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The 13 colonies of what became the United States of America can be divided into three geographic areas: the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies. The New England colonies were the northernmost of the colonies: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The other nine colonies were New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware (the Middle colonies) and Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia (the Southern colonies). Areas of the New England colonies were among the first that Europeans settled. The Pilgrims were the early settlers of New England. They founded Plymouth, in what is now Massachusetts, in 1620. The Pilgrims were fleeing religious persecution in England. Many of them wanted to “separate” from England’s official church, the Church of England (the Anglican church). In 1630 the Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans also had differences with the Church of England. However, they wanted to make reforms to the church rather than to separate from it. The Pilgrims found life in the colonies challenging. In the first year of settlement at Plymouth, nearly half of them died. They were not skilled at hunting and fishing, and they suffered from malnutrition and disease. Over time, however, the colonists learned to live off the land. Some received help from Indian tribes. By the 1700s the colonists had established towns and small cities. The Puritans followed strict moral and religious rules. If people did not live according to the rules, they were treated harshly or expelled from the settlement. Some Puritans disagreed with these policies, so they left Massachusetts to found new settlements. The Reverend Thomas Hooker and his followers left Massachusetts and founded Hartford, Connecticut, in 1636. That same year Roger Williams founded the town of Providence and the colony of Rhode Island. The Puritans had banished him in 1635 in part for his religious beliefs. Providence hence became a place for Baptists, Quakers, and others to express publicly their religious beliefs. In the New England colonies families often kept small farms to provide food for themselves. All the members of each family shared in the work. The men planted crops, built fences, and butchered livestock. They also often hunted and fished to feed their families. The women milked the cows, gathered eggs, and preserved food for winter. They raised the children and did household chores such as cooking, sewing clothes, and making candles and soap. Boys worked with their fathers, and girls helped their mothers. The area’s cold climate and rocky landscape made large-scale farming difficult. Many New Englanders therefore made a living through trade, seafaring, or fishing. They used lumber from the abundant forests to build ships. The colonists used the ships for fishing and for trade with Europe, Africa, and the West Indies. New Englanders eventually gave up on agricultural pursuits and began raising livestock. Meat products, fish, and lumber were among the valuable exports. In the New England colonies the land was divided among the settlers. As land owners, the free adult males participated in the town meetings and made decisions for the community. Still, only a relatively small group of men dominated the colonial governments of New England. This elite group consisted of men in prominent occupations, such as merchants and lawyers. The center of New England’s merchant elite was Boston, Massachusetts. (See also New England.)
The Origins of American Slavery The concept of slavery was hardly a new one when England’s colonists reached North American shores, as it had been practiced in Europe for more than a century before the colonies. So the arrival of Africans in Virginia in 1619 was not the start of a new phenomenon, but the beginning of human trafficking between Africa and North America based on the social norms of Europe. While slavery grew exponentially in the South with large-scale plantations and agricultural operations, slavery in New England was different. Most of those enslaved in the North did not live in large communities, as they did in the mid-Atlantic colonies and the South. Those Southern economies depended upon people enslaved at plantations to provide labor and keep the massive tobacco and rice farms running. But without the same rise in plantations in New England, it was more typical to have one or two enslaved people attached to a household, business, or small farm. In New England, it was common for individual enslaved people to learn specialized skills and crafts due to the area’s more varied economy. Ministers, doctors, tradesmen, and merchants also used enslaved labor to work alongside them and run their households. As in the South, enslaved men were frequently forced into heavy or farm labor. Enslaved women were frequently forced to work as household servants, whereas in the South women often performed agricultural work. New England’s Forced Laborers: the Enslaved, Indentured Servants, and Native Americans Part of the reason slavery evolved differently in New England than in the middle and southern colonies was the culture of indentured servitude. As a carryover from English practice, indentured servants were the original standard for forced labor in New England and middle colonies like Pennsylvania and Delaware. These indentured servants were people voluntarily working off debts, usually signing a contract to perform slave-level labor for four to seven years. Historians estimate that more than half of the original population of the American colonies was brought over as indentured servants. New England colonies were also slower to start accepting African slavery in general—possibly because there were local alternatives to enslaved Africans. Early in New England’s history, a different kind of human trafficking emerged: enslaving and shipping local Native Americans to the West Indies. This kind of slavery was limited compared to the number of enslaved Africans and indentured servants that eventually came to New England, but exporting and enslaving these native people was an undeniable part of early New England human trafficking. Enslaved Africans quickly replaced indentured servants on plantations in Virginia, Maryland, and other Southern colonies, but in New England, imported enslaved people were initially given the same status as indentured servants. This changed in 1641, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws for enslaved people differentiating enslaved labor from the indentured servants’ contract labor, which took away the enslaved’s rights. Still, the New England colonies began to show differences in their approaches to slavery, even as slavery became more common in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in the 18th century. The colonial government in Rhode Island—which had the largest enslaved population by the 1700s—tried, though ultimately failed, to enforce laws that gave the enslaved the same rights as indentured servants and set enslaved individuals free after 10 years of service. Although human trafficking continued to flourish throughout the 1700s, these first moves to break up human trafficking foreshadowed what was to come in the New England colonies. Becoming the “Free North” The use of slavery throughout the colonies (particularly the southern ones) continued to grow throughout the 18th century, but as the colonies moved closer to revolution against England, there was a growing trend of questioning slavery and its practices in New England. The number of people freed from bondage in New England grew, as the enslaved who fought in the Revolutionary War (on both sides) were offered freedom. Religious societies like the Quakers (who believed that slavery was sinful and amoral) began the first stirrings of anti-slavery movements in New England. These early movements would later form the backbone of the 19th century abolitionist movements that would spread throughout the United States. New England governments began to step in as well, outlawing active human trafficking in the Connecticut and Rhode Island colonies. However, few colonial leaders wanted a full repeal of slavery at the time. It was not until the last decades of the 18th century that the former New England colonies began the long process of outlawing slavery via emancipation statutes. These were "gradual emancipation" laws, however, designed to phase out the institution over many years. Though the enslaved populations dwindled over time after these laws were passed, enslaved people were still legally held for decades in some northern states. Despite passage of these gradual emancipation laws in 1784, Rhode Island and Connecticut didn't free their last enslaved people until the 1840s. How did settlement of the southern colonies differ from settlement of the New England and Middle colonies Brainly?Unlike the New England and the middle colonies, the main reason people settled the Southern Colonies was to gain religious freedom. Unlike the New England and the middle colonies, the main reason people settled the southern colonies was to make money.
How did the southern colonies differ from the Middle and New England colonies?The New England colonies being colonized mainly for religion while the Middle colonies found wealth through industry, whereas the Southern colonies sought more trade and wealth opportunities through colonization.
What was the major difference between the southern and New England colonies that led to very different economies?The southern colonies had large plantations that grew tobacco or cotton and required slave labor, while northern colonies had small family farms. Learn more about the economics of the 13 British colonies with these classroom resources.
What was different about the New England colonies?The New England colonies had rocky soil, which was not suited to plantation farming, so the New England colonies depended on fishing, lumbering, and subsistence farming. The Middle colonies also featured mixed economies, including farming and merchant shipping.
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