Slavery and Race in South Carolina

The history of South Carolina, and of the United States as a whole, is inseparable from slavery and race.  Neither are easily discussed.=

Slavery is a very ancient concept.  The very first written documents from ancient Sumer and Akkad mention slaves and slavery in such a way as to suggest that they were taken for granted and was already ancient when people started writing things down five thousand years ago.  For example, the Code of Hammurabi (1754 BC) makes a distinction between the penalties for killing a free man (death) and killing a slave (a substantial fine).  

It seems likely that slavery did not exist before the Agricultural Revolution (about fifteen thousand years ago).  Before people started farming, they found food and shelter and status by hunting and killing wild animals and by gathering nuts, berries, roots, mushrooms, and small animals (like edible insects, snakes, and lizards) and honey.  The very few hunting and gathering communities still in existence in the world tend to be nomadic and small.  They have very little property and no sense that a bit of land belongs to them as individuals—though they often claim and are willing to defend a vast stretch of forest or desert as belonging to their community.  Because they are nomadic—regularly picking up and moving to another spot where the hunting and gathering might be better—hunters and gatherers do not need or want a lot of stuff.  Stuff (what better word is there for it?) has to be carried around.   The most important things they carry with them are relationships, skills, and stories.  All three are vital to any community’s continued existence, but neither take up any space.

Nomadic hunters and gatherers also seem to spend very little time working.  Hunting, fishing, and gathering may take skill and patience, but they don’t take a lot of time.  Most so-called “primitive” tribes in the modern world spend a few hours a day gathering food and similar chores and the rest of the day playing games, telling stories, and hanging out with friends.  This was probably true of ancient hunter-gatherer tribes as well.

Agriculture provided the ancient communities who invented it with a lot more food and did away with the constant need to move around (except for cattle, sheep, and goat herders, who had to move their herds and flocks around in order to find enough grass to keep the livestock fed).  However, agriculture requires a lot of work.  Work is less pleasant—usually—than hunting or gathering, so it is not surprising that somewhere between the time agriculture was invented in the Ancient Near East (15000 years ago) and the time people started recording things in writing (about 5000 years ago) a small number of people found ways to compel a larger number of people to work for them.

Slavery in the ancient world took a lot of forms, none of them particularly pleasant for the slaves.  Some people became enslaved because they owed a debt they could not pay.  Some people managed to pay off such debts by selling their children or even their wives into slavery.  Some people became slaves because they had broken the rules of the community and slavery was a punishment—the loss of freedom was as much a punishment as the unpaid work.  Others became slaves because they had been captured by a neighboring tribe or nation and brought home as a prize of war.

Though some slaves had it better than others, no one ever wanted to become a slave, and virtually all slaves desired their freedom more than any other good.  

Slavery in the ancient world also had nothing to do with race.  In fact, it is not clear that the idea of race even existed in the ancient world.  The Greeks and Romans tended to think of everyone who could not speak Greek or Latin as “barbarians” since whenever those scary blonde people from the north talked, all the civilized listener could hear was “barbarbarbar.”  A barbarian was someone who couldn’t speak a civilized language, and a captured barbarian could be enslaved without hesitation.

Race does not even seem to have existed as an idea before the sixteenth century (about five hundred years ago).  People spoke different languages and sometimes looked differently and had different religions, but “race” is the idea that different groups of people are biologically different in the same way that cats and dogs are different.  The idea simply never came up.  People from Africa were Africans.  Blonde, blue eyed people from the north were Saxons or Germans.  All, except for those who troubled themselves to learn Greek or Latin, were barbarians.  

During the European Middle Ages, the vast majority of men and women were not slaves but serfs.  They were part of the landscape, and while they had a very few rights—they could not be sold, for example—their purpose in life was to work on behalf of the noble family who held the land.  The nobility held their power from the king.  The king ruled in the name of God.  No one was completely free.  Everyone owed obedience to someone.  The only exceptions were outlaws—like Robin Hood—and their freedom meant that they were a threat to all of society. Being an outlaw meant being outside of the protection of the law.  Anyone who came across an outlaw had every right to kill him or her on sight, which made the life of Robin Hood and his merry men a good bit less merry.

The Spanish and other explorers who arrived in the Americas after 1492 came from a world in which everyone  was a servant of someone. Free people were a threat to the Spanish social order, and the Indians seemed dangerously free. Just as they would have done had they discovered unclaimed horses, they decided to make servants of them.  

