Although the two colonies find themselves very similar at the later stages of their settlement, the reason for their colonization, the grounds from which motivated them to leave their homeland and venture into the unknown waters of the Atlantic remains different. Europe was a very religiously volatile place in the 16th Century, especially in England. After the Church of England was reconstituted and the rise of the Calvinist doctrine and theology, an extreme Protestant group called the “Separatists” demanded fuller reformation and when they failed to achieve their objectives, these “Puritans” simply moved to the Ne

therlands between 1607 and 1609 (Murrin, 54-55). After tens years of religious freedom in Holland, these Puritans suddenly realized that their descendants will grow up as Dutch, not English. For fear of discrimination, the group negotiating rather harsh terms with the London Company, and sailed off to the Americas on the Mayflower (Murrin, 69). Unlike the religious freedom sought by the Puritans, the founders of the Jamestown colony we motivated by pure greed. With hopes of discovering rich gold and silver mines, a northwest passage to the continent to Asia, a cure for syphilis and other valuable products for sale in Europe they sailed into the Atlantic (Murrin, 59).

Aside from the differences in the motives of settlement between the two colonies, the labor system from which the two colonies operated also sets them apart. The Virginia Company of England was responsible for “the first introduction of Negro slaves into Virgina” (McClellan, 43). At the same time, the Dutch claimed the Delaware, the Hudson, and the Connecticut River valleys (Murin, 53); with such strongholds, the Dutch West India Company controlled much of the slave trades in the Americas. When the Jamestown colony was established in the early sixteen teens, Dutch ships unloaded their cargos of Negroes to the colonists (McClellan, 42). Initially, these African were not considered as slaves but rather as indentured servants, as they were listed in the 1623 census count. They were simply considered as new settlers, who happened to be of African decent, and they worked for a period to pay for their passage to the new world. However, as time went on Virginia increasingly fell behind in satisfying the labor needs of the colony with Indians and indentured servants, and enacted the actual statutory recognition of slavery in Virginia in 1661. On th

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