When was middle colonies founded

While the majority of residents lived in towns with individual landholdings of acres, a few rich proprietors owned vast estates. English Quakers and Anglicans owned large landholdings. Unlike Plymouth, Jamestown, and other colonies, New Jersey was populated by a secondary wave of immigrants who came from other colonies instead of those who migrated directly from Europe. New Jersey remained agrarian and rural throughout the colonial era, and commercial farming developed only sporadically.

Some townships emerged as important ports for shipping to New York and Philadelphia. Examine the religious and social factors that shaped the establishment of the Pennsylvania and Delaware colony. Between and , Delaware was an incorporated county under the Province of Maryland. The Mason-Dixon line is said to have legally resolved vague outlines between Maryland and Pennsylvania and awarded Delaware to Pennsylvania.

Delaware Colony became a region of the Province of Pennsylvania, although never legally a separate colony. From until , it was part of the Penn proprietorship and was known as the Lower Counties. In , it gained a separate assembly from the three upper counties but continued to have the same governor as the rest of Pennsylvania.

William Penn had asked for and later received the lands of Delaware from the Duke of York. Penn had a hard time governing Delaware because the economy and geology were largely the same as that of the Chesapeake, rather than that of his Pennsylvania territory.

He attempted to merge the governments of Pennsylvania and Delaware. Representatives from both areas clashed and, in , Penn agreed to two separate assemblies.

Delawareans would meet in New Castle and Pennsylvanians would gather in Philadelphia. Delaware continued to be a melting pot of sorts and was home to Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and French, in addition to the English, who constituted the dominant culture. The Charter of Privileges mandated fair dealings with American Indians. This led to significantly better relations with the local tribes such as the Lenape and Susquehanna than most other colonies had. The Quakers had previously treated American Indians with respect, bought land from them voluntarily, and even had representation of American Indians on juries.

In , the Colony spent a great deal of its political goodwill with the native Lenape in pursuit of more land. The colonial administrators claimed that they had a deed dating to the s, in which the Lenape-Delaware had promised to sell a portion of land beginning between the junction of the Delaware River and Lehigh River, near present Wrightstown, Pennsylvania. The document was most likely a forgery; nonetheless, the Provincial Secretary set in motion a plan to grab as much land as possible. In the end, the Penns gained 1,, acres of land in what is now northeastern Pennsylvania, an area roughly equivalent to the size of the state of Rhode Island.

The Lenape tribe fought for the next 19 years to have the treaty annulled but was forced into the Shamokin and Wyoming Valleys, which were already overcrowded with other displaced tribes. George Fox had founded the Society of Friends commonly known as Quakers in England in the late s, having grown dissatisfied with Puritanism and the idea of predestination. They gained the name Quakers because they were said to quake when the inner light moved them. Quakers rejected the idea of worldly rank, believing instead in a new and radical form of social equality.

William Penn and his fellow Quakers imprinted their religious values on the early Pennsylvanian government; the Charter of Privileges extended religious freedom to all monotheists, and the government was initially open to all Christians.

Until the French and Indian War, Pennsylvania had no militia, few taxes, and no public debt. Among the first settlers were the Mennonites, who founded Germantown in , and the Amish, who established the Northkill Amish Settlement in Despite Quaker opposition to slavery, by colonists had brought about 4, slaves into Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of was the first attempt to abolish slavery in the colonies. The Middle Colonies were more ethnically diverse than elsewhere in British North America and were somewhat more socially tolerant. Families generally held and worked plots of between 40 and acres. Indentured servitude was especially common in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York in the 18th century, though few such servants worked in agriculture.

American Indian tribes had long occupied the area that was conquered as the British Middle Colonies. Once colonization had begun, the Middle Colonies were more ethnically diverse than the other British colonial regions in North America and tended to be more socially tolerant. For example, in New York, any foreigner professing Christianity was awarded citizenship, which made for a diverse albeit largely Christian populace.

