The American Promise – Lecture Notes
Chapter 3 - The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,
1601-1700
An English Colony on Chesapeake Bay (Slide 2) Page 55
A. The Fragile Jamestown Settlement
1. Virginia Company—King James of England wanted to colonize New World
land that Spain could not defend; he issued a land grant to the Virginia Company,
a joint stock company; the London investors of the Virginia Company hoped to
strengthen England overseas and at home, as colonists could both consume and
produce goods.
2. Jamestown—First settlement, named after King James; 144 colonists arrived
at Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607.
3. Powhatan and the Algonquian Indians—Algonquian Indians attacked the
colonists their first night there, which demonstrated to the colonists the need to
protect themselves from Indians and the Spanish; also faced threats of disease
and starvation; fifty colonists died by September; Algonquian chief Powhatan
rescued the colonists by bringing corn to the colony for barter; starving colonists
overcame their prejudice against corn; still, most settlers in Virginia went to an
early grave.
B. Cooperation and Conflict between Natives and Newcomers
1. Mutual Distrust—English settlers did not trust the Indians; few settlers other
than John Smith even learned their language; Powhatan was suspicious of the
English, as they did not hesitate to use violence to enforce English notions of
proper Indian behavior; Indians did not organize an all-out assault against the
English because they needed allies.
2. Trade Relationship between English and Indians—The English traded
European goods for corn; Indians preferred English iron and steel knives, axes,
and pots; the English had difficulty feeding themselves, as very few farmers
came to the New World; most settlers were gentlemen and their servants.
3. Difficulties for Powhatan’s Chiefdom—Conflict with Europeans spread deadly
diseases; settlers’ appetite for corn required Indians to spend more time growing
crops; women did agricultural work, so their burden increased; Indians
understood the English were not going away.
1 of 7
The American Promise – Lecture Notes
4. Opechancanough—Powhatan’s brother; he succeeded Powhatan as supreme
chief in 1618; launched an all-out assault against the English in 1622; killed 347
colonists; the attack did not dislodge the English, but it did increase English
violence toward Indians; most colonists from that point on considered the Indians
their perpetual enemies
C. From Private Company to Royal Government (Slide 4) Page 60
1. Revocation of Virginia Company Charter—Royal official investigated the
colony after Opechcancanough’s assault; determined that the death of the
colonists resulted less from Indian raids and more from disease and
mismanagement; the king revoked the charter of the Virginia Company and
made it a royal colony, subject to the direction of the royal government rather
than the company’s investors.
2. A Royal Colony—King now appointed a royal governor; most other features of
local government remained intact; colonists still voted for members of the House
of Burgesses, even though its laws had to be approved by royal bureaucrats;
marked the end of the first phase of English colonization.
A Tobacco Society (Slide 5)
A. Tobacco Agriculture
1. Tobacco—John Rolfe planted West Indian tobacco seeds in 1612, and the
colonists grew enough to send back to England by 1917; tobacco transformed
Virginia from a colony of aimless adventurers into a society of planters; tobacco
was a demanding crop that required close attention and year-round labor; the
colonists had only primitive tools, making the labor particularly taxing.
2. Abundance in Virginia—English settlers grew as much tobacco as possible to
make as much money as possible; men could earn two to three times more in
Virginia tobacco fields than in England; abundant land made it extremely cheap
as well; new settlers who paid their own way also received a headright—fifty
acres of free land.
B. A Servant Labor System
1. Indentured Servitude—Allowed poor immigrants to come to the New World; 80
percent of immigrants came as indentured servants; very few slaves arrived
during the first half century after settlement; poor immigrants agreed to a contract
called an indenture, which was a form of credit; an immigrant borrowed the cost
of transportation from a merchant or sea captain, and, to repay the loan, the
indentured person promised to work as a servant in America for four to seven
years, after which time the servant would be free; the merchant or ship captain
2 of 7
The American Promise – Lecture Notes
sold the right to an immigrant’s labor to a tobacco farmer; planters reaped
immediate benefits, as it typically took only one year for a servant to grow
enough tobacco to match the cost of his indenture; labor during the remaining
three to six years of the indenture promised a handsome profit for the planter.
2. Gender Imbalance—About three out of four servants were unskilled men
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five; women were rare, which created a
gender imbalance; planters believed men were better at field work, which
perpetuated the imbalance.
