Building Dutch Suriname in English Carolina: Aristocratic Networks, Native Enslavement, and Plantation Provisioning in the Seventeenth-Century Americas

Nestled along Prioleau Creek near its confluence with the Back River outside Goose Creek sits what is perhaps "the oldest house of record in South Carolina" (Figure 1). Medway plantation was founded in 1687 by Johan van Aerssen, Heer van (Lord of) Wernhout, and his wife, Sabina de Vignon. Both had recently migrated from the Netherlands. The Lords Proprietors of Carolina had granted a twelve-thousand-acre barony to Van Aerssen. Both Johan and Sabina died within a couple of years, and they had no children to whom an inheritance would go. Medway plantation therefore became best known in South Carolina's history as the home and burial place of Sabina de Vignon's second husband, Thomas Smith, governor of Carolina and landgrave, the highest title of nobility granted by the proprietors.¹

Figure 1.

Medway Plantation (south elevation), U.S. Route 52, Pine Grove, Berkeley County, South Carolina. Photo by C. O. Greene, September 1940. Historic American Buildings Survey SC-140, http://www.loc.gov/item/sc0348/. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Most historians make note of these Dutch colonists as a short introduction to Smith, who used Sabina de Vignon's wealth to catapult himself to the highest echelons of Carolina society. Or they assume that Johan van Aerssen, like many migrants who traveled from the Low Countries, was part of a Huguenot diaspora in the era of the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.² This article, in contrast, shows that the Dutch nobleman and his small retinue of Dutch colonists in Carolina were not another example of Protestant refugees finding sanctuary in the New World. Rather, they were masters of the Old World. The Van Aerssen family were diplomats and promoters of a long-standing alliance, in politics and by marriage, between the English House of Stuart and the Dutch House of Orange. In the 1680s both Johan van Aerssen and his second cousin Cornelis van Aerssen, Heer van Sommelsdijk, sought to capitalize on these aristocratic connections, along with the increasingly lucrative slave trade, for the growth of their personal and familial wealth by moving to Carolina and Suriname, respectively.³ Suriname, in the Guiana region along the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America, was a rebounding sugar colony that many hoped would become the next Brazil or Barbados in wealth production. Sommelsdijk became its first governor under the newly chartered Sociëteit van Suriname (Society/Company of Suriname) in 1683, purchasing a third of the company, as did the City of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company (WIC).⁴ Curiously, Johan van Aerssen, instead of following his cousin to Suriname, where his familial connections could assure his status and wealth potential as a sugar planter, accepted the estate in Proprietary English Carolina in 1686. Carolina proprietors and investors intended for the colony, founded in 1670, either to provision other English colonies or to provide cash crops for the metropole. Yet throughout the 1680s the colony's agricultural production and commodity exports remained stagnant. Carolina was little more than a pirates' nest with some animal skins to sell, livestock to export, and trade with Native Americans. The most profitable activity was the capture and exportation of Indigenous peoples for enslavement, mostly to the Caribbean, at precisely the time when Suriname's planters were clamoring for both enslaved laborers and provisions to rebuild after years of warfare.

With scholars such as Peter H. Wood, Alan Gallay, Justin Roberts and Ian Beamish, Edward B. Rugemer, and, most recently, L. H. Roper, we agree that Carolina's foundational period in the late seventeenth century cannot be understood without its Caribbean contexts.⁵ Furthermore, we join Christian J. Koot, April Lee Hatfield, and Wim Klooster in asserting how Anglo-Dutch trade throughout the Atlantic world was foundational to both sets of colonies.⁶ The story of Dutch Suriname's connections to English...