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| [[Georgia]] || 1732 || [[James Oglethorpe]], brought [[English]] debtors to protect [[Georgia]] from the [[Spanish]] || Indigo, tobacco || Governor appointed by king || Protestant
| [[Georgia]] || 1732 || [[James Oglethorpe]], brought [[English]] debtors to protect [[Georgia]] from the [[Spanish]] || Indigo, tobacco || Governor appointed by king || Protestant
|}
|}
The Southern Colonies were mainly dominated by the wealthy slave-owning planters in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. These planters owned massive estates that were worked by African slaves. Of the 650,000 inhabitants of the South in 1750, about 250,000 or 40 percent, were slaves. Planters used their wealth to dominate the local tenants and yeoman farmers. At election time, they gave these farmers gifts of rum and promised to lower taxes to take control of colonial legislatures.
===South: Chesapeake Bay area===
===South: Chesapeake Bay area===
[[Image:Wpdms king james grants.png|left|thumb|The 1606 grants by James I to the London and Plymouth companies. The overlapping area (yellow) was granted to both companies on the stipulation that neither found a settlement within 100 miles (160 km) of each other. The location of the Jamestown Settlement is shown by "J"]]
[[Image:Wpdms king james grants.png|left|thumb|The 1606 grants by James I to the London and Plymouth companies. The overlapping area (yellow) was granted to both companies on the stipulation that neither found a settlement within 100 miles (160 km) of each other. The location of the Jamestown Settlement is shown by "J"]]
Georgia was established on strict moralistic principles. Slavery was forbidden, as was alcohol and other forms of supposed immorality. However, the reality of the colony was far from ideal. The colonists were unhappy about the puritanical lifestyle and complained that their colony could not compete economically with the Carolina rice plantations. Georgia initially failed to prosper, but eventually the restrictions were lifted, slavery was allowed, and it became as prosperous as the Carolinas.
Georgia was established on strict moralistic principles. Slavery was forbidden, as was alcohol and other forms of supposed immorality. However, the reality of the colony was far from ideal. The colonists were unhappy about the puritanical lifestyle and complained that their colony could not compete economically with the Carolina rice plantations. Georgia initially failed to prosper, but eventually the restrictions were lifted, slavery was allowed, and it became as prosperous as the Carolinas.
===Plantations===
Beginning in the 1720s, after many years being poorly educated, hunting deer on foot, getting drunk, and gambling, the next generation of planters began to construct large Georgian-style mansions, wear bright red attire, and hunt deer from horseback. Wealthy women in the Southern colonies shared in the British culture. They read British magazines, wore fashionable clothing of British design, and served an elaborate afternoon tea.
Once women were married, they supervised the household slaves and put on elaborate dinners and festive balls. These efforts were the most successful in South Carolina, where wealthy rice planters lived in [[townhouse]]s in Charleston, a busy port city. Active social seasons also existed in towns, such as [[Annapolis, Maryland]], and on tobacco plantations along the [[James River (Virginia)|James River]] in Virginia.
====Slaves====
The African slaves who worked on the indigo, tobacco, and rice fields in the South came mostly from the Caribbean sugar islands (plus a few who came directly from Africa). In 1700, there were about 9,600 slaves in the Chesapeake region and a few hundred in the Carolinas. About 170,000 more Africans arrived over the next five decades. By 1750, there were more than 250,000 slaves in British America and in the Carolinas; they made up about 60 percent of the total population. Most slaves in South Carolina were born in Africa, while half the slaves in Virginia and Maryland were born in the colonies.
==Literature==
Colonial American literature is perhaps the most vibrant field in American literary studies today. In the last decade an explosion of anthologies designed to make widely available a broad range of non-canonical writings produced in and about Great Britain's colonies in the Western hemisphere has provided teachers and scholars with important new tools. The explosion has been driven partly by the identity-based recuperation movements of the 1970s and 1980s, partly by a new awareness of the importance of texts circulated in manuscript or newspapers rather than in book form, and partly by dissatisfaction with the predominant Puritan origins narrative and a swelling interest in transnationalism. New anthologies include Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner's ''The English Literatures of America, 1580–1800'' (Routledge, 1996), Vincent Carretta's ''Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century'' (Lexington, Ky., 1996), Sharon M. Harris's ''Early American Women Writers to 1800'' (Oxford, 1996), and ''Thomas W. Krise's Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777'' (Chicago, 1999), Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, ''The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology'' (Oxford, 2001) Carla Muford's ''Early American Writings'' (Oxford 2002), and Susan Castillo's, ''Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500–1786: Performing America'' (Routledge, 2006). Add in the University of Massachusetts Press series on native writers and scholars have made readily available a vast array of once obscure English-language works. Some of these new volumes represent an effort by colonialists to catch up to the rest of the field of Americanist scholarship, providing the pre-literary history to contemporary Caribbean or African American literature. In an important sense, however, colonialists occupy a unique position among Americanists. At a moment when many scholars are rejecting nationalist narratives of literary history, which they view as the intellectual equivalent of isolationism in a world increasingly committed to globalization, students of colonial American literature rightly claim a pre-national vantage point. A transnational approach to colonial literature has the attractive features of being both intellectually sound and trendy.<ref> Sandra M. Gustafson, "The Americas in Writing," ''William and Mary Quarterly'' 2003 60(1): 207-213. ISSN: 0043-5597
Fulltext: [[History Cooperative]]</ref>
==Unification of the 13 colonies==
==Unification of the 13 colonies==