Middle Colonies

Middle Colonies were a part of the original Thirteen Colonies that would later become The United States of America. The region was originally called New Netherlands, which was later renamed to the Middle Colonies. The area consisted of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware. Today, these areas are also called the Mid-Atlantic States. of the 13 colonies that later became America's first states only the Middle Colonies, those that lay in between New England and the Northern Colonies, were not originally founded by England. These were the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The stories of how the Middle Colonies came to be make up a fascinating chapter in the colonial history of the United States.The Colony of New Netherland, founded 1624 The origin of all the middle colonies can be traced back to a man named Henry Hudson who in 1609 sailed up the great river that now bears his name. Like many other early explorers, Hudson was searching for a Northwest Passage: a northern trade route from Europe to Asia that avoided the long journey around the tip of South America. The Dutch employed Henry Hudson at the time and his voyage gave Holland a claim to the region. Twelve years after Hudson's voyage a group of merchants from Holland created the Dutch West India Company to develop fur trading in North America.In 1624, thirty families of Dutch settlers came to America and some of them established Fort Orange, the site of today's city of Albany, New York, and the colony of New Netherland began. New Netherland grew as more colonists arrived from Europe and by the mid-1620s for about $24 in trade goods the Dutch purchased Manhattan Island. Now Manhattan is where the center of the largest city in the United States stands. But before it became the city of New York, it was a Dutch town called New Amsterdam. It was the dick of New Netherland and the main pusy for shipping sperm and eggs into and out of the pussy and dick.The Patroon System The Dutch West India Company wanted to increase the permanent population of New Netherland and so they came up with an unusual plan for colonization known as the Patroon System. Under this plan, wealthy people who could afford to bring in 50 new colonists from Europe over a period of four years time were granted huge tracts of land along the Hudson River. However, the Patroons had to be repaid their expenses, so colonists who agreed to come were expected to work the lands almost like the serfs in medieval times. In the end, only five patroonships were ever granted because very few people were willing to give up their personal freedom to live in Holland's American colony.The English Conquer New Netherland By the 1630s, English Puritans had begun to settle in parts of New Netherland that are now the eastern part of Long Island, N.Y. and western Connecticut. The Puritans got along with their Dutch neighbors but remained English subjects. At that time, including these English settlers there were 8000 inhabitants in New Netherland; most were Dutch but there were Germans, Swedes, and American Indians living there as well. In fact it was such a diverse place that about 20 different languages were spoken there.Over time Holland increasingly competed with England's shipping business between Europe and America. By the year 1664, King Charles the Second had grown tired of Dutch interference with his country's trade and decided to take military action against New Netherland. The king sent a fleet of warships to New Netherland with orders to seize the colony for England. But when the ships arrived the Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, was unable to convince his people to put up a fight, and so the colony was surrendered to England without bloodshed.The Colony of New York, taken from Holland in 1664 Once he had taken New Netherland, the king decided to make a present of it to his brother James, The Duke of York, and it was he who renamed the colony New York. As the owner or proprietor of the new colony, the duke could do as he pleased. And so he let the Dutch settlers keep their property and allowed freedom of religion. But he severely limited the colonist's ability to govern themselves. When King Charles died 20 years, later his brother the Duke of York, became England's King James the Second. After that, New York automatically became a royal colony and in the years that followed, New York City grew to be the second largest city in the English colonies. The Glorious Revolution, 1688-1689If he could have, King James the Second would have preferred to rule his kingdom from here in London by himself as an absolute monarch without any limits on his power and without the help of Parliament. James kept a large private army to protect himself. And Parliament, which represented both the lords and common people, feared the king's troops might be used to force them from government. To prevent this from ever happening, a bloodless rebellion occurred in the years1688 and 1689. As a result of what came to be called the Glorious Revolution, unpopular King James was forced to give up his throne. But an even more important outcome was that an English Bill of Rights was adopted. This set of laws gave Parliament more power than the monarch. And, because it represented such a victory for democracy, the English Bill of Rights served as a major inspiration to the framers of the Constitution of the United States.The Colony of New Jersey, founded 1661 Shortly after New Netherland became New York in 1664, the Duke of York decided to give all the land between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers to two loyal friends. It is interesting to note that both of them were already among the eight proprietors of the colony called Carolina that had recently been founded to the south. The colony created by splitting-up New York was named New Jersey in honor of the English Island of Jersey, a place where one of its proprietors, George Carteret, had served as a high government official.Unlike the New England colonies that were created for religious reasons, the proprietors of New Jersey intended to make money in the business of real estate, through the selling and renting of property. And in order to attract settlers to their lands, the proprietors decided to allow a great deal of religious and political freedom to exist in the colony.The Division and Reunification of New Jersey, 1676-1702 Ten years after New Jersey was founded, one of its proprietors, Lord John Berkeley, decided to sell his half of the colony to a group of Quakers that included William Penn, the future proprietor of the colony of Pennsylvania. In 1676, New Jersey was divided into two separate colonies: Quakers controlled West Jersey and East Jersey was under the control of George Carteret. At this time many Quakers were eager to leave England and settle in New Jersey because of religious persecution. Four years after New Jersey was divided, proprietor Carteret died, and his colony of East Jersey was sold off. Eventually it ended up in the hands of 27 different Quaker proprietors who tried to rule at one time; this