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Who was it that left their home lands for America. . . . Was it "the best" the inovative, the fortune seekers or was it "the worst", the outlaws and hunted?
I have heard many people argue for both points, but I am not yet won over by any of them.
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The answer, I think, is "all of the above." Just like most mass emigrations.
On the low extreme, there were the transportees- convicted criminals sentenced to indentured servitude (however, they were never as significant in number as British myth would have it- America wasn't Australia!). At the other end, there were indeed members (usually younger) of noble families: West (Lord De la Warr), Calvert (Lord Baltimore), Fairfax; and others of high rank like the Byrd and Digges dynasties (the same families as the famous courtiers). The Washingtons were nowhere near as exalted but were still solid country gentry.
Nonetheless these were also quite small in number, even when we include those of gentle origin who never entered history in those (to us shockingly) recordless and anonymous days. One of my ancestors in his 1712 will bequeathed to his eldest son "my rapier and my gold seal ring which I am accustomed to wear:" the hallmarks of a gentleman, although we know nothing of his origins.
The principal attractant to the Colonies was land: and what land attracted was farmers. In agrarian England land was still the fount of wealth- but it was all spoken for, and rarely sold at the freehold level. Most rural English were tenants, a trend which accelerated throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries. Even the remaining independent yeomen were ill-disposed to divide their acreage, leaving younger sons out in the cold.
But, in America! The Crown was giving the stuff away free! Fifty acres per head, just for clearing and farming it! What a tremendous magnet for those willing to endure the hardships.
Religion was a much lesser motivator. There were certainly some religious 'refuges' after Plymouth, like Maryland and Pennsylvania: but Penn was wise enough to know he needed certain skilled trades, and happily recruited blacksmiths and coopers and whatnot without regard to faith: and at any rate, these religious-based communities were soon overwhelmed by ordinary land-seekers, Anglican and Presbyterian both.
Ah, the Presbyterians- the so-called 'Scotch-Irish' or 'Ulster Scots' (although two-thirds of them were of English origin). The legend persists (and was passed down in my family) that they fled religious persecution (in some versions by the Irish Catholics!!!!!!!)- but the principal reason was much more prosaic: in the early decades of the 18th century the original 99-year leases in the Ulster Plantation were expiring, and the landlords were jacking the rents up through the roof. Were those who therefore migrated to claim the available American lands (chiefly by then in the hardscrabble Appalachians) thus more or less 'worthy' or 'tough' or whatever compared to those Orangemen who stuck it out in Tyrone and Derry? Is chocolate or vanilla better?
In all of this though one thing was certainly the case: social mobility was far more rapid in the Colonies than it had been in the Mother County. A relative nobody like Robert "King" Carter could amass wealth on a baronial scale: 300,000 acres and 10,000 pounds cash. He was obviously the exception: what was however not the exception but normative was that the small farmer on his 100 or so acres was a landowner, nobody's tenant: and therefore also a voter, empowered to choos his Burgess and local magistrates in a manner unknown to most small English farmers. He tended therefore to regard himself 'as good a man' as the planter grandees, notwithstanding their wealth, luxury and slaves (a key element in making this all possible, of course.)
And thus began the American belief or myth that this is a 'classless' society. We aren't of course, and never have been: but the very belief is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, the very condition of assuming that you (and everyone else) is "middle class" is an impetus toward making it so. Certainly Americans don't obsess over class in the British manner; if anything we tend to pretend it's not there even when it is. Or as somebody (Hayek?) once said: Americans don't have time to hate the rich because they're too busy trying to join them.
It's also worth pointing out that *birth* has never in itself been much of a factor over here. While there are obviously advantages to be had from growing up with money and opportunity, it's the money and opportunity that make the difference. This is a very different case from the old British system, when no mere merchant or tradesman, however loaded, was ever quite as good as a born aristocrat. (In Vanity Fair, the mercantile Osbornes are clearly much richer, but clearly move in lower circles, than the blueblood Crawleys).