Guide to Color Codes

Guide to color codes

topical sentence (thesis or component of the thesis)

evidence from outside source evidence from a document

analysis

A storm of English colonization in the 17th century transplanted English people and culture to North America. Cast on different shores, these English colonists created dramatically different societies that gradually dichotomized the entire continent into a North-South divide and eventually civil war. In exploring the causes of this regional polarity, it is necessary to begin with the observation that the two regions were not settled by the same people. Common English heritage mattered little next to the critical differences between the two types of settlers who settled in the Chesapeake and New England regions. The English colonists diverged on the basis of starkly divergent ambitions, which nurtured polar opposite economies, governments, and social systems in the Chesapeake and New England.

The religious ambitions of the New England settlers contrasted sharply with the profit-seeking aspirations of the Chesapeake colonists. In New England, the core settlers sought the twin spiritual objectives—safety and purity of practice. These colonists' objectives were a reaction to a century of spiritual confusion and religious corruption as England struggled to shake all remnants of Catholicism. Their impetus to search for a new home where their own religious doctrines could be advanced intensified after King Charles I and his Anglican allies purged and persecuted Puritans in the 1630s. Thus New England was populated by a "Great Migration" of faithful and fearful congregations with the simple aim to create a harmonious, devoted community that modeled the word of God to the world (doc A). Every aspect of the founding of Maryland and Virginia, however, revolved around profit. The territorial charters, ships, and supplies of travels to Virginia were financed by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock institution that prioritized profit returns to its shareholders. In addition, these colonies were populated by indentured servants—economically distressed individuals risking the wilderness and costly contracts of labor obligations in order to enrich themselves, preferably from the easy wealth that comes with discovering silver like the Spanish conquistadors had or, better yet, gold (Doc F). These colonies were led and governed by an aristocratic class of younger sons of the landed elite of England who, by the laws and traditions of primogeniture, could inherit nothing and thus had to seek new sources of wealth if they wanted to maintain the status and standard of living that they had grown accustomed to enjoying. Ostensibly faithful and swearing oaths to the Church of England, the predominantly male colonists aboard the Merchant's Hope