This chapter reconstructs the manner of settlement and the character of immigrant life in six areas of early colonization: Chesapeake Bay, southern New England, the French and Dutch area from the St. Lawrence River to the Hudson River, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and the Spanish toeholds on the southern fringe of North America. A comparison of these various colonies will show how the colonizers' backgrounds, ideologies, modes of settlement, and uses of labor-free, slave, and indentured-produced distinctly different societies in North America in the seventeenth century. The chapter also shows how these regional societies changed over the course of the seventeenth century and how they experienced internal strain, a series of Native American wars, a destructive and community-shattering witchcraft craze, and reactions to England's attempts to reorganize its overseas colonies.
