Now the cultivation of rice and the cultivation of indigo are both very unhealthy occupations. The work in the swamps is deadly to white men. But after 1713 negroes were brought to South Carolina in such great numbers that an athletic man could be had for £40 or less. Every such negro could raise in a single year much more indigo or rice than would repay the cost of his purchase, so that it was actually more profitable to work him to death than to take care of him. Assuming, then, that human nature in South Carolina was neither better nor worse than in other parts of the civilized world, we need not be surprised when told that the relations between master and slave were noticeably different from what they were in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The negroes of the southern colony were reputed to be more brutal and unmanageable than those to the northward, and for this there is a twofold explanation. In the first place, slaves newly brought from Africa, half-savage heathen, were less tractable than African slaves who had lived many years under kindly treatment among white people, and far less tractable than slaves of the next generation born in America. Such newcomers as had been tribal chiefs or elders in their country were noted as especially insolent and insubordinate.[294] In many respects the negro has proved quickly amenable to the softening influences of civilized life, and to the teachings of Christianity, however imperfectly apprehended. In the second place, the type of Virginia slavery was old-fashioned and patriarchal, while South Carolina slavery was of the modern and commercial type. The slaves on a Virginia plantation were like members of a great family, while in a South Carolina rice swamp their position was much more analogous to that of a gang of navvies. This circumstance was closely connected with a peculiarity of South Carolina life, in which it afforded a striking contrast to the slave states north of it. Except in the immediate neighbourhood of Charleston, few if any planters lived on their estates. The reason for this was doubtless the desire to escape the intense heat and unwholesome air of the newly tilled lowlands. The latitude of South Carolina is that of Morocco, and it was natural for settlers coming from the cool or chilly climates of France and England to seek such relief as the breezes of Charleston harbour could afford.[295] As a rule, the planters had houses in Charleston and dwelt there the year round, making occasional visits to their plantations, but leaving them in the meanwhile to be managed by overseers. Thus the slaves, while set to much harder labour than in Virginia, were in the main left subject to the uncurbed tyranny of underlings, which is apt to be a very harsh kind of tyranny. The diminutions in their numbers, whether due to hardship or to whatever cause, were repaired by fresh importations from Africa, so that there was much less improvement in their quality than under the milder patriarchal system. The dog that is used to kicks is prone to snarl and bite, and the slaves of South Carolina were an object of dread to their masters, all the more so because of their overwhelming numbers. Nothing can indicate more forcibly the social difference between the two Carolinas than the different ratios of their black to their white population. About 1760 the inhabitants of North Carolina were reckoned at 200,000, of whom one fourth were slaves; those of South Carolina at 150,000, of whom nearly or quite three fourths were slaves. In the former case the typical picture is that of a few black men raising tobacco and corn on the small plantation where the master lives; in the latter case it is that of an immense gang toiling in a rice swamp under the lash of an overseer. Care should always be taken not to exaggerate such contrasts, but after making all allowances the nature of the difference is here, I think, correctly indicated.
Negro insurrection of 1740.
In 1740, while war was going on between Spain and England, there was a brief but startling insurrection of slaves in South Carolina. It was suspected that Spanish emissaries were concerned in it. However that may have been, the occasion of such a war might well seem to the negroes to furnish a good opportunity. Under the lead of a fellow named Cato the insurgents gathered near Stono Inlet and began an indiscriminate massacre of men, women, children. The alarm was quickly given and the affair was soon brought to an end, though not until too many lives had been lost. The news arrived in Wilton while the people were attending church. It was the custom of the planters to carry rifles and pistols, and very little time was lost before Captain Bee led forth a well-equipped body of militia in quest of the rebels. They were overtaken in a large field, all in hilarious disorder, celebrating their bloody achievement with potations of rum; in which plight they were soon dispersed with slaughter, and their ringleaders were summarily hanged.[296]
Cruelties.
The habit of carrying fire-arms to church was part of a general system of patrol which grew out of the dread in which the planters lived. The chief business of the patrol was to visit all the plantations within its district at least once a fortnight and search the negro quarters for concealed weapons or stolen goods.[297] The patrolmen also hunted fugitives, and were authorized to flog stray negroes wherever found. The ordinary death penalty for the black man was hanging. Burning at the stake was not unknown, but, as I have already mentioned, there is one instance of such an execution in Massachusetts, and there are several in New York, so that it cannot be cited as illustrating any peculiarity of the South Carolina type of slavery. The most hideous instance of cruelty recorded of South Carolina is that of a slave who for the murder of an overseer was left to starve in a cage suspended to the bough of a tree, where insects swarmed over his naked flesh and birds had picked his eyes out before the mercy of death overtook him.[298] That such atrocities must have been condemned by public opinion is shown by the act of 1740, prescribing a fine of £700 current money for the wilful murder of a slave by his master or any other white man; £350 for killing him in a sudden heat of passion, or by undue correction; and £100 for inflicting mutilation or cruel punishment.[299]
Life in Charleston.
Contrast between the two Carolinas.
The circumstance that most of the great planters had houses in Charleston went along with the brisk foreign trade to make it a very important town, according to the American standards of those days. In 1776, with its population of 15,000 souls, it ranked as the fifth city of the United States. Charleston had a theatre, while concerts, balls, and dinner parties gave animation to its social life. It was a general custom with the planters to send their children to Europe for an education, and it was said that a knowledge of the world thus acquired gave to society in South Carolina a somewhat less provincial aspect than it wore in other parts of English America.[300] The sharpest contrast, however, was with its next neighbour. As South Carolina may have been in some respects the most cosmopolitan of the colonies south of Pennsylvania, so on the other hand North Carolina was certainly the most sequestered and provincial. As I observed at the beginning of this chapter, for the development of the frontier or backwoods phase of American life two conditions were requisite: first, the struggle with the wilderness; secondly, isolation from European influences. This combination of conditions was not realized in the case of the first settlers of Virginia and Maryland, of the Puritans in New England, or the Dutch in New Netherland, or the Quakers in Pennsylvania. In all these cases there was more or less struggle with the wilderness, but the contact with European influences was never broken. With North Carolina it was different; the direct trade with England was from the outset much less than that of the other colonies. For a time its chief seaport was Norfolk in Virginia; European ideas reached it chiefly through slow overland journeys; and it was practically a part of Virginia’s backwoods. On the other hand, South Carolina, focussing all its activities in the single seaport of Charleston, was eminently accessible to European influences. Its life was not that of a wilderness frontier, like its northern neighbour. But its military position, with reference to the whole Atlantic seaboard, was that of an English march or frontier against the Spaniards in Florida and the West Indies.
The contrast above indicated applies only to lowland South Carolina, the only part with which the earlier decades of the eighteenth century are concerned. At that time the highlands of both Carolinas remained in the possession of the Cherokees, so that they have nothing to do with my comparison. At a later time that whole highland region became a wilderness frontier, the scene of the civilized white man’s backwoods life. All the way, indeed, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, along the Appalachian chain, there was a strong similarity of conditions and of life, in marked contrast with the divergencies along the coast region, in stepping from Pennsylvania into Maryland, thence into Virginia, and so on; but that life along the coast which approached most nearly to the life of the interior wilderness was to be seen about Albemarle and Pamlico sounds.