Practice questions: The Regions of British Colonies

Answer: (B) spreading plantations along rivers where ships could load at each dock

1. Compact towns around a meetinghouse were the New England pattern; tobacco planters scattered across the countryside and built few towns.
2. Tobacco needed fresh land and direct shipping, so planters spread out along the deep rivers of the Chesapeake and loaded their crop at their own docks.
3. Settlers moved into the backcountry valleys in large numbers only in the 1700s, long after tobacco first spread along the tidewater rivers.
4. Grain-exporting port cities such as Philadelphia grew in the middle colonies, while the tobacco economy kept the Chesapeake rural.

Answer: (C) A grant of fifty acres to whoever paid for a migrant’s passage

1. The House of Burgesses first met in 1619 and gave planters a voice in lawmaking, but it did not tie land to the import of workers.
2. Virginia made slavery hereditary in 1662, more than forty years after Pory wrote, and the law concerned enslaved Africans rather than servants.
3. The headright system gave a sponsor fifty acres for each migrant he brought over, so planters who imported servants gained both land and workers for tobacco.
4. Virginia became a royal colony in 1624, after Pory’s letter, and the change of rulers did not create the link between servants and tobacco land.

Answer: (D) Fewer English servants arrived while slave traders brought in more Africans.

1. Virginia became a royal colony in 1624, nearly fifty years before Berkeley’s count, so it cannot explain a change after 1671.
2. Barbados turned to sugar in the 1640s, a Caribbean change that came well before Berkeley’s count and did not alter what Chesapeake planters grew.
3. Maryland’s Toleration Act of 1649 dealt with religion, not labor, and it came two decades before Berkeley’s report.
4. As fewer English migrants signed indentures later in the century and slave traders brought more Africans, slavery replaced servitude as the main Chesapeake labor system by 1700.

Answer: (A) A mixed economy that combined small farms with fishing and trade

1. Poor soil and a short growing season kept New England farms small, so colonists also fished, cut timber, built ships and traded.
2. Export estates worked by bound laborers marked the Chesapeake, where tobacco paid; New England’s rocky soil grew no such staple crop.
3. Massachusetts demanded conformity to one approved church, while broad religious diversity marked the middle colonies and Rhode Island.
4. A fur trade that needed few settlers defined New France and New Netherland, while New England drew some twenty thousand English migrants in the 1630s.

Answer: (D) building a community in which shared faith guided civil rule

1. Separating government from religion was Roger Williams’s position, and Massachusetts banished him for it in 1635.
2. A property test without a church requirement came to Massachusetts with its 1691 charter; in 1631 the vote depended on church membership.
3. Protecting Catholics was the aim of Maryland’s founders, the Calverts, not of the Puritans who governed Massachusetts.
4. Puritans saw their colony as a covenant community, so they let only male church members become freemen who voted and held office.

Answer: (B) challenged the religious authority of the colony’s ministers and magistrates

1. Quakers emerged as a movement in the 1650s and first reached Boston in 1656, nearly twenty years after her trial.
2. By claiming direct revelation and accusing ministers of false teaching, she challenged the leaders whose shared authority held the colony’s religious and civil order together.
3. Hutchinson was a Puritan who accused most ministers of teaching salvation by good works; she did not side with the bishops the Puritans had left behind.
4. Thomas Hooker led his congregation to Hartford in 1636, a move usually explained by a need for land and disputes with Boston’s leaders, not by her teaching.

Answer: (C) Massachusetts banished him for denying its power to rule over conscience.

1. England revoked the Massachusetts charter in 1684, nearly fifty years after Williams left, and a royal governor arrived with the Dominion of New England in 1686.
2. The Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact in 1620, and it governed Plymouth rather than the Massachusetts Bay colony that expelled Williams.
3. Massachusetts banished Williams in 1635 for teaching that magistrates could not punish matters of belief, and in 1636 he founded Providence, the start of Rhode Island.
4. Massachusetts hanged four Quakers between 1659 and 1661, more than twenty years after Williams founded Providence.

Answer: (A) the persecution of Quakers and other dissenters in England

1. English law punished Quakers who worshipped outside the Church of England, and Penn himself had been jailed, so he sought a refuge for many faiths.
2. The Calverts founded Maryland as a Catholic refuge in 1634, and its example did not prompt Penn’s Quaker plan nearly fifty years later.
3. Fear of Spanish Florida shaped Georgia’s founding as a buffer colony in 1732, not Pennsylvania’s founding in 1681.
4. Tobacco prices mattered to Chesapeake planters, while Penn planned his colony around religious refuge and family farms.

Answer: (B) migrants from many European nations settling a former Dutch colony

1. Limiting the vote to church members was the Massachusetts practice, meant to keep one faith in charge rather than to welcome many.
2. New York kept the Dutch settlers and churches of New Netherland after the English conquest of 1664 and drew migrants of many faiths from across Europe.
3. Barbados planters helped settle Carolina in 1670, not New York, and they brought a plantation economy rather than religious variety.
4. The revivals of the Great Awakening split congregations in the 1730s and 1740s, half a century after Dongan wrote.

Answer: (B) allow women to speak and to preach in their religious meetings

1. Requiring a conversion experience for church membership was a Puritan practice in New England that Quakers rejected.
2. Quakers believed an inner light lived in each person, so they had no ordained ministers and let women speak and preach in meeting.
3. Quakers refused to pay tithes and had no paid clergy, one reason English authorities fined and jailed them.
4. Quakers rejected outward sacraments such as infant baptism and opposed churches that the law made residents support.

