USA > South Carolina > The history of South Carolina under the proprietary government, 1670-1719, V.1 > Part 1
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REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02294 3549
THE HISTORY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
UNDER THE PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT 1670-1719
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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016
https://archive.org/details/historyofsouthca01mccr 0
THE HISTORY
OF
SOUTH CAROLINA
UNDER THE
PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT
1670-1719
٧٠١ BY
EDWARD MUCRADY
A MEMBER OF THE BAR OF CHARLESTON, SC .. AND VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Lin. 1807
Il rights reserved.
866.53
1707505
COPYRIGHT, 1597. BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
J S Cuplony : Co. - Berwies & Sunth Forwoco Vars U.S.A.
-----
THE following study of the history of South Carolina has been made amidst the engagements of a busy profes- sional life, in hours snatched from that jealous mistress - the law. It has been a labor of love. and has been under- taken and carried on with the single purpose of learning and telling the story of the State of which the author is proud to be a son and a citizen. In the course of his study. he has found, as he conceives, occasional errors in the works of those who have preceded him ; and these he has pointed out. He cannot hope himself to have escaped like mistakes - though he has striven to do so. It will be the duty of those who come after to correct where he has gone astray. He only asks that this shall be done in the spirit of fairness he has endeavored to observe. To his readers in general he would recall the lines of the poet : -
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. In ev'ry work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend ; And if the means be just, the conduct true, Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due.
POPE's Essay on Criticism, 250-260,
AUTHORITIES CONSULTED AND QUOTED
American Commonwealth Series. Horace E. Scudder.
Connecticut : A Study of a Commonwealth Democracy. By Pro- fessor Alexander Johnson.
Maryland : The History of a Palatinate. By William Hand Browne. Virginia : A History of the People. By John Esten Cooke.
Anderson's History of the Colonial Church. London 1856.
A New Voyage to Carolina. John Lawson, 1709.
Bancroft's History of the United States (Edition 1882).
Baptist Church, Charleston, History of.
Barbadoes, Poyer's History of.
Barbadoes, Ligon's History of.
Bingham's Antiquities.
Bohun, Edmund, Memoir and Autobiography of.
British Empire in America. Oldmixon. 2 ed. MDCCXLI.
Bruce's Economic History of Virginia. 1896.
Burke's Peerage.
Burnet's History of His Own Times. London 1724.
Burn's Ecclesiastical Law.
Calendar State Papers, Colonial (Sainsbury, London, 1889). Calhoun's Works.
Carroll, B. R. Historical Collections. 2 volumes.
A Brief Description of the Province of Carolina, etc., 1664.
An Account of the Province of Carolina, etc. Samuel Wilson, 1682. Carolina ; or, A Description of the Present State of that Country. By T- A -- (Thomas Ash), 1682.
A New Description of that Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina, etc. John Archdale, 1707.
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the People of South Carolina in the year 1719. (1726.)
A Description of South Carolina, etc. Governor Glen.
Political Annals of the Province of Carolina. etc. George Chalmers. Statements made in the introduction to the Report of General Ogle- thorpe's Expedition to St. Augustine. 1741.
An Account of the Missionaries sent to South Carolina.
An Account of the Breaking-out of the Yamassee War. Extracted from the Boston News of the 13th of June, 1715.
An Account of What the Army did under the Command of Colonel Moore, etc. Boston News, May 1, 1704
vii
viii
AUTHORITIES CONSULTED AND QUOTED
Charlemagne Tower, Collection of Colonial Laws, privately printed for The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1890.
Charters and Constitutions. The United States. Poore, 1878. Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. 2 volumes. Oxford. MDCCXL. Collections of the Historical Society of South Carolina. Volumes I, II,
III. IV.
Collins's Peerage.
Colonial Records of North Carolina. Volumes I and II.
Commons Journals MS., Columbia, S. C.
Coxe's Description of the English Province of Carolana.
Cyclopedia, Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas. Brandt & Fuller, Chicago. Preface to, by Edward McCrady.
