THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN COLONIAL AMERICA
After defeat of the Spanish Armanda in 1588, English confidence in their military’s ability to defeat Spain gave King James I the courage to seek Spain-like profits in North America (Roark 55). In 1606 he granted the Virginia Company of London the first English charter to colonize North America, initiating the first wave of Europeans to North American shores. Twenty-three years later his son, King Charles I, granted a royal charter to a joint stock company founded by a group of Puritan merchants to colonize New England. The charter included a special provision that allowed the company to have its government in the colony instead of England (Roark 55). Two years later, in 1631, King Charles I granted ownership of 6.5 million acres surrounding the Chesapeake Bay to his friend, George Calvert, who hoped to establish a refuge for Catholics. The first two colonies began as royal charters granted to joint stock companies and the last as a proprietorship. However all three colonies came under royal control and English rule as a result of the Indian conflicts and the Glorious Revolution. The policy of salutary neglect added to the wealth of the British Empire in the beginning but eventually led up to the American Revolution.
Jamestown was founded by the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company, a year after King James I granted the charter in 1606. This charter gave shareholders the authority to rule over the colony through a company appointed governor. The Virginia Company created the House of Burgesses, a representative assembly, in 1618. The first such assembly in colonial America it was intended to encourage those who wanted more freedom to migrate to Virginia. However, the company included a stipulation requiring laws passed by the House of Burgess to be approved by the company first (”London Company”).
Jamestown became the first permanent English settlement in the western hemisphere and was originally founded as a trading outpost. In the beginning Jamestown struggled to survive and ultimately failed as a trading venture. The Virginia Company expected to reap the same rewards as the Spaniards did a century before. They sent skilled craftsman, silk dressers, metal smiths, and caviar makers in anticipation of finding gold, silkworms, and roe (Reilly). Jamestown failed as business venture because that the Indians had no valuable products to exchange for English goods, and because the crops the Company hoped to provide them with a profit wasn’t there. No farmers or laborers were aboard the first ships that arrived, in their place were gentleman and servants who never labored nor farmed in their lives and believed that such work was beneath them (Reilly).
With the no one willing to plant seeds and maintain the fields, crops simply were not planted and food quickly began to run out. The early settlers soon faced starvation and disease soon began to spread among them. The colonists were rescued by the Algonquian Indians in September of 1607(”United States History”). They traded corn with the colonists for English goods. When this wasn’t enough to satisfy them the colonists sent Captain John Smith to bargain with the Indians. The friction between the Indians and the colonists festered when the Indians refused to trade food with them and Captain Smith was sent to raid their villages and steal their foodstuffs. Captain Smith was able to keep thirty-eight of the original settlers alive until the next shipment of food and colonist arrived from England four months later.
The salvation of Jamestown came with the discovery that tobacco grew well there. They decided to grow tobacco because in the early 1600s tobacco was in short supply, and was very expensive to buy. They realized that growing it would be highly profitable. Tobacco changed the culture of the colony and settlers rushed out to claim lands along navigable rivers so ships could reach them and allow them to bring their crops to market. They didn’t form towns or large communities like the Puritans did in New England because tobacco needed plenty of room to grow, and by 1624 two thousand pounds of tobacco were being shipped yearly to England. Growing tobacco became the beat of the drum that the colony danced to. It became the driving force of life in the colony and everything was planned around its cultivation, harvesting, and preparation (Reilly).
Seventeen years after the colony was founded the monarchy recognized the potential to increase its wealth through the tobacco trade and used the mortality rate of the colonists as an excuse to charge the Virginian Company with mismanagement and dissolved its charter. The colony came under the control of the royal government, and allowed the local government’s House of Burgess to survive the changeover. As the supply of tobacco surpassed the demand, Virginians had to grow more and more tobacco to earn the same amount of money. They need two important things in order do so; they needed more land and laborers. Both of these needs were met with the influx of indentured servants seeking to stake out their futures in America (”United States History “).
In 1629, King Charles I granted a royal charter to a joint stock company founded by a group of Puritan merchants and gentleman called the Massachusetts Bay Company. The company chose John Winthrop to lead a group of Non-Separatist English Puritans to the new world (Roark 80). In the spring of 1630, Winthrop guided one thousand men, women, and children on eleven ships to America (Reilly). The charters given to the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company of London’s were identical with one exception. The Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter contained a unique provision that permitted the Company to locate their governing body in the colony rather than England, and were the first company under a royal charter to do so (Roark 80).
In America, the settlers transformed the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Company into a colonial legislature. In the General Court of the Company each shareholder had a vote; in the colonial legislature each qualified settler was given a vote. However, the right to vote and to hold office was limited to men who were Puritan church members; as a result this prevented women and non-puritans from participation in the political process of the colony (Reilly). Winthrop also created representative institutions within each town, and the Puritans established Congregationalism as the state-supported religion, which effectively barred members of other faiths from conducting services (Reilly).
New England settlements and economy were very different than Virginias. The Puritans, as a component of their religious views, came to the colony with the understanding that they would live in villages or towns. The Puritans believed they should live in groups so that Christian virtues could be practiced (Reilly). Puritans practiced the “open field system” of farming with the intention of spreading the risk of losing crops in a drought or flood among its settlers. This system was not a very efficient way to farm due to the allocation of small strips of land, and was geared more toward local consumption than as cash crops (Reilly). Farming never took off like it did in Virginia; the soil in New England tended to be exceptionally rocky and the growing season was short: the winters came early and spring arrived late.