Answer: (C) Cheap land let servants who finished their terms start their own farms.

1. New England’s poor soil did limit farm size, but Downing worried that servants would leave to farm, not that farming paid poorly.
2. Headrights pulled many servants to the Chesapeake, yet Downing’s point concerned servants in New England quitting to work their own land.
3. Land was plentiful and labor scarce, so servants who finished their terms could farm for themselves, which led Downing to want workers held for life.
4. Colonists did sell Pequot captives in the West Indies after the war of 1637, but that trade explains his exchange plan rather than his worry about servants.

Answer: (D) Planters bought enslaved Africans in larger numbers as sugar spread.

1. Barbados planters resisted baptizing the people they enslaved because they feared it would weaken their claim, and baptism did not bring freedom.
2. Sugar estates swallowed small farms, so many former servants found no land on Barbados and left for other colonies.
3. Planters put nearly all their land into sugar and bought their food, including flour and fish from the mainland colonies.
4. Once planters turned to sugar in the 1640s, they bought enslaved Africans held for life with their children, and by 1680 enslaved people outnumbered whites nearly two to one.

Answer: (A) Northern colonists shipping food, flour and timber to the sugar islands

1. Sugar planters used nearly all their land for cane, so merchants from New England and the middle colonies sold them food, flour, fish and barrel timber.
2. Sugarcane needed a frost-free climate, so Chesapeake planters kept growing tobacco.
3. New England merchants traded heavily with the sugar islands, and some carried enslaved people there themselves.
4. Quaker meetings set aside the Germantown protest in 1688 and did not require members to free enslaved people until the 1770s.

Answer: (D) Enslaved Africans resisting bondage where they were the majority

1. Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676 set frontier farmers, servants and others against Governor Berkeley, a different conflict from a plot by enslaved Africans on Barbados.
2. Native nations fought New England settlers in King Philip’s War in 1675, but the Barbados plot was planned by enslaved Africans.
3. Quaker protests against slavery, such as the Germantown petition of 1688, came from free colonists rather than from enslaved people.
4. Enslaved Africans far outnumbered whites on Barbados, and the 1675 plot shows them organizing to resist slavery despite brutal punishment.

Answer: (A) a long growing season and wetlands suited to rice grown for export

1. Rice planters needed many workers for the swamps and fields, so they bought enslaved Africans, and traders also sold Native captives, until enslaved people outnumbered whites.
2. Carolina began in 1663 as a proprietary colony owned by eight proprietors, and the Crown took over its government only after 1719.
3. Scots-Irish and German farmers reached the southern backcountry in large numbers after the 1730s, and as free settlers they added to the white population.
4. French Protestants and other refugees did settle in Carolina, but they came as free migrants and do not explain an enslaved majority.

Answer: (B) using the time left after daily tasks for gardens, family and worship

1. Carolina’s laws kept baptized people enslaved, so joining a church did not open a path to freedom in court.
2. Under the task system, workers who finished an assigned job could use the rest of the day for themselves, which helped sustain Gullah culture inside slavery.
3. Free men with property elected the Commons House, which wealthy planters controlled, and enslaved people had no vote.
4. Enslaved workers at the indigo vats were not paid wages, and the planters who owned them kept the profits of the crop.

Answer: (A) Few good harbors, which kept most farms small and limited exports

1. With few deep harbors, North Carolina shipped little directly overseas, so most settlers kept small tobacco and food farms and large plantations were rare.
2. North Carolina’s proprietors allowed slavery, and a ban on it was the policy of Georgia’s trustees after 1735.
3. Indigo became a major crop in the 1740s, after Byrd’s survey, and it spread mainly in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.
4. Spanish raids threatened the colonies farther south near Florida rather than North Carolina’s farms on the Virginia border.

Answer: (C) Settlers’ demands for enslaved labor to grow rice as South Carolina did

1. The buffer plan supported the ban, since the trustees feared that enslaved people near the border would aid Spain or flee to it.
2. Florida’s offer of freedom was one of the Highlanders’ own arguments against slavery, not a reason to allow it.
3. Savannah settlers who watched Carolina rice planters grow rich kept demanding enslaved labor and smuggling it in, and the trustees made slavery legal in 1751.
4. Small fifty-acre grants were part of the trustees’ plan for a colony of free farmers, which the ban on slavery was meant to protect.

Answer: (D) Its trustees ruled from London and allowed no elected assembly.

1. The 1735 bans governed what settlers could own and sell, not how their leaders were chosen.
2. Georgia’s role as a military buffer explains why Britain founded it in 1732, not how its leaders were chosen.
3. Small land grants shaped who settled Georgia but did not decide who made its laws.
4. Connecticut’s settlers elected deputies to make laws, while Georgia’s trustees governed from London and gave settlers no elected assembly until 1751, and even then it could only advise.

Answer: (C) Settlers’ demands and policy choices decided when slavery spread into a suited climate.

1. Georgia’s trustees in London banned slavery, and settlers themselves petitioned to bring enslaved people in.
2. Georgia grew slowly under the ban, and many settlers left for South Carolina, where enslaved labor was legal.
3. Georgia shared Carolina’s climate from the start, but slavery became legal only in 1751, after settlers had demanded it and smuggled enslaved people in.
4. Georgia began with small free farms and a ban on slavery, and planters copied Carolina’s rice plantations only after 1751.