Chapter XV: The Carolina Frontier (2)

The Yamassee country was the last quarter from which the South Carolinians would have expected hostilities to come. But after 1713, in spite of treaty obligations, the St. Augustine government bent all its energies to stirring up all the frontier tribes to a concerted attack upon the English. Bribes in the shape of gaudy coats, steel hatchets, and firearms were distributed among the chiefs; the solemn palavers, the banquets of boiled dog, the exchanges of wampum belts, the puffing of red clay pipes, the beastly orgies of fire-water, may be left to our imagination, for we have no such minute chroniclers here as the Jesuits of Canada. The outcome of it all was a grand conspiracy of Yamassees, Creeks, Catawbas, and Cherokees, with other less important tribes, comprising perhaps 7,000 or 8,000 warriors, against the colony of South Carolina. But, as in all such plans for concerted action among Indians, the concert was very imperfect. Hostilities began in April, 1715, with the massacre of ninety persons at Pocotaligo, and lasted until February, 1716, by which time 400 Christians had lost their lives; while the red men were thoroughly vanquished, and the shattered remnant of the Yamassees sought shelter in Florida.

[Sidenote: Robert Johnson.]

Governor Craven, who had conducted this war with great ability and courage, was a man of high character, and when he returned to England in 1717 his departure was mourned. His successor, Robert Johnson, was son of Sir Nathaniel Johnson, who had formerly been governor. The younger Johnson, an able and popular official, was the last governor of South Carolina under the lords proprietors. His romantic experiences in dealing with pirates will be recounted in my next chapter. The chain of events which brought about a political revolution in 1719 admits of brief description. The Indian war had laden South Carolina with debt, and it was felt that the lords proprietors ought to contribute something toward relieving the distress of a colony which had yielded them a princely income. But the lords proprietors did not take this view of the case. As a means of discharging the public debt, the assembly laid a revenue tariff upon imports, but the lords proprietors vetoed it. The assembly proposed to raise money by selling Yamassee lands to settlers, but the lords proprietors laid claim to the conquered territory for their own use and behoof. Thus the situation was fast becoming unendurable.

[Sidenote: The revolution of 1719 in South Carolina.]

In December, 1718, war broke out again between Spain and England. The Spaniards planned an expedition against Charleston, and Johnson asked the assembly for money. They proposed to raise it by collecting revenue under the tariff act, in disregard of the veto. Nicholas Trott, the chief justice, declared that this would not do; the courts would uphold delinquents who should refuse to pay. The assembly denied the right of the proprietors to veto their acts. The members consulted their constituents and were sustained by them. Finally the assembly resolved itself into a revolutionary convention, deposed the lords proprietors, and offered the governorship to Johnson as royal governor. On his refusal to take part in such proceedings, the convention chose for provisional royal governor Colonel James Moore, the hero of the Tuscarora war. Johnson’s only reliance, in such an emergency, was the militia; but the militia deserted him and went over to the convention, and thus, in December, 1719, the popular revolution was complete. When the news reached London, the course of the assembly was approved by the crown, the proprietary charter was declared to be forfeited, and our old friend Sir Francis Nicholson was sent out to South Carolina as royal governor.

[Sidenote: End of the proprietary government.]

Three years later there was renewal of civil discord in North Carolina, after the death of Governor Eden and the arrival of his successor, George Burrington, a vulgar ruffian who had served a term in prison for an infamous assault upon an old woman. Five years of turmoil, with changes of governors, followed. In 1728 Parliament requested the king to buy Carolina, and appropriated money for the purpose. The proprietors were Henry Somerset, Duke of Beaufort, and his brother, Lord Charles Somerset; Lord Craven; Lord Carteret; John Cotton; the heirs of Sir John Colleton; James and Henry Bertie; Mary Dawson and Elizabeth Moore. Lord Carteret would not sell his share. All the others consented to sell for a modest sum total scarcely amounting to £50,000; and so in 1729 the many-headed palatinate founded by Charles II. came to an end, and in its place were the two royal provinces of North and South Carolina.

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[Sidenote: Contrasts between the two Carolinas.]

The careers of the two southern colonies whose beginnings we have thus sketched were very different, and between their respective social characteristics the contrasts were so great that it is impossible to make general statements applicable alike to the two. In one respect the contrast was different from that which one would observe in comparing Virginia with New England. In New England a marked concentration of social life in towns and villages co-existed with complete democracy, while in Virginia the isolated life upon great plantations was connected with an aristocratic structure of society. But between the two Carolinas the contrast was just the reverse of this. Of all the southern colonies, North Carolina was the one in which society was the most scattered, and town life the least developed, while it was also the one in which the general aspect of society was the least aristocratic. On the other hand, in South Carolina there was a peculiarly strong concentration of social life into a single focus in Charleston; and in connection with this we find a type of society in some respects more essentially aristocratic than in Virginia. We shall find it worth our while to dwell for a moment upon some of the immediate causes of these differences.

