Staring In The 1700s

During America’s colonial era, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard into two in 1606: the northern half to the Plymouth Company and the southern half to the London Company(Virginia Company). Later on in 1607, the Virginia Company would send 100 male settlers to America, where they would land in the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay area and create Jamestown. Although Jamestown was the first permanent colony of the New World, more than half its settlers died due to disease, famine, and local Native American attacks. Between the years 1607 and 1745, English colonists would develop a democratic society. Because the colonies were still controlled by Great Britain through an Ad hoc basis, colonists sought a more democratic style of government.
Staring in the 1700s in Europe, many Enlightenment thinkers questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change (history.com). Mathematician René Descartes, astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Sir Isaac Newton inspired American society to develop a new understanding of the natural world and the scientific laws that govern it. This Age of Reason would express reason and science over religion. John Locke who was an English philosopher had a large impact on the Enlightenment. In Locke’s essay, Concerning Human Understanding(1690), he proposed that everyone’s life begins as a “white paper, void of all characters,”, and that experiences make us who we are today. Locke’s theory is most formerly known as “blank slate” theory or the “tabula rasa” theory, and goes against the divine right of kings. According to Locke’s theory of “tabula rasa”, everyone is born the same and are therefore given inalienable rights which were liberty, life, and possessions/property. The scientific method would be introduced into the colonies when John Winthrop of Harvard led a scientific expedition to Newfoundland to observe the planet Venus. In addition, Winthrop was able to calculate the distance from the sun to the earth with only an error of 2 percent (Garraty 78-79). Consequently, the introduction of the scientific method transformed
William Cosby was the Royal Governor of New York, and fired Chief Justice Lewis Morris when conflict broke out over Cosby’s salary (Garraty 61). Because of this, Morris and his assembly allies established the New York Weekly Journal and hired John Peter Zenger to edit the papers. This newspaper would serve as a voice in opposition to Governor Cosby. For this reason, Cosby shut down the paper and charged Zenger with seditious libel (Garraty 62). Once Zenger is sentenced to jail, he gets a lawyer by the name of James Hamilton and Hamilton argued that Zenger’s criticism of Cosby constituted a proper defense against seditious libel. Eventually, the jury rules that Zenger is not guilty. This case would lead to the birth of free press and ultimately the creation of the 1st Amendment of the