USA > South Carolina > The history of South Carolina under the proprietary government, 1670-1719, V.1 > Part 27
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The neck of land between Cooper and Ashley rivers, about six miles in length, was well settled. One passed about this time, in riding up the road which Archdale described as so beautiful, the plantations of Mathews. Green, Starkey, Gray, Grimball, Dickeson, and Izard on the Cooper ; and further up those of Sir John Yeamans, Landgrave Bellinger. Colonel Gibbs, Mr. Schenkingh, Colonel Moore, and Colonel Quarry. On the Ashley Land- grave West, Colonel Godfrey, and Dr. Trevillian had planta- tions. Goose Creek was thickly settled. On the western branch of the Cooper River the most noted plantations were "Coming T." the plantation of Captain John Com- ings, the same who had come out with Halsted, and Sir Nathaniel Johnson's " Silk Hope." In Colleton County lived Colonel Paul Grimball, Landgraves Morton. Blake, and Axtell, and Mr. Boone. There were two small towns or hamlets besides Charles Town. - Wiltown or New London on the South Edisto, containing about eighty houses, and Dorchester at the head of the Ashley, con- taining about 350 souls.2
The Governor generally resided in Charles Town and the Assembly sat there, as well as the newly established courts. There also the public offices were kept and the business of the province transacted.
The first fortunes in Carolina were made in the Indian trade, a trade which the Proprietors jealously endeavored
1 Carroi's Coll., vol. II, 97.
2 British Empire in km., vol. 1, 512. 513.
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to appropriate to themselves. Guns, powder and shot, beads, trinkets. bright-colored cloaks, blankets, and rum were exchanged for skins and furs of wild animals and other Indian pelfry. With the exception of rice, the furs and skins obtained from the Indians continued to be the most valuable commodity in the colonial trade as late as 1747.1
Dr. Henry Woodward, it will be remembered, was the first explorer of the province. From his sojourn with the Indians, when left by Sandford in 1666, he became an interpreter of their languages, and as such was employed by the Governor and Council in their communications and treaties with them. In 1671 Sir John Yeamans sent him to Virginia upon an expedition of discovery, upon which occasion, reciting the hazardous and dangerous nature of the adventure he was about to undertake, he executed a will of all his property in Sir John's favor, which will is among the first records of the colony.2 There were many complaints to the Proprietors of this mission, implying that the expedition was for the private advantage of Sir John and himself. Dalton, the Secretary, wrote that it might "be dangerous to follow the fancies of roving heads," and asked that a skilful engineer should be sent.3 Woodward was still employed, however, by the Proprie- tors, and in 1674 was commissioned to treat with the Indians of Edisto for the purchase of that island, and was allowed to have one-fifth of the profits of the Indian trade .* He was evidently not a favorite of Governor West, during whose administration he appears to have
1 Governor Glen's Description of So. Ca., Carroll's Coll., vol. II, 234- 237.
2 Probate office, Charleston, South Carolina, and Secretary of State's office, Columbia. South Carolina.
3 Calendar State Papers, Colonial, 1670-74, 786-746.
4 Ibid., 1287.
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been convicted of some misdemeanor by the Grand Coun- cil and condemned to pay £100; a part of which he paid, and left the province. The Proprietors, however, pardoned him; and again, on the 23d of May, 1682, commissioned him to return to Carolina and make further explorations.1 There is no account of his subsequent career.
In Archdale's time, as we have said, Charles Town traded near 1000 miles into the Continent.2 Among the principal Indian traders were Colonel Bull, Governor Blake, and James Moore.3 James Moore, who first ap- peared as one of the leaders of the people in 1684, was also a great adventurer and Indian trader. He was a member of the Council as deputy of Sir John Colleton, and Secretary of the province. He it was of whom Ran- dolph wrote to the Lords of Trade. in March, 1798-99, that he had heard one of the Council (a great Indian trader who had been 600 miles up in the country west of Charles Town) declare that the only way to discover the Missis- sippi was from the province by land. This he was willing to undertake if his Majesty would pay the charge of the expedition. £400 or £500. He proposed to employ 50 white men and 100 Indians, and had no doubt but that in five or six months after his Majesty's commands he would find its mouth and latitude.+
The real object of this expedition Moore proposed was not, however, the discovery of the Mississippi, but the exploring of gold and silver mines. In 1691 he had made a journey into the Appalachian Mountains, in which jour- ney he had found several pieces of ore which he had sent to England to be assayed, and some of which had been
1 Public Records of So. Ca. (MISS.), vol. I, 159. 2 Carroll's Coll., vol. II. 97. 8 Thud., 108; Coll. Hist. Noe, of So. Ca .. vol. I, 217. Hist. Sketches of So. Ca. (Rivers), Appendix, 445.
