The English in North America

By: Jeffrey Phongsamran

American Colonies 8- New England The 17th century social and economic pressures generated the

Chesapeake colonies. They also created the colonies to the North known as New England. The settlers were known as Puritans, they meant to purify the Protestant faith.

The lands to the North required hard labor to make farms. However they thanked the lord for the hard work and explained that if you want to be corrupt in mind and body head south and seek rich soil.

The state of New England was almost completely

opposite of England. In England labor was cheap

and land was scarce and expensive while in New

England labor was hard to find and land was plentiful.

England had little employment opportunities and too

many people to employ, New England had many

employment opportunities and not enough colonist

to take them. They often had to rely on their own

family.

New England – 8: English Puritans Church and State were united in early Modern England. They

were so woven together that a aristocrat commented that it was like Hippocrates’ twins that cannot but laugh and cry together.

Puritans originally persists in scholarship to find people who shared a conviction that the Protestant Reformation remained incomplete in England.

Puritans were out to preach words, read scriptures, perfect their morality, and proposing radical schemes for improving society and disciplining the unruly and indolent.

They felted afflicted by the many English people who possessed neither their virtues nor their zeal.

In the 17th century the Puritan’s rigor began to alarm kings who wanted unquestionable loyalty.

Faced with growing powers of the king and bishop

they considered emigrating to New England.

New England - 8: The Great Migration In 1614 Captain John Smith explored the coast

and later claimed the land as New England because he claimed that the climate and soiled mimicked that of the mother country.

The land had a daunting reputation of being frigid and hostile

This appealed to the Puritans who were disgruntled with their Anglican rulers. The first Puritans consisted of 102 Separatist, later known as pilgrims. They crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower to found a town named Plymouth.

In 1630 a much larger Puritan emigration, known as the “The Great Migration” began with the leadership of John Winthrop.

This lead to expanding settlements that spawned new coastal colonies.

New England - 8: Family Life Families were very important in New England because

colonist were in such short numbers that family was the only reliable source of maintain the farms.

English culture expected all adults to marry and divided their labors into male and female responsibilities. Men generally conducted heavy work like construction and tending to livestock while females maintained the homes and raised the children. If the men were to become incapacitated the wife would take the role of “deputy husband” and take over his responsibilities.

Like England, New England men monopolized legal authority, land ownership, and political rights.

The minister of New England asserted that God had meant civilized people “to live in Societies, first of Family, Secondly Church, and Thirdly, Common-wealth.”

American Colonies 9- Puritans and Indians

The Puritans perceived pre-colonial landscape as a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beast and wild men.

They saw the Indians as pagan people who surrendered to their worst instincts to live in the wild instead of working hard to conquer nature.

Fearing that the wilderness would seduce them the Puritans avoid contact with the native ways and the native land.

To reassure themselves that

they remained civilized

Christians and resist Indian

life was to convert the land

through hard work and to

convert the Indians.

Puritans and Indians 9 - Natives Southern New England Indians possessed cultural, linguistic,

affinities, but lacked political unity. The leading tribes were the Mohegan and Pequot of Connecticut,

the Narragansett of Rhode Island, the Patuxet and Wampanoag of the Plymouth colony, the Nipmuck, Massachusetts, and Pennacook of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

The natives’ were highly productive horticulture that supplied most of the diets, yet the English still insist that the Indians were nothing more than hunters. A lot of their diets included maize, squashes, pumpkins, and beans.

They used fires to control the forest to their needs. As a byproduct it also created more fertile land and diminished mice, fleas, and other parasites that could be a nuisance.

Compared with colonist, Indians demanded less from nature, invested less labor in, and extracting less energy and matter from their environment.

Puritans and Indians 9 – Pequot War The first major conflict between the New English and Indians

erupted in 1636. The colonial leaders wanted to expanded their boarders and

expected the Pequot to pay a heavy tribute. Rebuffed the colonist pressured other tribes to ally with them

as they fought the Pequot. The other tribes agreed because of their rivalry and they chose the side most likely to win.

The colonist allies guided them to one of the Pequot villages that contained mostly women, children, and elderly. They set the village ablaze and killed everyone, only 5 people managed to survive. The native allies were shocked because they had expected to capture and adopt, they claimed that New England's warfare slaughtered to many people.

Unable to unite, the Indians became a shrinking minority in a land dominated by rapidly growing colonial populations.

Puritan and Indians 9 – Victory and Defeat Rather than treat their captives as prisoners of war, the

Puritan victors defined the Indians as traitors, executing the chiefs and selling others off to slavery.

Puritans insisted that the colonist needed to shed blood to alienate themselves from the Indian ways.

Indians refugee escaped northward to hide among New France and northern tribes.

The refugees carried bitter hatred for New England and in a series of wars lead the French to raid and repeatedly devastate frontier settlements of New England.

The Indians that stayed in New England became small minority and were considered the lowest rung of society.