Servitude, Slavery, and the Growth of the Southern Colonies, 1620-1760

The southern colonies’ reliance on the exporting of crops tied them closely to the broader trading patterns of the Atlantic, to British policies for regulating commerce, and to overseas sources of labor and manufactured goods. They had important links with the growing number of British colonies on the islands of the West Indies such as Barbados and Jamaica; after the Dutch introduced sugar cane to Barbados in 1636, sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans came to dominate these islands. As in all British American colonies, the inhabitants lived alongside Native Americans and the neighboring territories of other European powers, especially France and Spain. Despite crucial differences between the French, Spanish, and British colonies, their proximity to one another would influence the British colonies’ development. Elite British colonists needed labor to extract the profits they envisioned in this new land, and they turned to indentured servants to supply it. But large disparities in wealth and opportunity soon resulted in challenges from within colonial society.

French and Spanish settlements in North America represented marked contrasts to the patterns that evolved in English colonies, including those of the South.Neither the French or Spanish government successfully encouraged large numbers of their own people to move to the colonies. The Hispanic population of Spanish North America, in particular, remained tiny and predominantly male.

France established permanent agricultural settlements in Quebec and an extensive trading network that extended far across the Great Lakes region and ultimately down the Mississippi Valley to the colony of Louisiana, where the port and administrative center of New Orleans was established in 1718. French missionaries sought to convert Native people across this vast territory to Christianity. Since, except in Quebec and in parts of Louisiana, the French were primarily traders rather than settlers on the land, they often established reciprocal relations with the indigenous peoples they encountered.

Spanish missionaries also sought religious converts in New Mexico and Florida, but with less harmonious consequences. Spain’s military conquests and efforts to harness Native labor often provoked resistance, including the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 which temporarily drove Spanish settlers out of New Mexico (see Chapter 1). From the viewpoint of the Spanish government, the missions and fortifications of Florida and New Mexico, even the military bases or presidios that they later established in their North American territories, were marginal northern outposts of Spain's richer, more important colonies in Mexico and South America.

Nevertheless, European powers jockeyed for position in North America, not least to restrain their rivals’ influence. French traders in the Mississippi Valley and Louisiana, for instance, made contact with Ndés (Apaches) and Numunuus (Comanches) of the Southwest, providing them with horses and firearms that they used to attack settlements in New Mexico. Partly to counter the French, Spain extended its military and missionary activity into Texas in the eighteenth century. Spain and Britain, meanwhile, eyed one another warily over Florida, the Spanish keen to protect its sea routes to the Caribbean and Central America, the English anxious about their colonies in the Carolinas and Georgia, fearing them vulnerable to Spanish influence. Early in the eighteenth century, the English helped Native people of the Florida region attack and roll back the Spanish network of missions. The Spanish towns of St. Augustine and Pensacola, however, for a while remained potential refugees for freedom seekers from the lower South colonies.

While the French and Spanish monarchies sought close control of their empires and were unwilling to admit to their colonies immigrants from other European powers, English governments permitted much freer migration. In the South, arrivals from England and the West Indies, as well as the importation of enslaved persons, ensured relatively rapid population growth and expanding settlements. By increasing the demand for land, however, such growth fueled the potential for conflict with Native Americans. Plans to establish missions and schools for southern polities rarely came to much. Largely unable to exploit the labor of Native peoples and often uninterested in saving their souls, English settlers became increasingly bent on removing or destroying them. As Virginia’s English population grew, it pushed well to the west most of the area’s Native peoples.

New North American colonies faced an inescapable fact: the availability of land made gathering and keeping a labor force difficult. People who could make a living for themselves from the land had little reason to work for others. For hunters and small farmers whose family members provided sufficient labor, this posed few problems, but owners of large plantations could not work their fields solely with the labor of wives and children. In tobacco the leaders of the Chesapeake colonies had found a staple crop that could make them prosperous if they could grow it on a large scale, but to do that they needed to find and discipline a labor force that would make their land yield its wealth.

Virginia’s first promoters expected to make the Native Americans the colony’s labor force. They hoped that English goods and civility would seduce and domesticate a Native population they regarded as inferior to themselves. When the Powhatans refused to play this role, planters considered enslaving them. But for four decades after 1607, the Chesapeake nations were too well armed, too numerous, and too familiar with the countryside to be easily enslaved, and the 1622 and 1644 wars with the Powhatans convinced planters to drive them away from areas of English settlement.

So planters had to look elsewhere for laborers. English authorities assisted by forcibly transporting some of London’s orphans to work in the tobacco fields. Between 1617 and 1624, several hundred orphans, scores of whom had declared “their unwillingness to go to Virginia,” were turned over to planters to be worked until they reached the age of twenty-one. Having been “brought to goodness under severe Masters,” they could then be set free. Most of these involuntary migrants, however, died prematurely after months or years of hard labor. The Crown also proposed shipping convicts to Virginia, but planters opposed the plan. Not wishing to employ men and women who had already demonstrated a readiness to break the law, they were until the next century able to limit the number of convicts transported to Virginia.

Planters had little choice but to recruit young, poor English adults as servants. Population growth, economic depression, and enclosures had worsened poverty and unemployment in England, and produced a supply of recruits who were willing to sign an indenture, a contract by which they agreed to work for a term of four to seven years in exchange for passage to the colonies. At the end of their period of service, each would get freedom, a set of new clothes, some tools, and fifty acres of land. Over half of early indentured servants came from agricultural backgrounds, and another twenty percent were from the textile or clothing trades. Few had any other prospect of acquiring that much land.

Between seventy-five and eighty-five percent of those who migrated to Virginia and Maryland in the seventeenth century did so as indentured servants, and three-fourths of these were single men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Most worked with one or two other indentured servants on tobacco farms, performing the routine but delicate tasks of sprouting, transplanting, and curing tobacco. During growing season the fields had to be hoed often, and much additional work was required to eke out a subsistence through gardening, hunting, and foraging.

Indentured women, who accounted for nearly all unmarried female immigrants from England, made up only a small percentage of the population. Only a few hundred went to Maryland, where in the early decades of settlement men outnumbered women six to one. More women went to Virginia, but the sex ratio was still imbalanced; men outnumbered women by four to one in 1625 and remained in the majority for most of the century. An indentured woman’s work depended on the social status of her employer. If indentured to a small planter, she labored in the fields. Wealthier planters and merchants employed their female servants at domestic tasks such as washing clothes, sewing, preparing food, and child rearing.

Some planters also purchased enslaved persons and set them to work alongside English indentured servants. Nearly all the earliest enslaved workers in North America were male Africans who had been enslaved for several years on the tobacco or sugar plantations of the Caribbean, and so arrived in the Chesapeake already “seasoned.” Many of this first generation of enslaved American were from the trading societies of the West African coast, and had some familiarity with the commercial system that had ensnared them, as well as with the languages (English or various pidgins) that were spoken in the English Atlantic world.

Although the first enslaved people reached Virginia in 1619, their numbers remained small for decades. By 1660, the English population of the Chesapeake had reached thirty thousand, but there were probably fewer than fifteen hundred people of African birth or descent in the region. Though most of them labored as enslaved workers for life, some worked as indentured servants and were freed when their terms of service expired. Black and white servants worked together, but Black servants’ terms of service tended to be longer, and punishments for infractions more severe. Nevertheless, there were still chances to obtain freedom. By 1650, a small free Black population had grown up in the Chesapeake, finding employment as crafts workers, laborers, and tenants, or—like Anthony Johnson—acquiring land and becoming independent farmers.

