English Settlement in the South
• 1606: James I granted a charter creating 2 branches of the
Virginia Company of London:
– The Plymouth Company
– London Company
• Motives for settlement:
– Gold
– Passage to Asia
– Converting Indians to Christianity
• April 1607: London Company settles Jamestown
– 100 settlers led by Capt. Christopher Newport
– Selected the peninsula on the James River out of the concern
for effective defense
– Area was ridden with malaria
Jamestown
• Initial poor leadership
• John Smith eventually provides
effective leadership
• John Rolfe establishes tobacco
crops
• Tobacco
– 1616: 2500 lbs produced
– 1618: 30,000 lbs produced
– 1627: 500,000 lbs produced
• Tobacco profits off-set the
fruitless search for gold
Jamestown
• The charter is an important document in that
it guaranteed the overseas settlers the same
rights of Englishmen who were still in the
homeland.
• Relationship of John Smith and Pocahontas
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHBlEuFoLY
Virginia
• The first slaves came in the late 1600s
• Initially, the headright system provided labor force
– Settlers arranged their own transportation and that of
dependents in return for 50 acres per “head” transported
– Initially preferred indentured servants
• 1622: massive Indian attack reduces population by
250
• 1624: James I sees Virginia as a bad investment and
revokes the charter
• Creation of the House of Burgesses
• By 1670, there were 30,000 inhabitants
Maryland
• Lord Baltimore (Sir George Calvert) wanted
his own colony for the personal advantage of
his family and for the benefit of Roman
Catholics (who were encouraged to settle
there)
• Selected St. Mary’s as the first settlement
• Representative gov’t (like Virginia)
• Didn’t turn out to be Catholic refuge it was
hoped to be
Carolinas
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Chartered in 1663
Representative assembly
Largely Protestant
Settled by some French Huguenots
Also settled by some West Indian planters
(who brought slavery to the South Carolina
region)
– Wanted pine trees for ship building
– Rice became a major crop in Carolina
Georgia
• Established in 1713
• Founded by Gen. James Oglethorpe as a buffer
between the British and Spanish (in Florida)
• Also used as a debtor’s colony (criminals and
convicts from GBR)
Life in the Chesapeake
• Ridden with malaria, dysentery, typhoid, and
other diseases
• High death rate
• Difficult to start families and create solid
settlements
• Tobacco Economy
– The climate/soil was hospitable to tobacco
cultivation
– More tobacco means more labor, but where will this
labor source come from?
Life in the Chesapeake
• Headright System
– To encourage the importation of servant workers
– Whoever paid the passage of a laborer received the right
to acquire 50 acres of land
– Masters (not the servants) reaped the benefits of
landownership from the headright system
•  the beginning of the rich planter class with extensive land
holdings
– As land became more scarce, masters became more
reluctant to have land allowances in the “freedom dues”
• More harsh treatment of servants
• You would be free after 7 years, but then you’d be a poor farmer
with little choice but to sell yourself back into servitude
Triangular Trade
Bacon’s Rebellion
• There were an increasing number of poor
freemen in the Chesapeake region
– Frustrated by their broken hopes of acquiring
land and getting rich
– This growing class of “freemen” made the rich
planter class nervous
• Gov. Berkeley- governor of VA colony
– Was growing increasingly agitated with the large
number of rowdy poor throughout the colony
Bacon’s Rebellion
• The freemen were moving westward towards the
Indian settlements and were fighting w/ them on a
regular basis
– Resented Berkeley’s friendly Indian policies
• Berkeley had refused to avenge several brutal Indian
attacks on the frontiersmen
• So Bacon and his men disobeyed Berkeley and
attack/murder the Indians
– 1676: Nathaniel Bacon leads about 1,000 men on a raid of
Jamestown (the colonial capital of VA)
– Torches the town; Berkeley flees and returns w/ English
troops
Bacon’s Rebellion
• Bacon suddenly dies (illness)
• Berkeley brutally crushes all Bacon supporters
• Results of the Rebellion
– Awakened the latent unhappiness of the landless
former servants
– Pitted the backcountry frontiersmen against the
gentry plantation owners
– The lordly planters now looked for a different source
for plantation labor
Slave Trade
• The Royal African Company lost its charter in
1698
–  enterprising colonists rushed to cash in on the
lucrative slave trade (especially Rhode Islanders)
• By 1750, the slave trade had ground to a halt
• By the 1660s, specific “slave codes” had been
drawn up by the colonial gov’ts to delineate
between servants’ and slaves’ rights
Colonial Slavery
• About 10 million Africans were carried over
the course of 3 centuries
• First Africans came to Jamestown in 1619 (about
2,000)
• Slaves were too expensive for struggling colonists
• But in the 1680s, rising wages in England shrank the
pool of servants coming over
– Bacon’s Rebellion had brought a distrust of current and
former servants, as gentry feared future rebellions