The Indians were primitive in that they did not have the steel tools, the guns, the great ships, and other technologies the Europeans had enjoyed for  fairly short period of time before 1492.  As you probably remember, Viking explorers, settlers, and traders made their way to the new world before the year 1000, and established several small settlements, none of which lasted for more than a few years.  The Indians of the east coast of Canada were willing, it seems, to trade with these bearded strangers, but would not put up with settlers moving into their territory.  Because the Vikings’ tools and weapons were not much more effective than those of the Skraelings (as the Vikings called the Indians), the Vikings abandoned their efforts at colonization, though they did continue trading with the Indians, a relationship that gave advantages to both groups.

But the Spanish had advantages in the sixteenth century that the Vikings had not had in the eleventh.  In the intervening years, ships had grown bigger and bigger and thus were able to carry far more people than the Viking longships.  The Spanish (and other European settlers) had guns—only recently developed, and not very effective at the time.  The Spanish also brought horses (which had not existed in the Americas since the end of the last ice age), and a fierce determination to conquer this new land and its people.

The Spanish enslaved thousands of native people, using them to do every kind of unpleasant work, from mining silver to growing corn and sugar cane.  But the Indians were extremely susceptible to European diseases.  America before 1492 had been a markedly healthy place.  The diseases that had made life short and unpleasant in Europe and Asia had not existed in America before 1492.  When diseases began crossing the Atlantic in what would become known as the Columbian Exchange, Native Americans began dying in numbers it is difficult to imagine.  Perhaps as many as nine out of every ten Native Americans—millions of people at any rate—became infected with measles, diphtheria, small pox, and plague.  Europeans and Africans had been exposed to these diseases for generations, and while they got sick from them, most did not die.  Indians died.  Sometimes, entire towns were wiped out with no one left to mourn for the dead.

The enslavement of Indians did not stop, but as long as the Spanish (and the English) wanted the hard, unpleasant work of farming and mining done by someone else, they were going to have to look elsewhere for labor.  They looked to Africa.

The English, when they first began farming in Virginia in the seventeenth century, looked first to their own countrymen for labor.  In the 1600s and 1700s, there were many thousands of impoverished English, Irish, and Scottish men and women who could be persuaded to abandon home and family to cross the Atlantic (a ten-week voyage at best), and become an indentured servant for a farmer or businessman in America.  Most contracts for indenture were for seven years.  A skilled blacksmith or other tradesman might make a better deal since he had valuable skills to exchange for that ten-week voyage.  Young women also came as indentured servants.  Most became household servants, doing the washing, cooking, cleaning, and other chores of a “maid of all work” in the long eras before washing machines, toaster ovens, and vacuum cleaners.

At the end of seven years, if they survived (not a guarantee) the indentured servant received his or her freedom, a suit of clothes, and a little money to get started.  A few did well, buying land and getting their own servants.  But many remained poor and troublesome, unable to buy good land, unable to compete with indentured labor, unable to fulfill the promise of freedom and prosperity that America was supposed, even in those days before the Revolution, to represent.

So, not surprisingly, some of these indentured servants, who looked and spoke exactly like everyone else in the British colonies, caused trouble.  Some ran away, leaving their obligation to work off their seven years of labor unpaid.  Sometimes, young women became pregnant, burdening their master with the cost of raising a child, a cost which had to be paid back by the servant with time added to her contract.  Sometimes masters were cruel and servants complained to the courts.  They were subjects of the King of England, after all, and had every right to the protection of the king’s laws.  Such complaints rarely accomplished much, but they were embarrassing and costly for the master.  

But such was not the case with servants from Africa.  In late August of 1619, only eleven years after the English colony of Jamestown was founded in the Chesapeake Bay region of Virginia, a Dutch ship dropped anchor near the settlement.  John Rolfe, best known for marrying a young Indian princess named Pocahontas, wrote a brief report of the visit to Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the Lords Proprietor of the colony.

About the latter end of August, a Dutch man-of-war of the burden of 160 tons arrived at Point-Comfort. . . He brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, w(hi)ch the Governor and Cape Merchant bought for victuals (wherof he was in great need as he pr(e)tended) at the best and easiest rates they could. . .

