Multiple ethnicities came to America from Europe in hopes of finding religious freedom. They were tired of being persecuted back in their homeland. Some of the more notable factions were the Pilgrims, Puritans, and Quakers. The Puritans wanted to reform from the Church of England and set up a strict religious system in the new colony, Massachusetts Bay. Several of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise and passionately held religious convictions and fled to the New World. Although pursuit of religious freedom lied at the very foundation of New England, in the middle and southern colonies it played a smaller role, and instead democracy and slavery respectively played the primary roles.
The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were conceived and established “as plantations of religion”. Some settlers who arrived in these areas came for
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Initially these slaves were not from Africa but indentured servants or white slaves who had voluntarily mortgaged themselves for a better life in America. At the beginning of the 1700’s there were 100,000 white slaves in the southern colonies working for landowners that came to dominate the agriculture and commerce. This system was misused and once free little or no land was available as promised. This in turn led to dissent, rebellion and a great deal of tension. When there were no longer any willing whites to enslave these landowners turned their eyes toward Africa. “More than seven million Africans were carried in chains to the new world…Only about 400,000 of them ended up in North America, the great majority arriving after 1700.”(Kennedy & Cohen, p:62). Most of these slaves ended up in the southern colonies and came to color the entire region for the next 200