Southern Colonies Vs New England Colonies Essay

During the 1600’s, people living in England wanted to make a better life for themselves so they left to explore a new land. Upon arrival, they formed colonies. Two of the three colonies formed were New England colony and the Southern colony. Though these people wanted to change their way of living from England, these colonies had different viewpoints on how they wanted to live their lives once they arrived in the new world. Things like climate, education and religion played a major part in their economic growth.
The Southern colonies became in existence after the settlement of Jamestown. The states that made up of the Southern colonies include Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. These settlers came to America to seek economic growth that they couldn’t find while in England. The land in these regions had rich soil that made it possible to grow crops as tobacco, indigo and rice. The growth of the planation system in the Southern colonies

stimulated the rural economy of the Northern colonies (Newman, 2016). They used enslaved Africans to work on these plantations. These slaves were treated cruel and had to work under harsh conditions. As a result of the Civil War, the Southern agriculture revolutionized by destroying the slave labor system on which commercial production depended and by severely disrupting the credit and marketing system. Slavery was replaced by a variety of free labor arrangements, the most important of which was sharecropping, under which landowners and laborers divided the crop (Goreham, 2016). They had to face diseases that they never had to face in England. Malaria and malnutrition lowered the immunity of the colonists (Schweikart and Allen 2004). These alone with mosquitoes and parasites were some of the diseases that settlers had to face in America. In the Southern colonies they lived on plantations. Education wasn’t important because the children were expected to work the land. Though one could be persecuted for worshipping God in England, religion wasn’t as important as making a financial gain in the Southern colonies. Their religion included Baptists and Anglicans which played a small role in politics and the economy. In the column,” Colonial Religion”, the slaves were forced to give up their traditional religions and transformed to the beliefs of their religion. However, slave owners also uniformly prohibited slaves from learning to read, which meant that all the slaves' religious instruction came orally rather than directly from the Bible. The result was an amalgamation of African and Christian religious beliefs that varied tremendously from plantation to plantation. Although slaves attended local church services with their masters (confined to segregated seating arrangements), they also held their own church services in the slave quarters with their own slave preachers, who offered a unique form of the Gospels far from their masters' watchful eyes. By doing this, their owners felt that this would be beneficial by making the slave less rebellious (colonial religion 2016).
The New England colonies became in existence with the arrival of the Pilgrims and the Puritans in the 1600’s. The states that made up the New England colonies include Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. The soil was not as rich to grow crops as in the Southern Colonies. Their economy was based on fishing and selling goods to back home to help with their economy. Unlike in the Southern colonies, the New England colonies did not use slaves to do their work; many of the families did it themselves. They used indentured servants that helped the colonial economy be successful. After working for seven years to pay off their passage, indentured servants were free to enter the colonial economy as free wage laborers. Because most were unskilled (though some servants indentured to artisans and other skilled craftsmen learned a trade), they often became farm workers and casual laborers until they had earned enough income to purchase land, usually in the interior, where land prices were cheaper than in coastal areas (Newman, 2016). The Puritans in the New England colonies created the basis for a public education system that became the model adopted by federal and state governments in the mid-19th century. Puritans were the first social group in the colonies to harness the state to compel children to attend school. They passed the Massachusetts Act of 1642, which became the first compulsory school education law (Newman, 2016).
Unlike the Southern colonies, religion was very important to New England.

The main reason this colony was to avoid the same persecution that they faced in Britain. Religion played a major part in determining their political, social and economic lives. The two religious groups that dominated this region were the Puritans and the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims also known as Separatists believed that the Church of England could not be reformed whereas the Puritans believed that they could be. Some groups of Puritans labored to reform the church from within, but the Pilgrims choose to sever their ties with the Church of England and found their own religious order (colonial religion, 2016).
Both the Southern and New England colonies came to the new world looking for a better way of life. They used the resources that they had to build their new lives in the new world. Both colonies were different in the way of education, religion, politics and economics. These differences made each colony unique in their own

way.