[Sidenote: Effects of geographical conditions.]

[Sidenote: Interior of North Carolina contrasted with the coast.]

The history of North America affords an interesting illustration of the way in which the character of a community may be determined for good or ill by geographical circumstances. There have been historians and philosophers unable to see anything except such physical conditions at work in determining the course of human affairs. With such views I have small sympathy,[280] but it would be idle to deny that physical conditions are very important, and the study of them is highly instructive. But for the peculiar physical conformation of its coast, North Carolina, rather than Virginia, would doubtless have been the first American state. It was upon Roanoke Island that the earliest attempts were made, but Ralph Lane in 1585 already came to the conclusion that the Chesapeake region would afford better opportunities. First and foremost, the harbourage was spoiled by the prevalent sand-bars. Then huge pine barrens near the coast hindered the first efforts of the planter, and extensive malarial swamps imperilled his life.[281] The first attempts at cultivation increased the danger, which was of a kind that would yield only to modern methods of drainage. It was only by the coast that the conditions were thus forbidding. No American state has greater natural advantages than North Carolina. For diversity of eligible soils, for salubrity of climate, for variety of flora and fauna, she is unsurpassed; while for beauty and grandeur of scenery she may well claim to be first among the states east of the Rocky Mountains.[282] John Lawson describes North Carolina with enthusiasm as “a delicious country, being placed in that girdle of the world which affords wine, oil, fruit, grain, and silk, with other rich commodities, besides a sweet air, moderate climate, and fertile soil. These are the blessings, under Heaven’s protection, that spin out the thread of life to its utmost extent, and crown our days with the sweets of health and plenty, which, when joined with content, render the possessors the happiest race of men upon earth.”[283] The good Lawson, who was somewhat inclined to see things in rose-colour, praised even the gentleness of the Indians, who (as we have seen) returned the compliment after their manner, by roasting him alive. But, with all this beauty and richness of the interior country, the obstacles presented at the coast turned the first great wave of English colonization into Virginia; and thereafter the settlement of North Carolina was determined largely, and by no means to its advantage, by the social conditions of the older colony.

[Sidenote: Unkempt life.]

In its early days North Carolina was simply a portion of Virginia’s frontier; and to this wild frontier the shiftless people who could not make a place for themselves in Virginia society, including many of the “mean whites,” flocked in large numbers. In their new home they soon acquired the reputation of being very lawless in temper, holding it to be the chief end of man to resist all constituted authority, and above all things to pay no taxes. In some respects, as in the administration of justice, one might have witnessed such scenes as continued for generations to characterize American frontier life. The courts sat oftentimes in taverns, where the tedium of business was relieved by glasses of grog, while the judge’s decisions were not put on record, but were simply shouted by the crier from the inn door or at the nearest market-place. It was not until 1703 that a clergyman was settled in the colony, though there were Quaker meetings before that time. As late as 1729 Colonel Byrd writes of Edenton, the seat of government: “I believe this is the only metropolis in the Christian or Mohammedan world where there is neither church, chapel, mosque, synagogue, or any other place of public worship, of any sect or religion whatsoever.” In this country “they pay no tribute, either to God or to Cæsar.”[284]

[Sidenote: A genre picture by Colonel Byrd.]

According to Colonel Byrd, these people were chargeable with laziness, but more especially the men, who let their wives work for them. The men, he says, “make their wives rise out of their beds early in the morning, at the same time that they lie and snore till the sun has run one third of his course and dispersed all the unwholesome damps. Then, after stretching and yawning for half an hour, they light their pipes, and under the protection of a cloud of smoke venture out into the open air; though, if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return shivering into the chimney corner. When the weather is mild, they stand leaning with both their arms upon the cornfield fence, and gravely consider whether they had best go and take a small heat at the hoe, but generally find reasons to put it off until another time. Thus they loiter away their lives, like Solomon’s sluggard, with their arms across, and at the winding up of the year scarcely have bread to eat.”[285] Every one has met with the type of man here described. In Massachusetts to-day you may find sporadic examples of him in decaying mountain villages, left high and dry by the railroads that follow the winding valleys; or now and then you may find him clustered in some tiny hamlet of crazy shanties nestling in a secluded area of what Mr. Ricardo would have called “the worst land under cultivation,” and bearing some such pithy local name as “Hardscrabble” or “Satan’s Kingdom.” Such men do not make the strength of Massachusetts, or of any commonwealth. They did not make the strength of North Carolina, and it should not be forgotten that Byrd’s testimony is that of an unfriendly or at least a satirical observer. Nevertheless there is strong reason for believing that his portrait is one for which the old Albemarle colony could have furnished many sitters. Such people were sure to be drawn thither by the legislation which made the colony an Alsatia for insolvent debtors.

