The English colonists of the 17th century were motivated largely by the pursuit of wealth in their struggle to create a new society in the American colonies more than any other factor. The proof of this is the creation of Jamestown, the war in Chesapeake, and the African slave trade. It was motivated marginally also by the pursuit of faith.
Firstly, the Virginia Company of London funded the first English colony in Jamestown for its own advantages in 1607. The creation was fueled by an English industry hoping to increase its wealth by expanding. The company ran Virginia as a business investment by keeping control of government, land and trading. All settlers coming to Jamestown were employees; they searched for gold and silver deposits and established industries and trade that would be handsomely profitable to the Virginia Company. The populations of the town were mostly already wealthy gentlemen with a hankering for easy money to be made in the Newfoundland. After Jamestown went though some reformations to be able to support themselves when no easy money was found, they discovered selling tobacco, or ‘brown gold’ was tremendously profitable as the usually foreign product increased mercantilism for England. The discoveries of the tobacco staple crop lead to the southern colonies leading more towns and societies into farm life, increasing expansion in the southern colonies, and largely increased income for companies and/or landowners.
To continue, the war in Chesapeake was started in 1675, and is also known as Bacons Rebellion. The center of the issue was the hunger for land. Virginians realized that the low tobacco prices and high land prices prevented them from obtaining their own land if they weren’t already rich. The landless freemen were exasperated with the abundance of land owned by Native Americans while some colonists still owned no profitable acreage. To make up for the growing colonist population, they revoked the land promised to Natives north of York without the permission of their governor Berkeley, causing warfare between the close Native Americans. Even when the land already controlled by colonists was owned in majority by wealthy gents, people wanted more economic growth that would hit the middle to low class making a more equal society.
Also, with Virginia taking up so much cash crop land, they needed help maintaining the crops so they could reap plentiful benefits, ‘Benefits’ meaning money. For their wealth to really build though, buying African slaves made sense so they could have workers managing their crop and not have to waste money to pay the workers if they didn’t need to. The white settlers even created a harsh slave regime to prevent organized rebellion and to force the black population to operate well under hard, repetitive labor. Most Africans were kept in slave bondage their whole lives, and was still continued through further generations. The
