Carolina was a colony for a new era. The Jacobean settlements of Virginia, Bermuda and Plymouth had been tiny, struggling outposts in a very New World. The colonies formed under Charles I (the rest of New England, Barbados, Maryland and others) had been defined by the political and religious turbulence of his reign. Now, a revolution had come and gone, an empire had been born, and it was time for the next era of English colonial expansion. Because of all of this, settling Carolina would look dramatically different than colonial history that had come before. As we start discussing Carolina, we take a quick look at what some of those differences were.
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Transcript
Carolina 1: Cape Fear
England’s first wave of colonization was divided from its second by a political, religious and social revolution. This resulted in colonies whose intellectual foundations are significantly more familiar to us than the ones we’ve been talking about. The first colony of this second wave was Carolina.
Introduction
Virginia and its smaller offshoot of Bermuda had struggled, alone in the New World, for over a decade before they were joined by the also-struggling Plymouth Colony. These were tiny dots on the map, separated from each other by hundreds of miles, and populated by only a handful of people each. It was only after yet-another decade that the first mass migration to the New World took place. These people were fueled by political and religious idealism in years so tense they would soon lead to civil war. Most were Puritans, though Maryland was led by Catholics. Labor from England was cheap and easy to get thanks to overpopulation and widespread poverty there, along with seemingly endless land in America to incentivize migration.
America’s non-puritan population grew during the Civil Wars, when thousands of members of the losing side restarted their lives in colonies like Virginia and Barbados. And still its laboring population grew as POWs and political malcontents were transported there. The number of English colonies didn’t increase beyond the Bahamas and Jamaica, though, and neither of those places was exactly flourishing when the Restoration started. An unstable England left the colonists to fend for themselves, and they grew to really, really like the autonomy.
The years of Puritan rule had brought the first English Imperial policy, most notably with the Navigation Acts, as well as official government support for slavery and the slave trade and English government bodies whose job was to oversee and direct colonial expansion. But this was wildly unpopular in a colonial world that was now used to doing whatever it wanted, and to add to the stress, as England’s population dwindled, and its most ideological citizens had already found refuge in America, the influx of people from the mother country slowed to a halt.
The Restoration brought a mental shift in England from Early Modern to Enlightenment, and from ideological polarization to pragmatic moderation. The king had returned, but the Imperial structures and pretty much everything else put in place by the puritans would stay. And meanwhile, England didn’t have a surplus of people anymore, while the colonies’ population had exploded, but without a significant land increase to accompany this.
And this sets the stage for the restoration colonies. They wouldn’t be founded as a way to escape or question the status quo. They would be practical rather than ideological. They would establish themselves in a New World that was already populated, independent and even had its own trade routes. And they would draw their settlers from other colonies rather than the mother country.
The first of these colonies would start with a visit by John Colleton of Barbados to England, to receive a commendation for his faithful service in the Civil Wars.
Colleton was one of the Cavaliers who made his life in Barbados after the Royalists’ defeat in the Civil Wars. He took a position of leadership in the island’s affairs, and he’d become the quintessential Barbadian. He liked the Willoughbies, but supported above all else Barbados’s right to the autonomy it had claimed during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. He’s a person who was prominent enough to have consistently come up in my research, but who I’ve rarely mentioned because he was simply the model of a Barbadian citizen. And actually, this is a good chance to give you a travel tip. John Colleton’s house still exists in Barbados, and is a hotel that you can stay in. Kind of mindblowing, utterly beautiful, and something I’d highly recommend seeing if you’re ever there.
But while Colleton was in England, he wanted to explore the possibility of starting a new colony, and to do this, he started talking to William Berkeley, who was in England to advocate for Virginia, on the unsuccessful trip that I’d mentioned in the episode, Meet the New Boss.