[Sidenote: Industries.]

The industries of North Carolina in the early times were purely agricultural. There were no manufactures. The simplest and commonest articles of daily use were imported from the northern colonies or from England. Agriculture was conducted more wastefully and with less intelligence than in any of the other colonies. In the northern counties tobacco was almost exclusively cultivated. In the Cape Fear region there were flourishing rice-fields. A great deal of excellent timber was cut; in particular the yellow pine of North Carolina was then, as now, famous for its hardness and durability. Tar and turpentine were also produced in large quantities. All this furnished the basis for a flourishing foreign commerce; but the people did not take kindly to the sea, and the carrying trade was monopolized by New Englanders. The fisheries, which were of considerable value, were altogether neglected. All business or traffic about the coast was carried on under perilous conditions; for pirates were always hovering about, secure in the sympathy of many of the people, like the brigands of southern Italy in recent times.

[Sidenote: Absence of towns.]

In the absence of manufactures, and with commerce so little developed, there was no town life. Byrd describes Edenton as containing forty or fifty houses, small and cheaply built: “a citizen here is counted extravagant if he has ambition enough to aspire to a brick chimney.”[286] As late as 1776 New Berne and Wilmington were villages of five or six hundred inhabitants each. Not only were there no towns, but there were very few large plantations with stately manor houses like those of Virginia. A great part of the country was covered with its primeval forest, in which thousands of hogs, branded with their owners’ marks, wandered and rooted until the time came for hunting them out and slaughtering them. Where rude clearings had been made in the wilderness there were small, ill-kept farms. Nearly all the people were small farmers, whose work was done chiefly by black slaves or by white servants. The treatment of the slaves is said to have been usually mild, as in Virginia. The white servants fared better, and the general state of society was so low that when their time of service was ended they had here a good chance of rising to a position of equality with their masters. The country swarmed with ruffians of all sorts, who fled thither from South Carolina and Virginia; life and property were insecure, and Lynch law was not unfrequently administered. The small planters were apt to be hard drinkers, and among their social amusements were scrimmages, in which noses were sometimes broken and eyes gouged out. There was a great deal of gambling. But, except at elections and other meetings for political purposes, people saw very little of each other. The isolation of homesteads, which prevailed over the South, reached its maximum in North Carolina. It is not strange, then, that the colony was a century old before it could boast of a printing-press, or that there were no schools until shortly before the war for Independence. A mail from Virginia came some eight or ten times in a year, but it only reached a few towns on the coast, and down to the time of the Revolution the interior of the country had no mails at all.

[Sidenote: A frontier democracy.]

[Sidenote: Segregation and dispersal of Virginia’s poor whites.]

[Sidenote: Spotswood’s account of the matter.]

All these consequences clearly followed from the character of the emigration by which North Carolina was first peopled, and that character was determined by its geographical position as a wilderness frontier to such a commonwealth as Virginia. In the character of this emigration we find the reasons for the comparatively democratic state of society. As there were so few large plantations and wealthy planters, while nearly all the white people were small land-owners, and as the highest class was thus so much lower in dignity than the corresponding class in Virginia, it became just so much the easier for the “mean whites” to rise far enough to become a part of it. North Carolina, therefore, was not simply an Alsatia for debtors and criminals, but it afforded a home for the better portion of Virginia’s poor people. We can thus see how there would come about a natural segregation of Virginia’s white freedmen into four classes: 1. The most enterprising and thrifty would succeed in maintaining a respectable existence in Virginia; 2. A much larger class, less thrifty and enterprising, would find it easier to make a place for themselves in the ruder society of North Carolina; 3. A lower stratum would consist of persons without enterprise or thrift who remained in Virginia to recruit the ranks of “white trash;” 4. The lowest stratum would comprise the outlaws who fled into North Carolina to escape the hangman. Of the third class the eighteenth century seems to have witnessed a gradual exodus from Virginia, so that in 1773 it was possible for the traveller, John Ferdinand Smyth, to declare that there were fewer cases of poverty in proportion to the population than anywhere else “in the universe.” The statement of Bishop Meade in 1857, which was quoted in the preceding chapter,[287] shows that the class of “mean whites” had not even then become extinct in Virginia; but it is clear that the slow but steady exodus had been such as greatly to diminish its numbers and its importance as a social feature. Some of these freedmen went northward into Pennsylvania,[288] but most of them sought the western and southern frontiers, and at first the southern frontier was a far more eligible retreat than the western. Of this outward movement of white freedmen the governor of Virginia wrote in 1717: “The Inhabitants of our ffrontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as Servants, and being out of their time, ... settle themselves where Land is to be taken up ... that will produce the necessarys of Life with little Labour. It is pretty well known what Morals such people bring with them hither, which are not like to be much mended by their Scituation, remote from all places of worship; they are so little concerned about Religion, that the Children of many of the Inhabitants of those ffrontier Settlements are 20, and some 30 years of age before they are baptized, and some not at all.... These people, knowing the Indians to be lovers of strong liquors, make no scruple of first making them drunk and then cheating them of their skins; on the other hand, the Indians, being unacquainted with the methods of obtaining reparation by Law, frequently revenged themselves by the murder of the persons who thus treated them, or (according to their notions of Satisfaction) of the next Englishman they could most easily cutt off.”[289] In this description we may recognize some features of frontier life in recent times.

