These
colonies reproduced, in so far as their strange and wild surroundings
permitted, the towns, the estates, and the homes of Englishmen of that
day. They were organized and governed by Englishmen under English
customs and laws; and the Englishman's constitutional liberties were
their boast until the colonists wrote these rights and privileges into
a constitution of their own. "Foreigners" began early to straggle into
the colonies. But not until the eighteenth century was well under way
did they come in appreciable numbers, and even then the great bulk of
these non-English newcomers were from the British Isles--of Welsh,
Scotch, Irish, and Scotch-Irish extraction.
These colonies took root at a time when profound social and religious
changes were occurring in England. Churchmen and dissenters were at
war with each other; autocracy was struggling to survive the
representative system; and agrarianism was contending with a newly
created capitalism for economic supremacy. The old order was changing.
In vain were attempts made to stay progress by labor laws and poor
laws and corn laws. The laws rather served to fill the highways with
vagrants, vagabonds, mendicants, beggars, and worse. There was a
general belief that the country was overpopulated. For the restive,
the discontented, the ambitious, as well as for the undesirable
surplus, the new colonies across the Atlantic provided a welcome
outlet.
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