Period 2 · 1607–1754

Colonial America

From one English starting point, four very different regions grew: a tobacco Chesapeake, a Puritan New England, a diverse Middle Colonies breadbasket, and a rice-and-indigo Lowcountry. Coerced labor held the southern economies together, shifting after the 1680s from indentured servitude to permanent, hereditary racial slavery. A century of loose imperial supervision taught colonial assemblies to govern themselves, which is exactly why later British control felt like an attack.

English origins and early attempts

The Act of Supremacy (1534) made Henry VIII head of the Church of England.
Puritans wanted deeper reform; the 1588 Armada defeat opened the way west.
Roanoke (1585, 1587) vanished, leaving CROATOAN carved at the site.
Richard Hakluyt argued for colonies: trade, resources, rivalry with Spain.

The Chesapeake: Virginia and Maryland

The profit-seeking Virginia Company sent gentlemen, not farmers, to Jamestown (1607); the Starving Time killed two-thirds.
John Rolfe's tobacco saved Virginia and created constant demand for land and labor.
The headright system gave fifty acres per passage paid.
The House of Burgesses (1619) was the first representative assembly; Maryland's Act of Toleration (1649) protected Trinitarian Christians.

New England: covenant, town, and school

Plymouth's Mayflower Compact (1620) created self-government by consent, not democracy.
John Winthrop called Massachusetts Bay a city upon a hill.
The Great Migration (1630–1642) brought twenty thousand Puritans in families into a healthy climate, so growth came naturally.
Towns centered on meetinghouses and schools; Harvard opened in 1636.

Dissent, expansion, and war

Roger Williams was banished for separating church and state and founded Providence.
Anne Hutchinson was banished in the Antinomian Controversy; Connecticut's Fundamental Orders (1639) dropped the church-membership test.
The Pequot War (1636–1638) and the 1637 Mystic Massacre followed expansion into the Connecticut valley.
Metacom's War (1675–1676) nearly broke New England before English and allied forces won.

Economy, conformity, and Salem

Poor soil pushed New England toward fishing, shipbuilding, and Atlantic trade.
A covenant community policed dress, worship, and behavior.
The Salem witch trials (1692–1693) mixed religious fear, illness, grudges, gender expectations, and property disputes.
More than 150 were accused, nineteen hanged; nobody was burned.

The Middle Colonies

New York began as Dutch New Netherland, seized by England in 1664.
Pennsylvania (1681) was William Penn's holy experiment, and Quakers taught pacifism and toleration.
Dutch, German, Scots-Irish, Swedish, African, and Jewish settlers made it the most diverse region.
Fertile land made it the breadbasket.

The Carolinas and Georgia

Carolina (1663) was settled from Barbados with a ready-made plantation system.
South Carolina's rice and indigo depended on West African rice knowledge; enslaved people were a majority by 1708.
Georgia (1732) was a buffer against Spanish Florida and a chance for the worthy poor, not convicts.

Labor, slavery, and resistance

Indentured servitude traded passage for three to five years of labor.
Chattel slavery made people inheritable property, with status passing through the mother.
After the 1680s planters chose racial slavery: longer lives, costlier servants, and elite interest in dividing poor colonists.
Bacon's Rebellion (1676) burned Jamestown and exposed class conflict; the Stono Rebellion (1739) produced the Negro Act of 1740.

Religion, revival, and society

The Halfway Covenant (1662) let baptized but unconverted members baptize their children.
Deism described a creator knowable through reason and natural law.
The Great Awakening (1730s–1740s) stressed emotional conversion; Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield split congregations into New Lights and Old Lights.
Married women lived under coverture.

Trade, salutary neglect, and imperial war

The Navigation Acts (1660) forced colonial goods onto English ships; weak enforcement encouraged smuggling.
Salutary neglect let assemblies spend a century learning to tax, legislate, and govern.
Franklin's Albany Plan (1754), rejected by colonies and Britain, modeled later union.
The French and Indian War (1754–1763) left Britain victorious and deep in debt.