Colonial period of South Carolina
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The history of the colonial period of South Carolina has roots in French, Spanish, and English efforts to colonize North America.
By the end of the 16th century, the Spanish and French had abandoned the area of present-day South Carolina, north of the Savannah River, after several reconnaissance missions and colonization attempts. In 1629 Charles I granted his attorney general a charter to everything between latitudes 36 and 31. Later, Charles II gave the land to eight nobles, the Lords Proprietor. There was a single government of the Carolinas based in Charleston until 1712, when a separate government (under the Lords Proprietors) was set up for North Carolina. In 1719, the Crown purchased the South Carolina colony from the absentee Lords Proprietor and appointed Royal Governors. By 1729, seven of the eight Lords Proprietors had sold their interests back to the Crown and the separate royal colonies of North Carolina and South Carolina were established.
Throughout the Colonial Period, the Carolinas participated in numerous wars with the Spanish and the Native Americans, particularly the Yamasee, Apalachee, and Cherokee. The Carolina upcountry was settled largely by Scotch-Irish migrants from Pennsylvania and Virginia, while the lowcountry mostly consisted of wealthy plantation owners. Toward the end of the Colonial Period, the upcountry people were underrepresented and mistreated, which caused them to take a loyalist position when the upcountry complained of new taxes that would later help spark the American Revolution.
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[edit] Lords Proprietors
By the end of the 16th century, the Spanish and French had abandoned the area of present-day South Carolina after several colonization attempts and reconnaissance missions. Spanish Florida grew in strength and territory from the founding of St. Augustine to the late 17th century. By the 1590s Spain had established a system of missions, forts, and outposts across northern Florida and along the Atlantic coast north to the Savannah River.
In 1629 Charles I granted his attorney general Robert Heath a charter to all the lands between latitudes 36 and 31, which extends from the Georgia-Florida border to the North Carolina-Virginia border, and all the way west to the Pacific. In this charter, Charles I called this region the "Province of Carolina," (or "Carolana") after the Latin form of his own name. No one ever settled in South Carolina under the Heath Charter.
During the English Civil War, Charles I was beheaded and the Commonwealth of England established, followed by The Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. The English Restoration followed Cromwell's death. The monarchy was restored under Charles II. Wanting to pay back his allies and show them his gratitude, but lacking funds, Charles II granted most of the Heath Charter lands to a group of eight noblemen in 1663. In 1669, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the eight proprietors, and his secretary, John Locke, drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a plan for the government of the new colony. A number of colonists in the British colony of Barbados expressed interest in colonizing Carolina (the name had been changed slightly by Charles II). The Lords Proprietor were overjoyed and told the Barbadians to spread the word to their neighbors in a letter the lords named "Barbados Adventures." During the 17th century the sugar industry on Barbados boomed. Eventually, most of the island's land was in the hands of a small number of wealthy planters, while a growing number of colonists sought opportunities elsewhere.
[edit] The first passage
The Barbadian colonists greatly influenced Carolina culture well into the 21st century. They brought a social system rooted in European feudalism and slave-based sugar plantation industry. They brought African slaves, whose experience growing rice in West Africa helped in establishing the crop as one of South Carolina's first cash crops. In 1663 they sent William Hilton sailing along the Carolina coast to look for a good place for settlement, but nothing came of the voyage except for the discovery and naming of Hilton Head Island. In North Carolina a short-lived colony was established near the mouth of the Cape Fear River. A ship was sent southward to explore the Port Royal area, where the French had established the short-lived Charlesfort post and the Spanish had built Santa Elena, the capital of Spanish Florida from 1566 to 1587, when it was abandoned. Captain Robert Sanford made a visit with the friendly Edisto Indians. When the ship departed to return to Cape Fear, Dr. Henry Woodward stayed behind to study the interior and native languages.
In August 1669, the first three ships, called Carolina, Port Royal, and Albemarle sailed from England to Barbados. The third of the forementioned ships sank off the coast of Barbados. They grabbed the supplies the Lords Proprietors had prescribed, replaced the Albemarle with Three Brothers, and set sail again. The ships were separated in a thunderstorm shortly afterward, and Port Royal was drifting lost for six weeks. It ran out of drinking water in the process before wrecking in the Bahamas. Forty-four people made it to the shore, but many of them died before the captain was able to build a new ship to get them to the closest settlement. With the new ship, they reached New Providence and bought a new boat that would take them to Bermuda, where they were reunited with the Carolina.
