American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

Because Dutch-run plantations alone could not supply the refineries, Dutch traders financed the development of sugar plantations and mills on Barbados. They offered equipment and slaves on generous credit terms. As their reward, the Dutch profitably carried most of the Barbadian sugar to market in Europe, to the dismay of English imperialists but to the benefit of English planters.

By 1660, Barbados made most of the sugar consumed in England and generated more trade and capital than all other English colonies combined.

Free people did not volunteer for such degrading and debilitating work, and it became increasingly difficult even to obtain servants.

Because real wages rose in England after 1650, more laboring people could survive there without risking their lives in the West Indies.

Desperate for servants, the planters accepted growing numbers of convicted criminals and political prisoners, sent to the West Indies as a punishment. Between 1645 and 1655 the English government shipped to Barbados some twelve thousand captives taken in the suppression of rebellions at home. A mix of English, Scots, and Irish Catholics, such coerced servants rebelled or ran away early and often, despite brutal punishments for those caught. Because white men could more easily escape to pass as free on another island or aboard a pirate ship, planters increasingly saw an advantage in employing only permanent slaves of a distinctive color immediately and constantly identified with slavery.

By 1660, Barbados had become the first English colony with a black and enslaved majority: 27,000 compared with 26,000 whites. More slaves dwelled on Barbados than in all other English colonies combined.

Rather than improve those conditions, the Barbadian planters found it more profitable to import more slaves.

Because English law provided no precedents for managing a system of racial slavery, the Barbadians had to develop their own slave code, which they systematized in 1661. The Barbadian slave code became the model for those adopted elsewhere in the English colonies, particularly in Jamaica (1664) and Carolina (1696), which both originated as offshoots from Barbados.

This English refusal to convert slaves diverged sharply from the practice of French, Spanish, and Portuguese masters, who felt religiously and legally bound to promote the Catholic initiation of every soul, while they exploited the body.

Left alone by missionaries, the slaves could retain their traditional beliefs brought from West Africa. And as the great majority of the population, the West Indian slaves more readily preserved their African languages and customs.

By achieving economies of scale, the big operations remained profitable, but the smaller, less efficient operations failed. The losers sold out to their better-capitalized neighbors.

Barbados became the most socially polarized colony in the English empire, as an impoverished and enslaved black majority worked primarily for a small but wealthy planter elite.

Although a benefit to the wealthy few, the sugar revolution worsened conditions and prospects for the many common whites. In 1666 the planter Sir John Colleton conceded that during the preceding twenty-three years, Barbados had lost “at least 12,000 good men, formerly proprietors and tradesmen, wormed out of theire small settlements, by theire more subtle and greedy Neighbours.”

Suitably impressed, English visitors and the home authorities more readily accepted the West Indian planters as a proper elite—far superior to their cruder counterparts in the Chesapeake or New England.

these gentry families combined with the great London merchants who imported sugar to compose a formidable “sugar interest”—more influential than any other colonial interest. The sugar lobby protected the planters from the nearly ruinous taxes the crown levied on Chesapeake tobacco.

The Chesapeake planter worked primarily to benefit the crown; the West Indian planter kept most of the value his slaves made.

Squeezed out of Barbados, common whites emigrated by the thousand to the less developed West Indian islands: to the “Leeward Islands” of Nevis, St. Kitts, Montserrat, and Antigua or farther west to Jamaica, which became their principal destination.

English Jamaica had a dual economy: agriculture in the interior valleys and far-ranging piracy from the seaport of Port Royal.

But most Jamaican plantations of the 1660s were small-scale operations worked by their owners, sometimes assisted by a few indentured servants. Lacking the capital and slaves for sugar, the small planters raised cattle and pigs and cultivated small fields of indigo, cotton, and cacao (as well as tropical garden crops for subsistence).

More closely supervised by the planter elite, Kingston was too placid for the pirates. They moved to new havens in the Bahamas, conveniently close to the Florida Channel, which funneled Caribbean shipping into the Gulf Stream. Their departure diminished the common white population on Jamaica and completed the triumph of the planter elite. During the late 1670s and through the 1680s, the great planters consolidated most of the arable land into the largest sugar plantations in the English West Indies.

In 1660, Jamaica had seemed big enough for both small and great planters, but by the end of the century it became the English colony most dominated by great planters and their slaves.

By 1713, Jamaica was producing more sugar than Barbados and had become the wealthiest and most important colony in the English empire.

In sum, by 1700 the West Indian colonies featured a small but rich planter elite, a marginal population of poor whites, a great majority of black slaves, and a trace element of defiant maroons. As white immigration declined, the islands grew in overall population only by a massive importation of slaves from Africa that exceeded their heavy death rate from disease and overwork.

Although an economic success, the West Indies was a demographic failure that manifested a society in consuming pursuit of profit and with a callous disregard for life.

To secure Carolina from Spanish attack and accelerate its economic development, the Lords Proprietor needed to attract more colonists quickly. The Lords offered the incentives most alluring to English settlers of the late seventeenth century: religious toleration, political representation in an assembly with power over public taxation and expenditures, a long exemption from quitrents, and large grants of land.

