The Middle Colonies [5:44]
The area, maybe like America today, was extremely diverse in terms of ethnicities at the time. There were Dutch, Swedes, French, Scots-Irish, Germans, Portuguese, and quite a bit of slavery going on. A lot of Indian populations tended to move into that region. Religiously, there were Quakers, Anglicans, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, and the list just goes on. Whatever you wanted to look for, you could probably find in the Middle colonies.
What I want to do is to take a look at each of the four colonies individually and get a sense of their history. I want to start with the smaller ones, Delaware and New Jersey, that sometimes get a little short shrift in the mix. Starting with Delaware, unlike much of the colonial region for the first half of the 17th century, they were not even English. There was this ongoing battle between Dutch colonists and the Dutch West India Company and a Swedish colony. They fought battles, they tried to take over land. Peter Minuit and other members of the Dutch West India Company become disenfranchised, left, and began guiding Swedes in there.
Ultimately, in the 1660s, after the Dutch and the Swedes left their mark, the English Duke of York comes in. He conquers New Amsterdam in New York and begins moving on down the river. Ultimately, Delaware is given first to New York, then later to Maryland, trying to figure out where it should best go. It ends up in the hands of William Penn, who was founding the Pennsylvania colony. It never really does get its own status—it's called, in fact, the "three lower counties of the Delaware River"—and, in many ways, its own identity. It's perhaps more like a Chesapeake colony like Maryland or Virginia—heavy on tobacco. In the 1700s, although it was not its own colony, it did receive its own colonial assembly.
Delaware is kind of this melting pot with Swedes, Finns, and lots of Dutch around there. It's also a bread basket economy like the other ones, producing lots of barley and rye. It's a fascinating region. There are a lot of people in there that began to get involved in iron ore and producing nails, tools, finished goods, and so on. Ultimately, it picks up this identity from Pennsylvania as a religiously tolerant area, and so, it becomes very filled with diverse people and religious ideas.
Right next door and sort of tucked in is New Jersey. The two of them together took up most of the seaboard for the Middle colonies. Like Delaware, it had been settled by the Dutch and the Swedish long before the English arrived. Once England took over the area, the Duke of York grants New Jersey to what he calls the "two proprietors." These are essentially a couple friends of the Duke that wanted to make money out of the region. They pass this rather sweepingly progressive legislation called the Concession and Agreement, the short name of it, which basically granted religious freedom to anybody that wanted to come to New Jersey. Their goal was to encourage settlement and to charge farming rent, but they actually did quite a bit more, and the area becomes very productive. Ultimately, New Jersey is referred to as the "Dutch belt" by some and plays host to the Dutch Reformed Church.
Now onto the big colonies. New York, also one of the bread colonies, was, as described before, established by the Dutch and then later on in the 1660s, seized by the Duke of York. Right from the very beginning, it was established under English law and allowed all Christian dissenters, including the French Huguenots. They were a big importer of slaves, right from the very beginning, but oddly not for farm work, but rather for the dock, shipping, and manufacturing jobs that went on through there. It's a huge state that swept from the Atlantic Ocean up to Canada. Beyond growing all the grains, there was timber, fur, shipping, and the slave trade. Religiously, New York, as expected, had it all. There were a lot of members of the Church of England, the Anglicans. As in the other areas, there's Dutch Reformed, Quakers, Huguenots, and Presbyterians.
The final colony is Pennsylvania, founded by William Penn. This is an area that was set up as a homage to the Quaker people. He had become a Quaker in England and then heavily advertised the region, looking for industrious, progressive, and skilled craftsmen. Everybody came there—the Germans, the Dutch, the English. He had very open land policies. They were antiwar, antimilitary service, and even called the capital city Philadelphia, or city of brotherly love. Ultimately, Pennsylvania becomes this kind of utopian community of freedom of conscience, progressive ideologies, and commercial prosperity.
Ultimately, the Middle colonies really do provide a nice glimpse of what America will become: a nation based on strong economics, manufacturing, diversity, and a lot of religious freedom.
https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Topics/Display/1183166?cid=140&sid=1881330