Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729

217 Pages·2004·1.008 MB·English

by  L. H. Roper (auth.)

Conceiving Carolina
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Conceiving Carolina
Proprietors, Planters, and Plots,
1662–1729
L.H. Roper
CONCEIVINGCAROLINA
© L.H.Roper,2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-6479-3
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2004 by
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Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-52836-3 ISBN 978-1-4039-7347-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403973474
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roper,L.H.(Louis,H.)
Conceiving Carolina :proprietors,planters,and plots,1662–1729 /
L.H.Roper.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-52836-3
1.South Carolina—History—Colonial period,ca.1600–1775.
2.South Carolina—Politics and government—To 1775.3.Landowners—
South Carolina—Political activity—History—17th century.
4.Landowners—South Carolina—Political activity—History—
18th century.5.South Carolina—Race relations.6.South Carolina—
Relations—Great Britain.7.Great Britain—Relations—South Carolina.
8.Great Britain—Colonies—America—Administration—History—
17th century.9.Great Britain—Colonies—America—Administration—
History—18th century.I.Title.
F272.R68 2004
975.7’02—dc22 2003060754
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.Chennai,India.
First edition:April 2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Prologue 15
1. Genesis 21
2. Blueprint 29
3. Birthpangs 41
4. The Rise of the Goose Creek Men 51
5. Plots 69
6. Stuarts Town 83
7. Treachery 95
8. Tests 117
9. Consternation 133
10. Conclusions 143
Abbreviations 159
Notes 161
Index 209
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Acknowledgments
The pursuit of historical inquiry results, happily, in the accrual of
many debts and the emergence of this book grants me the opportu-
nity to acknowledge these. I would like to thank staff at the South
Carolina Department of Archives and History, the South Carolina Historical
Society, the Public Record Office of Great Britain, the British Library (Early
Modern Printed and Manuscript Collections), the National Archives of
Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, the Edinburgh City Archives, the
Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library at the
University of Oxford, the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, University of
Cambridge, the Gloucestershire Record Office, the Guildhall Library, and,
last but by no means least, the Interlibrary Loan Department at Sojourner
Truth Library at the State University of New York at New Paltz for their assis-
tance in helping with my enquiries and producing documents and other
materials. I would like to thank His Grace, the duke of Beaufort, for permis-
sion to quote from documents in his possession at Badminton,
Gloucestershire, and Mrs. Margaret Richards, librarian at Badminton, for
arranging the temporary transfer of those records to the Gloucestershire
Record Office.
I would like to especially thank Bertrand Van Ruymbeke who, with his
wife, Meredith, gave me a place to stay in Charleston while I undertook
research in South Carolina. He also applied his considerable knowledge of
the sources and of proprietary South Carolina to his reading of the manu-
script and he continues to engage me in ongoing discussions about the
proprietors and their world. I should also like to thank Evan Haefeli, Sarah
Barber, Warren Billings, Randy Sparks, Louise Yeoman, and an anonymous
reader for the press for their encouragement and insights. My thanks also to
Brendan O’Malley and the staff at Palgrave for their enthusiastic support and
their assistance in bringing this project to fruition. Finally, I would also like
to thank Charles Lesser for his continuing interest in this project and helpful
references.
Various fragments of this work have already appeared in public. An article
appeared in the 1996 number of The Historian.1 I also subjected audiences
at the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at the
Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard
University, the annual meeting of the South Carolina Historical Association,
viii Acknowledgments
the Society of Early Americanists Conference, the Annual Meeting of the
Organization of American Historians, the Annual Meeting of the American
Historical Association, and the Fifth Omohundro Institute of Early
American History and Culture Conference to my efforts to think out the
various problems that this book tries to address and I would like to thank
those who participated in those sessions. Finally, I would like to express my
gratitude for the financial support from the John Carter Brown Library, the
Office of Academic Affairs at the State University of New York at New Paltz,
and United University Professions, which subsidized research trips and
conference appearances.
Finally, I would like to thank the Department of History at the University
of Rochester for awarding me assistantships/fellowships for the four years
I spent as a student there. More particularly, I would like to acknowledge the
unpayable debt I owe to my mentors. From Perez Zagorin, I gained a deep
understanding of early modern Europe. I gained—and continue to gain—
from the wisdom afforded me by Mary Young. Finally, John Waters gave me
a priceless education, not only about the pre-industrial world (including
early America), but how to be a mentor, a historian, and a friend. I have tried
in a feeble way to apply their advice, both in particular and in general, in my
own labors in the vineyard. The mistakes that remain are, of course, my own.
As for everything else, I would like to simply thank my spouse, Rosemarie
Frisone, for making it all possible and I dedicate this volume to her.
Introduction
This book, in the first instance, offers a new history of South Carolina
from the formation of the proprietorship that founded the colony in
late 1662 to the statutory buy-out of the Lords Proprietors in 1729.
In doing so, it adopts the now fashionable “Atlantic” perspective on events
and behavior.2 But, it does not track the movement of people to a “New
World,” the environment of which purportedly compelled social and cultural
adaptation on their part or seek to plot the formation of a “new” colonial
society, let alone a “unique plantation regime.”3 Instead, it focuses, perhaps
unfashionably, on the central roles of politics and contingency in the creation
of Carolina since it was the pursuit of political interests and a common
understanding of how to pursue them that bridged the ocean: on the one
hand, these phenomena provided a common milieu for men on the make in
the later Stuart period; on the other, colonial political figures, in pursuit of
power, wealth, and status in accordance with the prevailing transatlantic view
of how the world worked, cultivated associations with patrons in England.
The results generated significant social and political results in both the
colony and the metropolis.
Thus, the book offers a proposal for reconfiguring our approach to the
study of colonial British America. Since the rise of the “new social history”
a generation ago, early Americanists have devised a number of strategies
to develop a new framework for understanding their subject in the trail
generated by an explosion of work from diverse geographical and social
perspectives, with admittedly indifferent success. Many peers regard the
development of the field since World War II as “liberating,” while others
have expressed concern that the sheer quantity of work threatens to render
prospects for a common comprehension problematic.4
Ironically and significantly, this self-styled historiographical new broom
has not effected an alteration in the fundamental approach taken by the field:
the eternal quest to find the “origins” of American society—with at least part
of an eye on American independence and the “American Revolution”—in
the mixture of “Old World” (European and African) and “New” (landscape,
including “Indians”). This phenomenon has endured even in the recent signs
L.H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina
© L.H. Roper 2004