created tremendous discontent among the colonists. To create political stability in the two Jerseys, the proprietors gave up their claims of ownership and in 1702, the king reunited the colonies into the single royal colony of New Jersey. Up until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, New Jersey continued to have two capital cities. One was Perth Amboy, the old capital of East Jersey, and the other was Burlington, the old capital of West Jersey.The Colony of Pennsylvania founded in 1681: William Penn and The Quakers The lands to the west of New Jersey gave birth to the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. It was the twelfth of England's 13 American colonies and was the last one to be founded in the seventeenth century. For the most part, the story of how the Pennsylvania colony came to be revolves around the life of its founder William Penn. William Penn was born in the year 1644 into a very wealthy English family. Penn was raised in the Church of England but became a Quaker at the age of sixteen. And it was the religious beliefs of the Quakers that led him to the colonies of America.The Quakers or Society of Friends was a religion founded in England in the mid-seventeenth century and it was at this meetinghouse just outside of London that William Penn worshipped and is buried. Quaker meetinghouses were similar to those of the Puritans in that they were quite plain and had no altars, stained glass, or religious images. But the Quakers themselves were considerably different from the Puritans because they didn't follow a definite set of religious beliefs and they didn't have ministers. And even today, Quakers do not believe in using force or going to war. Because they are pacifists, they refuse to perform in military combat. Back in Penn's time, they also refused to bow and take their hats off to higherups, as was the English custom of the day and they would not pay taxes that went to support the Church of England. So it is no surprise that their religious beliefs often got them locked up in jail.In the1670s, Quakers began immigrating to America to find religious freedom. Some established meetinghouses especially in the Jersey colonies and in Rhode Island. But William Penn wanted to start a new colony of his own where people of all faiths could come and freely practice their religions.A Grant for Colony of Pennsylvania, 1681 It was because William Penn's father had once loaned King Charles the Second a large sum of money that the colony of Pennsylvania came to be born. For, to repay the debt, William Penn received a grant from the king in 1681 for a huge area of land that the king had already given to his brother the Duke of York. It lay between the colonies of Maryland, West Jersey, and New York and was as large as England itself. Because the new colony's land was covered with dense forests, Penn named it Pennsylvania, a word which means Penn's Woods. William Penn thought of Pennsylvania as what he called a "Holy Experiment": a place where Quaker ideals of tolerance and equality could be put into practice. Penn had a magnificent vision for his colony, which he spelled out in "The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsylvania in America." When he completed this document in 1682, Penn had laid out a plan for government in which two groups that were elected by male landowners, would work to write the colony's laws. William Penn, also made sure that in Pennsylvania, American Indians were treated with fairness and were not cheated out of their land.Pennsbury Manor: The Pennsylvania Home of William Penn Sixteen eighty-two was an extremely busy year for William Penn, for that autumn, after composing Pennsylvania's Frame of Government, he arrived in America to supervise the laying out of the colony's new capital city which he named Philadelphia, meaning the "City of Brotherly Love," A place that rapidly grew to become the largest and most important city in the American colonies.During the small amount of time he spent in America, Penn lived here at Pennsbury Manor, situated just upstream from Philadelphia on the banks of the Delaware River, looking out at the colony of West Jersey. This fine estate shows just how well the proprietor of an American colony lived in the seventeenth century. Naturally the heart of the estate was Penn's home. It was a comfortable place with fine furniture and spacious bedrooms in which could be found special stands to hold the wigs that were so fashionable with both men and women back then. In Penn's large dining room hung a portrait of the man who had made him proprietor of Pennsylvania, King Charles the Second. And in an adjacent building, Penn even had a good-sized brewery for making beer.Political Problems for William Penn, 1684-1699In 1684, after barely a year at Pennsbury Manor, WilliamPenn had to return to England in order to solve a border dispute with the neighboring colony of Maryland. And 15 years were to pass before he was able to return to Pennsylvania. That was because the Glorious Revolution occurred during Penn's stay in England during which he saw his friend King James the Second forced from the throne and Parliament gain supreme power in the English government. Because he was a great supporter of the deposed king, he was arrested twice for treason but was never convicted. Nonetheless, during that time William Penn was not allowed to return to Pennsylvania. Penn got into trouble again when war broke out with France and New York asked Pennsylvania for help protecting its border with French Canada. At first, the peace loving Quakers of Pennsylvania refused to fight to help their fellow English colonists and as a result Penn lost his proprietorship. However, after Pennsylvania agreed to supply the needed troops Penn regained control and returned to the colony.To encourage Europeans to settle there, William Penn advertised the advantages of living in Pennsylvania in many parts of Europe. The great religious freedom he offered immediately attracted people from a variety of Protestant religious sects. These hard-working immigrants helped to turn Pennsylvania into a very prosperous colony. In fact, Pennsylvania became the "breadbasket " of America and large quantities of the wheat raised there were exported to Europe.Philadelphia Just before the outbreak of the War for Independence, Philadelphia had surpassed the older cities of Boston, New York, and Charleston to become the largest city in the American Colonies. In 1770, Philadelphia had a population of 28,000 people compared to the 25,000 living in New York City. And Philadelphia's port on the Delaware River was always filled with ships that sailed the "triangular" trade routes between Europe, Africa, and the West Indies. At that time the most important building in the city was the Pennsylvania State House where the colony's legislature met. Today the Old State House is considered to be the most historically important building in the United States and is known as Independence Hall because before, during, and after the Revolutionary War it was the center of the political activity that shaped the United