2. Gun Trade Carolina’s leaders decided that they needed to manage the local Indians, and to do this thy recruited them as slave catchers. They would offer them guns and ammunition as an incentive. The gun trade kept the natives dependent upon the weapons that they could neither make or repair. Without them, they might starve. By pushing the slave and gun trade, the Carolinas gained a large network of native people. Many people feared them. The natives were drawn into the slave trade and could not until the end that it would ultimately destroy them. Carolina’s Indian traders affected more native peoples than an other English colonists along the Atlantic seaboard. The Carolina traders benefited greatly from the native customs of giving a wife as a token of welcoming for the newcomers. The Carolina traders were not easy to host. Even if they traded with each other, the Indians and the Carolinians did not share the same economic ethos. For the majority of the time, the Carolina traders would get away with their rude behaviors by offering prized trade goods at decent prices along with a generous credit. Carolina traders sought animal hides and slaves. They armed their clients with muskets to hunt people as well as deer.
3. Rice! To prosper long term, the colonists needed to develop a valuable agricultural staple for export. Originally they supplied live stock and lumber to the English West Indies. Lumbering and cattle raising were ideal for a new frontier colony. Carolina became the leading producer of tar in 1717. Turing the 1670’s and 1680’s, slaves constituted about a quarter of the Carolina population, but Carolina had no racial harmony. Carolina experimented with more valuable crops and during the 1690’s developed rice as their greatest staple for the export market. RICE THRIVED. Carolina became the empire’s great rice colony. During the 1750’s Carolina developed a second valuable plantation plant: Indigo. Indigo was a plant that produced a blue dye that was during that time in great demand for the clothing industry in England. Carolina’s planters became the wealthiest colonial elite on the Atlantic seaboard! Rice generated large profits, but demanded numerous workers who could be forced to work intense labor under extremely harsh conditions. With more rice came more slaves.
4. Terror The imported Africans introduced malaria and yellow fever to Carolina. Carolina planters kept their slaves under harsh punishment and strong surveillance to keep them intimidated and working. On Sunday September 9, 1731, there was a slave rebellion on the Stono river, twenty miles from Charles town. Violence began with two slaves shooting and decapitating two store keepers, the slaves numbers grew from 80-100 people and they burned 7 plantations and killed 20 whites. Because of this local planters mustered their forces. On the second day of the uprising, about 100 armed and mounted white militiamen made a surprise attack on the rebels killing most of them even after they surrendered. To intimidate the rest of the slave community the victors cut off the rebels’ heads and put them on posts, one every mile, between the battlefield and Charles Town. Within that month almost all the rebels were killed by a massive manhunt that included Indian bounty hunters. Planters took great pride in their thriving plantations and their growing colony.
5. Georgia Georgia was founded in 1730, by Carolina officals and British imperialist to strengthen their hold on the southern frontier. The Georgia Trustees were a mix of wealthy merchants, landed gentry, and Anglican ministers. They proposed Virginia as a colonial workhouse to redeem england’s idle poor. They secured financial assistance from the crown and Parliament. Until 1752, 90% of the colony’s funding came from Parliament, thus making Georgia the first colony financed by British taxpayers. In designing Georgia, the trustees reacted against the larg landholdings and slave majority that had previously characterized South Carolina. To make their vision a reality the founders restircted most new settlers to fifty-acre tracts- and the trustees forbade the importation or possession of slaves. Industrious and tightly settled, these ideal Georgians would make a good and large militia to defend the new colony on a dangerous frontier. Georgia was the only British colony to reject the slave system. The Georgia Trustees did not trust their colonial subjects to improve themselves without strict guidelines. During the late 1730’s the trustees took away the bans on lawyers, large landholdings, and liquor, but held with the ban on slavery and an assembly. Slogan: “Liberty and Property without resrictions”
