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.Slavery was already becoming well entrenched by the 1650s, and by the endof the century the richest planters were beginning to flee back to England to liveaffluently as absentees off their island incomes.Regional differences extended to ethnicity as well.New England may have been moreEnglish than England, a country that had sizable Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French Huguenot,and Dutch Reformed minorities.The Middle Atlantic region was more diverse thanEngland.It threw together most of the people of northwestern Europe, who learned,particularly in New York, that every available formula for active government was likelyto antagonize one group or another.Pennsylvania s prescription of minimal governmentfor everyone worked better to preserve ethnic peace until war with frontier Indiansthreatened to tear the province apart between 1754 and 1764.The Chesapeake settlers,while predominantly English in both tidewater and piedmont, contained sizable ethnicminorities from continental Europe and, in the backcountry, large Scottish and Irishcontingents.But after 1700 their most significant minority was African.The southerncolonies mixed not just European peoples but newcomers from different continents.Slaves came to constitute about 40 percent of Virginia s population in the late colonialera.In coastal South Carolina, Africans had become a majority of two to one by the1720s, but not even South Carolina approached the huge African preponderances of thesugar islands.The economies of these regions also varied from north to south.In somewhat differentways, New England and the Middle Atlantic colonies largely replicated the economies ofnorthern Europe in their urban-rural mixture, their considerable variety of local crafts,and their reliance on either fish or cereal crops as a major export.Within the Atlanticcolonial world these free-labor societies were unique, but they could not have sustainedthemselves without extensive trade with the more typical staple colonies to the south.New Englanders learned as early as the 1640s that they needed the islands to sustain theirown economy, a process that would eventually draw Rhode Islanders into the slave tradein a major way.Tobacco, rice, and sugar all grown by forms of unfree labor shapedBeneficiaries of catastrophe 195Beneficiaries of catastrophe 195Chesapeake, South Carolina, and Caribbean society in profound, almost deterministicways.In effect, then, the colonists sorted themselves into a broad spectrum of settlementswith striking and measurable differences between one region and its neighbors.Allretained major portions of their English heritage and discarded others, but what oneregion kept, another often scorned.David Hackett Fischer traces this early Americanregionalism to its origins in British regional differences.East Anglia and other countieson the east coast of England gave New England their linguistic peculiarities, vernaculararchitecture, religious intensity, and other folkways as diverse as child-naming patternsand local cuisine.Tobacco and slaves aside, the distinctive features of Chesapeakesociety derived in a similar way from the disproportionate recruitment of planter gentryfrom England s southern counties.The Delaware Valley, by contrast, drew its folkwaysfrom the midland and northern counties and contiguous portions of Wales that gave shapeto the Quaker movement.Beginning about 1718 the American backcountry from NewYork south took most of its social character from the people of north Britain: the fifteenUlster, Scottish, and north English counties that faced each other around the Irish Sea andshared both numerous cultural affinities and deep-seated hostilities.These people wereused to border wars, and they brought their expectations to the American frontier, wherethey killed Indians including peaceful Christianized tribes with a zeal that shockedother settlers, particularly the Quakers.These contrasts affected not only demographic and economic patterns and anextensive list of major folkways but also religion and government.England containedboth an established church and eloquent advocates for broad toleration, mostly among thedissenting population.By the end of the seventeenth century, toleration for Protestantshad finally become official policy, and England emerged as one of the most pluralisticsocieties in Christendom.All these tendencies crossed the ocean, but they clustereddifferently in particular colonies.Until the middle of the eighteenth century most colonieswere more uniform and, certainly in formal policy and often in practice as well, morerepressive than the mother country.By 1710 the Church of England had becomeofficially established from Maryland south through the islands, but Virginia was far lesswilling than England to tolerate dissent.In New England, by contrast, dissent becameestablishment, and the Anglican Church had to fight hard and occasionally share anawkward alliance with Quakers and Baptists to win any kind of public recognition [ 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