Early Settlements of the Carolinas
In 1669 the Lords Proprietaries sent out from England three ships, the
Carolina, the Port Royal, and the Albemarle, with about a hundred
colonists aboard. Taking the old sea road, they came at last to Barbados,
and here the Albemarle, seized by a storm, was wrecked. The two other
ships, with a Barbados sloop, sailed on anal were approaching the Bahamas
when another hurricane destroyed the Port Royal. The Carolina, however,
pushed on with the sloop, reached Bermuda, and rested there; then,
together with a small ship purchased in these islands, she turned west by
south and came in March of 1670 to the good harbor of Port Royal, South
Carolina.
Southward from the harbor where the ships rode, stretched old
Florida, held by the Spaniards. There was the Spanish town, St. Augustine.
Thence Spanish ships might put forth and descend upon the English
newcomers. The colonists after debate concluded to set some further space
between them and lands of Spain. The ships put again to sea, beat
northward a few leagues, and at last entered a harbor into which emptied
two rivers, presently to be called the Ashley and the Cooper. Up the
Ashley they went a little way, anchored, and the colonists going ashore
began to build upon the west bank of the river a town which for the King
they named Charles Town. Ten years later this place was abandoned in favor
of the more convenient point of land between the two rivers. Here then was
built the second and more enduring Charles Town--Charleston, as we call it
now, in South Carolina.
Colonists came fast to this Carolina lying south. Barbados sent
many; England, Scotland, and Ireland contributed a share; there came
Huguenots from France, and a certain number of Germans. In ten years after
the first settling the population numbered twelve hundred, and this
presently doubled and went on to increase. The early times were taken up
with the wrestle with the forest, with the Indians, with Spanish alarms,
with incompetent governors, with the Lords Proprietaries' Fundamental
Constitutions, and with the restrictions which English Navigation Laws
imposed upon English colonies. What grains and vegetables and tobacco they
could grow, what cattle and swine they could breed and export, preoccupied
the minds of these pioneer farmers. There were struggling for growth a
rough agriculture and a hampered trade with Barbados, Virginia, and New
England -- trade likewise with the buccaneers who swarmed in the West
Indian waters.
Five hundred good reasons allowed, and had long allowed, free
bootery to flourish in American seas. Gross governmental faults,
Navigation Acts, and a hundred petty and great oppressions, general
poverty, adventurousness, lawlessness, and sympathy of mishandled folk
with lawlessness, all combined to keep Brother of the Coast, Buccaneer,
and Filibuster alive, and their ships upon all seas. Many were no worse
than smugglers; others were robbers with violence; and a few had a dash of
the fiend. All nations had sons in the business. England to the south in
America had just the ragged coast line, with its off-lying islands and
islets, liked by all this gentry, whether smuggler or pirate outright.
Through much of the seventeenth century the settlers on these shores never
violently disapproved of the pirate. He was often a "good fellow." He
brought in needed articles without dues, and had Spanish gold in his
pouch. He was shrugged over and traded with.
He came ashore to Charles Town, and they traded with him there. At
one time Charles Town got the name of "Rogue's Harbor." But that was not
forever, nor indeed, as years are counted, for long. Better and better
emigrants arrived, to add to the good already there. The better type
prevailed, and gave its tone to the place. There set in, on the Ashley and
Cooper rivers, a fair urban life that yet persists.
South Carolina was trying tobacco and wheat. But in the last years
of the seventeenth century a ship touching at Charleston left there a bag
of Madagascar rice. Planted, it gave increase that was planted again.
Suddenly it was found that this was the crop for low-lying Carolina. Rice
became her staple, as was tobacco of Virginia.
For the rice-fields South Carolina soon wanted African slaves, and
they were consequently brought in numbers, in English ships. There began,
in this part of the world, even more than in Virginia, the system of large
plantations and the accompanying aristocratic structure of society. But in
Virginia the planter families lived broadcast over the land, each upon its
own plantation. In South Carolina, to escape heat and sickness, the
planters of rice and indigo gave over to employees the care of their great
holdings and lived themselves in pleasant Charleston. These plantations,
with their great gangs of slaves under overseers, differed at many points
from the more kindly, semi-patriarchal life of the Virginian plantation.
To South Carolina came also the indentured white laborer, but the black
was imported in increasing numbers.
From the first in the Carolinas there had been promised fair freedom
for the unorthodox. The charters provided, says an early Governor, "an
overplus power to grant liberty of conscience, although at home was a hot
persecuting time." Huguenots, Independents, Quakers, dissenters of many
kinds, found on the whole refuge and harbor. In every colony soon began
the struggle by the dominant color and caste toward political liberty.
King, Company, Lords Proprietaries, might strive to rule from over the
seas. But the new land fast bred a practical rough freedom. The English
settlers came out from a land where political change was in the air. The
stream was set toward the crumbling of feudalism, the rise of democracy.
In the New World, circumstances favoring, the stream became a tidal river.
Governors, councils, assemblies, might use a misleading phraseology of a
quaint servility toward the constituted powers in England. Tory parties
might at times seem to color the land their own hue. But there always ran,
though often roughly and with turbulence, a set of the stream against
autocracy.
In Carolina, South and North, by the Ashley and Cooper rivers, and
in that region called Albemarle, just back of Virginia, there arose and
went on, through the remainder of the seventeenth century and in the
eighteenth, struggles with the Lords Proprietaries and the Governors that
these named, and behind this a more covert struggle with the Crown. The
details differed, but the issues involved were much the same in North and
South Carolina. The struggle lasted for the threescore and odd years of
the proprietary government and renewed itself upon occasion after 1729
when the Carolinas became royal colonies. Later, it was swept, a strong
affluent, into the great general stream of colonial revolt, culminating in
the Revolution.
Into North Carolina, beside the border population entering through
Virginia and containing much of a backwoods and derelict nature, came many
Huguenots, the best of folk, and industrious Swiss, and Germans from the
Rhine. Then the Scotch began to come in numbers, and families of Scotch
descent from the north of Ireland. The tone of society consequently
changed from that of the early days. The ruffian and the shiftless sank to
the bottom. There grew up in North Carolina a people, agricultural but
without great plantations, hardworking and freedom-loving.
South Carolina, on the other hand, had great plantations, a town
society, suave and polished, a learned clergy, an aristocratic cast to
life. For long, both North and South clung to the sea-line and to the
lower stretches of rivers where the ships could come in. Only by degrees
did English colonial life push back into the forests away from the sea, to
the hills, and finally across the mountains.
Back to: Virginia and the Southern Colonies
