The end of the first phase of immigration to North America.

1642 saw the start of a civil war in England when the elected parliament under the Calvinist Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, fought the supporters of the corrupt and useless nominally Church of England King, Charles 1st. Emigration from England stopped.

What were the people like who were now living in North America?

• Generally in the northern colonies the leaders were religious refugees mainly of the more extreme Protestant faiths which stood them in good stead for suffering and conquering the hardships of trying to learn how to live as castaways in a totally new climate and where none of the familiar crops, wild or cultivated, were available. Those who came with them were convenient hangers on who so long as they could work hard and live in a highly structured religious environment would soon be better off than they would have been at home. This immediately included an education based on the Bible which required them to learn how to read and write and behave to the rules of Moses and the philosophies of the Old and New Testaments.
• The first settlers in the Southern Colonies were city adventurers and not refugees of any type and generally had money and were looking for gold. They were not suited for farming and knew nothing of it but that is what they had to become. They were in a position to hire skills from England and thus became land owners and employees as soon as they could. When they found that the English Scots and Irish labourers could not work in the unaccustomed summer heat they employed Indian slaves who they found equally useless (see below) so they followed the Portuguese in Brazil and bought black West African slaves from the English slave traders who had already cornered the market.

All colonial regions on the east coast also attracted more than a proportionate share of skilled Artisans. (Tilers, Thatchers, Carpenters, Smithies etc.) This was because men with such skills in England would generally travel from town to town to look for the best work suited to their trades and because of the mini slump caused by the poor governance by Kings James and Charles 1st they saw little hardship in trying their luck in the New World.

Such people were called middling types and were the early Middle Class in England. At the other end of the social scale all colonial areas were expected to receive or have dumped on them the over flow from overcrowded prisons populated generally by fairly soft criminals like prostitutes and petty thieves. Ships captains would be paid to transport such people who they could sell at a profit as slaves to the colonists looking for labour. All such "slaves" were supposed to be freed after 5 to 7 years of good conduct and hard work and given land and tools to make a new life for themselves.

Indians or Native Americans
There were some 20 million Indians living in North America circa 1600 and 300 years later it was only 2 million. This was not a deliberate massacre or ethnic cleansing as we would call in now but a tragic loss of life through diseases brought into the Americas by Europeans. Small Pox was the big killer but Europeans also introduced TB and a host of sexually transmitted diseases. The religious Europeans thought that the Indian's death through disease was an act of God as Protestant English as well as Catholic Spanish thought that they had Gods Will behind them in their quest to establish the perfect religious environment. So God was doing the ethnic cleansing.

Second phase of colonisation after the English Civil War

New York originally called New Amsterdam
English explorer Henry Hudson, sponsored by the Dutch royal family, discovered the Hudson river and Manhattan Island in 1609. The first Dutch settlers landed soon after and by 1517 had built a fort a couple of hundred miles up the Hudson river at present day Albany. The Dutch were interested in the fur trade and this fort was on the edge of the rich hunting and trapping grounds of the Iroquois Indians. In 1624 the Dutch bought Manhattan Island from the Iroquois and Established the town New Amsterdam to be renamed New York. This colony was of no interest to the Dutch Royal family and soon settlers from England joined the Dutch on Long and Manhattan islands. Finding the Dutch settlers poorly treated, a message was sent to King Charles 2nd that the islands could be easily captured and so they were, by a fleet led by the English Duke of York in 1664, who found the Dutch only too willing to join the English.

Pennsylvania
The first European settlers were Swedish but in 1655 were dispossessed by the Dutch. In 1681 the area was given by Charles 2nd to his personal friend and Quaker William Penn who made it a safe haven for Quakers. To boost immigration Penn offered a safe haven to any religion and many of the European minority religious groups settled there including, Quakers, Amish, Baptists, Mennonites and Moravians. Access to Pennsylvania which straddles the Appellations and has no Atlantic seaboard was by the Delaware river. Penn and his followers practiced what they preached. For example Quakers were very fair to women treating them almost as equals and to Indians who were paid in full for their land.

North and South Carolina 1670
This area had attracted English settlers moving south from Virginia 20 years earlier and the first royal governor was appointed in 1664. Around 1670 some more English settlers moved south from New England for warmer climes and north from Barbados for more land. The first mass immigration came from France from those who had converted to Protestantism, called Huguenots, and were fleeing from their staunchly Catholic King, came and settled peacefully in an English speaking environment and set up the first town. An economic base was soon found by this mix of intelligent hard working races and religions from selling to England Indigo (dye) timber and rice. The Carolinas were probably the first to capture Indians as slaves but they soon found as the Spanish had discovered 100 years earlier that the Indians made useless slaves. They either soon died or escaped back to their tribe.

Georgia
The last of the colonies not really established until 1732 where under General James Oglethorpe, Georgia was seen as a frontier land between the English and Spanish colony of Florida. Oglethorpe was also something of a reformer and Georgia became a colony where the poor and previous prisoners could be led away from crime and corruption.

1680
At this time, the east coast from Newfoundland to the Carolinas was dominated by English speaking settlers who had established themselves as farmers, trappers, traders and manufacturers although the latter was still cottage industries. As settlements were nearly always by rivers water mills were soon built and operating. The majority of skills available in England were also available in the colonies and were augmented by skills from German farmers and French Huguenots.

In the south particularly in Florida and north of the Rio Grande (New Mexico) the Spanish were present but in very small numbers and basically always looking for, but not finding, a quick buck from a gold deposit. The Spanish government supported missionaries were also present trying in vain to convert Indians into good Catholics. In the huge cold unfriendly north both the French and English had set up trading links for furs with the local Indians which supported only a few at subsistence level. The English far north in Hudson Bay and the French a little further south in the St Lawrence River area where the French government supported them by building forts. The French government laid claim to all the vast lands from the St Lawrence via the Great Lakes south via the Mississippi to New Orleans but did not support it with any real money.

Relationships with the local Indians who were rapidly dying out from European imported diseases was generally bad except for the French and the English in the Hudson Bay area. Both groups were very small in number compared with the Indians and used them to snare the animals like Beaver for a continuous supply of valuable pelts. Elsewhere the English and the Spanish saw the Indians as stone as savages with no morals particularly sexual who could be hounded by dogs. The English used Bloodhounds to track them down and vicious Bull Mastiffs to tear them apart. One has to remember that life in both England and Spain at this time was barbaric by today's standards and dogs were regularly used in Warfare to kill the opposition and by land owners to kill poachers. The English also considered the Biblical texts made it clear that any man not working the land had no ownership rights. This applied to Indians who were largely nomads. Hence the settlers had no moral laws which disallowed taking Indian land by force.

The relationship between settlers and the English King who felt he had the right to grant the land in the New World to his subjects and who appointed a governor for each of the 13 Colonies was not understood by either party. The King and English Parliament thought the colonies were subject to English laws and taxes even though they had no Parliamentary representative. (This was not surprising as the majority of English citizens at this time had no representative.) The settlers on the other hand felt they were

• Out of sight hence out of mind even though they were revolutionising the economy back home.
• Religious dissenters and hence were effectively self governing.
• In New England rapidly becoming better educated (more literate and numerate) than their kinsmen back home. In the north there was compulsory education for everybody. Initially, so they could all read the Bible but soon such subjects as accountancy were studied. In the south where a rich landed gentry, slave owning class was rapidly emerging and tutors from England were hired to teach the wealthy offspring, boys firstly but girls were not left out.