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In the film Dazed and Confused, Ms. Stroud, a US history teacher, yells above the commotion of the year’s final bell, telling her students that, while“ [they’re] being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth of July brouhaha,” to remember that they’re celebrating “a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males [who] didn’t want to pay their taxes.” As our exploration of early colonial history has shown, this is an overly simplistic view of America leading up to the revolution. Still, in contexts of this week’s readings, we can see that the statement carries some merit.
The readings deal with the Southern colonies in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, which Taylor shows to be markedly different from their northern counterparts thanks to, primarily, their economy. Whereas the northern colonies sowed the seeds for a diverse, industrialized economy, the southern colonies quickly developed a single cash-crop system. In the Chesapeake, this crop was tobacco while the Carolinas specialized in rice cultivation. The fact that Virginia’s assemblymen were paid in tobacco—150 pounds per day in session—highlights how valuable a crop like tobacco was there.
Since wealth and power were so closely tied to farming, land was the most important commodity in the Southern colonies. In the Chesapeake colonies of the early 17th century, this was no problem as even indentured servants were promised substantial acreage as part of their “freedom dues.” However, as tobacco became ever more profitable and the influx of immigrants steadily grew, land quickly became scarce. Most indentured servants stopped receiving land upon freedom, and those that did found that the most fertile land been seized by ever larger plantations. As Taylor points out, “in Virginia’s Middlesex Country the richest 5 percent of the white families owned more than half of the property” by 1700 (157). Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 further highlights the growing inequality in the colonies and its resulting social unrest. Similarly, the split of Carolina into North and South Carolina in 1712 resulted from the power monopoly wealthy Carolinian planters established.
The southern colonies’ economic differences also manifested themselves in the way their treatment of Indians differed from their northern counterparts. Here, we can use Yuxi’s blog post from last week, which elucidates the interaction between the New England colonies and the various northern tribes, to clarify any similarities and differences. She points out that Natives were placed in “praying towns,” in which colonists tried to “enlighten” the Indians religiously. In the South, no such large-scale efforts were done to Christianize Natives. Rather, especially in the Carolinas, planters feared that the Indians would encourage slaves to escape, and so they commercially exploited their rivalries through the gun trade. Such manipulation was also evident in the North, as Yuxi points to the way the English presence inspired King Phillip’s War, which was the “first civil war among the Indians.”