More handpicked essays just for you.
The political relationship between Britain and its American Colonies
Differences between the new england and chesapeake colonies
Differences between chesapeake and new england
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The English Settlement in the New World was largely the result of the Age of Exploration. The English started emigrated to the New World around the early 1600s; they settles in regions including the New England and the Chesapeake region and by the 18th century these two regions had developed their own society. These two regions had developed different political, economic and social system in their regions. The political differences were due to who governs the colony. The economic differences were due to the motives of the settlement. The social differences were due to the people who settled there, while the New England emigrated as a family, the Chesapeake emigrated with mostly male. The political difference between the New England and Chesapeake region was that New England government associate more with religious matter than the Chesapeake government. The New England regions included the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Plymouth colony, the New Hampshire colony, Maine colony, Connecticut colony, and Rhode Island colony. Massachusetts colony for example was governed as a theocracy government. As the first governor of Massachusetts colony once stated in A Model of Christian Charity (Written on board the Arbella on the Atlantic Ocean, 1630),"we shall be as a city upon a hill" a holy commonwealth that could be served as an example community to the rest of the world. The Massachusetts Bay colony placed great importance on religious matters. Only the church member were allowed to vote or held office position. Those who held office position would enforce the law requiring attendance at services. Jamestown, Maryland and the Carolinas were some colonies in the Chesapeake regions. The governments in these regions were less concerned about... ... middle of paper ... ...ere more concerned about the commonwealth of the people due to their strong sense of community. Chesapeake government placed a harsh rule to ensure the survival of the settlers like the colony of Jamestown. New England had a diverse product due to poor soil and cold weather. They engaged in small scale agriculture, fishing, trading and shipbuilding. The Chesapeake regions had a warmer climate therefore it was more suitable to farm. The economic products that the Chesapeake region produced were tobacco and rice. The New England colonies were more of a community than the Chesapeake colonies. One of the reasons was that the settlers New England emigrated as a family and the Chesapeake emigrants were mostly males with the ambition to find gold and to own a large plantation; this resulted in mostly male population without female to enforce a sense of a real community.
Just like their religions, Massachusetts gave more power to the people and Virginia gave power to England. In the New England Handout, Mailer describes the difference further, “Unlike in Virginia where a governor is elected from a faraway company in London, and after 1624, by the Crown itself, the ‘freemen’ of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire elect their own governors.” (1) This information describes the contrast in the way a governor gets elected. In Massachusetts, the “freemen”, men who own land, get to vote for their governor, while Virginia’s governor gets appointed by the crown. Virginia’s government also consisted of the Governing Council, rich elites controlling everything, and the House of Burgesses, upper middle-class landowners. The main reason the governments of these colonies differ is the fact that the charter of Virginia created by the Virginia Company resides in England, or in other words it is controlled by the crown. On the other hand, Massachusetts’s charter, created by the Massachusetts Bay Company, resides in the colony, so the colony self-governs itself. This brings forth another comparison of the two colonies; the reason why they were founded.
The Chesapeake and New England regions were settled by people of English descent, but by 1700, they had become two distinctly different societies. They had evolved so differently, mainly because of the way that the settlers followed their religion, their way of conducting politics and demographics in the colonies. Even though the settlers came from the same homeland: England, each group had its own reasons for coming to the New World and different ideas planned for the colonies.
The Crusades of the middle ages introduced much innovative and formerly unheard of merchandise into Western Europe; however the scarcity of these luxury goods instilled Europeans with drive to find easier access to the Far East. Although desired "Northwest Passage" never was found, joint-stock companies, like the Virginia Company of London, settled colonies in the New World for untapped resources such as silver and other tradable goods. Many more corporations followed suit, settling mainly in the Chesapeake Bay area, their small settlements eventually developing into the Chesapeake colonies. The Chesapeake colonies were focused primarily on profitable enterprises. At the same time, the New England colonies were being settled with a whole different set of initiatives, principally religious freedoms and family. Governing bodies were established, with their success dependent on the quality of the settlers the colony attracted. The different motives for settlement affected the routine events in such a way that the New England and Chesapeake colonies differed very greatly from one another even though they were both mainly settled by the English.
As colonies of the British Empire, both the New England and Chesapeake regions were inhibited by innumerable immigrants of English origin. Despite this common characteristic, the two areas greatly differed from each other. New England was more tolerant and community based whereas the Chesapeake was focused more directly on personal wealth and land. While they both drew from British influence, the distinct conditions in each region caused them to develop separately and become unique in their own way.
Social differences are one of the reasons New England and Chesapeake developed into two distinct societies. People in England were tired of being oppressed by the government, so they wanted to come to the New World for new opportunities and better treatment. According to a source from Massachusetts of the New England Colonies, “our town shall be composed of forty families,…rich and poor…every inhabitant shall have a convenient proportion for a house lot, as we shall see [fit] for everyone’s quantity and estate…everyone shall have a share o...
