1. North Carolina
a. “Rift raft” – poor misfits
i. First North Carolina settlers were a mixture of poor families and runaway servants from Virginia and English Quakers, had no religion, similar to Rhode Island, hospitable, liked pirates, and dissenters (strong spirit)
b. The Carolina proprietors envisioned a traditional European society; there the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669) legally established the Church of England and prescribed a manorial system, with a mass of serfs governed by a handful of powerful nobles.
c. South Carolina:
i. Colonists also went their own way. The leading white settlers there were migrants from overcrowded Barbados. Hoping to re-create that island’s hierarchical slave society, they used enslaved workers — both Africans and Native Americans — to raise cattle and food crops for export to the West Indies. Carolina merchants opened a lucrative trade in deerskins and Indian slaves with neighboring peoples.
2. Slavery revolution and bought more Africans, putting these slaves to work on ever-larger plantations. By 1720, Africans made up 20 percent of the Chesapeake population; by 1740, nearly 40 percent. Slavery had become a core institution, no longer just one of several forms of unfree labor. Moreover, slavery was now defined in racial term
a. Rice: South Carolina
i. South Carolina primarily grew rice in 1700: The swampy estuaries of the coastal low country could be modified with sluices, floodgates, and check dams to create ideal rice-growing conditions, and slaves could do the backbreaking work. By 1708, white Carolinians relied upon a few thousand slaves to work their coastal plantations; thereafter, the African population exploded. Blacks outnumbered whites by 1710 and constituted two-thirds of the population by 1740 ii. Planted and exported rice to Southern Europe until 1700. To expand production, planters imported thousands of Africans, some of them from rice-growing societies. By 1710, Africans formed a majority of the total population, eventually rising to 80 percent in rice-growing areas iii. Work was done inland (swamps), dangerous and exhausting and in ankle deep mud. . Pools of stagnant water bred mosquitoes, which transmitted diseases that claimed hundreds of African lives. Other slaves, forced to move tons of dirt to build irrigation works, died from exhaustion
1. there were many slave deaths and few births, and the arrival of new slaves continually “re-Africanized” the black population.
b. Sugar
i. The South Atlantic System had its center in Brazil and the West Indies, and sugar was its primary product. Before 1500, there were few sweet foods in Europe — mostly honey and fruits — so when European planters developed vast sugarcane plantations in America, they found a ready market for their crop
1. Europeans went crazy for something so sweet – 20% of calories was sugar ii. After 1650, sugar transformed Barbados and the other islands into slave-based plantation societies, a change facilitated by English capital combined with the knowledge and experience of Dutch merchants. By 1680, an elite group of 175 planters, described by one antislavery writer of the time as “inhumane and barbarous,” dominated Barbados’s economy; they owned more than half of the island, thousands of indentured servants, and half of its more than 50,000 slaves iii. Sugar was a rich man’s crop because it could be produced most efficiently on large plantations. Scores of slaves planted and cut the sugarcane, which was then processed by expensive equipment — crushing mills, boiling houses, distilling apparatus — into raw sugar, molasses, and rum. The affluent planter-merchants who controlled the sugar industry drew annual profits of more than 10 percent on their investment.
c. Tobacco: tobacco cultivation required steadier and less demanding labor in a more temperate environment
1. Planted – spring
2. Hoed and weeded – summer
3. Picked and curved leaves - winter ii. plantation quarters