The tropical origins of South Carolina

By the league of the South

In recent months we have studied rather extensively the Caribbean roots of the Lower South and the plantation system which came to have such a cultural and economic impact on the Southern people. As informative as the facts are, it is nice to hear a story told particularly well. Southern professor and writer Ulrich Bonnell Phillips does just that in his 1929 book Life and Labor in the Old South. His summary on pages 47-48 of the Caribbean origins of the culture which spread out from Charleston, South Carolina is excerpted below. It is hoped that readers will enjoy his older prose:

The tale of South Carolina is in remarkable contrast to that of her northward sister, partly because the main impulse for her settlement came from a tropical source. An extraordinary congestion in Barbados, the most easterly of the West Indies, had made that little island a potential mother of new colonies. To it had gone thousands of English during the Cromwellian disturbances who had instituted a simple farming regime. But a recourse to sugar production had shortly brought a swarm of slaves and an engrossment of land into plantation units, which pinched out many small proprietors and impelled some larger ones to look abroad for greater spaces. Thus it came about that Sir John Colleton, returning to England from residence in Barbados, enlisted six powerful courtiers to join him and Sir William Berkeley in a Carolina proprietary venture.

…The nucleus of South Carolina was duly planted in 1670 on Charleston Harbor, though the first site of “Charles Town” soon gave place to the sandy neck across Ashley River where the city now stands. The settlement gained permanence and expansion through solid immigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, New England and New York, Germany and Switzerland, and notably from France and the West Indies. Some of these elements, particularly the thrifty Huguenots on Cooper and Santee rivers, maintained cultural distinctions for a time in separate clusters, but a gradual blending despite much dissension brought all the white people eventually into a single integrated community, with the West Indian elements contributing perhaps the major features in law and custom.

Also see: The Barbadian influence on Carolina, Caribbean origins of Southern plantation system, Barbados transformed by plantation system and The French in colonial Carolina