The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689. By Wesley Frank Craven. Volume I of “A History of the South,” Wendell Holmes Stephenson and E. Merton Coulter, eds. Baton Rouge and Austin: Louisiana State University Press and the Littlefield Fund for Southern History, The University of Texas, 1949.

Historian Wesley Frank Craven authored several texts examining the English presence in the Americans before the eighteenth century, including The Virginia Company of London: 1606 – 1624, An Introduction to the History of Bermuda, White, Red and Black: the Seventeenth Century Virginian, and The Colonies in Transition, 1660 to 1713 as well as others.  His work The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 exists as part of a larger collection titled “A History of the South,” authored while Craven served as a professor at New York University during the 1930s to 1950s.  The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 traces the establishment of English colonies in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, emphasizing the political histories of the region with a brief nod to economic aspects of settlement.

A large part of Craven’s work explains the political, economic and geographical hardships of establishing a colony in Virginia.  Craven isolates different English patterns of thought concerning the Americas as well as their function with regards to the mother country and defines investment plans in Virginia as “a gigantic land speculation . . . marked by a purpose to transfer to the New World an Old World type of landlordism” (37).  In his examination of Virginia’s first settlements, Craven holds a sympathetic perspective of leaders Captain John Smith and Sir Walter Raleigh, stating that the “failure of Raleigh’s experiment at Roanoke Island was easily charged to circumstances” and that Jamestown “appears to have been cursed with a plethora of leaders” (58, 71).  Craven challenges popular notions that settlement in Virginia arose from a mad gold rush, but rather that the London Company and the Virginia Company hoped the develop myriad exports, including copper, iron, silver, silk, and pineapples.

Craven places one of his more interesting analyses in his both his Virginia and Maryland sections.  Groups bound for each area espoused evangelistic goals, hoping to share biblical knowledge with the Indians they encountered.  In Virginia, colonists planned to first establish their colony and then to evangelize among the Indians.  Sir George Calvert, or Lord Baltimore, in Maryland brought a Catholic priest to the New World in order to build a mission school for Indian children.  At times both groups demonstrated a sophisticated approach to seventeenth century evangelism; initially, they hoped to learn Indian language and culture and meet among them rather than demand the Indians move into European homes and villages, abandoning their customs.  Craven perceptively identifies some of the colonists’ difficulties separating Christian beliefs with “converting the Indian to a European way of life,” in a sense, their trouble viewing religion apart from their culture, and disagreements developed (80 – 81).

Craven’s analysis of Maryland also presents a commentary on evolving governing forms, from the use of a combined commander and magistrate, to the abandonment of a commander and the growing influence of a delegate government.  The Calverts’ Maryland serves as a microcosm of conflicts in England between executive and representative leadership, existing within the parameters of a society attracting religious dissenters and attempting to negotiate both a comfortable peace and submission to authority.

By the time of the Carolinas’ settlements, the English New World had gained a reputation as one of religious freedom and respecting certain individual rights.  Craven introduces the topic of trading companies’ capitalization on some of those themes in their advertisements for settlers.  Those who signed up generally agreed to and demanded adherence to the statement of rights, which became pivotal negotiating forms of government in the Carolinas.  Craven concludes that the “political and religious liberalism which has become so characteristically American has deep roots in the economics of colonial promotion” (324).

Despite Craven’s many and admirable successes, his work contains some oversights.  The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 proposes to discuss “the southern colonies” without defining “southern” geographically or in character.  Craven mentions the influx of servants to the American South only as aides or irritants to the protagonists of his story, the colonial leaders, such as Captain Smith, Lord Baltimore and Captain Nathanial Sayle, rather than attempt to explore their reasons for moving the Americas.  He lightly credits cultural and linguistic distinctions as the only causes of conflict between the English settlers and American Indians, overlooking a long Western European history of racism that easily transported to the New World. 

Wesley Craven presents a thorough examination of the Virginia and London Companies ambitions and intentions in the foreground of a politically unstable and economically challenged England.  The author’s familiarity with colonial leaders and their difficulties presents a varied perspective that undermines the current flat and generalized depictions of aristocracy, government, and religious ideas in the English New World.  Despite some omissions and a sometimes bland prose, Craven’s work deserves merit as an exhaustive study of the seventeenth century American South. 

