History

HIS 131 Chapter 3

Expansion and Diversity: The Rise of Colonial America, 1625-1700.

I. The Growth of New England

Although it was in Virginia that Englishmen had established their first permanent colony, it was in New England that English settlement most rapidly spread and flourished in the first half of the 1600’s.

The future of the region was shaped, not by the minority Puritan group, the Puritan Separatists (or the Pilgrims) the region’s first settlers, but by the mainstream Puritans themselves.

This group, more worldly and more wealthy than the Pilgrims, came to America not only to escape from the religious repression of England but to create a prosperous, well- ordered economy.

Far from seeking to isolate themselves from the rest of the world, they sought to serve as a model for it…hoping by their example, to inspire a transformation of English society into something resembling their own.

A. To Massachusetts Bay

To the mainstream English Puritans, interest in migrating to America began to grow in the 1620’s particularly after the successes of their Pilgrim brethren.

But their interest was also substantially enhanced by other events within England. There, a long and bitter struggle was in progress between the British king and Parliament, and religious dissenters such as the Puritans were suffering severely as a result of this struggle.

The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 had brought to the throne her cousin James I, who ruled with unrestrictive power and whose harsh treatment of the Puritans created serious tensions.

This situation worsened in 1625 when his son Charles I took the throne, and proved to rule even more aggressively than his father…and his efforts to restore Roman Catholicism to England and to destroy religious non-conformity led the nation on the road that in the 1640’s would lead to civil war.

For the Puritans, who became particular target’s of Charles’s wrath (many of them were imprisoned for their beliefs), the situation in England was becoming intolerable.

2 In the midst of this turmoil, a group of Puritan merchants were organizing a new enterprise designed to take advantage of opportunities in America. At first their interest was largely an economic one.

They obtained a land grant in New England for most of the area now making up Massachusetts and New Hampshire…they also received a charter to establish the Massachusetts Bay Company through which they hoped to establish a colony in the New World….By 1629, they were ready to dispatch a substantial group of settlers to New England.

Among the members of the Massachusetts Bay Company were some Puritans who saw this enterprise as something more than a business venture. Upset over the harsh political and social atmosphere of England under Charles I, they began to consider the possibility of emigrating themselves, of creating in New England a refuge for Puritans.

Members of this group met secretly in the summer 1629 and agreed to move completely as a group to America if the other members of the company would transfer control of the enterprise to them.

When the other investors who preferred to remain in England agreed and sold their share in the company to prospective emigrants, no obstacle remained. The new owners of the Massachusetts Bay Company elected as their governor John Winthrop, Winthrop had been instrumental in organizing the trip…and he also commanded the expedition that sailed for New England in 1630 (17 ships and 1,000 people, the largest single migration of its kind in the 17th century).

Winthrop carried with him the charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company. Because they owned the charter, and they traveled completely as a group, there was no company officials in England to whom they owed allegiance. They would be responsible only to themselves.

Unlike the two previous English settlements in America (Jamestown and Plymouth), the Massachusetts migration produced more than one new town. Although the port of Boston, at the mouth of the Charles River became the company’s headquarters and the colony’s capital, settlers began establishing (almost right away) other towns and villages (such as, Charlestown, Cambridge, Roxbury, and others).

The Massachusetts Bay Company soon was transformed into the Massachusetts colonial government. According to the terms of the company charter, the “freemen” (the stockholders) were to meet as a General Court to choose officers and adopt rules for the corporation.

After their arrival in America, the freemen elected officials and passed laws for the colony. At their first meeting the freemen (there were 8 of them) voted to concentrate power in

3 their own and the governor’s hands.

At their next meeting, in 1631, they increased their number of freemen to more than 100, so as to include about half of the family heads in the colony. The word “freemen” no longer referred to the stockholders, it now stood for voters or citizens.

