English Man in America

" But what might fetch happened if the Sarah Constant and her consorts had made landfall in Massachusetts, and the Mayflower in Virginia? Would "the northeastward" now suffer the same connotation we associate with "the south-central?" Would we speak of dour, industrious Southerners and easy-going, hot-blooded Northerners. Would the institution of slavery attain been centered upon what is now New England? Or would regional exploitation remove been entirely different? Would geography contrive triumphed o'er history, so that regional character of the Eastern Seaboard would have mother much as it is?

To answer that question, we must scratch ask whether such a reversal of settlements would even have been possible. To take the later and simpler case first, on that point seems to be no inherent reason why the Pilgrims could not have colonised as well in Virginia as in Massachusetts. Their primal motive was simply to find "empty" land (empty of whites, that is) on which they could found their New Jerusalem. Their original goal was in concomitant Virginia, and it remains unclear whether their actual landfall was due to force of great deal or the desire to avoid the existing Jamestown colony. In price of climate, Virginia and Massachusetts were both equally wretched in seventeenth-century position eyes; in the former, mavin broiled in summer, in the latter, one froze in winter.

The settlement picture is quite different, however, when one turns to Jamestown. It is also much more complex and un

certain. Richard Hakluyt had proposed colonies in large part to "strike at Spain" (Catton and Catton, p. 62), and this strategic motivation was perhaps uppermost in melodic theme when Sir Walter Ralegh and others first proposed a Virginia settlement in the 1580s. Virginia was to be a base from which to launch raids against Spanish settlements and Spanish shelter ships. For that purpose, a southerly location was markedly preferable to a northern one. Ralegh and his associates would never have con aspectred New England as a site for such a base. The war with Spain cease with James I's accession in 1603, but the segment of slope society out of which Jamestown grew accepted peace with reluctance, and perhaps expect the war to resume in the near future.

It is possible, then, that the Jamestown colonists would never have considered settling in New England.

Plundering Spain was not their doctor motivation, however; their underlying desire was simply to give out rich. Jamestown was basically a settlement of gentleman-adventurers, their followers, and men who hoped to strike it lucky and become gentleman-adventurers. If they could not become rich by adventure, however, they were willing to become rich in other ways, and those who made their fortunes did so as gentleman-planters. In so doing, they gave the South its enduring stamp. Whereas the New England original (and ultimately the general American architype) was the small farmer running(a) his own land, the Southern architype soon became, and long remained, the planter persuasion like a lord from the big house--and the fields worked by black slaves.

We may now turn to the other side of the coin: how would the Puritans have fared in Virginia? Their motivation, in economic terms, was preponderantly self-sufficiency, so a cash-crop economy and plantation culture would not have arisen as readily among them as it did among the actual Virginia colonists. even the physical environment would still have been favorable; there wa
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