C. The Rigors of Servitude (Slide 8) Page 64
1. Racial Intermingling—Servants tended to work together regardless of race or
gender; racial intermingling occurred, although the small number of blacks made
it infrequent; courts punished interracial sex, but court records show it still
occurred often; servants felt a unity based on their status as unfree people rather
than a difference based on race or gender.
2. Harsh Realities of Servitude—Servant life was harsh by any standard;
servants could not control who purchased their labor; they were often bought and
sold several times; work was very difficult; punishments for petty crimes
extended servitude far beyond the original terms of indenture.
3. Restrictions Placed on Female Servants—Women servants were prohibited
from marrying, as the law assumed a servant woman could not serve two
masters at the same time—the one who owned her labor and her husband; but
gender imbalance pressured women to engage in sex; about one-third of
immigrant women were pregnant when they married; since pregnancy made
labor difficult, women servants who gave birth had to serve two extra years and
pay a fine; sometimes the father of the unborn child purchased the mother and
freed and married her.
D. Cultivating Land and Faith
1. Demands of Tobacco upon the Land—Chesapeake landscape featured small
tobacco farms surrounded by wilderness; farmers could only tend about an acre
at a time, but they constantly needed new land because tobacco exhausted the
fertility of the soil; tobacco planters sought land that fronted a navigable river to
minimize the work of transporting the heavy crop.
2. Prosperity Overshadows Religion—Most Chesapeake colonists were
Protestants required to attend Sunday services and follow the doctrine of the
Church of England; few clergyman migrated; on the whole, however, colonists
paid greater attention to tobacco than to religion; Lord Baltimore founded
Maryland in 1632 as a refuge for Catholics, but most settlers there were
Protestant workers; tobacco was the true faith of the Chesapeake.
3 of 7
The American Promise – Lecture Notes
Hierarchy and Inequality in the Chesapeake (Slide 10) Page 67
A. Social and Economic Polarization
1. Era of the Yeoman—A yeoman was a farmer who owned a small plot of land
to support a family; the land was tilled largely by servants and a few family
members; there were only a small number of elite planters during the first few
decades in the Chesapeake; led to a level of frontier equality among free
families; until midcentury, the principal social division in the Chesapeake was
more between free farmers and unfree servants than between rich and poor.
2. Formation of Planter Elite—A planter elite developed for three main reasons;
first, the oversupply of tobacco depressed prices in Europe, which reduced
profits and made saving to become landowners more difficult for freed servants;
second, the mortality rate declined, meaning more servants survived indentures,
which created a class of discontented, landless freemen; third, the declining
mortality rate also allowed long-time farmers to compound their success, buy
slaves, serve as merchants, and lend credit; by the 1670s, the Chesapeake
society became polarized between landowners and the landless.
B. Government Policies and Political Conflict
1. Government Reinforced Social Distinctions—Colonial government enforced
the distinction between servants and masters; until 1670, all freemen could vote,
and they typically elected prosperous planters to the legislature; no former
servant served in the governor’s council or the House of Burgesses after 1640;
voting by poor men was outlawed in 1670, as officials tried to keep political
power in safe hands.
2. Royal Government Tightens Control—The King tightened control over colonial
trade to collect substantial revenue from the colonists; Navigation Acts required
the colonists to trade exclusively with England.
3. Mercantilism—English policy based on mercantilism: what was good for
England should determine colonial policy; led to an import duty on tobacco as
part of the Navigation Act of 1660.
4 of 7
The American Promise – Lecture Notes
C. Bacon’s Rebellion (Slide 11) Page 69
1. Virginia’s Indian Policy—In 1644, colonists and Algonquians agreed to a treaty
to end fighting; Indians relinquished all claims to land already settled by the
English; wilderness land beyond the English settlement was reserved for Indian
use; the colonial government hoped to minimize contact between Indians and
settlers and preserve the peace; however the population grew, and colonists
encroached on Indian lands.
2. Bacon’s Laws—Nathaniel Bacon led frontier settlers who resented that the
government did not allow them to settle where they wished; he charged that
grandees, or elite planters, operated the government for their private gain;
Governor Berkeley threatened to punish Bacon for treason and called for a new
election of burgesses, but his plan to reinforce his power failed when local
leaders, including Bacon, won the elections; the new legislature passed reform
measures known as Bacon’s Laws, which gave local settlers a voice in setting
taxes, forbade officers from demanding bribes, and restored the vote to all
freemen.
