The British colonies in the American south were divided into two regions: the Chesapeake colonies, which included Maryland and Virginia, and the Southern colonies, which included Georgia and the Carolinas.
One of the first proprietary colonies, or colonies owned by an individual instead of a joint-stock company, was the Chesapeake colony of Maryland, granted by Charles I to Sir George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore. Upon his death, the land was left to his son Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, who actually founded the colony. Lord Baltimore’s purpose for founding Maryland was similar to the religious motives that drove the Puritans and Quakers to settle in the New World. He sought the colony as a refuge for English Catholics who were subjected to discrimination in England.
In 1634, Baltimore planted the first settlement at St. Mary’s, just north of the Potomac on Chesapeake Bay. The charter empowered Baltimore with almost regal authority. He was able to grant huge feudal manors, hold people in serfdom, make laws, and develop his own courts.
In the beginning, the estate owners were primarily Catholic gentlemen, with Protestants working as the servants. Baltimore soon discovered that to draw more settlers he also had to offer small farms and give the colonists a say in the government. In 1635, the first legislative assembly met, and in 1650 it divided into two houses with the governor and his council sitting separately from the lower house.
In contrast to the northern and middle colonies, the southern and Chesapeake colonies, including Maryland, were predominantly rural settlements. Maryland quickly prospered because, like its neighbor, Virginia, its economy was based on tobacco.
Lord Baltimore would have preferred an exclusively Catholic colony. However, from the outset there was a mixture of Catholic and Protestant settlers in Maryland. As the colony grew the Protestant settlers began to outnumber the Catholic colonists, and the Protestant majority threatened to restrict the rights of Catholics. In 1649, Lord Baltimore agreed to the Act of Toleration, which guaranteed freedom of religion to anyone “professing to believe in Jesus Christ.” This act helped to ensure Catholic safety in Maryland. When the colonial era ended, Maryland sheltered more Roman Catholics than any other English-speaking colony.
In 1642, the English Civil War between the Calvinists and Anglican royalists broke out when the English Parliament, led by a Puritan named Oliver Cromwell, rebelled against King Charles I. They ultimately executed Charles, and Cromwell assumed control of the government until his death in 1660. After years of civil war, royalists restored the monarchy and Charles II became King. These events had major consequences for the colonies. Colonization had been interrupted during this unrest and during the reign of Charles II, called the Restoration period, the government sought to bring the colonies under tighter royal control.
Unlike the investors in the joint-stock companies who established Virginia and New England, Charles II preferred using individual “proprietors,” such as the Duke of York and Lord Calvert to establish and run colonies. These settlements eventually became Royal Colonies functioning under official governors appointed by the crown. For example, Charles II granted Carolina to eight of his allies who became Lord Proprietors of the region. The proprietors set out from London with about 100 English settlers. On their way to Carolina they stopped at the English colonies of Bermuda and Barbados to pick up more experienced settlers.
British settlements in the Caribbean, called the "West Indies," included island colonies such as Barbados, Antigua, and Jamaica that dated back to the early 1600s. The settlers’ background caused the Carolinas to develop strong economic and cultural ties to the Caribbean until the time of the American Revolution. By the 1640s, 20,000 people lived on plantations in the British Caribbean colonies, where they initially produced tobacco and later raised sugar cane.
The first settlers arrived in Carolina in 1670 with hopes of growing sugarcane and exporting non-English products like wine, silk, and olive oil. None of these plans were successful, and it was two decades before the settlers found a staple crop. Rice emerged as the principle export crop for the colony in the 1690s. Carolinian colonists began paying a premium price for West African slaves who had experience in rice cultivation. By 1710, the Africans made up a large majority of the population in Carolina.
Dense forests also brought revenue with the lumber, tar, and resin from the pine trees providing some of the best shipbuilding materials in the world. North and South Carolina also produced and exported indigo, a blue dye obtained from native plants, which was used in coloring fabric.
Charles Town, now Charleston, was founded in 1680 and became the leading port and trading center of the south. The city had a diverse cosmopolitan feel with various cultures settling there including French Protestant refugees, called Huguenots, and sons of English aristocrats.
The northern region of Carolina was neglected from the outset because the English Aristocrat proprietors tolerated the region as a refuge for the outcasts of Virginia. The Virginians created a remote center called the Albemarle district just south of the Virginia border. In contrast to the sophistication of Charleston, with its English propriety and ties to Caribbean plantations, North Carolina developed distinctive traits such as a strong resistance to authority, being hospitable to pirates, and impious behavior. Due to friction between the governors, North and South Carolina were officially separated into two colonies in 1712. Subsequently, each settlement became a royal colony.
Just south of the Carolinas, Georgia was founded in 1733 by a group of London philanthropists. This was 126 years after the first colony, Virginia, was founded and 52 years after the twelfth colony, Pennsylvania, was founded.
Georgia was set up for two primary reasons: as a military buffer against the Spaniards in Florida and as a social experiment. A group of London philanthropists were concerned with the plight of honest persons who were imprisoned for debt. Their leader, James Oglethorpe, became interested in prison reform after a friend died in debtors’ jail.
Oglethorpe had a military background and was able to successfully repel Spanish attacks. As a buffer against Florida, the colony was considered a success. However, as a philanthropic endeavor, the colony was not as successful. The founders’ goal was to populate the colony with upstanding, industrious farmers. To perpetuate this goal, land grants were limited to small plots, rum and other spirits were banned, and slavery was prohibited. However, the settlers quickly found ways to circumvent these restrictions, and Georgia developed an economy much like South Carolina’s. In 1752, the philanthropists, disillusioned, abandoned their responsibilities and the settlement became a royal colony. Georgia continued to grow very slowly and at the end of the colonial era was the least populous of the colonies.
The British southern colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas, and the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, shared several distinct features that also tied them to the developing British colonies of the Caribbean. The plantation lifestyle they created, in which wealthy planters owned large amounts of land with slaves or servants as labor, helped the colonies survive in the New World. The colonists developed large estates and exported agricultural products, primarily tobacco and rice. Slaves could be found throughout all of the southern colonies during this time. In contrast to the small towns of New England and the cities of the middle-Atlantic, the character of the South was rural from the outset. Outside of Charleston and a few cities on the coast, there were few urban settlements. Official business, worship, and trade often took place at isolated courthouses or churches located at the intersection of roads.
The plantation economy was the south’s greatest asset and greatest weakness. Disparities of wealth and intolerance occurred in all of the southern colonies. In the south, the plantation system created a society divided by class and race. The decentralized rural pattern allowed individual landowners to have great autonomy and influence but also hampered the region’s ability to come together in times of crisis. The agricultural crops brought great wealth but at the expense of being dependent on international markets and reliant on the import of manufactured goods. Additionally, the settlers’ over planting of tobacco resulted in a need for more land. As the colonies expanded, the settlers had to confront Native Americans, the settlements of other nations, and each other.