In 1684 the King’s judges declared the Massachusetts charter void, and James II. was about to make New England one royal colony, when the English people drove him from the throne.  William and Mary in 1691 granted a new charter and united the Plymouth colony, Massachusetts, Maine, and Nova Scotia, in one colony called Massachusetts Bay.  This charter was in force when the Revolution opened.

SUMMARY

1.  The first colony established by the Plymouth Company (1607, on the coast of Maine) was a failure.

2.  Captain John Smith explored the New England coast and mapped it (1613), but did not succeed in planting any colonies.

3.  The permanent settlement of New England began with the arrival of a body of Separatists in the Mayflower (1620), who founded the colony of Plymouth.

4.  The Separatist migration from England was followed in a few years by a great exodus of Puritans, who planted towns along the coast to the north of Plymouth, and obtained a charter of government and a great strip of land, and founded the colony of Massachusetts Bay.

5.  Religious disputes drove Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson out of Massachusetts, and led to the founding of Rhode Island (1636).

6.  Other church wrangles led to an emigration from Massachusetts to the Connecticut valley, where a little confederacy of towns was created and called Connecticut.

7.  Some settlers from England went to Long Island Sound and there founded four towns which, in their turn, joined in a federal union called the New Haven Colony.

8.  In time, New Haven was joined to Connecticut, and Plymouth and Maine to Massachusetts; New Hampshire was made a royal colony; and the four New England colonies—­Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut—­were definitely established.

9.  The territory of Massachusetts and Connecticut stretched across the continent to the “South Sea,” or Pacific Ocean.

CHAPTER V

THE MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES

%47.  North and South Carolina.%—­You remember that away back in the sixteenth century the French under Jean Ribault and the English under Ralegh undertook to plant colonies on what is now the Carolina coast.  They failed, and the country remained a wilderness till 1653, when a band of emigrants from Virginia made the first permanent settlement on the banks of the Chowan and the Roanoke.  In 1663 some Englishmen from Barbados began to settle on the Cape Fear River, just at the time when Charles II. of England gave the region to eight English noblemen, who, out of compliment to the King, allowed the name of Carolina given it by Ribault to remain.  In 1665 the bounds were enlarged, and Carolina then extended from latitude 29 deg. 00’ to 36 deg. 30’, the present south boundary of Virginia, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.