The colony of South Carolina became one of the most important of the original 13 colonies, as it dominated the political and economic life of the Lower South.
Native Americans
Before the European invasion, various Indian groups, including the Cusabo, Catawba, Yamasee, and Cherokee, inhabited the area that would become South Carolina. When the first English colonists arrived in present-day North Carolina in 1585, the Catawba numbered among the many tribes who lived in the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina. During the next two centuries, European diseases decimated their population, while their independence, culture, and lands came under attack. Like many other Native Americans, they gradually became dependent on European goods, especially metal pots, arrow tips, knives, and guns. The Catawba and their neighbors initially killed deer and exchanged their skins for these articles, but, as the number of deer declined in their territory, the Catawba became the brokers in the trade between the English settlers and nearby Indians. Their position as merchants and their reputation as fierce warriors provided them with some protection from the excessive violence of the colonists. As neighboring tribes suffered even more severely from disease and war, they often sought refuge with and were adopted into the Catawba, thereby forging new cultures. The smallpox epidemics of the mid-18th century, along with the weakening deerskin trade, diminished the power of the Catawba.
When the Europeans arrived in North America, the Cherokee people dominated the Appalachian Mountains in present-day Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina. They lost a great many people to the diseases contracted from Spanish explorers during the 16th century, but, unlike many Indians along the eastern seaboard, they had time to regain their population before engaging in sustained contact and trade with the English in the 17th century. In 1650, the Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee probably numbered about 22,000. Their numerous villages typically consisted of a small number of log cabins. Women and men commonly shared political and social power, and women were primarily responsible for the agricultural production and gathering of foods, while men engaged in hunting. Chiefs, chosen by each town, had a division of responsibilities between wartime and peacetime leaders.
The Cherokee began to engage in significant trade with English settlers by the late 17th century. Some Cherokee villages signed treaties with South Carolina settlers, and a number of Cherokee women married Europeans, especially traders. Like the Catawba, the Cherokee came to rely on metal goods and commerce with white settlers, which undermined their power and independence. Their consumption of these commodities was so enormous that the Cherokee ceded large tracts of lands, from South Carolina to Tennessee, to British-American settlers in payment for their debts. The Cherokee were entangled in the complex political struggles among the British, French, and Spanish in the 18th century, and they often attempted to play one European power off against the other for their own benefit. During the Seven Years’ War, some Cherokee towns supported the French and attacked the Carolina backcoun-try in 1760, while many others fought with the British. Siding with the British during the American Revolution, the Cherokee eventually lost even more land and became subordinate to the new U. S. government.
Both the Spanish and the French many times attempted but failed to establish settlements in South Carolina in the 16th century. King Charles I of England claimed Carolina (named from the Latin name for “Charles”) in 1629 by granting the region to Sir Robert Heath. However, he did not attempt to found settlements. After the Stuart Restoration, King Charles II, responding to the requests of a group of prominent politicians, granted the area to eight supporters whom he named the Lords Proprietors over Carolina. Their charter provided them with extensive power over the colony, and they promised political and religious freedom as well as land to settlers. When these promises failed to attract many colonists, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper (subsequently earl of Shaftesbury) and the philosopher John Locke wrote the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669, which maintained feudal privileges but also granted some popular rights. Its purpose was to define a well-ordered, hierarchical colony, with counties of equal size, each of which was apportioned in equal parcels. The proprietors would own the largest number of parcels, the colonial aristocracy the next greatest number, and the least amount of land was reserved for less affluent settlers. Whites without property would enjoy no political rights, while black slaves were to be completely subject to their masters. Political power would rest primarily in the hands of the wealthy.
Settlers did not adopt the Fundamental Constitutions, and the colony developed along considerably different lines than envisioned by the authors of that document. Politically, the proprietors appointed the governor and half of the council, who essentially ruled the colony. The free men elected an assembly with very limited power. Meanwhile, northern and southern Carolina evolved into distinct societies. In North Carolina (initially separate in 1712, then officially in 1729 when the king formally divided the region), freeholders used slave laborers and indentured servants to produce corn, tobacco, livestock, and naval stores. South Carolina’s first permanent English settlement was at Albemarle Point, where immigrants from England and Barbados arrived in 1670. During the next 10 years, most new arrivals were white Barbadians and their black slaves. For the next few decades, South Carolina produced wood staves, corn, and livestock to trade with the sugar-producing island of Barbados, becoming, as one historian has called it, the “colony of a colony.” In 1680, the colonists moved their capital to Charles Town (later Charleston), which expanded rapidly and became the center of the colony’s political, social, and cultural life. Roughly 5,000 colonists lived in South Carolina at the end of the 17th century, many of whom were Indians and black slaves. Although white settlers quickly established a slave society, many Africans and Aerican Americans exercised at least some nominal freedoms and engaged in diverse occupations, at least during the final years of the 17th century.
Cultivated by black slaves familiar with the crop in their homeland, rice was introduced into South Carolina about 1680, and within a quarter century, it quickly became the colony’s most important export. The intense labor demands associated with rice production spurred an incredible expansion of slavery and the establishment of a harsh plantation regime that brutalized bound laborers. One result was that black inhabitants outnumbered white residents throughout most of the 18th century. In some marshy rice-producing areas, and especially when owners fled to Charleston during the summer to escape malaria and the heat, slaves accounted for more than three-quarters of the population. These conditions, combined with the continual importation of Africans, enabled slaves to blend traditions, religions, and languages from various parts of Africa to create a distinct culture. In 1739, when black bondpeople were more than twice as numerous as white residents in the colony, a group of 50 slaves staged the Stono Rebellion—the largest slave revolt in early North America. Hoping to escape to the freedom promised by the Spanish in Florida, slaves attacked property and killed more than 20 whites before being defeated by the militia. In response, the colony’s assembly passed the most severe slave code in mainland North America. Thereafter, slaves adopted subtler, less violent ways to resist their exploitation.
The early 18th century was a time of considerable difficulty. In 1715, the Yamasee attacked the colony, killing more than 400 settlers and causing the colonists to abandon half of their cultivated lands. Meanwhile, the growing number of pirates off the coast contributed to the unrest. Dissatisfied settlers complained about the proprietors’ failure to protect them or to grant them additional lands. In 1719, the colonists engaged in a bloodless rebellion and received the protection of the Crown. The next year, the British sent Francis Nicholson to serve as the provincial royal governor. South Carolina became a royal colony in 1729 when the original proprietors’ heirs sold their rights to the Crown.
The remainder of the colonial era was somewhat more peaceful and stable. Indigo became the second most important product of South Carolina during the 1740s. In addition to African forced migrants, large numbers of Germans and Swiss arrived in the 1730s and 1740, while the Scots-Irish moved southward from Pennsylvania and Virginia in the 1760s. Yet, the colony remained fractured in regional, economic, and social terms. Poorer farmers in the backcountry struggled against the powerful rice planters along the coast, and the latter ruled and continued to rule the region for decades.
Further reading: S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Philip D. Morgan, Slavery Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998); M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663-1763 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1966); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974).
World History
