However, the low, marshy terrain was harsh and inhospitable for settlement. It lacked drinking water, access to game for hunting, and adequate space for farming. The colonists arrived ill-prepared for self-sufficiency.
In addition to securing gold and other precious minerals to send back to investors in England, the survival of Jamestown depended on regular supplies from England and trade with American Indians. Disease and conflicts caused many deaths to the American Indians and the English invaders. The London Company sent supply ships to the colony three times, but these were sometimes delayed and left the colonists with little in the way of food and supplies.
As a result, Jamestown was abandoned briefly until new supply ships arrived. The Algonquian Chief Powhatan controlled more than 30 smaller tribes and more than settlements.
In , the native Tidewater population was over 13, By the midth century, the Powhatan and allied tribes were in serious decline in population, due in large part to epidemics of newly introduced infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles, to which they had no natural immunity. Surviving members of many tribes assimilated into the general population of the colony. John Smith, who arrived in Virginia in , introduced an ultimatum to the settlers: those who did not work would not receive food or pay.
The economy of the Colony presented an additional problem. Gold was never found, and efforts to introduce profitable industries in the colony had all failed until John Rolfe introduced two foreign types of tobacco.
A small number of slaves, along with many European indentured servants, helped to expand the growing tobacco industry. Major importation of African slaves did not take place until much later in the century, however. Tobacco plants : By the early s, tobacco cultivation began to impact every aspect of daily life in Virginia. In , John Rolfe, prosperous and wealthy, married Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan, bringing several years of peace between the English and American Indians.
After Pocahontas and her father died and the English continued to appropriate more land for tobacco farming, relations with the Powhatans worsened. After several years of strained coexistence, Chief Opchanacanough and his Powhatan Confederacy attempted to eliminate the English colony once and for all. On the morning of March 22, , they attacked outlying plantations and communities up and down the James River.
Thereafter, the British invaders waged a relentless war against the Powhatans, burning and pillaging their villages and cutting down or carrying off their crops. In , Opchanacanough was captured and killed while in custody, and the Powhatan Confederacy began to decline. The treaties required the Powhatan to pay yearly tribute payments to the English and confined them to reservations.
In , the first representative assembly in America convened in a Jamestown church. This became known as the House of Burgesses. While the House of Burgesses was still allowed to run the government, the king nevertheless appointed a royal governor to settle disputes and enforce certain British policies. The House of Burgesses instituted individual land ownership and divided the colony into four large boroughs.
Initially, the colony only allowed men of English origin to vote, but they eventually extended suffrage to white men of other nationalities. Despite the setbacks, the colony continued to grow. Virginia became the largest, most populous, and most important colony. The Church of England was legally established; the bishop of London made it a favorite missionary target and sent in 22 clergymen by In practice, establishment meant that local taxes were funneled through the local parish to handle the needs of local government, such as roads and poor relief, in addition to the salary of the minister.
When the elected assembly, the House of Burgesses, was established in , it enacted religious laws that made Virginia a bastion of Anglicanism. It passed a law in requiring uniformity among the Anglican congregations of the colony. According to the ministers, the colonists were typically inattentive, disinterested, and bored during church services. Some ministers solved their problems by encouraging parishioners to become devout at home, using the Book of Common Prayer for private prayer and devotion rather than the Bible.
This allowed devout Anglicans to lead an active and sincere religious life apart from the unsatisfactory formal church services. However, the stress on private devotion weakened the need for a bishop or a large institutional church of the sort Blair wanted.
The stress on personal piety opened the way for the First Great Awakening, which pulled people away from the established church. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other evangelicals directly challenged these lax moral standards and refused to tolerate them in their ranks.
The evangelicals identified the traditional standards of masculinity as sinful, which revolved around gambling, drinking, brawling, and arbitrary control over women, children, and slaves. Baptists, German Lutherans, and Presbyterians funded their own ministers and favored disestablishment of the Anglican Church.
The dissenters grew much faster than the established church, making religious division a factor in Virginia politics into the American Revolution. Sir William Berkeley, the governor of Virginia from — and —, tried to push for diversification in the economic activities of the colony. Governor Berkeley was a royal insider from an early age, and his governorship reflected the royal interests of Charles I and Charles II.
Berkeley remained popular after his first administration and returned to the governorship in His second administration, however, was characterized by many problems—disease, hurricanes, war with American Indians, and economic difficulties all plagued Virginia at this time. Berkeley successfully established autocratic authority over the colony. To protect this power, Berkeley refused new legislative elections for 14 years. After a lack of reform, Nathaniel Bacon began a rebellion in and captured Jamestown, taking control of the colony for several months.
Bacon then burned Jamestown before abandoning it, and continued his rebellion until dying from disease. Subsequently, Berkeley managed to eliminate the remaining rebels. The rebuilt statehouse in Jamestown burned again in , after which the colonial capital was permanently moved to nearby Middle Plantation, and the town was renamed Williamsburg. Elite planters dominated the colony and would later play a major role in the fight for independence and the development of democratic-republican ideals of the United States.
The Province of Maryland was a British colony in North America that existed from until , when it joined the other 12 of the North American colonies in rebellion against Great Britain and became the state of Maryland.
Colonial Maryland was larger than the present-day state of Maryland. The original charter granted the Calverts an imprecisely defined territory north of Virginia and south of the 40th parallel, comprising perhaps as much as 12 million acres. Maryland lost some of its original territory to Pennsylvania in the s when, after Charles II granted that colony a tract that overlapped with the Maryland grant, the Mason-Dixon Line was drawn to resolve the boundary dispute between the two colonies.
Maryland also ceded some territory to create the new District of Columbia after the American Revolution. The first settlers purchased land from the Yaocomico Indians and founded St. In , Maryland declared war on the Susquehannock Indian nation and remained in an inactive state of war until a peace treaty was concluded in He possessed absolute authority over his domain; in fact, settlers were required to swear allegiance to him rather than to the King of England.
The charter created an aristocracy of lords of the manor who bought land from Baltimore and held greater legal and social privileges than the common settlers. In Maryland, Baltimore sought to create a haven for English Roman Catholics and to demonstrate that Catholics and Protestants could live together harmoniously. Like other aristocratic proprietors, he also hoped to turn a profit in the new colony.
Women's lives in the colonies varied especially, with wealthy landowners' wives responsible for far less physical work than their poorer counterparts. Plantation wives did attend to household management, overseeing staff and meals, sewing clothing and preparing foods such as preserves, butter and cured meats.
Poor women who lived on farms, however, typically handled every aspect of domestic life single-handedly, and were also expected to help their husbands with planting and harvesting, if needed. These demands left little free time for socializing, although churches did provide opportunities to mix with other wives.
One common social activity different classes shared was hunting, with gentry preferring to hunt deer and foxes, while poorer men sought rabbits and fowl. Plantations grew cotton, tobacco, indigo a purple dye , and other crops. Most people in the Southern Colonies were Anglican Baptist or Presbyterian , though most of the original settlers from the Maryland colony were Catholic, as Lord Baltimore founded it as a refuge for English Catholics.
What role did Brokers play in the Southern economy? What led to conflicts between Southern colonists and Native Americans? Colonists destroyed Native American villages, and gave them diseases. Children had sack races and played tag, marbles, hopscotch, and leapfrog.
They also flew kites and went fishing and swimming. Even simple activities like swinging or taking a walk were enjoyed if they had friend to accompany them. They were very successful due to a warm climate, rich soil, and long growing season. These conditions promoted an agricultural based economy in the South.
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