The Cost of Expansion: U.S. History

Required Resources
Read/review the following resources for this activity:

• Textbook: Chapter 3, 4
• Lesson
• Minimum of 1 scholarly source (in addition to the textbook)

Initial Post Instructions
For the initial post, pick two (2) of the following settlements:

• Southern colonies
• Chesapeake colonies
• Middle colonies
• New England colonies

Then, address the following for your selections:

• Compare and contrast the settlement patterns.
• What forces and ideas shaped their origin?
• Examine the influence of religion for those settlements (e.g., Puritanism, Quakers, and the Anglican Church).

Follow-Up Post Instructions
Compare your selections and analysis of those selections with those of your peers. If they chose different settlements, examine how yours are similar and/or different. If they chose the same settlements, build on their posts by providing additional information about the settlements that you have not already noted in your own post.

Writing Requirements

• Minimum of 2 posts (1 initial & 1 follow-up)
• APA format for in-text citations and list of references

Grading
This activity will be graded using the Discussion Grading Rubric. Please review the following link:

ANSWER

The Cost of Expansion

Southern Colonies versus New England

Compare and contrast the settlement patterns.

The Southern Colonies comprised North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The area’s geographical features allowed the settlers to grow tobacco, indigo, and rice. Enslaved people provided a significant portion of the labor; hence, they were the backbone of the region’s economy.

In contrast, New England colonies encompassed Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Unlike the Southern colonies, New England’s geography did not support large-scale farming because it consisted of hills, forests, a cold climate, rocky land, and long winters. Therefore, the colonists depended on whaling, manufacturing, fishing, boat-building and selling, and lumber (Delahaye, 2020). While Southern colonists were primarily large-scale farmers, New England’s were merchants and craftsmen.

The similarity between these colonies is that they had bad relationships with the natives. The English puritans forced the natives to convert and adopt their version of Christianity, causing tension between the two groups. In 1637, the Puritans attacked and killed hundreds of natives despite signing a peace treaty (Corbett et al., 2017). The Puritans made these attacks to expand their territories. The Southern colonists also used violence to subdue the natives and force them to work on their fields.

Examine the influence of religion on those settlements 

Religion and family structure are other differences between Southern and New England colonies. Family and religion were very important to people in New England. The religious settlers were primarily puritans who were religious fanatics. Since the 1580s, reform-minded Englishmen and women had pressed for a more radical transformation of the country’s official church. Calvinists and other Protestant reformers like John Wycliffe were known as Puritans because they insisted on “purifying” the English church from what they considered to be non-scriptural aspects, especially Catholic rites and structures (Corbett et al., 2017).

Conflict erupted between Puritan preachers and the Church of England in the 1620s and 1630s when the latter forbade Puritan clergy from preaching (Corbett et al., 2017). Due to Puritans’ aspirations for social, cultural, and religious reforms, the church saw them as a threat to national security, causing a series of religious persecutions. Many Puritans fled to the New World because they were unable to accept the teachings of the Church of England (Corbett et al., 2017). However, the people who made the journey to the Americas were not all from the same place. One faction wanted to break away from the Church of England, while the other wanted to reform it. Any person in the colony found straying from these religious practices and customs would be severely punished because the puritans believed it threatened their governance order. Due to this influence, the church strongly influenced the New England colonies’ democratic and political processes.

In contrast, Southern Colonies had more religious freedom, and families were less prevalent than in New England. Religious practices existed in these colonies, but they did not significantly affect the settlers’ lives. The Southern Territories were mainly Anglican and Baptists, while the Middle Colonies were puritans.

What forces and ideas shaped their origin?

New England colonies were formed by immigrants who were escaping from the religious persecution in England. Puritans wanted to completely separate themselves from the Church of England instead of reforming it. These persecutions and the desire to separate from the Church of England were New England Colonies’ primary motivations. Southern colonies migrated to the U.S. in search of economic prosperity. They could not afford a splendid lifestyle of majestic manors and affluent lifestyles in their home country because the law only permitted large estates to be passed down to the oldest son. The U.S. provided the migrants of Southern colonies the opportunities to have a lifestyle they could never have imagined in their home countries. Another reason the migrants moved to the United States was for adventure, explaining why the settlers in Southern colonies were predominantly male.

