Why southern colonies were founded

Reading Guide. Virginia: A governor's recommendations , PDF. Carolina: Founders' promises to new settlers , Carolina: A young settler in Charles Town , Portraits: Rebecca Bonum Eskridge , ca. Buildings: Bacon's Castle , ca. Map: Charles Town , oriented with east to the left. What regional characteristics do they highlight? What is important to these settlers? To what extent are the "lessons" of the early English colonies reflected in the later colonies?

In , Opchanacanough was captured and killed while in custody, and the Powhatan Confederacy began to decline. The treaties required the Powhatan to pay yearly tribute payments to the English and confined them to reservations. In , the first representative assembly in America convened in a Jamestown church. This became known as the House of Burgesses. While the House of Burgesses was still allowed to run the government, the king nevertheless appointed a royal governor to settle disputes and enforce certain British policies.

The House of Burgesses instituted individual land ownership and divided the colony into four large boroughs. Initially, the colony only allowed men of English origin to vote, but they eventually extended suffrage to white men of other nationalities. Despite the setbacks, the colony continued to grow. Virginia became the largest, most populous, and most important colony.

The Church of England was legally established; the bishop of London made it a favorite missionary target and sent in 22 clergymen by In practice, establishment meant that local taxes were funneled through the local parish to handle the needs of local government, such as roads and poor relief, in addition to the salary of the minister. When the elected assembly, the House of Burgesses, was established in , it enacted religious laws that made Virginia a bastion of Anglicanism.

It passed a law in requiring uniformity among the Anglican congregations of the colony. According to the ministers, the colonists were typically inattentive, disinterested, and bored during church services. Some ministers solved their problems by encouraging parishioners to become devout at home, using the Book of Common Prayer for private prayer and devotion rather than the Bible. This allowed devout Anglicans to lead an active and sincere religious life apart from the unsatisfactory formal church services.

However, the stress on private devotion weakened the need for a bishop or a large institutional church of the sort Blair wanted. The stress on personal piety opened the way for the First Great Awakening, which pulled people away from the established church.

Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other evangelicals directly challenged these lax moral standards and refused to tolerate them in their ranks. The evangelicals identified the traditional standards of masculinity as sinful, which revolved around gambling, drinking, brawling, and arbitrary control over women, children, and slaves.

Baptists, German Lutherans, and Presbyterians funded their own ministers and favored disestablishment of the Anglican Church. The dissenters grew much faster than the established church, making religious division a factor in Virginia politics into the American Revolution. Sir William Berkeley, the governor of Virginia from — and —, tried to push for diversification in the economic activities of the colony. Governor Berkeley was a royal insider from an early age, and his governorship reflected the royal interests of Charles I and Charles II.

Berkeley remained popular after his first administration and returned to the governorship in His second administration, however, was characterized by many problems—disease, hurricanes, war with American Indians, and economic difficulties all plagued Virginia at this time. Berkeley successfully established autocratic authority over the colony. To protect this power, Berkeley refused new legislative elections for 14 years. After a lack of reform, Nathaniel Bacon began a rebellion in and captured Jamestown, taking control of the colony for several months.

Bacon then burned Jamestown before abandoning it, and continued his rebellion until dying from disease. Subsequently, Berkeley managed to eliminate the remaining rebels. The rebuilt statehouse in Jamestown burned again in , after which the colonial capital was permanently moved to nearby Middle Plantation, and the town was renamed Williamsburg.

Elite planters dominated the colony and would later play a major role in the fight for independence and the development of democratic-republican ideals of the United States. The Province of Maryland was a British colony in North America that existed from until , when it joined the other 12 of the North American colonies in rebellion against Great Britain and became the state of Maryland.

Colonial Maryland was larger than the present-day state of Maryland. The original charter granted the Calverts an imprecisely defined territory north of Virginia and south of the 40th parallel, comprising perhaps as much as 12 million acres. Maryland lost some of its original territory to Pennsylvania in the s when, after Charles II granted that colony a tract that overlapped with the Maryland grant, the Mason-Dixon Line was drawn to resolve the boundary dispute between the two colonies.

