Moon Coastal Carolinas

by Jim Morekis

  THE LOST COLONY

  The first English settlement in the New World, the ill-fated “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island, was in modern-day North Carolina. Somewhat confusingly, however, it was considered part of Virginia at the time. (The first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, happened two decades later in Virginia proper.)

  Famed English maritime adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh received a charter from Queen Elizabeth I in the 1580s to establish a colony—to be called Virginia after the “Virgin Queen” herself—that would provide a base of operations from which to plunder Spanish treasure ships crossing the Atlantic.

  The Outer Banks were considered the ideal place for such a naval base, and Raleigh sent an expedition to the modern-day Manteo area on Roanoke Island commanded by Phillip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, followed a few months later in spring 1585 by Sir Richard Grenville’s larger colonizing expedition.

  While first contact between the English and the resident Native Americans went reasonably well, a bad omen came early, when a dispute over a silver cup stolen from the colonists led to the ransacking of an Indian village and the brutal execution by fire of the local chief.

  Despite this, Grenville went ahead with his plan to leave about 75 colonists behind while he and his crew went back to England to re-provision. Though he promised to be back by April 1586, the only Englishman to visit during that time was the wide-ranging privateer Sir Francis Drake, who simply took the bulk of the colonists back to England with him.

  That group, however, was not the Lost Colony. Raleigh—who eventually did return, albeit finding no one there—sent a second group of 117 settlers to the same spot, making landfall July 22, 1587. In a chilling harbinger of what was to come, this group found no trace of the 15 men left behind to maintain the Queen’s claim to Virginia—save for the bones of a single man.

  The group of 117 settlers—their ranks expanded by one with the birth of the first English baby in the Americas, Virginia Dare—immediately ran into trouble with some of the local tribes, whose memory of the violence of a year before was still vivid. Though relations were good with the Croatan tribe, others in the area were less friendly, and a dispute led to the killing of a colonist, George Howe.

  In response, the colonists asked their leader, John White, to return to England to bring reinforcements. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

  The crisis induced by the attack of the Spanish Armada on England in 1588 meant White could find no decent ship in which to return to Roanoke. In desperation he contracted with the captains of two very small vessels. On the way back to America, the captains decided to indulge in a little piracy of their own, only to have the tables turned and have their own supplies taken from them. Thus humbled, White had to sail back to England.

  Continuing war with the Spanish further delayed White’s return to Roanoke by another three years. Finally hitching a ride with a privateer headed for the Caribbean, White made landfall in Roanoke on August 18, 1590.

  The colony was totally deserted, with no sign of struggle and the fortifications carefully dismantled. The only clue he found was a cryptic word carved into a tree that would resonate through history: “Croatoan.” On a nearby tree was apparently another attempt to write the same word: “Cro.”

  The tree-carvings weren’t without context. Before he had left the colonists, White had told them to carve a Maltese cross into a tree as a sign that they’d left under duress.

  Finding no such symbol, White could only assume that the colonists were trying to tell him they’d decamped for some reason to be near the Croatan tribe. He wanted to head north to find them, but a storm was brewing and White’s men refused to go any further. Later fact-finding expeditions out of the Jamestown colony farther north were also fruitless.

  Why did they leave? With no sign of struggle, it’s hard to blame friction with local tribes for the move. However, scientists have proven through tree-ring study that the period of the colonists’ departure coincided exactly with one of the worst droughts ever recorded.

  Where did these possibly drought-stricken colonists go? To this day no one knows. The modern-day Lumbee Indians of southeastern North Carolina insist they are descended from Roanoke colonists who intermarried with their tribe, and indeed they still bear many of the historical surnames of the colonists.

  Chief Powhatan of Virginia, however, told English settlers that the colonists had taken up with a tribe in his area, and that he had destroyed that tribe as well as the colonists wholesale.

