2. Carolina 1670s – West Indian Planters established a new colony on the Atlantic seaboard north of Florida but south of the Chesapeake and named it Carolina to honor King Charles II Carolina officially belonged to a set of English aristocrats, the Lords Proprietor – eight powerful political favorites of the king South Carolina featured a broad, fertile coastal plain meandered by many large, muddy rivers and broad swamps Making a plantation colony , the Carolinians feared that their African slaves might combine with defiant Indians to merge slave rebellion with frontier war which is fatal to the new colony
3. Carolina Colonists To secure Carolina, Loads Proprietor offered colonists the most alluring incentives: Religious Toleration Political Representation in an assembly with power over public taxation and expenditures Long exemption from quitrents Large grants of land Promised ambitious and wealthy men the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new colony Attracted farmers and artisans from both the Chesapeake and the West Indies Planters would enjoy “absolute Power and Authority over his Negro Slaves”but later frontier conditions obliged the planters to allow their slaves more autonomy than was common in either the West Indies or the Chesapeake Even the poor and servants were entitled to land, clothes, corn, tools and somefreedom
4. Carolina Gun Trade Key to managing the local Indians was to recruit them as slave catchers by offering guns and ammunition as incentive The gun trade rendered the natives dependent upon weapons that they could neither make nor repair If deprived of ammunition, the natives would suffer in their hunting and fall prey to slave-raiding by better-armed Indians more favored by their colonial supplier By pushing the gun and slave trade, the Carolinians gained mastery over a network of native peoples, securing their own frontier and wreaking havoc on a widening array of Indians Although they traded with each other, the Indians and the Carolinians did not share the same economic views
5. Carolina Agriculture Became the leading colonial producer of tar and preeminent cattle country in the English empire Became the empire’s great RICE colony, just as the Chesapeake specialized in tobacco and the West Indies in sugar 1750s Developed a second valuable plantation crop for export – INDIGO Carolina planters became the wealthiest colonial elite on the Atlantic seaboard, 2nd only to the West Indians within the empire