Regions and Economics of Colonial America

* New England

- Puritans, Pilgrims, and associated

-> Came seeking religious freedom

=> Set up religious communities/colonies

=> Lots of little "Cities upon Hills"

- Religiously strict

-> Salem witch trials one result

-> Many different ideal religious communities

=> Intolerant of internal dissent

- Economics

-> Many small, subsistence farmers

-> Excessive wealth frowned upon

=> Community welfare a goal

-> Whaling and fishing important industries

-> a growing "industrial" sector

=> Shipbuilding and tar

- Politics were local and democratic

-> Town meetings, consensus, and charters/constitutions

* Mid-Atlantic states

- Catholics and settlers

-> Some came to set up religiously free Catholic communities

-> Most came to make money, settle

-> Non-first sons of the English gentry sometime came

=> Couldn't inherit in England because of primogeniture

- Religiously varied

-> Catholics in Maryland, Anglicans and others in Virginia

-> Religious toleration a practical necessity

- Economics

-> Estates and small-holders

-> Lots of agriculture and tobacco

-> Wide wealth differences and a local economic aristocracy

=> slavery increasingly important on plantations

- Politics were aristocratic and non-Constitutional

-> Close to English politics

* The South-Atlantic States

- Settlers, debtors, and criminals

-> Carolinas set up to defend against Spanish expansion

-> Georgia started out as a prisoner colony

=> Debtors and small-time criminals exiled from England

- Religion was varied

- Economics of plantation slavery

-> Small subsistence farmers at first

-> Cotton and tobacco plantations grew rich and massive

=> heavy dependence on slavery

- Politics were primitive

-> Planter aristocracy largely in control

-> White bunker against massive slave population

-> Largely loyalist