Winthrop continued to dominate colonial politics, but in 1634 he agreed to an arrangement by which the freemen would hold annual elections for a new governor. A deputy governor, a council of governor’s assistants, and two “deputies” from each town…all of whom would make up the general Court.

In 1644 this became a legislature made up of two legislative bodies, with a lower House of Deputies, and an upper chamber consisting of the governor and his council.

Through their careful planning, and with a strong sophisticated elected government in place, the Massachusetts Bay Company’s colony prospered.

Throughout the 1630’s, while Charles I ruled England, Puritans continued to escape his tyranny in such large numbers that by 1643 the colony had reached a population of about 15,000.

B. Exodus from the Bay Colony

Meanwhile, an outpouring from Massachusetts Bay to various parts of New England began.

This exodus was motivated for two reasons: 1) The stony soil around Boston proved to be unproductive. 2) The governmental and religious make up of the colony was begging to feel oppressive to some of the population.

Now, not all of the arriving settlers were Puritans, and as the population increased, the proportion of those who could vote or hold office declined.

To the Puritans, opposition to their church seemed like a threat to their government. Ironically, the Puritans, those that had fled England because of religious persecution, now attempted to force their beliefs on non-Puritan residents of their colony and also denied them any say-so in their government.

Many of these groups either wishing to find more productive agricultural lands or escaping the oppressive religious and political conditions of Massachusetts Bay became responsible for creating the settlements north in New Hampshire, south in Rhode Island, and west in Connecticut.

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C. Settlers and Natives

As the European settlement of New England expanded, the colonists became embroiled in a struggle that would characterize American history for more than two centuries…that is the battle between Europeans and Indians.

Almost from the beginning, the Puritans had viewed the Native Americans individuals who should be civilized by conversion to Christianity or exterminated.

Occasionally, an exceptional colonial leader would advocate tolerance and respect for the Indians, but, for the most part, the English attitude toward the natives was stern, harsh, and often brutal.

In 1637, members of the Pequot tribe, irritated by the continuing European incursions into their lands and the antagonistic attitudes of the new settlers, began hostile actions against settlers in the Connecticut River Valley.

White frontiersmen responded to these hostilities in what would become a familiar pattern…they marched against a fortified Pequot stronghold and set it on fire. About 400 Indians died, burned to death in the flaming stockade or killed by the white attackers as they attempted to escape. Those who escaped were hunted down, captured, and sold as slaves.

The Pequot tribe was almost completely wiped out. Other tribes would face a similar fate in the years to come.

It was not that the European settlers were inherently more cruel or violent than the Indian population. Indians also could be extremely brutal in their attacks against the settlers.

But several factors made the relationship between whites and Indians in the coming years disastrous for the Indian 1) The automatic assumption of the European colonists that the natives were inferior savages whose civilization deserved no respect. 2) The European commitment to expand into and development of the wilderness, which put the whites in direct conflict with the Indians, whose way of life depended upon the preservation of the natural world. 3) And eventually, the superior strength and sheer numbers of the whites, which ultimately made the inevitable conflicts hopeless mismatches and left the Native Americans with a tragic choice…accept white society or perish.

The bloodiest and most prolonged encounter between whites and Indians in the 17th century began in 1675...this was a nightmare that would be remembered for generations as King Philip’s War.

5 As in Connecticut with the Pequot War some 40 years earlier, another Indian tribe, the

Wampanoags, under the leadership of a chieftain known to the whites as King Philip… (known to his people as Metacom)…rose up in retaliation against the encroachments of the English settlers into what they considered their lands.

For three years, they inflicted terror upon a string of Massachusetts towns, destroying or depopulating 20 of them and causing the deaths of about 7% of the males in the colony.

As before, the whites prevailed. Massachusetts leaders requested assistance from the so- called “praying Indians” of the region…thousands of Indians who had been converted to Christianity by missionaries and who had settled near the towns of the whites.