[Sidenote: The German immigration.]

[Sidenote: The Scotch-Irish immigration.]

We have hitherto considered only the earliest period of North Carolina history. From about 1720 marked changes began to be visible. There was such a change in the character of the immigration as by and by to result in more or less displacement of population. Since the barbarous devastation of the Rhenish Palatinate by French troops in 1688-93 there had been much distress among those worthy Germans, and after a while they sought to mend their fortunes by coming to America. This migration continued for many years. Some of these Germans settled in the Mohawk valley, where their mark was placed upon the map in such town names as Minden, Frankfort, and Oppenheim, and where they contributed to our Revolutionary War one of its most picturesque figures in Nicholas Herkimer. A great many came to the Susquehanna valley in what was then the western part of Pennsylvania, where their descendants still speak and write that sweet old-fashioned language which we ought hardly to call Pennsylvania _Dutch_, since it is a dialect of High German besprinkled with English. From Pennsylvania large numbers followed the valleys between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies and made their way as far as South Carolina. We have already noted the arrival of Germans, Swiss, and Huguenots on the North Carolina seaboard early in the century. Later on, in 1745, after the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion, there came to North Carolina a powerful reinforcement of Scotch Highlanders, among them many of the clan Macdonald, including the romantic Flora Macdonald, who had done so much for the young fugitive prince. But more important and far more numerous than all the other elements in the population were the Scotch-Irish from Ulster, who--goaded by unwise and unjust laws--began coming in large numbers about 1719, and have played a much greater and more extensive part in American history than has yet been recognized. There was hardly one of the thirteen colonies upon which these Scotch-Irish did not leave their mark. To the story of their coming I shall revert in my concluding chapter, where it forms the most important part of the story of the westward advance of Virginia. For the present it may suffice to point out that in North Carolina they had come, before the Revolutionary War, to be the strongest element in the population of the colony. Under the influence of these various and excellent streams of immigration, the character of the colony was gradually but effectively altered. Industry and thrift came to prevail in the wilderness, and various earnest Puritanic types of religion flourished side by side on friendly terms.

[Sidenote: Displacement and further dispersal of poor whites.]

As society in North Carolina became more and more orderly and civilized, the old mean white element, or at least the more intractable part of it, was gradually pushed out to the westward. This stream that had started from Old Virginia flowed for a while southwestward into the South Carolina back-country. But the southerly movement was gradually turned more and more to the westward.

[Sidenote: “Crackers,” etc.]

Always clinging to the half-savage frontier, these poor white people made their way from North Carolina westward through Tennessee, and their descendants may still be found here and there in Arkansas, southern Missouri, and what is sometimes known as the Egyptian extremity of Illinois. From the South Carolina back-country, through Georgia, they were scattered here and there among the states on the Gulf of Mexico. Taken at its worst, this type of American citizen is portrayed in Martin Chuzzlewit’s unwelcome visitor, the redoubtable Hannibal Chollop. Specimens of him might have been found among the border ruffians led by the savage Quantrell in 1863 to the cruel massacre at Lawrence, and among the desperadoes whose dark deeds used forty years ago to give such cities as Memphis an unenviable prominence in the pages of the “Police Gazette.” But in the average specimens of the type one would find not criminality of disposition so much as shiftlessness. Of the stunted, gaunt, and cadaverous “sand-hillers” of South Carolina and Georgia, a keen observer says that “they are incapable of applying themselves steadily to any labour, and their habits are very much like those of the old Indians.”[290] The “clay-eaters,” who are said to sustain life on crude whiskey and aluminous earth, are doubtless of similar type, as well as the “conches,” “crackers,” and “corn-crackers” of various Southern states. All these seem to represent a degraded variety or strain of the English race. Concerning the origin of this degraded strain, detailed documentary evidence is not easy to get; but the facts of its distribution furnish data for valid inferences such as the naturalist entertains concerning the origin and migrations of some species of animal or plant.