Second, those who migrated to New England tended to come over as families, quite dissimilar to the single men who flooded Chesapeake Bay. Obviously, a much more stable family life took root in New England. Single women in Chesapeake Bay were few and far between, and the few that were around were not single for long. It was much easier to establish families in New England, where the balance between men and women was much closer to equal. These strong families provided security and made the New England colonists live a more stable life than those who lived to the south in Chesapeake Bay.
During the late 16th century and into the 17th century, European nations rapidly colonized the newly discovered Americas. England in particular sent out numerous groups to the eastern coast of North America to two regions. These two regions were known as the Chesapeake and the New England areas. Later, in the late 1700's, these two areas would bond to become one nation. Yet from the very beginnings, both had very separate and unique identities. These differences, though very numerous, spurred from one major factor: the very reason the settlers came to the New World. This affected the colonies in literally every way, including economically, socially, and politically.
Q 1. The American colonies were divided into three distinct regions and these regions were different from each other in their origins, populations, economics and agriculture, religious makeup, and connection to England .write an essay comparing and contrasting the New England, middle, and southern colonies with specific examples.
Compare and contrast the government, religion, geography, and economy of the three English colonial regions (the Chesapeake area, New England, and Pennsylvania). Be sure to consider the role of race, gender, and ethnicity.
...le and Northern colonies, the Southern rivers did not freeze, therefore commerce was year round. The flip side to having a warm climate, is the increase in growth of bacteria and disease. Consequently, the Southern colonists faced a shorter life span. Women were often left widows leaving them the rights to their husbands' estate. Therefore, women had the opportunity and position to have more power. As a result of this warmer area, agriculture shaped the plantation colonies.
The colonists had different reasons for settling in these two distinct regions. The New England region was a more religiously strict yet diverse area compared to that of the Chesapeake Bay. The development of religion in the two regions came from separate roots. After Henry VIII and the Roman Catholic Church broke away from each other, a new group of English reformers was created called the Puritans. The Puritans came from protestant backgrounds, after being influenced by Calvinistic ideas. When their reforms were thwarted by King James I of England, they fled to the New World in what is now known as the "Great Migration". The Puritans were then joined by Quakers, Protestants, and Catholics in the religiously diverse New England area. These diverse religious factions were allowed to live freely but under the laws of New England. It was due to this religious freedom that these people came to escape religious persecution back home. The New Englanders had a religion-based society and religion was based on family. As the Bible highly regarded family, it condemned adultery. Adultery was considered a punishable crime. Adulterers were marked as impure by a letter "A" stitched on their clothing, as in the book "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. As religion was a very high priority in New England, it was very much less severe in the Chesapeake Bay region. The one established church in the region, the Anglican Church of Jesus Christ, was only then established in 1692, more than 70 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
There were a myriad of differences between Great Britain and her American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but these differences can be divided into three basic categories: economic, social, and political. The original American settlers came to the colonies for varied reasons, but a common trait among these settlers was that they still considered themselves British subjects. However, as time passed, the colonists grew disenfranchised from England. Separated from the king by three thousand miles and living in a primitive environment where obtaining simple necessities was a struggle, pragmatism became the common thread throughout all daily life in the colonies. It was this pragmatism that led the colonists to create their own society with a unique culture and system of economics and politics.
A community is a group of people who work together towards a common goal and share a common interest. Lack of such a quality can and most likely will cause a struggling town or city to fall into the extremes of poverty and wealth. The New England community was so strong and so supportive in comparison to that of the Chesapeake Bay, that it is no wonder they developed into two distinctly different cultures before the year 1700. The Chesapeake region developed into a land of plantations and money-driven owners, with the elite wealthy, almost no middle class, and those in poverty creating the population. New England, on the other hand, had developed into a religion and family based society comprised of mostly middle class families by 1700. Looking at the terrain, ethic, government, and even the people themselves, reveals clues about how the drastic split in society came to be. It was one America, but two distinct societies had developed in it by the 1700's.
The Chesapeake Bay Colonies and the New England Colonies were both colonized by the British, but both regions were vastly different from one another. The English-Native American relations remained tense since the moment the English arrived, and the results of the war was the same: English won, Indians lost. The Chesapeake and New England were both influenced by the geographical differences and lead to a difference in economic values as well as governments. The Chesapeake and New England were both established for different reasons: to expand an empire and to get away from religious prosecution. The oversea British Empire was the most dominant in the world, and even though the colonies were all “British”, they are all vastly different from one another.
Although the New England and Chesapeake regions of the United States were both settled by the English in the 1600s, they developed into two very different communities based mainly on their geographical location and religious devotion. Unlike their European rivals, the English founded colonies in North America.