Essay about Colonial America: Differences

Submitted By ortegaraul123
Words: 507
Pages: 3

In the 1700s, America was a brand-new and desired land. Many immigrants, mostly English, arrived in America seeking for commodities that their native land did not supply them with. Although the Chesapeake and New England colonies were both settled by people from English origin, both regions developed into distinctive societies because of their social and political purposes. These English societies were each founded for different social purposes. New England was established because the Puritans wanted a “new” England; a land where the rich and the poor worked to hold a community together, a land where everyone is a family and each have a share of the land, a land free of religious persecution and the slow reform of the Anglican Church. John Winthrop, an English leader part of the Great Migration, hoped to make his part of the New England settlement a society that would be looked up to like a “City on a hill”. They believed in education in order to achieve a better study of the bible. This belief in education established New England as the first public education system in the world and the highest literacy rate present in a society. The social stability in this settlement was greater than that of the Chesapeake because the English people who arrived there came in family units and groups that varied in age and gender. In contrast, The Chesapeake region on the other hand, was mostly illiterate because of the high indentured servant and slave rate. This rate created social instability because of the lack of family units and the focus on the plantation economy. Also, mostly Anglicans settled in the Chesapeake which made education tolerance and religious tolerance more difficult. Also, the Chesapeake area was settled by people interested in gold and business .This region evolved as a product of all the tobacco production and its oversea trade. Tobacco was the brown “gold” for the English and because the land was mostly suitable for its plantation, the people did not