There is, _first_, the importation of degraded English humanity in large numbers to the two oldest colonies in which there is a demand for wholesale cheap labour; _secondly_, the substitution of black cheap labour for white; _thirdly_, the tendency of the degraded white humanity to seek the frontier, as described by Spotswood, or else to lodge in sequestered nooks outside of the main currents of progress. These data are sufficient in general to explain the origin and distribution of the “crackers,” but a word of qualification is needed. It is not to be supposed that the ancestors of all the persons designated as “crackers” were once white freedmen in Virginia and Maryland; it is more probable that this class furnished a nucleus about which various wrecks of decayed and broken-down humanity from many quarters were gradually gathered. Nor are we bound to suppose that every community of ignorant, semi-civilized white people in the Southern states is descended from those white freedmen. Prolonged isolation from the currents of thought and feeling that sway the great world will account for almost any extent of ignorance and backwardness; and there are few geographical situations east of the Mississippi River more conducive to isolation than the southwestern portion of the great Appalachian highlands. All these circumstances should be borne in mind in dealing with what, from whatever point of view, is one of the interesting problems of American history.

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[Sidenote: Settlers of South Carolina.]

The settlement of South Carolina took place under different circumstances from those of the sister colony, and the resulting state of society was very different. In the earliest days there were many settlers of a rough and turbulent character, which their peculiar dealings with pirates, to be recounted in the following chapter, did not tend to improve. But the Huguenots, in whose veins flowed some of the sturdiest blood of France, soon came in great numbers. From the acquaintanceship of the Berkeleys, the Ashleys, the Hydes, and others, there came a certain number of Cavaliers; but at the end of the seventeenth century the impulse which had carried thousands of Cavaliers to Virginia had quite died out, and on the whole the general complexion of South Carolina, as regarded religion and politics, was strongly Puritan.

[Sidenote: Churchmen and Dissenters.]

[Sidenote: The vestries.]

In one respect there is a resemblance by no means superficial between the settlement of South Carolina and that of Massachusetts. Most of the South Carolina settlers had left their homes in Europe for reasons connected with religion; and emigrants who quit their homes for such reasons are likely to show a higher average of intelligence and energy than the great mass of their fellow-countrymen who stay at home. Calvinism was the prevailing form of theology in South Carolina, though there were some Lutherans, and perhaps one fifth of the people may have belonged to the Church of England, which was established by the proprietary charter, and remained the state church until 1776. We have seen how much disturbance was caused by the attempts of the High Churchmen early in the eighteenth century to enforce conformity on the part of the Dissenters; but such attempts were soon abandoned as hopeless, and a policy of toleration prevailed. Though the Church of England was supported by public taxation, yet the clergymen were not appointed to office, but were elected by their congregations like the Dissenting clergymen. Their education was in general very good, and their character lofty; and in all respects the tone of the church in South Carolina was far higher than in Virginia. At the outbreak of the Revolution the elected Episcopal clergy of South Carolina were generally found on the side of the Whigs; a significant contrast to the appointed Episcopal clergy of Virginia, whose Toryism was carried so far as to ruin the reputation of their church. But the most interesting feature connected with the establishment of the English Church was the introduction of the parish system of local self-government in very much the same form in which it existed in England. The vestries in South Carolina discharged many of the functions which in New England were performed by the town meeting,--the superintendence of the poor, the maintenance of roads, the election of representatives to the Commons House of Assembly, and the assessment of the local taxes.

[Sidenote: The South Carolina parish.]

In one fundamental respect the political constitution of South Carolina was more democratic than that of Virginia. The vestrymen were elected yearly by all the taxpayers of the parish. In this they were analogous to the selectmen of New England. Parish government in Virginia was in the hands of a close vestry; in South Carolina it was administered by an open vestry. Moreover, while in Virginia the unit of representation in the legislature was the county, in South Carolina it was the parish. Now the South Carolina parish was of purely English origin, not of French origin like the parishes of Louisiana. The Louisiana parish is analogous to a county, that of South Carolina was nearly equivalent to a township.[291] Although the colony had such a large proportion of French settlers, and of such marked ability and character, the development of its governmental institutions was as thoroughly English as if no Frenchman had ever set foot upon its soil. The approximation to the New England township is interesting. The freemen of South Carolina, with their open vestry, possessed what the smaller landed proprietors of Virginia in Bacon’s rebellion strove for in vain.

[Sidenote: Free schools.]

