early modern southeastern north america and the broader atlantic and american worlds

8/12/2019 Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds

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Southern Historical ssociation

Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American WorldsAuthor(s): Jack P. GreeneSource: The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Aug., 2007), pp. 525-538Published by: Southern Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649477.

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Early Modern Southeastern NorthAmerica and the Broader Atlantic andAmerican Worlds

By Jack P. Greene

JrllSTORIANS OF NEITHER THE INDIGENOUS INHABITANTSOF THE MAINLANDof southeastern North America nor the colonies Europeans establishedthere after 1560 have ever been comfortable working with the framework of the history of the South. The very idea of the South as adistinctive entity characterized by slavery, large numbers of people ofAfrican descent, large plantations producing staple crops for export,low investment in education and other social amenities, and deep religiosity makes sense only in theAmerican national context that tookshape during the fiftyyears following theAmerican Revolution and thesubsequent creation of a new federal state that by the 1820s had,however tenuously, drawn all the inhabitants of southeastern NorthAmerica into a national union. Only as a consequence of their experiences within that union did the people of these discrete politicalsocieties come to understand, first, that they had a common interest inrelation to other segments of the union and, over time, that they had acommon identity and composed a distinctive region within it.To be sure, the political societies that evolved out of these earlycolonies all subsequently became parts of the South and, to one degreeor another, shared in the defining of its attributes. Indeed, as the Southbecame a self-conscious entity in the years after the MissouriCompromise, residents of those old societies, especially Virginians andSouth Carolinians, often acted as leaders in the construction of a southern regional consciousness. Ifhistorians of the South have been contentto search the pasts of the colonies for the rudiments of the later South,and if some students of the southern colonies have been complicitousin such projects, most colonialists have found the anachronism anddecontextualization inherent in such undertakings discomforting and

Mr. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University.The Journal of Southern HistoryVolume LXXIII, No. 3, August 2007

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526 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYhave suspected that they would lead to distorted interpretations. Formore than a century, the urge to avoid such disfigurement has drivenhistorians of the early modern Southeast to seek frameworks that didnot treat their areas of study as anterooms to the histories of theUnitedStates and its subset, the South.The historians involved in this endeavor have been remarkably successful. They have represented the early modern southeastern coloniesas outposts or extensions of theEuropean empires towhich theywereattached and, further, as products of early modern European expansion,populated by European and African immigrants and culturally fusedwith indigenous peoples. Historians have used the perspectives of empire and of expansion to highlight the significance and changing character of European attachments, the concept of diaspora to focusattention on the extent and depth of theAfrican connection, and theidea of encounter to investigate the impact of both upon the indigenouspopulations who inhabited the Southeast in considerable numbers before and after the arrival of Europeans and Africans. Two additionaland complementary perspectives, the Atlantic and the panhemispheric, offer still other routes by which historians of the earlymodern Southeast may escape the pitfalls of anachronism and set theirarea of study in an even broader contemporary context.1Historical investigation over the past century has revealed that theearly modern Southeast was, by any measure, a place of extraordinarydiversity. Its indigenous inhabitants were descendants of urbandwelling and mound-building Mississippian peoples who had reachedtheir zenith in the thirteenth century. At the time of their encounterwith Europeans in the sixteenth century, they spoke a variety of languages and were divided into several large chiefdoms and confederacies and several hundred smaller nations. Many of these people weresedentary and agricultural, a few were sedentary and subsisted onmarine resources, and others supplemented their part-time agriculturewith hunting and gathering or were non-agricultural and seasonally

1See Jack P. Greene, Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and theRe-Creation of theEarly Modern Atlantic World, inJack P. Greene, Interpreting Early America:Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville, 1996), 17-42; David Armitage, Three Concepts ofAtlantic History,* inDavid Armitage and Michael J.Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World,1500 IHOO (New York, 2002), 11-30; and Jack P. Greene, Comparing Early Modern AmericanWorlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective, History Compass, 1(2003), http://www.blackwell-synergy.eom/doi/full/10.l 1 11/1478-0542.026.



