England's southern colonies in America were those of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Out of the 13 colonies, Virginia was the first to be established, and Georgia was the last. The southern colonies were quite different from England's other American colonies because their economic success depended almost completely on the use of large numbers of slaves.
Although most of the people who founded the southern colonies had not been familiar with slavery back in England, in America the use of slaves allowed many of them to grow rich. Like the colonists in England's other colonies, those that settled the South brought their language, customs, religions, and racial beliefs to America. And they adapted their old ways of doing things to make them work in a strange new land. Most changes were made in how they farmed and lived their daily lives, but others were in the laws they made and the ways they governed. Things like these blended together during the almost 200 years that England ruled in America and helped lay the foundation for the unique culture of the United States.
The first English colony, Virginia, was founded in 1607 by members of the Virginia Company of London. Their story was in many ways typical of the early colonists. while in others it was not.
The 104 men and boys who made the voyage to Virginia planned to search for gold and to try to find a new route to Asia. As the ships left England to cross the Atlantic, many of the passengers had worried about the long voyage that lay ahead of them. But by the spring, after four and a half months at sea, they had safely reached the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia.
After exploring, they found an island in a large river that flows into the bay and decided to build their settlement on it. First, they had to cut down trees, clear the land, and make wooden beams from which to build houses. They filled the spaces between the beams with woven branches and mud, a building method called daub and wattle, and they made thatched roofs from reeds that grew in the nearby swamps. When they were done, the houses of the settlement they named Jamestown, after King James, looked a lot like those they had known in England. But most of them were quite small and had only one room.
As time went by, the colonists also built barns where they could store supplies. And they built a new church where regulations required them to worship twice a day. They even sharpened logs to make a wall all the way around the first English town, or fort as they called it, for protection against both hostile tribes of American Indians and from the Spanish soldiers that lived to the south in Florida.
Most of the work of building Jamestown was done by the poor colonists. The other half of the colonists were wealthy members of England's upper class who, according to the old English ways of doing things, were not expected to work. This caused many bad feelings at the colony.
But that was just one problem Jamestown faced. Another was that it was built on swampy land that was bad for farming. Most of the drinking water was no good.
The swamps were filled with disease-carrying mosquitoes. And because of these things, as well as starvation, around 440 out of 500 colonists had died by the spring of 1610. It is not surprising that Jamestown almost failed. Not only because of illness and starvation, but because no gold had been discovered and because the colonists hadn't found any good ways of making a living.
But just when they were the most discouraged, new people came from England and they settled on healthier lands where they could farm. The Jamestown colonists were led for many years by this man. Captain John Smith.
He was an excellent governor, as well as an explorer and mapmaker. Smith put the upper class colonists to work. He kept everyone from starving by buying corn from the Native Americans, and also by learning how they hunted animals for food. One day, while John Smith was out exploring, he was captured and threatened with death by warriors from an unfriendly tribe.
only to be saved by the chief's daughter, Pocahontas. Later, she married one of the colonists and began dressing like an Englishwoman. Her husband, a plantation owner named John Rolfe, had worked for years developing a mild, sweet kind of tobacco. The English settlers in Virginia started raising lots of tobacco plants, and they grew quite well.
After the leaves were harvested and dried, The tobacco was shipped off to Europe, where the dangerous habit of smoking was just becoming popular. As the years passed, tobacco farming brought the colony great prosperity. In 1619, the people of Jamestown elected an assembly of men called the House of Burgesses to make laws for their growing colony. That turned out to be a very important year, because it was the beginning of representative... government in America.
Unfortunately, 1619 was important for another reason as well. It was the year the first African slaves were sold to Virginia tobacco planters by a Dutch trader. After that, thousands of more slaves were put to work in the colony's plantations, and this allowed their owners to live in fantastic luxury.