In this connection it is worth while to observe that, from the first decade of the eighteenth century, a strong interest in popular education was felt in South Carolina. The same obstacles to schools in the rural districts that we have already observed in Virginia prevented the growth of anything like the public school system of New England. But of private free schools in the colony of South Carolina there were quite a number, and their quality was very good. The first was established in Charleston in 1712, and it not only taught the three Rs, along with bookkeeping, but it had classes in Greek and Latin. Private donations were encouraged by a provision that every giver of £20 “could nominate a scholar to be taught free for five years.” The commissioners of the school also appointed twelve scholars. Free schools were afterward erected by private bequests and subscriptions at Dorchester, Beaufort, Ninety-Six, and in many other places. A noteworthy instance was afforded by St. Thomas parish, where “James Childs bequeathed £600 toward erecting a free school, and the parishioners, by local subscription, increased the amount to £2,800.”[292] In such beginnings there lay the possibilities of a more healthy development than can be secured by the prevalent semi-socialist method of supporting schools by public taxation;[293] but the influences of negro slavery were adverse to any such development.

[Sidenote: Rice and indigo.]

The economic circumstance which chiefly determined the complexion of society in South Carolina was the cultivation of rice and indigo. The value of the former crop was discovered in 1693, when a ship from Madagascar, accidentally stopping at Charleston, had on board a little bag of rice, which was planted with very notable success. Rice was not long in becoming the great staple of the colony. By 1740 it yielded more than £200,000 yearly. Indigo was next in importance. Much corn was raised, and cattle in large numbers were exported to the West Indies. Some attention was paid to silk, flax, and hemp, tobacco, olives, and oranges. Some cotton was raised, but that crop did not attain paramount importance until after the invention of the gin and the development of great factories in England.

Rice and indigo absorbed the principal attention of the colony, as tobacco absorbed the attention of Virginia. Manufactures did not thrive. Every article, great or small, whether a mere luxury or an article of prime necessity, that had to be manufactured, was imported, and paid for with rice or indigo. This created a very prosperous trade in Charleston. The planters did not deal directly with the shipmasters, as in Virginia, but sold their crops to the merchants in Charleston, whence they were shipped, sometimes in British, sometimes in New England vessels, to all parts of the world.

[Sidenote: Some characteristics of South Carolina slavery.]

Now the cultivation of rice and the cultivation of indigo are both very unhealthy occupations. The work in the swamps is deadly to white men. But after 1713 negroes were brought to South Carolina in such great numbers that an athletic man could be had for £40 or less. Every such negro could raise in a single year much more indigo or rice than would repay the cost of his purchase, so that it was actually more profitable to work him to death than to take care of him. Assuming, then, that human nature in South Carolina was neither better nor worse than in other parts of the civilized world, we need not be surprised when told that the relations between master and slave were noticeably different from what they were in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The negroes of the southern colony were reputed to be more brutal and unmanageable than those to the northward, and for this there is a twofold explanation. In the first place, slaves newly brought from Africa, half-savage heathen, were less tractable than African slaves who had lived many years under kindly treatment among white people, and far less tractable than slaves of the next generation born in America. Such newcomers as had been tribal chiefs or elders in their country were noted as especially insolent and insubordinate.[294] In many respects the negro has proved quickly amenable to the softening influences of civilized life, and to the teachings of Christianity, however imperfectly apprehended. In the second place, the type of Virginia slavery was old-fashioned and patriarchal, while South Carolina slavery was of the modern and commercial type. The slaves on a Virginia plantation were like members of a great family, while in a South Carolina rice swamp their position was much more analogous to that of a gang of navvies. This circumstance was closely connected with a peculiarity of South Carolina life, in which it afforded a striking contrast to the slave states north of it. Except in the immediate neighbourhood of Charleston, few if any planters lived on their estates. The reason for this was doubtless the desire to escape the intense heat and unwholesome air of the newly tilled lowlands. The latitude of South Carolina is that of Morocco, and it was natural for settlers coming from the cool or chilly climates of France and England to seek such relief as the breezes of Charleston harbour could afford.[295] As a rule, the planters had houses in Charleston and dwelt there the year round, making occasional visits to their plantations, but leaving them in the meanwhile to be managed by overseers. Thus the slaves, while set to much harder labour than in Virginia, were in the main left subject to the uncurbed tyranny of underlings, which is apt to be a very harsh kind of tyranny. The diminutions in their numbers, whether due to hardship or to whatever cause, were repaired by fresh importations from Africa, so that there was much less improvement in their quality than under the milder patriarchal system. The dog that is used to kicks is prone to snarl and bite, and the slaves of South Carolina were an object of dread to their masters, all the more so because of their overwhelming numbers. Nothing can indicate more forcibly the social difference between the two Carolinas than the different ratios of their black to their white population. About 1760 the inhabitants of North Carolina were reckoned at 200,000, of whom one fourth were slaves; those of South Carolina at 150,000, of whom nearly or quite three fourths were slaves. In the former case the typical picture is that of a few black men raising tobacco and corn on the small plantation where the master lives; in the latter case it is that of an immense gang toiling in a rice swamp under the lash of an overseer. Care should always be taken not to exaggerate such contrasts, but after making all allowances the nature of the difference is here, I think, correctly indicated.