(John Rolfe, Letter to Sir Edwin Sandys, January 1619/20). https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj8.vc03/?sp=265 )

Rolfe seems to be passing off this incident as of minor interest.  A Dutch warship was running low on supplies and so it stopped off at the Virginia colony to see if it could trade “20 and odd Negroes” for some groceries.  We know nothing about where these men and women came from or what they were doing on a Dutch warship.  Nonetheless, their labor was welcomed and they became the first (as far as we know) African slaves to come ashore in the future United States.

They came ashore in something of a legal vacuum, as no laws existed to define their status in either England or Virginia.  Had these unfortunate Africans been treated as indentured servants—which did have a place in English law and tradition—they might have worked several years—or even a lifetime—but they would have died free, and their children would have been free.  

If this occurred to anyone at the time, we have no record of it.  No one went to court to clarify their status.  They were neither Indians (whose rights were protected by agreements with chief Powhatan and the fact that the Indians vastly outnumbered whites) nor English.  They were, by common consent, slaves.  No one troubled to record their names.  They were, we can assume, put to work cultivating Virginia’s new cash crop, tobacco.  

That was the beginning of race-based slavery in British North America, but it had already developed as a way of life in the Caribbean.

Today, the islands of the Caribbean are thought of, when they are thought of at all, as a favored vacation spot, complete with sandy beaches, palm trees, bright blue waters and reggae music.

But the Caribbean’s story has a dark side that ties it closely to American slavery and to South Carolina.

It starts with sugar.  It is hard to believe, but until fairly recently in human history, sugar was virtually unknown in the human diet.  It is not as if people missed having things that are sweet, since we don’t really ever miss what we don’t have.  Honey bees provided the occasional jolt of sweetness, and some fruits—like grapes—are naturally sweet, but for the most part, the European diet was not all that interesting, having only a bit of salt to enliven the porridge and a an occasional bit of garlic to add flavor to a meal.

And then the sugarcane plant came along.  Native to southeast Asia, sugarcane is rich in sugar.  When the stalks are crushed, the sap runs out.  When the sap is boiled down, it becomes a thick syrup that, when dried out completely, becomes the stuff that gives us diabetes.  

Soon enough, sugar joined the pantheon of products that are not really food but that people would pay through the nose to have in their lives:  tobacco, sugar, coffee, and tea.  We could add chocolate to the list, but chocolate really is food.  

Sugar was first introduced to the Caribbean in the early sixteenth century, where its cultivation spread quickly and profitably.  Because the work of growing sugarcane and processing it into sugar and molasses  in a tropical climate—the only place it will grow—is brutally demanding, no one could be found who would freely take on the job.  Enslaved Indians either ran away from the brutal labor of the sugar plantation or died.  Gradually, a solution to the labor problem developed:  African slavery.

Slavery had been part of west African society for centuries.  As in the ancient world, people became slaves as a result of warfare, or by being unable to pay debts, or by bad luck.  Generally, slaves were part of the family and the community in which they found themselves, and if their fate was not to be envied, it was not horrific either.  

When Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch merchant ships began making regular stops along the coast of west Africa—initially to trade woven cloth and other European goods for African ivory, they discovered that they could also purchase men (and, less often, women).  These enslaved Africans could then be transported across the Atlantic and sold in South America and the Caribbean, often in exchange for sugar and molasses.  The molasses could be fermented and distilled into rum (usually in New England or Britain), which was shipped to Africa where it was exchanged for more slaves.

Europeans did not leave the coast or the trading posts they set up there.  Coastal tribes who had been selling ivory to Europeans for years, started buying slaves from interior tribes to sell to the European traders.  As the demand for labor in the Caribbean increased, so did the value of slaves.  Communities that had no slaves to sell started making war with their neighbors for the sole purpose of collecting slaves.  West African societies became corrupted by the slave trade.  No one was safe, and, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, families and communities were torn apart by the demand for unfree labor.

Once transported to the Caribbean, these African prisoners were put to work cultivating sugarcane, cutting the canes when they ripened, and processing the canes into sugar.  So brutal were the conditions, so profitable was the sugar industry, that little attention was paid to the well-being of the laborers.  Most died within five or six years of arriving, broken down by hard work, poor food, brutal conditions, and disease.  As more slaves died, they were replaced by more Africans captured and shipped aboard slave ships to the Caribbean.

By comparison, those Africans who were shipped to the Carolinas had a much better chance of surviving, starting families, and carrying on at least some of the traditions of their African homelands.  

