Page 62 - American Stories, A History of the United States

in the seventeenth century did not spring from a desire to build a centralized empire in the New
World similar to that of Spain or France. Instead, the English crown awarded colonial charters to 2.1
a wide variety of entrepreneurs, religious idealists, and aristocratic adventurers who established
separate and profoundly different colonies. Not only did New Englanders have little in common
with the earliest Virginians and Carolinians, but they were often divided among themselves. 2.2

M igration itself helps to explain this striking competition and diversity. At dif- 2.3
ferent times, different colonies appealed to different sorts of people. Men and
women moved to the New World for various reasons, and as economic, political, and
religious conditions changed on both sides of the Atlantic during the seventeenth cen-
tury, so too did patterns of English migration. 2.4

Breaking Away: Decisions to Move

to America

2.1 Why did the Chesapeake colonies not prosper during the earliest years of their settlement?
E nglish colonists crossed the Atlantic for many reasons. Some wanted to institute

a purer form of worship, more closely based on their interpretation of Scripture.
Others dreamed of owning land and improving their social position. A few
came to the New World to escape bad marriages, jail terms, or the dreary pros-
pect of lifelong poverty. Since most seventeenth-century migrants, especially those who
transferred to the Chesapeake colonies, left almost no records of their lives in England,
it is futile to try to isolate a single cause or explanation for their decision to leave home.
In the absence of detailed personal information, historians usually have assumed
that poverty, or the fear of soon falling into poverty, drove people across the Atlantic.
No doubt economic considerations figured heavily in the final decision to leave Eng-
land. But so did religion, and the poor of early modern England were often among
those demanding the most radical ecclesiastical reform. As a recent historian of sev-
enteenth-century migration concluded, “Individuals left for a variety of motives, some
idealistic, others practical, some simple, others complex, many perhaps contradictory
and imperfectly understood by the migrants themselves.”
Whatever their reasons for crossing the ocean, English migrants to America in this
period left a nation wracked by recurrent, often violent political and religious contro-
versy. During the 1620s, autocratic Stuart monarchs—James I (r. 1603–1625) and his
son Charles I (r. 1625–1649)—who succeeded Queen Elizabeth I on the English throne
fought constantly with the members of Parliament over rival notions of constitutional
and representative government.
Regardless of the exact timing of departure, English settlers brought with them
ideas and assumptions that helped them make sense of their everyday experiences in an
unfamiliar environment. Their values were tested and sometimes transformed in the
New World, but they were seldom destroyed. Settlement involved a complex process
of adjustment. The colonists developed different subcultures in America, and in each
it is possible to trace the interaction between the settlers’ values and the physical ele-
ments, such as the climate, crops, and soil, of their new surroundings. The Chesapeake,
the New England colonies, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies formed
distinct regional identities that have survived to the present day.

The Chesapeake: Dreams of Wealth

After the Roanoke debacle in 1590, English interest in American settlement declined,
and only a few aging visionaries such as Richard Hakluyt kept alive the dream of colo-
nies in the New World. These advocates argued that the North American mainland
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