He wanted to start a colony which could absorb some of Barbados’s excess population. The population boom of the Civil Wars had coincided with the rise of sugar production, which had caused land to be consolidated into large estates. As a result, Barbados had a huge, economically stratified population, to a degree that was unsustainable. There were white people so poor they were looked down on by slaves, there were people richer than almost anyone in England, and there were very few people in between. The younger sons of Barbadian planters had no real way to stay on the island to make a living, so even the richest of Barbadians had to take note of this reality. This fact made it one of the most important contributors to English colonial expansion. Some Barbadians went to Jamaica, Antigua and other islands, some to New England and Virginia, but Colleton envisioned something more reliable, and for that he looked to an old patent granted by Charles I to a man named Robert Heath. Sitting just south of Virginia, this land known as Carolana was big enough, it had been explored a little but not much, it was far enough south to potentially grow sugar, and it was close enough to Virginia that it could hope for a moderate amount of help from the colony.
In the 1630s, Heath had planned a Huguenot colony which would be known as Carolana. But, as we know, colonization was expensive and dangerous and Heath could get neither enough money nor enough settlers to make the venture work. In addition, as Huguenots, most of the proposed settlers were hardcore Puritans, and Charles I wasn’t particularly interested in setting up another puritan colony after the way that Massachusetts Bay had gone. Some of the people who signed up, like Samuel Vassall, went to New England when the venture fell through, and soon, most people forgot all about it, though as we’ll see, Vassall didn’t.
Over the course of the next few decades, a variety of people tried to explore or settle Carolana. Vassall sent people to map the area in 1632, but they failed to get there and ended up in Virginia, instead.
When Opechancanough had organized his second and last major massacre of Virginians, the one for which he ended up being shot in the back in prison, the ensuing Powhatan War had taken a group of Virginians into the Roanoke area. A handful of them, including George Yeardley’s son Francis, returned to buy land from the local Chowan tribe, where they settled and made a living from fur trapping and trading. This area became known as Albemarle County, at that point the southernmost part of Virginia.
So Colleton wanted to revive the venture in a major way, and Berkeley agreed to join his group of proprietors, though he would always put Virginia first, and soon Colleton had also enlisted William Lord Craven, Anthony Ashley Cooper aka Lord Shaftesbury, and the powerful Lord Clarendon, who incidentally was the author of the most important history of the English Civil War period. But more than that, he was Charles II’s right hand man. He didn’t participate very much in the venture, but he was paid to use his influence on its behalf at court. They also recruited the Duke of Albemarle, aka George Monck, the man who had marched to London from Scotland, invited Charles back as king, and actually ushered in the Restoration.
The king gave Colleton’s group a patent to an insanely big tract of land. It drew its inspiration from the old Carolana charter, but granted them all English lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific within the latitudes specified. Actually, funnily enough, that area also includes Santa Fe in what’s now New Mexico. Santa Fe had been founded in 1607, the same year as Jamestown, but it was also enough out of Carolina’s reach that this would never have become an issue of debate, so it’s just an amusingly useless fact.
Charter in hand, the proprietors started working. The first thing they did was agree to contribute 25 pounds each to an expense fund which would be used among other things for a surveyor to draw a map and description of the area to attract colonists. And three people quickly emerged as leaders, taking a particularly keen interest in it. Colleton was obviously one of them, and he was second in command to Albemarle, chair of the meetings who definitely lent his military influence to the founding documents. And third was Shaftesbury, who was a keen political mind. He was a close friend of John Locke, and in fact Locke lived with him and was his servant for a while.
Actually, around the time all this was happening, Shaftesbury almost died from an abscess of the liver and required surgery to survive, and Locke assisted with this. This was centuries before anaesthetics were invented, so this surgery was done while Shaftesbury was wide awake, strapped into a chair, and held down by a couple of people until the operation was done. Locke was one of the ones holding him down. Then Shaftesbury had to walk around with a permanent drain in his abdomen for the rest of his life.
Shaftesbury had been a puritan and a parliamentarian. He’d invested in Barbados and the Slave Trade, and served on the Council for Foreign Plantations under Cromwell. It was he, Locke and Colleton who established the colony’s political direction, reflecting the new, Enlightenment ideals, and incorporating ideas from both the old royalists and parliamentarians, as well as lessons from both England and Barbados’s experiences.
