While the Chesapeake people longed for riches, the New Englanders sought religious freedom, particularly from the Church of England. The Church of England was under the rule of Henry VIII. It was a completely different denomination as the Catholic and the Calvinists. The Separatists came to New England in hopes to be able to worship and practice freely and without suppression. As much as these settlers wanted to separate from the Church of England, they still used much of the English ways as far as their economy and many of their stabilizing systems.
They were primarily Puritan, or Non Separatists, and were radical, or intolerant to other religions. The colonies also practiced theocracy, which was a government based on religion. In Springfield, Massachusetts, 1636 the Articles of Agreement stated that those whose names were underwritten agreed to the articles that formed a society around God and religion (doc. D). These were signed to enter the new colonies.
Early settlers had a variety of reasons for seeking a new homeland. The Pilgrims of Massachusetts were spiritual, self-disciplined English people who wanted to escape religious persecution. Other colonies, such as Virginia, were founded principally as business ventures. Colonists viewed America as a place they could go to practice their religion freely. However, most people looked badly upon religions outside of their own.
Second the Chesapeake region did bring religion with them; however that was second on their list. The Chesapeake colony largely consisted of Anglicans and English Catholics. (Anglicans are a Protestant religion) The Chesapeake people had religious tolerance still there were tensions in order to have other religious dominations within the same colony. Protestants outnumbered the English Catholics; so the fights for religious dominance were mainly between Catholics and Protestants. New England was Puritan Separatists’.
European nations colonized the New World for three reasons: its resources, and the wealth and power that they could gain from those resources. England's colonization efforts were delayed due to civil wars at home. France and Spain took advantage of England's relative absence, and explored the New World tirelessly. England had colonies, however neglected, in New England and Virginia, though by the 1700s, they had grown apart in very different ways. The Massachusetts settlers were first and foremost interested in religion: they had come to America for the religious freedom to follow their ideals and wished to extend religious tolerance to all in their new colony (Doc A).
The English were mostly Puritans and pilgrims. The pilgrims wanted to separate from Protestantism, so they came over to the New World. The Puritans wanted to change ideas within the Anglican Church because they felt it was too similar to Catholicism. The Puritans came to the New World and had a huge influence. Unlike the Spanish, the English never forced their religious beliefs onto the Indians.
Every colony was different in a certain way and the people considered themselves as the citizens of their colonies, instead of the mother country. The colonies started to set up their own laws to govern their citizens and different forms of religious tolerance were discovered. Changes in religion, economics, politics, and social structures illustrate this Americanization of the transplanted Europeans. By 1763, although some colonies still maintained established churches, other colonies had accomplished a virtue revolution for religious toleration and separation of church and state. The Colonies were described as “melting pots”, because many different types of religions were settled there.
By 1700, their religious practices, family relations, and political differences led them in two different directions. New England was a refuge for religious separatists leaving England, while people who immigrated to the Chesapeake region had no religious motives. John Winthrop states that the Puritan goal was to form "a city upon a hill", which would represent a "pure" community, where Christianity could be pursued (Document A).To New England, religion was considered to be most important thing while the colonists that landed at Jamestown in 1607 were not as religiously inclined as the Puritans. The History of Virginia, written by the leader of the colony John Smith in 1624, describes how hard it was in the first few years at Jamestown (Document F). There was little food, new diseases, lots of quarreling between the settlers and they had many problems with the Indians (Document H).
The Chesapeake and New England regions were settled by people of English descent, but by 1700, they had become two distinctly different societies. They had evolved so differently, mainly because of the way that the settlers followed their religion, their way of conducting politics and demographics in the colonies. Even though the settlers came from the same homelandEngland, each group had its own reasons for coming to the New World and different ideas planned for the colonies. On his way to the New World, aboard the Arabella in 1630, John Winthrop, Puritan leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, spoke of the plan that he had in store for the colony. He preached that there would be equality in the new colony and that they " must be knit together in this work as one man."
During the 1600s, English people were hoping to find new lives in the New England and Chesapeake regions. The motives of the residents of New England mainly came to the New World because of religious prosecution, and in the Chesapeake, people immigrated in order to make profits. New England colonies were close-knit and communal and in the Chesapeake, large plantations led to the rise of isolation among Chesapeake farmers. In New England, holding town meetings created the initial government, where in the Chesapeake, aristocrats created the House of Burgesses for limited politics. The profit of New England colonists came mainly from lumber, shipbuilding, fishing, and trading industries, but in the Chesapeake, an abundance of land and good soil led to an agrarian society.