From Creating and Contesting Carolina:
“The Carolina colony was founded amidst a flurry of Barbadian expansion projects in the 1650s and 1660s. Nationalist approaches have situated the colony within the context of the area that eventually formed the United States. At its inception, however, South Carolina was part of a Caribbean world. Imperial rivalries and economic, demographic and political forces in the early English Caribbean dictated the settlement of the Carolina colony. Most of its principal architects drew on their experiences in settling and cultivating the English Caribbean, envisioning the colony as a satellite to their Caribbean world. To better understand the impetus for the settlement of Carolina, its initial failures, and its ultimate survival, the story of early Carolina needs a broader Atlantic framework. The capital that fueled the exploration and settlement of the Carolinas drew heavily on the fantastic wealth being generated in the sugar islands, and the leaders of the Carolina adventure envisioned the colony as a satellite to their Caribbean world. …”
Read the whole thing.
I hate the way American history is taught in our public schools. It artificially places the South in a narrative of an inevitable American nationalism. New England is at the center of the narrative. In reality, South Carolina was a Caribbean colony and originally had nothing to do with the Puritan experiment in New England. It was an offshoot of Barbados.
The Barbadians also successfully spread their plantation civilization to the Leeward Islands, Windward Islands and Jamaica in the Caribbean which never became part of the United States. They colonized Suriname on the coast of South America until they were run out by the Dutch after the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667. In fact, it was only after their failure to settle nearby Suriname and St. Lucia that the Barbadians turned their attention to settling South Carolina.
This story has been airbrushed out of our historical memory. The South only makes sense when you think of it as the far northern tier of the Greater Caribbean.
Dunno about this, but was in South Carolina for the first time in my life, recently. It did not-I repeat, did NOT feel like the rest of the United States.
Boy, you guys got a lot of Darkies down there!
Depends on where you are. In the Greenville area and that northwestern corner of the State there aren’t very many. But south of Aiken down to Beaufort they are a large majority.
In the low lands.
There is a “black belt” in South Carolina just like in Alabama.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were Sons of the South, and they played a big role in The American War of Independence. And I don’t think anyone put a gun to the heads of the South Carolina lawmakers and forced them to sign the Declaration of Independence. No one forced the South Carolina lawmakers to join The Union.
If you get a chance, read George Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow. You’ll find out how profoundly Southern Washington was. The book also hints at the animosity that already existed at that early date, between the North and South. Washington and Jefferson and the other Virginians and Carolinians balked at joining the Union, but did so out of concern for British revanchism and the potential threat of other European powers. Overall, it’s a good book. The way History is taught in School and popular culture, I thought Washington was from Vermont and the Deleware river was in Connecticut and Yorktown was a suburb of Boston.
Hello James Owen,
I second your comment with one caveat. I would be hesitant to read a book by Brooklyn born (((Ron Chernow))). A while back I picked up a Washington bio by Rev vet, and South Carolinian resident David Ramsay (1749-1815), though I have yet to read it.
Joe
I thought so too, but I got it for six bucks at Walmarts. Surprisingly, Chernow is fair. He emphasis, positively, how profoundly Southern Washington actually was. But he does it without being obvious. As a Southerner, you easily recognise it as familliar as natural. From his anonymous charity giving, to laying out BBQ spreads with whiskey and cigars when campaigning for office.
No, they just altered the terms of the deal after South Carolina joined, and told South Carolinians to pray that they didn’t alter them any further.
Damn sure did. They also wanted to get up an army and invade Virginia before the ink was even dry on the Bill of Rights.
Washington applied for a commission in the British army. The board of commission rather miopically turned him down.
Yet again another interesting piece on the formation of the south from Mr. Wallace of OD. I just reposted it to my Google profile to spread the word. I am in what i understand to be part of Greater Appalachia. The more I study the U.S.A. and our early history, the more inevitable Balkanization seems to be. The dream of one white America, as articulated by great WNs like George Lincoln Rockwell overlooked our very real differences regional differences. What state or states that our volk builds after the collapse or tyranny that seems inevitable, I hope that they all remember the Three Principles.
https://putnamlibertynotes.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/the-three-principles/
As I’ve mentioned too you before, the only place I have ever seen this Gold Circle/Caribbean stuff is in anti-Southern, anti-slavery propaganda circulated before the Civil War and published in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I don’t doubt the displaced French after the slave revolt in Haiti made an impact on South Carolina—you can see it in SC to this day. But, to say that any relationship with the Caribbean was more important than British mercantilism wouldn’t be true. The factors were back in England, not in the Caribbean or France.
Baijan you mean!
‘Bajan’ (bay-gin)