Which were the new england colonies

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Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. Freedom of religion is the idea that people have the right to practice the faith of their choice.

The founding fathers had this in mind when they added the First Amendment to the U. S Constitution in the Bill of Rights. Select from these resources to teach your students about the freedom of religion. The British began their invasion of North America in when the Plymouth Company established a settlement that they dubbed Roanoke in present-day Virginia. This first settlement failed mysteriously and in , the London Company sent a ship full of people to establish a presence.

They named the area Jamestown. Over time, they formed the thirteen British colonies up and down the East Coast. Learn more about the thirteen British colonies with these classroom resources.

Many of the New England colonies eventually had their charters revoked though and became royal colonies when the crown began to tighten its control over the colonies due to its growing economic interest in colonial trade. The monarchy first converted some of its southern colonies before attempting to convert the New England colonies, according to Taylor:.

Such conversion primarily meant that the king, rather than a proprietor, appointed the governor and council, for the crown felt obliged to retain the elected assemblies. The crown acted first where the revenues were greatest, to secure control over tobacco-rich Virginia and the sugar colonies of Barbados, the Leeward islands, and Jamaica.

The crown was slower to reorganize the New England colonies because they lacked a lucrative staple critical to the royal revenue. After converting the southern colonies, the English monarchy established the Dominion of New England in , merging the colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, together into one large royal colony. The Dominion was short lived though and came to an end after the Glorious Revolution of occurred in England and the colonists rose up and overthrew the Dominion officials.

After the dominion was overthrown, many of the New England colonies remained royal colonies. A new charter was issued for Massachusetts Bay in , which converted it into a royal colony called the Province of Massachusetts Bay and ordered Plymouth colony to be absorbed into the province.

A new charter was also issued for New Hampshire in which converted it into a royal colony called the Province of New Hampshire. New England colonists highly valued education and had a much higher literacy rate than the southern colonies. A few years later, in , the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed another law requiring that all towns establish and maintain public schools. Towns with 50 or more families were obligated to hire a schoolmaster to teach their children how to read and write and in towns with or more families the schoolmaster had to be able to teach Latin.

As a result of this emphasis on education, the New England colonies became highly more educated and literate than other colonies. According to Kenneth Lockridge in his book Literacy in Colonial New England, about 60 percent of white New England men were literate between and Between and , that number rose to 85 percent, and between and , it rose to 90 percent.

In cities such as Boston, the literacy rate had come close to percent by the end of the 18 th century. Yet, female literacy rates still lagged behind men in New England. Lockridge estimates that while male literacy rates rose from 60 percent to 90 percent in the late 18 th century, female literacy rates rose at about half that rate, from 31 percent to 48 percent.

The first English settlement in North America had actually been established some 20 years before, in , when a group of colonists 91 men, 17 women and nine children led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on the island of Roanoke.

Mysteriously, by the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. Historians still do not know what became of its inhabitants. In , just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant.

They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of and headed about 60 miles up the James River, where they built a settlement they called Jamestown. The Jamestown colonists had a rough time of it: They were so busy looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves.

The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in In , the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to Virginia in many ways.

Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and later enslaved workers. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all. The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in to found Plymouth Colony.

Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger and more liberal group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they generated new colonies in New England. Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven the two combined in In , King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York.

This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New World. In , the king granted 45, square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland.

Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, most of these emigrants paid their own way to the colonies—they were not indentured servants—and had enough money to establish themselves when they arrived.

As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place. By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living.