Between the 1620s and the 1650s, as the tobacco economy expanded, thousands of English immigrants flocked to Virginia and Maryland. Servants and enslaved Black people found themselves scattered on farms and plantations across the Tidewater, the low-lying region that lay close to Chesapeake Bay’s many navigable rivers and inlets, where crops could easily be loaded onto ships. Virginia’s elected assembly, the House of Burgesses, emerged as the protector of the interests of large planters. Yet, because planters’ lives revolved so completely around the competitive scuffle for tobacco and money, public institutions often remained scanty or neglected. One member of the House of Burgesses was so busy getting rich from tobacco that he attended only one session in eight years. Schooling was poor or nonexistent, and no public provision for education would be made for generations. Some planters could not even be persuaded to organize, much less to participate in, a militia.

To ensure that their servants actually worked, masters exercised considerable power. Colonial laws gave them wider authority over servants than they would have enjoyed in England. Unlike their English counterparts, Virginia servants lacked, for example, the right to take masters to court for maltreatment or breach of contract, and the local magistrates to whom they might appeal were in any case often the very men who employed them. Labor discipline was largely maintained by brute force. One woman was beaten “like a dogge,” another “sore beaten and her body full of sores and holes.” Even when the authorities did act to protect servants, masters could show their contempt. A Captain William Odeon, on being convicted in 1662 of repeated maltreatment of servants, promptly “struck and abused his servant” right there in the courtroom.

Colonial indentured servants, unlike English servants, could be repeatedly bought and sold, and those accused of insubordination could be fined, branded, whipped, or have their terms of service extended. Serious offenders faced execution, usually at a public ceremony attended by fellow servants, staged to act as an example to the discontented among them. The Virginia House of Burgesses required each county court to install a ducking-stool (a chair in which offenders were ducked in water) with which to punish misbehaving women. Combined with the fact that most servants had no family in the Chesapeake, such conditions often resulted in lives of abject misery. “So the truth is,” the servant Edward Hill wrote to his brother in England, “we live in the fearfullest age that ever Christians lived in.”

Disease, poor diet, and maltreatment meant that before 1650 nearly two-thirds of servants died before their indentures expired, so planters often escaped the obligation to provide land to them on completion of their terms. Even in Maryland, where survival rates exceeded those in Virginia, only one in three of the servants who arrived before 1642 eventually acquired land. After mid-century, however, although labor remained harsh, improvements in diet and living conditions did produce a higher survival rate among indentured servants.

The Chesapeake colonies also faced the problem of regulating sexual contacts and marriages with scarce white women in a predominantly male society. Unmarried servants who became pregnant, as did an estimated twenty percent, were punished by additional years of service. It took Virginia until 1662 to recognize the obvious incentive this gave owners to impregnate their own servants; the House of Burgesses then passed a law requiring that the extra service be with a new master. Some women had their infants taken from them and sold, for a few pounds of tobacco, to another master. Masters permitted these female servants to marry only if the servants compensated them for the loss of their labor, a financial obligation beyond most servants’ means.

Only rarely did female servants acquire property or political rights after gaining their freedom. For a time, however, it was possible for freed men who obtained land to aspire to minor political offices, and to vote for the prominent planters who filled nearly all important public positions. Nevertheless, the planter elite continued to protect its own interests. Both in Virginia and Maryland, new laws lengthened the years of indentured service, denied freed men their promised fifty acres, or narrowed economic and political opportunities for small landowners. As more servants survived their terms and clamored for the land they had been promised, the system of indentured servitude began to lose its attractiveness to planters. Unwilling to share wealth and power with their former servants, planters found this growing group of free, landless people menacing. Their geographical isolation on Tidewater plantations heightened planters’ sense of vulnerability. After midcentury their lives would be dominated by a constant balancing of their need for labor against their fear of social disorder.

At the top of this fragile new society were the men who had been most successful at reaping wealth from the fertile soil through the hard work of their servants. Many of those who sat in the House of Burgesses and on the judicial bench had married the widows of wealthy planters, made the best deals, or paid the highest bribes to other men to do their bidding. By midcentury, some planters had obtained thousands of acres of land apiece. Colonel Philip Ludwell acquired his land simply by altering documents so that he received ten times the acreage he was entitled to. Planters’ exercise of power through government and law was an unconcealed effort to use the tools of civil authority to keep the upper hand in a continuing battle for profit.

The Chesapeake colonies’ reputation improved as they achieved a measure of stability. Rather backhandedly, an English pamphleteer noted in 1656 that they were no longer ”a nest of Rogues, whores, desolute and rooking persons,” but somewhere planters might prosper. The Chesapeake attracted a new group of men, immigrants who were richer and better connected with the aristocracy in England. They acquired assembly seats, joined court benches, and obtained other important positions. Many were the younger sons of English gentry. Barred from their fathers’ status and wealth by England’s laws of primogeniture—by which an eldest son inherited his father’s whole estate—these men found in America the chance to begin life at the top of society. Some had inherited thousands of acres originally purchased from the Virginia Company, others arrived with the cash to buy plantations or uncleared land. In the 1660s and 1670s, these men formed a new ruling elite, using their wealth as tobacco planters to make political connections, and filling political offices with relatives. By 1700, ninety percent of Virginia’s burgesses were linked by ties of blood or marriage.

The rise of this new colonial elite took place during a time of great turmoil in England. Between 1640 and 1660, England had been too preoccupied with its civil war to pay much attention to what was happening in the colonies. Virginia planters turned to Dutch merchants to carry tobacco to Europe and ship cattle to the West Indies, and access to Caribbean markets encouraged them to shift some land from growing tobacco to raising cattle and grains, which they traded for rum, sugar, and enslaved laborers, largely without paying duties to the English government. Planters came to regard free trade as a right and any English law not ratified by their own assemblies as invalid.

Their notions did not survive challenge from England, both before and after the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. Commercial rivalry between England and Holland provoked three wars between the 1650s and 1670s and led English governments to curb colonists whose trade conflicted with England’s interests. New trade regulations known as the Navigation Acts, introduced in 1651 and extended in the early 1660s, required colonial products to be carried in vessels built, owned, and crewed by Englishmen or English colonials. Tobacco, whatever its ultimate destination, had to be shipped to England, Ireland, or another English colony, where it incurred an import duty, and cargoes shipped on from there were assessed export duties as well. These rules enriched the crown and English merchants, but burdened Chesapeake planters. To make matters worse, overproduction of tobacco in the 1660s and 1670s drove the price of the crop to an all-time low, just as the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars disrupted trade and colonists were obliged to raise taxes to pay for troops and fortifications.

To ensure planters paid the taxes they owed, Charles II relied on his friend and supporter, Virginia’s governor William Berkeley. Royal officialdom in Virginia, often at odds with the House of Burgesses, comprised Berkeley and those he chose to favor with office. Though officials and burgesses overlapped in membership and goals, the crown and planters faced a basic conflict of interests. Planters’ fortunes rose and fell with the price of tobacco, and the consequent profits they could earn from the crop; overproduction, which drove prices down, was a major concern to them. Crown revenues depended on the quantity, not the price, of tobacco shipped, and so officials had no interest in curbing output or promoting agricultural diversification.

In many respects the Chesapeake colonies were more successful by the mid-seventeenth century than they had been in their early years. Life expectancy for the second generation of colonists was at least as good as the forty years enjoyed by their English cousins. Immigrants found opportunities there, and the crown and merchants benefited financially from the colonies. Still, the Chesapeake was far from idyllic. Death rates were still such that one in four white newborns died within a year, and half of white Virginians did not live to be twenty-one. Men outnumbered women by at least three to one in 1660, and by six to one in some areas, so marriages were not the rule and mortality often disrupted those that did occur: two out of three marriages lasted less than ten years. Orphans were common: half of seventeenth-century Virginia children had lost one or both parents by the age of nine. Society still seemed crude and unstable.

