The Palmetto State
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The Palmetto State

The Making of South Carolina

Jack Bass, W. Scott Poole

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The Palmetto State

The Making of South Carolina

Jack Bass, W. Scott Poole

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About This Book

A concise approach to the major themes and events that define contemporary South Carolina

The captivating, colorful, and controversial history of South Carolina continues to warrant fresh explorations. In this sweeping story of defining episodes in the state's history, accomplished historians Jack Bass and W. Scott Poole trace the importance of race relations, historical memory, and cultural life in the progress of the Palmetto State from its colonial inception to the present day.

In the discussion of contemporary South Carolina that makes up the majority of this volume, the authors map the ways through which hard-won economic and civil rights advancements, a succession of progressive state leaders, and federal court mandates operated in tandem to bring a largely peaceful end to the Jim Crow era in South Carolina, in stark contrast to the violence wrought elsewhere in the South. This volume speaks directly to the connections between the state's past, present, and future, and it serves as a valuable point of entrance for new inquiries into South Carolina's diverse and complex heritage.

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1
THE BEGINNING
Although earlier European settlements on today's South Carolina coast had failed, Stephen Bull wrote on September 12,1670, to his patron in England, Lord Ashley, “Wee conceive this to be as healthful A place as ever was settled
there is a lande sufficient here for some thousands of People where they may make very brave and happy settlements.”1
A Kiawah Indian chief had directed the settlers to Albemarle Point on the Ashley River, the site of today's major state historical park known as Charles Towne Landing. In exchange for guns to protect themselves from the rival Westos from across the Savannah River, the Kiawah befriended the English, providing them supplies and other help. This site provided the launch for the state's first permanent European settlers. It turned out to be less healthy and less safe than first believed, and in 1680 the settlers moved across the Ashley to today's Charleston peninsula, building a palisade wall around the settlement for protection—the only English walled city in what would become the United States.
More than a century and a half earlier, other Europeans—from Spain—had landed on the South Carolina coast, confronting native peoples who called their land Chicora. Those earliest Europeans left behind a record of treachery, mistreatment, and devastating new diseases. In 1521, after a Spanish expedition from the Caribbean anchored on the coast near present-day Beaufort, crew members enticed friendly Indians aboard, held them captive, and sailed back to the Caribbean. There they sold the captives as slaves.
One of these ships, however, wrecked at sea. Its survivors included a captive who learned Spanish, became a Christian, and two years later traveled to Spain. Given the name Francisco Chicora, he spent time with and influenced the royal family. His stories, some of which got into print, led to Charles V's approving an exploration and a settlement north of present-day Florida. This time the Spanish brought African slaves with them.
In 1526 Chicora served as interpreter and guide for the first Spanish settlement, San Miguel de Gualdape, probably near present-day Georgetown, South Carolina. Once back among his native people, Chicora quickly abandoned the Spaniards. Their settlement became the first European colony anywhere in what today is the United States. It survived less than a year. In the earliest of many slave revolts in what would become South Carolina, Indians and Africans rose up against the Spanish. Only a starving one-fourth of the original six hundred settlers made it back to Spain.
In 1540 Hernando de Soto led an expedition across the South that crossed through South Carolina. At a major Indian settlement near present-day Camden, an Indian headwoman welcomed the Europeans as if they were visiting dignitaries. De Soto responded by taking her hostage, together with her female court, when he moved northward into North Carolina.
In 1562 France settled a short-lived colony on Port Royal Sound, a name given by the French leader Jean Ribaut, at the site of what would someday become Parris Island Marine Recruit Depot. After the French colony failed, the Spaniards returned. By 1570 they had established a model Spanish town with more than three hundred people, including women and children. This colony suffered, however, from an absence of effective leadership. When food became scarce, the colony's raids on Indian settlements ultimately led to open warfare. In 1587, after Sir Francis Drake's English explorations along the South Atlantic coasts and his assault on St. Augustine, Spain abandoned its settlements north of Florida.
