Religion played a crucial role in shaping northern colonial settlement in North America. Puritans in New England and Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey created more stable colonies than those in the Chesapeake, while in New France the Jesuits helped to shape cultural and commercial relationships that treated Indians more as allies than subjects. Nonetheless, the impact of European settlement in northern regions still had a tremendous impact on the worlds of the natives.

France in North America

In Canada, the French primarily cultivated trading relationships with the Indians rather than attempting to settle on native lands. This relationship-building process combined economic, strategic, and religious objectives. Jesuit friars, fired by the zeal of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, made the effort to live among natives and learn their languages and cultures, but they also convinced traders to give Christianized Indians better prices for furs. This accommodating strategy succeeded initially, primarily because French colonists, who remained few in number, did not threaten Indian claims to land and political authority.

The arrival of the Dutch as competitors for native furs caused a crisis that culminated in the Beaver Wars. The Iroquois, armed by the Dutch, launched a series of attacks designed to secure new hunting grounds and replenish the population they had lost to disease. Half of the French population was killed or captured in these wars, and the survivors began to take a broader view of their place on the North American continent. They expanded their operations to the western Great Lakes, where they discovered the strategic benefit of the Mississippi River and began establishing trading relationships along it and its tributaries.

The Founding of New England

While the French slowly built alliances in Canada and along the Mississippi, radical Puritans fleeing persecution and "corruption" in England planted more populous settlements between Maine and Long Island. The first New England settlers, the Separatists or "Pilgrims," were humble English farmers and craftsmen who had fled religious persecution in England and settled in the Netherlands. Concerns that their children were adopting Dutch customs prompted them to settle the Plymouth colony in 1620.

A larger wave of Puritan migration first reached the shores of what became the colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Led by John Winthrop, an English landowner and gentleman, this group of Puritan migrants was wealthier and more prominent than the Pilgrim Separatists. They differed, too, in continuing to regard themselves as members of the Church of England. Indeed, members of the new Massachusetts Bay Colony hoped that their settlement would become a model for social and religious reform back in England.

Stability and Order in Early New England

Although the Pilgrim Separatists of Plymouth and the Congregationalists of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut differed in some ways, the New England colonies were more notable for their similarities. The distinguishing features of early New England society included rapid population growth through natural increase, large families headed by patriarchal fathers, reliance on subsistence agriculture and widespread land ownership, a rough economic equality, and an absence of bound labor.

These economic and social factors lent stability to early New England society. So did the shared commitment to Puritanism, the organization of churches, and a strong tradition of self-government at both the town and colony level. New Englanders were also fortunate "beneficiaries of catastrophe," for a massive epidemic had devastated the Indian societies in the region only four years before their arrival, killing as much as 90 percent of the population and leaving little opposition to the development of English settlements in the region. In all of these respects, New England contrasted strikingly with the early American South.

Despite its coherence and order, early New England did not lack conflict. Devout New Englanders often fought bitterly over the proper definition of Puritanism; women's struggles to assert themselves led to convictions for blasphemy and witchcraft; and contests between white and Indian settlements erupted into violent confrontations—the Pequot War and Metacom's War—as expansion proceeded westward.

The Mid-Atlantic Colonies

The Middle Colonies shared with New England comparable agrarian economies, systems of free labor, and patterns of rapid population growth. Unlike New England, however, all of the Middle Colonies were ruled by proprietary governments, like those in Maryland and South Carolina. Consequently, representative government remained weaker and civic life more embattled.

Ethnic and religious antagonisms compounded the political strife in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Unlike homogeneously English and Puritan New England, the population of the Middle Colonies included a patchwork of diverse ethnic groups and religious denominations. In New York, for example, English Anglicans and Puritans, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, Scandinavian Lutherans, and African Americans—both enslaved and free—adhering to West African tribal religions joined the Dutch Calvinist settlers who had founded the colony as New Netherlands in 1624.

By 1664, the English had taken control of the colony and renamed it New York, but chronic political strife discouraged prospective settlers and the colony remained small throughout the 1600s. Confusion over constantly changing claims to ownership, as well as conflict between Puritans and Quakers, left New Jersey lightly settled as well. However, under the leadership of the radically egalitarian Quakers and with the benefit of generous land policies and a superb natural harbor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania quickly prospered.

Relations between whites and Indians in the Middle Colonies also developed differently. While the Puritans sought to subdue the New England tribes, New Yorkers conciliated the powerful league of the Iroquois in order to maintain a competitive edge over the French for the fur trade. And for many decades, Quaker Pennsylvanians coexisted peaceably with the Lenni Lenapes.

Adjustment to Empire

The later Stuart monarchs, Charles II and James II, in an effort to gain more economic benefit from their growing colonies, attempted to centralize England's American empire. Their efforts created serious disruptions of political life in every northern colony except newly established Pennsylvania. The crown's experiment in centralization, the Dominion of New England, ended with the Glorious Revolution in 1688: James II went into exile and was replaced on the throne by William and Mary.

The dismantling of the Dominion greatly reduced the tensions between England and its colonies. After some small adjustments to ensure the collection of customs revenues, English monarchs gave up efforts to impose a strict, centralized administration on America for more than half a century. All of the colonies continued to enjoy relative independence under an imperial policy of "benign neglect."