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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Pioneers of the Old South: A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings', Mary Johnston masterfully interweaves historical narrative with vivid storytelling to explore the English colonial experience in the Southern United States. Set against a backdrop of burgeoning settlements and complex interactions between European settlers and Native American tribes, Johnston's prose reflects a meticulous attention to detail and a deep understanding of historical contexts. The book captures the spirit of adventure and hardship, illustrating how these early pioneers navigated the treacherous path of colonization and shaped the cultural fabric of the South. Mary Johnston, a prominent American novelist and suffragist, drew upon her Virginia roots and extensive research in historical documentation to craft this compelling work. Her experiences growing up in the South infused her writing with both authenticity and emotional resonance. Johnston's commitment to illuminating the lives of those who shaped American history is evident throughout the narrative, as she seeks to honor the complexities and conflicts of the colonial era. This book is highly recommended for readers interested in American history, particularly the narratives surrounding colonization and its lasting impact on Southern identity. Johnston's engaging storytelling will captivate both historians and casual readers alike, making it an essential addition to any exploration of America's colonial past. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Pioneers of the Old South: A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the threshold of the American South, English ambition and uncertainty meet stubborn landscapes and shifting tides, as distant plans and local improvisations struggle to found durable communities amid risk, scarcity, and the testing of old loyalties and new possibilities.
Pioneers of the Old South: A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings by Mary Johnston is a work of narrative history that surveys the earliest English ventures in the southern reaches of North America. Written for general readers and published in the early twentieth century as part of the multi-author Chronicles of America series, it situates the story of settlement within a broad, accessible frame. Johnston’s volume keeps close to the formative period commonly labeled the “Old South,” tracing origins without presuming inevitability, and emphasizing how early experiments in community, commerce, and governance took shape under pressing constraints.
The book offers a concise, chronological account that moves from initial designs and voyages to the precarious realities of establishing footholds, securing provisions, and defining authority far from home. Rather than dwelling on exhaustive archival detail, it presents a clear, continuous narrative, guiding readers through the contingencies that marked the making of towns, trade, and tenuous order. The experience it offers is steady and reflective: the voice is measured, the tone sober yet attentive to drama, and the style shaped to reveal patterns and turning points without sacrificing momentum or clarity.
Readers encounter themes central to colonial beginnings: the pull of profit and policy against the drag of disease, distance, and discord; the molding of social bonds under pressure; and the improvisation of rules in a setting where precedent traveled slowly. Johnston highlights how fragile ventures can harden into institutions, how landscapes demand adaptation, and how ideals meet the friction of survival. The narrative underscores that “beginnings” are less a single event than a series of contested trials whose outcomes—provisional, partial, and often unintended—gradually alter expectations of power, place, and belonging.
As a chronicle shaped in the early twentieth century, the book reflects the interpretive habits and vocabulary of its time, presenting a synthesis aimed at coherence and readability. Readers today may notice this framing, yet the volume remains useful for the way it gathers early episodes into an intelligible arc and keeps sight of the uncertainties that defined them. Johnston writes with economy and an eye for causation, emphasizing sequence and consequence. The effect is to make the unfamiliar feel navigable while preserving the sense that colonial life was contingent, improvised, and persistently on the brink of reversal.
The themes resonate beyond their period setting. By examining how distant directives translated into local practice, the book invites reflection on the formation of regional identities, the roots of civic and economic habits, and the enduring tension between grand designs and ground-level realities. Its attention to risk, resilience, and institutional trial-and-error speaks to contemporary readers interested in how societies manage scarcity, govern change, and convert aspiration into durable structures. It also prompts a critical awareness of origin stories—how they are constructed, what they include, and what they leave unresolved.
Approached as a compact, carefully paced narrative, Pioneers of the Old South offers a guided passage into the uncertainties and ambitions of English colonial beginnings in the South. It rewards readers who value synthesis over spectacle, continuity over anecdote, and questions as much as answers. Without anticipating later outcomes, it sets the stage for understanding how fragile starts gather weight, and how choices made under duress can cast long shadows. Mary Johnston’s chronicle thus serves as both introduction and invitation: to read closely, think historically, and weigh the cost and consequence of beginnings.
