AP US History Unit 2 ReviewColonial Society, 1607–1754

APUSH Unit 2 covers how scattered English settlements grew into thirteen distinct colonies between 1607 and 1754, while Spain, France, and the Netherlands built very different empires alongside them. The single biggest idea is regional difference. Geography, labor systems, and imperial goals produced colonies that looked nothing alike, from Puritan towns in New England to slave-based tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake. By 1754, those colonies were tied to Britain through trade and culture but were also developing habits of self-government that would matter enormously later.

What this unit covers

Four empires, four strategies

Europeans didn't colonize North America the same way, and the exam loves asking you to compare them.

• Spain extracted wealth (gold, silver, agricultural labor) by subjugating Native populations, converting them to Christianity, and folding Native people and Africans into a caste-based colonial society. Think of the Spanish model as conquest plus conversion.
• France and the Netherlands sent relatively few settlers. They built fur-trade economies based on alliances and intermarriage with American Indians. Fewer colonists meant more cooperation.
• England sent the most people by far, including whole families, often pushed out by economic troubles and religious tension at home. English settlers wanted land for farming, which put them on a collision course with Native nations.

The three British regions

This is the core comparison of the unit. Environment plus labor supply explains almost everything.

• The Chesapeake (Virginia, Maryland) and North Carolina got rich on tobacco, a labor-hungry crop worked first by white, mostly male indentured servants and later by enslaved Africans. The shift from servants to slaves accelerated after events like Bacon's Rebellion (1676) exposed the dangers of a large class of armed, landless former servants.
• New England, settled by Puritans, built small towns around family farms and developed a mixed economy of agriculture and commerce. Healthier climate, family migration, and longer lifespans created stable communities.
• The middle colonies (Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware) exported cereal crops like wheat and attracted the most ethnically and religiously diverse population, including Quakers, Germans, and Dutch.
• The southernmost Atlantic coast and the British West Indies ran plantation economies (rice, indigo, sugar) with the heaviest reliance on enslaved labor, and in places like South Carolina, enslaved Africans became a majority of the population.

The Atlantic economy and mercantilism

• A triangular Atlantic trade network exchanged goods, enslaved Africans, and enslaved American Indians among Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Colonies existed to produce commodities Europe wanted.
• Mercantilism was the operating theory. Colonies supplied raw materials and bought finished goods, keeping wealth inside the empire. The Navigation Acts (starting 1651) enforced this by requiring colonial trade to flow through English ships and ports.
• In practice, Britain often didn't enforce these rules tightly. That hands-off habit, called salutary neglect, let colonial assemblies and merchants act with real autonomy.
• Trade also transformed Native communities. European goods flowed in, Native economies reoriented around the fur trade, and dependence on European weapons and goods reshaped diplomacy.

Slavery and resistance

• Every British colony participated in the Atlantic slave trade, just to different degrees. New England farms used few enslaved laborers, all port cities held significant enslaved minorities, and Chesapeake and southern plantations held large enslaved populations.
• Abundant land, soaring European demand for colonial goods, and a shrinking supply of indentured servants pushed planters toward enslaved African labor.
• Colonial laws hardened slavery into a permanent, hereditary, race-based system. Chattel slavery meant people were legally property, and status passed through the mother.
• Enslaved Africans resisted both overtly and covertly. The Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina was the largest slave uprising in the British mainland colonies. Covert resistance included breaking tools, working slowly, and, crucially, preserving family structures, religion, language, and culture.

Ideas, religion, and a growing American identity

• Religious and ethnic pluralism (Puritans, Quakers, Anglicans, Germans, Scots-Irish, Dutch) made the colonies an unusually open intellectual environment compared to Europe.
• The First Great Awakening (1730s-1740s), led by preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, swept across colonial lines. It emphasized individual religious experience and taught ordinary people to question established authority, a habit that transferred easily to politics.
• Enlightenment ideas about natural rights and reason crossed the Atlantic through a growing print culture.
• At the same time, the colonies were becoming more Anglicized, building political institutions on English models with elected assemblies like the Virginia House of Burgesses (1619). The paradox of the period is that colonists felt more British and more self-governing at the same time.
• Tension simmered under the surface. Colonists and British officials disagreed over frontier defense, territorial settlements, trade rules, and self-rule, producing mistrust on both sides of the Atlantic well before 1754.

