Climate Difference in the Continental United States
Topic: American Life in the Seventeenth
Century
Aim: Identify and describe the ways
that climate in the southern colonies
influenced life expectancy, family life,
immigration, and economic
development.
For each of the three main geographic area of
early American colonization:
1. List two colonies and a unique product for
each.
2. Give a specific example how climate affected
social or economic development.
Advertisement from the Virginia Gazette, May 12, 1774
• Headright
System: Plantation owners were given 50 acres for every indentured servant they
sponsored to come to America.
• Indentured Contract: Served plantation owner for 4-14 years as a laborer in return for
passage to America.
Dues: Once servant completed his contract, he/she was freed….They were given
land, tools, seed and animals. However, they did not receive voting rights.
• Freedom
Base your responses on
the chart to the left and
your understanding of
American History:
• Why might someone
leave England for
colonial Virginia in the
1600s?
• How might the
headright and/or
indenture system
increase social
stratification in colonial
Virginia?
• What additional social
and/or economic
pressures could result
from the indenture
process?
• Slavery in the colonies began in 1619 when a Dutch ship dropped off 20 slaves in Jamestown.
• Slavery was expanded throughout all thirteen colonies by 1660.
• By the end of the colonial era, nearly 20% of the population was either African or a descendent.
• Enslaved Africans were a mix of peoples from different regions of Africa, increasing ethnic diversity
wherever they were transported.
Robert Carter III of Nomini Hall, 1753
Thomas Hudson (1701–1779) Oil on canvas
Early Colonial Virginia (1607-1700)
Like any other European colony of the New
World, Virginia was a very stratified society.
1. 93% of the population lived in squalid
conditions.
2. Perhaps with 1% comprising people with
moderate means.
3. Remaining 6% of the population owned
most of the wealth.
• The 6% of that society at this time accrued their
wealth by permission of the British government.
•T heir wealth was assured by their loyalty to the
British government.
Robert Carter III (1728–1804) was the namesake of
the first Robert Carter (1663–1732), a dynastyfounder so influential and wealthy that
contemporaries called him "King."
• This elite exploited the labor of the majority of
the population in society, initially with
indentured servants and eventually through
slavery.
Founded in 1680, Charleston grew to become the bustling seaport and center for the slave trade pictured in this 1730s drawing.
The fraternization of white indentured servants and African slaves worried the wealthy elite.
Virginia and Maryland early on in their history began to pass laws that made contact and
intermarriage and contact between these groups illegal:
1. 1660s: the first laws in Virginia and Maryland regulating marriage between whites and
blacks only pertained to the marriages of whites with black (and mulatto) slaves and
indentured servants.
2. 1664: Maryland enacted a law which criminalized such marriages.
3. 1691: Virginia was the first English colony in North America to pass a law forbidding free
blacks and whites to intermarry
4. 1692: Maryland followed suit
The Origins of Bacon’s Rebellion 1676-1677
Nathaniel Bacon was a rich man but not wealthy,
who wanted to rise in the socio-economic ladder of
colonial Virginia. He recognized that the only way
this could be achieved was to acquire more
territory from the Native Americans. As a pretext
to try to accomplish these means he requested
assistance from the government of Virginia to send
troops to assist the back-country communities that
bordered Native Americans against provoked raids
by Natives.
How did Bacon’s Rebellion represent
a turning point for both issues of class
and race in the colonies?
The problems with this were as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
If a war ensued from these military activities
it could be too costly for the 6%.
If on the other hand Bacon mounted his own
expedition with the assistance of the backcountry communities and they were
successful the territory would fall to Bacon
and his men.
If this happened it was possible that Bacon’s
influence would grow and he might wrest
power away from the 6%.
This sort of redistribution of wealth and the
democratization of Virginia that would
follow worried the elite (6%).
It’s possible that Bacon understood this and wanted
to capitalize on the elite’s inactivity and fears,
presenting it as lack of concern for their safety to
the back country communities on the part of the
government of Virginia.
Governor William Berkeley (1605-1677)
• How does Bacon’s Rebellion shift the importance of labor and slavery in the
colony of Virginia by the 1720s?
• Describe at least one legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion for other plantation economy
colonies like Maryland, the Carolinas, or Georgia.
• Describe the community structure of colonial New
England.
• How did the development of the jeremiad and the
Half-Way Covenant impact colonial New England
life?
• Describe differences between
family life in Virginia and New
England.
• How did Puritan ideals impact
social and economic conditions in
New England?
Puritan Family Portrait—1700s
"Examination of a Witch" Thompkins H. Matteson, 1853.
Describe the social and economic pressures that culminated in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
Lesson Summary
Be able to address these questions with specific examples (names, dates, events, historical
developments)!
•
•
Analyze and explain the social and economic pressures that led to the development of
indentured servitude, Bacon’s Rebellion, slavery, and the Salem Witch Trials.
Compare and contrast social, economic, and class development in southern colonies versus
the New England colonies.