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REASSESSING THE COLONIAL SOUTH 527nomadic. Despite severe demographic decline, a result ofwar, enslavement, and their susceptibility toEuropean diseases, they continued fortwo centuries to be numerically predominant in the region as a whole.As late as 1760 theywere twice as numerous as whites in the vast areassouth and west of the nodes of European settlement on the Atlanticcoast. With a long history of creating new collectivities, moreover,they showed themselves to be incredibly adaptive, repeatedly secedingand combining to form new groups, some of which constituted powerful nations and others of which lived on themargins of colonialsocieties and entered into webs of economic, social, and political exchange with European settlers. By 1776 the indigenous population hadstabilized, and it held sway over much of the vast area between theCarolinas and theMississippi River Valley.2The Europeans who came to the area were similarly diverse, representing three different national states with divergent legal cultures andstyles of colonization. The Spanish established the first permanentEuropean colony in 1565 on the northern fringes of Spain's Americandominion, naming itFlorida and conceiving of itprincipally as a strategic outpost on the return route of silver fleets. Attracting few Spanishsettlers, it consisted of a presidio in St. Augustine and a hinterland ofmore than twenty-six thousand evangelized Indians organized into selfgoverning mission provinces that in the middle of the seventeenthcentury extended from north Florida intoGeorgia and from theAtlanticto the Gulf of Mexico. Florida's support system, providing royal subsidies to the Indians in return for their agricultural products and labor,was unique in early European colonial relations in southeastern NorthAmerica. By the early eighteenth century, proxy wars and slave raidinggenerated by the English to the north had destroyed this extensivemission system and reduced Florida to a citadel at St. Augustine, twoposts on theGulf, at Pensacola and San Marcos, and a few hundredrefugee Indians and fugitive slaves. The small export economy that haddeveloped in the seventeenth century around deerskins, ranch products,naval stores, and provisions for the port of Havana had become acasualty of war and Indian flight. In an unrelated colonizing ventureduring the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Spanish,

2Amy Turner Bushnell, The First Southerners: Indians of theEarly South, in JohnB. Boles,ed., A Companion to the American South (Maiden, Mass., 2002), 3-23, provides an excellentessay on the literature on this subject.



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528 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYpushing the frontier of New Spain north, established a presidio and amission and began to settle in San Antonio, Texas.When theEnglish came to southern North America, they brought anentirely different pattern of colonization. With settlement as theirprincipal objective, the English colonies?Virginia and Maryland in theChesapeake in the early seventeenth century, the two Carolinas in thelatter half of the seventeenth century, Georgia in the early eighteenthcentury, and, briefly, East andWest Florida between 1763 and 1783?promoted large-scale British immigration, privatized landholding, created consensual polities, imposed legal and religious practices, andused unfree labor?European, Indian, and African?to produce staplecrops?tobacco in theChesapeake and northern Carolina; naval stores,rice, and indigo in the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Floridas?for export. Although theEnglish developed a brisk tradewith the Indians indeerskins and, until the late 1720s, in Indian slaves and used Indianallies as proxies inmilitary contests with the Spanish, the Englishshowed little interest in evangelizing Indians and, in contrast to theSpanish in Florida, segregated themselves from indigenous populations. Driven by land hunger, the aggressive settler population in theEnglish colonies expanded rapidly. By the 1760s and 1770s, it haddriven the Indians out of and occupied most of the area up to theAppalachian Mountains and was spilling across those mountains intothe eastern reaches of theMississippi River Valley.4The last to make permanent settlements on the southern NorthAmerican mainland, the French established the colony of Louisiana in1699, beginning with posts along the gulf at Biloxi andMobile and, in1718, inNew Orleans. Although the colony attracted farmore metropolitan immigrants than Spanish Florida had and rather early developed the rudiments of a plantation economy using slave labor toproduce indigo and other staples for export, the area occupied by whiteimmigrants remained relatively small, with a core of fairly dense settlement radiating out from New Orleans and several scattered grainproducing settlements, often associated with trading posts, extendingnorth up theMississippi and its tributaries. Outside the areas of

