Colonial America (1607–1754): every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
102 flashcard terms for AP U.S. History Unit 2, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 29-question quiz — free, no account needed.
England's first permanent colony, founded by the Virginia Company as a profit venture. Early years brought starvation and death until tobacco saved the economy.
Virginia Company
The joint-stock company that financed Jamestown, expecting gold and quick profit; investors instead got years of losses before tobacco paid off.
The 'Starving Time' (1609–10)
A catastrophic winter at Jamestown when the population fell from ~500 to ~60 through famine and disease.
John Smith
Jamestown's tough early leader — 'He who shall not work shall not eat' — who imposed discipline and negotiated with the Powhatan.
Powhatan Confederacy
The powerful chiefdom surrounding Jamestown; relations swung between trade, uneasy peace (Pocahontas's marriage to John Rolfe), and open war.
Anglo-Powhatan Wars
Rounds of warfare (1610s–1646) that broke Native power in tidewater Virginia and set a pattern of expulsion rather than incorporation.
John Rolfe & Tobacco
Rolfe's sweet tobacco strain (1612) gave Virginia its cash crop — the 'brown gold' that drove land hunger and labor demand.
Headright System
Fifty acres granted for each person whose passage a colonist paid — encouraging both immigration and the accumulation of large estates.
Indentured Servitude
Poor English migrants exchanged 4–7 years of labor for passage to America; the Chesapeake's main labor source before African slavery.
House of Burgesses (1619)
Virginia's assembly — the first representative legislature in English America.
1619 — First Africans in Virginia
A Dutch ship sold ~20 Africans at Jamestown; their status was initially ambiguous, hardening into hereditary racial slavery over the century.
Bacon's Rebellion (1676)
Nathaniel Bacon led frontier settlers and servants against Governor Berkeley and Native peoples; the scare pushed planters from indentured labor toward African slavery.
Slave Codes Emerge
Late-1600s Virginia laws defined slavery as lifelong, hereditary (through the mother), and racial — constructing the legal architecture of American slavery.
Maryland (1634)
Founded by Lord Baltimore as a refuge for Catholics; its Act of Toleration (1649) protected all Christians — while prescribing death for non-Christians.
Plymouth & the Pilgrims (1620)
Separatists seeking to worship apart from the Church of England; before landing they signed the Mayflower Compact, agreeing to self-government.
Mayflower Compact
A covenant to form a 'civil body politic' and obey common laws — a foundational precedent for self-government by consent.
Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630)
Puritans under John Winthrop built a 'city upon a hill' — a model godly commonwealth with unusually broad (church-member) male suffrage.
John Winthrop
Massachusetts's longtime governor who framed the colony's mission in 'A Model of Christian Charity' — the covenant community watched by the world.
Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England from within; Separatists (Pilgrims) abandoned it entirely.
Great Migration (1630s)
Some 20,000 Puritans — largely families — migrated to New England, giving it a stable, healthy, family-based society unlike the Chesapeake.
New England Town & Congregation
Settlement by covenanted towns with meetinghouse, common, and town meeting — local self-government at its most intense.
Roger Williams & Rhode Island
Banished for demanding church-state separation and fair dealing with Natives, Williams founded Rhode Island on liberty of conscience.
Anne Hutchinson
Tried and banished for antinomian teachings that challenged clerical authority — a test of Puritan orthodoxy and gender boundaries.
Halfway Covenant (1662)
Allowed partial church membership for children of members — a response to declining conversions and a marker of cooling piety.
Salem Witch Trials (1692)
Panic that executed 20 people; reflected social tensions, frontier war anxiety, and the era's religious worldview before spectral evidence was rejected.
Pequot War (1637)
English and Native allies destroyed the Pequot, including the massacre at Mystic — opening Connecticut to settlement.
King Philip's War (1675–76)
Metacom's pan-Native resistance devastated New England (proportionally America's deadliest war) but broke southern New England's Native power.
New Netherland → New York (1664)
England seized the Dutch colony; New York inherited Dutch diversity, commerce, and the patroon estates of the Hudson Valley.
