What Were the Factors That Stimulated English Migration to the New World
English Colonization
Spain had a one-hundred year head start on New Globe colonization and a jealous England eyed the enormous wealth that Spain gleaned from the new Globe. The Protestant Reformation had shaken England but Elizabeth I assumed the English crown in 1558 and oversaw the expansion of merchandise and exploration — and the literary achievements of Shakespeare and Marlowe — during England's so-called "golden age." English mercantilism, a state-assisted manufacturing and trading organization, created and maintained markets, ensured a steady supply of consumers and laborers, stimulated economic expansion, and increased English wealth.
However, wrenching social and economic changes unsettled the English language population. The island's population increased from fewer than iii meg in 1500 to over five million by the middle of the seventeenth century. The skyrocketing cost of land coincided with plummeting farming income. Rents and prices rose merely wages stagnated. Moreover, the and then-chosen "enclosure" move — sparked by the transition of English landholders from agriculture to livestock-raising — evicted tenants from the land and created hordes of landless, jobless peasants that haunted the cities and countryside. Ane-quarter to i-half of the population lived in farthermost poverty.
New World colonization won support in England amid a time of rising English language fortunes amid the wealthy, a tense Castilian rivalry, and mounting internal social unrest. Just English language colonization supporters always touted more than economic gains and mere national self-interest. They claimed to be doing God's work.
Many cited spiritual concerns and argued that colonization would glorify God, England, and Protestantism by Christianizing the New Globe's pagan peoples. Advocates such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and John Dee, for instance, drew upon The History of the Kings of Britain, written by the twelfth century monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, and its mythical account of King Arthur's conquest and Christianization of infidel lands to justify American conquest. Moreover, promoters promised that the conversion of New World Indians would satisfy God and glorify England's "Virgin Queen," Elizabeth I, who was verging on a near-divine image amidst the English. The English — and other European Protestant colonizers — imagined themselves superior to the Spanish, who notwithstanding bore the Black Legend of inhuman cruelty. English colonization, supporters argued, would prove that superiority.
In his 1584 "Discourse on Western Planting," Richard Hakluyt amassed the supposed religious, moral, and infrequent economic benefits of colonization. He repeated the "Black Legend" of Castilian New World terrorism and attacked the sins of Catholic Spain. He promised that English colonization could strike a accident against Castilian heresy and bring Protestant faith to the New Earth. English interference, Hakluyt suggested, may provide the only salvation from Catholic rule in the New Earth. The New World, too, he said, offered obvious economic advantages. Trade and resources extraction would enrich the English treasury. England, for case, could notice plentiful materials to outfit a earth-grade navy. Moreover, he said, the New Earth could provide an escape for England'south vast armies of landless "vagabonds." Expanded trade, he argued, would not only bring turn a profit, merely also provide work for England'southward jobless poor. A Christian enterprise, a accident against Spain, an economic stimulus, and a social rubber valve all beckoned the English toward a commitment to colonization.
This noble rhetoric veiled the coarse economic motives that brought England to the New World. New economic structures and a new merchant class paved the way for colonization. England's merchants lacked estates only they had new plans to build wealth. By collaborating with new authorities-sponsored trading monopolies and employing fiscal innovations such every bit joint-stock companies, England's merchants sought to improve on the Dutch economic system. Spain was extracting enormous cloth wealth from the New World; why shouldn't England? Articulation-stock companies, the ancestors of the modernistic corporations, became the initial instruments of colonization. With regime monopolies, shared profits, and managed risks, these money-making ventures could attract and manage the vast capital needed for colonization. In 1606 James I approved the formation of the Virginia Company (named afterwards Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen").
Rather than formal colonization, notwithstanding, the most successful early English language ventures in the New World were a form of country-sponsored piracy known as privateering. Queen Elizabeth sponsored sailors, or "Sea Dogges," such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, to plunder Castilian ships and towns in the Americas. Privateers earned a substantial turn a profit both for themselves and for the English language crown. England expert piracy on a scale, one historian wrote, "that transforms criminal offence into politics." Francis Drake harried Castilian ships throughout the Western Hemisphere and raided Castilian caravans as far away as the coast of Peru on the Pacific Ocean. In 1580 Elizabeth rewarded her skilled pirate with knighthood. But Elizabeth walked a fine line. Protestant-Catholic tensions already running high, English privateering provoked Spain. Tensions worsened after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic. In 1588, King Philip II of Kingdom of spain unleashed the fabled Fleet. With 130 Ships, 8,000 sailors, and 18,000 soldiers, Spain launched the largest invasion in history to destroy the British navy and depose Elizabeth.
