Augustine, Florida. French traders were in Nova Scotia. But the continent still belonged to Native Americans. The settlers stayed for a year. Then they went home. A second group arrived in , but they mysteriously disappeared. Later, another group settled in Jamestown, Virginia. The colony faced great difficulties, but it was successful.
Over the next century, the English established 13 colonies. By nearly 2 million Europeans lived in the American colonies. Still others came from Africa. Most of the Africans were transported to America as slaves. Most people in England were farmers.
A few nobles owned the land. They rented plots to small farmers. But England was changing. Landowners made more money raising sheep than renting to farmers. Farmers were turned out of their homes. For them, America was the only opportunity.
Others came to the colonies in search of religious freedom. In Europe each nation had an official state church. Everybody had to attend the church. Those who refused were sometimes sent to prison. Religious dissenters voyaged to America to practice their own religion.
In King James of England gave two companies the right to settle the Atlantic coast. The Virginia Company of London was assigned to Virginia. The Plymouth Company got New England. In three Virginia Company ships set sail. They anchored off a marshy island, where colonists built a settlement called Jamestown.
The colony struggled against disease, famine, and hostile Indians. But Jamestown eventually flourished. By more than 1, settlers lived in Virginia. Each settlement was allowed to elect two men to represent them in the government.
These men, called burgesses, met with the colonial governor and helped make laws. Representative government had begun. Meanwhile, in England, a group of Puritans was fleeing religious persecution. Some decided to go to America. In September these Pilgrims sailed to the New World.
They chose Plymouth as the site of their colony. They founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop became its first governor. By more than 20, settlers were living around Boston. Another region, near present-day Charleston, South Carolina, was settled under the Lords Proprietors in The Charles Town settlement developed more rapidly than the Albemarle and Cape Fear settlements due to the advantages of a natural harbor, and it quickly developed trade with the West Indies.
South Carolina was primarily settled by French Huguenot aristocrats, while North Carolina was settled by poor whites moving in from Virginia.
Some tribes, such as the Westos, were well armed, using more European weapons than their neighbors at the time. American Indians around Charleston obtained weapons from the Spaniards and from Virginia traders.
Carolina, established relatively late, nevertheless soon established an American Indian slave trade that overshadowed other mainland colonies. As in other areas of English settlement, native peoples in the Carolinas suffered tremendously from the introduction of European diseases. Despite the effects of disease, American Indians in the area endured and, following the pattern elsewhere in the colonies, grew dependent on European goods. Local Yamasee and Creek tribes built up a trade deficit with the English, trading deerskins and captive slaves for European guns.
English settlers exacerbated tensions with local American Indian tribes, especially the Yamasee, by expanding their rice and tobacco fields into American Indian lands. Worse still, English traders took American Indian women captive as payment for debts. The outrages committed by traders, combined with the seemingly unstoppable expansion of English settlement onto native land, led to the outbreak of the Yamasee War — , an effort by a coalition of local tribes to drive away the European invaders.
This native effort to force the newcomers back across the Atlantic nearly succeeded in annihilating the Carolina colonies. As the settlement around Charles Town grew, it began to produce livestock for export to the West Indies. In the northern part of Carolina, settlers turned sap from pine trees into turpentine used to waterproof wooden ships. The southern part of Carolina had been producing rice and indigo a plant that yields a dark blue dye used by English royalty since the s, and South Carolina continued to depend on these main crops.
The northern part of Carolina continued to produce items for ships, especially turpentine and tar, and its population increased as Virginians moved there to expand their tobacco holdings. Tobacco was the primary export of both Virginia and later North Carolina, which also traded in deerskins and slaves from Africa.
Slavery developed quickly in the Carolinas, largely because so many of the early migrants came from Barbados, where slavery was well established. By the end of the s, a very wealthy class of rice planters who relied on slaves had attained dominance in the southern part of the Carolinas, especially around Charles Town. By , the southern part of Carolina had a black majority because of the number of slaves in the colony. The legal basis for slavery was established in the early s as the Carolinas began to pass slave laws based on the Barbados slave codes of the late s.
These laws reduced Africans to the status of property to be bought and sold as other commodities. The Lords Proprietors, operating under their royal charter, were able to exercise their authority with nearly the autonomy of the king himself. The actual government consisted of a governor, a powerful council of which half of the members were appointed by the Lords Proprietors themselves , and a relatively weak, popularly elected assembly. The Charleston settlement was the principal seat of government for the entire province.