In Bermuda, an 80-year-old Puritan Bermudian colonist, Colonel William Sayle, was named governor of Carolina. On March 15, 1670, under Sayle, they finally reached Port Royal. According to the account of one passenger, the Indians were friendly, made signs toward where they should best land, and spoke broken Spanish. Spain still considered Carolina to be its land; the main Spanish base, St. Augustine, wasn't far away, and the Spanish missionary provinces of Guale and Mocama occupied the coast south of the Savannah River and Port Royal. Though the Edisto Indians were not happy to have the English settle there permanently, the chief of the Kiawah Indians, who lived farther north along the coast, arrived to invite the English to settle among his people and protect them from the Westo tribe, slave-raiding allies of Virginia.
The sailors agreed and sailed for the region now called West Ashlee. When they landed in early April at Albemarle Point on the shores of Ashlee, they founded Charles Town, in honor of their king. On May 23, Three Brothers arrived in Charles Town Bay without 11 or 12 passengers who had gone for water and supplies at St. Catherines Island, and had run into Indians allied with the Spanish. St. Catherines Island was the capital of Spanish Florida's Guale province. Of the hundreds of people who had sailed from England or Barbados, only 148 people, including three African slaves, lived to arrive at Charles Town Landing.
[edit] Population growth
Since Spain claimed the Carolina coast, the new settlers prepared to protect themselves against the Spanish and their Indian allies. In August of 1670, the residents of St. Augustine sent Indians to destroy Charles Town. Dr. Henry Woodward arrived, returning from a diplomatic journey where he had convinced many tribes to unite with England in a powerful defense league against the Spanish. The arriving Spanish and allied Indians, knowing of this, decided not to attack after all and went back to St. Augustine to fortify the city.
In February 1671, 86 Barbadians arrived to join the settlement, Governor Sayle died, and he was replaced by the temporary Governor Joseph West. Barbadian Governor John Yeamen arrived September 1, 1671 with 500 more Barbadians and eventually replaced West as governor. The young colony's economy depended largely upon the export of Indian slaves. The Westo tribe had already established itself as slave-raiders, trading captured Indians for weapons and trade goods from Virginia. After a few years of conflict, an alliance between South Carolina and the Westo was made. From 1675 to 1680 there a profitable trade in slaves captured by Westo raids upon Spanish-allied Indians in Guale and Mocama and shipped from Charles Town to the West Indies to work the sugar plantations. However, the Westo fought Indians of the interior with whom the Carolinians wished to trade, such as the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and proto-Creek. During the late 1670s, a new alliance was forged between South Carolina and the Savannah Indians (a group of Shawnee who had migrated to the region). War broke out with the Westo in 1679, ending with the destruction of the Westo. The Savannah and Yamasee Indians quickly replaced the Westo as South Carolina's slave-raiding allies. In the early decades of the Carolina colony, before the establishment of cash crops on a large scale, the export of Indian slaves was a major component of the colony's economy. According to historian Alan Gallay, from 1670 to 1715, more slaves were exported from Charles Town than imported. The total number of Indian slaves exported from Charles Town in these years is estimated to be between 24,000 and 51,000, mostly of which came from Spanish Florida. Most were shipped to the West Indies, but some were bought by northern English colonies such as Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. At the time, the price of slaves from Africa was much higher than the price of Indian slaves from South Carolina. Even so, Carolinians were reluctant to use Indian slaves, preferring Africans. Part of the reason may be the many powerful Indian nations that surrounded South Carolina and the need to prevent them from making military alliances with France and Spain.
At the same time, South Carolina was forming alliances with interior tribes such as the Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee, trading not only in slaves, but deerskins, naval stores, and rice. This lucrative trade helped Carolina grow quickly in population and prosperity. However, most of South Carolina's first immigrants were indentured servants or slaves that worked for Barbadians, building plantations up the rivers and on the nearby Sea Islands.
As late as 1715, 90% of South Carolina's European and African population lived within 30 miles of Charles Town. The traders did not need land, and rice cultivation produced large yields from small amounts of land. Furthermore, growing rice required the construction of dikes and sluices, and did not exhaust the land in the way that crops like tobacco did. As a result, the area of settlement was relatively limited, but dense, and focused on the city of Charles Town. In contrast, Virginia had no city comparable to Charles Town. Thus while Virginia developed an agrarian society, South Carolina was more cosmopolitan. English colonists who didn't work on plantations lived mostly among their own slaves, with African-American bond servants outnumbering free slaves by as much as 10 to 1 in some districts. Some Europeans warned that planters that they were setting themselves up for an insurrection, but the Barbadians claimed that they had created a successful, booming economy before, in Barbados, and slavery was the way to do it.