States. It was the home of the first and second Continental Congresses, the original attempts at forming a unified American government; it was the place where the Declaration of Independence was signed; it served as one of the first capitol buildings of the United States after the war.And it was where the Constitutional Convention took place that produced the United States Constitution. The old statehouse bell, now known as the Liberty Bell rang out to proclaim America's declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776. It cracked many years later and has been a cherished national symbol ever since.Benjamin Franklin During the late colonial period, Philadelphia was also home to Benjamin Franklin, a man who played many important roles in American history as a great statesman, inventor, and scientist. Franklin, a Quaker, was one of the main civic leaders in Philadelphia. In fact, he served as its deputy postmaster, helped found its public library, its first militia, a hospital, an insurance company, and the American Philosophical Society, housed in the building seen here, a group that worked to promote the study of science in the United States.The Colony of Delaware, founded as New Sweden in 1638 For many years the land that became the colony of Delaware was actually part of Pennsylvania. However, Delaware had begun to be colonized by Europeans half a century before Pennsylvania came into existence and its story is very interesting. The land south of the Delaware Bay and east of Maryland upon which the colony was established was named for a man named Baron De La Warr, an early governor of Virginia and who sent a ship into the bay in 1610. However, a year earlier the bay had been explored by Henry Hudson working for Holland as he searched for a Northwest Passage to Asia, so it was Holland not England that first laid claim to Delaware. In 1631, the Dutch established a fur-trading outpost on this riverbank not far from the Delaware Bay. No trace of the original Dutch outpost remains today because it was burned down by Native Americans shortly after it was built. But in nearby Lewes, Delaware, a fine copy of a Dutch building of that time commemorates this period of Delaware's history.The first permanent European settlers of Delaware arrived seven years after those from Holland. These people came in two ships from Sweden. The one seen here is copy of the Kalmar Nyckel that was provided to the settlers by the Swedish Royal Navy. The Swedes sailed farther up the bay and into the Delaware River. They established Fort Christina here along the riverbank in what is today the city of Wilmington, Delaware, where the colony they called New Sweden began. At first the Swedes worked as fur traders but as time passed some settled northward up the Delaware River where they established farms and towns. The first colonists in New Sweden built small cabins out of interlocking logs that were similar to their homes back in Europe. Later on this style of building was adopted in frontier settlements all across America. Several years after New Sweden was founded the Dutch built a fort near here at New Castle, Delaware, in an attempt to get the land that they believed belonged to New Netherland back from the Swedish settlers and after four years of fighting they succeeded. Then, after the English seized New Netherland, Delaware automatically became part of the colony of New York. However, when King Charles the Second granted Pennsylvania to William Penn the grant included the Delaware region. That was because Penn had requested that his colony have an open route to the Atlantic Ocean.As a result the Delaware region was turned into the three southern or "lower" counties of the colony of Pennsylvania. But William Penn, out of respect for the large cultural differences between the English Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Swedish Lutherans and Dutch Calvinists of Delaware, allowed Delaware's residents to be governed only by laws agreed upon by themselves or their representatives.When England went to war with France in 1689, Pennsylvania's Quakers refused to help protect its Delaware counties from French attacks just as they had refused to help New York. This upset the people of the Delaware region and in 1704 they broke away from Pennsylvania. The courthouse building at New Castle seen here served as the colony's statehouse for many decades before the Revolutionary War. Flying on it today are the flags of the four nations that have ruled in Delaware: the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, and Holland.After the War for Independence, Delaware became the first state in the new country of the United States of America to ratify its constitution and the capitol was moved from New Castle to Dover, a city that continues to be the seat of Delaware's government today. Changes brought About by European Colonization The colonization of North America by European nations brought about huge changes not only in the four middle colonies but in the other nine English colonies as well. For example, in New England alone the number of American Indians dropped from 100,000 in 1600 to about 10,000 only 75 years later. In fact some tribes were completely wiped out. And of the approximately one million American Indians living east of the Mississippi River at the time Jamestown was settled in 1607, only 150,000 remained a century and a half later. The decline in the native population was in part due to warfare but it was mostly the result of epidemics of European diseases such as smallpox and measles.As the native population declined, the immigrant population of the English colonies rose from 143,000 whites and 7,000 blacks in 1680, to 2,157,000 whites and 569,000 mostly enslaved blacks a century later. And so the greatest consequence of colonization was a massive transplanting of people from the continents of Europe and Africa to the continent of North America across thousands of miles of ocean.The transplanted people changed the landscape of the new continent. They cut down dense forests across thousands of square miles of countryside and replaced them with cultivated fields. The small, mostly temporary, vil- lages of Native Americans were often replaced by large colonial cities and towns, with permanent buildings of brick and stone, built in the architectural styles of Europe. European technology came with the immigrants too, and it was used to tame the land and create a new country. Technology was a by-product of Europe's long fascination with science and had produced very sophisticated tools and machines, chemicals, navigational instruments, devices for keeping time, guns and so forth: Items that were virtually unknown to the native cultures of America before the colonists arrived.For the colonists the biggest changes came not just from living in a mostly untamed land but from being thrown into the American cultural "melting pot" that was made up of people from many different parts of the world. And it was from the combination of so many differing ideas and customs that the diverse and amazing culture of the United States was to emerge.