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reported to be very valuable, and he now wished to make further exploration at his Majesty's expense. In the meanwhile, one Thomas Cutler had come out with a com- mission from the Lords of Trade to search for mines, but he was wholly inexperienced in the matter, and relied en- tirely upon the stories which two brothers-in-law of his in Carolina, Edward Loughton and David Maybanck, had gathered from the Indians. Moore soon persuaded Cutler that he alone possessed the necessary information and skill to find and develop the mines, and induced him to return to London to represent to the Board of Trade that he. Moore, was a person of known experience, judgment, and great power among the Indians, and had more perfect knowledge of the mines than those they had first relied upon. The Board of Trade, however, very curtly informed Mr. Cutler and his friend, Mr. Smith, who accompanied him, " that their Lordships do not concern themselves nor meddle in what Captain Moore desires of them & what they the said Smith and Cutler think fit to do upon his request." 1 We hear no more of the mines in Carolina.
Both cotton and rice had been exported from Carolina before the end of the seventeenth century. Hewatt and Ramsay credit Landgrave Smith with the introduction of rice culture. The former gives an interesting story of a bag of seed rice, obtained by him from a brigantine from the Island of Madagascar, touching here on the way to Great Britain in 1693, and his distribution of it between Stephen Bull. Joseph Woodward, and some other friends, who agreed to make the experiment, and planted their several parcels in different soils.2 But Rivers very prop- erly declines to adopt this account, and points to an act of
1 Hist. Sketches of So. Ca., Appendix, AT. 459.
" Hewatt's Hist. of No. Ca., vol. 1, 118 ; Ramsay's Hist. of So. Ca., vol. II, 200.
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Assembly in 1691 conferring a reward upon Peter Jacob Guerard, inventor of a "Pendulum engine " for husking rice, which it was said was superior to any machine pre- viously used in the colony.1 Rice was, with indigo, one of the plants to be tried by West on the experimental farm under instructions of July, 1669.
In a bill of lading. 1671, from London, per ship William and Ralph bound for Charles Town, Ashley River, there was, among other articles in the cargo, " a barrel of Rice." Mayor Courtenay, in his address upon the centennial of the incorporation of Charleston. quotes from a curious pamphlet by a gentleman in 1731, long resident in Caro- lina, "Dr. Woodward's" name. mentioned as receiving a parcel of seed rice from " Madagascar." Dr. Woodward appears, however, to have been ignorant for some years how to clean it for use. He quotes also from this pam- phlet that it was likewise "reported that Du Bois, Treas- urer of the East India Company, did send to Charles Town at an early date a small bag of seed rice, some short time after Dr. Woodward's planting of Rice, from whence it is reasonable enough to suppose might come those two sorts called Red Rice -from the redness of the inner husk - and white Rice. though they both clean and become white alike."2 From these accounts it is quite certain that rice was received from Madagascar and experimented upon by Smith. Bull, Woodward, and others, but had been intro- duced and planted before. However introduced, rice soon became the staple commodity of the province, and the advantageous employment of Africans in its cultivation greatly increased the demand for negro slaves. The wet. deep, miry soil of the cypress swamp, in which rice was found to grow so luxuriantly, especially when turned in
1 Hist. Sketches of So. Co. (Rivers), 172; Statutes, vol. II, 63.
2 Year Book City of Charleston (Courtenay ), 1-83, 395.
3
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cultivation, proved to be fatal to the white man, but con- genial to the negro from Africa.
