Contrasting Colonization Models: Virginia vs. New England

Key Insight

While all English immigrants shared a common language and a political education emphasizing rights and liberty, derived from their shared heritage in a country of partisan strife, significant differences emerged in their colonization. European colonies generally carried the 'germ' of democracy because emigrants were typically not the wealthy or powerful, and poverty fostered equality. However, American soil proved 'implacably hostile' to landed aristocracy, naturally promoting small land holdings cultivable by owners, fostering a 'bourgeois and democratic liberty' distinct from the mother country's aristocratic form.

The Anglo-American family developed two main branches: Virginia in the South and New England in the North. Virginia, founded in 1607, initially attracted gold-seekers, described as restless, undisciplined men, and later working men of lower English classes. 'No noble thought or immaterial contrivance' guided its establishment. Slavery was introduced early, a 'capital fact' that profoundly impacted the South's character, laws, and future by dishonoring labor and fostering idleness, ignorance, pride, poverty, and luxury, while sapping intellectual vigor.

New England's founding, by contrast, was a 'novel spectacle'. Its inhabitants were predominantly 'well-to-do' and 'enlightened' individuals, often with advanced education and European renown, who immigrated with families. They left secure positions not for wealth, but for a 'purely intellectual need' to ensure 'the victory of an idea'—Puritanism. This religious doctrine, coinciding with 'absolute democratic and republican theories', motivated them to seek freedom to live and worship as they wished. This formed a society 'homogeneous in all its parts', where democracy, 'such as antiquity had never dared to dream of', emerged fully developed from a feudal past, eventually spreading its influence across the American continent.