I Plantation as America o o The incorporation of the southern A What s the norm in early America o Does the U S start with uplifting story of religious freedom or does it start in the mercenary phase with slavery experience has been incorporated in the last few decades Today s effort is to understand the southern colonies Is slavery a central part of American identity and experience or is it a problem we wisely figured out how to get rid of with the way we now think about slavery B Model materialism avarice and conquest o Ambitious men people who sought opportunities for money land power resources oportunity etc o Europeans risking danger to seek o Africans seeking money land power C What do we want to remember A Early problems o What are the British Men who arrive here going to be doing once they arrive II Colonial Chesapeake The trip from England takes months of dissentary dehydration miserable experience so you arrive weak Have to figure out how to make it despite this Some of them are coming as traders or factors who are going to figure out trade differentials Some of them think of themselves as conquistadors looking for gold silver Exaggerated wealth lying around they think riches will just be lying around Some look for a northwest passage as traders None of these things turn out to be the case so they have to figure out what they need to do to be successful The scale of death and suffering is enormous at first They re hopelessly ill equipped No farmers are coming over on the ships They aren t prepared to feed themselves Relied heavily on the Indians for help B Demography o The study of the distribution of people in your population the characteristics One failure is the sex ratios overwhelming numbers of young men They re physically most likely to make the voyage The problem for this is young men are not the ideal population to make communities because they re prone to violence and impulses Hard to begin producing genuine communities without women Population dispersed because the men want their own territories You end up with counties not towns Labor plenty of land in Europe plenty of labor but no land 1610 1660 vast majority come over as indentured servants enormous risk more African slaves being brought in Africans are a long way from After 1660 you re getting a lot their native land which makes it hard and brings in risks On the one hand you have free people who are male may or may not own some slaves and can function in freedom women are further down the scale of freedom because they can t own land or cultural fluidity Creole person with mixed cultures Restrictions of racial interactions Your legal status follows according to your mother This is because slave owners were sleeping with the slaves this ensured child stayed a slave confederacy C Relations with Indians o At first quite amicable because they re arriving weak and trading so they help to keep these people alive o Powhatan is the major authority figure in the region In charge even though very loose o 1622 is the massacre where the Indians are trying to push the British out because it sees British as an adversary D Tobacco and Slavery o Tobacco is what saves the British because they figure out how to plant dry and roll them o Types forms of Cigars snuff pipes o Rise of Coffee houses Leads to a whole new kind of culture in English king originally is not Europe enthusiastic about tobacco but profits are too great to be denied When people arrive to plant tobacco they try to create their own brand Requires labor and land Crown seems to priveledge Indian lives over their own Nathaniel Bacon Bacon s rebellion rebellion against the crown by men seeking to obtain more land from Indians They questioned why the crown was more concerned about Indian rights than their own rights as Englishmen Indentured servants involved slaves involved multi racial coalition Colonial governor at this time was Berkley and he has to retreat E Early Democracy o There is a state not a democracy run by a corporate trading enterprise that is later taken over by the crown represented by the men who own property Quasi participitory system o There is a type of congress only o Slavery o American Slavery American Freedom these two things take place together you can t uncouple these things in the past III South Carolina F Disney s Pocahontas o Telling the story as a romance depoliticizes the story A The Bajan Connection B Ambitious men C Indian Slave Trade o It s dangerous to enslave Indians if their homelands are relatively close o o Makes the Carolinas very unstable o Colonial admin would prefer to have peace with Indians but cant control traders on the ground o What the traders see is a huge profit Indians eventually stop trading D Stono Rebellion o 1739 o A slave revolt in Charleston o Largest scale revolt of its sort in this o Spanish were trying to entice enslaved period of relative fluidity people out of British territory They run into a militia Is it a rebel to be opposing slavery o o Slaves drawn from a variety of ethnicities o Drumming and flags was a way of communicating against ethnic lines
View Full Document