Just as the English established a set of goals and strategies for their first outpost on Chesapeake Bay, so too did the Native Indians of that region pursue their own aims and interests in the midst of dramatic social change. The weroance (or chief) Powhatan had recently consolidated the region's Indians into a powerful confederacy. Powhatan used the English newcomers to advance his own longstanding objectives. Although he considered the new colonists a nuisance, Powhatan welcomed trade goods and English weapons as a means to consolidate his political authority and to fend off challenges from the Piedmont tribes. His choice to assist the English when he might have been able to destroy them reflects the difficult balance between accommodation and conflict both Europeans and Indians faced as the fleeting encounters of the sixteenth century turned into confrontations between sustained colonies in the seventeenth century.

Spain's North American Colonies

Spain was the first European power to establish lasting colonies north of Mexico, but the abundant opportunities elsewhere in the Spanish Empire meant few settlers chose to struggle in the ecologically challenging regions of the upper Rio Grande and coastal Florida. New Mexico began with the goal of extracting the supposed great riches of the North, but provided such little economic return that only the Franciscan priests' desire to minister to the natives they had baptized convinced the crown not to abandon the colony. Franciscans also played a crucial role in Spanish Florida, where they worked to incorporate the Indians into colonial society as docile servants and pious farmers and artisans.

This approach did not always work. In New Mexico, where brutal treatment by the Spanish and smallpox epidemics had drastically weakened the Pueblo Indians, native leaders revolted against imposed Christianity. Led by a man named Popé, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 became the most successful Indian revolt in North American history, driving the Spanish entirely out of New Mexico.

English Society on the Chesapeake

This check on Spanish power occurred as its European rivals began to make progress in their own endeavors in North America. The economic theory known as mercantilism, which called for enriching a nation by maintaining a favorable balance of trade, suggested that colonies could dramatically improve a nation's economic health. For England's King James I, that idea led him to support a private venture by the Virginia Company of London to colonize the Chesapeake Bay.

The first expedition founded a settlement named Jamestown, which struggled to survive for the first decade of its existence. The discovery of the value of tobacco as a cash crop dramatically improved the colony's economic fortune, bringing an increasing number of white settlers into Virginia; some were free men and women, but the vast majority were indentured servants, who signed labor contracts that committed their work and its products to a master for a certain number of years. The spread of English plantations built by this growing population encroached on tribal lands. Mounting tensions finally exploded in 1622 into full-scale armed conflicts between whites and Indians, resulting in appalling casualties on both sides, as well as a determination, on the part of the English, to destroy the "savage" Indians.

Another casualty of these hostilities was the Virginia Company itself, the joint-stock company that had overseen the early settlement of the colony. The king dissolved the company after an investigation revealed that mortality rates from disease and the abuse of servants far exceeded the casualties of the Indian war. Virginia then became a royal colony.

As the price of tobacco leveled off, a more coherent social and political order took shape in Virginia. Even so, tensions remained high, fueled by resentment at the settlement of Maryland, a proprietary colony ruled by the Catholic Calvert family. Maryland's tobacco economy competed with Virginia's, and led to the outbreak of another Indian war in 1644. Meanwhile, England did little to ease friction or direct development in the region because it became distracted by domestic political upheavals that culminated in its civil war. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, Charles II launched a more consistent and watchful colonial policy. That year Parliament passed the first in a series of Navigation Acts designed to regulate colonial trade in ways that benefited England.

Chesapeake Society in Crisis

The Navigation Acts only intensified the forces propelling Chesapeake society toward a crisis. Local elites became divided and jealous, while freed servants and small planters found diminishing opportunities for themselves. Religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants and a renewal of hostilities with the Indians raised tensions further. Two civil wars resulted: Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia and Coode's Rebellion in Maryland.

Only the conversion from white servitude to African slavery as the region's dominant labor system finally eased the divisions within white society in the Chesapeake. As the Atlantic slave trade grew, slavery became more cost effective and transformed both West African and American cultures. In the Chesapeake, the growing presence (and implicit threat) of African Americans bonded whites of all classes and religions, and a racist consensus emerged. With their profits now secured by the exploitation of black rather than white labor, a new Chesapeake "gentry" encouraged the development of a prosperous and deferential small planter class.

From the Caribbean to the Carolinas

As the tobacco economy evolved in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, a booming sugar economy also transformed the Caribbean into a slave-based plantation society. Land scarcity on the English island of Barbados fostered the settlement of South Carolina, another proprietary colony. Both of these regions struggled through extreme violence and high mortality rates for many decades before they stabilized.

In the Caribbean, where African slaves made up eighty percent of the population, masters imposed harsh slave codes but still faced seven major slave uprisings during the first century of settlement. In the Carolinas, the northern region (which became the separate colony of North Carolina in 1701) struggled to overcome its lack of good harbors and navigable rivers. South Carolina held more promise, but a need for capital led the settlers to become involved in the Indian slave trade. Raids on Florida to gain more slaves destroyed Spanish control in the region, but it also created a fear among South Carolina's allies, the Yamasee Indians, that the whites would turn on them once they needed more slave labor. In 1715, they determined to strike first, killing hundreds of colonists around Charleston and selling others into slavery in Florida. The Yamasee War finally ended the regional slave trade, but it brought the colony to the brink of dissolution and ended proprietary rule.

Reconstituted as a royal colony after 1729, South Carolina recovered its former prosperity by exporting rice and later indigo. Greater social and political harmony ensued, mainly because whites recognized the need to unify against the threat posed by the slaves who supplied the skilled labor on plantations and who by this time constituted a majority of the inhabitants within the colony. At the same time, the founding of Georgia, a colony that after an idealistic beginning developed a comparable economy and social structure, provided a buffer between South Carolinians and Spanish Florida.

These early decades of southern settlement began with decades of disaster and death before achieving stability. Dreams of empires and utopias foundered for Europeans and Indians alike, and a degree of independence for whites proved achievable only through reliance on the labor of African slaves.