The Evolution of White Supremacy in Carolina (part V)

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 beging implimenting policies to encourage European immigration and try 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 over the even more basic issue of physical intimacy.” 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.

NOTE: I hope OD readers are enjoying the 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.