Jamestown's Impact On The Cultures Of The 13 Colonies

The initial settlers of the various thirteen colonies generally left a deep impact on the individual cultures and demographics that would later develop there. Jamestown, the first successful settlement, was initially settled entirely by men, young adventurers and “gentlemen,” with women only arriving later and in smaller numbers.
When the Jamestown colonists and those who followed them began to spread out, they retained a male-dominated atmosphere even as small tobacco farms grew into enormous plantations. The benefit to such a society was the ease with which a man, even with few means, could claim land (at least until the plantations spread and land became increasingly hard to come by in the south), but the difficulty and isolation life in the south meant that men in the south typically had shorter lifespans than their northerner men. This made it so much easier for women to own property in the south as opposed to the north, especially widows. As the seventeenth century progressed and plantations grew larger, a certain “planter aristocracy” began to develop, with the burgesses, wealthy white men, on top.
The particulars of plantation agriculture made gaining workers predominant in any situation. Initially plantation owners attempted to use indentured servants for the labor, but due to the
Colonists identified much more closely with their branch of Christianity in the north than south, and because religiously-motivated colonists had a much greater tendency to bring their entire families into the New