English Colonization Of North America

Sixteenth-century English map of North America

English colonization of North America was the process whereby English people began colonizing parts of the eastern seaboard of North America in the early seventeenth century, leading eventually to the emergence of the thirteen British colonies there which became the United States at the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). The first such colonies were established at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 and separately to the north in New England from 1620 onwards after the arrival of the Mayflower there. These colonies were settled owing to a mix of motives on the part of the settlers, some seeking land and profit and others fleeing religious persecution at home. Over time the ethnic makeup of the settlers changed, with the Welsh, Irish and Scots also becoming involved, while at Pennsylvania from the 1680s onwards German religious radicals began arriving. Overall, the demographic impact of English colonization of the region was enormous, laying the seeds of the United States.

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English colonization of North America chronology of events

English exploration of North America dated as far back as the discovery of the New World. It is believed that English sailors based out of the port of Bristol may have been fishing off the banks of Newfoundland as early as the 1480s without being fully aware that they had discovered a new continent, while John Cabot, an Italian navigator in the service of the English crown, was the first European since the Viking Age to record details of the North American mainland during an expedition of 1497 at a time when the Spanish had still only reached the islands of the Caribbean. Still, while they were pioneers in exploring the Americas, the English, unlike the Spanish, were slow to attempt to actually establish colonies in North America. It was not until an ultimately failed effort was made by Sir Walter Raleigh to do so in the mid-1580s at Roanoke in what is what is now North Carolina that an effort at an English colony here was made.

Jamestown in Virginia was named after James I

The early seventeenth century saw more sustained efforts by the English to plant colonies here. These were undertaken by the Virginia Company, a chartered corporation. It funded an expedition in 1607 which established Jamestown in Virginia, so named after King James I. It struggled in its first years, but in the 1610s it began to grow exponentially on the back of a boom in tobacco sales back in Europe and soon settlements and farms were springing up all around the banks of the James River and the wider Chesapeake. Thus, profit was the main motive for colonization here and in 1619 the first slaves arrived from Africa as cheap labor was sought for the tobacco and cotton plantations which dotted the region in increasing numbers. Over the decades that followed tens of thousands of settlers from England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland arrived to Virginia. Before long they were expanding to the south into the region covered by North Carolina and then South Carolina. The spread of British settlement is found in the names of these regions. Carolina comes from Carolus, the Latin for Charles, and is derived from the fact that King Charles I ruled England from 1625 to 1649 and his son Charles II from 1660 to 1685. By the time settlement had spread as far south as Georgia, King George I (who reigned from 1714 to 1727) was king of Great Britain.

Further north the situation was somewhat different. The first English settlers arrived to Massachusetts in New England in 1620 on board the Mayflower, landing at Plymouth Rock. These weren’t the naked profiteers that made up much of the Virginia settlements early on. Instead they were religious exiles, men and women were who were effectively Calvinists or ‘Puritans’. Their brand of austere Protestantism was not tolerated in England under King James I and King Charles I, both of whom were moderate Anglican Protestants. As a result, many of these Puritans left England to worship in greater freedom overseas. Before heading for North America some had lived for a time in the Protestant Dutch Republic. The first arrivals in New England triggered a growing movement to head across the Atlantic and in 1630 a fleet of English Puritan exiles arrived to Massachusetts, establishing Boston there. As with the settlers further to the south in Virginia, these initial waves of settlers in Massachusetts soon spread out and established new colonies further inland and along the coast. In the course of the 1630s and beyond, new settlements emerged in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine.

For a time English colonization was centered overwhelmingly on the Southern Colonies (Virginia and the Carolinas) and New England (Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island), but in the second half of the seventeenth century a third block emerged. These were known as the Middle Colonies and were, as one might expect, in the middle of the other two blocks. The lands here were settled in different ways. For instance, Maryland was first settled as a colony for English Catholics, named after Henrietta Maria, the Catholic wife of King Charles I. Pennsylvania was established by the Quaker, William Penn, from the early 1680s onwards and became a haven for all manner of religious minorities from Britain, Ireland and even parts of continental Europe. Finally, New York was taken over by England in 1664 in the midst of the Second Anglo-Dutch War. It had previously been the Dutch colony of New Holland. By the time the English arrived and renamed it after the Duke of York, the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan was already a substantial trading town hemmed in on the north by a wall which lies along the course of what is now Wall Street.

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Extent of migration to North America owing to English colonization

A modern replica of the Mayflower

The migration which occurred as a result of English colonization of North America was slow at first and expanded hugely over time. For instance, the Jamestown colony in Virginia consisted of just a few hundred people in the late 1600s and into the 1610s. Just 102 people sailed on board the Mayflower in 1620 and a dozen of those were the ship’s crew who didn’t intend on staying. By 1630 when John Winthrop led an expedition to New England the numbers were increasing. Winthrop had eleven ships carrying upwards of 1,000 Puritans and settlers. A full idea of how many people were migrating can be seen from the overall population of the colonies across the seventeenth century. In the 1620s before the large expedition arrived to New England, there were no more than 4,000 settlers in all. This grew six-fold in the 1630s to reach 25,000 people by 1640. The number tripled again to 75,000 by 1660, doubling to 150,000 by 1680 and then reaching a quarter of a million by 1700. There were over a million people living in the Thirteen Colonies by 1750 excluding the Native American population.

Demographic impact of English colonization of North America

The demographic impact of this is genuinely hard to understate. While the figures involved sound small by comparison with the modern-day population of some 330 million people in the United States, the settlers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries provided the basis for all future population expansion. The port cities established by these settlers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere acted as entry points for future European settlement and transformed the demography of North America in the centuries to come. Consider that over 20 million migrants passed through Ellis Island in New York City between 1892 and 1924. The foundation for all of this was laid down by English settlers in the seventeenth century.

Furthermore, the demography of the United States was shaped by this early European settlement. For many years the character of the nation was framed by the concept of being a WASP, a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a statement of the region’s English, Protestant heritage. Moreover, families which were established in the early days of colonization have played an outsized role in American life since. The Bush family’s roots in America can be traced back to 1647. John Washington, the great-grandfather of George Washington, moved from England to Virginia in 1657. The Roosevelts, from which lineage two presidents of the United States have hailed, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, are ultimately descended from a Dutch settler who arrived to New Amsterdam in the 1640s. Abraham Lincoln was descended from Samuel Lincoln, an Englishman who settled in Massachusetts in the mid-1630s.

See also

• Colonial period in the United States
• How to research American Colonial ancestors
• European immigration to the Americas
• Age of Explorations
• Transatlantic Slave Trade
• United States
• The Scots-Irish
• Jewish Pirates

Explore more about English colonization of North America

• Genesis of the United States, a Narrative of the Movement in England, 1605-1616 record collection on MyHeritage
• Story of a Pilgrim Family From the Mayflower To the Present Time (1890) record collection on MyHeritage
• Mayflower Descendants and Their Marriages record collection on MyHeritage
• Record of Pennsylvania Marriages Prior To 1810 record collection on MyHeritage
• New England, Passenger and Crew Lists record collection on MyHeritage
• US Naturalization Records, New England, 1791-1906 record collection on MyHeritage
• Virginia, Marriages, 1785-1940 record collection on MyHeritage
• Colonial Immigration – The English Pioneers of Early America at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Colonial Immigrants: Who They Were and Where They Came From at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• How to Connect with Your Pilgrim Ancestors to Join the Mayflower Society at Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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