By the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, A powerful society of large plantation owners controlled the colonial legislature in Virginia. Two of the most famous of these Virginia gentlemen were George Washington, who maintained his beautiful plantation of Mount Vernon alongside the Potomac River, and Thomas Jefferson, whose grand plantation called Monticello, stood far to the west in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Both plantations had hundreds of slaves. The second southern colony, Maryland, received a royal charter in 1632, 25 years after Virginia was founded. Maryland was the first of what were called the proprietary colonies, that is, colonies that were run by an owner or proprietor.
The first proprietor of Maryland was a wealthy Catholic nobleman named Cecil Calvert, also known by his official title, Lord Baltimore. Proprietors such as Calvert were the men to whom kings granted colonial charters. Colonial charters normally required the proprietors to abide by basic English laws, but they were given the right to use the colony's land and to defend and administer the colony as they saw fit.
Calvert wanted the colony of Maryland to be a place in which large estates would be owned by Catholic noblemen, who would then profitably rent out the land to others. St. Mary's City, the first capital of Maryland, was founded in 1634, when colonists sailing from England arrived on the shores of a beautiful inlet of the Chesapeake Bay, not far from the eastern boundary of Virginia. On board the ships, were two Catholic priests and the families of 17 Catholic gentlemen. In addition, there were about 200 other people who were mostly members of the Church of England.
In the beginning, some colonists moved into houses in which Native Americans had lived. They furnished them with their own belongings, but soon they constructed English-style houses and other buildings. Over the years, St. Mary's City turned into a busy little port town, serving the needs of a major tobacco exporting colony.
As the headquarters for Maryland's colonial government, it was the The only place for colonists to come if they had dealings with the court. And to accommodate such travelers, St. Mary's City had a well-equipped ordinary or public inn. The young women who worked at the inn in St. Mary's City were indentured servants. Indentured servants were people who had signed a contract or indenture in which they agreed to work in the colony without pay, usually for around six years, in exchange for free transportation to America.
Indentured servants were common in all the colonies. Usually, they were people who had decided to leave England because of poverty. Although indentured servants provided a lot of cheap labor in Maryland and the other colonies, they were legally free to go as they pleased once their contracts had been fulfilled.
In fact, most of them stayed on to start their own farms and to raise families. In contrast, the colony's legal system bound the slaves who did most of the work on the plantations to a lifetime of forced labor. Religious struggles erupted in Maryland not long after it was founded. They occurred mainly because Catholics controlled its government, yet they made up only a small fraction of its population.
This caused resentment among many colonists. When Puritans, who strongly disliked Catholics, flooded into Maryland, violence broke out. To soothe his colonists, Lord Baltimore replaced the Catholic governor with a Protestant one. And even more importantly, in 1649, here at the colony's capital in St. Mary's City, Maryland enacted a Religious Toleration Act which guaranteed freedom of worship to all Christian faiths.
The Toleration Act was the first step ever taken to promote freedom of religion on the American soil. In 1649, The same year that Maryland was enacting its Toleration Act, King Charles I of England was beheaded for treason by order of the Parliament, and for the next decade, England had no king. But then the monarchy was restored under the dead king's son, King Charles II. The new king awarded the proprietorship of the land south of Virginia, known as Carolina, to eight loyal friends to... thanked them for their help in bringing him to the throne.
Two separate colonies, North and South Carolina, were later carved from the original Carolina colony. North Carolina was the site of England's first attempt at colonization in America. It all started in 1584 when Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to a vast region of land along the east coast of America to her friend Sir Walter Raleigh.
Explorers from England searched for a good site for a colony and they selected Roanoke Island just off the mainland of North Carolina. The following year, over 100 men and boys arrived at the island. Their goal was to create a base for supplying English warships.
But they soon realized that the island's shallow waters would make running such a base impossible. And so they abandoned their mission and returned to England. The next attempt at colonization happened two years later, when a group of 117 men, women, and children sailed off to colonize land further north in Virginia.
But due to some confusion, they ended up at Roanoke Island, too. After several months on the island, there were struggles with the Native Americans, and the colonists needed more supplies. So the ship that had brought them to America returned to England to get them. However, a major war broke out between Spain and England, and the English needed every ship they could find.
