The various waves of European exploration and settlement in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, to a great extent, simply part of the surging sea of faith that had engulfed the Old World in the sixteenth century. The long-term repercussions of the Reformation not only drove many Europeans to America, but influenced the societies they founded there. Although the British settlements came to dominate in North America, this dominance was neither foreordained nor, given their initial forays, all that likely. It was France and Spain that appeared to be the strongest European forces in the New World. Despite Spanish successes in driving out the early French Huguenot settlements in what later became South Carolina and Florida, and the difficulties faced by the French missions further north in New France, in the eighteenth century, France’s influence gradually increased as Spain’s declined. The discovery, in 1673, by French explorers Louis Joliet - both the city of Joliet in Illinois and the town of Joliet in Montana were named for him - and Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette that the Mississippi flowed south to the Gulf of Mexico was the precursor to further French explorations along the Ohio Valley and into what would become Minnesota and settlements in Mississippi, Alabama, Michigan, and Louisiana. Yet as their mapping of river routes suggested, the French were more interested in trade than in settlement. By 1700, when the white population on the Chesapeake alone had reached some 90,000, the entirety of France’s possessions, which stretched all the way from Quebec to Louisiana, sustained only
25,000 French settlers - roughly a tenth of British settler numbers in North America as a whole by that point.
Numbers rarely tell the whole story, however, and the numerical strength of British settlers in early America disguised the chronic instability of many of those settlements they founded. By far the bulk of immigrants, both male and female, to the Chesapeake came as indentured servants who had to work off the cost of their passage. They did so in an environment that ushered many of them (some 30 to 40 percent of them) into an early grave, and offered a life expectancy into the midthirties, at best, to those who survived the initial “seasoning” period. Consequently, the white population of Virginia comprised an unusually high number of single men, widows, and, inevitably, orphaned children. Similar conditions prevailed in the second British colony to be founded on the Chesapeake - Maryland - although here the desire to escape religious persecution in England directly informed the settlement venture, distinguishing its ideals, if not its experiences, from its sister colony in Virginia.
Maryland began life as a proprietary colony. The land was granted to a single governor, or Lord Proprietor, in this case George Calvert, First Baron Baltimore, who had applied to Charles I for a charter to settle the area named for Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria. Calvert’s death in 1632 meant that it was his son, Cecilius (Cecil) Calvert, the Second Baron Baltimore, who took charge of the founding of the colony. As a Catholic whose father had been persecuted for his faith, Cecil Calvert intended Maryland to be not simply a haven for Catholics, but a colony in which Catholic and Protestant might coexist peacefully. Naturally, the reality fell somewhat short of this. The history of early Maryland proved that, whatever its founder’s ambitions, the reality of life as a colony was that
3,000 miles of ocean was not far enough if one wished to distance oneself from the religious and political machinations of the Old World, which too easily spilled over into the New. Although Calvert and the colony’s rulers were Catholic, the bulk of the settlers who arrived - many, as in Virginia, as indentured servants - were Protestant, and the struggle between them for control, exacerbated as it was by the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1641, almost destroyed the colony.
Calvert’s solution to the escalating violence and instability of the 1640 s was two-pronged. First, he reached out to Virginian dissenters from the Anglican faith - Virginia was wholly Anglican and intolerant of alternatives as well as wholly Royalist and intolerant of parliamentarians -and encouraged them to settle in Maryland. He reinforced this message via his appointment of a Protestant governor, the parliamentarian William Stone from Virginia. Second, he emphasized the colony’s position as protector of religious freedoms and formalized Maryland’s position on toleration via the 1649 Act Concerning Religion (or Toleration Act). This noted that “the inforceing of the conscience in matters of Religion hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous Consequence in those commonwealthes where it hath been practised,” and announced that no resident of Maryland “shall from henceforth bee any waies troubled, Molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof within this Province or the Islands thereunto belonging nor any way compelled to the beleife or exercise of any other Religion against his or her consent.” A fine of ten shillings, the threat of prison, and a public apology was imposed against anyone who uttered “reproachfull words” against “an heritick, Scismatick, Idolator, puritan, Independant, Prespiterian popish prest, Jesuite, Jesuited papist, Lutheran, Calvenist, Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead [or]
Separatist.” It was a fairly inclusive list for its day, even if it did exclude the Jewish faith by stipulating, above all else, both the acceptance of Jesus as the “sonne of God” and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, on pain of death.10
Calvert’s stance against religious intolerance, however, soon came under attack. Only six years after Stone became governor, an increasingly influential Puritan group in the colony sought to rescind the Toleration Act and reimpose laws restricting religious freedoms. This resulted in what has been termed the last battle of the English Civil War being fought on American soil, the Battle of the Severn (1655). The victory, in this case, went to Calvert’s opponents, but it was short-lived. Within two years, Calvert had regained control of the colony. Yet although the Battle of the Severn was essentially a minor skirmish, both it and indeed the precedent of the Maryland colony itself highlighted two aspects of colonial life in America that would, over the course of the following century, cause increasing concern to the colonists: the importance of religion -specifically freedom of worship - to the New World, and the susceptibility of the colonies to the destructive forces of British, and European, political and religious conflict.
War in Europe brought war to America, and the struggle for survival in the New World, at least until its separation from Great Britain, took place within the broader context of conflicts not of the colonists’ making, conflicts that many of them had come to America to avoid. Having arrived there, of course, the British settlers were more than capable of instigating colonial conflicts that had absolutely nothing to do with the home country, but everything to do with the their identity as freeborn Englishmen, an identity challenged, but ultimately reinforced, via their contact with the native “other.” This was, to a great extent, the experience of the Chesapeake. Yet if one is looking for examples of the destructive but also, in national terms, constructive confluence of race and religion in America’s early history, then one has to look further north, to a very different settlement venture, one driven by religious faith but defined by racial violence: New England.
No aspect of the British settlement of the Americas has been invested with so much ideological and, over the course of America’s development, nationalist baggage than the founding of the colonies that became
New England. The arrival of the Mayflower in 1620 may have brought only a hundred or so settlers to America’s Atlantic coast, but an entire mythology, which persists to this day, was constructed on the small boulder that is Plymouth Rock. Writing in 1867, the politician Robert Winthrop acknowledged that the Mayflower was “consecrated in every New-England heart as the carrier . . . of the pioneer Pilgrim-band, which planted the great principles of religious freedom upon our shores.”11 As with the founding of Maryland, it was the religious schisms within England that prompted the founding of New England, and in this case, the clue was very clearly in the title. The Puritans who traveled to the New World between 1620 and 1642 were seeking nothing less than a new, improved England, at least in matters of religion.