It was also unequal. The great majority of colonists were either landowners or servants. Wealthy planters stacked the odds in their own favor and against their poorer neighbors. They made up five percent or less of the landowners, but for themselves and their children they reserved the best land, including much of the fertile Tidewater. They had pushed westward most of the region’s Native polities, who maintained uneasy contacts with English traders and the colonists who settled near them.

Planters’ need for a large workforce did not lead them to improve conditions for their laborers. Instead, like most English employers of the period, they tried to exploit to the full the men and women they could recruit. Of those servants who survived long enough to achieve their freedom only a small proportion were able to acquire land—between nine and seventeen percent in Virginia in the 1670s, depending on the county. Even these fortunates often had land that was of poor quality, controlled by Native peoples, or too far from navigable water to permit tobacco to be marketed. Large planters often controlled the shipping that took tobacco to market and could gouge smaller competitors, and the planter-dominated House of Burgesses fixed taxes and fees to the disadvantage of small landholders. These conditions combined to create a large group of frustrated, debt-ridden small farmers who also, if they lived on the frontier of settlement, faced conflicts with nearby Native nations.

For Governor Berkeley and wealthy planters this discontent posed a threat. Small landowners, Berkeley told the Privy Council in London, set a bad example for servants and alienated both from the government which, he wrote in 1667 during one of the Anglo-Dutch wars, was “pressed at our backes with Indians, in our Bowills with our servants . . . and invaded from without by the Dutch.” He feared that free smallholders and servants would rise together to support the Dutch, “in hopes of bettering their condition by sharing the Plunder of the Country with them.” Six years later he thought that even without foreign provocation the population, of whom “Six parts of Seven at least are Poore, Indebted, Discontented, and Armed,” might rebel at any time. These fears were grounded in growing numbers of servant runaways, and small revolts in the early 1660s, one of which (led by Isaac Friend) resulted in several executions and laws tightening curbs on servants’ and enslaved people's freedom of movement.

Freemen and servants resented not just the elite as such, but the colonial government’s perceived indifference to their interests. By 1675 skirmishes with Native polities had intensified, and many frontiersmen had come to see all Native peoples, friendly or not, as enemies. Governor Berkeley and the burgesses planned measures against local polities, but hesitated for fear of igniting a widespread war among Native peoples. The following spring armed groups of small farmers pressing for action adopted as their leader Nathaniel Bacon, a young and well-to-do member of the gentry who, with other prosperous planters, was also frustrated at Berkeley’s leniency. With a mixed group of farmers and planters, Bacon led an unauthorized assault on a native village in May 1676, massacring friendly as well as hostile Native people and seizing stocks of pelts.

As Bacon sought a military commission from the governor to pursue further attacks, Berkeley declared him and his followers to be rebels and had Bacon captured. Making Bacon write a confession, Berkeley nevertheless pardoned him, in an effort to conciliate Bacon’s followers and reassert his own authority. Instead, during the summer of 1676 Bacon’s supporters drove Berkeley out of Virginia, tried to capture Maryland’s governor, plundered the estates of their prosperous opponents, and continued to attack Native people. In September, when Berkeley tried to restore his government in Virginia, Bacon and over five hundred armed men attacked Jamestown and burned it to the ground. His ranks swollen by servants and enslaved men including those of Berkeley's supporters who had joined the campaign on being promised their freedom, Bacon's movement had become a full-scale rebellion against Virginia’s rulers. Women, such as the affluent Sarah Drummond, helped stir Bacon’s supporters to action.

Bacon’s sudden death from dysentery in October 1676 blunted the rebellion, and the subsequent arrival of armed vessels from England cooled the enthusiasm of his more prosperous supporters, but many servants, enslaved people, and “Freemen that had but lately crept out of the condition of Servants,” fought on for a period. By January 1677 the rebellion was over, and Berkeley’s restored government exacted punishment by hanging twenty-three rebels, including Sarah Drummond’s husband. But although the rebellion had collapsed, it marked an important turning-point in the emergence of a distinctly “southern” form of colonial society. Almost succeeding in toppling the Virginia elite, Bacon’s Rebellion alerted colonial leaders to the dangers they faced from the concerted actions of freeholders, servants, and enslaved people in opposition to them.

Nathaniel Bacon was himself no social leveler. In fact he was related by marriage to Berkeley and was a member of the governor’s council. But in rallying supporters against Berkeley, he drew no distinctions between white and Black people, freemen and enslaved persons, speaking only of a “common people” united by oppression from “unworthy favourites and juggling parasites” among the colony’s rulers. Bacon’s own resentments at the governor’s ruling clique became the vehicle for a more popular uprising of the poor against the wealthy. As many as one in ten of all Virginia’s Black males joined the rebellion, and among the last rebels to surrender were eighty enslaved and four hundred white laborers. Leading planters, terrified by such interracial and interclass solidarity, were determined that no such challenge should threaten them again.

Population growth and the westward migration of former servants, who settled in the backcountry, increased pressure on the frontiers and intensified demands from white settlers for military action against Native peoples. Tensions between rich and poor, and between backcountry settlers and Tidewater inhabitants, threatened to divide Chesapeake society along class lines. The elite saw particular danger in the potential for a union of poorer white and Black people to rise up against them. They resolved to place less reliance on white servants and to recruit increasing numbers of Black enslaved laborers. Such changes altered landowners’ plans for working their properties. Thomas Gerard, lord of the manor of St. Clement’s in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, had expected to make his money from renting land to tenants, as he might have done in England. He purchased indentured servants to work on his farms, and recruited settlers and freed servants willing to rent land from him. But this increasingly became a difficult venture. Freed servants with means wished to purchase their own land, and the poor could neither buy nor rent. By 1670, Gerard had sold much of his manor to freeholders, and was now preoccupied with purchasing enslaved persons to work other land he owned in Virginia. In previous decades, Virginia and Maryland had been societies with enslaved individuals, in which enslaved workers had provided some of the labor. By the end of the seventeenth century they were being transformed into slave societies, in which enslaved Black people formed the bulk of the subordinate labor force.

Demographic changes and a new sense of permanence contributed to the emergence of a new labor system. White farmers, artisans, tenants, and laborers—the men among them, at least—secured some rights and economic opportunities denied to the growing number of enslaved people, who would increasingly be kept in racially based subjugation.

Among the first steps taken after Bacon’s Rebellion were efforts to reduce social tensions among white people. Disagreements between local and royal authorities diminished as Charles II limited the power of his council in Virginia and extended that of the House of Burgesses. Freed servants’ access to land was improved. New laws curbed land speculation–such as that practiced by the king himself when he granted two friends all the public lands in Virginia. There was a campaign to drive Native peoples over the mountains into present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. The English Parliament began investigating the treatment of indentured servants. The Crown now prosecuted recruiters who used illegal tactics such as kidnapping, misrepresentation, and fraud.

Among the first steps taken after Bacon’s Rebellion were efforts to reduce social tensions among white populations. Disagreements between local and royal authorities diminished as Charles II limited the power of his council in Virginia and extended that of the House of Burgesses. Freed servants’ access to land was improved. New laws curbed land speculation–such as that practiced by the king himself when he granted two friends all the public lands in Virginia. There was a campaign to drive Native people over the mountains into present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. The English Parliament began investigating the treatment of indentured servants. The Crown now prosecuted recruiters who used illegal tactics such as kidnapping, misrepresentation, and fraud.