One of these Indians shot and killed King Philip, and gradually the uprising was crushed. Some Wampanoag leaders were executed….others were sold into slavery in the West Indies…and the power of the Wampanoags and their tribes were forever destroyed.

These victories by the white settlers did not end the danger to their existence. This was in part because other Indians tribes survived, capable of launching future wars.

It was also because the New England settlers faced competition not only from the natives, but also from the Dutch and the French, who claimed the territory on which some of the outlying settlements were established.

The French, in particular, would pose a constant threat to the English and would later support hostile Indians in their attacks on the New England frontier.

II The Chesapeake Country

While Puritan settlers were expanding the area of settlement in New England, other English immigrants were populating a large region farther south, in the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay.

After its disastrous beginnings at Jamestown, the colony began in the 1620’s and 1630’s rapidly to expand. And alongside it there emerged a new colony…Maryland…which, though founded for different reasons, developed in very similar ways.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony had been established as a planned society, and the development of New England in the 17th century continued to reflect a sense of collective interest and shared social purpose.

The Chesapeake Bay colonies did not. The most noticeable feature of the Chesapeake Bay Colony was the complete absence of common purposes and goals.

6 A. Maryland and the Calverts

Like Massachusetts, Maryland emerged in part from the desire of a religious minority in England to establish a refuge from discrimination. In this case, however, the minority was not dissenting protestants but Roman Catholics.

The new colony was the idea of George Calvert the first Lord Baltimore. His first attempt was to establish a colony in Newfoundland, but after spending a miserable winter there, he decided to relocate his colony further couth on the Chesapeake.

Returning to England he began the process of trying to convince King Charles I to grant him a charter. Unfortunately, he died before this was accomplished , but his son, and the second Lord Baltimore Cecilius Calvert, won the charter in 1632.

The Maryland charter was remarkable not only for the extent of the territory it granted to Calvert (this was an area that contained parts of modern-day Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia, in addition to Maryland) but also for the powers that it bestowed upon Calvert.

He and his heirs were to hold their province as true and absolute lords and proprietors, and they were allowed to establish a government however they saw fit. Their only requirement placed on Calvert for this, was to pay an annual fee to the king.

The early Marylanders knew no massacres, no plagues, and no starving time.

The Calvert family had spent a large part of their family fortune in the development of their American possessions, therefore, although the original plan was to establish a Roman Catholic colony, they knew that they needed to attract many thousands of settlers if their venture was to pay off.

Therefore, they encouraged the immigration of Protestants as well as Roman Catholics, and soon the Protestant settlers far outnumbered the Catholics.

Realizing that Catholics would always be a minority in the colony, the Calverts insisted from the beginning on religious toleration. To appease the Protestant majority, Calvert appointed a Protestant as governor in 1648.

As in other colonies, government in Maryland quickly took on a form similar to government in England.

In 1635 representative assembly was called, which was known as the House of Delegates…whose proceedings were based on the rules of British Parliament. Within 15 years the colony had a legislature consisting of two bodies, with an upper house that consisted of the governor and his council.

7 In other respects, the distribution of power in Maryland differed sharply from that in other colonies.

Remember, under the royal charter that the Calverts had received, the Lord Baltimore retained absolute authority to distribute land as he wished…and initially, Lord Baltimore granted large estates to his relatives and to other wealthy Englishmen, so that from the start there existed a distinct upper class in Maryland.

B. Turbulent Virginia

Having survived the “starving time” of the early days at Jamestown, the Virginia colony grew rapidly in the mid-17th century, increasing both its population and complexity and profitability of its economy.

It also grew more politically unsettled as emerging factions within the colony began to compete for the favor of the government.

Virginia had been a royal colony, with its governor appointed by the king, ever since the collapse of the London Company in 1624. One of those governors, Sir William Berkeley, arriving in the colony in 1642, dominated the politics of the colony for over 30 years.