3See Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain 's Support System for thePresidioand Mission Provinces of Florida (Athens, Ga., 1994); Bushnell, First Southerners, 11; andDavid J.Weber, The Spanish Frontier inNorth America (New Haven, 1992), 191-95.4 See Jack P. Greene, Pursuits ofHappiness: The Social Development of Early Modern BritishColonies and theFormation ofAmerican Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988), 81-100, 141-51, 170-206.



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REASSESSING THE COLONIAL SOUTH 529commercial agriculture, French relations with Indians fell somewherebetween those of the Spanish and those of theEnglish and involved asignificant degree of mutual interaction.5If the differences among these areas of national colonial occupationwere striking, there were also significant variations within them, especially in the case of themore densely settled (with Europeans andAfricans) sphere of British colonization. Notwithstanding the commonalities deriving from theirEnglish origins and continuing connections with the m?tropole, the Chesapeake colonies, including thenorthern portions of North Carolina, differed radically from those tothe south. Students of these colonies have always shared an awarenessof these variations, but the distinctions have been made ever moreexplicit over the last forty years as a result of a significant expansionand deepening of the historical literature.Founded during the first half of the seventeenth century, theChesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland produced their principal staple, tobacco, in a mixed agricultural economy. They employedmassive amounts of unfree labor, but before the closing decades of theseventeenth century, the workers were mostly indentured servants ofBritish origin. Enslaved Africans only became thepredominant form oflabor during the early decades of the eighteenth century and neverconstituted more than 40 percent of the total of a rapidly expandingpopulation through themiddle decades of the eighteenth century. As amode of economic organization, plantations with thirtyor more slavesaccounted for less than about a fifthof the land under tobacco culture,the typical establishments being much smaller family farms of a fewhundred acres worked by family members and fewer than ten slaves.By the early decades of the eighteenth century very few indigenesremained within or lived adjacent to the principal areas of settler expansion. The Chesapeake colonies were thus essentially yeoman cultures, the vast majority of property-owning settlers being smallfreeholders, whose holdings were surrounded by a few plantations,often no more than two or three per county. In these cultures not onlythe large planters but also the yeomanry had prominent roles in a civiclife that was fundamentally consensual, especially in the localities.By the time of the American Revolution, many prominent white

5See Daniel H. Usner Jr., Borderlands, inDaniel Vickers, ed., A Companion toColonialAmerica (Maiden, Mass., 2003), 408-24.



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530 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYChesapeake residents were beginning to recognize the problems a slaveeconomy had created forVirginia and, buying into the new antislaveryrhetoric emanating from Europe, were sympathetic to proposals foreliminating slavery. Along with a growing emphasis on wheat andgrain production, this ambivalence about slavery made some

Marylanders and Virginians think of their states as central states thatmore closely resembled Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York thantheydid the eastern states ofNew England or the southern states of thetwo Carolinas and Georgia.6The southern portions of North Carolina, South Carolina, and

Georgia, all settled after 1670, presented a striking contrast. For theirfirst century, they centered around a Lowcountry cultural core radiating from Charleston, the South Carolina capital, never penetratingmore than fiftymiles from theAtlantic, and stretching north into theCape Fear region of North Carolina and, after the removal of a ban onslavery in themid-eighteenth century, south into coastal Georgia and,after 1763, the new British colonies of East andWest Florida. Significantly influenced by the successful example of Barbados, from whichmany early immigrants came, this culture early came to rely on theinstitutions of the large plantation and slave labor for its economicbase. Although this area always engaged in enough mixed agricultureto feed itself, used the heavy forests to produce naval stores, andcarried on a brisk trade in deerskins and Indian slaves with the numerous indigenes who inhabited the region, it rapidly shifted to the production of rice and, in the 1740s, indigo. Following a model workedout in the sugar culture of Barbados, Lowcountry planters producedrice on large plantations with high concentrations of imported Africanslaves. Already by the first decade of the eighteenth century, blacksconstituted amajority of thepopulation in the core parishes, and by the1730s blacks outnumbered whites bymore than two to one, a ratio thatin some Lowcountry parishes reached as high as nine to one, as whiteplanter families typically lived not on theirplantations but in thegrowing urban port of Charleston, by far the largest colonial city on the