Proprietary authority was especially weak in a detached cluster of settlements on Albemarle Sound, near Virginia. Founded by Virginians during the 1650s, these settlements resented their inclusion in Carolina and resisted, sometimes violently, the collection of quitrents and customs duties by proprietary officials. In 1691 the Lords Proprietor mollified the Albemarle Sound colonists by establishing “North Carolina” as a distinct government with its own assembly and deputy governor.

In 1719 the South Carolina assembly revolted, declaring itself “a Convention, delegated by the People, to prevent the Ruin of this Government.” Seizing control of the militia, the convention chose a provisional governor and sent an agent to England with a petition requesting a crown administration to replace the proprietors.

The transfer consolidated the political power of the great planter elite. During the 1720s and 1730s the crown exercised little authority in South Carolina beyond appointing governors.

The government primarily operated to regulate the competition of great planters for additional land grants, to promote the export of their crops, and to protect them from slave rebellions and Indian wars.

Carolina’s early leaders concluded that the key to managing the local Indians was to recruit them as slave catchers by offering guns and ammunition as incentive.

To pay for the weapons, the native clients raided other Indians for captives to sell as slaves—or they tracked and returned runaway Africans. Far from undermining colonial security, the gun trade rendered the natives dependent upon weapons that they could neither make nor repair.

Unlike their Spanish and French rivals, the English relied almost exclusively on their economic advantage, rather than on understanding (or converting) the culture of their customers.

According to the trader Thomas Nairne, a gun cost an Indian twelve to sixteen deerhides, but a single slave “brings a Gun, ammunition, horse, hatchet, and a suit of Cloathes, which would not be procured with much tedious toil a hunting.” Successful slave raids rewarded the attackers with the means to purchase additional trade goods, especially more muskets, compounding their military prowess. As a further bonus, successful slave raiding crushed and dispersed rival peoples, opening up their deer hunting grounds for exploitation by the victors.

But captives too readily escaped into the nearby forest, and the Carolinians worried that contact between Indian and African slaves might embolden both to make common cause in a rebellion against their exploiters. Consequently, the Carolinians exported most of the Indian captives to the West Indies, especially Barbados, trading them for Africans, who were then brought back to work the Carolina plantations. The exchange rate of two Carolina Indian slaves for one African reflected the shorter life expectancy of the enslaved native.

In fact, almost no religious instruction took place on a Barbados or Carolina plantation, which simply screwed as much labor as possible out of people before they died.

Unlike the Spanish or the French, the Carolinians made virtually no effort to convert the Indians to Christianity.

Very little of the decline derived from direct conflict between colonists and Indians, but the population collapse had everything to do with the indirect consequences of the European intrusion into North America. The Carolina Indians dwindled from a catastrophic combination of disease epidemics, rum consumption, and slave raiding.

In 1700, Indian numbers nearly equaled the colonists and their slaves in Carolina: 15,000 natives, compared with 16,000 colonists and Africans. By 1730 the 37,000 white colonists and 27,000 blacks in South and North Carolina had surged far beyond the local Indian population, which had declined to just 4,000.

A Carolina leader explained, “It can never be our Interest to extirpate [the Indians of the interior], or to force them from their Lands” for fear that “their Ground would be soon taken up by runaway Negroes from our Settlements, whose Numbers would daily increase, and quickly become more formidable Enemies than Indians can ever be.”

Many owners entrusted the roaming cattle to the care of black slaves, who had previous experience as herdsmen in Africa. In Carolina the black herdsmen became known as “cowboys”—apparently the origin of that famous term.

A subtropical grain, rice thrived in the wet lowlands of Carolina, once the planters learned the proper techniques of cultivation from slaves, who had known the crop in West Africa. With slave labor, the planters reengineered the extensive tidewater swamps, diking out the tide to reserve fresh water for the rice.

Carolina became the empire’s great rice colony, just as the Chesapeake specialized in tobacco and the West Indies in sugar. The annual rice exports surged from 400,000 pounds in 1700 to about 43 million in 1740, when rice composed over 60 percent of the total exports from Carolina as measured by value.

During the 1750s, the Carolinians developed a second valuable plantation crop for export: indigo, a plant that produced a blue dye in great demand by the clothing industry in England. From a little over 63,000 pounds in 1750, South Carolina’s exports surged to over 500,000 pounds by 1760.

Carolina planters became the wealthiest colonial elite on the Atlantic seaboard—and second only to the West Indians within the empire.

Only 1,500 in 1690, the African population grew to 4,100 by 1710, when South Carolina became the first mainland colony with a black majority. By 1730, enslaved Africans outnumbered free colonists in Carolina two to one: 20,000 to 10,000.

In the low country, blacks outnumbered whites by nine to one, a ratio comparable to that in Jamaica and greater than that in Barbados.

As in Barbados, so in Carolina, the brutal working conditions and the disease-ridden lowland environment produced a slave mortality in excess of the birthrate.

The planters thought of themselves as the innocent victims of vicious blacks and of circumstances that compelled white Carolinians to own slaves.

Until 1752, 90 percent of the colony’s funding came from Parliament, making Georgia the first colony financed by British taxpayers.

Georgia was the first and only British colony to reject the slave system so fundamental and profitable to the rest of the empire. Driven by concerns for military security and white moral uplift, the antislavery policy expressed neither a principled empathy for enslaved Africans nor an ambition to emancipate slaves elsewhere.