Continuing a process begun before the rebellion, a series of measures sought to place Black people—both free and enslaved—in greater subjection, and to break the ties between white and Black laborers. Free Black people faced new restrictions on their legal and political rights. Laws passed in the 1660s had formally recognized slavery and begun to define it in racial terms. Any child born to an enslaved woman would be enslaved, too. Although “Christians” could not be enslaved, Africans were to be excluded from this principle; in 1682 those whose parents or homeland were not Christian at the time of their purchase were defined as slaves. Other laws prohibited interracial cohabitation or marriage, banned “Negroes and other slaves” from carrying arms or joining the militia, made freeing enslaved individuals more difficult, and prevented enslaved people from owning land. Laws against rape excluded enslaved women from their protection. By 1705, the contempt earlier generations of planters had shown for Native peoples and English indentured servants had reached its logical culmination in a slave code that gave enslavers unrestricted power over a permanently unfree labor force.

As many Black people lost what freedom they had, white people now benefited from preferential treatment. Guaranteed their own freedom, even poor whites could see themselves as superior to Black people. With laws that placed all white people above and separate from the Black population, Virginia’s elite fostered racial bonds among whites that overcame the economic and political inequalities between them, and reduced the chance that poor whites would join with Black people against their enslavers. Planters drove a wedge between enslaved and white servants and so ensured their own continued dominance.

Other changes reinforced these efforts to differentiate white from Black labor. Opportunities elsewhere curbed both the free white migration to the region and the supply of new white indentured servants. A revival of the English economy improved opportunities for the poor in England, while the attraction of newly opening colonies, such as Pennsylvania (see chapter 3), also reduced the flow of servants available to do farm and craft labor in the South. Indentured servants continued to come to the Chesapeake, but an increasing proportion were young women, purchased to perform domestic work in prosperous households.

As white labor became scarcer, more and more planters followed Thomas Gerard’s lead in buying enslaved personss to work as field hands. Until 1698 the Royal Africa Company held a monopoly on the slave trade with English colonies, and although company shipments enslaved persons increased after 1672, their demand for enslaved laborers induced Chesapeake planters to resort to illegal purchases whenever they could. Abolition of the monopoly increased the supply, and the number of enslaved persons imported from Africa continued to rise markedly. Virginia’s enslaved population rose from 3,000 in 1680 to 13,000 in 1700, of whom half had been brought from Africa and the remainder born either locally or in the Caribbean. By 1720 there were 27,000 enslaved people in Virginia, and imports from Africa exceeded one thousand a year. In St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where servants outnumbered enslave workers by almost four to one in 1680, by 1710 enslaved persons outnumbered servants by five to one. Instead of the society of landlords, tenants, and servants that wealthy settlers had once envisioned, the Chesapeake Tidewater was turning into a society of large and small landowners, poor white laborers, and enslaved Africans.

Unlike many among the first enslaved Americans, newly imported enslaved men and women spoke no English and had had no experience even of near-equality with whites people. Most came from the African interior, where there was little contact with the languages or commerce of the Atlantic trade system as there was in coastal West Africa. After suffering capture and a brutal voyage, they reached the Chesapeake to be put on sale. According to one observer around 1700, “slaves can be selected according to pleasure, young and old, men and women. They are entirely naked when they arrive, having only corals of different colors around their necks and arms.” They were usually dispersed singly or in small groups among different enslavers.

The strange society into which they were forced was becoming increasingly comfortable for its white inhabitants. After two generations of imbalanced sex ratios and high mortality, the Chesapeake’s white population was growing naturally, as well as through immigration, by the late seventeenth century. A better food supply and improved living conditions improved life expectancy. The proportion of women rose: in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where men outnumbered women by three or four to one before 1670, the ratio had reached 1.22:1 by 1712. Marrying young, women bore considerable numbers of children, an increasing proportion of whom survived infancy. Marriages, less frequently broken by death, lasted longer; among the gentry, the average length rose from fifteen years in the late seventeenth century to twenty-five for those commenced after 1700. Planters and small farmers began to build more permanent houses and farm buildings. A settled southern society, based on slavery, was starting to take shape.

As these changes were taking place in the Chesapeake, immigrants began to colonize the lower South. They settled in the area that at first was called Carolina, granted to a company of proprietors by Charles II after his restoration to the throne in 1660. From this original grant, the colonies of North and South Carolina (formally separated in 1719) and Georgia would eventually be formed.

At first, the lower South differed from the Chesapeake. Although migrants from Virginia brought tobacco and slavery to the Albemarle region, which became North Carolina, early South Carolinians rejected both tobacco and exclusive reliance on enslaved labor. They grew a variety of crops with a mixed workforce that, in addition to enslaved workers, included family members, indentured servants, and wage laborers. By the early eighteenth century, however, South Carolina too was making the transition from a society with enslaved individuals to a slave society.

The original principles of government for Carolina, the Fundamental Constitutions, were drawn up in the late 1660s, chiefly by the English political philosopher John Locke. He envisaged a harmonious agricultural society with an economy based on mixed farming, cattle raising, and a trade in deerskins with local Native peoples. Though his subsequent writings helped to inspire, among a later generation of Americans, the belief that all men were created equal, here Locke proposed an ordered, hierarchical society in which the right of large landowners to govern would receive the formal assent of the majority of settlers. However, despite repeated attempts, the colony’s proprietors failed to persuade settlers to approve the Fundamental Constitutions. Carolina society would indeed be unequal and hierarchical, but along lines of race and class quite different from those Locke had projected.

Carolina’s proprietors planned to recruit only “seasoned” colonists from the Caribbean who would pay their own passage, be offered land at a low price, and be encouraged to form communities of self-sufficient family farms. The Crown granted all colonists political and religious freedom, and promised adult white males the right to vote for assemblymen who were to govern the colony with the help of noblemen drawn from England.

Migrants flocked to Carolina. Children of some of the richest planters of the Caribbean sugar islands came, bringing hundreds of enslaved workers and the customs of the West Indian gentry. Still, independent, non-slave-owning white farmers at first outnumbered enslavers, indentured servants, propertyless laborers, and enslaved persons. Many migrants were Barbadians who owned too few enslaved workers and too little land on Barbados to make a success of sugar-growing, and who by the 1650s had few prospects on their already crowded, overcultivated island. They were generally older than the first Chesapeake colonists, and many had families. Immigrant families from Scotland, Germany, and Ireland likewise took up mixed-crop farming in Carolina. Most colonists lived on modest farms, close to the coast, where they grew their own food and raised cattle for export to the Caribbean.

Mixed subsistence farming generated little revenue, however, and the hoped-for deerskin trade with Native people failed to materialize. Instead, some colonists organized a new slave trade, capturing Native people to sell in the West Indies in exchange for rum and sugar. Meanwhile, the small minority of wealthy migrants acquired huge tracts of land and seized political control, many of them settling in Charleston, which soon became the largest port town in the South. Before 1705, these Charleston families owned most of the colony’s enslaved population. But successful traders and farmers also employed laborers, some American-born white people, some indentured servants from England and Ireland, and some enslaved Africans brought from the Caribbean.

Settling the Carolina coastal region, or lowcountry, involved interactions with Native nations. As elsewhere, early cooperation was followed by colonists’ provocations that caused first resentment against white settlers and then resistance to them. In what would become North Carolina, settlers captured Skarù∙ręʔ (Tuscarora) women and children to sell into slavery, and then encroached on the group’s lands. After a two-year war, beginning in 1711, settlers defeated the Skarù∙ręʔs (Tuscaroras), displacing them inland. In South Carolina, English settlers removed the Westos in the 1680s with the help of neighboring Yamasees, who then formed a thirty-year-long alliance with English governments, directed in part against Spanish Florida further down the coast. But English demands and encroachments eventually sparked Yamasee resistance as well.  Shifting their alliance to the Spanish and Muscogees (Creeks), Yamasees attacked South Carolina settlements in 1715, but they were defeated and the survivors sold into slavery. The English formed a new alliance with the stronger inland Cherokees, who for another half-century held their position, trading in enslaved workers and establishing settled agriculture while maintaining some of their traditional ways; Cherokee women, for instance, maintained rights over land and agricultural produce. By the 1760s, however, the English and the Cherokees were themselves coming into conflict.

