AP U.S. History · Lesson 1

The regional colonies

Know Know it

The English colonies grew in distinct regions, and the reasons they differed are a favorite exam theme. Look at who came, why they came, and what the land and climate let them sell.

The Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland). Jamestown (1607) was founded by a joint-stock company seeking profit. It nearly failed until colonists began growing tobacco for export in the 1610s. Tobacco needed land and labor, so the headright system granted land for each person brought over, and most early laborers were young English indentured servants. Disease kept death rates high, and men far outnumbered women. Virginia's House of Burgesses met in 1619. Maryland (1634) was a haven for English Catholics.

New England. Pilgrims settled Plymouth in 1620, and far more Puritans came to Massachusetts Bay from 1630. They came in families, built compact towns around a meetinghouse, and mixed small farming with fishing, timber, shipbuilding and trade. A healthier climate meant longer lives and fast population growth. Dissenters were not welcome: Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished, and Williams founded Rhode Island, which separated church and state.

The middle colonies. New York was taken from the Dutch in 1664. William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a Quaker colony with broad religious toleration. Rich soil made the region a grain exporter, and it drew a very mixed population of English, Dutch, German and Scots-Irish settlers.

The southern colonies. Carolina (1670) drew planters from the English Caribbean island of Barbados, who brought its slave-based plantation model. Rice, and later indigo, made South Carolina rich, and by the early 1700s enslaved Africans made up a majority of its people. Georgia (1732) began as a buffer against Spanish Florida.

In the Chesapeake, labor shifted from servants to slaves in the late 1600s. Fewer English laborers signed on as wages in England rose, and more enslaved Africans became available through English traders. Bacon's Rebellion (1676) also played a part. By 1700 enslaved Africans had become the main labor force.

Trap Puritans did not stand for religious freedom

The Puritans left England to practice their own faith freely, not to grant that freedom to others. Massachusetts banished dissenters, and from 1659 to 1661 it hanged four Quakers. Religious toleration in this period came from Rhode Island, Maryland's 1649 act and above all Pennsylvania.

Worked example Easy

Which crop rescued the Virginia colony from failure and shaped the Chesapeake economy?

  1. TobaccoAnswer
  2. Rice
  3. Wheat
  4. Sugarcane

How to solve it

  1. Match the region to its export: the Chesapeake is Virginia and Maryland.
  2. Its staple crop, grown for sale in England, was tobacco.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Correct. Colonists began exporting tobacco in the 1610s, and it became the Chesapeake's main source of wealth.
  • B. Incorrect. Rice was the great crop of South Carolina, not of the Chesapeake.
  • C. Incorrect. Wheat was the chief export of the middle colonies, not the crop that saved Virginia.
  • D. Incorrect. Sugarcane was grown in the Caribbean and Brazil; the Chesapeake climate was too cold for it.

Explain Explain it

Task verbs: explain, compare

For a comparison, set the two regions side by side on one feature at a time: who settled, how long they lived, how the economy worked. Then say why they differed. New England settlers came in families with a religious mission into a healthier climate; Chesapeake settlers were mostly young men seeking profit in a place with deadly fevers.

Worked example Medium

Compared with early settlers of the Chesapeake, early settlers of New England were more likely to

  1. arrive as single young men working off contracts
  2. grow a single staple crop for sale abroad
  3. arrive in family groups and live longer livesAnswer
  4. settle on scattered plantations along rivers

How to solve it

  1. Recall the Chesapeake pattern: young men, servants, tobacco, high death rates.
  2. New England was the opposite on each point: families, towns, a mixed economy, longer lives.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. Single young men working off labor contracts describes the Chesapeake, where most early settlers were indentured servants.
  • B. Incorrect. Growing one staple crop for export, tobacco, is the Chesapeake pattern, not New England's mixed economy.
  • C. Correct. Puritans migrated as families, and New England's cooler, healthier climate let people live much longer.
  • D. Incorrect. Scattered plantations along rivers describes the Chesapeake; New Englanders settled in compact towns.

Explain Your turn

Explain how Bacon's Rebellion (1676) helped push Virginia planters toward enslaved Africans instead of indentured servants. Say who rebelled, what the rebellion made planters fear, and why enslaved labor seemed to remove that danger.

Write it, then compare. Nothing you type here is saved or graded.

Compare with a model answer

A full answer does this

  • Says who took part in the rebellion
  • Says what the rebellion made planters fear
  • Explains that enslaved workers, unlike servants, would never become free men demanding land

Model answer

The rebels were frontier settlers, many of them poor former indentured servants, led by Nathaniel Bacon; they wanted land and war on nearby Native peoples, and they burned Jamestown. The rising taught wealthy planters to fear a growing class of armed, landless free men, which is what servants became when their terms ended. Enslaved Africans were held for life and had no legal rights, so they would never become free men demanding land, and planters turned more to slavery after 1676.

Apply Apply it

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