Regarding recruitment, they had no desire to attract people from England. Like I said, England didn’t really have people to spare at this point, much less a surplus of them, while the colonies did. But it’s also important to highlight just how much this affected the venture, itself. The cost of transporting colonists alone almost sank the Jamestown venture multiple times. The cost of crossing the Atlantic was why no one bothered to really look for the Roanoke colonists until the founding of Jamestown. And though there was less effective pressure for colonists in Plymouth or Massachusetts to pay this debt back, the financial strain of funding ships was what wiped their financiers out. This extended beyond colonists to food and supplies, many of which could now be pulled from a bustling Atlantic World, and shipped by New England merchants.
The biggest, most inescapable source of financial strain was now minimized from the outset for the first time in the Carolina colony. And, for the first time the bulk of settlers would immediately enter the colony with plenty of New World experience.
But they would be drawing from colonies who had polarized against each other in the previous few decades. And the first place that people would try to settle was Cape Fear.
A group from Charlestown, Massachusetts started exploring the area in 1662, and bought the land from a local sachem. The man in charge of the expedition, Captain William Hilton, said the area was full of meadows and wetlands, with temperate weather, fish, oysters, pine, hardwood, game, waterfowl and bees. He speculated that they’d be able to grow oranges, limes, plantains, cotton, pineapple, and perhaps even sugar there.
So they sent a group of people in 1663 to settle the area, but all they really achieved was to highlight the fact that even with colonial experience, moving to the middle of nowhere was hard. They stayed for about six weeks, and then threw up their hands, said “we have nothing to do but go home,” and went to Virginia, leaving little more than a sign warning other would-be settlers to go home and leave the wretched place. Some returned to New England, while others stayed at the Albemarle settlement in Virginia. Some tried to convince the Carolina proprietors to adopt a self-governing, corporate government model styled after New England, but when the backers refused they lost interest in moving there, again with the exception of Vassall.
Not too long afterward, Barbadians drafted plans to settle in Cape Fear themselves, led in part by Thomas Modiford, son of the Jamaica governor, and Peter Colleton, son of proprietor John. Hilton again would lead them, as well as William Vassall’s nephew, John. They sailed from Speightstown a few months after the New England venture had failed, arriving in Carolina 16 days later. They rescued the crew of a sunk English ship, some of whom had been captured by the local Edisto tribe and given to the Spanish, but all negotiations to get them back were friendly.
And with settlers taking such an immediate interest in moving to Carolina, the proprietors had to decide how exactly they would run the colony. First, they asked Berkeley to appoint a governor and council in Carolina, though Berkeley ended up just doing the job himself, and then they asked him to send explorers around the area to find a rumored place which could serve as a trading hub. They also asked him to recruit settlers in Virginia, where people were a bit more mild-mannered than either Barbados or New England. And then they went about finalizing the plan of government.
The Duke of Albemarle was keenly interested in defense and military issues, and they had in fact proven important time and time again in other colonies. More densely packed settlements would be easier to defend, and he encouraged the proprietors to grant smaller plots of land to achieve this. The problem, though, is that large tracts of land were what made settlement in America attractive. The possibility of getting a large tract of land was pretty much non-negotiable. This issue arose in a very practical way because Berkeley had already granted large plantations in what had now become Carolina, and he declined to overturn them when asked. It was very clearly not going to work, so the proprietors actually reversed their position completely and started to promise the biggest land grants of any colony – but with the caveat that owners had to keep the land occupied at a mandated density or else it would be regranted or sold. And they also required double the quitrent of any other colony.
Both of these caveats were extreme enough to alarm potential settlers. But to soothe their fears, the proprietors also promised that the quitrent would be the only form of income they would demand from the colony. There would be no export duties, excises or any other form of tax. Taxes would be predictable, simple, and effectively unchanging because the colonists would be the people in charge of raising them.
This is because proprietors conceded power to colonists on virtually every issue that had become a point of contention elsewhere. They would allow Carolina to be effectively autonomous, with some simple checks to protect colonists from the dangers of a pure democracy. The proprietors’ goal was a distribution of political power, checks and balances, such that “nobody’s power, no not any of the proprietors themselves, is so great as to be able to hurt the meanest man in the country.” Every person would get enough political power to protect their own interests, and by definition this meant that landowners had the greatest say.
