Hello everyone. My name is Dr George Pabis. I'm your professor and today we will discuss the Southern Colonies to 1700. The English were very late to the game. The Spanish had been exploring the Americas for over one hundred years. but now the English wanted their share. They had tried to set up some colonies earlier and those had failed, but their first successful colony and it was barely a success, was the founding of Jamestown on April26, 1607. The first building was a fort and it showed you right away the situation of the colonists--they were moving into a territory in which natives were living. There always was the chance that the Spanish would attack. Remember, Spain claimed all of North America. The English colonists at Jamestown came there to set up farms and maybe find goods that they could trade with the mother country back in England. Many of these colonists were actually not farmers at all. They were traders. They were craftsman. Even if you were a farmer, were you knowledgeable enough of the local conditions to farm--that was a huge problem. They also set up their colony in a marshy swamp land filled with mosquitoes. The natives were quite powerful. Powhatan was part of a confederation. He was an Algonquian chief. Luckily for the English settlers at Jamestown, Powhatan needed allies against other Native American tribes. Thankfully he helped them by offering them food and kept them alive. Even with the help of Powhatan, the majority of the settlers in Jamestown died in that first year. Many who came afterwards, many of them will die as well. It would take many years before Jamestown's population would be stable. The colonists could not feed themselves for ten years. The relationship between that colonists in Jamestown and the Native Americans was one of codependency--they needed each other. But as Jamestown became more stable and no longer needed the natives, problems began. They wanted more land as more people came. Powhatan was able to keep the peace, but when he died and his brother took over, Powhatan's brother launched an all out attack on the colony. In 1622, the colonists beat back the Native Americans, but now you have a perpetual hostility between the two. The colonists have learned a lesson--we can't trust these people. Ultimately, they want us out of here. And of course the Native Americans were saying the same thing. These people are invading our land, and just going to want more land. We need to push them out. That's really the story of American history that will see played over and over again: coexistence or hostility. In the long run, can there be coexistence with two independent people or will one have to be subservient to the other. The war on Native Americans had political consequences in Jamestown. Since its founding, the Virginia Company ran Jamestown. But after the attack and the terrible losses, and we'll see this played out in other colonies as well, the king took over and appointed a royal governor. Despite this change. local autonomy, local control over their lives, remained the case. The people pretty much governed themselves on a local level. The got trained in politics, and this will even be more true in other colonies. As we shall see, the English colonists at Jamestown had defeated the Native Americans, but could they find a cash crop to sell to England? The people who came to Jamestown did not want to live a subsistence type of life. They wanted to make money. They wanted to sell things to Europe and prosper. Finally, they found a plant that was grown by the Native Americans that they could sell on the market: that was tobacco. Tobacco was smoked by Native Americans and the colonists tried it. After a while, they got hooked. Tobacco was sent to Europe, and the Europeans liked it as well. Jamestown had its cash crop. Now as you grow tobacco, who's going to work the fields? Jamestown really never had that many people. So how do we get people to work our fields? What they did was turn to indentured servants. Indentured servitude was a contract. a labor contract. It is not slavery. It is two people that sign a contract. and that contract itself is sold from a merchant to a tobacco planter. Eighty percent of the English colonists who came to Jamestown, Virginia in the 1600s were indentured servants. In the 1600s, there's a huge increase in population among the rural poor of England. There are few jobs in the rural countryside. and the chances of getting land were none. Then someone comes up to you and offers you a chance to go to the English colonies in the Americas. This may be your chance to own land some day, but I don't have any money. We'll take care of that. We'll pay your cost of transporting you to the colonies. For five to seven years you will work for someone to pay it off. When the contract has been fulfilled, they would give you implements and land and you will become an independent farmer--your dream would come true. There were severe punishments if you broke the contract and ran away. Basically, you were treated pretty much like a runaway slave. Sadly, more than fifty percent of the indentured servants never survived pass those five to seven years. Those who survived got themselves a farm. You can imagine that over time, as there are more and more farmers. there would be some tensions between those that have a lot of land, the planters with plantations versus the small farmers. Of course, there's always the tension between those who have land and those who are indentured servants. As the years progressed especially once you get past the 1660s and 1670s, the prices of tobacco went down. We're not as prosperous anymore, and the way to get more profit is to acquire more land. So the plantations are expanding. The free farmers unless they expand, they are in economic trouble. And there are more and more free farmers. The hopes and dreams of the indentured servants getting some land, and even if they do get some land, being able to actually prosper on their farm was becoming harder and harder. And then came regulations