Synopsis
The book opens by situating English colonial ventures within the broader rivalry among European powers in the sixteenth century. It notes Spanish exploration and settlement, including St. Augustine, and recounts French Huguenot efforts in Florida and their destruction by Spain. Against this backdrop, English seafarers probed the Atlantic, and promoters articulated reasons for planting colonies—trade, strategic bases, and expansion of influence. The narrative sketches the intellectual and political climate under Elizabeth, the role of privateering, and the idea of America as both opportunity and challenge. This context frames why England, later than Spain, moved from voyages of reconnaissance to attempts at permanent settlement.
Early English endeavors are traced from John Cabot’s voyages to the schemes of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh. The book outlines reconnaissance of the Atlantic seaboard, the 1585 colony under Ralph Lane on Roanoke Island, and the 1587 settlement led by John White. It recounts supply difficulties, dependence on support from England, and the interruption caused by war with Spain and the Armada. The disappearance of the 1587 colony is presented as a cautionary episode. From these failures, colonizers drew practical lessons about provisioning, governance, and choosing sites, lessons that would inform the next, more enduring, attempt.
Attention then turns to the Virginia Company of London and its 1606 charter, with plans for colonization and profit. In 1607, settlers established Jamestown on the James River, selecting a defensible yet unhealthy site. The account summarizes leadership struggles, shortages, and the critical role of Captain John Smith in enforcing work, exploring the Chesapeake, and negotiating with Indigenous communities. Relations with the Powhatan paramount chiefdom are described as alternating between exchange and conflict. The colony’s early years appear precarious, with disease, hunger, and discord threatening survival, yet persistent resupply and organization kept the venture alive despite repeated setbacks.
A crisis followed with the Starving Time of 1609–1610, when drought, strained relations, and mismanagement reduced numbers drastically. The narrative notes the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda, bringing new leaders and supplies after delay, and the arrival of Lord De La Warr to impose stricter discipline. Gradually, more workable labor systems and defenses emerged. John Rolfe’s experiments with tobacco created an exportable commodity, giving the settlement an economic basis. The capture and later marriage of Pocahontas to Rolfe helped secure a period of peace with the Powhatan. These developments shifted Virginia from mere survival toward tentative stability.
With an economic footing, Virginia evolved its institutions and society. The headright system and private landholding encouraged migration and dispersed settlement. In 1619, the General Assembly met, marking representative governance, while the colony also received a group of women intended to foster family life. The same year saw the arrival of the first recorded Africans, initially under varied conditions that would later harden into slavery. The devastating Indigenous attack of 1622 prompted retrenchment and reorganization. Financial failures and criticism led to revocation of the company’s charter in 1624, placing Virginia under royal control and inaugurating a new administrative phase.
Under royal auspices, Virginia expanded along its rivers, anchoring a plantation landscape. The narrative outlines labor patterns shifting from indentured servitude toward enslaved African labor, influenced by economics and policy. The Restoration era brought Navigation Acts, governors’ authority, and tensions between frontier demands and official caution. This strain culminated in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, an episode of frontier war and civil conflict that exposed divisions in the colony. After its suppression, the colony tightened controls, fortified its militia, and increasingly relied on racial slavery, producing a stratified society dominated by large planters and Anglican institutions across the tidewater.
The chronicle next recounts the founding of Maryland as a proprietary colony granted to the Calvert family in 1632. Settlers established St. Mary’s City in 1634 as a refuge accommodating English Catholics within a mixed population. The book notes the Act of Toleration of 1649, intermittent religious and political strife during the English Civil War, and the restoration of proprietary government. Economically, Maryland shared Virginia’s tobacco orientation and riverine settlement pattern. Relations with neighboring colonies and with Indigenous peoples followed familiar rhythms of trade, land cessions, and conflict. By the late seventeenth century, Maryland also moved toward royal oversight and Anglican establishment.