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Spanish settlement map. In 1577 Spain placed a settlement on Santa Elena Island near Beaufort. This settlement had a baroque church, a fort, and about sixty houses. Ten years later it would be abandoned. The place name survives today as St. Helena Island. History of South Carolina Slide Collection, B-06; image courtesy of the Marine Corps Museum, Parris Island, South Carolina
Although the remaining native population on the South Carolina coast seemed to regain their lands after the first European assault, the Spanish legacy included new diseases, such as typhus fever, that wiped out much of the native population. Native Carolinians had managed, nevertheless, to repel the Europeans seeking land, labor, and mastery. They would not return for almost a century.
The English political philosopher John Locke helped draft the original Fundamental Constitutions for Carolina before the settlement in 1670 that established Charleston. The provision for religious liberty exceeded anything existing in seventeenth-century Europe. Another provision provided specifically for chattel slavery. Although none of the five drafts were ever adopted, many of the basic principles became fully accepted and influenced the earliest development of the colony. Only Roman Catholics were excluded from the free practice of their religion, a reflection of the politics of Restoration England. A provision that settlers believe in God covered Jews as well as Christians. Capitalist-minded Quakers and Huguenots were welcomed in a colony looking for settlers and economic development.
Three black slaves landed with the first fleet of Englishmen, thus introducing into the permanent settlement the issue that would dominate much of the economic, social, and political life of South Carolina's next three hundred years.
South Carolina developed as the only English colony in North America where slavery had been entrenched from the very beginning. Although the earlier colonists of Virginia had first experimented with slavery early in the seventeenth century, it was the hard-and high-living English planters on the Caribbean island of Barbados who perfected the oppressive system of chattel slavery in the 1630s. Their system became the model for the Carolina settlement, and sons of Barbadian planter families—seeking new lands and new staple crops—became a significant part of the original Charles Town settlement.
Locke had written his document of governance for his patron, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who emerged as the leader of the colonization effort as one of eight entrepreneurial English aristocrats. Known as the Lords Proprietors, all had loyally supported Charles II in his days of war and exile. As a reward after the Restoration, Charles gave them a grant of land that would be named “Carolina” after “Carolus,” the Latin version of his name.
These eight noblemen included some of England's most daring men. Many of their names remain familiar today. Present-day South Carolina counties are named for Sir John Colleton, Lord Berkeley, and the Earl of Clarendon. The Berkeley County seat of Monck's Corner apparently was named for General George Monck, Duke of Albemarle. Traditional Charlestonians still say, with mock solemnity, that Charleston is located where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet to form the Atlantic Ocean.
The grant of Carolina included all the land between Virginia and a point in Florida sixty-five miles south of St. Augustine and extending to the Pacific Ocean. Captain William Hilton sailed from Barbados in 1663 to find a location for a settlement by wealthy Barbadians. Although his voyage produced no settlement, publication of his glowing account helped the proprietors in securing settlers. Hilton Head Island, today an upscale subtropical resort and retirement center, was named for him.
Most of the Lords Proprietors already had strong Caribbean connections. Ashley Cooper, in addition to a Caribbean plantation, also held a financial interest in the Royal Africa Company, the major English financial concern involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Moreover some of South Carolina's most prominent families, including the Draytons and the Middletons, can trace their lineage directly to Barbadian settlers. The first Africans in the colony had been slaves in Barbados. Some historians refer to South Carolina as “the colony of a colony” because of the strong Barbadian influence.2 Barbadian architectural influence is also found in Charleston, especially the single houses—a single room wide with their downstairs and upstairs piazzas, or porches, to catch the breezes.
