1616 moved with their infant son, Thomas, to London. There the young princess drew excited attention from the royal family and curious Londoners. But only a few months after arriving, Rebecca, aged twenty, contracted a lung disease and died.

In 1618 Sir Edwin Sandys, a prominent member of Parliament, became head of the Virginia Company and instituted a series of reforms. First of all he inaugurated a new “headright” policy: anyone who bought a share in the company and could get to Virginia could have fifty acres, and fifty more for any servants. The following year the company relaxed the colony’s military regime and promised that the settlers would have the “rights of Englishmen,” including a representative assembly.

A new governor arrived with instructions to put the new order into effect, and on July 30, 1619, the first General Assembly of Virginia, including the governor, six councilors, and twenty-two burgesses, met in the church at Jamestown and deliberated for five days, “sweating & stewing, and battling flies and mosquitoes.” It was an eventful year in two other respects. The promoters also saw a need to send out more wives for the men. During 1619 a ship arrived with ninety young women, who were to be sold to likely husbands of their own choice for the cost of transportation (about 125 pounds of tobacco). And a Dutch ship stopped by and dropped off “20 Negars,” the first Africans known to have reached English America. The profitable tobacco trade intensified the settlers’ lust for land. They especially coveted Indian fields because they had already been cleared and were ready to be planted. In 1622 the Indians, led by Opechancanough, Powhatan’s
brother and successor, tried to repel the land-grabbing English. They killed one fourth of the settlers, some 350 colonists, including John Rolfe (who had returned from England). In England, John Smith denounced the Indian assault as a “massacre” and dismissed the “savages” as “cruel beasts” whose “brutishness” exceeded that of wild animals.Whatever moral doubts had earlier plagued English settlers were now swept away. The English thereafter sought to wipe out the Indian presence along their frontier. Some 14,000 men, women, and children had migrated to Jamestown since 1607, but most of them had died; the population in 1624 stood at a precarious 1,132. Despite the initial achievements of the company, after about 1617 a handful of insiders appropriated large estates and began to monopolize the indentured workers. Some made fortunes from the tobacco boom, but most of the thousands sent out died before they could prove themselves. In 1624 an English court dissolved the struggling Virginia Company, and Virginia became a royal colony. The king did not renew instructions for a legislative assembly, but his governors found it impossible to rule the troublesome Virginians without one.
Annual assemblies met after 1629, although they were not recognized by the crown for another ten years. After 1622 relations with the Indians continued in a state of what the governor’s council called “perpetual enmity.” The combination of warfare and disease decimated the Indians in Virginia. The 24,000 Algonquians who inhabited the colony in 1607 were reduced to 2,000 by 1669.

Sir William Berkeley, who arrived as Virginia’s governor in 1642, presided over the colony’s growth for most of the next thirty-five years. The turmoil of Virginia’s early days gave way to a more stable period. Tobacco prices peaked, and the large planters began to consolidate their economic gains through political action. They assumed key civic roles as justices of the peace and sheriffs, helped initiate internal improvements such as roads and bridges, supervised elections, and collected taxes. They also formed the able-bodied men into local militias. Despite the presence of a royal governor, the elected Virginia assembly continued to assert its sovereignty, making laws for the colony and resisting the governor’s encroachments. Virginia at midcentury continued to serve as a magnet for new settlers. As the sharp rise in tobacco profits leveled off, planters began to grow corn and raise cattle. The increase in the food supply helped lower mortality rates and fuel a rapid rise in population. By 1650 there were 15,000 white residents of Virginia. Many former servants became planters in their own right.Women typically improved their status through marriage. If they outlived their husbands— and many did—they inherited the property and often increased their wealth through second and even third marriages.
The relentless stream of new settlers into Virginia exerted constant pressure on Indian lands and produced unwanted economic effects. The increase in the number of planters spurred a dramatic rise in agricultural production. That in turn caused the cost of land to soar and the price of tobacco to plummet. To sustain their competitive advantage, the largest planters bought up the most fertile land along the coast, thereby forcing freed servants to become tenants or claim less fertile land inland. In either case the tenants found themselves at a disadvantage. They grew dependent on planters for land and credit, and small farmers along the frontier became more vulnerable to Indian attacks.

The plight of the common folk worsened after 1660, when a restored monarchy under Charles II instituted new trade regulations for the colonies. By 1676 one fourth of the free white men in Virginia were landless.Vagabonds roamed the roads, squatting on private property, working at odd jobs, or poaching game or engaging in other petty crimes in order to survive. Alarmed by the growing social unrest, the large planters who controlled the assembly— generally ruthless and callous men—lengthened terms of indenture, passed more stringent vagrancy laws, stiffened punishments, and stripped the landless of their political rights. Such efforts only increased social friction.

