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When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, her cousin, James VI of Scotland, became King James I of England. -
In May of 1607 Jamestown was settled by 104 colonists. It was the first permanent English colony. -
Settlers found a profitable crop, tobacco. In 1612, settlers in Virginia began growing tobacco for export to England. -
In 1619 an English ship called the White Lion stopped at Point Comfort, Virginia, near Jamestown, and unloaded 20 African Americans. They were the first known enslaved Africans to have reached the British American mainland. -
In September 1620, a group of 102 women, men, and children crammed aboard the tiny Mayflower. They were bound for the Virginia colony but were blown off course to Cape Cod, southeast of what became Boston, Massachusetts. They settled there and called themselves Pilgrims. They called their hillside settlement Plymouth. They then signed the Mayflower Compact, a group contract to form "a civil body politic" based on "just and civil laws" designed "for the general good." -
By 1616, the discovery that tobacco flourished in Virginia intensified the settlers' lust for more land. English tobacco planters coveted Indian fields because they had been cleared and were ready to be planted. In 1622, the Indians tried to repel the land-grabbing English. The English retaliated by decimating the Indians of Virginia. -
In 1636, settlers in Massachusetts accused a Pequot of murdering a colonist; they took revenge by setting fire to a Pequot village. As Indians fled the flames, the Puritans killed them. Sassacus, the Pequot chief, organized the survivors and counterattacked. During the ensuing Pequot War of 1636-1637, the colonists and their allies killed hundreds of Pequots.
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Cecilius Calvert feared he might lose his colony once Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans took control in England and executed King Charles I in 1649. To avoid such a catastrophe he wrote a revolutionary document that welcomed all Christians, regardless of their denomination or beliefs. -
In 1676, when Governor William Berkeley refused to attack the Indian raiders, Bacon organized a rebel group to terrorize the "protected and darling Indians." He pledged he would kill all the Indians in Virginia. -
William Penn inherited a substantial fortune including a sprawling tract of land in America after his father died. It was named Pennsylvania. By the end of 1861, thousands of immigrants embracing different religions had settled in William Penn's new colony, and a town was emerging at the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. Penn called it Philadelphia.