6See Greene, Pursuits ofHappiness, 7-18, 81-100; James Horn, Adapting to a New World:English Society in theSeventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, 1994); Philip D. Morgan,Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry(Chapel Hill, 1998); and Jack P. Greene, The Constitution of 1787 and theQuestion of SouthernDistinctiveness, inRobert J.Haws, ed., The South's Role in theCreation of the Bill of Rights(Jackson, Miss., 1991), 9-31, 147-49.



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REASSESSING THE COLONIAL SOUTH 531southern North American mainland. In contrast to the Chesapeakeand the West Indies, where slaves produced staples in gangs, theLowcountry labor system of rice production typically used the tasksystem, assigning slaves specific jobs and permitting considerablescope for their own economic projects once they had completed thosetasks.7

Of course, these diverse societies?consisting of many scatteredindigenous nations, colonies attached to three separate empires, andlarge distinctive settler cultures within themore heavily settled Britishterritories that were further divided into five or, briefly after 1763,seven separate polities, each with its own discrete pattern of civic lifeand identity?had some contact with one another. Each of the colonieshad extensive interactions with indigenous peoples, principally throughtrade, slave raiding, or war. Indigenous nations and Spanish Floridaprovided refuges for runaway slaves from the British colonies, and asmall clandestine trade flowed between Spanish Florida and the lowersouthern British colonies. However, thesemany political societies wereall also discrete entities. The indigenous nations were scattered, onlyloosely connected or completely disconnected from one another andsometimes at war among themselves; and the colonies all were muchmore closely tied to the European m?tropole towhich theywere politically, economically, and culturally attached than to the colonies ofother national empires within the region. To the extent that individualcolonies had intensive interactions with other colonies, itwas withthose within the empires to which they belonged, e.g., the Britishcolonies with the British West Indian or other continental colonies,French Louisiana with the French settlements in the Illinois country,

Canada, or the French Caribbean islands, and Spanish Florida withCuba and New Spain, to both of which it had administrative attachments. Clearly, if these colonial spaces existed within the physicalsetting of the southern North American mainland, they also operated inand were constituent parts of the larger national imperial contexts towhich theywere connected by powerful ties of governance, law, trade,and cultural heritage.

7See Greene, Pursuits ofHappiness, 141-51; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; S. Max Edelson,Plantation Enterprise inColonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); and Bradford J.Wood, This Remote Part of theWorld: Regional Formation inLower Cape Fear, North Carolina,1725-1775 (Columbia, S.C., 2004).



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532 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYThrough a great number of monographs, many different historianscontributed to the construction of this understanding of early modernsoutheastern North America largely without benefit of an explicitlyAtlantic or pan-hemispheric perspective. To be sure, the imperial and

expansion-of-Europe frameworks within which they setmost of theirwork were always implicitly and often explicitly transatlantic, involving the comparison of colonial cultures with metropolitan cultures andthe explication of the continuing ties between metropolises and colonies in all areas of colonial life. Stimulated by the civil rightsmovement and the new historical consciousness relating to black Americathat itproduced, other historians used the concept of diaspora to studythe slave trade, theAfrican roots ofAmerican cultures, thewidespreaddistribution of African slaves throughout theAmerican world, and thediversity of the slave experience inAmerica and thereby also focusedattention on the transatlantic exchanges that characterized the newAmerican worlds created after 1492.8 Still others, using the concept ofencounter, examined the effects of the intrusion of Europeans andAfricans upon the old worlds of theAmericas and the vast culturalchanges provoked by this ongoing encounter.9 Indeed, it can be saidthat this body of work laid the groundwork for the development ofbroader conceptions of theAtlantic basin and theWestern Hemisphereas interconnected spaces in which similar social processes were atwork. The result has been the identification of ^ useful area of studythat can be called Atlantic orWestern Hemispheric history.How the rapid emergence ofAtlantic history as an area of studymaychange theway historians think about early modern southeastern NorthAmerica is as yet unclear. So far,Atlantic history has mostly been, inJ.H. Elliott's words, a history conceived in terms of connections,producing much new detail about many aspects of the complex andchanging relationships that bridged and surrounded theAtlantic butlittle about the new worlds that developed within the four Atlanticcontinents.10 For the study of those worlds, however, the greatestpromise of an Atlantic framework is that itmay encourage more his

