Middle and Southern Colonies

Middle Colonies Started with the Dutch setting up New Amsterdam along the Hudson river The English took control of New Amsterdam in 1664 when the English sailed into the harbor and the governor had no choice but to surrender to the English King Charles II gave the city to his brother who was the Duke of York and he renamed the city New York This shows the start of the English dominating the eastern coast of America

William Penn and Pennsylvania William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 He was from a wealthy English family and a personal friend to King Charles II He shocked his family by joining the Quakers who were hated by the English Quakers where Protestant reformers They believed all people were equal in God’s sight They spoke out against all war and refused to serve in any army Pennsylvania means Penn’s Woodlands

Daily Life in the Middle Colonies Thriving Economy- the land that the colonists had to grow on were all very vertile and they chose to grow wheat, barley, and rye These are all cash crops; this means that they were sold for money on the markets and not consumed by the farmer’s family They became known as the Breadbasket Colonies Large farms that raised cattle and pigs Every year they would send tons of beef, pork, and butter to the ports of New York and Philadelphia to be shipped to England

Daily Life… Counties rather than cities became important for government because houses were normally very far apart Each culture that showed up in the Middle Colonies had different ways of building and farming Households were largely self-sufficient making everything they needed including clothing, soap, and candles

Southern Colonies

Creation of Maryland In 1632 Sir George Calvert persuaded King Charles I to grant him land for a colony in the Americas He named this colony Maryland in honor of the King’s wife but died before they officially landed there, the job fell to his son Cecil, Lord Baltimore In 1634 200 colonists arrived on the north side of the Chesapeake Bay, across the Potomac River from Virginia This area was full of fish, oysters, and crabs They learned from the failures of the colonies and chose their first settlements location very carefully

Maryland Lord Baltimore owned Maryland and it was his personal responsibility to start and manage the colony He appointed a governor and a council of advisers and then gave colonists a role in government by creating an elected assembly Lord Baltimore made sure to welcome Protestants and Catholics to the colony to make sure that it grew

Carolinas In the northern part of the Carolinas the settlers were mostly poor tobacco farmers and had small farms They officially split in 1712(North Carolina) and in 1719(South Carolina) Most of the colonists that settled in South Carolina’s capital Charleston were English people who had been living in Barbados Rice and Indigo

Georgia Georgia was formed out of the farthest southern part of South Carolina by a English soldier and social reformer named James Oglethorpe in 1732 He and some other wealthy Englishmen funded the colony privately They wanted to create a place where debtors could make a fresh start They also wanted to protect the colonies to the north from Spanish Florida

Georgia Under English law the government could arrest debtors until they paid what they owed and if they got they normally had no money and no place to go Oglethorpe offered to pay for debtors and other poor people to travel to Georgia In 1733 they built the first settlement of Savannah There were some strict rules they had to follow though Farms could be no bigger than 500 acres Slavery was forbidden At first Georgia grew slow with these rules but later when Oglethorpe changed the rules to allow large plantations and slave labor it grew rapidly

Tidewater Plantations Coastal lands where growing tobacco was very successful They also found that growing rice, indigo, and cotton were very profitable Large Plantations grew here because of the access to trade and the fertile soil The plantations started along rivers and creeks, they built their own docking systems on these rivers On those docks the merchant ships picked up crops and delivered goods directly to them For this reason few large seaport cities developed in the Southern Colonies