Sources of Stability: New England Colonies of the Seventeenth Century
Colonists in New England successfully replicated a social order they had known in England based on the primary social unit of the family.

Immigrant Families and New Social Order
In contrast to the early settlers of the Chesapeake colonies who were primarily single males, the early settlers of New England migrated as families, providing a more stable basis for society. These families were better able to maintain local English customs and ameliorate the strangeness of the New World, contributing to increased reproduction and unprecedented longevity. Additionally, a dispersed population, pure drinking water, and a cool climate helped retard the spread of contagious disease and promoted good health. People who would have died in England or Virginia survived in New England.

Commonwealth of Families
In New England, town life was built upon the foundation of the family, and New England towns were essentially elaborate kinship networks with children rarely moving away. The household was the primary place of work, and the family was the basis for having and educating children. As towns matured, however, they took over the role of education by establishing schools supported by local taxes. New England achieved a literacy rate that the southern colonies would not match for another century. Harvard was the first institution of higher learning founded in the colonies. The family was also the basis of church life in New England with congregations eventually becoming focused primarily on members rather than reaching out to the larger community. Outsiders who were not absorbed into an established family unit, and therefore the church and town, often moved away.

Women’s Lives in Puritan New England
Because the household was the primary unit of production, women’s contributions and labor were essential for a successful household. They worked on family farms alongside their husbands and often managed and ran the home as “deputy husbands.” Despite this, wives’ political and legal rights were severely limited. They could own no property in their own right, and divorce, even from an abusive or irresponsible spouse was rare and difficult to obtain. New England women tended to join churches in greater numbers than men.

Social Hierarchy in New England
With neither paupers nor noblemen, New England colonists found their society incomplete by European standards, particularly when it came to the absence of wealth. Like most Europeans, they believed such well-placed persons were “natural rulers.” Gradually the colonists sorted themselves into new social and economic groups, such as provincial gentry, yeomen, and indentured servants. Most northern colonists were yeomen farmers who worked their own land, but it was not unusual for northern colonists to work as servants at some point in their lives. Such servitude was more like an apprenticeship than the kind of servitude that developed in the Chesapeake, as there was ample room for upward social and economic mobility in New England.

The Challenge of the Chesapeake Environment
Despite being founded at roughly the same time by people primarily from England, society developed quite differently in England’s Chesapeake colonies than it had in New England.

Family Life at Risk
Physical conditions were not as favorable for survival or longevity in the Chesapeake colonies because of contagious diseases and contaminated drinking water. Most colonists came as individuals rather than as members of a family, and there was an imbalance between the number of men and women. For those individuals that were able to create families, family life was much more unstable, and childbearing was extremely dangerous. Additionally, the prevalence of the practice of indentured servitude contributed to the instability of Chesapeake society. Women were particularly vulnerable as servants.

The Structure of Planter Society
The cultivation of tobacco shaped Chesapeake society and perpetuated social inequality. Great planters dominated Chesapeake society by controlling large estates, the labor of indentured servants or slaves, and the political system of the colony. Freemen (usually former indentured servants) formed the largest class. The experience of indentured servitude was not degrading in and of itself, but the conditions of life as an indentured servant were difficult at best. Because the tobacco-based economy was based on the plantations, cities and towns were slow to develop, and especially after the 1680s, newcomers discovered that upward social mobility was more difficult to attain than in the northern colonies.

Race and Freedom in British America
Many of the first settlers in the Americas were not voluntary settlers, but were forced to migrate to the colonies as slaves. This practice only increased as the supply of white indentured servants dried up.

Roots of Slavery
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost eleven million Blacks were brought to the Americas as slaves. Most were sold in South or Central America. Because slaves were required to endure hard labor, men were preferred, and in most slave communities, outnumbered women by almost two to one. There were almost no objections to enslaving Africans for life because economic considerations required cheap labor. Planters, however, generally justified slavery by identifying Black Africans as heathen and barbarous in need of civilizing. At first, slavery and race were not intertwined, as some Blacks were able to become free, and a few to become successful planters themselves but as the Black population expanded, lawmakers drew up ever stricter slave codes. By 1700, slavery was undeniably based on the color of a person's skin.