Dalcho's Church History, 1820.
De Bow's Review.
Doyle's English Colonies in America.
Drayton. John. A View of South Carolina. 1802.
Drayton, John, Memoirs. 2 volumes.
Emigrants to America, 1600-1700 (Hottin).
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Fraser, Charles, Reminiscences of Charleston. 1854. Gazette, The South Carolina.
Gazette. The Roval Charlestown, South Carolina, 1780-82.
Genesis of the United States, Alexander Brown. 1801.
Gentleman's Magazine. Vol. X. MDCCXL.
George II, Memoirs of. Walpole.
Golden Islands, An Account of. By John Barnwell, London, 1720.
Green's History of the English People.
Greg, Percy, History of the United States.
Hakluyt's Voyages.
Hawks, Francis L., D.D., History of North Carolina. 2 volumes.
Hewatt, Rev. Alexander, D.D., An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, 1779.
Howe, Rev. George, D.D., History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina.
Huguenots, The. Samuel Smiles.
Johns Hopkins University Studies.
The Carolina Pirates and Colonial Commerce. S. C. Hughson. 12 series, V. VI, VII. Goverment of the Colony of South Carolina. Edson L. Whitney, Ph. D., LI .. B. 13 series, I, IL.
Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century. Lecky's Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland.
1X
AUTHORITIES CONSULTED AND QUOTED
Legal Works and Reports. Blackstone's Commentaries. Kent's Commentaries. Jacob's Law Dictionary. Phillimore on International Law. Brown's Parliamentary Cases.
English Common Law Reports. Dwyer, Salkeld.
English Equity Reports. Perre Williams.
South Carolina Law and Equity Reports. State Trials. Volume VI-XV. Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet. Pamphlet, 1719. Statutes of the Realin. English. Statutes of South Carolina.
Liste des Français et Suisse. Edited by Theodore Gaillard Thomas, M.D., New York, 1888.
Locke's Works. 2 ed. London MDCCXCIV.
Macaulay's History of England.
Marion. James's Life of. 1821.
Morton, Memoranda relating to the Family of. 1804.
old Churches. Ministers, and Families in Virginia. Bishop Meade.
Parliamentary History. Volume XVI.
Public Records MIS., Columbia, S. C.
Puritan. The, in England and America. Douglass Campbell, A. M., LL. B., New York, 1802.
Ramsay, Dr. David. History of South Carolina. 2 volumes.
Rivers, Professor William J., Historical Sketch of South Carolina.
Rivers. Professor William J .. Chapter Colonial History .
Shecut's Medical and Philosophical Essays. 1819.
Slavery in the Province of South Carolina, 1670-1770. Edward McCrady. Annual Reports Am. Hist. So., 1896.
Smollett's History of England.
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Historical account of. Hum- phreys. 1729.
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Digest Records of. 1701-1892. West Indies. Bryan Edwards's History of. 2 ed. MDCCXCIV.
West Indies. Froude's English in the.
Wheeler'. Reminiscences of North Carolina.
Year Books, City of Charleston, during the administrations of the Hon. William A. Courtenay, the Hon. John F. Ficken and the Hon. I. Adger Smyth.
HISTORY OF SOUTH CAROLINA UNDER THE PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
Tur domain of the United States of America was det settled by the English under Royal grants, from daher principal points, nearly equidistant from each other: thetown in Virginia. in 1607, Plymouth in Massachu- wit .. 1620. and Charles Town in Carolina, in 1670. From theat points have emanated the differing political thoughts of the country, which have, in the main in parallel lines, exemptnied the tide of emigration westward. 1
Physical causes marked great differences in the devel- opment of these settlements, and especially in that of Carolina from the other two. To these physical causes 1 The extent of emigration from South Carolina is not generally realized. 1: is not generally known that she was one of the great emigrant States. * Y'ot from 1820 to 1860," says General Francis A. Walker, in his Intro- 4hedon to the United States census of 1880, " South Carolina was a bee- tive from which swarms were continually going forth to populate the Leser cotton-growing states of the Southwest." The whole population " to State in 1900 amounted to 470.257. There were then living in ·'ier State- 193,859 white persons born in South Carolina. That is, two- 1. Ths of the whole native-born population had emigrated and were then ng in other states, and these almost entirely in Georgia. Alabama, H: Ippi. Luisiana, Florida, and Texas. In 1-70 out of 678, 706 molen south Carolinans more than one-third, about 216,000, were Wang in other States.
