Page 84 - American Stories, A History of the United States

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ChaRLES town This engraving from 1671 of the fortified settlement at Charleston, South Carolina, shows the
junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers. Many of Charleston’s settlers came from the sugar plantations of Barbados.

located in Craven County distrusted the Barbadians. The proprietors—an ineffectual
group after Cooper died in 1683—appointed incompetent governors who only made
things worse. One visitor observed that “the Inhabitants of Carolina should be as free
from Oppression as any [people] in the Universe . . . if their own Differences amongst
themselves do not occasion the contrary.” By the end of the seventeenth century, Quick Check
the Commons House of Assembly had assumed the right to initiate legislation. In How did the Barbadian background
1719, the colonists overthrew the last proprietary governor. In 1729, the king created of the early settlers shape the
separate royal governments for North and South Carolina, hoping that splitting the economic development of the
colonies would help lead to more effective (and more peaceable) governance. Carolinas?

Founding of Georgia

The early history of Georgia was strikingly different from that of Britain’s other main-
land colonies. Its settlement was really an act of aggression against Spain, which had
as good a claim to this area as did the English. During the eighteenth century, the
two nations were often at war (see Chapter 4), and South Carolinians worried that
the Spaniards moving up from bases in Florida would occupy the disputed territory
between Florida and the Carolina grant.
The colony owed its existence primarily to James Oglethorpe, a British general and
member of Parliament who believed that he could thwart Spanish designs on the area
south of Charles Town while providing a fresh start for London’s worthy poor, saving
them from debtors’ prison. (Until the nineteenth century, debtors could be imprisoned
if they could not repay what they owed.) Although Oglethorpe envisioned Georgia as
an asylum as well as a garrison, the military aspects of his proposal appealed to the Brit-
ish government. In 1732, King George II granted Oglethorpe and a board of trustees a
charter for a new colony named after him to be located between the Savannah and Alta-
maha rivers and from “sea to sea.” The trustees living in the mother country were given
complete control over Georgia politics, a condition the settlers soon found intolerable.
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