As a consequence, early settlements of Germans from many different sects concentrated in the Middle Colonies. German immigration greatly increased around , and many immigrants began coming from the Rhineland in western Germany. They were erroneously labeled the Pennsylvania Dutch and comprised one-third of the population by the time of the American Revolution. They were noted for tight-knit religious communities, which were often Lutheran. The Scots-Irish also began immigrating to the Middle Colonies in waves after They primarily pushed farther into the western frontier of the colonies, where they repeatedly confronted American Indians.

When the colony fell to the British, the Company freed all of its slaves, establishing early on a nucleus of free Africans in the Northeast. In an early attempt to encourage European settlement, the New Jersey legislature enacted a prohibitive tariff against imported slaves and in favor of European indentured servitude. Despite Quaker opposition to slavery, by , colonists had brought about 4, slaves into Pennsylvania.

Divining America. Native American Religion in Early America. The Legacy of Puritanism. Witchcraft in Salem Village. The First Great Awakening. Religious Pluralism in the Middle Colonies. Church and State in British North America. The Church of England in Early America. Divining America Advisors and Staff. Patricia U. If the American experiment in pluralism at times suggests the metaphor of a pressure cooker rather than a melting pot, this should come as no surprise to observers of the Middle Colonies.

The mid-Atlantic region, unlike either New England or the South, drew many of its initial settlers from European states that had been deeply disrupted by the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars that followed in its wake. African Americans and the indigenous Indians, with religious traditions of their own, added further variety to the Middle Colony mosaic. But no two-word phrase can capture the essence of those who set the mold for Middle Colony religious culture. To see why this is so, we must look a little closer.

The Dutch were the first Europeans to claim and settle lands between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers, a region they named New Netherland. Yet half of the inhabitants attracted to the new colony were not Dutch at all but people set adrift by post-Reformation conflicts—including Walloons , Scandinavians, Germans, French, and a few English.

In New Netherland was conquered by England. Suffolk County at the eastern end of Long Island, settled by migrating New Englanders, was the stronghold of Congregationalists. French Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in , established their own town at New Rochelle in Westchester County, for decades keeping local records in French. From its earliest years a port of entry for assorted newcomers, the city increasingly came to reflect its polyglot heritage.

A woodblock of shows a skyline etched by church spires—eighteen houses of worship to serve a population of at most 22, New Jersey, if slower to develop, also embraced a variety of religious groups. By the colony had forty-five distinct congregations; unable to afford churches, most met in houses or barns.

And because clergymen were few, lay leaders frequently conducted services, with baptism and communion being offered only by the occasional itinerant minister. All denominations in New Jersey expanded rapidly over the eighteenth century. A church survey in lists the active congregations as follows:. William Penn, an English gentleman and member of the Society of Friends, founded the colony of Pennsylvania in the early s as a haven for fellow Quakers. Such groups as the Amish, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Mennonites, and later the Moravians made small if picturesque additions to the heterodox colony.

The most influential religious bodies beside the Quakers were the large congregations of German Reformed, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Presbyterians. Episcopal church established by Welsh settlers G Presbyterian church established by a Scotch-Irish community G Three churches established in the mid s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania photographed in Courtesy National Archives. Delaware, first settled by Scandinavian Lutherans and Dutch Reformed, with later infusions of English Quakers and Welsh Baptists, had perhaps the most diverse beginnings of any middle colony.

Yet over the eighteenth century Delaware became increasingly British, with the Church of England showing the most striking gains before the Revolution. Adding further diversity to the region were inhabitants some missionaries considered ripe for conversion to Christianity—African Americans, who may have comprised 15 to 20 percent of the population of New York City and parts of New Jersey, and the native Indians.

African Americans appear on the roles of almost every religious denomination, if usually in small numbers. Congress, What role does religious faith serve in these settlers' lives? How do trade and commerce contribute to the colonies' stability? How do the settlers deal with adversity and disappointment?

In what ways are they hopeful or idealistic? Do their actions reflect a trust in their colony's stability? How do the homesteads reflect the characteristics of these Middle Colonies settlers?

From these selections, compare the factors that contribute to permanence in the Middle Colonies and the New England colonies. Which region offers more stability from its basic characteristics?