English Colonies

- Explain how the English colonies in the New World were different from one another in terms of government, population and origin.


     The English colonies in the New World were all started for different reasons; some were started as grants from the King or Queen of the time, others for religious freedom, others still as economic projects, and in the case of Georgia, as a penal colony.  The 13 colonies each had their own goals, their own ways of doing things, and had almost no correlation to one another.  It seemed to be a separate world for each English colony in the New World.

     In 1606, the Virginia Company set its foundations in Virginia.  There, they planted and cultivated tobacco, primarily using slave labor, for the settlers, and Englishmen back at home.  The profits from this were innumerable, and the colony prospered.  Meanwhile, Catholics fled from England with, hoping to escape prosecution from the now-protestant government.  They were also a plantation colony, but had no interest in trading with their motherland.  Instead, they became a self-sustaining, independent colony.  Years later, Georgia was founded with the goal of defending the Carolinas from the Spanish, who were bent on re-obtaining their land.  In return, it became the least popular of the now 13 colonies.  

     While all these colonies were inhabited by (former) Englishmen and women, their goals were vastly different.  Virginia and Maryland were right next to each other, and had completely different goals.  One was a colony intended purely for profit, making its money from friendly England, while the other was bent on escaping persecution based on their religion from menacing England.  The Carolinas were founded with blessing from King Charles II, and had its roots in slavery and the expulsion of the Native Americans.  A few miles away, William Penn, who founded another colony based on religious freedom from England, promised friendly relations between them and the Natives, yet the Carolinians still had their bloody massacres of the "savages."  It could easily be said that not all of the colonies were "Friendly Neighbors"

     By 1775, the differences between these colonies were fairly clear, based only on their statuses.  All the colonies serving England, be it by selling their goods to them, protecting their most valuable money-makers, or simply to prove a political point.  Of course, all the colonies escaping English persecution for not being Protestant were given no such status, and remained independent.  The colonies that sought religious freedom were generally friendly to the natives, taking into regard their land needs, culture, and openly traded with them.  As seen with Carolina, the "royal" colonies took little to no consideration, and wanted nothing more than for the Indians to leave or die.

     There was a clear distinction between the English colonies; they all had different goals and ideals, and some of them clearly didn't get along.  Georgia was founded to protect the rest of them, and later became the slowest-growing and most hated colony.  But the difference wasn't only in their goals and social statuses, but in the way they behaved in this New World.  All the colonies founded under or by the British Government tended to be much more cruel to people unlike them; they dealt in slavery and "hunted" Indians, while the religious freedom colonies had no slaves, and treated the Native Americans with respect to their culture.  Colonial America was most definitely a mixed, sperate world from itself.