[Sidenote: Negro insurrection of 1740.]

In 1740, while war was going on between Spain and England, there was a brief but startling insurrection of slaves in South Carolina. It was suspected that Spanish emissaries were concerned in it. However that may have been, the occasion of such a war might well seem to the negroes to furnish a good opportunity. Under the lead of a fellow named Cato the insurgents gathered near Stono Inlet and began an indiscriminate massacre of men, women, children. The alarm was quickly given and the affair was soon brought to an end, though not until too many lives had been lost. The news arrived in Wilton while the people were attending church. It was the custom of the planters to carry rifles and pistols, and very little time was lost before Captain Bee led forth a well-equipped body of militia in quest of the rebels. They were overtaken in a large field, all in hilarious disorder, celebrating their bloody achievement with potations of rum; in which plight they were soon dispersed with slaughter, and their ringleaders were summarily hanged.[296]

[Sidenote: Cruelties.]

The habit of carrying fire-arms to church was part of a general system of patrol which grew out of the dread in which the planters lived. The chief business of the patrol was to visit all the plantations within its district at least once a fortnight and search the negro quarters for concealed weapons or stolen goods.[297] The patrolmen also hunted fugitives, and were authorized to flog stray negroes wherever found. The ordinary death penalty for the black man was hanging. Burning at the stake was not unknown, but, as I have already mentioned, there is one instance of such an execution in Massachusetts, and there are several in New York, so that it cannot be cited as illustrating any peculiarity of the South Carolina type of slavery. The most hideous instance of cruelty recorded of South Carolina is that of a slave who for the murder of an overseer was left to starve in a cage suspended to the bough of a tree, where insects swarmed over his naked flesh and birds had picked his eyes out before the mercy of death overtook him.[298] That such atrocities must have been condemned by public opinion is shown by the act of 1740, prescribing a fine of £700 current money for the wilful murder of a slave by his master or any other white man; £350 for killing him in a sudden heat of passion, or by undue correction; and £100 for inflicting mutilation or cruel punishment.[299]

[Sidenote: Life in Charleston.]

[Sidenote: Contrast between the two Carolinas.]

The circumstance that most of the great planters had houses in Charleston went along with the brisk foreign trade to make it a very important town, according to the American standards of those days. In 1776, with its population of 15,000 souls, it ranked as the fifth city of the United States. Charleston had a theatre, while concerts, balls, and dinner parties gave animation to its social life. It was a general custom with the planters to send their children to Europe for an education, and it was said that a knowledge of the world thus acquired gave to society in South Carolina a somewhat less provincial aspect than it wore in other parts of English America.[300] The sharpest contrast, however, was with its next neighbour. As South Carolina may have been in some respects the most cosmopolitan of the colonies south of Pennsylvania, so on the other hand North Carolina was certainly the most sequestered and provincial. As I observed at the beginning of this chapter, for the development of the frontier or backwoods phase of American life two conditions were requisite: first, the struggle with the wilderness; secondly, isolation from European influences. This combination of conditions was not realized in the case of the first settlers of Virginia and Maryland, of the Puritans in New England, or the Dutch in New Netherland, or the Quakers in Pennsylvania. In all these cases there was more or less struggle with the wilderness, but the contact with European influences was never broken. With North Carolina it was different; the direct trade with England was from the outset much less than that of the other colonies. For a time its chief seaport was Norfolk in Virginia; European ideas reached it chiefly through slow overland journeys; and it was practically a part of Virginia’s backwoods. On the other hand, South Carolina, focussing all its activities in the single seaport of Charleston, was eminently accessible to European influences. Its life was not that of a wilderness frontier, like its northern neighbour. But its military position, with reference to the whole Atlantic seaboard, was that of an English march or frontier against the Spaniards in Florida and the West Indies.

The contrast above indicated applies only to lowland South Carolina, the only part with which the earlier decades of the eighteenth century are concerned. At that time the highlands of both Carolinas remained in the possession of the Cherokees, so that they have nothing to do with my comparison. At a later time that whole highland region became a wilderness frontier, the scene of the civilized white man’s backwoods life. All the way, indeed, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, along the Appalachian chain, there was a strong similarity of conditions and of life, in marked contrast with the divergencies along the coast region, in stepping from Pennsylvania into Maryland, thence into Virginia, and so on; but that life along the coast which approached most nearly to the life of the interior wilderness was to be seen about Albemarle and Pamlico sounds.