Unit 2, Colonial Society, 1607-1754 at a glance

Why Unit 2, Colonial Society, 1607-1754 matters in APUSH

Unit 2 builds the social, economic, and political DNA of British North America. Almost every later development in the course, from the Revolution to sectionalism to the Civil War, traces back to patterns set here.

• Regional economic differences (plantation South vs. commercial North) become the sectional divide that drives Units 4 and 5. The roots of the slavery conflict are planted in this period.
• Salutary neglect plus colonial assemblies created an expectation of self-government. When Britain tightened control after 1754, colonists saw it as taking away rights they already had.
• The Great Awakening and Enlightenment introduced the language of individual rights and challenged authority, the intellectual toolkit of the Revolution.
• This unit is the course's best workshop for the comparison skill, since the regions are practically built for compare-and-contrast prompts.

How this unit connects across the course

• Backward to Unit 1 (Unit 1): the Columbian Exchange and early Spanish colonization set up the imperial competition here. Native nations you met in Unit 1 now negotiate, trade, and fight with multiple European powers, often playing rivals against each other.
• Forward to Unit 3 (Unit 3): 1754 is the cutoff because the French and Indian War ends salutary neglect. The self-governing habits, Enlightenment ideas, and colonial grievances from this unit become the causes of the American Revolution.
• Forward to Units 4 and 5 (Units 4-5): the regional labor systems established here, free labor in the North and slavery in the South, harden into the sectional crisis over slavery's expansion that explodes into the Civil War.
• Forward to Unit 6 (Unit 6): colonial port cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, born as trade hubs in this period, become the urban industrial centers of the Gilded Age.

Timeline

• 1607: Jamestown founded in Virginia, the first permanent English settlement. Early years were brutal until tobacco made it profitable.
• 1619: The Virginia House of Burgesses meets (first representative assembly in the colonies) and the first enslaved Africans arrive in Virginia, two threads that define American history.
• 1620: Pilgrims sign the Mayflower Compact at Plymouth, an early experiment in self-government by mutual agreement.
• 1630: Puritans found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, launching the Great Migration and the New England town model.
• 1649: Maryland Toleration Act grants religious freedom to Christians, an early (limited) step toward religious pluralism.
• 1651-1663: Navigation Acts put mercantilism into law, requiring colonial trade to benefit England, though enforcement stayed loose.
• 1675-1678: Metacom's War (King Philip's War) devastates New England. Per capita, it is among the deadliest wars in American history and breaks Native military power in the region.
• 1676: Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia. Frontier settlers and former indentured servants revolt, scaring planters into shifting toward enslaved African labor.
• 1688-1689: The Glorious Revolution in England topples James II; colonists overthrow the Dominion of New England, reinforcing the idea that government rests on consent.
• 1692-1693: Salem Witch Trials expose social and religious tensions in Puritan Massachusetts.
• 1730s-1740s: The First Great Awakening spreads revivalism across colonial lines, challenging established religious authority.
• 1739: Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the largest slave uprising in the British mainland colonies, leads to harsher slave codes.

Key people and groups

• John Smith: Leader who imposed discipline at Jamestown ("he who does not work shall not eat") and helped the colony survive its early years.
• Pilgrims (Separatists): Religious dissenters who founded Plymouth in 1620 and governed themselves under the Mayflower Compact.
• Puritans: Calvinist reformers who built Massachusetts Bay as a "city upon a hill," shaping New England's town-centered, religiously intense society.
• John Winthrop: Massachusetts Bay governor whose vision of a model religious community defined early New England.
• Anne Hutchinson: Religious dissenter banished from Massachusetts for challenging Puritan ministers, a marker of the limits of Puritan tolerance.
• Roger Williams: Founded Rhode Island on religious freedom and separation of church and state after his banishment from Massachusetts.
• William Penn: Quaker proprietor of Pennsylvania who promoted religious tolerance and relatively fair dealings with Native nations, attracting a diverse population.
• Metacom (King Philip): Wampanoag leader who led a coalition of Native nations against New England colonists in 1675-1678.
• Nathaniel Bacon: Virginia planter who led a 1676 rebellion of frontier settlers and former servants against the colonial government.
• Jonathan Edwards: Great Awakening preacher whose sermons (like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") pushed intense personal religious experience.
• George Whitefield: Itinerant preacher whose tours made the Great Awakening the first shared experience across all the colonies.