  Another theory has it that the colonists became assimilated into the Tuscarora tribe of the Carolinas, or maybe the Indians of Person County, long known for their European look and characteristics.

  DNA testing is now ongoing, and so far the most promising explanation favors the longest-running claim of all—that of the Lumbees.

  THE FOUNDING OF CAROLINA

  With the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the English focus moved farther north for awhile. Activity in what would later be called the Carolinas was further limited by continuing political unrest in England, which culminated in the savage English Civil War.

  The colony of Carolina was a product of the English Restoration, when the monarchy returned to power after the grim 11-year tenure of Oliver Cromwell, who had defeated Royalist forces in the English Civil War. The attitude of the Restoration era was expansionist, confident, and mercantile.

  Historians dispute exactly how close-minded Cromwell himself was, but there’s no debating the puritanical tone of his reign as British head of state. Theater was banned, as was most music except for religious hymns. Hair was close-cropped and dress was extremely conservative. Most disturbing of all for the holiday-loving English, the observation of Christmas and Easter was strongly discouraged because of their supposedly pagan origins.

  Enter Charles II, son of the beheaded Charles I. His ascent to the throne in 1660 signaled a release of all the pent-up creativity and energy of the British people, stagnant under Cromwell’s repression. The arts returned to their previous importance. Foreign policy became aggressive and expansionist. Capitalists again sought profit. Fashion made a comeback, and dandy dress and long hair for both men and women were all the rage.

  This then, is the backdrop for the first English settlement of the deep South. The first expedition was by a Barbadian colonist, William Hilton, in 1663. While he didn’t establish a new colony, he did leave behind his name on the most notable geographic feature he saw—Hilton Head Island.

  In 1665 King Charles II gave a charter to eight Lords Proprietors to establish a colony in the area, generously to be named Carolina after the monarch himself. (One of the Proprietors, Lord Ashley Cooper, would see not one but both rivers in the Charleston area named after him.) Remarkably, none of the Proprietors ever set foot in the colony they established for their own profit.

  Before their colony was even established, the Proprietors themselves set the stage for the vast human disaster that would eventually befall it. They encouraged slavery by promising that each colonist would receive 20 acres of land for every black male slave and 10 acres for every black female slave brought to the colony within the first year.

  In 1666 explorer Robert Sandford officially claimed Carolina for the king, in a ceremony on modern-day Seabrook or Wadmalaw Island. The Proprietors then sent out a fleet of three ships from England, only one of which, the Carolina, would make it the whole way. After stops in the thriving English colonies of Barbados and Bermuda, the ship landed in Port Royal. They were greeted without violence, but the fact that the local indigenous people spoke broken Spanish led the colonists to conclude that perhaps the site was too close to Spain’s sphere of influence for comfort. A Kiawah chief, eager for allies against the fierce, slave-trading Westo tribe, invited the colonists north to settle instead.

  So the colonists—148 of them, including three African slaves—moved 80 miles up the coast, and in 1670 pitched camp on the Ashley River at a place they dubbed Albemarle Point after one of thei
r lost ships. Living within the wooden palisades of the camp, the colonists farmed 10-acre plots outside the walls for sustenance. The Native Americans of the area were of the large and influential Cusabo tribe of the Creeks, and are sometimes even today known as the Settlement Indians. Subtribes of the Cusabo whose names live on today in South Carolina geography were the Kiawah, Edisto, Wando, Stono, and Ashepoo.

  A few years later some English colonists from the Caribbean colony of Barbados, which was beginning to suffer overpopulation, joined the Carolinians. The Barbadian influence, with an emphasis on large-scale slave labor and a caste system, would have an indelible imprint on the colony in years to come. Indeed, within a generation a majority of settlers in the new colony would be African slaves.

  By 1680, however, Albemarle Point was feeling growing pains as well, and the Proprietors ordered the site moved to Oyster Point at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers (the present-day Battery). Within a year Albemarle Point was completely abandoned, and the walled fortifications of Charles Town were built a few hundred yards up from Oyster Point on the banks of the Cooper River.