BACON’S REBELLION
A variety of simmering tensions—caused by depressed tobacco prices, rising taxes, roaming livestock, and crowds of
freed servants greedily eyeing Indian lands—contributed to the tangled events that have come to be labeled Bacon’s Rebellion. The roots of the revolt grew out of a festering hatred for the domineering colonial governor, William Berkeley. He had limited his circle of friends to the wealthiest
planters, and he had granted them most of the frontier land and public offices. He despised commoners. The large planters who dominated the assembly levied high taxes to finance Berkeley’s regime, which in turn supported their interests at the expense of the small farmers and servants. With little nearby land available, newly freed indentured servants were
forced to migrate westward in their quest for farms. Their lust for land led them to displace the Indians.When Governor Berkeley failed to support the aspiring farmers, they rebelled. The tyrannical governor expected as much. Just before the outbreak of rebellion, Berkeley had remarked in a letter: “How miserable that man is that Governes a People where six parts of seaven at least are Poore, Endebted, Discontented and Armed.” The discontent turned to violence in 1675 when a petty squabble between a frontier planter and the Doeg Indians on the Potomac River led to the murder of the planter’s herdsman and, in turn, to retaliation by frontier militiamen, who killed ten or more Doegs and, by mistake, fourteen Susquehannocks.
Soon a force of Virginia and Maryland militiamen attacked the Susquehannocks and murdered five chieftains who had come out to negotiate. The enraged survivors took their revenge on frontier settlements. Scattered attacks continued on down to the James River, where Nathaniel Bacon’s overseer was killed.

By then, their revenge accomplished, the Susquehannocks had pulled back. What followed had less to do with a state of war than with a state of hysteria. Governor Berkeley proposed that the assembly erect a series of forts along the frontier. But that would not slake the English thirst for revenge— nor would it open new lands to settlement. Besides, it would be expensive.
Some thought Berkeley was out to preserve a profitable fur trade for himself. In 1676 Nathaniel Bacon defied Governor Berkeley’s authority by assuming command of a group of frontier vigilantes. The tall, slender twentynine- year-old Bacon, a graduate of Cambridge University, had been in Virginia only two years, but he had been well set up by an English father relieved to get his vain, ambitious, hot-tempered son out of the country. Later historians would praise Bacon as the “Torchbearer of the Revolution” and leader of the first struggle of common folk versus aristocrats. In part that was true. The rebellion he led was largely a battle of servants, small farmers, and even slaves against Virginia’s wealthiest planters and political leaders. But Bacon was also a rich squire’s spoiled son with a talent for trouble. It was his ruthless assaults against peaceful Indians and his desire for power and land rather than any commitment to democratic principles that sparked his
conflict with the governing authorities.

Bacon despised the Indians and resolved to kill them all. Berkeley opposed Bacon’s genocidal plan not because he liked Indians but because he wanted to protect his lucrative monopoly over the deerskin trade with the Indians. Bacon ordered the governor arrested. Berkeley’s forces resisted—but only feebly—and Bacon’s men burned Jamestown. Bacon, however, could not savor the victory long; he fell ill and died of dysentery a month later. Governor Berkeley quickly regained control; he hanged twenty-three rebels and confiscated several estates. When his men captured one of Bacon’s closest lieutenants, Berkeley gleefully exclaimed: “I am more glad to see you than any man in Virginia. Mr. Drummond, you shall be hanged in
half an hour.” For such severity the king denounced Berkeley as a “fool” and recalled him to England, where he died within a year. A royal commission made peace treaties with the remaining Indians, about 1,500 of whose descendants
still live in Virginia on tiny reservations guaranteed them in 1677. The end result of Bacon’s Rebellion was that new lands were opened to the colonists, and the wealthy planters became more cooperative with the small farmers.

MARYLAND
In 1634, ten years after Virginia became a royal colony, a neighboring settlement appeared on the northern shores of Chesapeake Bay. Named Maryland in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, it was granted to Lord Baltimore by King Charles I and became the first proprietary colony— that is, it was owned by an individual, not a joint-stock company. Sir George
Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, had announced in 1625 his conversion to Catholicism and sought the colony as a refuge for English Catholics, who were subjected to discrimination at home. His son, Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, actually founded the colony. In 1634 Calvert planted the first settlement in Maryland at St.Marys, on a small stream near the mouth of the Potomac River. Calvert brought Catholic gentlemen as landholders, but a majority of the servants were Protestants. The charter gave Calvert power to make laws with the consent of the freemen (all property holders). The first legislative assembly met in 1635 and divided into two houses in 1650, with governor and council sitting separately. This action was instigated by the predominantly Protestant freemen— largely servants who had become landholders and immigrants from Virginia. The charter also empowered the proprietor to grant huge manorial estates, and Maryland had some sixty before 1676, but the Lords Baltimore soon found that to draw settlers they had to offer them small farms. The colony was meant to rely upon mixed farming, but its fortunes, like those of Virginia, soon came to depend upon tobacco.
SETTLING NEW ENGLAND

