Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

Chapter 1: “To Plant in Towns”: Charles Towne at the Founding of Carolina

17  n “To plant in towns” Charles Towne at the Founding of Carolina T he narrative of Carolina’s early colonization is a familiar one in the context of England’s New World settlements. Although the colony took an unusually long time to achieve stability, the events, people, and processes behind its founding followed the usual trajectory of the Old World’s move westward to the “empty” lands of America. Profit slowly triumphed over principle, and whites gradually accumulated control over blacks and Native Americans. Two groups of white adventurers were chiefly responsible for initiating the occupation of Carolina. The first group, an assemblage of eight Lords Proprietors who had been granted land by Charles II, was behind the logistics of settlement and the drawing up of the territory’s template for government, the Fundamental Constitutions. With most of these Proprietors never visiting Carolina, however, it was up to a second collective of Europeans—mostly consisting of Englishmen with Barbadian connections, and a party of French Huguenots—to people the new colony. These early white claimants to the territory of Carolina shared the initial motivations of others who led Europe’s settlement of North America. Like their compatriots, they embarked on their New World project to implement beliefs and principles that they had been unable to realize in their Old World. For Carolina’s eight Proprietors, such principles, embodied by the Fundamen- 18 building charleston tal Constitutions, centered on emerging ideas of governance too radical to implement in England. For the colony’s Huguenot settlers, arriving in waves toward the end of the seventeenth century, it was the religious toleration endorsed by the Constitutions that drew them from an intolerant Catholic France to a colony in which they could freely establish their own churches. However, those settlers with ties to the British Caribbean island of Barbados —settlers often known collectively as the Goose Creek men—were less devoted to the political or religious principles of their co-colonists. Leaving the Caribbean from a lack of economic opportunity, the Barbadians arrived in the Carolina Low Country intending to re-create the lucrative commercial society familiar to them in the empire’s southernmost reaches, and also characteristic of the nearby colony of Virginia. The exclusive commitment of these men to profit clashed with the more ideological stance of the Lords Proprietors , and it was this long-running conflict that lay behind Carolina’s troubled early history. Contravening the system of land distribution so that they might grab the best territories, the Goose Creek men relentlessly pursued their own agenda of settlement. Also ignoring the Proprietor’s policies and regulations concerning the Indian trade, the Barbadians chased profits through such commerce to the degree that armed conflict broke out between the two parties, reaching its zenith during the 1715 Yamassee War. Finally, the Goose Creek faction objected to the dissenting principles embodied by the Constitutions, instead seeking the primacy of their religious institutions. Receiving little support from metropolitan authorities, who were of course supportive of the Church of England, the embattled Proprietary government gradually lost ground to its opponents. With most of the original Proprietors either dead or disengaged from their colonizing project, Carolina eventually became a royal colony in 1729, with a standard system of British colonial rule through governor, royal council, and a Commons House of Assembly. Over the first half century of Carolina’s settlement, principles of political experimentation and religious freedom had largely lost out to the profit motive and the might of England’s official church. The quest for riches also triumphed when colonists confronted the need for labor on their extensive new plantations. With the experience of previous English settlers in New England, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake at hand, Carolina’s Proprietors had planned for a colony built on long-term settle- Charles Towne at the Founding of Carolina 19 ment and cultivation of the land rather than on the easy extraction of mineral wealth. Thus, on arrival, the majority of the colonists got down to the business of commercial agriculture. In this task, the Barbadian settlers found particular success, not only because they brought with them knowledge about cultivating crops in a hot climate, but also because they imported the enslaved Africans necessary to undertake the hard project of improving the “wilderness .” Quite unusual in the British American context, Carolina was a colony based on...