It should now be clear that our series discusses race relations in South Carolina and more specifically the Lowcountry where the colony was born. This was the region where the plantation culture was imported from Barbados by the English settlers who started the colony. By 1729 the process (which was begun in 1710) of splitting the vast Carolina colony into northern and southern halves was completed.
As we have discussed, the growth of rice cultivation in the Lowcountry spurred an influx of Negro slaves, mostly from the Caribbean in the beginning and later directly from the Dark Continent. This had a tremendous impact upon race relations. It drove the government to pass laws discouraging miscegenation, reserving most skilled trades for working class Whites and forbidding free Blacks from living in the colony. It also provoked leaders to impliment policies encouraging European immigration in order to establish a racial balance which would protect the Whites of the colony from the specter of Black revolt.
Dr. Peter Wood in his book Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974) writes about the “deepening white anxiety” as the Black population grew. Wood explains:
As the ratio of white men to women became more balanced with time, one motive for sexual relations between freemen and slaves diminished, and as the size of the Negro population grew, the impetus among Europeans for white offspring increased. From the minority’s point of view, every baby born to European parents “improved” the dangerous racial imbalance, while each child with a white father and a black mother increased the ranks of the slaves and served as a reminder of the Europeans’ precarious social and genetic position.
Dr. Wood goes on to describe a duel system of racial control for the city and surrounding countryside. In Charleston, the Watchmen, a force of 21 men, kept slaves in order and enforced laws preventing them from entering the city on certain days or “to drink, quarrel, fight, curse and swear, and profane the Sabbath.” Outside the capital, the Patrol enforced laws restricting Negroes, making rounds throughout the parishes and going from plantation to plantation. In 1721 these two forces were merged into the militia. From that point on “the local control of slaves in South Carolina rested with military authorities, and from this date as well there began a transformation of the militia ‘from a vital defensive agency to one whose principal duty was the police supervision of slaves.'”
The author, who continually exposes his personal bias on the issue, describes South Carolina as a Spartan-like colony in the making. Even the wealthiest planters were required by law to serve in the militia and support it in maintaining Carolina’s emerging system of White supremacy:
Life within this expanding settlement became increasingly complex, and the tensions which separated slaves and freemen grew increasingly strong. Confronted with different and more acute anxieties about race relations than their forebears or their counterparts in mainland colonies farther north, white Carolinians addressed with increasing directness the question of the Negro’s “place.” The fact that this question had not yet become a tradition, the fact that the answer had not yet been entirely foreordained, made the issue all the more vexing and the need for direct answers all the more intense. The net result was a pattern of controls intended to define with increasing clarity and bluntness the social, economic, and even physical “place” of the black Carolinian.
Of course, the settlers did not think of their African slaves as fellow Englishmen or Carolinians. They were not citizens. They had no natural right to liberty. They were slaves from a primitive, foreign culture who were employed to fill a labor shortage and because their racial traits made them fit for work in the rice fields of the Lowcountry. And due to their numbers they had to be tightly controlled, as on Barbados. Under the direction of Carolinians, their service helped to make the colony in which they lived an extremely prosperous society.
Click here for part IV of the series
NOTE: I hope OD readers are enjoying this series. I have learned quite a lot preparing for it and have future posts planned from different sources. I realize that Dr. Wood is obviously biased and anti-White. He presents White behavior in the harshest terms and is clearly sympathetic to the Africans. That said, his focus on the methods White people used to control Negroes in Carolina is enlightening. That system changed considerably over time and it is fascinating how those changes took place.
I read this carefully, and it does not sound like a good situation, in any way but, financial – and, as we see today, bigwig globalist Carolinians, who are prepared to sacrifice the community to line their pockets, do things like cave in to the NCAA or pull down our flag, are not good folk.
It’s no wonder all my mama’s families – the Richardsons, the Coxes, the Moxleys, the Ellises, and the Carrolls said,’ to hell with this,’ and moved to Appalachia – not just in South Carolina, but, Virginia, as well, and, ultimately, helpt to settle hill country area around Sparta & Black Mountain North Carolina.