They grew enough to feed their families and to stay out of debt. Settlers supported themselves by growing crops they could sell to new arrivals to the colony, but when immigration to the colony began to slow down New Englanders had to find another way to earn a living, and so they built their economy on distilling rum, fishing, and shipbuilding, and were not restricted on where they could send their goods like in Virginia (Reilly).
The colonist in New England did not encounter the kind of hostility with Indians as the Jamestown settlers did when they arrived to America. Mainly because ten years before the Puritans arrived an epidemic nearly wiped the Indians out (Roark 80). Indians that the colonists did encounter were relatively peaceful and the New Englanders tended to treat the Indians more kindly than the southern colonies.
However, the growth of the European population in New England meant more land was required and so the agreement struck between the Indians and the colonists tended to be encroached upon. By 1675, the tension between the Indians and the colonists reached a fever pitch and war erupted. Battles followed resulting in the destruction of thirteen colonial settlements, thousands of lives lost on both sides, (Roark 97) and the birth of anti Indian attitudes among the North American colonist (Reilly). The war between the Indians and the English came to be known as King Phillips War. King Phillip was the name the Puritans gave to the Wampanoag chief Metacomet.
In 1676, in the wake of King Phillips war, the King of England, looking for an excuse to take control of New England, dispatched an agent to investigate whether English Laws were being abided by the colonists (Roark 97). As a result the Massachusetts charter was revoked in 1684 converting New England into a Royals colony and essentially ending the Puritan form of government (Roark 97).In 1686 Massachusetts and colonies north of Maryland were incorporated into the “Dominion of New England” and governed by Sir Edmund Andros. The Dominion of New England nullified land titles and threatened property-owners with the possibility they could lose their land. The Dominion of New England also replaced church membership with property ownership as the prerequisite for voting in colony elections (Roark 97-98).
In 1631 King Charles’ friend, George Calvert (aka Lord Baltimore), was granted ownership of 6.5 million acres of land surrounding the Chesapeake Bay. George Calvert (Reilly) wanted to create a safe haven for Catholics who were suffering discrimination in England (Roark 64). However George Calvert died that year and his son, Cecilius Calvert, inherited the charter and his father’s aristocratic title as Lord Baltimore (Reilly).On March 25, 1634; one-hundred and fifty settlers arrived to establish the colony of Maryland which was named after King Charles’ wife Henrietta Maria (Reilly). The population of the colony grew slowly over the next twenty something years but attracted more Protestant settlers than Catholics (Roark 64).
According to the charter granted by the King, Baltimore owned Maryland as a private estate and could hold or dispose of the lands as he saw fit (Roark 64). As Maryland’s proprietor Baltimore had the authority to create churches, name ministers, and appoint public officials. The charter also gave settlers the right to have a representative assembly but did not clearly specify its powers (Roark 64). Members of the assembly argued that they had power to initiate legislation and Baltimore reluctantly agreed. Maryland’s government, politics, and society were almost identical to Virginias. Maryland’s cash crop was Tobacco and their economic way of life mimicked their Virginian neighbor (Reilly).
The English Parliaments’ move to depose James II, a zealous catholic, and reassert Protestant influence in the English empire came to be known as the “Glorious Revolution.” The aftermath of the Glorious Revolution had a ripple effect that was felt by every English colony in North America, and although relatively non violent in England, had an adverse impact on British rule in the colonies. It gave New England colonist justification to throw the deposed James’ officials in jail, destroy the Dominion of New England, re-established the Puritan form of government and restored all land titles. In Maryland John Coode led Protestants to overthrow the colony’s Pro-Catholic government (Roark 98) fearing they wouldn’t recognize the new Protestant King. Lord Baltimore’s proprietary government and the Coode’s rebellion ended in 1692 when King William III sent his representative to rule.
England’s policy of Salutary Neglect intended to keep the American colonies obedient to England by allowing the enforcement of the Navigation Acts to be relaxed. During the periods of salutary neglect, American colonies nearly evolved into an independent political and economic system. The upside is that it made Britain a very wealthy and powerful nation and when England attempted to rein in the colonist it backfired and in the end led to the American Revolution (”History of Colonial America”).
Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts Bay colonies all began for different reasons. For Virginia colony it was to make a profit and find wealth, for Massachusetts Bay it was to set an example for England to follow, and for Maryland it was to create a refuge for Catholics facing religious persecution. All three struggled in their own ways to survive and adapted to their environments. The years passed and the colonies began to thrive and produce products and build wealth. The British Empire looking for excuses to gain control did so when the opportunities presented themselves. The Glorious Revolution in England had a profound effect on the British rule in the colonies and temporarily returned control back to the colonists. Salutary neglect unintentionally planted the seeds of rebellion by it lack of enforcement of Laws which gave the colonies the opportunity to develop an independent identity from England.
Works Cited
“American Revolution “Microsoft Encarta 2007. 16 ed. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Corporation
“London Company.” Microsoft Encarta 2007. 16 ed. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Corporation
“History of Colonial America.”Microsoft Encarta 2007. 16 ed. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft CorporationReilly, Gretchen Ann. “American History before 1870.” Podcast. Dr. Gretchen Ann Reilly. iTunes. August 2007. Temple College Temple, TX, 2006. <http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=212324647>
Roark, James L., et al. The American Promise: A Compact History, Third Edition. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.“United States History.” Microsoft Encarta 2007. 16 ed. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Corporation
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