One of the most fundamental facts about English America, the society that later became the United States, is that it was founded twice, in two different places, at two different times, by two quite different sorts of people with wholly different sets of motivations. The second of these foundations, that at Plymouth Rock in 1620, is the first in pride of place. Perhaps it is different if one grows up in Virginia, but surely for most Americans their childhood memory of Thanksgiving, of Pilgrim Fathers and turkey dinner, is far sharper than their impression of Jamestown. This writer learned the name of the Mayflower in childhood; the names of the ships that brought the Jamestown settlers had to be looked up. (Indeed, even modern writers seem not to agree on them; Morrison and Commager, p. 38, give them as Sarah Constant, Goodspeed, and Discovery.)
Yet Jamestown was not inconsequential; it was not swallowed up by later settlers (as Plymouth itself was eventually swallowed up by the Massachusetts colony). The South remains the most distinctive of American regions, and while Southern particularism today is most heavily bound up with the era of the Civil War--or War Between the States--a distinctive Southern heritage can be traced back directly to the Jamestown settlement.
To what degree are the differences between the two settlements, and the regions they gave birth to, bound up in geography? Obviously geography played its part; our very name for the region that began with Jamestown is "the South." But what might have happened if the Sarah Constant and her consorts had made landfall in Massachusetts, and the Mayflower in Virginia? Would "the North" now have the same connotation we associate with "the South?" Would we speak of dour, industrious Southerners and easy-going, hot-blooded Northerners. Would the institution of slavery have been centered upon what is now New England? Or would regional development have been entir...