The colonists responded enthusiastically to Berkeley’s policies during the first years of his tenure. He helped to open up the interior of Virginia by sending out explorers who crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains. He also directed a force that put down an Indian uprising in 1644 led by old Chief Opechancanough winning a favorable treaty with the Indian confederation.

However, in later years, Berkeley began to force his personality on the government and took control of the House of Burgesses.

Originally, the Virginia government had been remarkably democratic. When the first House of Burgesses met in 1619, all men aged 17 or older were allowed to vote. After 1670, the vote was restricted to landowners and elections were seldom held, therefore the same burgesses remained in office year after year.

Each county continued to have only two representatives, even though the new counties in the west now contained many more people than some of the old ones of the tidewater area.

Thus the more recent settlers on the western frontier were becoming underrepresented or not represented at all. A pattern was emerging in Virginia that would repeat itself time and again in other parts of America.

8 New settlements in the west were growing larger and more prosperous, developing interests and political demands of their own. But more established wealthy landowners near the coast continued to ignore the demands for representation and assistance from

those residing in the western part of the colony.

A situation was building that promised to produce social conflict. And, in 1676, it did.

C. Bacon’s Rebellion

Nathaniel Bacon, young, handsome, educated, and ambitious, arrived in Virginia in 1673.

His wealth and his family background enabled him to purchase a good farm in the back country (the western part of the colony), and also to obtain a seat on the governor’s council. In other words, he quickly became an established member of the back-country gentry (a group of influential, propertied individuals that were emerging in the western region of the colony in the same way that their counterparts had previously emerged in the east).

However, the new back country aristocracy was different in crucial ways from its tidewater counterpart. Isolated geographically from the colonial government, western aristocrats sensed themselves being cut off from any real political power.

There were, in short, growing regional tensions between eastern and western Virginia.

These tensions came to a head in response to Governor Berkeley’s policies for dealing with Indians on the Virginia frontier. These policies were a result of the treaty that Berkeley had made with the Indians when Chief Opechancanough was defeated. He had agreed to prevent white settlement west of the fall line protecting that area for the Indians.

For some time property owners in the back country had been upset about the governor’s attempts to hold steady this line of protection in an effort to avoid antagonizing the Indians.

The back country settlers believed that it was really an effort by the eastern aristocracy to protect its dominance by restricting western expansion. (In truth, it was an effort by Berkeley to protect his own lucrative trade with the Indians). Gradually, Bacon established himself as the leader of a faction in western Virginia (in defiance of Berkeley), which attempted to seize additional lands from the Indians.

The result was predictable….a bloody confrontation between white settlers and Indians in 1676, in the course of which several 100 whites were killed.

Bacon demanded that the governor send the Virginia militia out to pursue and destroy the 9

Indians. Berkeley, however, continued to try to ease the conflict. He did send the militia, but he ordered them to merely guard the edge of settlement, and to engage in no

aggressive actions against the Indians.

Bacon, now infuriated, formed his own army and launched a vicious but unsuccessful pursuit of the Indians. When Berkeley heard of this unauthorized military effort, he dismissed Bacon from the council and proclaimed him and his followers to be rebels.

At that point began what became known as Bacon’s Rebellion…the largest and most powerful insurrection against established authority in the history of the colonies, one that would not be surpassed until the Revolution.

When Berkeley, in an effort to increase his waning popularity, called for a new election of members of the House of Burgesses, Bacon ran and was overwhelmingly elected. He then marched with his army to Jamestown to demand his seat.

Berkeley’s first impulse was to have Bacon arrested….but fearful of the political consequences of having such a popular individual hanged, he soon pardoned him, promised him a commission to fight the Indians, and restored him to his position on the council. Convinced that he had regained his own popular support, Berkeley withheld the promised commission and renewed the charge that Bacon was a rebel.

Once again, Bacon led his army on a march to Jamestown…this time gathering wide support as he came. Ultimately he forced Berkeley to flee, burned the capital, and stood on the verge of taking command of Virginia….instead he died of dysentery.