2
1
=
2
HISTORY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
others were added which tended to form the society of Carolina upon a basis differing from that of the other colonies; and to produce a people to a considerable degree peculiar in their characteristics.
The colony of Virginia was little further from that of Massachusetts than from that of Carolina; but the terri- tory between Virginia and Massachusetts, already to some extent peopled by the Dutch, was soon filled up by the settlements of the provinces of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, forming a chain of colonies linked together by neighboring influences and conveniences, and thus beget- ting something of a common American colonial sentiment. There was nothing in the situation of the colony of Caro- lina to produce a similar effect. The colonists at Charles Town, more than three hundred miles south of the James River, were practically much further than that distance from Virginia, the nearest established colony. Hatteras projecting into the ocean rendered communication between the first settlers in Carolina and the other colonies, in their small vessels, more dangerous almost than that with England. The only travel by land between Carolina and Virginia was by Indian trail. There were no roads nor means of transportation. Lederer, the learned German explorer, whom Governor Berkeley sent out from Virginia in 1669 to explore the country, after travelling for months with Indian guides certainly did not reach beyond the Santee-if, indeed, he entered at all the territory of the present State of South Carolina. A postoffice was established in Charles Town as early as 1698, but this was for European and West Indian cor- respondence. Peter Timothy, postmaster, gives notice in the Gazette, August 19, 1756, nearly sixty years after.
1 History of No. Cu. (Hawks), 52.
3
UNDER THE PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT
that the first mail from Wilmington (North Carolina) is hourly expected to arrive here, and will set out on his return two days after his arrival. This was to be con- tinued every fortnight, and those who wished to have their letters forwarded by this conveyance were requested to send them in time. The letter of intelligence of the battle of Lexington, which was transmitted from com- mittee to committee, dated 24th of April, 1775, and starting from Wallingsford, Connecticut, one hundred miles from New York, reached Charleston in seventeen days. It was sixteen coming from New York. fifteen from Princeton, ten from Fredericksburg. Virginia, and three days from Wilmington, North Carolina.1 This was by express, and was considered remarkable for its dis- patch; and so it was. for the express which brought the news of the Declaration of Independence from Philadel- phia did not reach Charleston until the 2d of August. twenty-nine days after it had been adopted in Congress. It reached Paris but a few days later than it reached Charleston. ¿ e. some time in the first half of the month of August. The South Carolina and American General Gazette, of the 11th of September, 1776, complains that though not long since an express had come in sixteen days from Philadelphia, the Northern Post generally took abont double that time. Ships frequently arrived from England. bringing European news within the month. Thus separated from the other colonies by distance, and still more so by the character of the intervening country, South Carolina was left to struggle by herself for existence.
The colony was for a long time, indeed until 1733, the distant outpost between the other English colonies and the Spaniards at St. Augustine, and the French on the Mis-
1 Drayton's Memoirs, vol. I, 248.
4
HISTORY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
sissippi. It was planted to assert the dominion of Great Britain against that of Spain in disputed territory. At each end of the long attennated line of the British settle- ments on the American coast there was a hostile post. At the North the French in Canada were jealously watching the growth of the English colonial system, while at the South the Spaniards in Florida, regarding the planting of the colony in Carolina as an invasion of their own territory, were on the alert to attack it upon every favorable opportunity, regardless whether peace or war formally subsisted at the time between Spain and England. The French were a menace to New England, but the colonists there could be reached only by an over- land invasion, which, by the climate, was practically restricted to one season of the year, and which, from the difficulty of transportation, was much less serious. The Spaniards at St. Augustine, on the other hand, were the constant active and malignant enemies of the Carolinians. who were at such a distance from the other British colonies as to be beyond the reach of their support. Then, too, Charles Town was a little further from St. Augustine than a third of the distance from JJamestown, in Virginia, the nearest settlement, with the exception of the feeble colony at Albemarle, from which no support could be extended. The Carolinians were open to attack by sea, and to this danger they were open at all seasons of the year.