Tina Cannon

 Wesley Frank Craven, on the faculty of Princeton at the time of publication, provided the initial work in A History of the South, a ten volume study covering the American South that featured many of the period’s finest historians:  Avery O. Craven, Charles S. Sydnor, and C. Vann Woodward.  Craven’s effort was a worthy beginning, representing the culmination of serious scholarship that relied largely on primary sources and profound analysis to provide insights to the origin and initial development of England’s North American colonies.  The focus remained traditional, emphasizing political events while suggesting economic issues and virtually ignoring social and cultural ramifications.  Much of the discussion centered on the imperial context of colonization, stressing the connection between colonial enterprises and England’s imperial drive without failing to note periods of distraction.  Craven self-admittedly emphasized Virginia, the first, largest, and most influential Southern colony.  He argued that not only was Virginia important for its internal advances but also for its position as the mother colony from which emigrants moved into adjoining areas, taking with them social and political habits of such enduring influence that a study of Virginia’s local government “contributes to an understanding of the political structure of nineteenth-century Kentucky or Tennessee.” (xiv)

 Craven began with a chapter analyzing the influences flowing from Spain’s colonization efforts, finding that Spaniards charted the way for all later arrivals by establishing the viability of New World settlements.  In the transition to England’s early efforts Craven quickly asserted the importance of Richard Hakluyt the elder and especially the younger, the author of “Discourse in the Western Planting,” which Craven termed the most important single document “to an understanding of the genesis of England’s colonial program” that established the idea that successful colonization depended on the development of colonial trade based on marketable staples. (41)  Although the bulk of study concentrated on Virginia Craven did include chapters on Maryland and the Carolinas as well as two chapters covering the English Civil War, the Protectorate, and the Restoration.

 Craven stressed the expansion of jurisdiction and power of counties as the most impressive feature of the political scene before 1660, arguing that the demand for self-government was more local rather provincial.  Several instruments of control existed on the local level, including county courts which, in addition to judicial functions, regulated commerce, marriage, adoption, and land grant disputes; county commanders, later called colonels, who served as civil and military leaders; sheriffs, who became the colonies’ chief colonial law enforcement officers, serving writs and collecting past due taxes; and justices of the peace, who arbitrated petty disputes.  The nature of county government tended to concentrate those offices in the leading planters or the area, establishing a special obligation on a few successful residents that spurred the growth of a home-grown ruling class.

 Craven’s work displayed themes of economic determinism and Tunerian democracy.  He believed so strongly in the influence of commerce that he identified the central theme of Virginia’s early history as the pursuit of national interest as defined by Hakluyt, giving trade and its merchants salient roles in early colonial history.  Craven also suggested that the origins of representative government owed much to attempts to win support for a common economic program, such as efforts eliciting planter support for limitations on the production of tobacco and promotion of other commodities, such as hemp, flax, and mulberries. (163)  The concessions made to support those reforms fixed a pattern of guaranteed rights which colonists regarded as proper and necessary. (137)  Later, Craven asserted that the most notable feature of the Chesapeake settlements was an absence of common goals, other than the primacy of individual interests.  The presence of a high degree of individualism defined those areas as the “first typically American frontier community.” (222)  Like Turner, Craven argued that the prominence of individualism, bred and nurtured in the disorderly advance of successive frontiers settlements, provided a fertile ground for political liberty.  He added that the other side of the coin was that individualism spawned thoughtless waste in unrestrained farming that eroded the land’s productivity and then demanded fresh fields over the next horizon.

 Reviewers have faulted Craven for his emphasis on Virginia and the tedium of his detailed narrative.  While those criticism are supportable they also are limited in that they criticize Craven for doing what he intended, to tell the story in what he termed “in its fullest context” stressing those factors that were salient for colonial development and for development of the South as a distinct region before its people began to think of themselves not as Englishmen or Europeans. (xiii)  The peculiarities of that effort required that Virginia hold “a place of special prominence.” (xiv)  Craven’s work is defined by its scope and its attention to detail, making it not a light but an informative read.

Harold Rich