PRESENT-DAY SOUTH CAROLINA roughly resembles an equilateral triangle, with roughly a 200-mile base resting upon the Atlantic Ocean and the apex 236 miles to the northwest on the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. South Carolina acquired most of its mountain strip in 1772 when North Carolina made an equitable settlement of an earlier boundary error to the east that was caused by faulty surveying.
The state that grew from these colonial beginnings divides geologically and geographically into two regions. This division is marked by a fall line, a sandy belt that runs from Augusta northeastward through Columbia to the North Carolina line near Cheraw. In the early days of settlement the fall line marked the point where streams became navigable, and it marked a rough political and cultural boundary between lowcountry and upcountry. In the centuries to come these two sections would vie for control in state politics and, just as frequently, unite against outside threats to a common way of life.
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Charleston Powder Magazine and St. Philip's Protestant Episcopal Church (left). The St. Philip's congregation was the first Anglican congregation in the settlement of South Carolina. The current structure was built in 1838 and has had numerous restorations since, including a 1993-94 renovation. John C. Calhoun is among the South Carolina notables buried in the churchyard. Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, South Carolina, 10-CHAR, 114-1
In granting official toleration to all groups that “solemnly worship God,” Locke's original Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina opened the colony to settlers who practiced a tradition that dissented from the Anglican form of worship. England fought wars with Spain and France, two of the great Catholic powers of Europe, almost once a generation in the early modern period. Englishmen worried throughout the seventeenth century about Romish plots against their liberties at home. After the Restoration most Englishmen equated the practice of Catholicism with political treason. South Carolina would not have an active openly Catholic congregation until after the American Revolution, with the founding of St. Mary of the Annunciation in Charleston in 1789.
Most of the first English settlers in Carolina were members of the Church of England. One of the first churches built in the new colony was St. Philip's, built on the Charleston peninsula in 1680 on the present site of St. Michael's. In 1707 the Anglican Church became the established church in Carolina. Clergy received stipends funded by the colonial government, and church parishes functioned as voting districts. Although the Anglican Church would be disestablished in South Carolina during the American Revolution, its Episcopal form, developed after adoption of the Constitution, would continue to have a profound cultural influence in the South Carolina lowcountry.
Most white settlers unaffiliated with the Church of England adhered to some variant of the Reformed tradition. French Huguenots seeking religious freedom were among the early settlers of the colony. A group of Puritans from Dorchester, Massachusetts, founded a Congregational church in 1696 in today's Dorchester County, leaving behind the county name before moving to Georgia. “The White Meeting House” on today's Meeting Street had been established in 1681 in Charleston as the primary congregation for those of Calvinist and Congregationalist persuasion. Theological disagreements led to splits in this congregation and the founding of First Scots Presbyterian and Charleston's Unitarian congregation, the first of its kind in the American South. The original church is today's Circular Church, a vibrant and politically progressive congregation at the original Meeting Street site in downtown Charleston.
By 1700 Charleston's first Baptists had organized a congregation. Like most English Baptists of the time, this congregation followed closely the teachings of John Calvin on election and predestination. Influenced by American revivalism in the early nineteenth century, the Southern Baptist tradition departed from its Reformation roots. Today the First Baptist Church of Charleston calls itself “the mother church of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
Dissenters who made up the so-called left wing of the Reformation also came to Carolina. Quakers, persecuted throughout much of the British Atlantic world, made Carolina home in the late seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth, a large Quaker community lived in what is today Newberry County, and a small but prominent group settled in Charleston. Most Quakers, largely because of their opposition to slavery, left South Carolina by 1808, but the original members of two prominent South Carolina families, the Ladsons and the Elliotts, were Quaker.
