Let me somewhat arbitrarily focus the question more specifically on the earliest English explorers, adventurers, and settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts in the first half of the 17th century.

Reading their published accounts gives one the impression that their lives alternated between extremes of feast and famine, between health and sickness, between sublime ease and almost unimaginable hardship, and between periods of contentment and even boredom and periods of sharp fear and terror interspersed with periods of sheer joy. Supplementing those accounts, however, with evidence from rather more mundane sources such as probate and account books, old court records, and modern excavations of kitchen middens from colonial sites, yields a larger story of people organizing and conducting their work and family lives in ways similar to ours today.

Captain John Smith published A Description of New England in 1616 in London, in which account he sought, among other things, to recruit English settlers. In it he declared:

Worthy is that person to starve that here cannot live; if he have sense, strength and health: for there is no such penury of these blessings in any place, but that a hundred men may, in one houre or two, make their provisions for a day: and he that hath experience to manage well these affaires, with fortie or thirtie honest industrious men, might well undertake (if they dwell in these parts) to subject the Salvages, and feed daily two or three hundred men, with as good corn, fish and flesh, as the earth hath of those kindes, and yet make that labor but their pleasure; provided that they have engins, that be proper for their purposes.

The first minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Reverend Francis Higginson, acting, like Smith, as a kind of colonial recruiter, published New-England's Plantation; or, a short and true description of the commodities and discommodities of that countrey in 1630 in London. In it, he praised the "fat black earth" around the Charles River in Massachusetts. The land, he said, was extremely fertile, and was well suited to the plow. "It is scarce to be believed how our kine and goats, horses and hogs do thrive and prosper here, and like well of this country." He bragged of the vast harvest of corn, turnips, parsnips, carrots, watercress, "pumpions," "cowcumbers," and herbs. He wrote that the colonists also planted and harvested mulberries, plums, raspberries, currants, chestnuts, filberts, walnuts, cherries, and strawberries.

He wrote about the abundance of game: deer and bear, as well as the other animals, listing wolves, foxes, beavers, otters, martins, great wild cats, and "a great beast called a molke"—most probably a moose. The abundance of fish was "almost beyond believing." Cod, mackerel, bass, and sturgeon; oysters, clams, mussels, and lobsters were easy to catch or gather. Of lobsters, Higginson wrote that "the least boy in the Plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them. For my own part, I was soon cloyed with them, they were so great, and fat, and luscious. I have seen some myself that have weighed sixteen pound; but others have had diverse times so great lobsters as have weighted twenty-five pound, as they assured me."

Higginson commended the "temper of the air" of New England as healthful. He noted that summers were hotter than in England and winters were colder, but he said that the cold was not so bad because of the ease of getting firewood. "Here is good living," he wrote, "for those that love good fires."

Higginson's improbably upbeat list of New England's "discommodities" was much shorter: First, mosquitoes; second, the snow and cold of winter; third; poisonous snakes; and fourth, the lack of more settlers. This last "discommodity" is telling, and does much to explain the hearty promotional tone of the rest of his description.

In fact, many of the first settlers, both in Massachusetts and Virginia, died of starvation, which especially afflicted them during the first winters. Several times, Indians brought them some relief with baskets of corn and game.

Diseases of one kind or another also took their toll. Some of these they brought with them, such as smallpox. Some of them, like dysentery and scurvy, were the result of malnutrition or lack of fresh drinking water. The sheer physical difficulties involved in exploration and in building a settlement in the wilderness also presented tremendous hazards to those that undertook the work.

Shipwreck was also common, especially from the hurricanes and nor'easters that were novel to them. Shipwrecks not only endangered their own lives but also imperiled the re-provisioning of the colonies from England. This was especially critical in the first years of the settlements, when their vulnerability was increased by the fact that they had to depend on ships to supply them, not just with food, but also with basic goods, such as gunpowder, firearms, tools, iron, and cloth.

Colonel Henry Norwood's pamphlet, A Voyage to Virginia, described his harrowing trip in the fall of 1649 from England, in which his ship met storms off the coast of Cape Hatteras and they were blown offshore. He and a small party of others were eventually marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Maryland and nearly starved until being rescued by Indians and carried by them to the colony at Jamestown:

Of the three weak women before mentioned, one had the envied happiness to die about this time; and it was my advice to the survivors, who were following her apace, to endeavour their own preservation by converting her dead carcase into food, as they did to good effect. The same counsel was embrac'd by those of our sex; the living fed upon the dead; four of our company having the happiness to end their miserable lives on Sunday night the day of January___. Their chief distemper, 'tis true, was hunger; but it pleased God to hasten their exit by an immoderate access of cold, caused by a most terrible storm of hail and snow at north-west, on the Sunday aforesaid, which did not only dispatch those four to their long homes, but did sorely threaten all that remained alive, to perish by the same fate.