  The original Anglican settlers were quickly joined by various Dissenters, among them French Huguenots, Quakers, Congregationalists, and Jews. A group of Scottish Presbyterians established the short-lived Stuart Town near Port Royal in 1684. Recognizing this diversity, the colony in 1697 granted religious liberty to all “except Papists.” The Anglicans attempted a crackdown on Dissenters in 1704, but two years later Queen Anne stepped in and ensured religious freedom for all Carolinians (again with the exception of Roman Catholics, who wouldn’t be a factor in the colony until after the American Revolution).

  The English settlements quickly gained root as the burgeoning deerskin trade increased exponentially. Traders upriver, using an ancient network of trails, worked with local Native Americans, mostly Cherokees, to exploit the massive numbers of deer in the American interior.

  The Tuscarora War

  The Tuscarora War was a remarkably bloody conflict in present-day North Carolina between settler and Indian that had the result of cementing the control of white settlers on the region.

  In a similar story repeated throughout the region, the Tuscarora—demoralized by disease and tired of unscrupulous white traders—decided to take a stand and coordinate an attack. On Sept. 22, 1711, came the first attacks, near the town of Bath and the plantations on the Neuse and Trent rivers. Hundreds of settlers died.

  The response was even more devastating. Gov. Edward Hyde called out the militia, and a combined force of settlers and Indian allies attacked the southern Tuscarora Indians at Fort Narhantes in Craven County in 1712. Over 300 Tuscarora were killed. Unrest continued, resulting in a clash at Fort Neoheroka in Greene County in which over a thousand Tuscarora were killed or captured.

  By this time the tribe began emigrating to the New York area to escape further destruction. The remaining tribespeople signed a peace treaty in 1718, one of the terms of which was their removal to a tract of land in Bertie County.

  The Yamasee War

  South Carolina would have its own bloody conflict with Native Americans, also named after the tribe in opposition to the settlers.

  Within 20 years the English presence expanded throughout the Lowcountry to include Port Royal and Beaufort. Charles Town became a thriving commercial center, dealing in deerskins with independent traders in the interior and with foreign concerns from England to South America. Its success was not without a backlash, as the local Yamasee tribe of the Creek Indians became increasingly disgruntled at the settlers and their allies’ growing monopolies on deerskin and the slave trade.

  Slavery was a sad and common fact of life from the earliest days of white settlement in the region. Indians were the most frequent early victims, with not only white settlers taking slaves from the tribes, but the tribes themselves conducting slaving raids on each other, often selling their hostages to eager colonists.

  As rumors of war spread, on Good Friday, 1715, a delegation of six white Carolinians went to the Yamasee village of Pocataligo to address some of the tribe’s grievances in the hopes of forestalling violence. Their effort was in vain, however, as Yamasee warriors murdered four in their sleep, the remaining two escaping to sound the alarm. The treacherous attack signaled the beginning of the two-year Yamasee War, which would claim the lives of nearly 10 percent of the colony’s population and an unknown number of Native Americans—making it one of the bloodiest conflicts in American history.

  Energized and ready for war, the Yamasee attacked Charles Town itself and killed about 90 of the 100 or so white traders in the interior, effectively ending all commerce in the area. As Charles Town began to swell with refugees from the hinterland, water and supplies ran low and the colony was in peril.

  After an initially poor performance by the Carolina militia, a professional army—including armed African slaves—was raised. Well trained and well led, the new army more than held its own despite being outnumbered. A key alliance with local Cherokees was all the advantage the colonists needed to turn the tide for good. While the Cherokee never received the overt military backing from the settlers that they sought, they did garner enough supplies and influence to convince their Creek rivals, the Yamasee, to begin the peace process.

  The war-weary settlers, eager to get back to life and to business, were eager to negotiate with them, offering goods as a sign of their earnest intent. By 1717 the Yamasee threat had subsided and trade in the region began flourishing anew.

