Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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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 leader Powhatan into a powerful confederacy. Powhatan used the English newcomers to advance his own longstanding objectives. Although he considered the new colonists inferior, Powhatan welcomed trade goods and English weapons as a means to consolidate his political authority and to fend off challenges from the Piedmont tribes.

English Society on the Chesapeake

But after Powhatan's death, the English presence proved more likely to threaten than to support his confederacy's control over the Chesapeake. The European theory of mercantilism encouraged colonies as a means to achieving national self-sufficiency through international trade. If a colony could produce a commodity, like tobacco, that would enrich investors and enhance royal revenues, it was highly prized. Such was the case when a joint stock company established the colony of Virginia. With the beginning of a boom in tobacco-growing, an increasing number of white settlers came to Virginia, the vast majority as indentured servants.

The spread of English plantations encroached on tribal lands. Hostilities erupted between whites and Indians. Appalling casualties resulted, 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 king dissolved the company, making Virginia a royal colony.

As the price of tobacco leveled off, a more coherent social and political order took shape in Virginia. Meanwhile, a rival colony with a tobacco economy was established nearby: Maryland, a proprietary colony. England did little to direct the development in the region because it became distracted by domestic political upheavals that culminated in a Civil War. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, Charles II launched a more consistent colonial policy. Parliament passed the first in a series of Navigation Acts to regulate colonial trade in ways that, following mercantilist theory, benefited England.

Chesapeake Society in Crisis

The Navigation Acts only made worse the forces already shaking Chesapeake society. Freed servants and small planters found their opportunities shrinking. Hostilities with the Indians resumed. Political and religious rivalries deepened tensions. Two uprisings resulted-Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia and Coode's Rebellion in Maryland.

What finally eased the strife within white society was a shift in the main labor system from white servitude to African slavery. As slavery became more cost effective, the growing presence of imported Africans-legally coerced and distinct-unified whites of all classes and religions. Improved economic prospects for whites strengthened this consensus based on race. Their profits now secured by the exploitation of black labor, a new Chesapeake "gentry" encouraged the development of a prosperous subordinate and deferential but prosperous small-planter class.

From the Caribbean to the Carolinas

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 English Barbados fostered settlement of South Carolina, another proprietary colony.

More prosperous than either its poor neighbor, North Carolina, or even older Virginia, South Carolina, as with other proprietary colonies, was divided by chronic political factions. Social instability, the result of ethnic and religious diversity, high mortality rates, and strained relations with local Indian tribes compounded the unrest. 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 prospered by exporting rice and later indigo. Greater social and political harmony ensued mainly because whites unified against the threat posed by their colony's black majority, slaves who supplied the labor on plantations. At the same time, the founding of Georgia-a colony that developed a comparable economy and social structure, after an experimental phase as a failed utopia-formed a buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida.

The Spanish Borderlands

While the English colonies in southern North America were taking shape, the Spanish pushed northward into the American Southwest. There, they scattered military garrisons and cattle ranches throughout region. To incorporate 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 ravages of disease, the Indians still managed to resist Spanish control. Like the English in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, the Spanish in the Southwest encountered sustained resistance to their expansionism from Indian cultures. In sum, dreams of empire or independence cherished by red, white, and black inhabitants suffered disappointment and sometimes disaster during the seventeenth century.

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