All of these areas were devoid of speculating globalist bigwigs and their imported field-hands and I can see why they were attracted to live there. It, also, is not so hot, in these places, a serious consideration without air-conditioning.
I, however, live in the low eastern plantation country; and as I often say to those officers in my town (15 white officers for this little town) : ‘I thank y’all for making it possible for me to live here without having to spend all my days watchin’ over my wife with a shotgun.’
Let’s not forget that the African Blacks were living in an advance civilization in the Carolinas—a civilization thousands of years ahead of the one they left behind in Africa.
If you have a large stone age population, of limited IQ & other genetic factors, how else can you control them in a humane way except by law. Heck, even 100% White societies have laws, and law enforcement.
My question, and this includes to my ancestors, do you want an African village on your farm? This is probably why most slave owners only owned a few slaves.
@Krafty, the Carolinas were likely more advanced then than what you’re average African dirt pit is now. We put man on the moon….in 1969, when I was a year old! I’ll leave it there…..you get the idea.
@Michael Cushman
I’m still enjoying this series. There are certain blogs that I visit, but will never comment there.
None of those people would study the subject of South’s origins without some bitterness and resentment. And not a small amount of contempt. They’re more interested in the South as an opponent of The Northern Assumption of American Civilisation. To most of them, discussions of the development of the Plantation Civilisation would be outrageous and out of the question. They view the Golden Circle, for instance, not as an existing historical region or phenomenon, but as a “treasonous”Southern plot against Massachusetts. They’re just not interested in learning anything genuine about the South. They’re more interested in being anti-White and anti-Southern. And in justifying their world view, and especially their specious assumptions.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I was taught a rudimentary version of the Golden Circle/British Caribbean Theory in elementary and middle school. I never saw the Virginia, Carolina and Georgia colonies as having any connection to the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies. In a complete reversal of convention, they were barely mentioned at all.
At any rate, your and Hunters series have given me more information than my rudimentary schooling on the subject, all those years ago.
Thanks. Keep it coming.
P.S. SJWs are starting to acknowledge that the South won the culture war up until the late Fifties, Sixties.
@James Owen. Unfortunately for us the Antebellum Southern Leadership up until the Mid 1840”s or so except for John C. Calhoun was for the most part a disaster. The South couldn’t pull together as a single unit. The problem really showed itself during the WAR OF 1812. The Western South KY, TN, MISS TERR, LA, fought a brutal war with the Indians. Jeffersonianism was revealed to be a failure, it had left the nation weak and retarded our agricultural growth. Western Southerners were HARD NATIONALISTS. When New England threatened Secession in 1814 it was South Carolina and Georgia, along with the Western Southern States, who took the lead in condemning them. The South at that time held the keys to the castle and didn’t anticipate that changing. Following the war, as a succor to New England, the Southerners gave New England certain economic considerations.
The era of Andrew Jackson brought a complete flip-flop. John C Calhoun first proposed the noble idea that Southern States should advocate for their own economic interests, New England had grown extremely rich between 1815-1830 at the expense of Dixie. Unfortunately for Calhoun, the concerns of the Cotton South was not the economic concern of Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia and Tennessee and North Carolina were caught in the middle. Kentucky and Missouri Hemp depended upon Northern tariffs to survive competition from Latin American hemp. Thus Henry Clay advocated for the North, because it benefitted Kentucky.
The only thing that managed to bring the South together was the extreme abolitionist attacks in Kansas but even in 1861, North Carolina and Tennessee barely passed the majorities to secede and Kentucky and Missouri, likely because of the years that the Hemp planters had sympathized with the Whigs their governments basically collapsed, although legally both managed to secede under extreme duress.
Had the Antebellum Southern Leadership been successful in establishing a unified Southern economy, secession would have come easy. Unfortunately the in-fighting and the compromising, the worst of which done for 40 years by Henry Clay (Abe Lincoln’s Idol) left Dixie ill prepared in 1861. When you consider the forty years of political failures, its amazing the South was able to come together at all.