As a result, three years passed by before the supply ship could safely return to Roanoke Island. When the ship finally got back in 1590, the island was deserted. In fact, the only sign of the colonists were the letters C-R-O, carved in a tree. These letters may have been a reference to Croatoan Island to the south.
But to this day, the fate of the Roanoke colonists of North Carolina remains a great mystery, and no trace of them has ever been found. By the time the eight lords proprietors began to govern North Carolina in 1663, a small area not far from Roanoke Island had already been settled by a few people who had been indentured servants and small-time tobacco farmers in Virginia. The town of Bath, seen here, is the oldest town in North Carolina, founded in 1705. Three years after it was founded, Bath had 12 houses, a shipyard, a mill for grinding grain, and 50 residents.
The town was frequently visited by a man named Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, a pirate who terrorized shipping lanes along the southern coast of America. During its early days, North Carolina's main exports were tobacco, furs, and forest products for wooden ships. such as timbers, turpentine, pitch, resin, and tar.
Eventually, North Carolina changed from being a privately owned proprietorship colony to a royal colony. The king built a beautiful palace for his governor, William Tyron, right before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. And for a short time, Tyron Palace served as the home of North Carolina's colonial legislature.
But another purpose of this fine building was to remind the colonists of England's strength and greatness during a time of growing political turmoil in America. The colony of South Carolina, founded in 1663, was first settled on and around a narrow peninsula of land where two great rivers flow into the ocean. The city that was built here, starting in 1670, was named Charleston, in honor of King Charles II. Charleston eventually became the fourth largest city in the English colonies, and one of the wealthiest. In contrast, the colony of North Carolina never had a large city.
The first colonists in South Carolina arrived by ship from England late in the year 1669. and settled near here on the banks of the Ashley River. They established small farms, traded in furs, and exported forest products for wooden ships, as the settlers in the North were doing. Starting in the 1680s, persecuted Protestants from Europe immigrated to South Carolina to farm and find religious freedom. The flat swampy South Carolina Lowcountry was perfect for growing rice, and it was mainly this crop that brought them prosperity.
Later on, planters in South Carolina raised a plant called indigo, from whose leaves a valuable blue dye is derived. Eventually, indigo became a major export of the colony as well. Rice was grown on huge plantations, and it required a large number of workers to produce. As a result, thousands of African slaves were brought in, so that by 1699, there were four black slaves for every white person in the colony. Slavery on this scale resulted in the creation of a powerful upper class made up of extremely wealthy planters.
many of whom lived in and around Charleston. This mansion, called Drayton Hall, is a good example of a wealthy South Carolina planter's house. It stands on the banks of a river and once overlooked the plantation's huge rice fields. Planters who lived in enormous houses like this one like to show off their wealth in other ways, too. In fact, Visitors to a plantation house usually had to pass down a long drive along which stood row after row of slave cabins that were intentionally placed there so the visitors would be impressed with how many expensive slaves the owner possessed.
Those seen here at Boone Hall Plantation are only a third of the 27 cabins that once stood here. These cabins were for the use of household and skilled craftsman slaves alone. Cabins of the much more lowly field slaves stood further away from the house. The colony of Georgia was founded in 1732. It was the last of England's American colonies and it was the only one founded in the 18th century.
Georgia was created in the area of disputed land that lay between the colony of South Carolina and Spanish Florida. But more than a decade before the charter was even granted for the colony of Georgia, the British had staked their claim to the region by establishing Fort King George along the swampy banks of the Altamaha River. Originally, an Indian village had stood on the site of the fort, And in the late 1500s and 1600s, the Spanish had a mission there. The purpose of this fort was to prevent the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana from moving any closer to the Carolina colonies.
Fort King George didn't last long because it cost the British government too much to operate, and so most of its troops were withdrawn after only six years. Nevertheless, While it was in operation, more than 140 British soldiers died there from malaria, malnutrition, and from skirmishes with the Indians while defending the southern frontier of the American colonies. A royal charter for Georgia was granted by King George II, for whom it was named, to a group of men who shared a common humanitarian vision. The trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in America.
