Middle Colonies

Therefore, the area ended up as a center for shipbuilding activity and fishing.

To get their food, they would trade with the breadbasket of America, the middle colonies.

This mid-Atlantic region was fantastic for farming.

The area has a long, warm growing season, and plentiful arable soil.

It's not pushing things in the South.

It's not pushing things particularly in the middle colonies.

It's a New England story, I think.

Now, while religion may not have served as a cause of the American Revolution, it certainly played a big role in the revolution and really helping Americans sort out which side of the conflict they wanted to support.

In your opinion, Kate, what might have happened if early Americans had not chosen to collapse the realms of religion and government in the new United States? What might the history of the early United States look like without this collapse?

If the federal government had found a way to build the United States as a Protestant country, there's a lot of religious nationalism in 75 and 76.

So if that had carried forward into a structure and it would have to be kind of a three-part grouping of Anglicans in the South or Episcopalians then in the South, and Presbyterians in the Middle Colonies and Congregationalists in the North, if those three groups could have collaborated, it's possible we would have seen the United States move more towards a European-style church establishment, where they are now, where there are generalized funding for sort of official or heritage churches, but a much stronger social state.

that goes along with that.

It was reaching directly into the bank accounts of some very determined men.

To the south of New England lay the Middle Colonies, and here the picture changed.

New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were a patchwork of peoples, far more mixed than tidy New England.

Here lived Dutch families whose ancestors had settled New York when it was still called New Amsterdam, German farmers in the Pennsylvania countryside, Scots-Irish settlers pushing toward the frontier, Quakers, Catholics, Jews, and a dozen other groups who had come seeking land or refuge or simply the freedom to be left alone.

If this was to become a continental war, the army would have to become a continental army, and a continental army needed a commander, a single man whom all the colonies could accept and follow.

The choice the Congress made was both practical and shrewd, and it would prove to be one of the most important decisions in the entire history of the new nation.

The army around Boston was overwhelmingly a New England force, and there was a real danger that the rest of the colonies might come to see the whole struggle as a New England quarrel, a regional affair that the southern and middle colonies need not fully embrace.

To bind the colonies together, it made sense to choose a commander from outside New England, a man whose appointment would signal that this was truly a common cause.

No, it's not.

It's the middle colonies is what we're looking for.

Middle colonies.

We didn't learn that in

Maryland history.

It has been estimated that two-thirds of all immigrants into Pennsylvania between the opening of the 18th century and the outbreak of the Revolution were in bondage.

In the other middle colonies, the number was doubtless not so large, but it formed a considerable part of the population.

The story of this traffic in white servants is one of the most striking things in the history of labor.

Bondmen differed from the serfs of the feudal age in that they were not bound to the soil, but to the master.

In five states, Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, the slaves nearly equaled, or actually exceeded, the whites in number.

In South Carolina, they formed almost two-thirds of the population.

Even in the middle colonies of Delaware and Pennsylvania, about one-fifth of the inhabitants were from Africa.

To the north, the proportion of slaves steadily diminished though chattel servitude was on the same legal footing as in the South.