Berkeley soon managed to regain control, at which point the saw to the execution of 37 of Bacon’s rebels.

Bacon’s Rebellion was significant for several reasons. 1) It revealed the bitterness of the competition among rival aristocracies within the colonies (and between easterners and westerners in particular). 2) It also exposed something Bacon himself had never intended to unleash…the potential for instability in the large population of free, landless men…most of them former indentured servants…who formed the bulk of Bacon’s constituency.

III. The Restoration Colonies

A. The Carolinas

Carolina, was like Maryland, carved in part from the original Virginia grant. It was awarded by Charles II to a group of 8 of his favorites, all prominent politicians active in colonial affairs.

10 In two successive charters (in 1663 and 1665) the Eight Proprietors received joint title to vast territory stretching south to the Florida peninsula and west to the Pacific Ocean. Like Lord Baltimore, the eight proprietors were given almost kingly powers over their

territory.

They expected to profit as landlords and land speculators, reserving tremendous estates for their own development, selling the rest in smaller tracts, and collecting annual payments from the settlers

In the hopes of attracting settlers from the existing American colonies and thus avoiding the expense of financing expeditions from England, the eight proprietors welcomed newcomers whether they were Protestant or not. Their charter guaranteed religious freedom to all who worshiped as Christians, and it also promised political freedom with laws to be made by a representative assembly.

The Eight Proprietors also intended to introduce slaves into the colony so as to profit both from selling them and from using their labor. Early settlers were offered a bonus of extra land for every slave they brought in. African slavery existed in North Carolina from the outset, with no transitional period of temporary servitude as was seen in the other colonies.

The leading proprietors desired a planned society and a uniform pattern of settlement for the colony. With the aid of the political philosopher John Locke, they drew up the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina in 1669 which dictated how the colony was to be divided geographically and socially.

While the Fundamental Constitution remained in effect for 30 years, Carolina was slow to develop. Geographical conditions in Northern Carolina greatly hindered its development. The hazardous coastline, known as the “graveyard of the Atlantic” with its shallow waters and barrier islands, prevented large trading vessels safely entering and exiting. Therefore, most of these vessels either went north or south of Northern Carolina. Also, the Northern colony’s navigable rivers only flow north and south, which also prevented trade coming in and leaving the Northern part of the colony.

The southern part of the early Carolina colony was very different. It was favored with an excellent harbor at the point where the Ashley and Cooper rivers join. Here in 1670 a fleet arrived, bringing colonists, who eventually established the city of Charleston, which soon had wharves, fortifications, and fine houses.

The city of Charleston became the capital of the Carolina colony in 1690, when the governor took up his residence there, leaving his deputy to take charge of the Northern portion of the colony.

Already there were in fact two Carolinas having a distinctive way of life, long before the colony was formally divided into North and South Carolina in 1729.

11 B. New Netherland and New York

In 1664, one year after making his Carolina grant, Charles II bestowed on his brother, the

Duke of York, all the territory lying between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers.

But unlike other such grants, this one faced a major challenge from prior claims upon the region. A serious problem lay in the Dutch claim to the entire area, and in the existence of Dutch settlements at strategic points within it.

The Dutch republic had launched upon its own career of overseas trading and empire building in America. On the basis of their own explorations, the Dutch staked an American claim and proceeded promptly to exploit it with a busy trade in furs.

To add permanence to their business, the Dutch began transporting whole families of settlers on voyages beginning in 1624. They developed the colony of New Netherland centered on New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, and also included scattered settlements on the Hudson, Delaware, and Connecticut rivers, with forts for their protection.

Three Anglo-Dutch Wars arose from the commercial and colonial rivalry of England and the Netherlands.

In 1664, troop-carrying vessels of the English navy put in at New Amsterdam and extracted a surrender from the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant.

New York, formerly New Netherland, already the property of the Duke of York and renamed by him, was his to rule virtually as an absolute monarch.

