miscellaneous
Calvinist doctrine that God has foreordained some people to be saved and some to be damned. Though their fate was irreversible, Calvinists, particularly those who believed they were destined for salvation, sought to lead sanctified lives in order to demonstrate to others that they were in fact members of the "elect."
predestination
Series of laws passed, beginning in 1651, to regulate colonial shipping; the acts provided that only English ships would be allowed to trade in English and colonial ports, and that all goods destined for the colonies would first pass through England.
Navigation Laws
Established Maryland as a haven for Catholics; unsuccessfully tried to reconstitute the English manorial system in the colonies and gave vast tracts of land to Catholic relatives, a policy that soon created tensions between the seaboard Catholic establishment and backcountry Protestant planters
Lord Baltimore (1605-1675)
Began with an Indian attack on Newbern, North Carolina. After the Tuscaroras were defeated, remaining Indian survivors migrated northward, eventually joining the Iroquois Confederacy as its sixth nation.
Tuscarora War (1711-1713)
Frontier farmers who illegally occupied land owned by others or not yet officially opened for settlement. Many of North Carolina's early settlers were these people who contributed to the colony's reputation as being more independent-minded and "democratic" than its neighbors.
squatters
Intense religious experience that confirmed an individual's place among the "elect," or the "visible saints." Calvinists who experienced conversion were then expected to lead sanctified lives to demonstrate their salvation.
conversion
Passed in Maryland, it guaranteed toleration to all Christians but decreed the death penalty for those, like Jews and atheists, who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. Ensured that Maryland would continue to attract a high proportion of Catholic migrants throughout the colonial period.
Act of Toleration (1649)
Soldier-statesman and leading founder of Georgia. A champion of prison reform, he established Georgia as a haven for debtors seeking to avoid imprisonment. During the War of Jenkins's Ear, he successfully led his colonists in battle, repelling a Spanish attack on British territory.
James Oglethorpe (1696-1785)
Agreement to form a majoritarian government in Plymouth, signed aboard the Mayflower. Created a foundation for self-government in the colony.
Mayflower Compact (1620)
Religious group known for their tolerance, emphasis on peace, and idealistic Indian policy, who settled heavily in Pennsylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Quakers
Much-loathed administrator of the Dominion of New England, which was created in 1686 to strengthen imperial control over the New England colonies; established strict control doing away with the town meetings and popular assemblies and taxing colonists without their consent; when word of the Glorious Revolution in England reached the colonists they promptly dispatched him back to England
Sir Edmond Andros (1637-1714)
Also known as sumptuary laws, they are designed to restrict personal behavior in accord with a strict code of morality. Blue laws were passed across the colonies, particularly in Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania.
blue laws
Puritan general who helped lead parliamentary forces during the English Civil War, and ruled England as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658.
Oliver Cromwell
Migration of seventy thousand refugees from England to the North American colonies, primarily New England and the Caribbean. The twenty thousand migrants who came to Massachusetts largely shared a common sense of purpose—to establish a model Christian settlement in the new world.
Great English Migration (1630-1642)
English Protestant reformers who sought to purify the Church of England of Catholic rituals and creeds. Some of the most devout believed that only "visible saints" should be admitted to church membership.
Puritans
Prominent Quaker activist who founded Pennsylvania as a haven for fellow Quakers in 1681; established friendly relations with neighboring Indian tribes and attracted a wide array of settlers to his colony with promises of economic opportunity and ethnic and religious toleration
William Penn (1644-1718)
Representative parliamentary assembly created to govern Virginia, establishing a precedent for government in the English colonies.
House of Burgesses
French Protestant reformer whose religious teachings formed the theological basis for New England Puritans, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and members of the Dutch Reformed Church; he argued that humans were inherently weak and wicked, and he believed in an all-knowing, all-powerful God who predestined select individuals for salvation
John Calvin (1509-1564)
Series of clashes between English settlers and Pequot Indians in the Connecticut River valley. Ended in the slaughter of the Pequots by the Puritans and their Narragansett Indian allies.
Pequot War (1636-1638)
Defeated by the south Carolinans in the war of 1715-1716. The Yamasee defeat devastated the last of the coastal Indian tribes in the Southern colonies.
Yamasee Indians
Dutch-born monarch and his English-born wife, daughter of King James II, installed to the British throne during the Glorious Revolution of 1689. They relaxed control over the American colonies, inaugurating a period of "salutary neglect" that lasted until the French and Indian War.
William III and Mary II
First formal statute governing the treatment of slaves, which provided for harsh punishments against offending slaves but lacked penalties for the mistreatment of slaves by masters. Similar statutes were adopted by Southern plantation societies on the North American mainland in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Barbados Slave Code of 1661
Erudite leader of the separatist Pilgrims ho left England for Holland and eventually sailed on the Mayflower to establish the first English colony in MA; his account of the colony's founding, Of Plymouth Plantation, remains classic of American literature and an indispensable historical source
William Bradford (1590-1657)
Series of assaults by Metacom, King Philip, on English settlements in New England. The attacks slowed the westward migration of New England settlers for several decades.
King Philip's War (Metacom's War) 1675-1676
Small group of Puritans who sought to break away entirely from the Church of England; after initially settling in Holland, a number of English Separatists made their way to Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts in 1620.
Separatists