Episode Details

After Bacon’s Rebellion, a certain kind of Virginian gave up on the Chesapeake and looked south — to a coast the advertisements called empty, warm, and waiting. It was none of those things. It was the contested ground between the English colonies and Spanish Florida, where the French had already been massacred and the Spanish had held Saint Augustine since before Jamestown existed. This is the opening of a new season: the story of Carolina, sold over coffee on a London lane and planted as a wedge against an empire.

The English failed on this coast, and failed again — a Barbadian settlement that died of a feud and a sunken supply ship, governed by the very man who would later hang for Bacon’s rebellion. Then eight of the most powerful men in England took a charter to the place and promptly forgot about it, leaving the colony to be run by their absence — until one of them, the future Earl of Shaftesbury, set out to salvage it with money, credit, a sweeping agricultural experiment, and a constitution written by his unknown secretary, John Locke. And in the fine print of every promise was the phrase that defined the whole enterprise: subject to change by the proprietors.

A colony advertised as theirs — and the long, violent argument over who it would actually belong to.