However, since he was himself a Roman Catholic, and since his province already contained Anglicans from England and Puritans from New England as well as Calvinists from Holland, he found it expedient to be religiously and politically broadminded.

The Duke of York remained in England but delegated powers to a governor and a council, and made great political and social concessions in an attempt to satisfy the population.

Under English rule, the population grew much faster than it had while still under Dutch control. By 1685, New York contained about 4 times as many people ( around 30,000) as when it had been taken over about 20 years prior.

Most of the population lived within the Hudson River valley, close to the river itself, with the largest settlement at its mouth, in the town of New York.

On the north and west the Duke’s control extended as far as Lake Ontario. To the east he shared a boundary with the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies. To the south lay the

12 area of the Lower Delaware, but this area was soon diminished by the Duke giving away what would become New Jersey to a pair of political allies, two of the 8 Lord Proprietors from Carolina.

One of these sold his interest to two members of the Society of Friends or Quakers, thus bringing the Quakers into the business of colonization.

The Duke then gave what would become Delaware to another Quaker: William Penn , perhaps the greatest colonizer of all.

C. The Quaker Colonies

The Society of Friends originated in mid-17th century England in response to the teachings of George Fox, an English shoemaker, whose followers came to be known as Quakers from his warning to “tremble at the name of the lord.”

Of all the Protestant faiths of the time, the Quakers were the most democratic and the most anarchistic.

They had no church government except for their monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings. They had no traditional church buildings, only meeting houses. They had no paid clergy, and in their worship they spoke up one by one as the spirit moved them.

Disregarding social distinctions such as those of sex and class, they treated women as equals. Defying other accepted conventions, they refused to participate in taking oaths or in fighting wars.

The Quakers were unpopular enough as a result of these beliefs and practices, and they increased their unpopularity by occasionally breaking up other religious groups at worship. Many of them were jailed from time to time.

Naturally, like the Puritans earlier, George Fox and his followers looked to America for asylum.

A few of them went to New England, but there, they were greeted with fines, whippings and orders to leave, and three men and a woman who refused to leave were actually put to death.

Many migrated south to northern Carolina, and there, as the fastest-growing religious community, they soon were influential in colonial politics.

Yet the Quakers desired a colony of their own, and George Fox himself visited America in 1671-2 to look over a possible site. However, as the head of the religious group despised

13 in England, he could not get the necessary land grant without the aid of someone influential at the court. Fortunately for his cause, his teachings had struck the hearts of a number of wealthy and prominent men, one of whom in particular made the Quaker dream possible…William Penn.

William Penn (whose father was Sir William Penn, and admiral in the Royal Navy and a landlord of valuable Irish estates) received a gentleman’s education. He was soon converted to the Quaker faith and the young William Penn took up evangelism.

With George Fox he visited the European continent and found Quakers there, as in the British Isles, who longed to emigrate to the New World.

New Jersey, half of which was owned by two of his fellow Quakers, received Penn’s attention first, when its proprietors asked Penn for help with their debts. In their behalf, Penn helped to divide the province into East and West Jersey.

One of the original proprietors kept the east and the Quakers kept the west. West Jersey soon began to fill up with Quakers from England, while East Jersey was populated mostly by Puritans.

Before long in 1682, Penn, together with other wealthy Quakers, purchased the eastern property, and the two Jerseys were reunited as one colony in 1702.

Pennsylvania (which Charles II insisted on naming for his old ally the admiral) was based on a land grant of the king in 1681. William Penn had inherited his father’s estate in Europe and also his claim to a small fortune owed to him by the King. The king not having ready cash to pay this debt, granted Penn the territory between New York and Maryland.

Within this fabulous estate (Pennsylvania), Penn was to have the rights of both landlord and ruler, only being required to acknowledge the king by a token payment of two beaver pelts per year.