  No sooner had the Yamasee War ended, however, when a new threat emerged: the dread pirate Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard. Entering Charleston harbor in May 1718 with his flagship Queen Anne’s Revenge and three other vessels, he promptly plundered five ships and began a full-scale blockade of the entire settlement. He took a number of prominent citizens hostage before finally departing northward along the coast, thinking he had a royal pardon. However, a Royal Navy flotilla tracked him down near Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks and killed him.

  Slavery Expands

  While it was the Spanish who introduced slavery to America—of Indians as well as Africans—it was the English-speaking settlers who dramatically expanded the institution.

  For the colonists of South Carolina, the Blackbeard episode was the final straw. Already disgusted by the lack of support from the Lords Proprietors during the Yamasee War, the humiliation of the pirate blockade was too much to take. So to almost universal agreement in the colony, the settlers threw off the rule of the Proprietors and strenuously lobbied in 1719 to become a crown colony, an effort that came to final fruition in 1729. While this outward-looking and energetic place—whose name would morph into Charlestown, and then simply Charleston—was originally built on the backs of merchants, with the introduction of the rice and indigo crops in the early 1700s it would increasingly be built on the backs of slaves.

  For all the wealth gained through the planting of indigo, rice, and cotton seeds, another seed was sown by the Lowcountry plantation culture. The area’s total dependence on slave labor would soon lead to a disastrous war, a conflict signaled for decades to those smart enough to read the signs.

  By this time Charleston was firmly established as the key American port for the importation of African slaves, accounting for about 40 percent of the trade. As a result, the black population of the coast outnumbered the white population by more than three-to-one. The very real fear of violent slave uprisings had great influence over not only politics, but day-to-day affairs. These fears were eventually realized in the Stono Rebellion.

  On September 9, 1739, 20 slaves, led by an Angolan known only as Jemmy, met near the Stono River 20 miles southwest of Charleston. Marching with a banner that read “Liberty,” they seized guns from a store, killing the proprietors, with the eventual plan of marching all the way to Spanish Florida and sanctuary in the wilderness. On the way they burned seven plantations and killed 20 more whites. A militia eventually caught up with them, killing
44 escaped slaves and losing 20 of their own. The prisoners were decapitated and had their heads spiked on every milepost between the spot of that final battle and Charleston.

  The result was not only a 10-year moratorium on slave importation into Charleston, but a severe crackdown on the education of slaves—a move that would have damaging implications for generations to come.

  Spain Vanquished

  In 1729, Carolina was divided into north and south. In 1731, a colony to be known as Georgia, after the new English king, was carved out of the southern part of the Carolina land grant specifically to provide a military buffer to protect Carolina.

  A young English general, aristocrat, and humanitarian named James Edward Oglethorpe gathered together a group of Trustees—similar to Carolina’s Lords Proprietors—to take advantage of that grant. Like Carolina the Georgia colony also emphasized religious freedom. While to modern ears Charleston’s antipathy towards “papists” and Oglethorpe’s original ban of Roman Catholics from Georgia might seem incompatible with this goal, the reason was a coldly pragmatic one for the time: England’s two main global rivals, France and Spain, were both staunchly Catholic countries.

  In 1742 Oglethorpe defeated a Spanish force on St. Simons Island, Georgia in the Battle of Bloody Marsh. That clash marked the end of Spanish overtures on England’s colonies in America. With first the French and then the Spanish effectively shut off from the American East Coast, the stage was set for an internal battle between England and its burgeoning colonies across the Atlantic.

  REVOLUTION AND A NEW NATION

  It’s a persistent but inaccurate myth that the affluent elite on the southeastern coast were reluctant to break ties with England. While the coast’s cultural and economic ties to England were certainly strong, the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts combined to turn public sentiment against the mother country there as elsewhere in the colonies.