Chesapeake Colonies versus Middle Colonies

Compare and contrast the settlement patterns.

The Middle Colonies comprised Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. The geographical features in these colonies entailed a warm climate, fertile soil, swift rivers, and wide valleys, making the area suitable for farming. The middle colonies had more port cities and urban areas, while the Chesapeake colonies were more of a rural area with very few urban centers. The settlement pattern in middle colonies was this: farms the size of 500 acres (owned by a single person) were common. Farmsteads were placed between contiguous fields in open country neighborhoods with no distinct edges.

Cash crops, livestock-keeping, mining, and trading were important elements in the economy of the Middle Colonies. Similar to Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake colonies also practiced farming, with tobacco being the main cash crop (Bushman, 1998). The Middle Colonies shipped their cash crops to England, while Chesapeake shipped to Caribbean Islands. The middle economy was more diverse because they traded furs, shipbuilding, and lumbering and had different agricultural products. The Chesapeake colonies concentrated on tobacco and other cash crops.

What forces and ideas shaped their origin?

Middle colonies such as New York, Delaware, and New Jersey were primarily founded to serve as trade centers. Some of the earliest settlers in this area were the Dutch. The Dutch gained their independence from Spain in the late sixteenth century, thanks to the support of Protestant England. A powerful maritime and commercial force in its own right, the Netherlands challenged and subdued England.

As a result of their newfound power, they expanded their empire, particularly in the East Indies. The Dutch, like the English, established colonies by allowing joint-stock firms to set up trading posts and businesses in the new territories (Anderson & Tollison, 1982). These factors led to the creation of the middle colonies. Chesapeake colonies had a similar commercial orientation. English settlers in the Chesapeake Bay region formed the Maryland and Virginia states for commercial reasons. Initially, the Early Virginians thought they could find gold in the region. However, they soon realized that was the only way to make money in the region. Therefore, numerous young English men and women, many of whom were unmarried, unemployed, and impatient, placed their stakes in the tobacco fields to find a better life.

Examine the influence of religion on settlements

Religion did not significantly influence the lives of the settlers in Virginia. The Church of England was the main church in the area; hence, members paid taxes to support it regardless of religious affiliation. Church membership was not important because they were few churches and clergymen in Virginia. Therefore, religion was of minor importance in the state of Virginia.

Lord Baltimore established Maryland as a refuge for English Catholics fleeing political and religious persecution in England, but the colony only attracted a small number of Catholics. The cheap land supplied by Baltimore attracted Protestants instead. Initially, the relationship between Catholics and Protestants was amicable to sharing a chapel (King, 1921). This amicable relationship continued until the enactment of the Act of Religious Toleration, legislation that gave Christians the freedom of worship. This legislation brought religious disputes to the colony. Therefore, religion was also important in Maryland. The Middle colonies enjoyed religious freedom just like the Southern colonies.

References

Anderson, G. M., & Tollison, R. D. (1982). Adam Smith’s analysis of joint-stock companies. Journal of Political Economy, 90(6), 1237-1256. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/261119

Bushman, R. L. (1998). Markets and composite farms in early America. The William and Mary Quarterly, 55(3), 351-374. https://personal.tcu.edu/gsmith/GraduateCourse/EarlyRepublicPDFs/RichardBushman.pdf

Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., & Lund, J. M. (2017). U.S. History: English Settlements in America. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/3-3-english-settlements-in-america

Delahaye, A. (2020). Commerce and Settlement: Rethinking Early New England History. XVII-XVIII. Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, (77). https://journals.openedition.org/1718/5877

King, W. (1921). Lord Baltimore and His Freedom in Granting Religious Toleration. Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, 32(4), 295-313. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44208562

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