Like the Calverts, the Carolina Proprietors, and the Duke of York, Penn intended to make money from land sales, and from private property to be worked for him.

Though his informative and honest advertising, Penn made Pennsylvania the best-known and most cosmopolitan of all the colonies.

Penn was much more than a mere real estate broker, and he undertook in Pennsylvania what he called a Holy Experiment. Penn believed that colonies were the seeds of nations, and he intended to plant the seeds of brotherly love.

He devised a liberal frame of government with a representative assembly. He personally supervised the laying out of the city he named Philadelphia meaning “brotherly love.”

14 Penn believed that the land belonged to the Indians, and he was careful to see that they were reimbursed for it, as well to see that they were not ruined by the fur traders’ alcohol.

The Indians honored him as a rarity, an honest white man, therefore his colony had no

trouble with the Native Americans during his lifetime. Thus, Penn’s colony prospered form its outset because of his thoughtful planning, and also because of favorable circumstances, including the mildness of the climate and the fertility of the soil.

Delaware, after its transfer to Penn from the Duke of York in 1682, was treated as a part of Pennsylvania, and even though Delaware was allowed to set up its own representative government, it retained the same governor as Pennsylvania until the Revolution.

D. The Founding of Georgia

Although the population of each colony continued to grow, pushing the frontier of settlement continually westward, for several decades there were no attempts to enlarge the English realm in America farther north or south.

Not until 1733 did another colony emerge; Georgia, the last English colony on the mainland of what would become the United States.

Georgia was unique in its origins. It was founded neither by a corporation nor by a wealthy proprietor.

Its guiding purpose was neither the pursuit of profit nor the desire for a religious refuge.

Instead, Georgia emerged from the work of a group of unpaid trustees. And while Georgia’s founders were not uninterested in economic success, their primary motives were military and social.

They wanted to erect a military barrier against the Spaniards on the southern border of English America; and they wanted to provide a refuge for impoverished Englishmen, a place where men and women without prospects at home could come and begin a new life.

The need for a military buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida was growing urgent in the first years of the 18th century.

There had been tensions between the English and the Spanish ever since the first settlement in Jamestown; and although in a treaty of 1676, Spain had recognized England’s title to lands already occupied by Englishmen, conflict between the two powers continued.

In 1686, Spanish forces from Florida attacked and destroyed a South Carolina settlement, 15

and when Spain and England resumed their war in Europe in 1701, hostilities erupted in America again.

The war ended in 1713, but another European conflict with repercussions for the New World was continually expected.

General James Oglethorpe, a hero of the late war with Spain, was keenly aware of the military advantages of an English colony south of the Carolinas. Yet his interest in settlement rested even more on his social interests.

As head of a English parliamentary committee on English prisons, he had grown appalled by the plight of honest debtors rotting in confinement. Such prisoners, and other poor Englishmen in danger of succumbing to a similar fate, could, he believed, become the farmer-soldiers of the new colony in America.

A 1732 charter for King George II transferred land to the administration of Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees for a period of 21 years.

In their colonization policies they were to keep in mind the needs of military security. Landholdings were limited in size so as to make settlement compact. Blacks (free or slave) and Roman Catholics were excluded to prevent the danger of wartime insurrection. Also, Indian trade was strictly regulated, with rum prohibited, to lessen the risk of Indian complications.

Oglethorpe himself led the first expedition, building a fortified town at the mouth of the Savannah River in 1733.

Only a few debtors were released from jail and sent to Georgia, but hundreds of needy tradesmen and artisans from England, Scotland, and religious refugees from Switzerland and Germany were brought to the new colony at the expense of the trustees.

Though other settlers came at their own expense, immigrants were not attracted in large numbers during the early years. Newcomers generally preferred to settle in South Carolina, where there were no laws against large plantations, slaves, and rum.

Before the 21 years of the trusteeship were up, these restrictions were repealed, and after 1750, Georgia developed along lines similar to those of South Carolina.