Notwithstanding the failure of the Huguenots to estab- lish the manufacture of silk, the attempt was made by Sir Nathaniel Johnson upon a plantation settled by him in what was afterwards St. Thomas' Parish, called Silk Hope, and in 1699 he was able to present to the Proprietors a sample of silk made by him.1 When Oldmixon wrote (1707). Sir Nathaniel was making from £300 to £400 yearly from silk alone. Others, encouraged by him, also experimented. and some families were then making from £40 to $50 a year without neglecting their other planta- tion work. Little negro children were employed in feed- ing the silkworms. Silk and wool were manufactured into druggets.2 As mulberry trees grow spontaneously in Carolina, and native silkworms producing well-formed cocoons are often found in the woods, it appears that this country was well adapted to the development of the indus- try ; but though again tried by the Swiss near Purysburg in 1731. and again by the French colony at New Bor- deaux, Abbeville, in 1764, its manufacture has never been persevered in, probably, says Dr. Ramsay, because there were easier modes of making money.3
The produce of the Indian trade, rice, and the silk that was made. were sent to England; beef, pork, corn, peas, butter, tallow, hides, tanned leather, hogshead and barrel staves and hoops to the West Indies. Though there were no cattle in the province upon the first coming of the colony, they had increased to such an extent in thirty years that not only did beef and pork constitute two of the principal commodities of export, but wild cattle became
I Coll. Hist. Soc. of So. Co., vol. 1, 149.
2 British Empire in .Im .. vol. 1. 517.
3 Ramsay's Hist. of No. Cu .. vol. II, 220.
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almost as great a nuisance in Carolina as the rabbit in later years in Australia. In 1695, as we have seen, an act had been passed for destroying unmarked cattle in con- sequence of the inability of penning and marking them at that time, by reason of a hurricane which had rendered the woods difficult of travel. Eight years afterwards an- other act upon the subject was deemed necessary. This act, which recited that the great numbers of wild, unmarked, and outlying cattle had drawn the tame cattle from their ranges, and also ate up the winter food, curiously assum- ing that every master or mistress of a plantation owned "such cattle," required every owner of a plantation who would not swear that, to the best of his know- ledge, he did not own 100 head to any one or more of his stock houses or cow pens to send one man for every 100 head to commissioners appointed under the act to hunt for, kill, and take wild and unmarked cattle. The men so sent were to be mounted, and to hunt under the direction of the commissioners. The owners of any marked cattle taken up in this way were allowed to claim and prove their property under provision of the act.1 This prolific produce of cattle in the swamps of the low country was the origin of the stock law of South Carolina which so long impeded the full cultivation of the soil by requir- ing planters to maintain fences to keep out cattle from their plantations and farms, rather than the owners of cattle to provide enclosures for keeping them in ; a policy which existed and extended all over the State for more than two hundred years, being only abandoned in the year 1882.2 Oldmixon states that some persons had 1000 head of black cattle each. For one man to have 200 was very common. Hogs were in great abundance, roving for miles, feeding
1 Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 220.
2 Ibid., vol. XVII, 591.
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on nuts and roots.1 Lawson says that the stocks of cattle were incredible, being from 1000 to 2000 head in one man's possession.2
The black cattle did not, however, have the swamps to themselves : these regions were still alive with beasts of prey, from which the planters suffered much, and so re- wards were offered in 1703 for their destruction; a white man was offered 10%. for every wolf, tiger (panther), or bear killed by himself or his slave and 58. for every wild cat; an Indian was offered 5s. for every wolf or tiger and 2s. 6.7. for every wild cat.3
The first attempt to establish a postoffice in the colony was made in 1698. In an act for raising a public store of powder, provision was made requiring every master of a ship arriving in the province to deliver all the letters in his custody, with an exact list of them, to Mr. Francis Fidling and to no other, and this list Mr. Fidling was required to fix up in some public place in his house, to be viewed by persons who desired to do so. He was to deliver the letters to whom they were addressed and to mark the delivery on the list. He was to receive for each letter or packet one-half royal postage.4 In 1702 another act upon the subject was passed, entitled "An act to erect a General Postoffice "; but it did little more than appoint Mr. Edward Bourne postmaster in place of Mr. Fidling.5
In the same year that a postoffice was established in the
1 British Empire in Am .. vol. I, 520, 521.
2 A New Voyage to Carolina, 4.
3 Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 215.
+ Ibid , 153. section X, of an act entitled "An act for the raising of a public store of Powder for the defence of the province."
5 ILA1. 159. In 1892 a Royal patent was granted to Thomas Neale to establish postoffices in America, which was recognized by an act of Assem- bly in Vughtit. Bruce's Economic Hist. of Va., vol. II, 240. We find no mention of it in Carolina.