Conditions in early South Carolina were difficult for all settlers, white and Black. Work was hard. All suffered from inadequate shelter, poor nutrition, and semitropical diseases. Even those who survived their first few years had a relatively short life-expectancy. Judith Manigault, who settled with her husband on the Santee River in 1689, and worked with him to clear and plant land, died in 1711, aged 42. Though mortality rates fell with each generation, only after 1750 did births outnumber deaths.

Some harsher aspects of the Chesapeake’s labor regime were absent from South Carolina, however. Restrictions placed on enlavers in 1676 and the availability of land in other colonies gave prospective indentured servants some bargaining power. Enslaved persons, too, had slightly more freedom of action than in Virginia or Maryland. Commercial cattle farmers, unlike tobacco planters, needed a mobile, self-reliant labor force, and they recognized the skill of Africans at raising livestock in a subtropical climate. Cattle were unfenced, and enslaved laborers who tended them had to move with the herds and run down strays. Servant and enslaved males also had some access to public life. As late as 1706, petitioners complained that in “the last election Jews, Strangers, Sailors, Servants, Negroes, and almost every French Man came down to elect, and their votes were taken.” The need to defend the colony from hostile Spanish troops in Florida even required—in contrast to Virginia—that enslaved men sometimes be mobilized and armed. A Carolina official noted in 1710 that “enrolled in our Militia [are] a considerable Number of active, able, Negro Slaves; and Law gives everyone of those his freedom, who in Time of an Invasion kills an Enemy.”

In 1732, the southernmost territory of the original Carolina grant was organized as the new colony of Georgia. Initially Georgia was to be a military buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, and its founders hoped for a colony not based on slavery. Early settlers were Englishmen who had signed up for the colony’s militia as an alternative to debtor’s prison. The colony’s promoters, led by James Oglethorpe, recruited skilled workers from Italy, whom they hoped would develop a silk industry, and unskilled laborers from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. Women and children were not included in their original plans, because they could not contribute to the colony’s defense. In 1735 slavery was prohibited on military grounds as a potential source of internal rebellion, and some Georgia settlers also expressed moral objections to slavery. White people, wrote some petitioners to the king in 1738, would one day pay a heavy price for enslaving men and women who held freedom as “dear” as they did.

But in the lower South, as in the Chesapeake, various factors led to the expansion and hardening of slavery. After 1680, the number of white indentured servants arriving in the Carolinas fell. Determined to reap profits from staple-crop production, the wealthy planters who had migrated from Barbados consolidated their lowcountry farms into large plantations and concentrated on growing rice, thus squeezing out mixed-crop farmers and cattle raisers. By the early eighteenth century, the rice grown on these plantations became South Carolina’s chief export, and planters turned almost exclusively to imported enslaved Africans for their workforce. Some of these enslaved workers had grown rice as free men and women in West Africa. South Carolina’s enslaved population rose from 2,400 in 1700 to 12,000 in 1720, of whom nearly three-fifths were African-born. Moreover, by 1708, for the first time in any North American colony, Carolina’s Black population outnumbered the white.

Rice cultivation also spread quickly to the Georgia lowcountry after the colony’s founding, and in 1749 Georgia rescinded its ban on slavery. A plantation economy then developed, and the lure of profits helped overcome the original proprietors’ military and moral objections to slavery. Enslavers in other colonies had objected to Georgia’s prohibition of slavery, viewing it as an enticement to their own enslaved workers to escape.

Enslaved rice growers were not subject to the regimentation and close supervision that were imposed in those in the tobacco regions. Rice did not, like tobacco, require constant daily attention. Enslaved workers spent part of the year repairing dams, building canals, and mending fences. Many had done similar work in Africa, and their experience helped both to shape the system of labor and to enhance their bargaining position with English enslavers who did not know how to grow rice. Even so, conditions were very difficult. Planting and harvesting rice in water-filled fields was backbreaking, unhealthy labor; work on dikes and canals was heavier still. Hard work, poor diet, disease, and maltreatment contributed to high mortality rates. Enslavers had unrestricted authority over their enslaved workers and did not hesitate to use it. Brute force maintained discipline. In South Carolina the law prescribed amputation as the punishment for recaptured freedom seekers: females could have their ears cut off, males their testicles.

As the rice economy spread and a structured, race-bound society emerged, slavery became more rigid. An English immigrant wrote in 1711 that freemen could do well in the colony if they could “get a few slaves and beat them well to make them work hard.” Enslaved individuals had little chance of obtaining freedom. Free Black servants, too, could expect extended terms of bondage, and free Black women were forced to “apprentice” children born during their servitude, which often lasted into their early thirties. Opportunities for escape became scarcer, as the loose supervision of cattle farms gave way to a tighter plantation regime, and the Yamasee war wiped out the chief allies of freedom seekers.

Beginning in the 1720s, successful South Carolina rice planters left overseers in charge of their plantations and moved to Charleston, where the climate was pleasanter, diseases like malaria less prevalent, and the society more stimulating than in the countryside. There they formed an aristocracy at least as wealthy and elegant as that of Virginia. Many enslaved people in Charleston were hired out, working for master craftsmen as shipbuilders, ropemakers, leatherworkers, and carpenters, or as dock workers or general laborers. In contrast to those on plantations, many enslaved urban residents were literate, worked as artisans, and were of mixed English and African origin. Women also formed a higher proportion of the enslaved urban population than the enlsaved population in the countryside. By 1776, half of Charleston’s twelve thousand inhabitants were Black. Interaction with their enslavers, more frequent than on the plantations, also provided the occasional opportunity to buy or be granted freedom.

By 1760, the American slave system, which would last another century, was firmly in place. It defined most Black people as the property of white men, yet within slavery’s confines Black people created their own fragile institutions through which to assert their dignity and humanity. They established  kinship and community networks that extended beyond the limits of any one plantation and strove to survive the slave sales that separated husband from wife and parent from child. African Americans also practiced their own religions, composed songs, created dances, devised ceremonies, and established ways of thinking that distinguished them from both their enslavers and their African ancestors. African American culture evolved as some half-million transported Africans and their descendants learned to resist the degradation and oppression of their enslavement and to assert some control over their day-to-day existence. This culture was neither English nor African, neither imposed by the enslaving class nor simply a relic of a lost African past, but was instead a blend of cultures, adapted to the peculiar needs of a people in bondage. Enslaved persons retained what they could of their African heritage and reconciled it with what they were forced to do, or had learned to do, to survive in America.

This evolving African American culture contrasted with the experiences of the first two generations of enslaved and free Black people in the Chesapeake. For those enslaved early a distinctive new culture had been impossible. Their numbers were small, and contact among them limited by their dispersal among a much larger English population. Closely supervised by their enslavers, enslaved persons had little time for themselves. There were also no rigid barriers yet to divide white from Black laborers, and some enslaved workers could expect to gain their freedom. So enslaved individuals adopted the culture of their English fellow servants, with whom they drank, “frolicked,” conspired, and escaped.

A distinctly African American culture began to emerge only as the number of Africans increased, as racial laws began restricting their contact with whites, and as the chances of freedom from slavery dwindled. Wrenched from different societies in Africa, most newly arrived enslaved persons faced a life among strangers. They had been robbed of their land, tools, and possessions, so they could not ply their trades or even dress as they had previously done. Separated from others from their own societies, they could not speak their native languages, play their assigned kinship roles, or practice their religions—the things that had distinguished them as belonging to diverse African villages and regions. Forcibly separated from their families, most enslaved persons began life in America without kin or other acquaintances around them.

