In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Northern and Southern colonies were extremely different. Each “section” of America was socially, economically, and politically dissimilar from the next. From the beginning, it was difficult to picture the colonies as their own separate nation due to a lack of colonial unity.

In the Southern plantation colonies, social structure was molded mostly by the emphasis on slavery and racism that was perpetuated. A hierarchy of status and wealth similar to that of the English social structure formed in place of the rough equality of poverty and disease of the earlier colonial days. Perched at the top of this social ladder were the wealthy, pres...

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