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colony, i.e. in 1698,1 a public library was formed by the efforts of the Rev. Thomas Bray, the Bishop of London's commissary in Maryland, with the aid of the Lords Proprietors and contributions of the Carolinians, and was placed under the charge of the minister of the Church of England. This, it is believed, was the first public library in America. In the year 1700 an act was passed " for se- curing the Provincial Library ut Charles Town," by which commissioners and trustees were appointed for its preser- vation.2 On the 16th of January, 1703, Nicholas Trott informs the House of Commons that Dr. Bray had sent sundry books as a further addition to the public library, together with additional books for a layman's library, upon which he was instructed to write to Dr. Bray returning thanks for them.3 In May following the Re- ceiver was instructed to pay Edward Moseley £5 15s. for transcribing the catalogue of the library books.+ In the church acts of 1704 and of 1706 a room was reserved in the rectory of the minister of Charlestown for this library ; 5 and in that of 1712, also reserving the room in the parsonage, other commissioners were named in the place of five who had died, and provision was supplied for supplying vacancies thereafter. The provision of this latter act we shall give more fully hereafter. By the first act all inhabitants, without any exception, were at liberty to borrow any book out of the library, giving a receipt for the
1 Hist. Skitches of So. Ca. (Rivers), 231; MSS. Journals House of Commons, 1098.
2 These commissioners were James Moore (then Governor). Joseph Morton, Nicholas Trott, Ralph Izard, Esq., Captain Job Howes, Captain Thomas Smith, Mr. Robert Stevens, Mr. Joseph Crosskeys, and Mr. Robert Fenwick Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 374.
& MISS. Journals, 1793.
: Ibid.
5 Statutes of So. Ca., vol. II, 287, 286. 2A
*
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same; but. as we shall see, the act of 1712 put it in the power of the librarian to refuse to lend books in certain cases. There were also parochial libraries established by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and after- wards by Sir Francis Nicholson and other charitable persons. These the commissioners were also instructed to examine by the catalogue. The parochial libraries were probably only of religious works; but the public library in Charlestown was a library for laymen as well.1
As before suggested, the Barbadian element in the colony naturally exerted the greatest influence upon the development of its society. The charter required that the laws should be as near as may be to the laws of England; but these were also to be suitable to the novel conditions of the new province. In the other colonies of America society was built up from its very foundations upon the peculiar circumstances of each, Its structure in each instance was entirely new. But many of the earliest settlers of Carolina coming from Barbadoes, where a colonial society was already fully developed, as before ob- served, brought with them customs and precedents upon which that of South Carolina was formed.
In 1674 upon the Island of Barbadoes, which was not much larger than the Isle of Wight, there were 50.000 whites and 80.000 negroes. - 130,000 souls in all. In fifty years. since the foundation of the English colony there, a social order had been established and developed upon the basis of African slavery. As it was this which the Barbadians brought with them to Carolina, some account of its condition at this time will not here be out of place.
Oldmixon tells us that the inhabitants of Barbadoes
1 Statutes of No, I'm, vol. II. 874. The new commissioners under this act were Hon. Charles Braun, Governor Arthur Middleton, Charles Hart, Colonel George Logan, and Colonel Hugh Grange.
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were ranked in three orders: Masters, - who were either English, Scots, or Irish. with some few Dutch, French, and Portuguese Jews, - white servants, and slaves. The white servants were either by covenant or purchase; there were two sorts. - such as sold themselves in England, Scotland. or Ireland for four years or more, and such as were transported by the government of England for capi- tal crimes. The gentlemen of Barbadoes scorned, he says, to employ any of the latter sort until the late sickness - a pestilential distemper in 1692, supposed to have been introduced by soldiers returning from an expedition to the Leeward Islands, which swept away many of the people, including numbers of negroes - had reduced them to great want of hands. Of the other white servants, poor men's children whether driven thither by necessity or discontent. many. behaving themselves honestly and laboriously. had raised themselves, after their servitudes were over, to be masters of plantations.
The masters. merchants. and planters lived like little sovereigns on their plantations : they had their servants of the household and those of the field; their tables were spread every day with variety of nice dishes, and their attendants were more numerous than many of the nobility in England: their equipages were rich : their liveries fine, their coaches and horses the same ; their chairs, chaises. and all the conveniences of their travelling magnificent. The most wealthy of them, besides their land equipages, had their pleasure boats to make the tour of the island in and sloops to convey their goods to and from the Bridge ( Bridge Town).
