Colonial Development

The Early Settlers

Since the time when Christopher Columbus, trying to find a new route for Asia, had
stumbled upon America in 1492, many attempts had been made by the kings of Spain, France
and England to explore and conquer new lands on the continent. In 1535 Jacques Cartier had
discovered the site of Montreal and named the St. Lawrence River. In 1603 Samuel de
Champlain had laid the foundations of New France. Between 1539 and 1542, Hernando de
Soto had carried the Spanish flag to Florida and Texas, while Francisco Vasquez Coronado
had made his way from Mexico to the heart of the country west of the Mississippi. Before the
end of the sixteenth century the Spaniards had planted the First European settlements in North
America: St. Augustine in Florida and Santa Fe in New Mexico. In 1587, under Queen
Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh had sent to an Island off the coast of North Carolina an
expedition that ended disastrously.

But the American adventure really began in the Spring of 1607 when three small ships
coming from England brought about a hundred men dreaming of silver and gold to Virginia,
where they founded Jamestown. Thirteen years later, The Mayflower, coming from
Plymouth, reached the wild coast of Massachusetts, much farther to the North, on November
21, 1620. The passengers, 102 in number, were English Calvinists who had lived in Holland
for some twelve years rather than submit to Anglican episcopacy. The Pilgrim Fathers, as
they are called, had sailed to the New World to set up a separate church of their own. Before
landing, they signed a solemn agreement (the Mayflower Compact) binding them together in
a “civil body politic” to make just and equal laws. A few months before, on July 30, the first
Assembly of Virginia had met in the Episcopalian Church of Jamestown to organize the
government of the colony. In spite of their religious differences, the adventurers of Jamestown
and the separatists of Plymouth had one thing in common, they meant to govern themselves.

They also had to face similar hardships and dangers. They learnt to endure the scorching
heat of the summer in the South and the intense cold of the winter in the North. They had to
build houses in the wilderness, to clear land for cultivation, to go trapping, hunting and
fishing. They were in constant fear of wild beasts and Indians, of famine and diseases. They
did not know how to befriend the Natives as the good-natured French had done in Canada.
The Indians taught them how to grow corn, John Rolfe married Pocahontas, daughter of
King Powhanten; the colonial leaders smoked pipes with the Indian chief; the settlers learnt
how to grow tobacco and began sending timber to England. Yet the settlers relations with the
Natives varied from uncertain peace to treacherous massacre on both sides. When the
Palefaces had introduced rum and firearms to the Redskins, the fighting became a war of
extermination.
The Great Migration

Those early pioneers were followed by great numbers of later emigrants. As puritans
were persecuted in England, many of them looked hopefully towards America, where their
brethren could worship God in their own way. Twenty-thousand of them sailed over, the
ancestors of almost a sixth of the present population of the Union. Their exodus was to stop
only in 1646 when persecution came to an end.

The founders of New England did not believe in toleration. Their ideal was not
democracy, but an aristocratic theocracy, and they persecuted dissidents as they had been
persecuted themselves. But they could rise to a pith of moral grandeur. To this day, they have
impressed American civilization with the substance of their teaching: “faith in God, faith in
man, faith in work.”

In 1640 when Parliament triumphed over King Charles I, it was the turn of the Puritans’
opponents to emigrate. The Cavalier exodus gained volume after the King’s execution in
1649 till the restoration in 1660. It raised the population of the Southern colonies to nearly
forty thousand. Many of the newcomers bought large estates, built beautifully designed
mansions and organized prosperous plantations. They became leaders according to the
traditions of the English monarchy. Fearing anarchy, but determined to maintain their British
liberties, they were the forefathers of the Revolutionary statesmen, who a century later, earned
for Virginia the title of “Mother of Presidents.”

The Thirteen Colonies

By 1733, there were thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. Britons were the
dominant element and the English tongue was the common language, but all Western Europe
was more or less represented in them especially the Presbyterian Scots, the Germans, the
Swedes, the French Huguenots and the Dutch. New York (called at first New Amsterdam)
was settled in 1624 when Dutch fur-traders purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians for
sixty guilders, (about twenty dollars). The New Netherland colony was conquered by the
English in 1664 and renamed after Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York. Maryland, so
named in honor of Charles I’s French wife, was founded in 1634 by a catholic nobleman Lord
Baltimore.

By 1636, emigrants from Massachusetts searching for better land had moved to
Connecticut, the first colony to adopt a written constitution. Banished from Massachusetts
for his free thought regarding the relation of Church and State, and his assertion of the
Indians’ right to their land, Roger Williams, charged with heresy for his tolerance fled to
Rhode Island where he founded the city of Providence in 1636. Then the Swedes sent
colonists to Delaware in 1638. The Carolinas were given by Charles II in 1663 to the chief
supporters of the Royalist cause during the rebellion. The Duke of York assigned New Jersey
to his friends Carteret and Berkeley in 1664.

By far the most successful of the early settlers was the Quaker William Penn, son of a
wealthy admiral, who having secured from the King the territory of Pennsylvania, founded
Philadelphia the city of Brotherly love in 1682 as a “holy experiment.” Owing to his wise
policy towards the natives, the colony had no Indian troubles and prospered wonderfully.
Finally Georgia sprung into existence under the guidance of James Oglethorpe, a
philanthropist, who wished to help poor debtors released from English prisons to make a fresh
start.

By 1763, with the Treaty of Paris, France had ceased to be an American power. Spain
was weak. The thirteen colonies, with a population of 1, 500, 000 people, had no more rivals
to fear and needed English protection no longer. They could proudly remember the work
accomplished since the early settlers had first come to attempt colonization in newly
discovered Virginia.

Immense tracks of the wild continent had been settled and organized, and a new man had
risen in a new land, ready to assert his own independence and his boundless faith in the
destiny of America.