The English Colonies

The English Colonies

During the 17th century, Europeans had unquestionably come to North America to stay, a fact that signaled major changes for the people of both hemispheres. At first, the English sought to benefit from the New Found land by trading across the continents, but later many English people decided to migrate to North America. Unlike other Europeans, the English transferred their society and politics to their new environment. The New England colonies and the Chesapeake colonies were both English colonies but each had different factors that influenced them.

Around 1606, a large population boom followed by high inflation and a fall in real wages motivated men and women to migrate to the New Found land. Merchants and wealthy gentry, who were interested in gaining great profits by finding precious metals and opening new trade routes, formed the Virginia Company which was to become the Chesapeake colonies. On the other hand, men and women migrated to New England mostly for religious purposes.

The climate in New England was very cold and the soil was infertile unlike the climate in Chesapeake were the region's wide rivers, climate and soil were very fruitful. Hence agriculture was an essential and successful trade in the Chesapeake where tobacco and sugar were the major products. While immigrants rushed to New England looking for freedom of religion, men and women migrated from a small landscape apparently over populated island to Chesapeake, a large, land-rich content.

Puritans organized the New England colonies in hope of finding a place where they could practice their religion. Except for the few Catholics who moved to Maryland, immigrants to Chesapeake seem to have been little affected by religious motives. Puritan congregations quickly became key institutions in colonial New England, whereas neither the Church of England nor Roman Catholicism had much impact on the settlers or the early development of the Chesapeake colonies.

The New England colonies' method for distributing land, helped to further the communal idea unlike the Chesapeake colonies where individuals acquired head rights and sited their farms separately, in Massachusetts groups of men applied together to the General Court for grants of land on which to establish towns.

The men then receiving these grants decided how to distribute it. Thus, the New England settlements tended