Southward, proprietary Carolina took shape after 1663, envisioned under the Fundamental Constitutions but shaped by local conditions. In the north, small farmers occupied Albemarle, while a Barbadian-influenced settlement at Charles Town began in 1670. The narrative highlights rice and later indigo as staples, the growth of plantation slavery, and the Indian slave trade. Frontier wars—the Tuscarora conflict in North Carolina and the Yamasee War in South Carolina—reshaped alliances and expansion. Administrative difficulties and unrest led to the effective separation of North and South Carolina and eventual conversion to royal colonies. Coastal prosperity contrasted with backcountry challenges and gradual inland settlement.
Finally, the book treats Georgia’s founding in 1732 as a strategic buffer and philanthropic project under James Oglethorpe. Settlers established Savannah with planned town designs, initial bans on slavery and rum, and support from diverse groups, including Highland Scots and German Protestants. Tensions with Spanish Florida produced military episodes during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Over time, restrictions eased and plantation agriculture spread. The narrative closes with the southern colonies established, their economies grounded in staple crops and enslaved labor, their institutions formed through adaptation and conflict. These beginnings framed the society and politics that would later shape the region’s history.
Historical Context
Set chiefly between the late sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, Mary Johnston’s Pioneers of the Old South surveys the English advance from first reconnaissance to established plantation societies along the Atlantic seaboard. Its geographical canvas extends from the Chesapeake—Jamestown on the James River and Maryland’s St. Mary’s—to the Albemarle and Cape Fear in Carolina and down to Savannah on the Georgia frontier. The book situates these colonies within a wider imperial contest with Spain and France and amid powerful Indigenous polities, especially the Powhatan paramount chiefdom. Climatic realities, tidal rivers, and profitable staples like tobacco and rice frame the environmental constraints and opportunities that shaped policy, society, and conflict.
Johnston begins with Elizabethan ventures that prepared the ground for permanent settlement. Sir Walter Raleigh sponsored reconnaissance in 1584 and colonies on Roanoke Island in 1585 and 1587 under Ralph Lane and John White; the latter vanished, the "Lost Colony" noted by the 1590 relief expedition. These attempts unfolded while England challenged Spanish sea power, culminating in the defeat of the Armada in 1588. The book uses Roanoke and the age of "sea dogs"—Francis Drake, Richard Grenville—to portray the fusion of private enterprise, national rivalry, and Protestant zeal that later animated the Virginia Company’s charters (1606, 1609, 1612).
Jamestown (1607) anchors the narrative as the formative experiment in southern colonization. Backed by the Virginia Company of London under a 1606 charter from James I, three ships—the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery—carried 104 settlers led by Christopher Newport to a marshy island on the James River in May 1607. Captain John Smith’s disciplined leadership through 1608 stabilized the colony, yet the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614), the chaotic "Starving Time" winter of 1609–1610 that left only about 60 survivors, and the imposition of martial law under Thomas West (Lord De La Warr) and Sir Thomas Dale revealed deep structural fragilities. Dale’s Laws (published 1612) enforced harsh order, while John Rolfe’s successful curing of Nicotiana tabacum by 1612 birthed the tobacco boom that would define the Chesapeake economy. Reformers around Sir Edwin Sandys introduced the headright system (1618), granting 50 acres per migrant or sponsor, and authorized a representative assembly: the House of Burgesses first met at Jamestown on 30 July 1619. That same year saw the arrival at Point Comfort of "20 and odd Negroes" seized from the Portuguese slaver San Juan Bautista—an event signaling the emergence of African labor in the colony. Peace with the Powhatans followed the 1614 marriage of Rolfe and Pocahontas (Matoaka), but Opechancanough’s coordinated assault on 22 March 1622 killed about 347 colonists, prompting years of reprisal and a decisive turn toward dispersed, fortified plantations. In 1624, the Crown dissolved the Virginia Company, converting Virginia into a royal colony; governance continued through the General Assembly while royal governors, notably Sir William Berkeley (1641–1652; 1660–1677), promoted a staple economy and hierarchical order. The book presents these developments not as isolated episodes but as linked adjustments—economic, military, and constitutional—through which a precarious outpost became a durable, plantation-anchored society.