As the number of enslaved workers grew rapidly in the first half of the eighteenth century, different circumstances in the Chesapeake and the lower South determined how long it would take for new arrivals to establish relationships with one another and with those who had preceded them. In the Chesapeake, many enslaved persons were sold to small planters and so lived separately from each other. Perhaps as many as one in three enslaved inhabitants of Chesapeake lived in groups of five or less, and they had quite close contact with whites. As slavery spread across the Virginia piedmont region in the eighteenth century, only about one-third of enslaved persons lived on plantations with more than twenty enslaved workers each. South Carolina rice plantations were larger, on average, than Chesapeake tobacco farms. Here, newly imported enslaved persons were more often sold in large groups to single planters, so were less likely to be separated from one another and more likely to live apart from whites. Consequently enslaved workers in the Chesapeake tended to speak English, while those in South Carolina and Georgia combined various African languages with English to form Gullah, which became a common and unifying language among those enslaved in the lowcountry.

Differences between tobacco and rice production also shaped regional patterns in the lives of enslaved workers. Work on large Chesapeake tobacco farms was fairly continuous, conducted by enslaved gangs who worked for long hours under the supervision of overseers. Carolina rice cultivation, by contrast, involved more strenuous but more varied work and was not suited to gang labor. Rice planters introduced a task system, in which enslaved persons remained more free of direct supervision; upon the completion of allocated jobs, they were allowed time to hunt, fish, or cultivate their own “provision grounds” (garden plots). As a result, enslaved South Carolinians found themselves with greater relative autonomy and greater responsibility for providing their own food than those in the Chesapeake. At the same time, though, they were more vulnerable to the whims of overseers left in charge by absentee planters who had taken up residence in Charleston.

Despite these differences, enslaved Black cultures throughout the South also developed much in common with one another. The strong emphasis African societies placed on kinship, and especially on ties between brothers and sisters, helped uprooted people survive enslavement. Even aboard slave ships, unrelated captives began to refer to each other as brothers and sisters, and sexual intercourse between such “siblings” was forbidden. Children were taught to call former shipmates aunts and uncles. Over several generations, kinship practices helped enslaved individuals from diverse backgrounds order their lives and maintain connections that extended beyond a single quarter, plantation, or county.

These bonds were easily strained by the constant arrival of new immigrants and by the sending of enslaved workers from one plantation to another, fracturing communities. Even so, since such movements often occurred within the same geographical area, kin connections and knowledge of family histories could, with effort, be maintained. In southern Maryland in the 1760s, between 120 and 300 enslaved persons claimed their descent from a couple called Butler, who had started having children eighty years before. After 1720 in the Chesapeake and 1760 in the lower South, various impediments to family life for enslaved people diminished: death rates fell, the number of men and women equalized, and importation of enslaved people from Africa declined in relative importance. Among Robert “King” Carter’s enslaved workers in Virginia, over half lived in households with children by 1733, including almost all the women. Of fifty-five Black people belonging to a North Carolina owner in 1761, only eight were single; the rest lived in six families.

Accordingly, by contrast with the Caribbean and Brazilian slave plantation societies, where sex ratios and mortality remained unfavorable, the Chesapeake’s enslaved population began to sustain its numbers by natural increase—the first in the Americas to do so. By the 1740s a majority of enslaved Chesapeake workers were native-born, and this would be the case throughout the South by 1800. Increasingly, young Black Americans were not “seasoned” by white enslavers like their predecessors, but raised by African American parents in an emerging African American culture.

Yet enslavers still defined the character of daily life and limited the ways in which enslaved individuals could act. They set working conditions, enforced slave codes, and ultimately held the power of life and death. They could break up enslaved families at will, while their indebtedness, bankruptcy, or death could do so unintentionally. However, if slavery was to work for them, enslavers had to depend on the ability of enslaved persons to take care of each other, to raise children, to learn English, to perform a variety of tasks, and, in some cases, to manage other enslaved workers. Enslaved people did all of these things, and taught their children to do likewise.

Living arrangements for enslaved workers also evolved. In the seventeenth century, when the majority of field hands were men, many lived together in rough barracks. But as the sex ratio became more balanced in the early eighteenth century and many enslaved men and women established families, an increasing number lived in separate dwellings. Cabins sprang up in settlements near plantation houses. They reminded one visitor to South Carolina of the “wooden cottages [of] poor villagers” in England, but many constructed by enslaved persons themselves reflected an African influence. Often scantily built, these dwellings offered basic shelter, but little material comfort or adornment. Still, in the family cabin, enslaved people enjoyed a space that was mostly theirs, where to some extent they could shape their own lives. Within this private sphere, they took last names different from their enslavers’ and named children for grandparents and great-grandparents—Cuffee, Quash— linking them to an African past and the memory of freedom.

Many enslavers, intent on destroying the remnants of their chattels’ free identities, discouraged African customs and languages, and so work habits, family arrangements, and religious beliefs most similar to English practices were those most likely to survive. Even so, enslaved communities retained non-Christian beliefs, dances, songs, and funeral practices. African influences persisted in foodways, child-rearing practices, the work of artisans who made pottery, musical instruments and metal goods, and the objects enslaved people placed in the graves of their dead. By building bonds of family and kinship, and by preserving aspects of African culture, eslaved workers fashioned a social identity that enabled them to maintain their dignity despite captivity and oppression.

In addition to forging social and cultural bonds, enslaved people tried actively to resist captivity. By 1760, African Americans accounted for about two-fifths of the Chesapeake’s population. In South Carolina, with its larger rice plantations, they were a substantial majority and here, particularly, the threat of rebellion by enslaved laborers led plantation owners to create more repressive arrangements. But wherever slavery existed, the fear and actuality of resistance produced harsh laws and institutions designed to impose order on potentially unruly enslave workers.

From time to time enslaved people did overtly rebel. As many as two hundred enslaved people took part in a revolt around Norfolk, Virginia, in 1730. Four of them were executed, and whites enlarged local militias. The Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739 began when about twenty enslaved workers marched off in the direction of Florida from the Stono River, not far from Charleston. Many of them were recently arrived from Angola and may have been prompted to resist their enslavement by an outbreak of war between England and Spain. After stealing arms and decapitating two storekeepers, they began burning buildings and murdering whites at the plantations they passed, while recruiting an additional fifty or more enslaved persons into their ranks. At the Edisto River, a white militia confronted them, shooting fourteen dead immediately and killing two dozen more after they had surrendered. In the brutal repression that followed, fleeing rebels were rounded up and executed. Their heads were displayed at mileposts along the roadsides as a warning to others.

Such outright rebellion was rare. But fear of it was common, and periodic panics gripped the white population. Planters were also wary of “intestine enemies” and “dangerous domestics.” Women employed as cooks, who were intimately connected to their white owners and in a unique position to harm them, came under suspicion. Enslaved Africans were known to have brought the knowledge of poisons from Africa, and those suspected of plotting to use it faced savage punishment.

Enslaved people resisted in less violent ways as well. As their numbers grew and a sense of community developed among them, they worked together to protect one another and reduce the harshness of labor. Though whippings for disobedience or insolence were a near-certainty, enslaved workers conspired to break tools, feign illness, slow down or neglect work, and avoid learning new tasks. When a Virginia planter skimped on his field hands’ clothing so that they were almost naked, one of his neighbors noted that he got “nothing by his injustice but the scandal of it,” because the enslaved laborers produced poor crops. The Virginia planter Landon Carter railed at the frequency with which his enslaved workerss fell ill on Mondays.

