A History of the American People

secondary-it was successful farming and ownership of land which brought you personal
independence, the only kind which really mattered. Again, on the Delaware River, there was a
mixed Swedish-Dutch-Finnish settlement at Fort Christian, dating from 1638. It called itself New
Sweden, and when the English finally got control in 1674 it was the sixth change of flag over the
colony in half a century. The settlers, overwhelmingly farmers-and good ones-did not mind so
long as they were left in peace.
The English, French, and Dutch, as well as the Spanish, scattered all over the Caribbean and
the islands of Central America. Some islands changed hands again and again. The English put in
the biggest effort, both of men and money. In the years 1612-46 alone, 40,000 English Puritans
emigrated to various West Indian island-colonies. The most important by far was Barbados, not
least because it became a springboard for colonization in the Carolinas on the American
mainland. Barbados, unlike most of the other islands, was not a volcanic mountain sticking out
of the sea but a limestone block with terraced slopes. It was uninhabited when the English
arrived in 1627. First they tried planting tobacco, then cotton, both unsuccessfully. Then, during
the English Civil War, there was an influx of royalist refugees, bringing capital and grand ideas,
and Dutch expelled by the Portuguese from northeast Brazil. The latter knew about sugar-
planting, and with the help of English capital they set up a sugar industry. From the start it was a
huge commercial success, the first plantation boom-economy in English-speaking America. By
the middle years of Charles II's reign, there were 400 households in the capital, Bridgetown, 175
big planters, 190 middling, and 1,000 small ones, 1,300 additional freemen, 2,300 indentured
servants, and 40,000 slaves. It was easily the richest colony in North America-its sugar exports
were more valuable than those of all the other English colonies combined."' But with over 55,000
people on 166 square miles it was also the most congested.
A solution was found in 1663 when Charles II gave the Carolinas, unsuccessfully settled under
his father in 1629, to a group of eight proprietors, who invited experienced colonizers, from the
islands as well as from Virginia and New England, to take up land on easy terms. The
Barbadians responded with enthusiasm. A first group came in 1664 to Cape Fear, but had to
abandon it three years later. In 1670 a much larger group tried again, laying out Charlestown.
This time it worked. Of course there was the usual nonsense from the proprietors of 12,000 acre
baronies' and private courts-feudal ideas died hard among the more romantic gentlemen- adventurers. The actual Barbadian planters simply ignored the propaganda and went for the most likely sugarbearing lands on inlets and creeks. They ignored proprietorial guidance in other ways. The proprietors wanted religious toleration, in order to attract the maximum numbers of settlers. The planters were Anglicans, insofar as they were anything: they agreed with Charles II that it wasthe only religion for gentlemen.' So they made it their business to enforce second-
class status on people from other faiths. The proprietors opposed slavery. The planters needed
slaves, and got them. In one sense the wishes of the proprietors were carried out-the Carolinas
got a stratified society, with three classes: a small ruling class of plantation owners or gentry, a
large class of laborers, and an enormous number of slaves.
The settlement of Carolina was by no means exclusively Barbadian. There were also Scotch
Presbyterians at Port Royal, Huguenots on the Santee, English dissenters west of the Edisto. And
there were new waves of settlers from Ireland and France, as well as England. Nor did sugar do
particularly well in Carolina. It can be argued that Carolina was saved by rice just as Virginia
was saved by tobacco. The lands backing onto Charleston and the other river systems made
perfect ricefields: it was easy to set up a water-control system, and rice-fields, unlike tobacco
plantations, did not have to be moved every few years. But the essence of Carolina was a