Far to the north of the Chesapeake Bay colonies, quite different settlements were emerging. The New England colonists were generally made up of middle-class families who could pay their own way across the Atlantic. In the Northeast there were relatively few indentured servants, and there was no planter elite. Most male settlers were small farmers, merchants, seamen, or fishermen. New England also became home to more women than did the southern colonies. Although its soil was not as fertile as that of the Chesapeake and its farmers not as wealthy as the southern planters, New England was a much healthier place to settle. Because of its colder climate, the region did not foster the infectious diseases that ravaged the southern colonies. Life expectancy was much longer. During the seventeenth century only 21,000 colonists arrived in New England, compared with the 120,000 who went to the Chesapeake. But by 1700 New England’s white population exceeded that of Maryland and Virginia.

Most early New Englanders were devout Puritans, who embraced a much more rigorous faith than the Anglicans of Virginia and Maryland. In 1650, for example, Massachusetts boasted one minister for every 415 persons, compared with one minister per 3,239 persons in Virginia. The Puritans who arrived in America believed themselves to be on a divine mission to create a model society committed to the proper worship of God. In their efforts to separate themselves from a sinful England and its authoritarian Anglican bishops, New England’s zealous Puritans sought to create “holy commonwealths”
that would help inspire a spiritual transformation in their homeland. In the New World these self-described “saints” could purify their churches of all Catholic and Anglican rituals, supervise one another in practicing a communal faith, and enact a code of laws and a government structure based on biblical principles. Such a holy settlement, they hoped, would provide a beacon of righteousness for a wicked England to emulate.

PLYMOUTH
In 1620 a band of English settlers headed for Virginia strayed off course and made landfall at Cape Cod, off the coast of Massachusetts. There they decided to establish a colony, naming it Plymouth after the English port from which they had embarked. The “Pilgrims” who established the Plymouth Plantation belonged to the most uncompromising sect of Puritans, the Separatists, who had severed all ties with the Church of England. Many Separatists had fled to Holland in 1607 to escape persecution. After ten years in the Dutch city of Leiden, they longed for English ways and the English flag. If they could not have them at home, perhaps they might transplant them to the New World.

The Leiden Separatists secured a land patent from the Virginia Company and set up a joint-stock company. In 1620, 102 men, women, and children, led by William Bradford, crammed aboard the three-masted Mayflower. Their ranks included both “saints” (people recognized as having been elected by God for salvation) and “strangers” (those yet to receive the gift of grace). The latter group included John Alden, a cooper (barrel maker), and Myles Standish, a soldier hired to organize their defenses. The stormy voyage had led them to Cape Cod. “Being thus arrived at safe harbor, and brought safe to land,”William Bradford wrote, “they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean.” Since they were outside the jurisdiction of any organized government, forty-one of the Pilgrim leaders entered into a formal agreement to abide by the laws made by leaders of their own choosing—the Mayflower
Compact.

On December 26 the Mayflower reached the harbor of the place they named Plymouth and stayed there until April to give shelter and support while the Pilgrims built dwellings on the site of an abandoned Indian village.Nearly half the colonists died of exposure and disease, but friendly relations with the neighboring Wampanoag Indians proved their salvation. In the spring of 1621, the colonists met Squanto, an Indian who spoke English and showed them how to grow maize. By autumn the Pilgrims had a bumper crop of corn, a flourishing fur trade, and a supply of lumber for shipment. To celebrate, they held a harvest feast in the company of Chief Massasoit and the Wampanoags. That event provided the inspiration for what has become Thanksgiving.

In 1623 Plymouth gave up its original communal economy and stipulated that now each male settler was to provide for his family from his own land. Throughout its separate existence, until absorbed into Massachusetts in 1691, the Plymouth colony remained in the anomalous position of holding a land grant but no charter of government from any English authority. The government grew instead out of the Mayflower Compact, which was neither exactly a constitution nor a precedent for later constitutions. Rather, it was the obvious recourse of a group that had made a covenant (or agreement) to form a church and believed God had made a covenant with them to provide a way to salvation. Thus the civil government grew naturally out of the church government, and the members of each were identical at the start. The signers of the compact at first met as the General Court, which chose the governor and his assistants (or council). Later others were admitted as members,
or “freemen,” but only church members were eligible. Eventually, as the colony grew, the General Court became a body of representatives from the various towns.
MASSACHUSETTS BAY
The Plymouth colony’s population never rose above 7,000, and after ten years it was overshadowed by its larger neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It, too, was originally intended to be a holy commonwealth made up of religious folk bound together in the harmonious worship of God and the pursuit of their “callings.” Like the Pilgrims, most of the Puritans who colonized Massachusetts Bay were Congregationalists, who formed self-governing churches with membership limited to “visible saints”—those who could demonstrate receipt of the gift of God’s grace. But unlike the Plymouth Separatists, the Puritans (who referred to themselves as the “godly”) still hoped to reform the Church of England, and therefore they were called Nonseparating Congregationalists. In 1629 King Charles I issued a charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company to a group of English Puritans led by John Winthrop, a lawyer from East Anglia animated by profound religious onvictions. Winthrop, tall and strong with a long face, resolved to use the colony as a refuge for persecuted Puritans and as an instrument for building a “wilderness Zion” in America.

