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Finally, we reached the South. We piddled around the area for a little while with Virginia and shortly after went North. But now we can talk about some good ole southern tales of rice, raiders, terror, and for brief moment, Georgia. Those short headers from Taylor’s Chapter 11 on the Carolinas show us just how great colonial times were in the Carolinas. It is safe to say that they showed up a little late to the party. The “new world” was no longer a disease ridden mystery but rather a disease filled reality. People had been in America long before the Lords Proprietor were set govern the large state of everything above Florida and below Virginia. But quickly, as Taylor points out and we might expect, that large land mass split into North Carolina, South Carolina, and eventually Georgia.
However, for the Carolinas showing up late to the party might not have been a bad thing. Just as Virginians figured out their crop was tobacco, so did South Carolinians figured out that rice could be their fortune. So the South Carolinians did as all respectable rich white men did back then, they bought slaves. The slave trade was not a new entity, but rather a practiced trade. And these were not any slaves. They were specialists in their fields, literally. However, being so southern the slaves could easily run south away from the slaveholders and into free territory. So, to prevent them for running away they armed themselves at all times, scared them, and armed the Native Americans around them to help if any slaves were to run in their direction. The whites were scared up an uprising in a society where blacks were a large part of the population. As history tells us, South Carolina becomes a slave state and remains that way for a long, long time.
Now, as Taylor did with Georgia, I will briefly speak of the Chesapeake colonies. Taylor presents a lot of information here. Yet, while I was reading, I felt as if I was reading a book of fun facts. He spats off numbers about how much it cost to cross the ocean and then mentions the story of Elizabeth Abbot and her master. Which leads him to wealth, successful planters, which in turn lead to Bacon’s Rebellion, and so on. Taylor then ends the chapter with slavery. He acknowledges a successful freed black man, Anthony Johnson, but then speaks his final words on the demise of the status of freed black men. One colonist even said that Negro and Slave had become homogenous (157).
I’ve always had a passion for studying southern history because it is where I am from. But it has never been nor will it ever be pretty. Taylor does what should be done. He speaks of truths, horrible, horrible truths, but truths that should be acknowledged and learned from.