North America Research Paper

Journal 4: The settling of North America continent was greatly motivated for economic reasons such as money and gold or anything profitable. English North America in the seventeenth century was a place where entrepreneurs sought to make fortunes, religious minorities hoped to worship without governmental interference and to create societies based on biblical teachings, and aristocrats dreamed of re-creating a vanished world of feudalism. Many fled to America escaping religious persecutions in England because they wanted more tolerance of religion and did not want to be forced into the Church of England. Chartered in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company was founded by a group of London Merchants who hoped to further the Puritan cause and turn a profit through trade with the Indians. Long remembered as the Great Migration, this flow of population represented less than one-third of

Unlike slaves, indentured servants could look forward to a release from bondage, assuming they survived their period of labor, servants would receive a payment known as “freedom dues” and become free members of society. Owning land gave the men in America a sense of control over their own labor and, in most colonies, the right to vote. The Virginia colony avidly promoted the immigration of women. The vast majority of women who emigrated to the region became indentured servants. In the English colonies, a married woman possessed certain rights before the law, including a claim to “dower rights” of one-third of her husband’s property in the vent that he died before she did. Widows and women who never married took advantage of their legal status as a woman alone to make contracts and conduct business. The Puritans hoped to establish a society based on the lives of the early Christian saints. (178