The proprietors and royals were not concerned with the slavery, as it was yet legal in the British empire, but they were concered with Carolina's exports. Their Carolinan rice, and, after 1740, indigo, were extremely valuable to the empire. The rice was valuable for supporting the West Indies sugar plantations, where little or no food crops were grown. Rice from Carolina fed the Caribbean slaves, as did cod from New England. In the 1730s, England even made a point of settling Georgia in order to create a buffer zone for the protection of the Carolinan plantations. The Georgia coast, once the well-defended Spanish provinces of Guale and Mocama, had been decimated by slave raids and general war with the Spanish. By the time of the founding of Georgia, those provinces were depopulated and unable to resist.
By 1680 it was decided that Albemarle Point was too unhealthy and hard to defend. Some settlers began moving north to Oyster Point. The white-shell point at the end of a narrow-necked peninsula was much easier to defend because there was no question about which direction a ground attack would come from. Anyone attacking from the harbor would be visible a long way off. In May 1680, the Lords Proprietors instructed the governor and the council to resettle Charles Town at Oyster Point. Because it was low on the peninsula, planters on the coast could easily transport their good to Charleston's port using tidal creeks.
French Huguenot Protestants began arriving in 1680. France's 1685 repeal of religious freedoms for non-Catholics sped up the process.
[edit] War of Augustino
Though they accepted English settlement of Charles Town, the Spanish forbade any further settlement to the south. But in 1686, 100 Spanish, free blacks, and Indians landed at Edisto Island and broke into Governor Joseph Morton's house, stole his valuables, kidnapped and murdered his brother-in-law, and freed his slaves. By 1695 Charles Town was made into an armed fortress. By 1702 England was in the middle of Queen Anne's War with France and Spain. Carolina had been fighting a "cold war" with Spanish Florida, via Indian allies, since the colony's founding. Queen Anne's War gave Carolina the permission to launch large-scale attacks the stronghold of St. Augustine and Spanish Florida in general. A combined land and sea force, including pirates operating out of Charles Town, destroyed the few remaining refugee missions in Guale and Mocama before reaching St. Augustine, which was burned to the ground. The Spanish fortress, however, could not be captured. Another major invasion of Spanish Florida occurred in 1704, when Carolinian forces and Indian allies, including the Creek, destroyed the Apalachee tribe of western Florida. The Apalachee were the only remaining powerful Indian ally of Spanish Florida. About a quarter of the Apalachee were killed, hundreds or thousands were enslaved, and the remainder were forced to relocate to the Savannah River region.
In 1705, the Carolinians and their Indian allies destroyed the rest of the Spanish missions in Timucua Florida and south as far as the Florida Keys. Spanish control was restricted to the castle of St. Augustine and the fort of Pensacola.
During the beginning of the 1700s, numerous problems plagued Carolina. Pirates, once useful allies, became liabilities after the peace established by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. The Yamasee Indians, once important allies of South Carolina, became less useful as trading routes to the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw became established. Abuse of traders and encroachment on Yamasee land, among other things, triggered the Yamasee War of 1715-1717. Many other tribes joined in the rebellion, including the Creek and Chickasaw. The war devastated South Carolina. In the aftermath, the trade in Indian slaves went into rapid decline. Many tribes moved away from the region, and South Carolina had to develop new relationships with the Indians. The Yamasee War also helped to establish racial awareness and segregation. Previously race was less important than nationality (such as English or Spanish, Yamasee or Cherokee), or religion (Catholic, Anglican, or Dissenter). While the Civil War can be said to mark the end of the "Old South", the Yamasee War marks its beginning.
[edit] The end of proprietary rule
Proprietary rule was unpopular in South Carolina almost from the start, mainly because propertied immigrants to the colony hoped to lionize political power themselves. They generally preferred the short, flexible royal charter to the detailed, idealistic Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina as a basis for government. Moreover, many Anglicans resented the Proprietors' guarantee of freedom of religion to Dissenters. In November 1719, Carolina elected James Moore as governor and sent a representative to ask the king to make Carolina a royal province with a royal governor and to grant the colony aid and security directly from the English government. Because the Crown was interested in Carolina's exports and did not think the Lords Proprietors were adequately protecting the colony, it agreed. Robert Johnson, the last proprietary governor, became the first royal governor.
Meanwhile, the colony of Carolina was slowly splitting in two. In the first fifty years of the colony's existence, most settlement was focused on the region around Charleston. The northern part of the colony had no deepwater port. North Carolina's earliest settlement region, the Albemarle Settlements, was colonized by Virginians and closely tied to Virginia. In 1712, the northern half of Carolina was granted its own governor and named "North Carolina." North Carolina remained under proprietary rule until 1729.
Because South Carolina was more populous and more commercially important, most Europeans thought primarily of it, and not of North Carolina, when they referred to "Carolina." By the time of the American Revolution, this colony was known as "South Carolina."
