The Massachusetts and Chesapeake Colonies

America, one of the youngest countries in the world, partly owes its success to the events that took place in the northeastern coast in the 1600s. It was great risk for English to colonize in America, a foreign and faraway land, from which they did not know what to expect. At that time, America was dominated by Dutch and French traders and a native population not-so-friendly with most of the settlers. The colonies in Massachusetts and Chesapeake, located at the main crossroads of English, Dutch, and French settlers and natives, play a significant role in the development of the future world power. Although today the east coast enjoys a harmonious and successful lifestyle, in the early days of our Nation’s birth, the Massachusetts and Chesapeake communities were very distinct from each other in development, economy, and the population.

The Chesapeake colonies were the first to establish in North America along the mid sections of the east coast. In the early 1600s, a group of London investors, Virginia Company, sent a hundred men to build a fort named Jamestown, in honor of the King. This became the first permanent English settlement in North America. Mostly gentlemen type figures were in Jamestown. They were inexperienced, trying to understand how to build a thriving colony. Later in 1632, King Charles I granted 10 million acres of land to the Calvert family who named their land Maryland, after Calvert’s wife. Rulers of Maryland were a Catholic minority in England. They formed the only English colony in North America with a significant Catholic minority. Maryland was a proprietary colony in which the Calverts controlled the land and created feudal manors that would provide them with money. The majority of the English migrants were ...

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...ements without proper agreement. They believed the land was “unused,” whereas the Native Americans’ way of nomadic life was to let nature replenish the land after they used it. The English forced them to sign “quit-claims,” documents that forced natives to give up their land when they signed it. The natives tried to resist these harsh actions, but were unable to defend themselves due to the epidemic of smallpox killing most of their population. The Pequots, a nearby Indian tribe, raged war against the English and Naragansetts in which the English acted very brutally.

These harsh yet significantly different conditions forced the Massachusetts and Chesapeake communities to develop their own self-sufficient governments, strong economies, and freedom-loving populations. Later, these two communities formed the core of the nation known as the United States of America.