Civil war convulsed England in the 1640s. King Charles I had dismissed Parliament in 1629, and when he even tually recalled it in 1640, the members were mutinous.
Finding their great champion in the Puritan-soldier Oliver Cromwell, they ultimately beheaded Charles in 1649, and Cromwell ruled England for nearly a decade.
Finally, Charles II, son of the decapitated king, was restored to the throne in 1660.
Colonization had been interrupted during this period of bloody unrest. Now, in the so-called Restoration period, empire building resumed with even greater intensity-and royal involvement. Carolina, named for Charles II, was formally created in 1670, after the king granted to eight of his court favor ites, the Lords Proprietors, an expanse of wilderness ribboning across the continent to the Pacific.
These aristocratic founders hoped to grow foodstuffs to provision the sugar plantations in Barbados and to export non English products like wine, silk, and olive oil.
Carolina prospered by developing close economic ties with the flourishing sugar islands of the English West Indies. In a broad sense, the mainland colony was but the most northerly of those outposts.
Many original Carolina settlers, in fact, had emigrated from Bar bados, bringing that island's slave system with them.
They also established a vigorous slave trade in Carolina itself. Enlisting the aid of the coastal Savannah Indians, they forayed into the interior in search of captives. The Lords Proprietors in London protested against Indian slave trading in their colony, but to no avail.
Manacled Indians soon were among the young colony's major exports. As many as ten thousand Indians were dis patched to lifelong labor in the West Indian canefields and sugar mills. Others were sent to New England.
One Rhode Island town in 1730 counted more than two hundred enslaved Carolina Indians in its midst.
In 1707 the Savannah Indians decided to end their alliance with the Carolinians and to migrate to the back country of Maryland and Pennsylvania, where a new colony founded by Quakers under William Penn prom ised better relations between whites and Indians.
But the Carolinians determined to "thin" the Savannahs before they could depart. A series of bloody raids all but annihi lated the Indian tribes of coastal Carolina by 1710.
After much experimentation, rice emerged as the principal export crop in Carolina. Rice was then an exotic food in England; no rice seeds were sent out from London in the first supply ships to Carolina.
But rice was grown in Africa, and the Carolinians were soon paying premium prices for West African slaves experienced in rice cultivation. The Africans' agricultural skill and their relative immunity to malaria (thanks to a genetic trait that also, unfortunately, made them and their descen dants susceptible to sickle-cell anemia) made them ideal laborers on the hot and swampy rice plantations.
By 1710 they constituted a majority of Carolinians.
Moss-festooned Charles Town-also named for the king-rapidly became the busiest seaport in the South. Many high-spirited sons of English landed families, deprived of an inheritance, came to the Charleston area and gave it a rich aristocratic flavor.
The village became a colorfully diverse community, to which French Protestant refugees, Jews, and others were attracted by religious toleration.
Nearby, in Florida, the Catholic Spaniards abhorred the intrusion of these Protestant heretics. Carolina's frontier was often aflame.
Spanish-incited Indians brandished their tomahawks, and armor-clad warriors of Spain frequently unsheathed their swords during the successive Anglo-Spanish wars.
But by 1700 Carolina was too strong to be wiped out.