Indigenous power and diplomacy remain central across the century. The Powhatan chiefdom, a network of Algonquian-speaking tribes under Wahunsenacawh (Powhatan) and later Opechancanough, negotiated, traded, and fought to shape English expansion. After renewed war in 1644, colonial forces captured Opechancanough in 1646; treaties that year and the Treaty of Middle Plantation (1677) transformed remaining groups into tributary nations and delineated reservation lands under the English Crown. Johnston foregrounds both conflict and accommodation—gift exchange, interpreters, and intermarriage—using figures like Pocahontas and chiefs such as Necotowance to illustrate the contingent diplomacy that underwrote settlement beyond the fall line.
The labor regime evolved from indentured servitude to race-based chattel slavery. In the seventeenth century, most field hands were English or Irish indentured servants bound for four to seven years. As mortality declined and tobacco exports rose, planters relied increasingly on enslaved Africans. Key Virginia statutes codified hereditary slavery: the 1662 law making status follow the mother (partus sequitur ventrem), the 1667 act declaring baptism no bar to bondage, and the 1705 "Act Concerning Servants and Slaves" consolidating racial distinctions. The book links this legal architecture to plantation expansion, tracing how profits and land hunger hardened social stratification and the coercive control of Black labor.
Political fissures culminated in Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), when frontier grievances over Indian raids, land access, and perceived favoritism provoked Nathaniel Bacon to defy Governor Sir William Berkeley. Militiamen attacked friendly tribes, seized power, and burned Jamestown in September 1676 before the uprising collapsed after Bacon’s death. Royal commissions condemned Berkeley’s reprisals, and the Crown restored order. Johnston treats the revolt as a watershed: elites tightened racial slavery, extended western forts, and curbed smallholders’ political leverage—measures that stabilized planter rule while shifting class tensions onto lines of race, an enduring transformation in the Old South’s political economy.
Beyond Virginia, the book surveys parallel southern foundations. Maryland, chartered in 1632 to Cecilius Calvert (2nd Lord Baltimore) and settled at St. Mary’s in 1634, experimented with Catholic–Protestant coexistence via the 1649 Act Concerning Religion, later disrupted by the Protestant Associators’ Revolution (1689) and royal rule until 1715. The Carolina grant of 1663 to eight Lords Proprietors fostered Charleston (1670), rice and indigo cultivation, and complex Native alliances; instability surfaced in Culpeper’s Rebellion (1677) and Cary’s Rebellion (1711), followed by the Tuscarora War (1711–1715) and the Yamasee War (1715). South Carolina’s reliance on African rice expertise set the stage for the Stono Rebellion (1739) and the sweeping Negro Act (1740). Georgia, a trustees’ buffer colony under James Oglethorpe (charter 1732; Savannah 1733), banned slavery and rum early and repelled Spanish incursions at the Battle of Bloody Marsh (1742). Johnston uses these episodes to portray the march of settlement, conflict, and policy experimentation along the southern frontier.
While celebratory of enterprise, the book implicitly critiques the period’s social order by exposing its costs. It juxtaposes constitutional innovation—the House of Burgesses and proprietary compacts—with the dispossession of Native lands through wars and unequal treaties. It underscores how the tobacco and rice booms produced oligarchic planter classes, dependent on indentured and then enslaved labor, and fostered laws that racialized bondage. By tracing Bacon’s Rebellion and later slave uprisings, it points to the political bargains that suppressed dissent while entrenching hierarchy. In this sense, Johnston’s chronicle doubles as a commentary on power, expansion, and injustice in the colonial South.