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[Sidenote: The Spanish frontier.]

The mention of Georgia serves to introduce the statement that, with the growth of civilization on the South Carolina coast, the need for a buffer against the Spaniards began to be more and more strongly felt. We have seen how the vexatious Yamassee war of 1715 was brought on by Spanish intrigues. After the overthrow of the Yamassees the troubles did not entirely cease. For some years the Indians continued to be a source of annoyance, and in their misdeeds the secret hand of Spain was discernible. The multitude of slaves, too, in regions accessible to Spanish influence, greatly increased the danger.

[Sidenote: James Oglethorpe.]

[Sidenote: Beginnings of Georgia.]

In 1732 the state of affairs on the South Carolina frontier attracted the attention of a gallant English soldier whose name deserves a very high place among the heroes of early American history. James Oglethorpe, an officer who in youth had served with distinction under Prince Eugene against the Turks,[301] conceived the plan of freeing the insolvent debtors who crowded English prisons by carrying them over to America and establishing a colony which might serve as a strong military outpost against the Spaniards. The scheme was an opportune one, as the South Sea Bubble and other wild projects had ruined hundreds of English families. The land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers, with the strip starting between their two main sources and running westward to the Pacific Ocean,[302] was made over to a board of trustees, and was named Georgia, in honour of the king, George II. The charter created a kind of proprietary government, but with powers less plenary and extensive than had been granted to the proprietors of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Oglethorpe was appointed governor; German Protestants and Highlanders from Scotland were brought over in large numbers; and a few people from New England joined in the enterprise, and founded the town of Sunbury. All laws were to be made by the trustees, and the settlers were at first to have no representative assembly and no voice in making the government. But this despotic arrangement was merely temporary and provisional; it was intended that after the lapse of one-and-twenty years the colony should be held to have come of age, and should choose its own government. Military drill was to be rigidly enforced. Slave-labour was absolutely prohibited, as was also the sale of intoxicating liquors; so that Maine cannot rightfully claim the doubtful honour of having been the first American commonwealth to try the experiment of a “Maine Law.” Such were the beginnings of Georgia, and in the Spanish war of 1739 it quite justified the foresight of its founder. The valour of the Highlanders and the admirable generalship of Oglethorpe were an efficient bulwark for the older colonies. In 1742 the Spaniards were at last decisively defeated at Frederica, and from that time forth until the Revolution the frontier was more quiet. But proprietary government in Georgia fared no better than in the Carolinas. In 1752, one year before the coming of age, the government by trustees was abandoned. Georgia was made a crown colony, and a representative government was introduced simultaneously with negro slavery and Jamaica rum.

The social condition of colonial Georgia does not present many distinctive or striking features. In 1770 the population numbered about 50,000, of which perhaps one half were slaves. There was no town life. Rice and indigo were the principal crops, and there was a large export of lumber. Near Savannah there were a few extensive plantations, with fine houses, after the Virginia pattern; but most of the estates were small, and their owners poor. The Church of England was supported by the government, but the clergy had little influence. The condition of the slaves differed but slightly, if at all, from their condition in South Carolina. There were a good many “mean whites,” and there was, perhaps, more crime and lawlessness than in the older colonies. The roads were mere Indian trails, and there were neither schools, nor mails, nor any kind of literature. Colonial Georgia, in short, with many of the characteristics of a “wild West,” stood in relation to South Carolina somewhat as North Carolina to Virginia. It was essentially a frontier community, though the activity of Savannah as a seaport somewhat qualified the situation.

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[Sidenote: Cavaliers and Puritans once more.]

A comparative survey of Old Virginia’s neighbours shows how extremely loose and inaccurate is the common habit of alluding to the old Cavalier society of England as if it were characteristic of the southern states in general. Equally loose and ignorant is the habit of alluding to Puritanism as if it were peculiar to New England. In point of fact the Cavalier society was reproduced nowhere save on Chesapeake Bay. On the other hand, the English or Independent phase of Puritanism was by no means confined to the New England colonies. Three fourths of the people of Maryland were Puritans; English Puritanism, with the closely kindred French Calvinism, swayed South Carolina; and in our concluding chapter we shall see how the Scotch or Presbyterian phase of Puritanism extended throughout the whole length of the Appalachian region, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and has exercised in the southwest an influence always great and often predominant. In the South to-day there is much more Puritanism surviving than in New England.

But before we join in the westward progress from tidewater to the peaks of the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky range, we must look back upon the ocean for a moment and see how it came to be infested with buccaneers and pirates, and what effects they wrought upon our coasts.