The promise of the Jamestown seeding was in its gold and the passage to the Indies. The Virginia Company was financing the expedition, expecting to liquidate the company’s assets for to capitalize on their profits. Instead, the Virginia colony prolonged its longevity by finding a gold in the form of Tobacco. Tobacco was labor intensive and required a vast amount of land. This created the need for laborers. Indentured servants began arriving soon to work for the planters to pay for their passage to the Americas and hopefully earn a plot of land at the end of their servitude. These indentured servants eventually created the largest social demographic in the Chesapeake area. Contrasting New England, Virginia had a lack of men, whose main concern was not religious beliefs.
The New England colonists dreamt of a religious haven, where Puritans were free to practice their religion purified of the church of England. They created many small towns, with churches as the center for a group of families. The religious principles of the colonists helped them to set up a strong government. Both colonial areas had their reasons for colonization but they were entirely different from their start, so how could the two colonial regions forge a way of life that was the same from the start of the colonies?
The people of the colonies were very different from each other. The people were ultimately shaped by the land and opportunity around them. In the North, the land had very rocky soil and was infertile, making farming a hard task. With the infertile soil, the New England colonies began to develop their economy on various trade markets, such as fish, timber, and ships. Industry began to take the upper hand in the economic development of the colony. On the other hand, in the plantation south, the land was fertile and ready for agricultural production. The people soon began to depend upon the agriculture industry that was available to them. Tobacco and rice cultivation soon became the backbone of the southern economy.
The land, the people, and the economies of the two parts of the American colonies were very different primarily because of what they stressed as important. Many towns in New England had schools where children were to learn how to read and write. Universities in the New England colonies were established not long after the colony began to support itself, while in the south it was more than 80 years after the colony was established that the people decided to found the college of William and Mary. On another level, the people of the southern colonies were not there to worship religion or to think freely, they came to increase their wealth. This difference is what ultimately made the two colonies different. The values placed upon religion and free thought in New England created a place where the values had a big part in people lives. That is not to say that the southern plantation colonies did not have values, but that their values stressed different principles. The people of the south worked very hard, toiling the land of the south in order to keep the crop yield high, so that they could continue the plantation way of life.
The New England colonies and the Plantation colonies were very different in how they lived and worked. The values changed as they changed with the land they settled. The way of life differed only because of the opportunities they had. If their ways of life were so different, how did two groups come together to defeat the greatest power of the world during the Revolutionary war?
