American Colonies: The Settling of North America

In the 1670s common planters edged out of the West Indies and the Chesapeake moved to Carolina (modern-day North and South Carolina and Georgia). Carolina’s intolerable summers were offset by the fertile (if swampy) land and the Lord Proprietors’ promises of religious tolerance, political representation, low taxes, and large tracts of land (224). Great planters from Jamaica and Barbados were also drawn by the promise of “absolute Power and Authority” over slaves (225).

Carolina’s remote Lord Proprietors in England struggled from the start, largely because their governors could not control the wealthy planters. In 1691 weak proprietary authority led to North Carolina being established as a distinct colony (225). In South Carolina the great planters, known as the Goose Creek Men, dominated the local government and eventually overthrew the Lord Proprietors in 1719. While the Crown now ostensibly owned the colonies, wealthy locals held the reins (225-26).

Carolinians decided to defend themselves from the local Indians and from their own African slaves by pitting them against each other. Indians were given substantial rewards to capture both escaped African slaves and other Indians to sell into slavery (223). Carolinians freely sold the Indians guns, which they could then withhold at any time, making it difficult for the Indians to hunt or protect themselves. The destruction from this strategy cascaded through local tribes. As one Carolinian summarized, they “assist[ed] them in Cutting one another’s throats without offending either” (228), all the while profiting immensely from the goods traded to them by the warring Indian factions. In the Carolinas, “very little of [native] decline derived from direct conflict between colonists and Indians, but the population collapse had everything to do with the indirect consequences of the European intrusion into North America” (235).

Realizing they needed a more stable source of income than Indian slaves and deerskins for long-term success, the Carolinians shifted first to lumber and cattle rustling, then, in the 1690s, to indigo and rice, which became the colony’s staple crop (236-37). The rice planters of South Carolina enjoyed an even more extravagant lifestyle than rich Virginians. “Of course,” Taylor notes, “this pleasure and ease depended upon the lands and hard labor forced from others” (237-38). The brutal conditions imposed on slaves led to fear of rebellion, and in turn, harsher restrictions. In a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a slave rebellion rose up near Charles Town, South Carolina, in 1739, which was quickly and brutally put down. But the incident did not lead to any form of introspection. Instead, the masters “pitied themselves that they possessed such a dangerous form of property” (240).

In the late 1720s, James Oglethorpe and the Georgia Trustees founded the colony of Georgia, which they intended to be a slave-free zone. They did not make this decision out of empathy for the slaves; instead, they imagined Georgia could be a kind of “colonial workhouse to redeem England’s idle poor” (241), much as the West Country men had proposed for Virginia. Slaves would also mean a smaller white population, leaving the colony defenseless on the frontier, and less motivation for white workers, in whom the trustees wanted to instill discipline. The trustees, however, underestimated the colonists’ overwhelming desire for slaves. Strikingly, Georgians claimed a denial of slaves to be a denial of freedom; “such reasoning made sense in an 18th-century empire where liberty was a privileged status that almost always depended upon the power to subordinate someone else” (242). In 1751 the trustees surrendered Georgia to the Crown, and like the Carolinas, Georgia became a slaveholding plantation society.

Compared to other imperial rulers, the English monarch had less direct control of his colonies due to the proprietary system of colonization. In this system, private interests—companies (like the Virginia Company) or rich individuals called Lord Proprietors—bought royal charters from the Crown. These charters allowed private interests to found the colony and create elective assemblies to decide taxation—assemblies in which propertied colonists quickly asserted their own authority. Thus with proprietary colonies, the Crown was losing out on tax money and feared losing its colonies to other powers (247). To reassert authority and take the English colonies back under royal control, King Charles II and his brother James concentrated first on conquering the Dutch colonies of the mid-Atlantic, the region south of New England and north of the Chesapeake.

In the 17th century the Netherlands was the center of religious tolerance and free-thinking in Europe. This mentality made it a huge economic power. As the English writer Daniel Defoe wrote, “The Dutch must be understood as they really are, the Middle Persons in Trade, the Factors and Brokers of Europe” (248). In turn, New Netherland was the most religiously and ethnically diverse colony in North America (255). Emigrants tended to be middle-class families (as in New England) rather than single unmarried men (as in the Chesapeake and West Indies). Women retained more legal rights and shared in an economic partnership with their husbands (255). But Dutch immigration numbers were low compared to the English, as they had less reason to leave the Netherlands. New Netherland’s reputation also suffered from incompetent leadership and bloody conflict with the local Indians, the Five Nation Iroquois and the Algonquins (253).

The English sought to wrest power from the Dutch first by enacting the Navigation Acts, beginning in 1651. The Acts put strict rules on trade: only English ships could trade with English colonies; certain commodities from the colonies (tobacco, sugar) could only be shipped to England; and any international imports to English colonies needed to first pass through English ports (258). The Acts were part of a mercantilist outlook, in which the government strengthened its economic partnership with its own colonies to the exclusion of other empires.

The Dutch attempted to resist the Acts in three wars in the 1650s, 60s, and 70s, but failed. Under the pretext of reclaiming land they had previously explored, England declared war and took the Dutch by surprise. In 1667 the Dutch formally surrendered New Netherland, which became the English colony of New York. James, the king’s brother, was its proprietor. With the Dutch withdrawal, the English controlled the Atlantic seaboard from Florida in the south to Acadia in the north (259).

Charles II and James had initially attacked New Netherland to reassert royal authority in the colonies. They complicated this aim by founding more proprietary colonies: the Carolinas, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. New Jersey was charted in 1664; it was divided into West Jersey, which was primarily English Quakers, and East Jersey, which was multiethnic, before finally being reunited as the royal colony of New Jersey in 1702.

A former West Jersey Quaker, William Penn, founded Pennsylvania in 1680. Quakers rejected the formalities of organized religion. Most radically, they advocated for equality between all Christian denominations, as they considered everyone equals before God. This won them support from James, the soon-to-be king. As a Catholic in Protestant England, James sought allies who supported religious tolerance. Pennsylvania was successful due to this policy as well as a profitable staple crop of wheat and peaceful relations with the neighboring Lenni Lenape Indians (266-69). But ideological differences popped up within the Quakers themselves, ultimately prompting the colony’s division into Delaware and Pennsylvania in 1704 (269-70).

Unlike in New England and the Chesapeake, which were majority English, the Middle Colonies were a melting pot of various European and native cultures. The success of these colonies “violated the traditional English conviction that local cohesion and political order depended on ethnic and religious uniformity” (271). Many colonists there were also openly disdainful of authority and made their disagreements known in elective assemblies, which “precociously anticipated the American future” (271).