Winthrop shrewdly took advantage of a fateful omission in the royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company: the usual proviso that the company maintain its home office in England. Winthrop’s group took its
charter with them, thereby transferring government authority to Massachusetts Bay, where they hoped to
ensure Puritan control. So unlike the Virginia Company, which ruled Jamestown from London, the Massachusetts Bay Company was selfgoverning. In 1630 the Arbella, with John Winthrop and the charter aboard, embarked with six other ships for Massachusetts. In “A Modell of Christian Charity,” a lay sermon delivered on board,Winthrop told his fellow Puritans that “we must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill”—a shining example of what a godly community could be. They landed in Massachusetts, and by the end of the year seventeen ships bearing 1,000 more colonists had arrived. As settlers—both Puritan and non-Puritan—poured into the region, Boston became the new colony’s chief city and capital. The Arbella migrants proved to be the vanguard of a massive movement, the Great Migration, that carried some 80,000 Britons to new settlements around the world over the next decade. Fleeing religious persecution and economic depression at home, they gravitated to Ireland, the Netherlands, and the Rhineland. But the majority traveled to the New World. They went not only to New England and the Chesapeake but also to new English settlements in the Caribbean. The transfer of the Massachusetts charter, whereby an English trading company evolved into a provincial government, was a unique venture in colonization. Under the royal charter, power in the company rested with the Massachusetts General Court, which elected the governor and the assistants. The General Court consisted of shareholders, called freemen (those who had the “freedom of the company”), but only a few besides Winthrop and his assistants had such status. That suited Winthrop and his friends, but then over 100 settlers asked to be admitted as freemen. Rather than risk trouble, the ruling group finally admitted 118 in 1631, stipulating that only church members could become freemen.

At first the freemen had no power except to choose “assistants,” who in turn chose the governor and deputy governor. The procedure violated provisions of the charter, but Winthrop kept the document hidden and few knew of the exact provisions. Controversy simmered until 1634, when each town sent two delegates to Boston to confer on matters coming before the General Court. There they demanded to see the charter, which Winthrop reluctantly produced, and they read that the power to pass laws and levy taxes rested in the General Court. Winthrop argued that the body of freemen had grown too large, but when it met, the General Court responded by turning itself into a representative body with two or three deputies to represent each town. The freemen also chose a new governor, and Winthrop did not resume the office until three years later. A final stage in the evolution of the government, a two-house legislature, came in 1644, when, according to Winthrop, “there fell out a great business upon a very small occasion.” The “small occasion” pitted a poor widow against a well-to-do merchant over ownership of a stray sow. The General Court, being the supreme judicial as well as legislative body, was the final authority in the case. Popular sympathy and the deputies favored the widow, but the assistants disagreed. The case was finally settled out of court, but the assistants feared being outvoted on some greater occasion. They therefore secured a separation into two houses, and Massachusetts thenceforth had a bicameral assembly, the deputies and assistants sitting apart, with all decisions requiring a majority in each house.

Thus over a period of fourteen years, the Massachusetts Bay Company, a trading corporation, evolved into the governing body of a commonwealth. Membership in a Puritan church replaced the purchase of stock as the means of becoming a freeman, which was to say a voter. The General Court, like Parliament, became a representative body of two houses: the House of Assistants corresponding roughly to the House of Lords and the House of Deputies corresponding to the House of Commons. The charter remained unchanged, but practice under the charter was quite different from the original  expectation. It is hard to exaggerate the crucial role played by John Winthrop in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He had been a man of limited means and little stature who nonetheless, as the new colony’s godly governor, summoned up extraordinary leadership abilities. A devout pragmatist who often governed as an enlightened despot, he steadfastly sought to steer a middle course between clerical absolutists and Separatist zealots. Winthrop firmly believed that God had chosen him to create a godly community in the New World. His stern charisma and his indefatigable faith in the ideal of Christian republicanism enabled him to fend off Indian attacks and antinomian insurgencies as well as political challenges. He also thwarted the efforts of powerful foes in England who challenged the infant colony’s legality. An iron-souled man governing a God-saturated community, John Winthrop  provided the foundation not only for a colony but also for major elements in America’s cultural and political development.