Unit 2, Colonial Society, 1607-1754 on the AP exam

Unit 2 content shows up across every question type, and it almost always asks you to compare or explain causation rather than just recall facts.

• Multiple-choice questions are stimulus-based. Expect excerpts from colonial sermons, charters, trade records, or accounts of Native-European relations, with questions about the document's context, purpose, or what regional pattern it reflects.
• Short-answer questions frequently ask you to compare two colonial regions or two European empires, then explain a cause or effect of the difference. "Identify one difference between New England and the Chesapeake, then explain a reason for it" is a classic setup.
• This unit feeds comparison and causation essay prompts. A long essay question might ask you to compare the development of labor systems, economies, or relationships with Native peoples across regions from 1607 to 1754.
• DBQs rarely sit entirely inside this period, but colonial-era documents appear in prompts about the causes of the Revolution, so know how salutary neglect, colonial assemblies, and the Great Awakening set up 1754-1800.
• The skill to practice here is explaining why differences existed, not just listing them. Tie every regional difference back to geography, labor supply, migration patterns, or imperial goals.

Essential questions

• Why did European powers build such different colonial societies in North America, and what role did environment and imperial goals play?
• How did labor demands and the Atlantic economy lead to the entrenchment of race-based slavery in the British colonies?
• How did interactions between Europeans and American Indians shift between accommodation and conflict over time?
• How did the colonies become more British and more self-governing at the same time, and why did that tension matter?

Key terms to know

• Mercantilism: Economic theory that a nation grows wealthy by exporting more than it imports, with colonies existing to supply raw materials and buy finished goods.
• Salutary neglect: Britain's loose, hands-off enforcement of trade laws, which let colonial self-government and smuggling flourish.
• Navigation Acts: English laws requiring colonial trade to be carried in English ships and routed through English ports.
• Indentured servitude: Labor system in which migrants worked four to seven years in exchange for passage to the colonies, dominant in the early Chesapeake.
• Chattel slavery: Hereditary, race-based system that legally defined enslaved people as property, codified in colonial law over the 1600s.
• Headright system: Virginia policy granting land (typically 50 acres) for each person whose passage a colonist paid, encouraging both migration and servant importation.
• Triangular trade: The Atlantic trade network exchanging enslaved people, raw materials, and manufactured goods among Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
• Middle Passage: The horrific forced ocean voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
• First Great Awakening: A wave of religious revivals in the 1730s-1740s emphasizing emotional, personal faith and weakening deference to established authority.
• Enlightenment: European intellectual movement stressing reason, natural rights, and the social contract, which spread to the colonies through print culture.
• Anglicization: The process by which the colonies grew more culturally and politically English over time, even as they governed themselves locally.
• Mayflower Compact: 1620 agreement among Plymouth settlers to form a government by mutual consent, an early model of self-rule.
• House of Burgesses: Virginia's elected assembly (1619), the first representative legislature in British North America.
• Stono Rebellion: 1739 South Carolina slave uprising, the largest in the British mainland colonies, which prompted stricter slave codes.

Common mix-ups

• Pilgrims vs. Puritans. Pilgrims were Separatists who wanted to leave the Church of England entirely and founded Plymouth (1620). Puritans wanted to purify the church from within and founded Massachusetts Bay (1630).
• The First Great Awakening (1730s-1740s, this unit) is not the Second Great Awakening (early 1800s, Unit 4). The First challenges religious authority before the Revolution; the Second fuels reform movements like abolition.
• Salutary neglect is not a law. It's a pattern of non-enforcement. Britain had mercantilist rules on the books the whole time; it just mostly didn't apply them until after 1754.
• Slavery existed in all the colonies, not just the South. The difference is degree. New England held relatively few enslaved people, port cities held significant minorities, and the plantation South held large enslaved populations.