[edit] Frontier settlement
Governor Robert Johnson encouraged settlement in the western frontier to make Charles Town's shipping more profitable, and to create a buffer zone against anyone looking to attack the Carolinans. The Carolinans arranged a fund to lure European Protestants. Each family would receive free land based on the number of people that it brought over, including slaves. Every 100 families settling together would be declared a parish and given two representatives in the state assembly. Within ten years, eight towniships formed all along navigable streams. Charlestonians considered the towns created by the Germans, Scots, Irish, and Welsh, such as Orangeburg and Saxe-Gotha (later called Cayce), to be their first line of defense in case of an Indian attack or military reserves against the threat of a slave uprising.
By the 1750s the Piedmont region began to fill up with frontier families from the north, using the Great Wagon Road. Differences in philosophy of the Calvinist subsidence farmers in the Upcountry and the Anglican aristocrat planters of the Lowcountry bred distrust and hostility between the two regions. By the time of the Revolution, the Back Country contained nearly half of the white population of South Carolina, 20,000 to 30,000, nearly all of them non-Anglicans. Despite the promises of the initial constitutions, the Anglican planters had gone ahead and established the Anglican church as the official state church of South Carolina.
[edit] Land acquirement
Though Governor Francis Nicholson had tried to pacify the Cherokee with gifts, they had still grown discontent with the arrangements. Sir Alexander Cuming negotiated with them to open some land for settlement in 1730. Because Governor James Glenn stepped in to bring peace between the Creek and Cherokee, the Cherokee rewarded him by granting South Carolina with a few thousand acres of land on which the Carolinians built Fort Prince George, near the Keowee River, as a British outpost and trading center. Two years later Old Hop, an important Cherokee chief, treatied with Glenn at Saluda Old Town midway between Charles Town and the Indians' town of Keowee, and gave the Carolinians the 96 District, a region that now includes parts of ten separate counties.
By January 19, 1760, the Cherokee, angered at the British broken promises, increasing tension with settlers, and the gradual theft of their land, began attacking white settlers in the Upcountry, an uprising referred to as the Cherokee War. South Carolina's Governor Lyttelton raised an army of 1,100 men and marched on the Lower Towns (Seneca Town was the closest), which quickly agreed to peace. As part of the peace terms, 29 Cherokee chiefs were imprisoned as hostages in Fort Prince George. Lyttelton returned to Charles Town, but the Cherokee were still angry and continued raiding the frontier. In February of 1760, the Cherokee attacked Fort Prince George itself, trying to rescue the hostages. In the battle the fort's commander was killed. His replacement quickly ordered the execution of the hostages, then fought off the assault. Governor Lyttelton, unable to put down the rebellion, appealed to Jeffrey Amherst, who sent Archibald Montgomery with an army of 1,200 of British regulars and Scottish Highlanders. Montontgomery's army burned a few of the Cherokee's abandoned Lower Towns then tried to cross into the region of the Cherokee Middle Towns. He was ambushed and defeated at "Etchoe Pass" and forced to return to Charles Town. In 1761 a third attempt was made to defeat the Cherokee. General Grant led an army of 2,600 men, including Catawba scouts. The Cherokee again fought at Etchoe Pass, but failed to stop Grant's army, which proceded to burn the Cherokee Middle Towns and fields of crops.
In September of 1761, a number of Cherokee chiefs led by Attakullakulla petitioned for peace. The terms of the peace treaty included the cession of most of the eastern lands of the Cherokee, including the whole region of the Lower Towns. The Cherokee who had lived there could not stay, and most migrated to the Middle Towns or beyond.
With the Cherokee defeated and their eastern land ceded, new settlers flooded into the Upcountry through the Waxhaws in what is now called Lancaster County. Lawlessness soon ensued and robbery, arson, and looting became common. Upcountry residents formed a group of "Regulators," who were vigilantes who decided to take the law into their own hands. Now home to 50% of the white population, the Upcountry sent representative Patrick Calhoun and other representatives before the Charles Town state legislature to appeal for representation, courts, roads, and supplies for churches and schools. Before long, Calhoun and Moses Kirkland were in the legislature as Upcountry representatives.
By 1775, the colony contained an estimated 60,000 European-Americans and 80,000 African-Americans. No other colony enjoyed the wealth concentrated in the Low country. The constant battles with Indians, French, and Spanish were enhancing the average colonist's feelings of military competence and independence.
Lord William Campbell was the last English Governor of the Province of South Carolina.
[edit] Further reading
- Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
- Olwell, Robert. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
- Ramsay, David. History of South Carolina, From Its First Settlement in 1670, to the Year 1808. Charleston: David Longworth, 1809.
- Sirmans, M. Eugene. Colonial South Carolina: A Political History 1663-1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.
- Weir, Robert M. Colonial South Carolina: A History. New York: KTO Press, 1983.
- Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Norton, 1974.