Their dress and that of their ladies was fashionable and courtly, and having been generally bred in London. their behavior was genteel and polite: in which, says the author, they had the advantage of most of the country
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gentlemen of England, who, living at a distance from London, frequent the world very little, and from convers- ing always with their dogs, horses, and rude peasants acquire an air suitable to their society. The gentlemen of Barbadoes were civil. generous, hospitable, and very sociable.
"In short," says Oldmixon, "the inhabitants of Barba- does live as plentifully and some of them as luxuriously as any in the world. They have everything that is requisite for pomp and luxury ; they are absolute lords of all things -life and limb of their servants excepted - within their own territory, and some of them have no less than 700 or 800 negroes, who are themselves and their posterity their slaves forever." 1
James Anthony Froude, in his work on " The English in the West Indies," gives a similar description of the society of Barbadoes, taken from an account of Père Labat. a French missionary who visited the island about the time of which we write. The contemporaneous descriptions of Labat of Barbadoes and Lawson of Carolina correspond in a remarkable manner. Lawson found no such brilliant ... jewellers and silversmith shops in Charles Town as Labat did in Bridge Town, for Barbadoes was much older and as yet much richer, but the society they describe is the same. The merchants of Carolina, says Lawson. are fair and frank traders. The gentlemen seated in the country are very courteous, live very nobly in their houses, and give very genteel entertainments to all strangers and others that come to visit them. Both seem equally struck with the well-disciplined militia, especially their horse. In Bridge Town a review was held for Labat, in which 500 gentlemen turned out, admirably mounted and armed.
Lawson says that the horsemen in Carolina are mostly 1 British Empire in Am, vol. II, 128.
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gentlemen and well mounted and the best in America. Their officers, both infantry and cavalry, generally appear in scarlet mountings as rich as in most regiments belong- ing to the Crown, which, he observes, shows the richness and grandeur of the colony.1
The Barbadian settlers thus brought with them a colo- nial society already to a considerable degree formed. and with their slaves they brought the slave code as it existed in Barbadoes. Under this code the condition of the black slave was only worse than that of the white servants be- cause their servitude was perpetual. Indeed, the negro slave had the great security that if he died his owner lost his pecuniary value : whereas by the death of a white indented servant the loss was only that of two or three years' wages. The master was accordingly rendered more careful of his slaves than of hired servants.
The Proprietors, as we have seen, had offered induce- ments to those who would bring out white servants, and others had been sent by the government, condemned to servitude as punishment for crimes or political offences. Owing, however, to the large numbers of negro slaves imported into the colony, not many white servants were induced to come of their own accord, and fortunately fewer criminals were sent to South Carolina than to other colonies.
At the time of the settlement of Carolina negro slavery was a recognized institution in all the European colonies ; it was assumed that it would exist also in Carolina. Four of the Proprietors of Carolina. - the Earl of Shaftesbury, Earl Craven, Sir George Carteret, and Sir Peter Col- leton. - Ralph Marshall and John Portman, who came out with Sayle, were members of the Royal African Company
1 The English in the West Indies (Froude), 27; A New Voyage to Carolina ( Lawson), 3.
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with James, then Duke of York, which was chartered and given the sole trade in slaves on the African coast.1 We find it provided by the philosopher Locke in his Constitu- tions that " every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves of what opinion or religion soever." The significance of this provision was not in recognition of slavery as an institution of the province - that was assumed; nor yet in the absolute power it proposed to give to the freeman over his slave, great as that was, but in the last words, wherein it was in- tended to provide against the effect of the possible conver- sion and baptism of the negroes. A doubt had arisen and prevailed extensively upon this point. The idea was that as the enslavement of negroes was chiefly justified on the ground that they were heathen, upon their becoming Christians they would be released from bondage. It is curious to observe the effect of this scruple, which appears to have been honestly entertained. Some Christian mas- ters, rather than offend their consciences by holding fellow- Christians in slavery, withheld the Gospel from these people lest they might hear and believe and be converted, and become as one of themselves. We shall see hereafter how Church and State agreed in dispelling this idea.2
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