Jews arrived in the colony before 1700. Francis Salvador, a member of the Provincial Congress of South Carolina in 1775, became the first Jew ever to hold public office in the Western Hemisphere. Although the Jewish population in the state remains less than half of 1 percent, Charleston was home to the largest Jewish population of any American city as late as 1820. Participation by Jews in public affairs would continue in the tradition set by Salvador. Columbia, the state capital, elected two Jewish intendants (mayors) before the Civil War.
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Francis Salvador plaque. Francis Salvador, a member of the Provincial Congress of South Carolina in 1775, was the first Jew ever to hold public office in the Western Hemisphere. © Images by Joseph, Charleston, S.C.
ONLY A TINY REMNANT exists of the original Indian settlers. The Catawba, who possess a reservation in York County, have tribal status now recognized by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 2005 the descendants of both the Pee Dee and Waccamaw Indians received official recognition from the state of South Carolina. A small group of Kusso-Natchez (Edisto) remain in Dorchester County, and some Santee descendants lived near the town of Santee.
The names of many original Indian tribes remain preserved in South Carolina. Rivers include the Catawba, Pee Dee, Wando, Congaree, Saluda, Santee, Waccamaw, Combahee, Edisto, Keowee, and the wild Chattooga that links South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. Cherokee County was once part of the lower Cherokee nation. Oconee County is named for a mountain in the Cherokee nation. Kiawah Island near Charleston is named after the tribe whose leader welcomed the first English settlers.
THE FIRST KNOWN RICE grown in South Carolina was on the Charleston peninsula in the 1690s. It was initially an experimental crop grown by a few entrepreneurs, but by the 1720s thousands of West Africans familiar with the crop had been brought to the colony to provide both the skills and hard labor necessary to build dikes and convert tens of thousands of acres of tidal marshes into rice fields. During that time rice replaced the deerskin trade and other early economic experiments as the primary product for export.
Slave labor quickly became the economic engine driving the colony. By 1708 enslaved Africans outnumbered whites. Chattel slavery shaped everything from law to land ownership. The earliest colonial land policy insured both the marginality of the small farmer and the centrality of plantation slavery.
In the first fifty years of colonial existence, the fierce independence of the Barbadian settlers caused the financial hopes of the Lords Proprietors to dim. White settlers, many with an aristocratic temperament linked to a strong entrepreneurial impulse, quickly gained control of the profitable deerskin trade. By 1719 the Lords Proprietors had lost control of the colonial governorship, and a decade later South Carolina became a royal colony, with the king appointing the governor.
Land ownership became more common after King George II authorized colonial governor Robert Johnson in 1730 to grant fifty acres to white men for every dependent man, woman, and child—white or black, slave or free. From 1731 to 1738 more than a million acres were added to the tax books by feverish land speculation, with planters importing 15,600 slaves. Between 1720 and 1740 a total of 40,000 enslaved Africans came into the colony.
Meanwhile the colony had survived such major crises as a war with the Yamassee Indians and a showdown with pirates. The Yamassee War of 1715 had almost wiped out the English settlement. White settlers survived only with the help of their Cherokee allies to the north. Piracy became a serious problem with the end of Queen Anne's War in 1713 and the sudden unemployment of hundred of “sea dogs.” The hanging of forty-nine pirates in Charleston in 1718 is recorded on a stone marker at White Point Gardens near the Battery in Charleston. The marker tells of the hanging of Stede Bonnet—the so-called Gentleman Pirate who had once been a respectable sugar planter in the Caribbean—and his crew.
The refusal of Africans to submit meekly to the slave system had represented the major challenge for the first generations of South Carolina whites. Escape to the frontier or into Spanish-controlled Florida became a common occurrence in the early eighteenth century. Spanish authorities encouraged this practice as a way to strike back at the hated English. In 1733 Governor Antonio de Benavides of Florida declared that slaves who adopted the Catholic faith and worked in St. Augustine for four years would become free. Before 1740 the Spanish had a settlement and a fort north of St. Augustine made up of armed African militia, almost all of them former slaves from South Carolina.
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Slave sale. By the 1730s Africans came into Charleston by the thousands, twenty thousand between 1720 and 1740 alone. Fears of smallpox, as illustrated by this advertisement, led to their quarantine on Sullivan...

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