The leader of the trustees was a man named James Oglethorpe. He was a person who understood the importance of establishing strong defenses against the Spanish. But more importantly, Oglethorpe and the other trustees wanted the lands of Georgia to be used by impoverished English Protestants, who had been locked up in debtor's prisons for being unable to pay their bills.
The trustees wanted to turn Georgia into a place where hard-working, virtuous people could prosper on family farms. And so they made grants of only small amounts of land to prevent big plantations from being developed. They outlawed slavery in Georgia, not just for humanitarian reasons, but because they believed that the moral benefits of hard work would be lost if slavery was allowed. The trustees even banned the sale of rum, mainly because this alcoholic drink had been used as an item of trade in other colonies with American Indians, and its effect on them had been very destructive. In February 1733, a ship carrying James Oglethorpe and around 120 settlers sailed up the Savannah River, the river that formed the boundary between the colony of South Carolina and the new colony of Georgia.
With the help of a friendly Native American, a site for Savannah, the new capital of Georgia was purchased. The land they selected was situated on a low bluff, overlooking the river about 10 miles upstream from the ocean. Oglethorpe oversaw the planning of the town, which he laid out in a distinctive style, made up of regularly spaced public squares, surrounded by houses and public buildings. For the first 10 years, Oglethorpe acted as the colony's governor, representing the trustees back in Britain, and he ruled without the help of a colonial legislature.
Only six years after Georgia was founded, war broke out with Spain over the slave trade, and Governor Oglethorpe was ordered to attack their outpost of St. Augustine in Florida. For a month, 900 British soldiers and 1100 of their American Indian allies laid siege to the city, but they didn't have enough men to capture it. After that, as commander of all the troops in Georgia and the Carolinas, Oglethorpe continued to make improvements in his colony's defenses. Here on St. Simons Island, not far from the border of Florida, the English outpost of Fort Frederica was strengthened.
Since stone was non-existent on the island, oyster shells were burned to make crude concrete called tabby to construct the fort's main buildings. During this time, Fort Frederico grew into a small town with many buildings, 500 citizens, and a large number of soldiers. Naturally, the fort was a tempting target for the Spanish forces just to the south.
It was three years after the British attack on St. Augustine that the Spanish tried to strike back at Fort Frederica. But British troops ambushed the Spanish, just as they were sneaking up on the outpost. During the battle, the Spanish were able to get to the outpost.
A battle of bloody marsh that followed, one British and 200 Spanish soldiers were killed. After that, the Spanish threat to Britain's southern colonies ceased to be a serious problem. During its first ten years as a colony, Georgia did not prosper. Few settlers had made the voyage to the Georgia shore, and about half of those that had come had done so at the trustees'expense.
And the trustees'goal of turning it into a place where poor people could come to start new lives had been a failure. In fact, most Georgians felt that the trustees'rules were what was actually holding the colony back. Under the rules, Georgians couldn't develop large rice plantations like those in South Carolina or have slaves, couldn't buy rum, and had no voice in the colony's government. In other words, they wanted to see big changes made. Because the colonists were so unhappy with how things were going in Georgia, James Oglethorpe realized that his humanitarian dreams for the colony would never come true.
And so, broke and feeling defeated, he returned to England and never came back again. In the years that followed his departure, the trustees'rules were changed. and in 1754, Georgia fell under the control of the king and became much more like the other southern colonies, a place where rum flowed freely and where slavery and large rice plantations flourished.
True or false? Virginia was founded by men seeking religious freedom. True or false?
Cotton was the main export of the Virginia colony. True or false? The first proprietor of Maryland was a Catholic. True or false? Indentured servants provided cheap labor in Maryland.
True or false? The first tries at colonizing Roanoke Island failed. True or false?
North Carolina's assembly met at Tyron Palace. True or false? South and North Carolina were once a single colony.
True or false? Rice was raised on the big slave plantations of South Carolina. True or false?
Georgia was the last English colony founded in America. True or false? James Oglethorpe was one of the trustees of the Georgia colony.