The Virginian, William Byrd II, exemplified the aristocratic nature of those who dominated Virginian life during these formative years of the colony.  William II was born in 1674 on his father William I's huge Belvedere Estate (later known as the Westover Plantation) near the modern site of Richmond, further up the James River from Jamestown.

As was typical of the Virginia nobility, the young William was sent off to England (age seven) for schooling while living with relatives there.  Here for nine years he studied classic and modern European languages and literature.  He then apprenticed in London and Rotterdam in the tobacco trade before taking up the study of law at the Middle Temple, London, in 1692.  He was admitted to the bar in 1695 and, complements of the support of family friend Sir Robert Southwell, elected to the Royal Society in 1696.

In 1696 he also returned to his native Virginia, which he had not seen in seventeen years.  Here, with his aristocratic father's urging and backing, William was elected to the House of Burgesses, representing Henrico county.  But finding colonial life lacking the sparkle of English social life, William soon resigned his position and returned to England to practice law.  In 1698 he received the appointment as London Agent of the Virginia Governor's Council (the upper chamber of the Virginia House of Burgesses), thus now entitled to the prestigious rank of colonel. However, in this position he became deeply involved in political tensions arising between his father and Virginia Governor Nicholson (the Byrds had been supporters of the ousted former governor, Sir Edmund Andros).

His four years at this position made him a somewhat cynical observer of political behavior.  lso this aspiring young colonel found that despite all his close study and discipline in the graces of the English aristocracy, he suffered from the incurable social disease of being a mere colonial, and was never accepted into English society on an equal footing, despite his many social accomplishments.

Thus in hearing of his father's death in 1705, he returned to Virginia to take up the responsibilities of running the huge estate he had just inherited. Those responsibilities included not only supervising the vast production of tobacco by hundreds of slaves, but of representing the Westover Plantation in all its power and social grace to the society of Virginian aristocracy. In this he was well prepared, complements of his years of (unsuccessful) effort in London to achieve entrance into English aristocracy. In 1709 he was appointed to the Governor's Council in the Virginia capital of Williamsburg.

He found a wife from colonial society (daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke II, governor of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean), Lucy Parke. This high-spirited young lady was a perfect social match for William, though not untypical of high society at that time, William was reputed to be having alliances with a number of other women during their ten-year marriage.  In 1715 Lucy died of smallpox. William would remarry eight years later.  From this second marriage William III would be born.

This Virginia taskmaster could be tough on his slaves (beatings of slaves for even minor infractions was normal procedure) but also on himself.  He rode hard, ventured into the Virginia wilderness to survey the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, founded the town of Richmond, and kept himself well-read on all the latest literature, which he added to his classic collection – around 4,000 books in his personal library, which he considered to be nearly sacred ground.  He even took up writing book-length studies, most notably his adventures during the Virginia-North Carolina surveying expedition.

When he died in 1744 he left to his son William III family landholdings which at this point totaled almost 180,000 acres.

The main inspiration for the colony came from English General James Oglethorpe, who had been involved in the War of Spanish succession (1701-1713).  Although the question of which family should rule Spain had been resolved back in Europe, other questions, including the issue of what exactly were Spain's rights in North America, were still open.  Thus trouble from Spanish Florida was expected. Consequently, a fortified colony south of Charleston and north of Florida was seen as a military necessity.

Oglethorpe, as a member of Parliament, had been involved in a study of the conditions in England's debtors' prisons – which he found appalling and little likely to improve the lot of a debtor.  So the idea emerged of using this proposed military colony as a place to help debtors get out from under an impossible situation. Oglethorpe and a group of fellow philanthropists thus petitioned King George for just such a colony (1732).  The plans were to build forts along the coast of this new colony of Georgia and to locate the colony's capital city (constructed in a very well laid out grid pattern) at the mouth of the Savannah River.  Blacks and Catholics were excluded from the colony (during only its very first years) in the hope of ensuring against any danger of religious and racial turmoil.

Actually, very few debtors made their way to the colony.  But it soon became a place of refuge for religious minorities from the continent of Europe, and for English tradesmen hoping for a better start in life.  Still, the tight supervisory mindset that was supposed to get the colony off in the right direction seemed to discourage a great number of settlers from heading to Georgia.  Most new settlers preferred to head instead to the less restrictive Carolinas. Only after the various laws regulating the character and behavior of the settlers were lifted did the colony begin to receive a large number of settlers.  Then (by 1750) the colony began to take on the cultural flavor of nearby South Carolina, and the capital city Savannah some of the character of Charleston.