This separation of South Carolina from the other colo- nies on the Continent was recognized and acted upon in the treatment of the colony by the Government in Eng- land. It was regarded as more nearly allied to the island colonies chan to those on the main. Thus when Edward Randolph, the collector of the King's customs. proposed in 1604 a rearrangement and consolidation of the Colonial
5
UNDER THE PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT
Governments for the better control and collection of the King's revenue, he recommended that the Proprietary Governments should be set aside, and that South Carolina and all the Bahama Islands should be put under one government. under her Majesty's immediate authority; that North Carolina should be annexed to Virginia. Delaware to Maryland, West Jersey to Pennsylvania, East Jersey and Connecticut to New York, and Rhode Island to Massachusetts, thus reducing the number of the colonies to but six.1
This treatment at home, and constant exposure to attack from St. Augustine by sea and from Indians on land, instigated alike by the Spaniards in Florida and the French from Mobile, had great influence upon the devel- opment of the Carolina colony, alike upon the organiza- tion of its government and its social structure.
In the first place it forced the Carolinians to depend upon themselves for their defence, and to that extent produced a sentiment of independence in regard to the other colonies.
In the next it began the centripetal character of the development of the colony, which as a province and State South Carolina so long retained, and which indeed she has not even vet entirely lost. The colonial development of Virginia was by rural communities. There was no city or town life. "The only place in Virginia previous to 1700 to which the name of a town could with any degree of appropriateness be applied was Jamestown, and even this settlement never rose to a dignity superior to that of a village. "2 Williamsburg was never more than a college town and seat of government. In New Eng- land the colonists separated very early into different com-
1 Colonial Records of No. Co. vol. 1. 441, 412.
2 Bruce's Economic History of Virginia, vol. II, 325.
6
HISTORY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
munities. In Connecticut, says Professor Johnston, town and church were but two sides of the same thing, and as there would be differences of opinion in church as well as in town matters, every religious dispute gave rise to a new town until the faintest lines of theological divergence were satisfied.1 Each of these new towns with its own peculiar schism became a new centre, from and around which population spread. But in South Carolina the constant and immediate danger of invasion by Spaniards and Indians, as exemplified in the utter destruction of the attempted settlement by Lord Cardross at Port Royal in 1686, restricted the colonists for many years to distances within reach of the fortifications of Charles Town, and formed within and around it a compact body of society. with outlying plantations, from which in case of alarm the colonists withdrew to the town, as in case of the rising of the Yamassees in 1715. When this danger was overcome by the increase of population, and the founding and building up of the colony of Georgia, the unhealth- fulness of the country along the rivers, increased, if not caused, by the disturbance of the soil and the stag- nant water of rice planting in the inland swamps, com- pelled the planters to reside in the summer in the town or in some high resinous pine-land settlement away from malaria.2 Thus, until the immigration of the Scotch- Irish and Virginians into the upper country by the way of the mountains, from 1750 to 1760, the development of
1 Connecticut, Am. Com., Series 6.
" A recent writer, of whom we shall have occasion presently to speak. has fallen into the curious error of stating that it was the winter months during which the wealthy planters, owing to the unhealthfulness of the surrounding country, were in the habit of resorting to Charlestown, missing at wret the fact and the cause. Government of the Colony of South Carolina (Whitney). Johns Hopkins University Studies, 18 series, 1-11.
7
UNDER THE PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT
the colony was not, as in New England, from many and distinct settlements or towns, but from one point, the circle enlarging as the population increased, but always with reference to the one central point, -- the town, - Charles Town.
