Question

How did ethnic, religious, and occupational diversity impact colonial America?

Answer 1

In earliest days of colonization, the religious differences were fairly significant because people, in those days, wanted to punish any who did not believe as they did. This meant execution for various heresies, or preaching against the will of God. It meant in Mediterranean countries (Spain and Italy) that Inquisitions executed large numbers of people based on often no more than an accusation or rumor. The divisions between religions led to violent and prolonged wars.....the Christian Crusades beginning in 1092, the Inquisition, the Reformation and all its subsequent killings, the more recent Balkan Wars in the period following the fall of Yugoslavia, the struggles between Catholic and Protestant in, say, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of the French Huguenots in the 1680s. This encouraged people in Europe to escape when they felt their days might be numbered because their neighbors might want to burn them alive or some such. The Separatists were the first of many who fled Europe ahead of the burnings and torture.

To the specifics of your question now.....the French Huguenot (Protestant) survivors fled to the Carolinas and established Charleston, South Carolina, to avoid the Catholic French king's intent to kill those who had survived his first attempt.

The Separatists in Plimouth Plantations were escaping what they felt was certain aboliton of their faith in England and dissolution of it by their Dutch neighbors.

Connecticut and Rhode Island were established to move away from the restrictions of the Puritans in Massachusetts.

Pennsylvania was for ANY group of dissidents who felt threatened anywhere in Europe or the New World. Thank Wm Penn and the Quakers for that stroke of genius.

Maryland was to protect Catholics who felt threatened in England (the original Protestant country thanks to Henry VIII). Lord Baltimore was its protector.

The frontier absorbed all the various individuals and groups too numerous to mention in these lines and protected them with distance and obscurity.

The same frontier became the source of the great colonial growth of individuality that would protect the colonies when Britain and France threatened to end the very freedom to practice religion.