Between 1660 and 1685, Penn and other English gentlemen were established as the proprietors of a string of proprietary colonies from Carolina to New York. These powerful aristocrats could govern largely as they wished as long as they conformed broadly to English traditions. Most envisioned a manorial system in which they and other gentry presided over workers producing goods for export. In practice, however, local conditions dictated what was possible, and by the 1680s a range of labor relationships had emerged. Following Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (see chapter 2), small farmers and laborers in northern Carolina rose up and forced proprietors there to offer land at reasonable prices and a semblance of self-government. In the southern part of Carolina, however, English West Indian planters dominated. They created a mainland version of Barbados by introducing enslaved Africans as laborers, carving plantations out of coastal swamps, and trading with the West Indies.

William Penn provided a more progressive model of colonial rule. He established friendly relations with the local Lenni-Lenape Indians and drew up a Frame of Government in 1681 that recognized religious freedom for all Christians. It also allowed all property-owning men to vote and hold office. Under Penn’s leadership, Pennsylvania attracted thousands of middling farm families, most of them Quakers, as well as artisans and merchants. By the time Charles II died in 1685, Pennsylvania was the most successful of his proprietary colonies.

Charles’s death marked an abrupt shift in crown-colony relations. Charles’s successor, James II, instituted a more authoritarian regime both at home and abroad. He consolidated the colonies in the Northeast and established tighter controls. His royal officials banned town meetings, challenged land titles granted under the original colonial charters, and imposed new taxes. Fortunately for the colonists, the Catholic James II alienated his subjects in England as well as in the colonies, inspiring a bloodless coup in 1688. His Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange (r. 1689–1702) then ascended the throne, introducing more democratic systems of governance in England and the colonies. This so-called Glorious Revolution inspired John Locke to write his famous treatise justifying the changes made by William and Mary. Locke challenged the divine right of monarchs and insisted that government depended on the consent of the governed.

Eager to restore political order and create a commercially profitable empire, William and Mary established the new colony of Massachusetts (which included Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Maine) and restored town meetings and an elected assembly. But the 1692 charter also granted the English crown the right to appoint a royal governor and officials to enforce customs regulations. It ensured religious freedom to members of the Church of England and allowed all male property owners (not just Puritans) to be elected to the assembly. In Maryland, too, the crown imposed a royal governor and replaced the Catholic Church with the Church of England as the established religion. And in New York, wealthy English merchants won the backing of the newly appointed royal governor, who instituted a representative assembly and supported a merchant-dominated Board of Aldermen. Thus, taken as a whole, William and Mary’s policies asserted royal authority at the same time that they sought to create a partnership between England and colonial elites by allowing colonists to retain long-standing local governmental institutions (Table 3.1).

In the early eighteenth century, England’s North American colonies took the form that they would retain until the revolution in 1776. In 1702 East and West Jersey united into the colony of New Jersey. Delaware separated from Pennsylvania in 1704. By 1710 North Carolina became fully independent of South Carolina, forming its own assembly and receiving its own charter. Finally, in 1732, the colony of Georgia was established as a buffer between Spanish Florida and the increasingly lucrative plantations of South Carolina. At the same time, settlers pushed back the frontier in all directions. Wealthy Englishmen like Robert Livingston bought up land on the upper Hudson River and joined Dutch patroons who had earlier established vast estates in the region. Meanwhile families in Massachusetts carved out farms and villages on the New Hampshire and Maine frontier, while migrants and immigrants pushed the boundaries of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas westward.