8 See Philip D. Morgan, African Americans, in Vickers, ed., Companion to ColonialAmerica, 138-71, and David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in theAmericas (New York,2000).9 See the excellent article by James H. Merrell, Indian History during theEnglish ColonialEra, inVickers, ed., Companion toColonial America, 118-37.10J.H. Elliott, Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation, inArmitage and Braddick, eds.,British Atlantic World, 236-37 (quotation on p. 237).



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REASSESSING THE COLONIAL SOUTH 533torians to look across imperial and national boundaries and exploretransnational continuities and similarities and thereby create broadercontexts of comparison that will at once stimulate an appreciation ofthe general contours of the early modern New World experience,clarify understanding of the manifold specific variations within thatexperience, and enable historians to fit the particular areas they studyinto that general context.With reference to the early modern Americas, scholars from avariety of disciplines have been moving in this direction formorethan a quarter century. Although he totally neglected developmentsin the southern continent, D. W. Meinig, working in the field ofhistorical geography, in the first volume of The Shaping of America:A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, published in1986, employed the concept Atlantic America as a framework for histransnational discussion of European intrusions into North Americabefore 1800.11 In the same year, Peter Hulme, a literary analyst deeplyinfluenced by postcolonial perspectives, used the concept of an extended Caribbean to call attention to commonalities inEuropean understandings of the encounter with indigenous peoples and thesubsequent colonial process in a broad area stretching from English

Virginia south to Portuguese Salvador.12 Perhaps more useful for students of early modern southeastern North America is the concept of aplantation complex that has emerged principally out of the work of themany historians who over the past four decades interested themselvesin theAfrican slave trade and themany inscriptions of African slaveryupon American social landscapes.Like the idea of an extended Caribbean, the concept of a plantationcomplex calls attention to the ubiquity of a form of settlement thatstretched across national and imperial boundaries and encompassed asubstantial area of the Americas. Distinguishing plantation coloniesfrom settlement colonies inwhich themajority of the populations wereof European origin, Philip D. Curtin defined the primary attributes ofthe former in a succinct volume published in 1990. These attributesincluded location in a tropical or semitropical and fertile space, theoverwhelming predominance of unfree labor, a majority slave population that was non-self-sustaining and had to be replenished by

1D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years ofHistory. Vol. I: Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (New Haven, 1986).12Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797(London, 1986), 3-4.



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534 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYcontinuing imports, organization of agricultural production aroundlarge-scale capitalist plantations, and a powerful focus on the production of staples for foreign export. Curtin finds the purest examples ofthis complex in the sugar colonies. Although Spaniards brought sugarculture from the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic islands to

Hispaniola and to New Spain during the first half of the sixteenthcentury, Brazil was theAmerican place inwhich, during the last halfof the sixteenth century, Europeans firstworked out all the characteristics of the plantation complex, which spread to Barbados and othereastern Caribbean islands during the last half of the seventeenth century and from thence to theGreater Antilles, where during the centuryafter 1690 Jamaica and St. Domingue became its fullest expressionsbefore the early nineteenth century. At the same time, this plantationculture spread inmodified form onto both the South American andNorth American mainlands. If it centered in theCaribbean, Brazil andtheNorth American Southeast functioned as parallel continental sitesfor its extension into the rest of theAmericas. Indeed, itproved to behighly adaptable for the production of agricultural staples other thansugar, for forest industries, and even for ranching, and it subsequentlyspread into themining areas of Peru and New Granada, where thesupply of Indian labor was diminishing; and, following the discoveryof gold in the 1690s and diamonds a few decades later, intoMinasGerais inBrazil.13