Constructing African-American Identities
Despite the cruelty and alienation of slavery, Blacks developed their own unique African- American culture in terms of music, art, religion, and language that was neither African nor European. Even so, the slave experience varied from colony to colony with slaves in the South, where they made up a greater percentage of the population, better able to establish kinship relationships and maintain more African cultural traditions. By the eighteenth century, creole slaves (those born in America) reproduced in greater number than the number of slaves imported from Africa. As slaves, many Blacks protested with individual acts of violence, in organized revolts, such as the Stono Uprising of 1739, or with acts of non-violent resistance. Others found opportunities for a degree of personal freedom by working, for example, as mariners on colonial sailing vessels.

Rise of a Commercial Empire
After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a British policy of indifference toward the colonies was replaced by one of intervention.

Response to Economic Competition
England developed a framework of regulatory policies, termed mercantilism, to increase exports, decrease imports, and grow richer at the expense of other European states. Though these policies were not developed as a well-integrated set of ideas about international commerce, they did provide a blueprint for England’s first empire and remained in place with only minor adjustments until 1765.

Regulating Colonial Trade
Beginning in 1660, Parliament passed a series of Navigation Acts, which detailed commercial restrictions, and set up the Board of Trade to oversee colonial affairs and to limit competition, especially with the Dutch. Inadequate or lax enforcement and corruption often impeded the execution of imperial policies, but ultimately the colonists largely obeyed the Navigation Acts because they found it profitable to do so.

Colonial Factions Spark Political Revolt, 1676-1691
In the second half of the seventeenth century, several of the colonies experienced instability as the local gentry split into competing political factions, and internal rebellions erupted in Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts Bay.

Civil War in Virginia: Bacon's Rebellion
In 1676, Virginians suffered from economic depression and political repression. Nathaniel Bacon capitalized on this unrest in leading an unsuccessful rebellion against the government of Lord Berkeley, ostensibly to protect western settlers against Indian raids, but probably because of the governor’s monopoly of the fur trade. There were clear divisions between many of the colonists and “greedy” Crown appointees. Though the rebellion did not last long, many Native Americans and Virginia colonists died, Jamestown was burned to the ground, and some political reforms were made.

The Glorious Revolution in the Bay Colony
During the 1660s and 1670s, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay colony found themselves drawn into closer and closer contact with England, something many leaders perceived as a violation of their covenant with God. In 1675, an Indian uprising known as King Philip's War cost the lives of more than one thousand Indians and New Englanders before it was put down. The large debt incurred in this war by the colony led England to annul the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company and merge the colony into the larger Dominion of New England with the tyrannical Sir Edmund Andros as governor. When James II was deposed during the Glorious Revolution in England, Americans in New England overthrew Governor Andros, and the colony of Massachusetts received a new royal charter.

Contagion of Witchcraft
Fear and hysteria resulted in the hanging of nineteen alleged “witches” in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, but hundreds more were accused, awaiting trial when the hysteria abated. Religious discord and economic tension seem to have been the underlying causes.

The Glorious Revolution in New York and Maryland
News of the Glorious Revolution sparked feuds among the colonial gentry in both New York and Maryland. In New York, Jacob Leisler led an abortive attempt to seize control of the colony from powerful Anglo-Dutch families. In Maryland, John Coode led an anti-proprietary and anti-Catholic group which successfully petitioned the Crown to transform Maryland into a royal colony, though the Baltimore family remained important, even regaining their proprietorship in 1715 under the Anglican fourth Lord Baltimore.

Conclusion: Local Aspirations within an Atlantic Empire
The creation of a new imperial system did draw the colonies into closer contact with England, but did not eliminate the sectional differences in the colonies. It would be a long time before a sense of nationalism would unite the colonies and kindle an American Revolution.