The thirteen American provinces owed their origin to many different causes, and were very distinct both in their character and laws. There was, in the first place, the group of New England provinces, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire (which included what is now called Vermont), and Rhode Island; these owed their origin to the Pilgrim Fathers, and though the first zeal of their Puritan religion had died away, much of the stern character of their original founders remained among the population: their capital was Boston, almost surrounded by the sea, and already a port of very considerable importance and wealth; the Hudson formed their boundary towards the west. Then there came a group of provinces originally belonging to the Dutch, and known as the New Netherlands. These had come into the hands of England during the war between Holland and England in the reign of Charles II., and had been granted to the Duke of York. New Amsterdam became New York, and Fort Orange, higher up the stream, Albany. Another part of the same grant was New Jersey, lying between the Hudson and the Delaware. This had been given for payment by the Duke of York to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret; the western part had been subsequently parted with by Berkeley to the Quakers, and the whole province, which was surrendered to the Crown in the reign of Queen Anne, was therefore known commonly as the Jerseys, and was peopled almost exclusively by Quakers, Presbyterians and Anabaptists. Spreading from their colony in New Jersey, the Quakers, under their great leader William Penn, had occupied the large province of Pennsylvania, with its capital Philadelphia lying inland to the west. One other province belongs to this group, Maryland, which was regarded as a sort of appendage to Pennsylvania, but had a separate assembly of its own; the governor however was generally the same as the Pennsylvanian governor. Below these two groups were three great colonies, owing their origin to less easily defined sources. Virginia, south of the Potomac, originally founded by Raleigh, had then (by a grant of King James I.) passed into the hands of merchant adventurers. Behaving badly, and quarrelling with their colonists, they were deprived of their rights, and in 1624 the colony became a Crown colony. It had been peopled principally by Church of England men and by men of good English birth. As the oldest colony it was the best peopled, while the birth and character of its proprietors, who resembled English gentlemen, caused them to be regarded as the aristocracy of the colonies. The two Carolinas had been granted to a number of proprietors in the reign of Charles II., but, as in most other cases, the original proprietors had quarrelled with the people, and sold their rights to the Crown. Below these Carolinas was Georgia, founded for philanthropic purposes as a refuge for insolvent debtors and persecuted Germans by General Oglethorpe, the originator of the inquiry