So extensive was the importation of Africans to meet the labordemands of this expanding plantation complex thatAfricans could befound in significant numbers well beyond the apparent boundaries ofthat complex, sometimes even functioning on large, plantation-typeunits of production in non-tropical areas, as in the case of iron production in the British middle colonies and agricultural production inNew Jersey, New York, the Connecticut River Valley, and theNarragansett area of Rhode Island.14 Insofar as the employment ofAfrican slaves on large units of production was the central feature oftheplantation complex, there seem tohave been few limits on itsutilityin the early modern Americas. Following Philip D. Morgan, however,itmay be useful tomake a distinction between slave colonies, where

13Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays inAtlantic History(New York, 1990).14See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in NorthAmerica (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), chap. 2.



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REASSESSING THE COLONIAL SOUTH 535slaves provided a high proportion of the labor force and constituted asubstantial segment of the population, and slave-owning colonies,where slaves supplied only a fraction of the labor and were a distinct

minority of the population, albeit in both types of colonies slavery wasprotected and regulated by law. This distinction is similar to the oneCurtin made between settlement colonies and plantation colonies.15Yet these distinctions cannot be applied too strictly.Except possiblyfor those small island colonies the British established in theWestIndies after the Seven Years' War, the slave societies of the plantationcolonies were never without at least a few small, independent producers working with smaller numbers of slaves on the peripheries of thesugar plantations and were never strictlymonocultural in the sense thatthey produced only the principal export staple. All the older islandcolonies in the Lesser Antilles, both British and French, producedmuch of their own foodstuffs, and if, as in the case of Barbados, theyhad a significant white population before the adoption of slavery, thepopulation continued to be up to a fifthwhite. In the Greater Antillesof Jamaica and St. Domingue, the number of whites never rose muchabove 10 percent, but much slave labor went into the production ofminor staples such as coffee, indigo, cotton, and ginger, into growingfoodstuffs, and into cattle raising. On themainlands of North and SouthAmerica, even in the Lowcountry of southern North America and inSalvador inBrazil, where the populations were heavily African, substantial numbers of small producers raised foodstuffs and livestock andproduced naval stores and logwood in a varied economy that concentrated on but was not limited to the production of the main exportstaple. The plantation economies of the Chesapeake and Louisiana?where the proportion of blacks was far lower and the number of independent yeoman farmers much larger?practiced even higher levels ofmixed agriculture in a social landscape dominated by smaller economicunits. In the study of these variations, a broad pan-hemispheric framework may be just as useful as an Atlantic perspective.16

By locating early modern southeastern North America within thelarger framework of the pan-hemispheric plantation complex, historians can better understand where the area fits within the broad colonialprocess that transformed theAmericas after 1492. They can see itnot

15Philip D. Morgan, British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 16001780, in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: CulturalMargins of theFirst British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991), 157-219.16Greene, Pursuits ofHappiness, 178-80.



