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What struck me most in reading chapters 7 and 11 in American Colonies were some of the vast differences between the British’s Chesapeake colonies (mainly Virginia) and Carolina during the late 1600’s through the mid 1700’s. Differences are prevalent in the economies, social life, slave labor, politics and so on.
In chapter 7, Taylor discusses the Chesapeake colonies from 1650-1750. We learn that the colonies were essentially governed by “competitive, ruthless, avaricious, crude, callous and insecure men” (p. 139) who abused their power and reaped big rewards while a much larger lower class struggled to keep up. So overbearing and controlling was the ruling class that it even caused rebellion in the colonies. It’s also noted that the colonists in Virginia worked almost year round because of the time and attention tobacco required. Rest was scarce for working men in Virginia as they built an economy off of hard work and tobacco production. Things in Carolina were very different. While Carolina was also ruled by a select group of powerful men, their control and corruption was not nearly as widespread as in Virginia; allowing for a greater sense of balance and fairness amongst the colonists. An economic dependency on rice rather than tobacco and a more widespread, harsher use of slaves were also differences amongst the colonies. Virginia used slaves but the Carolinians adopted the West Indian slave system (after slave revolts), which treated slaves worse and got more labor out of them. The bottom paragraph of the top blogpost in this link gives a solid description of how slavery varied from Virginia and Carolina– ( http://sites.davidson.edu/his141/author/systrauss/ ). It started off worse in Virgina but after slave rebellion in South Carolina and stricter racial lines drawn throughout English colonies, it became much worse further south. This created a society that feared what potential uprisings from slaves. It also created a culture that was far more relaxed than that of Virginia. Taylor describes Carolina elite as “more gracious, polite, genteel, and lavish than the gentlemen of Virginia” (p.238).
To me, it was interesting to learn that even though the inhabitants of these colonies had originally came from the same country, each colony had created an identity that was solely its’ own. I think Taylor highlights these differences as a way to show that even though the original settlers of each of these colonies had at one time considered themselves Englishmen, their identity was now more heavily tied to what colony they belonged to. By 1750 a colonist in Virginia was more of a Virginian than an Englishman. I have to believe that these type of changes in social identity were a key part in kickstarting the American Revolution.