Chesapeake Bay

Examples of Chesapeake Bay in the following topics:

• The War in the Chesapeake

  • The strategic location of the Chesapeake Bay near the U.S. capital made it a prime target for the British.
  • The strategic location of the Chesapeake Bay near America's capital made it a prime target for the British during the War of 1812.
  • Starting in March of 1813, a squadron under British Rear Admiral George Cockburn started a blockade and raided towns along the bay from Norfolk to Havre de Grace.
  • On July 4, 1813, Joshua Barney, a Revolutionary War naval hero, convinced the Navy Department to build the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, a squadron of twenty barges to defend the Chesapeake Bay.

• Settling the Colonial South and the Chesapeake

  • The Chesapeake Bay area included Maryland, first settled in 1634, and Virginia, with Jamestown established in 1607.
  • Prior to colonization, the Native American tribes of the Algonquin, Siouan, Iroquoian linguistic groups inhabited the Chesapeake Bay area .
  • The ease with which it grew turned tobacco into the largest cash crop for the Chesapeake and Southern Colonies.
  • The largest social class in the south and Chesapeake regions was the merchants, vendors, and small farmers of the colonies.
  • Both the Delaware Bay and the Chesapeake Bay are rendered in full and even include a number of undersea notations and depth soundings.

• Conclusion: Growth and Development of the Colonies

  • Thousands of English migrants arrived in the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland to work in the tobacco fields.
  • Another stream, this one of pious Puritan families, sought to live as they believed scripture demanded and established the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven, Connecticut, and Rhode Island colonies of New England.
  • Conflicts flared repeatedly in the Chesapeake Bay tobacco colonies and in New England, where a massive uprising against the English in 1675 to 1676—King Philip’s War—nearly succeeded in driving the English intruders back to the sea.
  • By the mid-18th century, the thirteen original New England, Middle, Chesapeake, and Southern colonies had all been established.

• Surrender at Yorktown

  • De Grasse sailed from the West Indies and arrived in the Chesapeake Bay in late August 1781.
  • In early September, the British were defeated by de Grasse in the Battle of the Chesapeake and forced to fall back to New York.
  • On September 26, transports with artillery, siege tools, and French infantry and assault troops arrived from the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay, giving Washington command of an army of 7,800 Frenchmen, 3,100 militia, and 8,000 Continentals.

• A Growing Population and Expanding Economy in British North America

  • The first successful English colony was Jamestown, established in 1607 near Chesapeake Bay.
  • The Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 with 400 settlers.
  • Unlike the cash crop-oriented plantations of the Chesapeake region, the Puritan economy was based on the efforts of self-supporting farmsteads who traded only for goods they could not produce themselves.
  • There was a generally higher standard of living in New England than in the Chesapeake.

• Poverty in the Colonies

  • For example in the Chesapeake Bay alone, some 100,000 indentured servants arrived in the 1600s looking for work; most were poor young men in their early twenties.
  • The change in the status of Africans in the Chesapeake to that of slaves occurred in the last decades of the 17h century.
  • Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 helped to catalyze the creation of a system of racial slavery in the Chesapeake colonies.

• New Jersey

  • European colonization of New Jersey started soon after the 1609 exploration of its coast and bays by Sir Henry Hudson .
  • The Dutch concentrated their settlement in the seventeenth century along the banks of the North River and the Upper New York Bay.
  • Emmanuel Bowen's map covers Chesapeake Bay to Lake Champlain and LakeOntario to Nova Scotia.

• English Colonies

  • The colonies were Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
  • The first successful English colony was Jamestown, established in 1607 near Chesapeake Bay.
  • The Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 with 400 settlers.
  • There was a generally higher economic standing and standard of living in New England than in the Chesapeake.
  • The colonial South included the plantation colonies of the Chesapeake region and the lower South.

• The Coming of the English

  • In August of 1576, he landed at Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island.
  • In 1578, he reached the shores of Greenland and made an unsuccessful attempt at founding a settlement in Frobisher Bay.
  • The colonial South included the plantation colonies of the Chesapeake region—Virginia and Maryland—and the lower South colonies of Carolina and Georgia.
  • By 1640, 20,000 settlers had arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
  • The location of the Jamestown Settlement ("J") is shown just south of the overlapping area, 60 miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

• Chesapeake Slavery

  • The economy of the Chesapeake region revolved around tobacco and relied heavily on slave labor.
  • The Chesapeake region was composed of Virginia, with its first successful settlement Jamestown established in 1607, and Maryland.
  • As a result, many Chesapeake farmers turned toward imported African slaves to fulfill their desire for cheap labor.
  • As the demand for Chesapeake cash crops continued to grow, planters began to increasingly invest in the Atlantic slave trade.
  • However, small farmers composed the largest social class in the Chesapeake.