These colonies were known as the "breadbasket" because of the large amounts of barley, wheat, oats, and rye that were grown here. Religion in the Middle Colonies was varied as no single religion seemed to dominate the entire region. Religious tolerance attracted immigrants from a wide-range of foreign countries who practiced many different religions.
Quakers, Catholics, Jews, Lutherans and Presbyterians were among those religious groups that had significant numbers in the middle colonies. The Middle Colonies enjoyed a successful and diverse economy. But people living in those times made decisions and took risks while having no idea how things would turn out. To perceive not only what they did but why, we have to recreate the cultural environment and mentality of their era.
The century and a half following the Reformation was an Age of Belief when the finest minds tussled with theological questions and marked out boundaries that people of faith were prepared to defend with their lives. Some of these early religious enmities were carried to North America in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay were determined to exclude alien elements from their spiritual community, and they hanged four Quakers to prove it.
Virginians at about the same time expelled from their Anglican province every Puritan they could lay hands on. New Netherland governor Peter Stuyvesant cleansed his colony of Lutherans and Quakers, and tried to do the same to Jews. Such episodes were largely confined, however, to the seventeenth century. Though religious strife was not completely extinguished in America in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its expression was often indirect and less harsh, frequently taking a political form.
Philadelphia politicians tried to disenfranchise the Germans—whose churches had organized them into an effective political bloc—until they learned to speak English. Quaker and Jewish votes were disallowed on at least two occasions in closely contested New York elections. And authorities in New Jersey periodically tried to disqualify Quakers from public office, given their pacifist disinclination to raise a militia.
Modern students accustomed to seeing politicians march in St. And in times of high tension, then as now, religious politics could turn ugly. Political writings were laced with religious and ethnic slurs. The addition of race to religion precipitated two of the most violent moments in eighteenth-century Middle Colony history, brief reversions to the bloodletting of an earlier age. The town seethed with rumors that Catholics were conspiring with slaves to instigate a rebellion. The magistrates launched a fierce investigation, the result of which was the execution of thirty blacks and four whites more than half again the number executed as witches at Salem.
The other episode, in , involved Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in the western Pennsylvania town of Paxton. It is not clear whether race or religion was the more significant catalyst for these melancholy events. Maintaining group identity: An Amish woman in Pennsylvania, Courtesy National Archives DA This history of group tensions in the Middle Colonies can serve as a springboard for discussion about the pros and cons of group identity, a subject that has gained renewed attention in recent American discourse and practice.
Is it better for Americans to play down their ethnic, religious, and racial differences in order to nurture an overarching national identity? The religious pluralism so visible in the Middle Colonies also bears on another issue much in the news these days—the relationship between church and state. To set the stage for this discussion, students must enter another time-warp.
A primary axiom of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thought asserted that a strong church was the mainstay of civic stability.
The church instilled moral behavior and respect for authority; in turn, the government protected the church. Throughout the early modern world, each state sanctioned but one official church—an established church—that was supported by taxes and received privileges granted to no other denomination. Every colony founded in the western hemisphere before the mid-seventeenth century, except one, conformed to this pattern. The exception, Maryland, was the personal fiefdom of a Catholic proprietor whose dependence on Protestant settlers ruled out any church establishment.
The original inhabitants of the area included the Hackensack, Tappan, and Acquackanonk tribes in the northeast, and the Raritan and Navesink tribes in the center of the state. In return for land, settlers paid annual fees known as quitrents. Land grants made in connection to the importation of slaves were another enticement for settlers.
After one of the proprietors sold part of the area to the Quakers, New Jersey was divided into East Jersey and West Jersey—two distinct provinces of the proprietary colony. The political division existed from to The border between the two sections reached the Atlantic Ocean to the north of Atlantic City. Much of the territory was quickly divided after , leading to the distribution of land into large tracts that later led to real estate speculation and subdivision.
In , the two provinces were reunited under a royal, rather than a proprietary, governor. The governors of New York then ruled New Jersey, which infuriated the settlers of New Jersey, who accused the governor of showing favoritism to New York. While the majority of residents lived in towns with individual landholdings of acres, a few rich proprietors owned vast estates.