Enslaved people also made bids for freedom. Running away, individually or in small groups, was common. Most left only for short periods, to visit kin on other farms or escape punishment. Much truancy occurred during planting, hoeing, or harvesting seasons. The majority of runaways were men, though women frequently harbored fugitives. Returned runaways could expect a whipping, but some persistent fugitives had their toes cut off: one planter wrote that “nothing less than dismemberment” would “reclaim” an “incorrigeble rogue” who kept absconding. Some escapees paid with their lives. Twenty-one-year-old Henry Carter, sold to a new enslaver with a fearsome reputation, ran away, only to be stoned to death by an overseer who caught him crossing a river.

Unlike some Caribbean islands like Jamaica whose Black majority populations and mountainous terrain sheltered communities of formerly enslaved escapees (known as maroons), the southern colonies provided only slender chances for permanent escape. Hostile whites inhabited land surrounding Chesapeake plantation districts, for example. Near present-day Lexington, Virginia, in 1728–1729 one group of freedom seekers did create a village. They built homes like those they had known in Africa, established a government under a chief, and (with stolen implements) grew crops using African methods. Whites soon destroyed the village, killed the chief, and returned the residents to their enslavers. The Carolinas held somewhat more promise, but not much. Escape to different Native nations, such as Cherokees or Muscogees might offer a chance for assimilation, but equally likely led to re-enslavement by the nation to which they fled. Small groups of maroons did survive in the swamps behind rice plantations, but in isolated and harsh conditions.

The Spanish in Florida gave enslaved Carolinians one other chance of escape. In 1693 Spain promised freedom to fugitives who would convert to Catholicism. Some enslaved persons evaded capture on the dangerous march south, and in Florida groups of runaways lived among Native Americans or in their own communities. Even so, they were vulnerable. English troops seized the largest maroon village, Santa Teresa de Mose near St. Augustine, in 1740. Although the Spanish later recaptured it, Mose never regained its former size and disintegrated when Florida became a British possession in 1763.

By the 1750s, the population of the southern colonies numbered just over 300,000 whites and about 200,000 enslaved people, together with small numbers of free Black people and Native peoples not yet forced west. Nearly two-thirds of all southerners lived in Virginia and Maryland, and a third in the two Carolinas; only about 5,000 people had settled in Georgia by this time. Each colony had a colonial assembly and court system that governed in accordance with English precedents. The king’s representatives included a royal governor in each colony, customs collectors, and other officials charged with overseeing trade. The Church of England had become part of the fabric of life; as in England it was closely identified with the elite, and with the enforcement of social hierarchy. Southern customs and lifestyles no longer horrified English visitors as they had in earlier decades. Though few of the increasing numbers born in the South would ever see England, many shared an English cultural identity, and to some extent duplicated the social norms of their English peers. The availability of abundant land meant that more white men owned land than in England, yet great disparities in wealth remained. A small network of wealthy families, mainly located in coastal regions, largely dominated politics and society and demanded deference, but inland settlers, and later the rise of evangelical religious beliefs, frequently challenged this elite authority.

Men no longer outnumbered women in the southern colonies, and the family became the center of social life. Like their counterparts in England, many white women contributed to the family income by spinning, weaving, gardening, and selling dairy products. Slavery and the plantation economy were securely in place. There had been some diversification of agriculture. Chesapeake farmers and planters exported cattle and wheat. From the lower South went shipments of the dyestuff indigo—first grown on the plantation of a resourceful young woman planter, Eliza Lucas Pinckney—as well as naval stores such as pitch, tar, and timber. But the main staple crops of each region remained dominant. In the Chesapeake, tobacco production rose from 28 million pounds in 1700 to 80 million in 1760; from coastal South Carolina and Georgia rice exports rose from ten thousand barrels in 1720 to one hundred thousand in 1760.

Export crops and enslaved labor gave the southern colonies a prosperity unmatched elsewhere in eighteenth-century North America. White wealth per capita in Virginia and South Carolina was double that in New England or the Middle Colonies. Land was easier to acquire in the South than in England, and European visitors noted the abundance of food and prevalence of landownership. In Virginia about two in three white families farmed their own land in 1750, consuming roughly sixty percent of what they produced and bartering the surplus for tools and other goods they could not make. In the Carolinas the proportion of white households with land was higher still.

Yet the South’s wealth was very unequally distributed. Dramatic distinctions existed between rich and poor. Those at the lower end of the scale slipped easily into poverty, and at least one-fifth of the white population owned little more than the clothes they wore. Owning enslaved persons enhanced the advantages of the rich over the poor. Tobacco and rice, speculation in western land, trading enslaved workers, and shipping had made a few southerners very wealthy. When he died in 1732, Virginia’s richest planter, Robert “King” Carter, owned 300,000 acres and almost one thousand enslaved individuals. Across the southern colonies the richest ten percent of the population owned half of all wealth, including one-seventh of the people.

Wealthy planters mimicked the English gentry. By the 1720s they were building spacious brick mansions in parklike surroundings, and Charleston’s elite built elegant townhouses too. The rich imported elaborate furnishings, adorned their wives and daughters in European fashions, and maintained large numbers of enslaved house servants. They hired tutors for their sons or sent them to be educated in Scotland or England. They raised their children to exercise authority, sometimes by purchasing enslaved youth to be their personal servants.

Most white southerners lived in humbler surroundings. Their houses were small and built of wood; they had no servants, enslaved workers, or silverware, and relied on their own labor. Though many had land, significant numbers of whites in the Chesapeake owned none. In Maryland, a majority of small farmers were tenants, renting land from large landholders and living in relative poverty. Landless whites relied on intermittent work, or settled and hunted on marginal land or in frontier areas. Landless men worked as tenants on large estates or as wage laborers in agriculture, shipping, or craft trades; most landless women worked as domestic servants.

Also in humble surroundings were the growing numbers of white men and women who lived in the less-settled areas of the South, away from the coast. This “backcountry” attracted both the children of poorer native-born southerners and recent immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. A mid-century visitor to the South Carolina backcountry found many inhabitants who “have nought but a Gourd to drink out of, nor a Plate, Knive or Spoon, a Glass, Cup, or anything.” Many were tenants who rented from large landowners and speculators. Backcountry society was less structured and authority less established than on the coast. There were few great plantations or large concentrations of enslaved persons. In western North Carolina, for example, only about twelve percent of the white population owned enslaved workers, and very few of those owned more than five.

Frontier land was cheaper than on the coast, and thousands obtained legal title through squatter’s rights—that is, by building a cabin, clearing a number of acres, and planting a crop. Permitting settlement to expand in this way could help a colonial government bolster its claims to the interior against the counterclaims of Native peoples, English speculators, or other colonies. Though few settlers achieved more than a decent subsistence, they established communities in which a rough equality prevailed. The backcountry could also provide the opportunity for social mobility. In Virginia’s newly settled Southside, for instance, John Hix and George McLaughlin were landless laborers in 1748, but by 1769, McLaughlin owned 250 acres and Hix had acquired almost four hundred acres and two enslaved persons.

Along with Crown officials, the South’s wealthy men controlled government, courts, and church, forming a stable gentry class. By the eighteenth century, the Beverlys, Randolphs, Carters, Harrisons, Lees, and Byrds, with their relatives and connections, had secure hold of Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Between 1700 and 1760, members of just nine families held one-third of places in the Virginia governor’s council. John Randolph wrote that “person[s] of note in [Virginia] . . . are almost all related, or so connected in our interests, that whoever of a Stranger presumes to offend any one of us will infallibly find an enemy of the whole.” Pinckneys, Rutledges, Draytons, and some others gained even greater relative prominence in South Carolina.

Gentry power was locally rooted. Planters controlled the vestries, or governing bodies, of the established Church of England (or Anglican church), and individual parishes levied taxes to pay clergymen, who were mostly educated and ordained in England. County courts, the local centers political as well as legal power, were gentry-dominated too. Planters’ houses were centers of social and political activity, of hospitality and patronage for farmers and voters, and of sociable rituals of gambling, horse racing, and other entertainment.

