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Jamestown Colony Versus Plymouth Colony Early English colonists arriving along the northern coast of the New World in the early 17 th century faced certain similar circumstances in their new land. For many, there were like motives for immigrating to America. Yet, the differences were enough to create characteristically different cultures in Jamestown and New England, in the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay region. The slave trade, geographic considerations, economic conditions, Native-American relationships, and religion defined the early colonies as separate cultures.
The New World offered hopes and adventures to many British citizens. Amidst reports of vast, fertile land and possible treasure, English rulers were likewise anxious to join the fray in laying claim to New World lands. Historians estimate that 95 % of England's population had no hope of owning their own land, traveling farther than five miles beyond their own home, or living past the age of 40 (Davies 704). The English and other colonists who came to America voluntarily came for different reasons, but virtually all could be boiled down to one essential point: they wanted to improve their lives.
Behind that self-evident fact was the additional idea that they had different backgrounds and had different primary motivations. Some were seeking economic advantage - most of all a chance to become landowners. Others sought religious freedom, the right to worship God according to their own beliefs. Their decision to emigrate was also often determined by conditions in England and elsewhere - during times of strife or economic hardship, the impetus for emigration was stronger than in good, stable times. In general, the very well-to-do did not emigrate because they had everything to lose and could gain only a great risk. The very poor did not come at first because they had nothing to offer - no skills, no money for passage, etc.
Later many poor people came against their will - some were prisoners who were offered a chance to go to America in lieu of a long sentence, and others came as indentured servants, some sold into that temporary form of servitude by parents or families. Both convicts and indentured servants had a chance to succeed because labor was dear in America and they were valued far more than they might have been at home. Though emigration from England began as a mere trickle, it resulted in a quarter of a million colonists in the New World by 1620 (Dodson 21). The journey to England's first colony began on April 26, 1607. Three ships - the Discovery, the Godspeed, and the Susan Constant landed on what is today Virginia Beach. The arriving British emigrants on May 15, 1607 began construction of the fort known as Jamestown (Dodson 8).
Jamestown colony and the people who founded it were primarily business people, who viewed the new colony as a good source of profit making. There was some religious back up to the campaign, but not nearly as much as there was for the Plymouth colonists. The London Company was organized and chartered by the Crown as an investment opportunity that would help make England stronger and reap rewards for those who dared to adventure their capital - or their persons - in America. The company soon discovered that the gold in America was the land, but that money and labor were needed to exploit it. Therefore, the company used various recruiting schemes in an attempt to lure more people to invest in and / or go to Virginia, but its only real asset was the land. As mentioned above, the problem in Europe was finding enough land for the people: in America, the reverse was true.
The fact that labor was more valuable than land constantly undermined traditional ideas of class and position. If order to attract new people to go to the new land, there were huge marketing campaigns created. Pretty pictures of the vast land were shown to those who would never have it in England, and that seduced many to go and colonize America. Many plans were used to try to increase the labor supply, including the use of Indians as slaves.
The critical shortage of labor also contributed to the growth of slavery. While the Indians were excellent farmers, they did not take to slavery, and since they could easily escape that experiment failed. Even as farmers Indians were not as wedded to the idea of land ownership as Europeans; in fact, most Indians didn't understand the concept of individual ownership of land. Furthermore, idleness was a virtue among male Indians. They often laughed at white men farming, or doing womens work.
The Virginia settlers were patriots, Christians, men seeking personal profit and betterment of their economic circumstances. They were urged to come for the good of your country and your own, to serve and fear God... Emigration to America became a selection process. The temperament and personality of the settler was that of someone searching for the unknown - escaping from the intolerable. Those who decided to come began what we might call the American gene pool.
The goals of the companies and to some extent of the settlers were to secure a place, find gold, civilize the natives, find river to India. Indians were seen both as laborers and as potential consumers of European goods: it was a form of economic imperialism, later called the last stage of capitalism. As it turned out, there were indeed plentiful opportunities of all kinds, including opportunities for political power not available in England. A class system did evolve in Virginia, which was the most aristocratic of the colonies; Virginians believed in rule by elite, though that elite might be based on achievement and wealth rather than by name or birthright. Virginia started out as a white male democracy, in a limited sense, but that system also evolved. The Colony of New Plymouth, colony founded in the New World by the Pilgrims.
The foundation of this colony was one of the major events in the early history of the American colonies. In the reign of Elizabeth I, queen of England, one of the sects of Puritans known as Brownists separated from the new Protestant Church of England and after much persecution took refuge in the Netherlands. A number of emigrants called Puritans, who had unsuccessfully sought to reform the established Church of England, arrived to the Plymouth as well. Though nearly half of the colonists died of exposure and disease, native Wampanoag Indians provided vital information to the settlers on how to grow maize and survive. Crops flourished and colonists learned to support themselves through trade in furs and lumber.
In 1630, armed with a grant from the British king for colonial authority, a large wave of Puritan emigrants arrived on the shores of the Massachusetts Bay and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony's charter established a rigid orthodoxy for both church and government affairs. Likewise, bitter persecution of Quakers, who were extreme dissenters of the Church of England, helped to settle the British Middle Colonies in Pennsylvania and Delaware. Bringing personal libraries with them from England, both the Puritans and Quakers were instrumental in establishing Americas first libraries and school systems (Gordy 210). Both Puritans and Quakers were financed by a group of London investors, who gave the money in exchange for most of their produce from America during their first six years.
Their ship, the Mayflower, taking on many other passengers to fill the boat, sailed from Plymouth, England, for America on September 16, 1620. When they reached the American coast, strong winds drove the Mayflower into Provincetown Harbor, at the end of Cape Cod. They wrote and signed the Mayflower Compact, which served as a precursor to constitutional law in America. After some exploration they settled on the site of what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Plymouth Colony later united with other New England colonies to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691. The legal and governmental structure for Plymouth Colony was not set forth in a royal charter from the Monarchy in England.