So, the proprietors would only appoint the governor, surveyor general, and secretary, and they’d be at the top of the court system so any appeals could end up in their hands. The governor would be responsible for selecting a council of 6-12 colonists, never anyone who didn’t live in the colony, and advised by this council, he could appoint the other colony leadership. This leadership would be responsible for defense and keeping the peace, the administration of courts, and calling for election, as well as issuing land grants. But, nothing else. They could not levy taxes or customs duties, alter or resurvey grants which had been settled for seven years, or address legal issues themselves. One specified instance of this was assessing damages for trespass when stray livestock had damaged neighboring properties.
All colonists had to swear or subscribe an oath to the king, proprietors, and to do justice to all men. And allowing was a way for Quakers and other puritans who didn’t believe in swearing oaths to get around that reservation.
Carolina’s General Assembly would, unlike virtually any other, be unicameral. This gave colonists an overwhelmingly stronger influence over colony affairs than the governor’s council would have. The governor’s council would administer the colony, but all major decisions would go through a unicameral General Assembly in which they would be greatly outnumbered. These decisions included not just laws and taxes, but the establishing of courts, creation of precincts and political divisions, and even how much the governor should earn as a salary. The Assembly even had the authority to appoint a president or speaker in case of governor and deputy absence. It determined its own meeting times and places, adjournment and quorum, and it could bypass the governor and address the proprietors directly “concerning any grievances whatsoever. In yet another nod to Barbadian politics, and perhaps the most extreme yet, the Assembly could effectively enact legislation without any proprietor approval at all. A law could be in effect for 18 months before it was ever sent to England, and though the proprietors could veto laws at that point, the assembly could simply reenact it for another 18 months, and 18 months after that, as many times as they wanted.
The only restrictions on the Assembly were that it could not contradict English law or the Carolina Concessions and Agreement, which was the name of this constitution I’m describing, and it couldn’t directly contradict the proprietors’ interests.”
There was no question of balancing proprietor and colonist interests. Proprietors effectively only existed to ensure that the assembly didn’t get out of hand and start abusing people, and they only profited a minimal amount. The governor was little more than an administrator, and the colonists would control Carolina politically.
This was a product of Colleton’s Barbados experience and Shaftesbury and Locke’s idealism, but it was also enabled by the lower cost of colonization that resulted from pulling settlers and resources from other colonies rather than directly from England. There was no question of recouping impossible financial losses, as had always been the case in the past. They could start with little investment, and therefore demand little in the way of returns. So while they did demand double the quitrent, this was with the understanding that they would never get any other money from the colony, and in exchange for a higher quitrent, colonists knew they would never be put in the same situation as, for instance, Barbadians had been. This was a trade-off that suddenly made Carolina extremely attractive.
And regarding religion, Carolina would follow the Barbadian model. The Anglican Church would be the official one, but there would be complete and total religious toleration and colonists would not be able to change that.
Regarding labor, Carolina did allow for slavery from the get go, but it tried to find alternatives which would emphasize the use of British labor. There were thousands of white poor people in Barbados who needed a place to go, people who Colleton described as being “of no interest or reputation, of little innate courage, being poor men that are just permitted to live, … derided by the negroes, and branded with the epithet of white slaves.” The proprietors wondered whether they could entice these laborers to Carolina to act as a permanent, serf-like labor force called leetmen. They’d be promised a comfortable place to live, and 10 acres of land to be leased to them on marriage. They’d get security in exchange for labor, a positively feudal arrangement, and one which absolutely did not become successful.
And one last novelty was that because Carolina was so big, and because it would be populated by such disparate groups of people, the colony would be divided into self-governing units with far more independence than counties had in other colonies. These could be called counties or precincts, a Barbadian term, and each of them would get representation in the colony-wide General Assembly. It was effectively a federal structure, another new thing in the New World. And this is what would ultimately enable the split between North and South Carolina.
In 1665, the Carolina lords proprietors obtained a new charter from the king which expanded their holdings even more, now extending south nearly to St. Augustine, and north an additional 6 miles into Virginia territory. And that was also the year they unveiled this constitution, the Concessions and Agreement. This document would not only act as the foundation for Carolina’s government, but it would also inspire the constitutions of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and ultimately the United States.
So that’s the story of the foundation of Carolina, a completely new type of colony for a new era, and we’ll continue it next episode.