Maryland also ceded some territory to create the new District of Columbia after the American Revolution. The first settlers purchased land from the Yaocomico Indians and founded St. In , Maryland declared war on the Susquehannock Indian nation and remained in an inactive state of war until a peace treaty was concluded in He possessed absolute authority over his domain; in fact, settlers were required to swear allegiance to him rather than to the King of England.

The charter created an aristocracy of lords of the manor who bought land from Baltimore and held greater legal and social privileges than the common settlers. In Maryland, Baltimore sought to create a haven for English Roman Catholics and to demonstrate that Catholics and Protestants could live together harmoniously. Like other aristocratic proprietors, he also hoped to turn a profit in the new colony. The Calvert family recruited Catholic aristocrats and Protestant settlers for Maryland, luring them with generous land grants and a policy of religious toleration.

Despite the focus on creating a safe haven for Catholics, the majority of settlers were Protestant. Passed by the assembly of the Maryland colony, it was the first law requiring religious tolerance in the British North American colonies. Although Maryland was an early pioneer of religious toleration in the English colonies, religious strife among Anglicans, Puritans, Catholics, and Quakers was common in the early years. In , after the Third English Civil War — , Puritan rebels briefly seized control of the province.

The Protestant Revolution of was an event in Maryland when Puritans, by then a substantial majority in the colony, revolted against the proprietary government, in part because of the apparent preferment of Catholics to official positions of power.

The Puritans set up a new government that outlawed Catholicism and deprived Catholics of all official positions. Full religious toleration would not be restored in Maryland until the American Revolution. In the 17th century, most British settler-invaders in Maryland lived in rough conditions on small family farms. While they raised a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and livestock, the cash crop was tobacco, which soon came to dominate the provincial economy.

Tobacco was sometimes used as money, and the colonial legislature was obliged to pass a law requiring tobacco planters to raise a certain amount of corn as well, in order to ensure that the colonists would not go hungry.

Baltimore became the second-most important port in the 18th century South, after Charleston, South Carolina. The need for cheap labor to help with the growth of tobacco led to a rapid expansion of indentured servitude and, later, forcible immigration and enslavement of Africans.

Up to the time of the American Revolution, Maryland, along with Pennsylvania, was one of two remaining English proprietary colonies. In the late colonial period, the southern and eastern portions of the province continued their tobacco economy, but as the revolution approached, northern and central Maryland increasingly became centers of wheat production. The Province of Maryland was an active participant in the events leading up to the American revolution and echoed events in New England by establishing committees of correspondence and hosting its own tea party, similar to the one that took place in Boston.

The Province of Carolina was originally chartered in In , Charles II of England rewarded eight men for their faithful support of his efforts to regain the throne of England by granting them the land called Carolina; these men were called Lords Proprietors and controlled the Carolinas from to The charter granted the Lords Proprietor title to all of the land from the southern border of the Virginia Colony to the coast of present-day Georgia.

In , the charter was revised slightly, with the northern boundary extended to include the lands of settler-invaders along the Albemarle Sound who had left the Virginia Colony. Likewise, the southern boundary was moved just south of present-day Daytona Beach, Florida, which had the effect of including the existing Spanish settlement at St.

The charter also granted all the land between these northerly and southerly bounds from the Atlantic Ocean westward to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The soil was perfect for farming and the growing season was longer than in any other region. Hot summers, however, propagated diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. Most people in the Southern Colonies were Anglican Baptist or Presbyterian , though most of the original settlers from the Maryland colony were Catholic, as Lord Baltimore founded it as a refuge for English Catholics.

Religion did not have the same impact on communities as in the New England colonies or the Mid-Atlantic colonies because people lived on plantations that were often distant and spread out from one another.

The Southern economy was almost entirely based on farming. Rice, indigo, tobacco, sugarcane, and cotton were cash crops.