An isle nation, England depended upon a robust navy for trade and territorial expansion. England had fewer ships than Spain merely they were smaller and swifter. They successfully harassed the Armada, forcing it to retreat to holland for reinforcements. Just then a fluke storm, historic in England as the "divine wind," annihilated the remainder of the fleet. The destruction of the Armada changed the course of earth history. It not only saved England and secured English Protestantism, just it too opened the seas to English expansion and paved the way for England'due south colonial future. By 1600, England stood ready to embark upon its authority over North America.
English language colonization would look very different from Castilian or French colonization, equally was indicated past early experiences with the Irish. England had long been trying to conquer Catholic Ireland. The English used a model of forcible segregation with the Irish that would mirror their future relationships with Native Americans. Rather than integrating with the Irish and trying to convert them to Protestantism, England more often only seized land through violence and pushed out the erstwhile inhabitants, leaving them to motion elsewhere or to die.
English colonization, however, began haltingly. Sir Humphrey Gilbert labored throughout the late-sixteenth century to establish a colony in New Foundland but failed. In 1587, with a predominantly male cohort of 150 English colonizers, John White reestablished an abandoned settlement on North Carolina's Roanoke Island (Effigy 3). Supply shortages prompted White to return to England for additional back up simply the Spanish Armada and the mobilization of British naval efforts stranded him in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland for several years. When he finally returned to Roanoke, he found the colony abased. What befell the failed colony? White found the give-and-take "Croatan," the name of a nearby island and Indian people, carved into a tree or a post in the abandoned colony. Historians presume the colonists, brusk of food, may accept fled for the nearby island and its settled native population. Others offer violence every bit an explanation. Regardless, the English language colonists were never heard from again. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, no Englishmen had notwithstanding established a permanent North American colony.
Afterwards King James made peace with Spain in 1604, privateering no longer held out the promise of cheap wealth. Colonization assumed a new urgency. The Virginia Company, established in 1606, drew inspiration from Cortes and the Spanish conquests. It hoped to find gold and silver as well as other valuable trading commodities in the New World: glass, iron, furs, pitch, tar, and anything else the land could supply. The Company planned to identify a navigable river with a deep harbor, abroad from the eyes of the Spanish. At that place they would find an Indian trading network and excerpt a fortune from the New World.(three)
Jamestown
In April 1607, Englishmen aboard three ships — the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery — sailed forty miles up the James River (named for the English language male monarch) in present-twenty-four hours Virginia (Named for Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen") and settled upon just such a place. The uninhabited peninsula they selected was upriver and out of sight of Castilian patrols. It offered easy defense force confronting ground assaults and was uninhabited but still located close enough to many Indian villages and their potentially lucrative trade networks. But the location was a disaster. Indians ignored the peninsula because of its terrible soil and its brackish tidal water that led to debilitating disease. Despite these setbacks, the English language congenital Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the present-day The states.
The English language had not entered a wilderness but had arrived amid a people they called the Powhatan Confederacy. Powhatan, or Wahunsenacawh, as he called himself, led almost ten,000 Algonquian-speaking Indians in the Chesapeake. They burned vast acreage to articulate castor and create sprawling bogus park-like grasslands so that they could easily hunt deer, elk, and bison. The Powhatan raised corn, beans, squash, and possibly sunflowers, rotating acreage throughout the Chesapeake. Without plows, manure, or typhoon animals, the Powhatan achieved a remarkable number of calories cheaply and efficiently.
Jamestown was a turn a profit-seeking venture backed by investors. The colonists were mostly gentlemen and proved entirely unprepared for the challenges ahead. They hoped for easy riches but found none. The peninsula'due south location was poisonous and supplies from England were sporadic or spoiled. Equally John Smith afterward complained, they "Would rather starve than piece of work." And so they did. Disease and starvation ravaged the colonists. Fewer than half of the original colonists survived the first 9 months.
John Smith, a yeoman's son and capable leader, took command of the bedridden colony and promised, "He that will not work shall not eat." He navigated Indian diplomacy, claiming that he was captured and sentenced to death but Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, intervened to save his life. She would later marry another colonist, John Rolfe, and dice in England.
Powhatan kept the English live that first winter. The Powhatan had welcomed the English and their manufactured appurtenances. The Powhatan placed a high value on metal axe-heads, kettles, tools, and guns and eagerly traded furs and other arable goods for them. With 10,000 confederated natives and with food in abundance, the Indians had little to fearfulness and much to proceeds from the isolated outpost of sick and dying Englishmen.
