COLONIAL SOUTH Trade, Slavery, and the Emergence of a Settler Society

THE CAROLINAS

1663 8 proprietors

6 directors of Royal African Company

Colony named Carolina in honor of Charles II

1670 Charles Town

Indian Trade

Indigo, Rice and Sea Island Cotton

African slaves

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUTIONS

Attempted to establish feudal manors with quitrents

Farmers refused to work on the large manors or pay quitrents

Some early agriculture but were mainly founded on trade in “slaves and skins”

INDIAN SLAVE TRADE

INDIAN SLAVE TRADE

Dominates the economy for first 75 years of colony

Indian slaves taken by more powerful Indian groups were traded with the English for guns and sent to the sugar plantations in the West Indies

Rice and Indigo did not become a commodity until the 18th century

THE LOWER SOUTH, 1660-1730

Carolinas

Georgia

Planters

Debtors

CHARLES TOWN PORT

SOUTHERN COLONIES

CROPS OF THE CAROLINAS

RICE & INDIGO EXPORTS

TUSCARORA WAR, 1711

YAMASEE WAR, 1715

JAMES OGLETHORPE

GEORGIA

Founded in 1732 as a buffer between the Carolinas and the Spanish settlements

Penal colony

Social reformers sought to help English poor

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER1. What impact did Tomochichi have on the Georgia

Colony?

2. Explain two ways Mary Musgrove assisted the Georgia colonists

1733 SAVANNAH

WHITE OVER BLACK?

Why race based slavery? Some considerations and arguments, although the debate is quite

varied and still a matter of contention:

Concepts of “otherness” and inferiorityColor, especially the concept of “black” as having a connotation of sinister, foul, or malignant

Biblical citations of HamNeed for ready labor in a land that was abundant

CULTURE OF POWER

Between “Kings” and “Slaves” lay a hierarchical chain of being in which every single person had an assigned place and defined role.

Robert Olwell, “Masters and Slave, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country”

TOWARDS A BLACK MAJORITY “Unlike white servants, Negroes could be held for unlimited terms, and there was no means by which word of harsh or arbitrary treatment could reach their homelands or affect the further flow of slaves.”

Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina

4 CORNERS OF LAW IN THE COLONIAL

SOUTH:GodKing

MastersMarket

WHAT WAS THE PLANTATION? A place of production

A little kingdom of rice, money, and power

What else was it?

By the late 17th century, Virginia had a plantation economy in search of a labor force, whereas South Carolina had a labor force in search of a plantation economy

THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION “The plantation’s distinguishing mark was its peculiar social order, which conceded nearly everything to the slaveowner and nothing to the slave. In theory, the planters’ rule was complete. The Great House, nestled among manufactories, shops, barns, sheds, and various other outbuildings, which were called, with a nice sense of the plantation’s social hierarchy, ‘dependencies,’ dominated the landscape, the physical and architectural embodiment of the planters’ hegemony. By the masters’ authority radiated from the great estates to the statehouses, courtrooms, countinghouses, churches, colleges, taverns, racetracks, private clubs and the like.”

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

RACE IS A SOCIAL HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION “Slavery in itself continually changed… Slavery was never made, but instead was continually remade, for power– no matter how great– was never absolute, but always contingent.”

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America