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An
excerpt for the state history pages....
It is a
far cry from Barbados to the Carolina shore, but so is it a far cry from
England. Many royalists had fled to Barbados during the old
troubles, so that its English population was considerable. A number may
have welcomed the
chance to leave their small island for the immense
continent; and an English trading port as far south as Cape Fear must have
had a general appeal. So, in 1665, came Englishmen from Barbados and made,
up the Cape Fear River, a settlement which they named Clarendon, with John
Yeamans of Barbados as Governor. But the colony did not prosper. There
arose the typical colonial troubles — sickness, dissensions, improvidence,
quarrels with the aborigines. Nor was the site the best obtainable. The
settlers finally abandoned the place and scattered to various points along
the
northern coast.
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 and 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 builded 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, freebootery 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 it 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, hard-working 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.
[Excerpt from "Pioneers of the
Old South: A Chronicle of English Colonial" By Mary Johnston, published
1918] |