Despite reinforcements, the English connected to die. Four hundred settlers arrived in 1609 and the overwhelmed colony entered a desperate "starving time" in the wintertime of 1609-1610. Supplies were lost at sea. Relations with the Indians deteriorated and the colonists fought a kind of deadening-burning guerrilla war with the Powhatan. Disaster loomed for the colony. The settlers ate everything they could, roaming the woods for basics and berries. They boiled leather. They dug up graves to swallow the corpses of their former neighbors. One man was executed for killing and eating his wife. Some years later, George Percy recalled the colonists' desperation during these years, when he served equally the colony's president: "Having fed upon our horses and other beasts as long equally they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin equally dogs, cats, rats and mice … as to eat boots shoes or any other leather … And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every confront, that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seam incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them." Archaeological excavations in 2012 exhumed the bones of a fourteen-twelvemonth-old daughter that exhibited the telltale signs of cannibalism. All but sixty settlers would die by the summer of 1610.
Little improved over the adjacent several years. By 1616, 80 percent of all English immigrants that arrived in Jamestown had perished. England'south outset American colony was a ending. The colony was reorganized and in 1614 the marriage of Pocahontas (Figure 5) to John Rolfe eased relations with the Powhatan, though the colony yet limped along equally a starving, commercially disastrous tragedy. The colonists were unable to discover whatever profitable commodities and they still depended upon the Indians and sporadic shipments from England for food. Merely then tobacco saved Jamestown.
By the fourth dimension King James I described tobacco as a "baneful weed, …loathsome to the middle, mean to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs," it had already taken Europe by storm. In 1616 John Rolfe crossed tobacco strains from Trinidad and Guiana and planted Virginia's first tobacco crop. In 1617 the colony sent its first cargo of tobacco back to England. The "baneful weed," a native of the New Earth, fetched a high price in Europe and the tobacco boom began in Virginia and then later spread to Maryland. "Tobacco created a golden rush gild in Virginia," wrote one historian. Within 15 years American colonists were exporting over 500,000 pounds of tobacco per twelvemonth. Within forty, they were exporting 15 meg.
Tobacco inverse everything. Information technology saved Virginia from ruin, incentivized farther colonization, and laid the groundwork for what would become the United states of america. With a new market open, Virginia drew not but merchants and traders, but also settlers. Colonists came in droves. They were mostly immature, mostly male, and mostly indentured servants. Just even the rough terms of servitude were no match for the promise of land and potential profits that beckoned ambitious and dispossessed English farmers alike. But still there were not enough of them. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop and ambitious planters, with seemingly limitless state earlier them, lacked merely laborers to exponentially escalate their wealth and status. The colony's great labor vacuum inspired the cosmos of the "headright policy" in 1618: whatsoever person who migrated to Virginia would automatically receive 50 acres of land and any immigrant whose passage they paid would entitle them to 50 acres more than.
In 1619 the Virginia Visitor established the House of Burgesses, a limited representative torso composed of white landowners that first met in Jamestown. That same year, a Dutch slave ship sold xx Africans to the Virginia colonists (Figure vi). Southern slavery was born.
Presently the tobacco-growing colonists expanded beyond the bounds of Jamestown'due south mortiferous peninsula. When it became clear that the English were not simply intent on maintaining a small trading post, but sought a permanent e'er-expanding colony, conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy became nigh inevitable. Powhatan died in 1622 and was succeeded by his brother, Opechancanough, who promised to drive the land-hungry colonists back into the body of water. He launched a surprise assault and in a single day (March 22, 1622) killed 347 colonists, or one-quaternary of all the colonists in Virginia (Figure 7). The colonists retaliated and revisited the massacres upon Indian settlements many times over. The massacre freed the colonists to drive the Indians off their land. The governor of Virginia declared it colonial policy to achieve the "expulsion of the savages to gain the free range of the state." War and illness destroyed the remnants of the Chesapeake Indians and tilted the balance of power decisively toward the English colonizers, whose foothold in the New World would end to be as tenuous and challenged.
English language colonists brought to the New Globe particular visions of racial, cultural, and religious supremacy. Despite starving in the shadow of the Powhatan Confederacy, English language colonists nevertheless judged themselves physically, spiritually, and technologically superior to native peoples in North America. Christianity, metallurgy, intensive agriculture, trans-Atlantic navigation, and fifty-fifty wheat all magnified the English sense of superiority. This sense of superiority, when coupled with outbreaks of violence, left the English language feeling entitled to indigenous lands and resource.
