The Three Colonial Regions: Economy, Geography & Variation · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · New England: thin soil, long winters, ships

The glaciers that covered New England stripped the soil and left the stone walls that still run through the woods there — those walls are field clearance, not decoration. With a short season and poor ground, a farm fed a family and produced a modest surplus, which meant farms stayed family-sized and holdings were divided among sons until there was not enough to divide.

So the region made its living from what it had instead. The cod fishery on the Grand Banks, timber from forests that England had long since cut down, and shipbuilding: by the eighteenth century a substantial share of British merchant tonnage was built in New England yards. Trade followed the ships, and Boston became a port before it was anything else.

That trade had a shape worth knowing. New England merchants carried fish, timber and provisions to the West Indies, sold them to sugar planters who grew nothing but cane, and brought back molasses to distil into rum. The profits of the Caribbean sugar islands — worked by enslaved people in conditions that killed them faster than anywhere on the mainland — paid for a great deal of New England's prosperity. A region with few enslaved people of its own was deeply tied to slavery's economy.

Settlement was by town. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, granted land to groups rather than individuals, and those groups laid out a village around a meeting house with fields beyond. Perhaps 20,000 people arrived in the Great Migration of the 1630s, and they came disproportionately in families rather than as single young men — which is why the population grew quickly by natural increase and why towns, schools and churches appeared so fast.

Part 2 · The Chesapeake and the South: one crop, and what it needed

Virginia nearly failed. The Jamestown settlers of 1607 looked for gold and starved in large numbers. What saved the colony was John Rolfe's tobacco in 1612 — a sweeter West Indian strain that sold in London, grew well in Chesapeake soil, and could be loaded straight onto ships from wharves on the tidal rivers.

Tobacco is demanding. It exhausts soil within a few years, so planters needed continual new land, pushing settlement inland and into conflict with the nations already there. It also needs many hands at particular moments of the year. Planters first met that with indentured servants from England; when that supply tightened, they turned to enslaved Africans, which is the subject of the next unit.

The pattern of settlement followed the crop as directly as the labour did. Tobacco is bulky and perishable, so a planter wanted his own landing on a navigable creek, which spread estates along the water rather than gathering them into villages. The Chesapeake built very few towns for more than a century; Virginia governed itself through county courts and parish churches because there was often no town to govern through.

Further south the crops changed again. Rice took hold in the Carolina lowcountry from the 1690s, grown in flooded fields using techniques and expertise that enslaved West Africans brought with them, and indigo followed. These were brutally unhealthy to work and enormously profitable, and South Carolina had a Black majority for much of the eighteenth century. By 1770 enslaved people were around 40 per cent of Virginia's population.

Part 3 · The middle colonies: the breadbasket, and everybody

Between the two sat the best farmland on the seaboard. Deep soil, a season long enough for grain, and the Hudson and Delaware to carry it out meant wheat, and the middle colonies exported so much of it that they were called the breadbasket. A wheat farm is bigger than a New England homestead and far smaller than a rice plantation, which produced a society of middling farmers rather than one of either smallholders or grandees.

They were also the most mixed. New York had been Dutch; Pennsylvania, founded by William Penn in 1681, admitted Quakers and then Germans, Scots-Irish, Welsh and Swedes in numbers. Philadelphia passed Boston to become the largest city in the colonies. Several languages and a dozen denominations lived in the same counties, which forced a practical tolerance that was not anyone's ideal so much as the price of getting along.

That mixture matters later. When thirteen colonies tried to agree on anything, the middle colonies were where disagreement was already normal, and the habits of compromise that the Constitutional Convention needed had been practised here for a century.

Part 4 · Pressure, not destiny

It is tempting to read this as climate deciding history, and that goes too far. Nothing in the weather required slavery. Rice could be grown by paid labour, as it was elsewhere; the Chesapeake used indentured Englishmen for decades before shifting. What climate and soil did was make certain crops profitable, and the profit made a particular labour system attractive to the people in a position to choose. The choosing was done by people, and they could have chosen otherwise.

You can see that the pressure was not absolute by looking at what varied anyway. Slavery existed everywhere, including New England and New York, where it was urban and domestic rather than agricultural. Quakers in Pennsylvania began arguing against it in the 1680s, in the same soil and climate as their neighbours.

The regions also knew they were different, and said so. New Englanders described Virginians as idle and grasping; Virginians thought New Englanders censorious and sharp in a bargain. Those opinions were exchanged in print well before independence was imagined, which is a useful reminder that the thirteen colonies were not a nation waiting to be born. They were separate societies with separate economies that would later have to be argued into acting together.

Hold both halves together. Geography explains why it was easier to get rich a particular way in a particular place, and it explains why three regions that began with similar settlers diverged so sharply. It does not excuse the decisions, and the people who made them had contemporaries telling them they were wrong.