ely different? Would geography have triumphed over history, so that regional character of the Eastern Seaboard would have become much as it is?
To answer that question, we must first ask whether such a reversal of settlements would even have been possible. To take the later and simpler case first, there seems to be no inherent reason why the Pilgrims could not have settled as well in Virginia as in Massachusetts. Their primary motive was simply to find "empty" land (empty of whites, that is) on which they could found their New Jerusalem. Their original goal was in fact Virginia, and it remains unclear whether their actual landfall was due to force of circumstances or the desire to avoid the existing Jamestown colony. In terms of climate, Virginia and Massachusetts were both equally wretched in seventeenth-century English eyes; in the former, one broiled in summer, in the latter, one froze in win
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