Page 86 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Conclusion: Living with Diversity
Long after he had returned from his adventures in Virginia, Captain John Smith 2.1
reflected on the difficulty of establishing colonies in the New World. It was a task for
which most people were not suited. “It requires,” Smith counseled, “all the best parts of
art, judgment, courage, honesty, constancy, diligence, and industry, [even] to do neere 2.2
well.” On another occasion, Charles I warned Lord Baltimore that new settlements
“commonly have rugged and laborious beginnings.”
In the seventeenth century, women and men had followed leaders such as Baltimore, 2.3
Smith, Winthrop, Bradford, Penn, and Berkeley to the New World in anticipation of
creating a successful new society. Some migrants were religious visionaries; others were
hardheaded businessmen. The results of their efforts, their struggles to survive in an 2.4
often hostile environment, and their interactions with various Native American groups
yielded a spectrum of settlements along the Atlantic coast, from the quasi-feudalism of
South Carolina to the Puritan commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay.
The diversity of early English colonization must be emphasized precisely
because it is so easy to overlook (see Table 2.1). Even though the colonists eventu-
ally banded together and fought for independence, persistent differences separated
New Englanders from Virginians, Pennsylvanians from Carolinians. The interpretive
challenge, of course, is to comprehend how European colonists managed during the
eighteenth century to overcome fragmentation and develop the capacity to imagine
themselves a nation.

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