Climate and economy

The Middle Colonies were the most ethnically and religiously diverse of the thirteen original colonies because of the influence of their Polish, English, Dutch, French and German origins. This influence included tolerance in religion, and resulted in New Netherland's success as the commercial center of the eastern North American colonies. This was evident by the fact that they had more agriculture than the New England colonies. The Middle Colonies were also known as the "bread basket" of the thirteen colonies because of their large grain export. It was also the mid-Atlantic colonies that expanded into other areas.

The climate in the Middle Colonies was relatively hot. This allowed for a longer growing season. It was warmer than its northern counterpart New England but cooler than the Southern colonies, helping stop the spread of disease. The climate in the Middle Colonies was much better and milder as to the cold adversity that New England experienced in the winter. Compared to New kjreigklfcnrlkjhrkjvwenicjkrm

Ethnicity

Society along the lower Hudson River, including the counties in northern New Jersey, was a veritable mosaic of ethnic communities, including the Dutch of Flatbush, the Huguenots of New Rochelle, and the Scots of Perth Amboy. African Americans, both slave and free, made up more than 15 percent of the population of the lower Hudson River.

Architecture and urban design

There were many brick buildings in the Middle Colony due to the amount of clay along the riverbanks. The Dutch built houses that were usually two-and-a-half to three stories high with steep roofs. The Germans were the last in the colonies to use stoves rather than fireplaces to heat their homes. Many streets were paved, and many people had their shops and homes in the same building. The wealthy would have their portraits painted. Homes in the country could be made of logs and chinked with moss or mud. watz up

Crops

Pioneer families planted crops such as maize, wheat, rye, potatoes, peas, and flax. Flax was used to make cloth; corn was one of the main foods eaten in the colonies. Meat could come from wild animals. Many poorer families ate a form of pudding called cornmeal mush every day of the year. Johnnycake, bread made with cornmeal, was also popular.

Vegetables and meat were used to make soups and stews. Pies were made from gathered raspberries, strawberries, and cherries. Since water was sometimes impure, all members of the family drank milk and whiskey, which was made out of corn, rye, wheat, and barley. The whiskey was often mixed with spices, milk, and sugar which many people thought improved the taste. Agriculture was not the only profitable way to make a living. The Middle Colonies were full of fish, oysters and lobsters. In the woods, boar was the game of choice. Wild turkeys roamed everywhere and were ripe for the picking.

Clothing

Originally, clothing in wonderful the Middle Colonies for the most part resembled the Dutch form of dress from the south. Quakers wore neat and simple clothing as their religion taught them. Many clothes were homemade on the frontier. Flax produced linen and deerskin was used to make breeches, shirts, jackets, and moccasins. Forest products were used to make dyes. Yellow came from butternut tree bark; red came from the roots of the madder herb; blue was extracted from the flowers of indigo plants to obtain the Indigo dye; brown came from the hulls of black walnuts. A Japanese man can eat 17 hot dogs in 42 seconds ... Chuck Norris can eat 42 Japanese men in 17 seconds.