-
Sir Walter Raleigh organized an expedition that landed on North Carolina's Roanoke Island. After several false starts, the colony mysteriously vanished.
-
-
The treaty of 1604 established peace between England and Spain, providing opportunity for English colonization. Population growth provided the workers. Unemployment, as well as a thirst for adventure, for markets, and for religious freedom, provided the motives. Joint-stock companies provided the financial means.
-
A joint-stock company, known as the Virginia Company of London, received a charter from King James I of England for a settlement in the New World. The charter guaranteed the settlers the same rights of Englishmen, helping to reinforce the colonists' sense that they remained a part of traditional English institutions.
-
By 1683, the English considered the Powhatan peoples extinct. They mistfortunately fell victim to the three D's: disease, disorganization, and disposability. The fate of the Powhatans foreshadowed the destinies of indigenous peoples throughout the continent as the process of European settlement went forward.
-
About a hundred English men disembarked at Jamestown, Virginia.
-
The struggle to successfully colonize Jamestown was very real. The settlers died from disease, malnutrition, and starvation. By 1625, of the 8,000 settlers who had tried to start life anew in the ill-fated colony, only 1,200 had survived.
-
Relations between the Indians and English were tense, especially because the starving colonists would raid Indian food supplies.
-
Captain John Smith's leadership and resourcefulness saved Virginia from utter collapse at the start. He established the rule, "He who shall not work shall not eat," whipping the gold-hungry colonists into line.
-
The remaining colonists, driven by their suffering, attempted to return to England. At the mouth of the James River, they were met by a new governor, Lord De La Warr, who ordered them back to Jamestown, imposed a harsh military regime on the colony.
-
Lord De La Warr carried orders from the Virginia Company that amounted to a declaration of war against the Indians in the Jamestown region. A peace settlement ended the war, sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe - the first known interracial marriage.
-
John Rolfe perfected the methods of raising and curing tobacco. European demand for tobacco was nearly insatiable. Virginia's prosperity was finally planted in tobacco crops.
-
England's southern colonies flourished from their staple crops. These crops promoted the broad-acred plantation system, thus creating a demand for laborers - indentured servants, African slaves, and Native American slaves. Slavery was found in all of the plantation colonies.
-
A series of Indian attacks left 347 settlers dead. The Virginia Company responded, calling for a war without peace or truce that would prevent the Indians "from being any longer a people."
-
King James I revoked the charter of the Virginia Company, thus making Virgnia a royal colony directly under his control.
-
Baltimore founded Maryland with the intentions of reaping financial profits and creating a refuge for his fellow Catholics. Baltimore permitted unusual freedom of worship.
-
Like Virginia, Maryland blossomed forth in acres of tobacco.
-
The Indians made one last effort to dislodge Virginians but failed. The peace treaty of 1646 effectively banished the Chesapeake Indians from their ancestral lands and formally separated Indian from white areas of settlement.
-
Protestants threatened to persecute Maryland's Catholics, as in England. Passed in 1649, the Act of Toleration guarunteed toleration to all Christians, but decreed the death penalty for those who denied the divinity of Jesus, but protected the Catholic minority.
-
England secured its claim to several West Indian islands, its largest prize being Jamaica. Sugar formed the foundation of the West Indian economy.
-
The Barbados slave code denied even the most fundamental rights to slaves and gave masters virtually complete control over their laborers, including the right to inflict vicious punishment for even slight infractions.
-
King Charles II granted the Lords Proprietors, who hoped to grow foodstuffs to provision the sugar plantations in Barbados and export non-English products like wine, silk, and olive oil, an expanse of wilderness ribboning across the continent to the Pacific.
-
Carolina flourished by developing close economic ties with the English West Indies. Rice became the principal export crop in Carolina. Charles Town, Carolina quickly became the busiest seaport in the South.
-
North Carolina was officially separated from South Carolina.
-
Georgia was formally founded to serve chiefly as a buffer, protecting the more valuable Carolinas from Floridian Spaniards and the French of Louisiana.
