Certain distinctive features were shared by England's southern mainland colonies: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Broad acred, these outposts of empire were all in some degree devoted to exporting commercial agricultural products.
Profitable staple crops were the rule, notably tobacco and rice, though to a lesser extent in small-farm North Carolina. Slavery was found in all the plantation colonies, though only after 1750 in reform-minded Georgia.
Immense acreage in the hands of a favored few fostered a strong aristocratic atmosphere, except in North Carolina and to some extent in debtor-tinged Georgia.
The wide scattering of plantations and farms, often along stately rivers, retarded the growth of cities and made the estab lishment of churches and schools both difficult and expensive.
In 1671 the governor of Virginia actually thanked God that no free schools or printing presses existed in his colony.
All the plantation colonies permitted some religious toleration. The tax-supported Church of England became the dominant faith, though it was the weakest in all of the nonconformist North Carolina.
These colonies were in some degree expansionary. "Soil butchery" by excessive tobacco growing drove settlers westward, and the long, lazy rivers invited penetration of the continent-and continuing con frontation with Native Americans.