ABSTRACT
The Plymouth Company had secured a charter from the King for a colony north of Virginia, and a colonizing party of about one hundred reached Cape Cod, where they were attacked by local Indians, some of whose number had a few years earlier been kidnapped and enslaved by English visitors. In Massachusetts as in Virginia some colonists opposed slavery. Several spoke out publicly against the institution, including John Eliot in 1675 and Samuel Sewall in 1700. In Virginia and New England – the two initial regions of English colonization on the mainland of North America – indigenous nations of the Eastern Seaboard had been conquered by the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Several factors thus enabled the English to achieve unqualified control of Massachusetts, Virginia, and other coastal regions within a few decades of English settlement. In North America, Britain faced a problem like that of Virginia’s government a century earlier, which had led to Bacon’s Rebellion.