Spanish conquerors established the framework for the Atlantic slave trade over a century before the kickoff chained Africans arrived at Jamestown. Even Bartolomé de las Casas, celebrated for his pleas to relieve Native Americans from colonial butchery, for a fourth dimension recommended that ethnic labor be replaced past importing Africans. Early English language settlers from the Caribbean area and Atlantic coast of N America mostly imitated European ideas of African inferiority. "Race" followed the expansion of slavery across the Atlantic world. Skin-color and race of a sudden seemed fixed. Englishmen equated Africans with categorical blackness and blackness with Sin, "the handmaid and symbol of baseness." An English essayist in 1695 wrote that "A negro will always exist a negro, carry him to Greenland, feed him chalk, feed and manage him never so many ways." More and more Europeans embraced the notions that Europeans and Africans were of distinct races. Others at present preached that the Old Testament God cursed Ham, the son of Noah, and doomed blacks to perpetual enslavement.
And yet in the early years of American slavery, ideas about race were not yet stock-still and the exercise of slavery was not yet codified. The start generations of Africans in English Northward America faced miserable weather condition only, in contrast to later American history, their initial servitude was not necessarily permanent, heritable, or even peculiarly disgraceful. Africans were definitively set apart every bit fundamentally unlike from their white counterparts, and faced longer terms of service and harsher punishments, merely, similar the indentured white servants whisked away from English slums, these showtime Africans in North America could as well work for just a set up number of years before becoming gratuitous landowners themselves. The Angolan Anthony Johnson, for instance, was sold into servitude but fulfilled his indenture and became a prosperous tobacco planter himself.
In 1622, at the dawn of the tobacco smash, Jamestown had all the same seemed a failure. But the ascension of tobacco and the destruction of the Powhatan turned the tide. Colonists escaped the deadly peninsula and immigrants poured into the colony to grow tobacco. By 1650 over 15,000 colonists called Virginia domicile, and the colony began to turn a profit for the Crown.(3)
New England
The English colonies in New England established from 1620 onward were founded with high goals than those in Virginia. Although migrants to New England expected economic turn a profit, religious motives directed the rhetoric and much of the reality of these colonies. Non every English language person who moved to New England during the seventeenth century was a Puritan, but Puritans dominated the politics, religion, and culture of New England. Fifty-fifty after 1700, the region's Puritan inheritance shaped many aspects of its history.
The term Puritan began equally an insult, and its recipients usually referred to each other as "the godly" if they used a specific term at all. Puritans believed that the Church of England did not altitude itself far plenty from Catholicism after Henry Viii broke with Rome in the 1530s. They largely agreed with European Calvinists — followers of theologian Jean Calvin — on matters of religious doctrine. Calvinists (and Puritans) believed that mankind was redeemed by God's Grace lonely, and that the fate of an individual'south immortal soul was predestined. The happy minority God had already called to salvage were known among English language Puritans as the Elect. Calvinists as well argued that the ornamentation or churches, reliance on ornate ceremony, and (they argued) corrupt priesthood obscured God's message. They believed that reading the Bible promised the best way to empathise God.
Puritans were stereotyped by their enemies as dour killjoys, and the exaggeration has endured. Information technology is certainly true that the Puritans' disdain for excess and opposition to many holidays popular in Europe (including Christmas, which, every bit Puritans never tired of reminding everyone, the Bible never told anyone to celebrate) lent themselves to caricature. But Puritans understood themselves as advocating a reasonable eye path in a corrupt earth. It would never occur to a Puritan, for instance, to abstain from alcohol or sexual practice.
During the first century after the English language Reformation (c.1530-1630) Puritans sought to "purify" the Church of England of all practices that smacked of Catholicism, advocating a simpler worship service, the abolition of ornate churches, and other reforms. They had some success in pushing the Church of England in a more Calvinist direction, but with the coronation of King Charles I (r. 1625-1649), the Puritans gained an implacable foe that cast English Puritans as excessive and dangerous. Facing growing persecution, the Puritans began the Great Migration, during which about xx,000 people traveled to New England between 1630 and 1640. The Puritans (dissimilar the minor ring of separatist "Pilgrims" who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620) remained committed to reforming the Church building of England, but temporarily decamped to North America to accomplish this job. Leaders like John Winthrop (Figure 8) insisted they were non separating from, or abandoning, England, but were rather forming a godly customs in America, that would exist a "Shining Metropolis on a Loma" and an example for reformers back home. The Puritans did not seek to create a haven of religious toleration, a notion that they — along with nearly all European Christians—regarded equally ridiculous at best, and dangerous at worst.
