Africans in the Low Country
Unlike the Virginia and Maryland colonies, the Carolina colony essentially imported a preexisting slave system from the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. King Charles II of England chartered the Carolina colony in 1663 and it quickly developed a thriving economy based on African, African-American, and Native American slave labor. Nearly half of the colony’s first white settlers came from Barbados in the eastern Caribbean where English landowners used African slaves on their sugarcane plantations. By the early 1700s, white plantation owners in Carolina relied almost exclusively on African and African-American slaves for labor on their rice and indigo plantations. Founded in 1670, Charles Town (later Charleston), soon became the colony’s capital, a center of culture, commerce, and political power rooted in slavery. During the eighteenth century, more than half of all enslaved Africans who came to British North America would pass through the city. (Carson, The Struggle for Freedom , 54–55)
In 1712, Carolina split into two colonies, North and South Carolina (See Figure 3–5). Later, in 1733, James Oglethorpe settled the Georgia colony with a charter from King George the II to the land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers. The Low Country, an area of fertile fields and swampy salt marshes, includes 79 barrier islands or “Sea Islands” along the Atlantic coast from southeastern North Carolina to the St. John River in northeast Florida.
Rivers and tidewater streams lace the coastal plain creating widespread wetland landscapes. For Africans arriving in the Low Country, the climate and the wetlands, rivers and winding streams, if not the pine forests, must have seemed familiar, reminiscent of the landscapes they left behind in the wetlands of West or West Central Africa.
From the very earliest years of the colony, 20 to 30% of the settlers were Africans of diverse ethnic origins. During the first twenty-five years, about one in every four settlers was African. By 1720, Africans had outnumbered the Europeans for more than a decade. South Carolina was the one British colony in North America in which settlement and African slavery went hand in hand (Wood 1974; South Carolina 2004a).Over 40% of the Africans reaching the British colonies before the American Revolution passed through South Carolina. Almost all of these enslaved people entered the Charleston port. After a brief quarantine on Sullivan’s Island they were sold in Charlestown, later called Charleston, slave markets (See Figure 3-6). Many of these enslaved people were almost immediately put to work in South Carolina’s rice fields. Writers of the period remarked that there was no harder, or unhealthier, work possible. In fact, colonial travelers described the Carolina rice fields as charnel houses for enslaved African-Americans (Wood 1974; Morgan 1998).
In spite of the high death toll, a fortuitous combination of geographic and demographic factors, allowed these