However, due to their remoteness from each other, the northern and southern sections of the colony operated more or less independently until , when dissent over the governance of the province led to the appointment of a deputy governor to administer the northern half of Carolina.
From that time until , the northern and southern settlements remained under one government. The north continued to have its own assembly and council; the governor resided in Charleston and appointed a deputy governor for the north. During this period, the two halves of the province began increasingly to be known as North Carolina and South Carolina.
From to , due to disquiet over attempts to establish the Anglican Church in the province, the people were unable to agree on a slate of elected officials. Consequently, there was no recognized and legal government for more than two years. This circumstance, coupled with hostilities with American Indian tribes and the inability of the Lords Proprietors to act decisively, led to separate governments for North and South Carolina.
The division between the northern and southern governments became complete in , but both colonies remained in the hands of the same group of proprietors. Another rebellion against the proprietors broke out in , which led to the appointment of a royal governor for South Carolina in After nearly a decade in which the British government sought to locate and buy out the proprietors, both North and South Carolina became royal colonies in when seven of the Lords Proprietors sold their interests in Carolina to the Crown.
The Province of Georgia was chartered as a proprietary colony in and was the last of the 13 original British colonies. The Province of Georgia, also called Georgia Colony, was one of the southern colonies in British America and the last of the 13 original colonies established by Great Britain. An earlier grant to three Montgomery brothers was forfeited when they failed to establish a permanent colony, largely as a result of disease in the marshy area they chose to develop.
In , Georgia officially ceased to be a trustee colony and became a crown colony. South Carolina had never been able to gain control of the area; however, American Indians had been forcefully pushed back from the Georgia coast after the Yamasee War, excepting a few villages of defeated Yamasee who became known as the Yamacraw to distinguish them from the Yamasee in Florida and among the Creek.
In practice, settlement in the colony was limited to the vicinity near the Savannah River. The western area of the colony remained under the control of the Creek Indian Confederation until after the American Revolutionary War. Savannah, Georgia colony, early s : An early drawing of Savannah, Georgia, from sometime in the early s. In , General James Oglethorpe, who was a British member of Parliament, established the Georgia Colony as a solution for two problems.
Additionally, Oglethorpe decided to establish a colony in the contested border region of Georgia and populate it with debtors who would otherwise have been imprisoned according to standard British practice. However, colonists who relocated from other colonies, especially South Carolina, disregarded these prohibitions. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content.
Britain and the Settling of the Colonies: — Search for:. Settling the Southern Colonies. Learning Objectives Summarize the major events in the development of the Southern Colonies. The Province of Maryland existed from until The Province of Carolina was originally chartered in , with the first permanent settlement in The Province of Georgia was the last colony to be established by the British in London Company : An English joint stock business established by royal charter by James I of England on April 10, , with the purpose of establishing colonial settlements in North America.
Maryland : A map of the Province of Maryland. Virginia : A map of the Colony of Virginia. Georgia : A map of the Province of Georgia, — Virginia The Virginia Colony became the wealthiest and most populated British colony in North America, largely due to its tobacco crop industry.
Learning Objectives Describe the challenges faced by settlers in Jamestown. When the British invaders arrived, the American Indian population numbered around 14,; by , it had fallen to 1, Jamestown was the first settlement of the Virginia Colony, founded in ; it served as capital of Virginia until Elite planters dominated the colony and played a major role in the development of democratic-republican ideals of the United States. The Anglican Church of England controlled Virginian society and government during the colonial era.
This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and later enslaved workers. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all. The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in to found Plymouth Colony.
Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger and more liberal group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered. As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they generated new colonies in New England. Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven the two combined in In , King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York.
This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New World. In , the king granted 45, square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, most of these emigrants paid their own way to the colonies—they were not indentured servants—and had enough money to establish themselves when they arrived.
As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place. By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan.
In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef and pork, and—starting in the s—rice.
These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. As a result, slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony. It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in In , inspired by the need to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony.
By , on the eve of revolution, there were an estimated 2. The colonists did not have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.
The American Revolutionary War was sparked after American colonists chafed over issues like taxation without representation , embodied by laws like The Stamp Act and The Townshend Acts.
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