He marveled at how the SouthCarolinians deluded themselves in believing they were safe, burdened asthey were with a large slave population—“stupid security,” he called it.

He mused that colonization would have had a better outcomeif male settlers had been encouraged to intermarry with Indian women.Over two generations, the Indian stock would have improved, as a speciesof flower or tree might; dark skin blanched white, heathen ways dimmed.Here, Byrd was borrowing from the author John Lawson, who wrote in ANew Voyage to Carolina that men of lower rank gained an economicadvantage by marrying Native women who brought land to the union.

In milder weather they got as far as thinking aboutplunging a hoe into the ground.

The Fundamental Constitutions was really a declaration of war againstpoor settlers.

A court of heraldry was added to this strange brew: in overseeingmarriages and maintaining pedigree, it provided further evidence of theintention to fix (and police) class identity.

The Fundamental Constitutions did more than endorse slavery. It was amanifesto promoting a semifeudalistic and wholly aristocratic society.

Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury,

Albemarle County, named after one of the proprietors, GeorgeMonck, Duke of Albemarle.

he authoredthe Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which granted that“every Freeman in Carolina shall have ABSOLUTE POWER ANDAUTHORITY over his Negro Slaves.”

First, the majority population in eastern Virginia were enslaved blacks. Whites lived in constant fear of slave insurrection. Everyone knew about the 1739 slave rebellion in Stono, S.C., when blacks broke into a store, decapitated the shopkeepers, seized guns and powder, and marched with flying banners, beating drums and cries of “Liberty!” Up to 100 joined the rebellion before being engaged by a contingent of armed, mounted militiamen. Scores died in the ensuing battle.