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Essay about The Middle Colonies

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After the first few struggling settlements in the New World progressed, more and more colonies sprung from the untested North American soil. Eventually, there were three main categories to the European colonies. They were each unique, although one certain class stood in stark contrast to the other two. This group, the Middle colonies, was a halfway point between the New England and Southern colonies – and not just geographically. The Middle colonies extracted parts of its neighbors, like farming habits and spiritual sects, but the middle group managed to retain its own flavor. Perhaps one of the most important circumstances of the New World was the varying climate. The North American continent was not the same as its southern …show more content…

A significant factor of any civilization, be it vast as the Roman Empire or pitifully miniscule, is spirituality. Religion was (and even remains to be) a big part of North America. New England was strictly Puritan. English Puritans sought out haven in the New World, far away from persecution in the mother country. The Southern colonies consisted mostly of Anglicans, though some may speculate that the Southerners were more concerned with worshipping wealth. The Middle colonies were quite different in that there was no single dominant religion. Pennsylvania, which contained the largest city in all the thirteen colonies, was well-known for its many Quaker residents. However, there was also a fair share of Jews, Catholics, and other faiths, as well as the standard Puritans and Anglicans. Overall, the most defining factor of the Middle colonies was its ethnic diversity. The backgrounds of its inhabitants included (but was not limited to) German, Dutch, Scotch-Irish, English, French, Welsh, Swedish, Polish, and Finnish. New England could not compete, for its population was almost entirely English, save for the scattered Dutch remnants of New Amsterdam and the Native Americans, of course. The South was biracial, which meant that one was black, white, or an exceedingly rare mixture of the two. The Middle colonies had slaves, though its percentage of slaves in the population was between those of

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