3. Bacon’s Rebellion—Berkeley at first pardoned Bacon, but elite planters again
convinced him that Bacon was dangerous; when Bacon learned that Berkeley
had again branded him a traitor, he declared war; for the next three months,
Bacon’s forces fought Indians and attacked grandees’ plantations and
Jamestown; but Bacon died, and Berkeley and his men crushed the rebellion; the
response to the rebellion only strengthened the position of the elite, as the King
replaced Berkeley with a governor more attentive to the interests of the crown.
4. Aftermath—Following Bacon’s Rebellion, tensions between planters and small
farmers lessened; ruling elite concluded it was safer to allow colonists to fight
with Indians than to fight each other, so they made little effort to restrict colonists
from encroaching on Indian land; also reduced taxes.
Toward a Slave Labor System (Slide 12) Page 71
A. Religion and Revolt in the Spanish Borderland
1. Stagnant Growth in New Mexico and Florida—English colonies grew and
prospered thanks to tobacco, but the Spanish colonies of New Mexico and
Florida stagnated; small populations there could not sustain themselves.
5 of 7
The American Promise – Lecture Notes
2. Spanish Missionaries Convert Indians to Christianity—Spanish missionaries,
rather than profit-minded settlers, came to these colonies to attempt to convert
Indians to Christianity; officials hoped missionary work would pacify the Indians;
missionaries supervised the building of scores of Catholic churches, but they
forced the Indians to do the construction and to pay tribute in the form of food,
blankets, and other goods.
3. Indians Retaliate against Spanish Exploitation—Spanish missionaries
congratulated themselves on converting Indians, but they had actually increased
Indian resentment toward the Spanish; Indians retaliated repeatedly against the
Spanish, but the Spanish suppressed the uprisings; in 1680, Popé organized the
Pueblo Revolt, where Indians desecrated churches, killed two-thirds of Spanish
missionaries, and drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico; Florida Indians never
mounted a unified attack against Spanish rule, but they organized sporadic
uprisings and resisted conversion.
B. The West Indies: Sugar and Slavery
1. Barbados—The tiny island of Barbados was the jewel of the English West
Indies; planters began growing sugarcane there in the 1640s; sugar commanded
high prices in England; poor farmers could not afford the expensive machinery to
extract and refine sugar, but planters with capital got rich, sometimes four times
richer than the tobacco grandees in the Chesapeake.
2. Sugar and Slave Labor—Rich sugar grandees turned to slave labor; African
slaves planted, cultivated, and harvested sugarcane; during the 1650s when
blacks made up only 3 percent of the Chesapeake population, they had become
the majority in Barbados; brutal, unremitting labor, high mortality rates, and
mostly male slaves caused the slave population to grow by importation rather
than natural increase.
C. Carolina: A West Indian Frontier (Slide 15) Page 75
1. Settlers from Barbados Arrive in Carolina—The first settlers in Carolina were
from Barbados; they had a charter from the king to settle land between the
Chesapeake and Spanish colony; the first permanent settlement, Charles Towne
(later spelled Charleston), was established in 1670.
2. Slave Labor—Barbadian immigrants brought their slaves with them; by 1700,
slaves made up about half the population of Carolina; the settlers launched failed
experiments with tobacco, cotton, indigo, and olives; eventually took advantage
6 of 7
The American Promise – Lecture Notes
of the knowledge of rice cultivation among their African slaves to build rice
plantations.
D. Slave Labor Emerges in the Chesapeake
1. Black Population Grows Fivefold between 1670 and 1700—The turn to slave
labor reshaped racial demographics in the Chesapeake; by 1700, one out of
eight people in the region was a black person from Africa; only relatively
prosperous planters could afford to buy slaves.
2. Advantages of Slaves over Servants—Slaves were more expensive, but they
never became free; slaves were a perpetual labor force because children of
slave mothers inherited the status of slavery; unlike servants, slaves could be
controlled politically; color was a badge of bondage.
3. Slave Labor System Polarizes Chesapeake Society—Slavery polarized society
along the lines of race and status; all slaves were black, and nearly all blacks
were slaves; almost all free people were white, and all whites were free or only
temporarily bound in indentured servitude; poor whites maintained the status of
freedom and could do things slaves could not, such as owning property, getting
married, serving on juries, and moving as they pleased; racial polarization
replaced the divide between poor folk and grandees; unlike Barbados,
Chesapeake had a white majority, and slaves had frequent and close contact
with white people; slaves often did run away, but insurrection never occurred.
7 of 7