The development of Carolina thus presented the anom- aly that, though it was a planters' colony, it was devel- oped by way of city or town life. Boston was the largest town in Massachusetts, but there was organization and administration outside of it. For many years Charles Town practically embodied all of Carolina. Beaufort. the next town to be settled, was not attempted for more than forty years after the planting of the colony, and Georgetown not until some years later. Until 1716 elec- tions were generally held in the town for all the province, and representation outside of it - that by parishes- was not practically established until the overthrow of the Pro- prietary Government in 1719. No court of general juris- diction was held outside of it until 1773, over a hundred years after the establishment of the colony. There was only one government for the province, the town, and the church. The same General Assembly passed laws for the province, laid out streets. regulated the police for the town, and governed the church. Even after the colony had grown. and the upper country had been peopled from another source, every magistrate in the province was ap- pointed in Charles Town until the Revolution of 1776. and after that, upon the adoption of the Constitution of 1790 and the change of the seat of government to Colum- bia. at that place. There was thus from the inception of the colony in 1665 to the overthrow of the State in 1865. for two hundred years, only one government in South Carolina. There was no such thing as a county or town- ship government of any kind.
8
HISTORY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
From the isolation of the colony during the period of its formation. and for long after, it remained a dependency of England, as well in interest as in fact, rather than de- pendent upon the support and sympathy of its distant sister colonies ; and with the love of the old country, with which communication was constant and close, everything tended to limit whatever patriotism there might be to the gradually extending area of the province, while the con- stant recurrence in thought and act to the central point. the town, developed and intensified the Carolina conception of the entity of the State and of its absolute sovereignty.
There were other potent causes tending to differentiate the colonists of Carolina from those of the other provinces. All the other colonies, except New York, were peopled by emigrants in the main directly from the British Isl- ands : but beside the large Huguenot element in ber popu- lation, Carolina was settled in a great measure from Barbadoes and the other British West Indies. Naviga- tion to the southern parts of America was at first en- tirely by the way of the West Indies, and though Ribault in 1562 had ventured directly across the Atlantic, the course of communication between Carolina and England continued for many years to be principally by way of Barbadoes. The first colony sent by the Proprietors sailed for Barbadoes, consigned to agents there, from which it was dispatched to Carolina by way of Bermuda. While in the formation of the other colonies the whole structure of society was of necessity built up from the very founda- tion in accordance with the peculiar environment of each, the social and political system of Carolina was to a con- siderable extent transferred from that island in a state of advanced development. The settlers from Barbadoes under Yeamans brought with them a colonial system which, though comparatively new and not fully developed.
9
UNDER THE PROPRIETARY GOVERNMENT
was little later than that of Virginia and nearly contem- poraneous with that of Massachusetts; and the basis of this social system was the institution of African slavery. The attempt to engraft upon this social order a legally recognized aristocracy of Landgraves and Caciques. pro- posed by Locke and adopted by the Proprietors under the influence of Shaftesbury, and the struggle caused by its attempted enforcement, helped much in the formation of the peculiar characteristics which were to mark the politi- cal and social organization of South Carolina, giving to it on the one hand a strongly aristocratic tone with a party for sustaining prerogative. while on the other it developed in the very outset a party of the people who based their rights upon the dogma of a strict construction of chartered or constitutional provisions.
Then again. the establishment of the colony in prox- imity to the Spaniards, and the hostility of the Indians under French and Spanish influence. necessitated from the very beginning a military organization of the people ; and this was also rendered the more necessary by the increasing number of negro slaves, - savages. - which became a source of weakness in times of danger, and. until the institution in the course of years became thoroughly settled, a constant source of care and anxiety. The colonists. as we shall see, were desirous of checking the importation of negroes, not from any moral objections to slave holding, but from their apprehension of the danger of being outnumbered by the negroes. and of their rising in case the whites should be assailed by the Indians. or through the instigation of the Spaniards or French, as did happen in 1740. This danger gave rise to a military police organization of the whole people, which continued from 1704 until the emancipation of the negroes as the result of the war of secession.
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