While the Puritans did not succeed in building a godly utopia in New England, a combination of Puritan traits with several external factors created colonies wildly different from any other region settled by English language people. Dissimilar those heading to Virginia, colonists in New England (Plymouth [1620], Massachusetts Bay [1630], Connecticut [1636], and Rhode Isle [1636]) generally arrived in family groups. The majority of New England immigrants were small landholders in England, a class contemporary English language called the "middling sort." When they arrived in New England they tended to replicate their home environments, founding towns comprised of independent landholders. The New England climate and soil made large-calibration plantation agriculture impractical, and then the system of big landholders using masses of slaves or indentured servants to grow labor-intensive crops never took hold.
There is no evidence that the New England Puritans would take opposed such a system were it possible; other Puritans fabricated their fortunes on the Caribbean carbohydrate islands, and New England merchants profited as suppliers of provisions and slaves to those colonies. By accident of geography as much as past design, then, New England gild was much less stratified than any of Uk's other seventeenth-century colonies.
Although New England colonies could boast wealthy landholding elites, the disparity of wealth in the region remained narrow compared to the Chesapeake, Carolina, or the Caribbean area. Instead, seventeenth-century New England was characterized by a broadly-shared minor prosperity based on a mixed economy dependent on small farms, shops, fishing, lumber, shipbuilding, and merchandise with the Atlantic Earth.
A combination of environmental factors and the Puritan social ethos produced a region of remarkable wellness and stability during the seventeenth century. New England immigrants avoided most of the deadly outbreaks of tropical affliction that turned Chesapeake colonies into graveyards. Disease, in fact, only aided English language settlement and relations to Native Americans. In dissimilarity to other English language colonists who had to argue with powerful Native American neighbors, the Puritans confronted the stunned survivors of a biological catastrophe. A lethal pandemic of smallpox during the 1610s swept away every bit much as 90 percentage of the region'south Native American population. Many survivors welcomed the English equally potential allies confronting rival tribes who had escaped the catastrophe. The relatively healthy surround coupled with political stability and the predominance of family groups among early immigrants allowed the New England population to grow to 91,000 people by 1700 from only 21,000 immigrants. In contrast, 120,000 English went to the Chesapeake, and only 85,000 white colonists remained in 1700.
The New England Puritans ready out to build their utopia past creating communities of the godly. Groups of men, oft from the aforementioned region of England, applied to the colony'due south General Courtroom for land grants, which averaged 36 square miles. They by and large divided part of the land for firsthand utilise while keeping much of the rest as "commons" or undivided land for future generations. The boondocks's inhabitants collectively decided the size of each settler's home lot based on their current wealth and status. As well oversight of property, the town restricted membership, and new arrivals needed to apply for admission. Those who gained comprisal could participate in boondocks governments that, while not democratic by modern standards, nevertheless had wide popular involvement. All male property holders could vote in town meetings and cull the selectmen, assessors, constables, and other officials from among themselves to deport the daily affairs of authorities. Upon their founding, towns wrote covenants, reflecting the Puritan belief in God'south covenant with His people. Towns sought to intervene disputes and contain strife, equally did the church building. Wayward or divergent individuals were persuaded and corrected before coercion.
Popular conceptions of Puritans as hardened authoritarians are exaggerated, but if persuasion and mediation failed, people who did not accommodate to customs norms were punished or removed. Massachusetts banished Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and other religious dissenters like the Quakers.
Although by many measures colonization in New England succeeded, its Puritan leaders failed in their own mission to create a utopian community that would inspire their fellows back in England. They tended to focus their thwarting on the younger generation. "But alas!" Increment Mather lamented, "That so many of the younger Generation have so early corrupted their [the founders'] doings!" The Jeremiad, a sermon lamenting the fallen state of New England due to its straying from its early virtuous path, became a staple of tardily seventeenth-century Puritan literature.
Yet the Jeremiads could not stop the effects of the prosperity that the early on Puritans achieved. The population spread and grew more diverse as New England prospered. Many, if non well-nigh, New Englanders retained strong ties to their Calvinist roots into the eighteenth century, only the Puritans (who became Congregationalists) struggled against a rising tide of religious pluralism. On December 25, 1727, Judge Samuel Sewell noted in his diary that a new Anglican minister "keeps the mean solar day in his new Church at Braintrey: people flock thither." Previously forbidden holidays like Christmas were celebrated only in Church. Puritan divine Cotton Mather discovered on the Christmas of 1711, "a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock, had…a Frolick, a reveling Feast, and a Ball, which discovers their Corruption."
Despite the lamentations of the Mathers and other Puritan leaders of their failure, they left an indelible marking on New England civilisation and society that endured long after the region'due south residents ceased to be called "Puritan."(iii)
Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-fscj-ushistory1/chapter/english-colonization/
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