IMPERIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE 77armed by the Spanish to help protect St. Augustine.
The Stono Rebellion terrified British slaveholders and
led them to tighten slave codes in South Carolina
and to suspend the slave trade temporarily. Just as
British colonists gradually asserted their rights in the
eighteenth century, so too did slaves protest their
own bondage.
Complicating matters further was the Yamasee
War of 1715–7, in which British settlers drove several
native tribes south into Florida. The destructiveness
of that war challenged the very viability of the
Carolina colony, which was saved only by an alliance
between the Cherokee and the British.
Catesby’s map is also one of the first to identify
the new colony of Georgia. In 1732 James Oglethorpe
petitioned the Crown to create this new colony as a
haven for the “worthy poor” of England. Oglethorpe’s
high-minded goals included a prohibition against
slavery, but the law was repealed once Georgians
realized how profitable the plantations of Virginia and
the Carolinas were. In fact, by 1740, well over half of
South Carolina’s population were slaves, almost all
of whom were put to work in the rice fields that had
grown up almost overnight in the Lowcountry.
Florida was riven by its own internal discord. As
indicated by the map, the Spanish controlled much of
the colony through the early eighteenth century. Yet
the borders were continually contested. The dotted
horizontal line across Florida marks the British claim
for the southern border of the Carolina Colony. This
territorial conflict drove years of border warfare
between the Spanish and the British. With the defeat
of the French in the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the
British took control of the entire colony, only to watch
it revert to the Spanish when Americans achieved
independence in 1783.
Despite these divisions and rivalries, Catesby
presented a coherent geographical region in the
eighteenth century. With its increasing dependence
upon large-scale plantation agriculture, the
Southeast was drawn into a transatlantic system of
commercial exchange stretching thousands of miles
to Africa and Europe. The profitability of that system
in turn intensified British investment in the colonies.