Nation of Nations 3/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff
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THE CHAPTER IN PERSPECTIVE

The utopian hopes that had inspired some sixteenth-century English promoters of colonization--Gilbert, Raleigh, the Hakluyts--faltered and quickly failed during the first century of English settlement in the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. Instead of becoming havens for the English poor and unemployed, or models of interracial harmony, the southern colonies of the seventeenth century were weakened by disease, wracked by recurring conflicts with native Americans, and disrupted by profit-hungry planters' exploitation of poor whites and blacks alike. Many of the tragedies of Spanish colonization and England's conquest of Ireland were repeated in the American South and the British Caribbean.

OVERVIEW

Just as the English established their first outpost on Chesapeake Bay with a set of goals and strategies in mind, so too the native Indians of that region pursued their own aims and interests. The Indians had recently been consolidated by their werowance (or chief) Powhatan into a powerful confederacy. Powhatan used the new English newcomers to advance his own longstanding objectives. Although he considered the new colonists a nuisance, Powhatan welcomed trade goods and English weapons as a means to consolidate his political authority and to fend off challenges from the Piedmont tribes.

But after Powhatan's death, the English presence proved more likely to threaten than to support his confederacy's control over the Chesapeake. With the beginning of the tobacco boom, the Virginia Company transported an increasing number of white settlers into Virginia. Some were free men and women, but the vast majority were indentured servants. The spread of English plantations encroached on tribal lands. Mounting tensions finally exploded in 1622 into full-scale hostilities between whites and Indians, resulting in appalling casualties on both sides, as well as a determination, on the part of the English, to destroy the "savage" Indians.

Another casualty of the conflict was the Virginia Company itself, the joint-stock company that had overseen the early settlement of the colony. The king dissolved the company after an investigation revealed that mortality rates from disease and the abuse of servants far exceeded the casualties of the Indian war. Virginia then became a royal colony.

As the price of tobacco leveled off, a more coherent social and political order took shape in Virginia. Even so, tensions remained high, fueled by resentment at the settlement of Maryland, a proprietary colony ruled by the Calvert family. Maryland's tobacco economy competed with Virginia's and led to the outbreak of another Indian war in 1644. Meanwhile, England did little to ease friction or direct the development in the region because it became distracted by domestic political upheavals that culminated in their Civil War. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, Charles II launched a more consistent colonial policy. Parliament obliged by passing the first in a series of Navigation Acts to regulate colonial trade in ways that benefited England.

The Navigation Acts only made worse the forces that were already propelling Chesapeake society toward a crisis. Local elites were divided and jealous, while freed servants and small planters found diminishing opportunities for themselves. Religious hatreds and a renewal of hostilities with the Indians raised tensions further. Two civil wars resulted--Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia and Coode's Rebellion in Maryland.

What finally eased the divisions within white society in the Chesapeake was the conversion from servitude to slavery as the region's dominant labor system. As slavery became more cost effective, the growing presence (and implicit threat) of African-Americans drove together whites of all classes and religions, and a racist consensus emerged. Their profits now secured by the exploitation of black rather than white labor, a new Chesapeake "gentry" encouraged the development of a prosperous and deferential small planter class.

As the tobacco economy evolved in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, a booming sugar economy also transformed the Caribbean into a slave-based plantation society. Land scarcity on the English Barbados fostered the settlement of South Carolina, another proprietary colony.

More prosperous than either its poor neighbor, North Carolina, or Virginia, South Carolina still remained vulnerable to attack from the neighboring French and Spanish. As with other proprietary colonies, South Carolina was divided as well by chronic political factions. Compounding these political squabbles was the colony's social instability, the result of ethnic and religious diversity, high mortality rates, and strained relations with local Indian tribes. Worsening Indian relations resulted in the devastating Yamasee War in 1715, which brought the colony to the brink of dissolution and ended proprietary rule.

Reconstituted as a royal colony after 1729, South Carolina recovered its former prosperity by exporting rice and later indigo. Greater social and political harmony ensued mainly because whites recognized the need to unify against the threat posed by their colony's black majority, slaves who supplied the skilled labor on plantations. At the same time, the founding of Georgia, a colony that developed a comparable economy and social structure, formed a buffer between South Carolinians and Spanish Florida.

As the English colonies in southern North America took shape, the Spanish extended their empire into the American Southwest. There, they scattered military garrisons and cattle the ranches throughout the region. To incorporate the Indians into colonial society as docile servants and pious farmers and artisans, the Spanish relied on missions staffed by Dominican and Franciscan priests.

Despite the weakening of their populations by Europeans diseases, the Indians still managed to mete out defiance to Spanish cultural imperialism in a series of uprisings, the most successful being the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico. Like the English in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, the Spanish in the Southwest encountered sustained resistance to their expansionism from Indian cultures. Nevertheless, the hopes of empire or independence held by red, white, and black inhabitants suffered a cruel defeat during the seventeenth century.

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