English Quakers and Anglicans owned large landholdings. Unlike Plymouth, Jamestown, and other colonies, New Jersey was populated by a secondary wave of immigrants who came from other colonies instead of those who migrated directly from Europe.
New Jersey remained agrarian and rural throughout the colonial era, and commercial farming developed only sporadically. Some townships emerged as important ports for shipping to New York and Philadelphia. Examine the religious and social factors that shaped the establishment of the Pennsylvania and Delaware colony. Between and , Delaware was an incorporated county under the Province of Maryland. The Mason-Dixon line is said to have legally resolved vague outlines between Maryland and Pennsylvania and awarded Delaware to Pennsylvania.
Delaware Colony became a region of the Province of Pennsylvania, although never legally a separate colony. From until , it was part of the Penn proprietorship and was known as the Lower Counties.
In , it gained a separate assembly from the three upper counties but continued to have the same governor as the rest of Pennsylvania.
William Penn had asked for and later received the lands of Delaware from the Duke of York. Penn had a hard time governing Delaware because the economy and geology were largely the same as that of the Chesapeake, rather than that of his Pennsylvania territory. He attempted to merge the governments of Pennsylvania and Delaware. Representatives from both areas clashed and, in , Penn agreed to two separate assemblies.
Delawareans would meet in New Castle and Pennsylvanians would gather in Philadelphia. Delaware continued to be a melting pot of sorts and was home to Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and French, in addition to the English, who constituted the dominant culture.
The Charter of Privileges mandated fair dealings with American Indians. This led to significantly better relations with the local tribes such as the Lenape and Susquehanna than most other colonies had.
The Quakers had previously treated American Indians with respect, bought land from them voluntarily, and even had representation of American Indians on juries.
In , the Colony spent a great deal of its political goodwill with the native Lenape in pursuit of more land. The colonial administrators claimed that they had a deed dating to the s, in which the Lenape-Delaware had promised to sell a portion of land beginning between the junction of the Delaware River and Lehigh River, near present Wrightstown, Pennsylvania. The document was most likely a forgery; nonetheless, the Provincial Secretary set in motion a plan to grab as much land as possible.
In the end, the Penns gained 1,, acres of land in what is now northeastern Pennsylvania, an area roughly equivalent to the size of the state of Rhode Island. The Lenape tribe fought for the next 19 years to have the treaty annulled but was forced into the Shamokin and Wyoming Valleys, which were already overcrowded with other displaced tribes. George Fox had founded the Society of Friends commonly known as Quakers in England in the late s, having grown dissatisfied with Puritanism and the idea of predestination.
They gained the name Quakers because they were said to quake when the inner light moved them. The colonists did not have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence. The American Revolutionary War was sparked after American colonists chafed over issues like taxation without representation , embodied by laws like The Stamp Act and The Townshend Acts. The Declaration of Independence , issued on July 4, , enumerated the reasons the Founding Fathers felt compelled to break from the rule of King George III and parliament to start a new nation.
France joined the war on the side of the colonists in , helping the Continental Army conquer the British at the Battle of Yorktown in The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution and granting the 13 original colonies independence was signed on September 3, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
On May 14, , a group of roughly members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River. Famine, disease and conflict with local Native American tribes in the first two years In September , during the reign of King James I, a group of around English men and women—many of them members of the English Separatist Church later known to history as the Pilgrims—set sail for the New World aboard the Mayflower.
Two months later, the three-masted The 13 British colonies that eventually became the United States in some ways were more different than they were alike.
They were founded for a diverse range of reasons, from the pursuit of fortunes to the desire to create havens from persecution and model societies, and had In the pre-Revolutionary War era, people living in the original Many of the details of the Popham colony have been lost to history, but in its heyday the tiny settlement in Maine was considered a direct rival of Jamestown.
Both colonies got their start in , when the British King James I granted the Virginia Company a charter to establish The upstart settlement dates to the early 17th In September , a merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, a port on the southern coast of England.
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