It was assumed that in an unequal society the wealthy and powerful were owed deference and respect by the majority. One Virginian recalled that “we were accustomed to look upon . . . gentle folks as beings of a superior order.” Non-elite white men could participate in the benefits of privilege. By the mid-eighteenth century, the proportion of small enslavers was rising, particularly in coastal regions. About half the white farmers in coastal Maryland owned one or more enslaved persons, as did a majority of Charleston’s white artisans. Propertyholding or taxpaying was widespread enough that many white men qualified for the vote—between sixty and ninety percent across the South. The ten to forty percent of men who could not qualify were disenfranchised, as were all Black people and women. Even elite single women, like the pioneer landowner Mistress Margaret Brent, were unable to translate financial and political influence into the formal right to vote. But no white men, however poor, shared the inferior economic and political status of women or the burdens and penalties of slavery. These circumstances sustained notions of deference.

But powerful as the gentry were, their relationship with the poorer whites around them was not just one of domination. The Chesapeake gentry had noted the lessons of Bacon’s Rebellion, dispensing credit and employment to the less affluent, and making court sessions and elections a theater in which white property owners enjoyed a measure of equality. Sociability at taverns, racecourses, militia musters, and court-days, and the hospitality of the planter houses bridged distinctions between rich and poor whites and reflected their interdependence.

Even so, sharp conflicts over religion, politics, and economic issues arose between whites. Elites were divided by political differences. Wealthy planters and royal officials vied for power and the spoils of office. Planters complained about the “exorbitant” salaries they had to pay governors and other officials, and thought them too eager to exploit the region. Struggles over land and markets often pitted wealthy landowners and speculators against middling and poorer whites. In the 1730s, Virginia planters secured the passage of tobacco inspection laws that threatened to squeeze out smaller growers of the crop. Small farmers protested, burning down tobacco warehouses in several counties, but in vain.

In the Carolinas, there was conflict between the dominant coastal elites and poorer inhabitants of the backcountry. Frontier settlers claimed the right of all freeborn Englishmen to oppose illegitimate authority. People expected the wealthy to rule, but also to protect the larger interests of the community. When they did not, ordinary men and women claimed the right to take action on the community’s behalf. Backcountry people in the lower South seriously challenged coastal elites in the 1760s. Grievances mostly concerned access to the land and representation in colonial assemblies. Complaints readily escalated into violent confrontations, because frontier dwellers were already organized into armed militias for action against the Native peoples in the area. Though coastal authorities in the Carolinas and Georgia accused frontier dwellers of living “out of the bounds of the law,” such people were not overly violent or reckless. They were simply less deferential, more irreverent, and more egalitarian than their lowcountry peers.

A less violent but broader challenge emerged in the 1740s, when poor and politically disenfranchised whites joined a religious movement—called the Great Awakening by historians—that spread rapidly across the northern and southern colonies (see chapter 3). For decades the Anglican clergy and educated colonists had adopted the view, increasingly current in Europe, that God was rational and kind. This stance fit well with elite concepts of a decorous form of religious observance in which popular participation would pose no threat to social order or the authority of rulers. But evangelicals, many from the middling and lower classes, rejected the rationalists’ refined, philosophical religious discourse. Their God was wrathful and disgusted at mankind’s sinfulness. Individuals could be saved only by recognizing their own helplessness and depravity in the face God’s might, and by surrendering to God through an emotional conversion and begging forgiveness.

Figures who were at the heart of profound religious changes in England during the 1730s helped spread the Great Awakening in America. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached in Georgia in 1736, while a tour of the colonies three years later by his colleague George Whitefield prompted widespread revivals. From early revival meetings grew new sects that challenged Anglicanism and appealed to people of moderate and poor means. “New Lights,” as they were known, disputed with the clergy; attacked gambling, horse racing, and other leisured activities as sinful; and proclaimed the spiritual equality of all men and women before God. In Virginia small farmers enthusiastically denounced the gentry’s way of life. Itinerant preachers taught their growing flocks that ordinary folk were more likely candidates for divine inspiration than the gentry and educated clergymen who led them.

The egalitarianism of the Great Awakening challenged more than planters’ habits. It called their control into question, and it also threatened to break through the racial barriers that had become an essential facet of slave societies. Although Whitefield did not question slavery itself, he did condemn the mistreatment of enslaved individuals and referred to the recent Stono Rebellion as God’s judgment on planters. Others went further. In 1741, Hugh Bryan, a South Carolina planter and politician converted in the revival, began prophesying a day of doom that would bring “Deliverance of the Negroes from servitude.” The colonial assembly forced him to retract and apologize for his remarks because, as another planter put it, “we dreaded the consiquence of such a thing being put in to the head of the slaves and the advantage they might take of us.” The doctrine of spiritual equality had subversive potential in a slave society.

Revivalist religion, unlike Anglican hierarchicalism, spread Christianity among enslaved people, as well as poor whites, in the mid-eighteenth century. Enslaved workers like David George converted in large numbers, and the proportion of enslaved Christians would rise, though faster in the Chesapeake than in the lower South. Some evangelicals—considered by Virginia’s well-to-do to be “continual fomenters of discord”—held the radical belief that equality before God extended to all men and women, Black and white; all could surrender to God and be saved. In the Virginia backcountry, the Presbyterian preacher Samuel Davies attracted growing numbers of Black and white members to his churches in the 1750s, while Methodist churches regularly became forums of biracial worship. The evangelical movement as a whole, white and Black, raised the level of religious involvement in the colonies, and was particularly influential among women.

Davies assured leading Virginians that he was not seeking to undermine the social order. By turning human minds to spiritual matters, revivalism was potentially a conservative force. But by democratizing salvation, preachers helped erode some of the deference with which Black and most white people were expected to regard the gentry. Groups like the Separate Baptists became open critics of slavery and slave trading. Calling slavery into question and bringing white and Black worshippers together on an equal footing, the Awakening weakened the gentry’s formula, worked out in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, for preserving order in a slave society.

The Awakening also helped popularize the belief that government was merely the human mechanism through which God would ensure equality among individuals from various classes. In this belief, illiterate craftsmen, backwoods farmers, and female servants sought salvation for themselves and for society. Disdaining planters’ excessive comforts and pleasures, evangelicals questioned the legitimacy of their rule and the superiority of their culture.

Social tensions in the English southern colonies did not undermine their position with regard to Native peoples or other European powers whose territory lay adjacent to them. Population growth and frontier settlement maintained pressure on Native American groups. Wars and skirmishes across the border to the South weakened Spanish control of Florida and would lead to the British acquisition of East Florida in 1763. Meanwhile, in the Mississippi Valley, the French were also having difficulty sustaining their projected plantation society. Having imported several thousand enslaved Africans to Louisiana in the decade or so after founding New Orleans, they found themselves unable to build the kind of slave society that had emerged in the English South. Enslaved persons and members of the local W’Nahx’-Chee (Natchez) nation revolted in 1729, weakening an already tenuous French control of society. The European population grew more slowly than the African, and Louisiana soon had a Black majority. Slaveholding was concentrated in the hands of a small elite of planters and merchants, but racial distinctions were weakly defined and intermarriage became frequent. In contrast with the slave system in the English colonies, Louisiana ceased to be dominated by the existence of slavery; it became a “society with slaves.”

From Maryland to Georgia, by contrast, wealthy landowners convinced many poor whites that the division between white and Black meant more than that between rich and poor. The existence of slavery shaped virtually all social relations in the English southern colonies, where planters held sway over economic and political activity and exercised relatively unconstrained power. This made the South different, not only from Florida and Louisiana, but from the other English settlements to the north.