from England. There are more and more regulations put on the English colonies by England. One new regulation stated that the colonists can only trade with England. Whatever you make you have to sell it to England, but we can fetch higher prices from France! No no no no no no! You have to trade with England and English merchants would get a percentage. They also instituted a tax on tobacco. The English colonists in Virginia are wondering: are these regulations fair? We'll see these problems develop further and further. In the Chesapeake society, it all came to a head with Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. You can be poor in the society as long as you believe that you have a chance to survive; a chance to start a family; maybe someday buy a house; buy some land; and make it. And if you see the government helping you out, well you're OK with it. But if you see that maybe the elites, the rich people in society are benefiting from government more than you and maybe you're not benefiting from government at all, you're going to be upset. Of course, there's another factor here-- not just economics. And it's the Indians. The government of the Chesapeake wanted peace with the Indians. And what did the Indians want? The colonists to keep off their land. What did the new immigrants want? More land. Where can they get more land? From the Indians. So government buy more land, get more land from the Indians! The government says no--we're not going to do that for the poor settlers west of the plantation areas. The government seems to be ignoring them. In fact, it seems to them that their government is in cahoots with Native Americans who control vast expanses of land that these poor settlers want. It's basically a tension between the more settled areas of a colony and the frontier areas and we'll see this over and over. Really, it's a story of American history. The West is always different from the eastern part of the county. Bacon's Rebellion: the name comes from a man named Daniel Bacon. He became a very well-spoken leader of the frontier settlers. Basically, he was accusing the government of working for the planters, the rich elite, and organized a voting campaign. When elections came for the local council, Bacon got into the legislature of Virginia colony and this is very important. You see there is a governor, but there is the House of Burgess, a legislative body in Virginia. Bacon got himself elected and his supporters got elected and they were so numerous that they began passing reforms that help small farmers. Governor Berkeley sees Bacon as a dangerous troublemaker. Bacon wants all the Native Americans pushed out, whereas Berkeley had been working to make peace with the Native Americans. When Berkeley declares him a traitor, Bacon rebels. Jamestown is burned down. And it looks like the frontier people and the small farmers have won. but then disaster struck when Bacon died from a disease. The leadership of the frontier people are arguing with each other. Berkeley's troops captured the ringleaders of the rebellion. Then, they have them executed. In a surprise move, Berkeley and the elites give into rebel demands. They basically say: go ahead, attack the Native Americans, push them out and take their land. The planter elite realized that compromise was necessary. Berkeley would be soon dismissed from his position and sent back to England and a new governor was brought in. Virginia still had one more problem it had to face and that was it had a labor shortage. It needed people to work the tobacco fields. The indentured servants servants weren't coming in as they used to because the economy in England got better. The news and rumors that half of all indentured servants never got any land because they died while in servitude, decreased the number of English people willing to put up with that. Who can replaced the indentured servants? Remember the slave system in Africa? Slave labor. The Spanish and Portuguese were already using slave labor in the Americas. The first slaves came to South Carolina from Barbados. Basically, planters who moved from Barbados moved into South Carolina to set up rice plantations to feed Barbados. The Caribbean ultimately becomes one huge sugar production system. They don't even grow corn. They don't grow any food. Every square acre they can get devoted to sugar production. Slaves are being imported. They're worked to death on about six to eight years, and you get new slaves. The money that's being made is huge. Slaves in South Carolina are a success. Virginia brings slavery to the Chesapeake. In 1700, one out of eight people are black. It's still small number. This ratio will increase. By 1700, the Virginians have learned that slavery is economically viable, but also that when an African slave runs away, if someone spots them, you can tell by their skin color that they were slaves. Race becomes an issue now. But slavery also has an advantage in white society because the tension between poor whites and rich whites goes down. The racist ideology that develops in Virginia and in other companies states that the whites, no matter how poor, are superior to the black Africans races. And slavery subdued the tensions between rich and poor whites in Virginia because poor whites could benefit from slavery by working on the plantations as overseers, having control over the slaves. The white planters no longer had to worry about importing indentured servants who would one day have to be given farms and who would potentially rebel against them. In contrast, African slaves were going to be slaves for all their lives and so were their descendants. The threat of a slave rebellion would be crushed by all the whites working together. White society in Virginia became more stable by encouraging the enslavement of other human beings--the Africans. As the historian Edmund Morgan noted, liberty and slavery were intertwined in Virginia's history through the colonial period and beyond. We'lll stop here. Thank you very much, and have a good day. Bye-bye.