The members of the Colony produced four sets of written codifications of their laws over time, the first in 1636, followed by collections of laws published in 1658, 1672 and 1685. Yet, none of this law-making was based on authority granted expressly by royal charter, and Plymouth was fairly unique in its time for lacking such a charter. The colonists did possess land patents, which conferred title in the new plantation land to William Bradford and his associates. However, these land patents lacked the full grant of authorities that a charter would provide (Langdon, 40). Such charters typically provided the recipients with the express authority to establish a colonial government and to exercise powers over the inhabitants of the colony. Royal charters also provided details as to sources for substantive law that should be utilized in the colony (Chafee, 56 - 57).
For example, John Winthrop obtained a Royal Charter from King Charles I in 1630 for establishing the Bay Colony, and that charter served as the legal basis for the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for more than half a century. For the first few years, England's first colony, Jamestown, suffered numerous setbacks. Early settlers were made up of former peasants, townsmen and adventurers. Though Captain John Smith emerged as a strong leader, the colony succumbed to anarchy when Smith returned to England just two years after Jamestown was founded. Tensions mounted with the native Powhatan Indians, as in Smiths absence, settlers opted to raid Indian food supplies when staples ran out and British ships failed to arrive to replenish supplies (Taylor 127).
Disease struck most of the first settlers between 1609 - 1610. Only 60 of the original 300 settlers were still alive by May, 1610, according to historian Edward Dodson (14). That same year, colonists founded Henrico (which later became Richmond), easing the isolation problems and food shortages experienced at Jamestown. The one factor that revolutionized Jamestown and Virginias economy, though, came in 1612. Native plants crossbred with West Indies seed produced tobacco. Within a decade, it became Virginias primary source of revenue.
The area soon became controlled by a handful of large plantation landholders with indentured laborers. Since few British colonists could finance their cost of passage, colonizing agencies fronted transportation costs. In exchange, emigrants agreed to work for the agencies as contract laborers for usually between four and seven years. Often, these contracts were sold to colonists with large estates.
Though many indentured servants earned their freedom over time, more wealthy colonists were able to absorb New World land rapidly during early colonization. As experienced in other colonies, indentured servitude created an imbalance of economy and political power as Jamestown and the Chesapeake Bay colonies developed (Gordy 134). After indentured emigrants won their freedom, the situation also created a need for manpower, which came in the form of a burgeoning slave trade. Unlike the fertile, lush Virginia landscape, New England was made up of thin, stony soil with a lack of level land for farming, and cold, harsh winters. New England colonists quickly turned to other pursuits for survival. The sea became a source of great wealth.
Ship-building and trade along the harbor regions flourished, and New Englanders soon learned that rum and slaves were commodities in demand in the early colonies (Davies). As historian Norman Davies explains, One of the most enterprising -if unsavory - trading practices of the time was the so-called triangular trade. Merchants and shippers would purchase slaves off the coast of Africa for New England rum, then sell the slaves in the West Indies where they would buy molasses to bring home for sale to local rum producers (555). It was the lack of ideological and theological rigor in Virginia, however, that permitted the perpetuation of the abominable institution of slavery. The Tobacco Aristocracy was more attached to their habits and the expediencies of plantation farming than to the sacred word of Scripture. It is ironic, in a way, that Virginia was saved economically in the early years by the very weed that would later seduce them away from the golden rule of their religious creed and the principles of liberty for which they would later fight.
Legal historians often emphasize that the Plymouth Colony applied a combination of English common law and Mosaic law in regulating the daily affairs of the settlers. This invocation of religious authority was also useful in establishing the Colony's own authority to govern. What they lacked by royal charter was often obtained by invocation of the Colony's service of the greater glory of God, just as the Monarchy invoked this service of God as a source of legitimacy for its own claim of power and authority. Interestingly, when Plymouth Colony's General Court later directed that towns should establish their own regulations for managing the local, day-to-day affairs of the townspeople, the General Court required that such local regulations be made with fidelity to the laws of the Govern[ment] of the General Court, and not to England itself. The Bradford land patent required that the colonists establish no law, which would be repugnant to the law in England. Historian George Langdon, Jr.
has emphasized that the Plymouth colonists resisted this restriction for some time, based on their view that different circumstances in the hazardous territory of the New World made rigid adherence to English law less impelling (Langdon, 93). The adult men in the first settlement of Plymouth all held the status of stockholders in the joint-stock company that financed the Colony or plantation. They thus shared in the ownership of the plantations assets, its speculative economic venture, and its liabilities. They participated in the economic venture and its colonial government.
The colonists also began use of the separate term freemen early in the settlement, which indicated a citizen of the Colony, who possessed the right to vote for the Governor and Assistants and the right to hold office (thus, all stockholders were freemen, but not all freemen would be stockholders). Women and servants were not eligible for freeman status. Key factors influenced and shaped England's earliest colonies in varied ways. Land-versus trade based economies; cooperation and conflict with Indians, religion, and even the types of people emigrating from England defined distinctly individual cultures for each of the early colonies of the New World.
Works Cited Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Dodson, Edward.
The European Conquest of the Americas. The American Revolution. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. Gordy, Wilbur. History of the United States. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.
Taylor, Colin. The Native Americans. New York: Smith mark Publishers, 1991 Bradford, William, Plymouth Plantation, 1620 - 1647. Edited by Samuel Morison.
New York: Knopf, 1966 Fleming, Thomas J. , One Small Candle: The Pilgrims First Year in America, New York: W. W. Norton&Co. , 1963
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Research essay sample on Jamestown Colony Versus Plymouth