The colony in Virginia was established in the midst of the Algonquian nation of Powhatan, and the Plymouth Colony on the land of the Wampanoag tribe. Relations with the Indians were sketchy and volatile, consisting of periods of friendship interspersed with periods of fighting, sometimes alongside the Indians of one tribe against its enemies from other tribes. The colonists traded metal implements and cloth for food, furs, and land. But they also carefully constructed fortifications and palisades to protect themselves against the almost certain eventuality of attack by the various tribes and nations of Indians among whom they settled. Both colonies suffered large loss of life from Indian attack.

All in all, much of the earliest settlers' time and energies were devoted to providing for their basic, physical subsistence and doing what they could to ensure their survival. Much of the colonies' early precariousness was due to not having yet cleared and planted enough land to ensure harvests that would not only provide the colonists daily fare, but would also allow a surplus to draw upon during times of scarcity.

Until about the mid-20th century, historians largely worked from the writings of the colonists and explorers to understand what colonial life was like. But those writings offered only a very selective picture. For the past several decades, detailed research by archeologists and archivists into the material culture of the colonists has dramatically broadened and sometimes corrected the historical picture.

Puritan New England has long been given priority as a model for the development of America as a whole. There are a number of possible reasons for this regional prejudice. For one thing, historians have simply found it easier to research colonial New England because of the abundance of written sources that were created and have survived there. Additionally, the image of Pilgrims and Indians sitting down together at the first Thanksgiving meal makes a more comforting foundational moment than the messy first years at Jamestown, marked as they seem to have been by sloth, greed, and starvation.

The Puritans’ perception of their having been chosen for divine purposes, it has been suggested, also meshes well with America’s sense of manifest destiny, which was not just a geographical expansion, but also a moral one. And of course, the shadow of the Civil War casts itself over the whole question, making it tempting to write the South and its defense of slavery out of the mainstream of national development. This view assumes that the South was always hostile to economic innovation and forgets that slavery also existed in colonial New England.

Therefore, the idea that New England was the cradle of America is composed of different interlocking arguments. Prying them apart, we can ask the following questions:

1. Was New England a closer recreation of English society than other colonies were?
2. Was New England substantially different from other English colonizing projects?
3. Was New England a better model for what America would later become in the national period?

One historian, Jack Greene, in his book Pursuits of Happiness, makes an argument against the exclusive use of New England as a model of development for later American history. Greene argues that it was precisely to get away from the conditions marking contemporary England that Puritans emigrated in the first place. Their gathered churches, egalitarian society (compared to England), and their rejection of the market economy were all in contrast to developments in England. (1)

As research is now showing, English society at this time was much more mobile than previously thought, and was not composed of stable, static rural communities. (2) Agriculture in England was increasingly a commercial venture, dominated by large landowners who depended on tenants and wage laborers. For those who controlled their own smallholdings, the nuclear family composed of parents and children was not the unit of production, as it was in New England; rather, children were typically apprenticed out, and households employed other laborers. Laborers and apprentices were often involved in nonagricultural pursuits, notably the cloth industry. (3) English society, then, was open, competitive, stratified, and acquisitive, all of which makes New England seem much less English than its name might imply.

Looking at the question from the perspective of the colonial Chesapeake (specifically Jamestown), settlers both brought with them from England and maintained in the New World attitudes and values regarding family, community, work, order, and religion. (4) In addition, by the 1630s the Chesapeake was not the chaotic and divided society often depicted. Political stability had been achieved and community networks had been created despite dispersed settlement patterns. (5) Other historians have noted that despite the lack of personal religious inclinations on the part of individual settlers in Virginia, the colony was founded with religious goals at the forefront, and that the ethos behind these was essentially Puritan. (6)

All of this takes away from New England’s place of primacy as either most English or most unlike other colonies. At the same time, it has been argued that New England did lack traits that other colonies—as well as the later United States—exhibited. It was, for example, much less ethnically diverse than colonies founded later in the 17th century. The Middle Colonies with their Dutch, German, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Swedish, and Jewish settlers, and even Carolina with Huguenots, Highland Scots, Jews, and a large population of enslaved African Americans offer a better foretaste of the future multiethnic America.

The varying trajectories of the colonies all offered patterns for later American development, and the issue of originary myths did not begin with modern historians, nor even with the Civil War. In the quest for a national identity following the Revolution, each region articulated its own vision and insisted on its own importance to the development of the American character. New Englanders saw their regional characteristics of piety, industry, simplicity, and democracy as essentially American, but felt they were not shared by Southerners due to the widespread institution of slavery. This self-image came to be adopted by other Northern states, and because of migration by New Englanders to Western territories, it was spread there as well. (7) The South was in effect outflanked in its claims to be the repository of American ideals. It is for modern historians to look beyond these regional prejudices and adopt a more nuanced and inclusive view of the formative influences of the American past.