Pennsylvania & William Penn (1681)
Penn's Quaker 'Holy Experiment': religious liberty, relatively fair Native dealings (at first), cheap land, and heavy promotion — the fastest-growing colony.
Quakers
The Society of Friends — believers in the 'Inner Light,' equality, and pacifism; persecuted in England and New England, they shaped the middle colonies' tolerance.
The Carolinas
Carolina's south grew rice with enslaved African labor and Barbados-style slavery; North Carolina attracted poorer, more independent farmers.
Rice & the Lowcountry
South Carolina's rice economy — built on African skills and labor — produced the mainland's harshest slavery and a Black majority.
Georgia (1733)
Oglethorpe's buffer and debtor colony, initially banning slavery and rum; both bans collapsed as Georgia copied South Carolina.
Chesapeake vs. New England
Chesapeake: cash crops, scattered plantations, high mortality, male-heavy, unequal. New England: family farms, towns, churches, longevity, relative equality — two Englands in America.
Middle Colonies
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware — the 'bread colonies': grain exports, ethnic and religious diversity, and thriving ports (Philadelphia, New York).
Mercantilism
The theory that colonies exist to enrich the mother country — supplying raw materials, buying manufactures, and keeping gold within the empire.
English laws requiring colonial trade in English ships and routing key goods through England — enforcing mercantilism, often laxly.
Salutary Neglect
Britain's long stretch of lax enforcement, which let colonial assemblies, smuggling, and habits of self-rule flourish — with revolutionary consequences later.
Dominion of New England (1686–89)
James II's consolidation of northern colonies under autocratic Governor Andros; overthrown when the Glorious Revolution reached Boston.
Glorious Revolution in America (1688–89)
England's overthrow of James II inspired colonial revolts (Boston, New York, Maryland) and reaffirmed rights of Englishmen and assembly government.
Triangular Trade
Shorthand for Atlantic commerce linking the colonies, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe — rum, enslaved people, sugar, and manufactures.
Middle Passage
The horrific Atlantic crossing endured by enslaved Africans — packed ships, disease, and death rates around 15%.
Stono Rebellion (1739)
South Carolina's largest slave uprising; rebels marched toward Spanish Florida before suppression — leading to even harsher slave codes.
Colonial Slavery — Regional Variation
Slavery existed in every colony but varied: gang-labor rice and tobacco in the South, farm and household slavery in the North, a Black majority in South Carolina.
First Great Awakening (1730s–40s)
A wave of evangelical revivals — Edwards's theology, Whitefield's mass preaching — that split churches, founded colleges, and taught ordinary people to question authority.
Jonathan Edwards
Puritan theologian of the Awakening — 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' — combining terror of damnation with intense religious psychology.
George Whitefield
The Awakening's celebrity itinerant, preaching to open-air crowds of thousands across the colonies — America's first truly intercolonial experience.
Old Lights vs. New Lights
Established clergy (Old Lights) condemned revival enthusiasm; New Lights embraced it — the split spawned new denominations and colleges (Princeton, Brown, Rutgers).
The Enlightenment in America
Reason, natural rights, and science crossed the Atlantic — embodied by Benjamin Franklin, and supplying the vocabulary of the coming Revolution.
Benjamin Franklin
Printer, scientist, and civic improver — the American Enlightenment personified, from Poor Richard's Almanack to the lightning rod.
Zenger Trial (1735)
A jury acquitted printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel because his criticisms of New York's governor were true — a landmark for press freedom.
Colonial Assemblies' Power
Elected lower houses used their control of taxes and salaries to dominate royal governors — self-government becoming a colonial habit.
Consumer Revolution
Rising imports of British goods (tea, cloth, ceramics) tied colonists into a shared Anglo-American consumer culture — and later gave boycotts their power.
Scots-Irish & German Migration
18th-century waves settled the backcountry (Pennsylvania to the Carolinas), adding ethnic diversity and frontier grievances against coastal elites.