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536 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYonly as a promiscuous conglomeration of distinctive offshoots ofEuropean empires but also, at least in the British and French areas ofsettlement, as extensions of the plantation complex and as one or moreof themany possible variations within that complex. From this wideperspective, these areas seem to be less peculiar?less in need ofexplanation?in the earlymodern colonizing process than do the settlement colonies to the north: the middle colonies and New England incolonial British America, and New France in colonial French America.But the inclusion of the Chesapeake colonies within this plantationcomplex also underlines the fact that planters can co-exist with anumerically dominant and empowered slave-owning settler populationof smaller farmers within the plantation complex, an insight thatwillnot surprise historians of colonial British America but that has oftenbeen overlooked by students of the various cores of the plantationcomplex.This emphasis upon the combination of plantations and farms involving mixed agriculture, the production of staples, and slave labormay be particularly important for historians interested in pursuing thequestions of how and when the diverse societies and populations inearly modern southeastern North America eventually came together toform a coherent cultural region. Ultimately, of course, answers to thesequestions will require systematic and intensive analysis by historians ofthe emerging South in the national era.In light of the vast amount we have learned over the past generationabout all the entities of southeastern North America as they had developed by the closing decades of the eighteenth century, however, Isuggest that this exercise begin by acknowledging that themost dynamic and expanding population on the southern mainland of NorthAmerica was the British. Within the British sphere though, the Lowcountry model seems already by the 1770s to have been close toreaching its natural limits. IfBarbados had served as a cultural hearthfor the extension of the plantation complex to the Lowcountry, thecultural hearth that took shape in theLowcountry and revolved aroundrice production on large plantation units with large numbers of slaveswas unsuitable for lands far beyond the physical boundaries of theLowcountry and was therefore incapable of replication throughoutmuch of the area of future expansion.By contrast, the cultural hearth that developed in the seventeenthand early-eighteenth-century Chesapeake Tidewater turned out to be



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REASSESSING THE COLONIAL SOUTH 537eminently transportable and adaptable. Beginning in the 1730s,Tidewater immigrants carried Chesapeake culture, with its focus on amixture of tobacco, corn, and grain production using slave labor distributed among a few large plantations and a much larger number ofsmall producers, west into the Piedmont and across the Blue Ridgemountains. There they joined an even larger stream of immigrantspushing south from Pennsylvania, at once absorbing those immigrantsinto the broad outlines of Chesapeake culture and adapting that cultureto the interests and inclinations of the newcomers. Together, these twostreams of immigrants negotiated a new cultural hearth, the attributesofwhich a subsequent generation carried west across theAppalachiansintoKentucky and south into the backcountries of the Carolinas andGeorgia.17 With the emergence of cotton culture in the 1790s, thiscultural hearth underwent a further transformation before it sweptacross the South as fast as the Indians could be removed and Spanishcontrol over Florida, Louisiana, and Texas eliminated.Wherever the aggressive bearers and modifiers of this culture went,they took with them its central ingredients?an insistence upon a consensual and participatory political system, a system of law rooted inBritish common law, and, most important of all, a pattern of landoccupation devoted to the production of staples with slave labor on afew plantations and a much larger number of smaller units?and imposed them upon the physical and political landscapes. As Michael P.Johnson and David C. Rankin have shown in a study based on anintensive examination of the first fourUnited States censuses throughout the Southeast, this pattern of land occupation predominatedthroughout those states that came to constitute the South.18 Althoughthe bearers of this culture ran roughshod over the indigenous andnon-British cultures they encountered, even to a remarkable extent inFrench Louisiana, where theymet the heaviest resistance, they nevercreated a homogeneous regional southern culture.19 The flexibility of

17See Robert D. Mitchell, American Origins and Regional Institutions: The SeventeenthCentury Chesapeake, Annals of theAssociation ofAmerican Geographers, 73 (September 1983),404-20.18Michael P. Johnson and David C. Rankin, Southern Slaveholders, 1790-1820: A Census,paper presented at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, New Orleans, 1990.19See Jack P. Greene, The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of theEuropean Occupation of theAmericas, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal,forthcoming, scheduled for vol. 6 (Spring 2008).



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538 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYthis cultural system insured that it could be adapted to a wide varietyof distinctive areas, distinctions that derived from variations in physical settings, cultural inheritances, and population mixtures; and theemerging South turned out to be at least as heterogeneous as any otherarea of the new United States within whose jurisdiction it slowly tookshape in the decades after 1820, if, perhaps, not nearly so heterogeneous as it had been during the three previous centuries.

early modern southeastern north america and the broader atlantic and american worlds

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