[Sproogle]

Success: The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted. A rather basic definition by anyone's standards. But can success really be defines by such broad terms? Can someone be unwittingly successful in something? In 1630 New England, a zealous religious group called the Puritans landed in order to build a model society, a "city upon a hill" as the colony's founder John Winthrop would have it be. This utopia would not be, but the colony still thrived. Can it be called unsuccessful? Similarly, another group landed in Virginia in 1607, but not to build an ideal society. Instead, the colony was intended to make money for the Virginia Company, and, to a lesser extent, convert the locals to Christianity. It succeeded in only one of it's goals, and became a superb way for the London Company to make money. But in that one goal, it succeeded more than expected, and surely more than the Puritan efforts to change the world.
"Money is power." A simple phrase that perfectly describes the simple goal of the Virginia colony; to make the owners of the Virginia Company rich and powerful. Jamestown, the original town, was founded in 1607 with a charter from King James I that proclaimed the colony to spread Christianity to the local people, who were heathens as far as the English were concerned. But that was a great fallacy, since the true aim of the colony was profit, not God. Of the 900 colonists, very few of them women, that arrived between 1607 and 1609, a meager 60 survived. Disease and lack of food killed most of them, which was not uncommon for such a long journey, and because of the fact that the colonists were in a new and harsh world. Those that survived were misfits, the outcasts of society, drawn to the new world with promises of free land from the company. Since these people were the bottom rung of society, they had nothing to lose, and formed a cheap work force. But what one pays for is what one gets, and in the early days of the colony, few were skilled and even fewer willing to work very hard. They had assumed that the local indians were easy to enslave, as Cortez was able to do in days past. This was a dangerous misconception. Almost immediately, there was tension with the indians, who were wary of such new intruders on their land. Although the indians brought the colony food in it's first autumn, the leader of Jamestown, John Smith, regarded them as barbarians, and foolishly raided local towns for food.
None of this stopped the Virginia Company from pouring more and more workers into the colony, still using the same old promise of free land. Of the 9,000 that set out for the colony between 1610 nd 1622, 2,000 survived. By this time, tobacco planting and harvesting had taken off, and since most European men were addicted to it, it was a widely demanded crop. The colony grew proportionally, and more and more indentured servants were brought in to manage the new business of tobacco farming, which was very labor intensive. But with this boom in population, tensions between the settlers and the local indians finally escalated to violence when a prominent figure in the Powahatan community was killed. The colony was attacked in a fierce assault. Near to one-quarter of the population fell, buildings were razed to the ground, and the Virginia Company went bankrupt. But after a royal government was set up in the colony, more and more settlers arrived, and in the late 1600s, Britain took control of the slave trade. With this new form of gaining workers, the Virginia colony got back on it's feet, and ended up more profitable than was previously thought imaginable, thus achieving it's primary goal.
"Knowledge is power." The other colony formed in the 1600s, the New England colony, was made to be a religious retreat for the Puritans, those who wished to root out corruption in the English church. John Winthrop, the founder, believed that the only way to do this was to move to the new world with his fellow Puritans and build a utopia, a "city upon a hill." If the rest of the world saw how successful the Puritans were with their strict religious doctrine, they would change their sinful ways. And Puritan life was strict, to say the least. No forms of art or literature besides the Bible was allowed. Grey and black were the primary colors of the dress of the Puritans. Basically, it was thought that corruption was caused by anything that deviated from work and the study of the Bible. When the colony was founded in 1630, it was built to last. Unlike the Virginia colony, in which most of it's citizens lived in cheaply built shantys, solid and well-built homes, schools and, of course, churches were built. They made money through a myriad of ways. They fished, farmed, sold timber, and even traded with local indians. Because of this, there was plenty of room to farm crops besides tobacco, making the colony that much more self-sufficient.
But once life became easier, Puritan doctrine became harder to follow. It called for the good of the group to outweigh the good of the individual, and for the people to live humble, God-fearing lives. This was easy to live by in the beginning of the colony, since there was not much to go around otherwise. But once it became prosperous, it's citizens had to work less and less. Soon, rival religious factions denounced the original Puritan church. They complained about mandatory church attendance, and called for a separation of church and state. Although the colony never came to the brink of destruction such as the Virginia colony had, it was eventually split by such factions and incidents like the Salem witch trials.
Virginia had acieved it's goal of making it's company money. The secondary objective was spreading Christianity, but that was written off in the charter for form rather than for it to be seriously practiced. It may not have been as moral as the Puritan colony, but it was just as hard-working, if not more so, and was indeed more profitable. Money is what mattered, and money there was. The Virginia colony was a success. The Puritan colony, on the other hand, was most certainly a failure compared to the monetary might of Virginia. Not only did the idealistic Puritans fail in purifying the Church of England, but they did not build a utopia. It proved too elusive, and was chased away by basic human greed. The colony was split by religious debate, calls for separation of church and state, and absurd witch hunts. The Puritans achieved the opposite of what they wanted.