The Grim Years , livre ebook

The Grim Years
The Grim Years
Settling South Carolina, 1670–1720

John J. Navin
© 2020 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-64336-054-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-64336-055-3 (ebook)
Front cover design by Steve Kress
To Paul and Margaret Navin
“Where every man is enemy to every man … In such condition there is … continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
C ONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
One
Barbadian Precedents
Two
Carolina
Three
Paradise Lost
Four
“Dreadfull Visitations”
Five
Reapers
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
I LLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan
Richard Ligon’s 1657 map of Barbados
Visscher’s 1692 map, Insulæ Americanæ in Oceano Septentrionali
Carolina Charter of 1663, first page
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury [portrait]
Ogilby-Moxon 1673 map, A New Discription of Carolina
Section, Joel Gascoyne’s 1682 map, A new map of the country of Carolina
Pieter Mortier’s 1696 map, Carte Particuliere De La Caroline
Section, Crisp Map of 1711, A compleat description of the province of Carolina in 3 parts
Moll’s 1717 map, Carolina
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am greatly indebted to the many scholars who have published works on the founding and early development of Barbados and South Carolina. As my notes attest, these researchers and authors paved the way for myself, as well as anyone who hopes to provide a fair reckoning of South Carolina’s history. I am humbled by their respective efforts and hope that I have not in any way misrepresented their findings.
It has been my great privilege to have several esteemed historians as colleagues and mentors. At Brandeis University, I studied under David Hackett Fischer and have profited from his advice and example ever since. At Coastal Carolina University I worked alongside the late Charles W. Joyner, a scholar admired by every person with a serious interest in African American history. Whatever positive things that may be said about this work are due in part to the influence of these two historians; the flaws are mine alone.
I want to thank Richard Brown at the University of South Carolina Press for his insight and guidance. I also appreciate the efforts of the editors and production staff at USC Press and the anonymous outside readers who helped shape the final draft. Nicholas Butler at the Charleston County Public Library has been a great ally and source of information on early Charleston, and Steven D. Tuttle and Charles Lesser at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History provided valuable assistance. Those institutions have been essential to this study, as has the South Carolina Historical Society and its publications.
I am indebted to Robert Figueira for his editorial assistance on an article published in 2013 that was the precursor to chapter 2 (Navin, “Servant or Slave? South Carolina’s Inherited Labor Dilemma”). Special thanks to Ken Townsend for reviewing the entire text and providing candid feedback, and to Joseph Breault, a meticulous scholar, for his help with the documentation. I could not have completed this work without the support provided by Coastal Carolina University and its marvelous staff and resources at Kimbel Library. Finally I want to thank Karen Marie Loman, who assisted in the research for this book, and our daughter, Sarah Marie Navin, wordsmith extraordinaire , for her assistance in preparing the final draft.

The frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse, 1651. Wikimedia Commons Image Database.
Introduction
PORTENTS AND VISIONS

In 1651 philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes penned Leviathan , his dark vision of an unregulated society. Hobbes, shocked by the execution of Charles I, whom he supported, envisioned a world of unceasing poverty, violence, and death. In the absence of an absolute sovereign, there would be no law, and “where no Law, no Injustice.” Competition for power and wealth would go unchecked; the condition of man would become “a condition of War of every one against every one.” Unfettered by notions of right and wrong, every man would have “a Right to every thing: even to one another’s body.” Hobbes believed this to be the case among “the savage people in many places of America [who] … have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.” 1 Hobbes did not know how mistaken he was regarding Native American society, nor did he imagine that the nightmarish scenario he described would materialize, for a time, in a colony called Carolina.
In 1666, fifteen years after the publication of Hobbes’s treatise, John Locke, physician and future champion of natural rights, encountered Anthony Ashley Cooper—member of Parliament, privy councilor, and minister of state who would soon be named 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. An influential but highly controversial Whig, the earl was a schemer, an opportunist, and a visionary. 2 Despite the rancor his actions provoked, Shaftesbury’s writings, in retrospect, seem enlightened. They presaged an era that celebrated reason, skepticism, freedom of thought and religion, and a general lifting of the human condition. In Locke, Shaftesbury sensed a kindred spirit, an individual who foresaw the collective potential of stable government, commercial enterprise, and common purpose. 3 He enlisted Locke to help lay the groundwork for a self-sufficient land-based society—one that might pose a solution to England’s economic, demographic, and religious problems. 4 That grandiose vision would collide with reality in a colony called Carolina.

On December 5, 1740, a Spanish privateer cruising off the “bar of Carolina” seized a schooner coming out of Charles Town. One person on board was “a little negro of 10 or 12,” who reported that “the largest and best part of Carolina,” namely the city’s waterfront, had burned. According to the youngster, the inferno lasted for two weeks and the colony’s powder magazine had blown up. 5 The child may have overstated the duration of the fire, but its impact on the city’s residents was indisputable—the blaze consumed more than three hundred dwellings and commercial buildings. Hugh Bryan, a prominent planter, wrote a letter conveying “melancholy News” of the disaster: “How deplorable is the Condition of many there, that are in a few Hours reduc’d to want of Bread! Surely God’s just Judgments are upon us … O! that this fiery Dispensation may now lead us to Repentance, and truly humble us before GOD, that the Fury of his Anger may turn away from us, and that we be not utterly consumed!” 6
Bryan went on to catalog South Carolina’s recent tribulations; they included drought, disease, slave insurrections, and a failed assault on the Spanish stronghold at St. Augustine. These had all taken their toll; but, in Bryan’s view, not since the 1715 Yamasee War had so many colonists been cast into such dire circumstances at one blow. 7 Three weeks after the fire, Reverend George Whitefield visited the charred city and reminded its inhabitants of the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. The renowned preacher “endeavour’d to shew what were the Sins which provoked God to punish the Israelites in that Manner” and “drew a Parallel between them and the Charlestown People.” 8 Whitefield’s power of persuasion was unrivaled, but as Charles Town’s residents cleared the rubble and tallied their losses, they were either too distracted or too far corrupted to take such jeremiads to heart. Commerce was the lifeblood of the colony and the seaport’s inhabitants had to restore the city’s infrastructure of docks, wharves, warehouses, shops, offices, and private homes as quickly as possible.
Twenty-five years earlier, Yamasee warriors and their Native American allies had nearly driven South Carolinians into the sea. Anglican minister Francis Le Jau, who huddled behind Charles Town’s defenses with other refugees from frontier settlements, insisted that “the Evil Spirit of Covetiousness & self Interest” were “the true & Immediate Causes of our Desolution.” 9 As Indians advanced toward lowcountry settlements in 1715, people on both sides of the conflict were maimed or killed; dwellings, crops, and livestock were destroyed; the number of homeless and destitute colonists soared; and the colony’s very survival was briefly in question. 10 Although a quarter-century separated the Yamasee War from the fiery destruction of Charles Town’s waterfront in 1740, men of the cloth found the causes strikingly similar. In both cases, the conduct of the South Carolinians—particularly their avarice—had invited God’s wrath. But just as the 1740 conflagration did not deter colonists from their selfish, acquisitive ways, neither did the Yamasee War. 11
Since its founding in 1670, Charles Town had served as a vital but perilous outpost of England’s expand