The contrasting land systems of New England and Virginia reflected profound differences in the societies of the two regions. Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut were founded by Puritans who sought to create closed agrarian utopias in which they might practice their ideals of religious perfection. Their beliefs dictated tight settlement in villages and condemned dispersed, isolated farmsteads which inevitably loosened ties to the community. Although Puritans also migrated to Virginia, they did not dominate there. No compelling ideal motivated those who came to the Chesapeake Bay. The only bonds of community were the necessity of mutual protection from the Indians and the fear of Spanish attack.
There were also important demographic differences between the Northern and Nouthern Colonies. The typical Virginia immigrant during most of the Seventeenth Century was a young unmarried man in his twenties, while families, composed of men and women of all ages and their children, went to New England. Although the first women came to Virginia in 1608, throughout the Seventeenth Century there were at least three men for every woman in the colony, and in some decades the proportion may have reached four to one. This disparity in the sex ratio slowed the growth of the number of native-born Virginians, because many men were unable to marry and establish families. An exceptionally high mortality rate in the Chesapeake Bay region compounded Virginia’s population problem. Even after the harsh initial years at Jamestown, when starvation, Indian attacks, and disease took an incredible toll of the English settlers, the colony remained an unhealthy place where survival depended upon the continuing flow of new immigrants. Its total population did not reach 10,000 people until some forty years after Jamestown was founded.
In contrast, the New England colonies were rapidly peopled in the great wave of migration which brought more than 10,000 religious refugees to Massachusetts Bay in less than a decade. Afterwards, immigration was an insignificant trickle and population growth depended upon the natural increase of the original settlers. Mortality in the Puritan colonies was lower than that in England, so that it was possible for the families of the first generation to establish stable communities in which conservation of land resources for the future was held in high esteem. The modes of settlement and resultant differences in distributing public lands which were established in New England and Virginia had long range implications far outside their immediate regions. In the Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries, the Virginia model was more influential. Despite the attempts of the English officials to control development, the tendency in all of the colonies from Pennsylvania to Georgia was for settlement to outpace surveying, for the individual to locate land prior to survey, and for tracts to be patented in relatively large blocks.
(10 Feb 05)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.