Slaves were bought and sold throughout the British Colonies before the Revolutionary War.  In the New England and Middle Colonies, slavery played a minor role in the colonial economies.  In Virginia, most slaves worked growing tobacco—a labor intensive occupation but most commonly done on a small scale.

But in South Carolina, especially in the Sea Islands and Lowcountry, the institution of slavery was modeled much more strongly after Caribbean slavery, especially from the Caribbean island of Barbados.

This connection between Carolina Colony—and Charleston in particular—and Barbados requires some explanation.  

For a brief history of the settlement of Barbados by the English, read this article at barbados.org.  

A couple of things are worth noticing here.  The first English settlement on the island was in 1627.  Three years later, in 1630, sugarcane was introduced to the island.  It grew well and quickly took over the island.  Just as quickly, the demand for workers to plant, cultivate, harvest and process the cane into sugar, far outran the supply of workers.  Therefore, the Barbadian planters (the English colonists who owned the sugar plantations) began to offer poor  people throughout the British Isles a chance to come to Barbados.  If they worked in the sugar fields for a few years (seven was standard), they would receive their freedom and the implied promise that they too could become sugar planters with the chance to become wealthy.  Because labor was always in short supply, some “recruiters” did not bother with the contract.  They arranged for young men and women to be kidnapped from their homes and families in England, Ireland, and Scotland and transported in chains to Barbados where they too were put to work as if they were indentured servants.  But even these victims of kidnapping could hope to eventually become free land owners themselves.

It never worked out that way in Barbados.  Barbados is 166.4 square miles.  If it were a perfect square (which it is not even remotely), it would be a little less than 13 miles on each side. Within a very few years of the first English settlement, all of that land that could be cultivated was claimed and put to growing sugarcane.  The rest was worthless as far as the settlers were concerned.  Indentured servants who survived the brutal labor demanded of them in the cane fields found that, after their indenture was up, they had no job and no chance to claim any land for themselves.  

From the point of view of the planters, a better solution than importing white laborers from Britain was to be found in importing black slaves from Africa.  Because England had no laws regarding slavery, the Barbadians could make the laws up as they went along.  And the laws they made up were brutal in the extreme.  And because the colonists in Barbados were the first English colonists to develop slave codes, they provided a model for colonial legislatures in the rest of British North America.

The Barbados Slave Code of 1688 was based on a simple assumption.  White settlers were citizens of England, subjects of the English king, and protected in their persons and property by the laws of England.  Slaves were not.  Slaves were personal property or “chattel” in legal terms.  Slaves had no rights, and while slave owners were required to provide food and clothing and reasonable care to their slaves, the slaves themselves had no rights to demand such things.  Slave owners could punish their slaves in any manner they thought right, and if a slave died as a result of punishment, the slave owner suffered no penalty at all.  It was his or her property, after all, that had been killed, nothing more.

Planters in Barbados had it made.  They were making a product everybody wanted.  They had absolute control over their workers.  There was only one problem.  Bermuda is not very big.  Once the land was divided into plantations, the tropical forest was cut down and the sugar cane planted, there was no room for anyone else to get rich.  

But, in the Spring of 1670, a solution presented itself.  About 150 settlers from England came ashore in Charleston Harbor.  The soon began planting tobacco, rice, indigo and other commodities that everybody wanted.  A year later, these founders of Carolina Colony were joined by settlers and slaves from Barbados.  South Carolina became a copy of Barbadian society with a lot more room to expand, and the same slave codes that governed Barbados would quickly be applied to Carolina.

South Carolina would not produce much sugarcane, but the climate of the Sea Islands and Lowcountry do lend themselves to growing rice, indigo, tobacco and cotton.  

Thus, the story of South Carolina begins with slavery.  New England colonists, especially the Puritans, came to those unwelcoming shores with plans to build a “city on a hill” in which they could live out their lives in the way they believe God intended them to, and thus be a model to the whole world of how people can live together.  The Puritans were far from perfect, but their small farms were worked by members of the community.  Slavery existed, but on a small scale.  Slaves were at the bottom of the social order, but unlike slaves in the Carolinas and Bermuda, they were part of the community.

English settlers came to the Charleston intent on getting rich, and their wealth would be produced by the labor of others—indentured servants or African slaves. Because of the Barbadian influence, chattel slavery gradually replaced indentured servitude.  

By the time of the American Revolution, the same men who were willing to risk their lives in the defense of their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, gave not a second thought to the enslaved men and women of color laboring on their South Carolina plantations.