“Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies, no houses, or much less town, to repair to, to seek for succor… if they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the 1 world… What could now sustain them but the spirit of God and his grace?”
In essence, Colonial America was the result of a constant cycle of movement of peoples from England and Europe for resettling in a newly discovered land referred to in the fifteenth century as “The New World.” By 1610, hundreds of newcomers had endured harsh conditions in cramped sailing vessels to cross the Atlantic Ocean in search of a new life in a new land. Some of the first Jamestown, Virginia settlers were English farmers who had been driven from their homes in the old country- their desire was to procure land; others were unemployed laborers and tradesmen- they were willing to take a chance on a new life in a new world. Overtime, however, the majority of people coming to Jamestown came as indentured servants; they traded labor for ship passage.
Overall, life in the Jamestown colony was extremely difficult. By the end of its first year of establishment in1607, two-thirds of its settlers had perished. In 1609,
1 An excerpt from a narrative written by William Bradford, the man who led the pilgrim settlers when they arrived at Cape Cod in 1630. Retrieved from page 27 of Wilfred M. McClay’s book titled Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. Published by Encounter Books in 2019.
six hundred settlers arrived to replenish the colony; and in 1610, four hundred more arrived; unfortunately, by the end of the 1610 winter only about sixty settlers had survived.1 However difficult the trip across the ocean was, people continued to flee their old country. By 1619, Jamestown was firmly established; they had a legislative assembly and their own colonial government.2 By the early 1620’s, Jamestown was self-supporting and traded regularly with England.
Another colony founded by the English was Plymouth, Massachusetts. Unlike the settlers of Jamestown who were motivated primarily by material considerations, this colony consisted of those who fled Britain because of religious persecution;3 the Plymouth settlement was founded in 1620. The main goal of the founders of this colony was to propagate and advance their religion in the new world. Initially, the hard working people of Plymouth did not fair well… in their inaugural year, only fifty out of about one hundred people lived to make it through the first winter.
Population wise, Plymouth did not grow as large as Jamestown however; a small amount of immigrants did join it each year until eventually it was absorbed by another colony in the area in 1691.4
In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Company of England sent seventeen ships filled with passengers that were fleeing war or religious persecution in their country to a harbor north of Plymouth. Similar to Jamestown, this settlement slowly grew in population of which many were laborers and indentured servants (unfortunately, those who arrived as indentured servants sometimes found themselves in conditions similar to that of chattel slavery). This settlement, primarily made up of English immigrants, resulted in the initiation of a massive migration. In the next ten years, approximately 21,000 people fled their old world in search of opportunity and prosperity in America.5
Over time, more communities formed and grew into what eventually became thirteen Colonies. The last of these colonies was Georgia; chiseled out of Carolina territory, it was founded in 1732. Although by the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century a majority of people who populated the colonies was from
England, there were immigrants from European countries. For example, the
Swedish settled on the Delaware River near present day Wilmington; and the Dutch established fur-trading posts and eventually purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians. Early on in the seventeenth century, conditions were so bad in Germany that thousands of people fled the country; most went to America and eventually established themselves in all of the colonies. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, due to religious persecution and political issues, thousands of people fled France as well; these people risk the sea voyage to start over in America; many of them settled in the areas of Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. In addition, in 1699 the French established their own colonies in the region that is now Louisiana and Mississippi; they also established colonies in the Caribbean.6 Most importantly, by the end of the seventeenth century, America was no longer dependent upon England for it’s peopling.