New England Settlers Vs. the Chesapeake Settlers Dbq

Since the early 17th century, the English migrated to America for a variety of reasons. The promise of treasure, religious tolerance, and plentiful lands, lured gold-seekers, Puritans, Protestants, unemployed farmers, indentured servants, and younger sons (who had fallen victim to laws of primogeniture), to the land mistakenly named the Indies. English migration to the Chesapeake region spread over nearly a century, whereas voyagers to New England arrived within a single decade. One would think that since the English settled both of these regions, both of their societies would develop quite similarly, but one could not be more wrong. The variations of the societies that developed in the Chesapeake region and the New England region occurred because the settlers had different motivations pertaining to their journeys, contrasting family ties, and diverse geological situations.

In 1606, the main attraction to the “New World” was the promise of gold (combined with a strong desire to find a passage through America to the Indies). In 1607, England planted their first successful settlement, Jamestown, and thereby created the colony of Virginia, the first of the Chesapeake region. Captain John Smith, in 1624, once described his experiences on his journey to Virginia and that the worst people among him were the gold-seekers. Ten years after John Smith’s voyage, Lord Baltimore, a man of a prominent English Catholic family founded Virginia’s sister colony, Maryland. He had embarked on the journey partly to gain financial profits and partly to create a refuge for his fellow Catholics, who at the time were being persecuted by the Protestants of England. Around the same time, thousands of English families migrated to New England for religious purposes. Connecticut and New Hampshire were settled as religious havens. As was Rhode Island, but Rhode Island served as a “sewer” that held “all the Lord’s debris” which translates to a safe haven for all of those who had been rejected elsewhere.

Massachusetts, however, had deeper religious reasons that caused its colonization. During his journey to America, John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for 20 years, wrote a sermon entitled “A Model of the Christian Charity.” It stated that the colony they were about to settle was to serve to the rest of the world as a model community, to extol the ways of the Christian religion. Other underlying purposes of the colonization of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were to purify the Church of England, and to ensure salvation for the “elect”. There were also articles of agreement amongst the settlers concerning land plots and social classes, so these emigrants were also searching for bountiful lands and social equality. (Doc. D)

It is evident in documents B and C that the voyagers that traveled to the Chesapeake and New England had very different things in mind. The settlers of New England traveled with almost their entire families, and once they settled, families remained the center of the New England society.