At the very end of the period of which we are now writing the MS. description of South Carolina by the engineer William De Brahm, which is preserved in the library of Harvard University, becomes of importance for its topographical account, and its plans and maps, executed with much care. It is included in a volume, containing also similar descriptions of Georgia and Florida, which portions are noticed in the following chapter. There are transcripts of this document which have an early date,[816] and some at least have a title different from the Harvard one, and are called A Philosophico-historico-Hydrography of South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida. From such a one, which is without the drawings, that portion relating to South Carolina was printed in London in 1856, by Mr. Plowden Charles Jennett Weston, in a volume of Documents connected with the History of South Carolina. An engraved map by De Brahm, Map of South Carolina and a part of Georgia, composed from surveys taken by Hon. Wm. Bull, Capt. Gascoigne, Hugh Bryan, and William De Brahm, published in four sheets by Jefferys, also appeared in the General Topography of North America and the West Indies, London, 1768. The map itself is dated Oct. 20, 1757, and gives tables of names of proprietors of land in Georgia and Carolina.[817]
The earliest account of the history of South Carolina cast in a sustained retrospective spirit is the anonymous Historical Account of the rise and progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia (London, 1779), which is known to have been prepared by Dr. Alexander Hewatt,—as his signature seems to fix the spelling of his name, though in the bibliographical records it appears under various forms.[818] Carroll, in reprinting the book in the first volume of his Historical Collections, added many emendatory notes.[819] The next year (1780) produced a far more important book, in respect to authority, in George Chalmers’ Political Annals of the Present United Colonies, from their Settlement to the Peace of 1763 (London), the first volume of which, however, was the only one published.[820] Chalmers, who was born in 1742, had practised law in Maryland, but he could not sympathize with the revolution, and at the outbreak returned to England, where in time (August, 1786) he became the clerk of the Board of Trade and died in office, May 31, 1825, at the age of eighty-two.
When Williamson was engaged on his History of North Carolina (i. p. 9), he applied for assistance to Chalmers, whose Political Annals shows that he had access to papers not otherwise known at that time, but was refused. Grahame, in his Colonial History of the United States (i. p. xii.), says he got ready access to Chalmers’ papers, but as he disclosed in his text little new, it was conjectured that before Grahame’s opportunity much had passed out of Chalmers’ hands. Sparks, in a letter (1856) to Mr. Swain, the historical agent of North Carolina, says of Chalmers that “he undoubtedly procured nearly the whole of his materials from the archives of the Board of Trade. His papers, after having been bound in volumes, were sold by his nephew a few years ago (1843) in London. I purchased six volumes of them, relating mostly to New England. They are not important, being memoranda, references, and extracts, used in writing his Annals.”[821] Two large volumes of Chalmers’ notes and transcripts also came into the hands of George Bancroft, and were entrusted by him to the care of Dr. Hawks and Mr. Rivers, when they were at work upon their histories of North and South Carolina. Bancroft, from his own use of them, and of Chalmers’ printed Annals, and speaking particularly of the Culpepper revolution (1678), in the original edition (ii. p. 162) of his United States, says: “Chalmers’ account in all cases of the kind must be received with great hesitancy. The coloring is always wrong; the facts usually perverted. He writes like a lawyer and disappointed politician, not like a calm inquirer. His statements are copied by Grahame,[822] obscured by Martin, and, strange to say, exaggerated by Williamson.” Dr. William Smyth, in his Lectures on Modern History, calls the work of Chalmers an “immense, heavy, tedious book, to explain the legal history of the different colonies; it should be consulted in all such points, but it is impossible to read it.”[823]
Near the close of the Revolutionary War Chalmers began the printing of another work, a succinct sketch of the history of the colonies. A very few copies exist of the first volume, which is without title or preliminary matter, and in the copy before us a blank leaf contains a manuscript title in Chalmers’ own handwriting as follows: An Introduction to the History of the Colonies, giving from the State Papers a comprehensive view of the origin of their Revolt. By George Chalmers, Vol. I. Printed in 1782, But suppressed. This volume, beginning with the reign of James I. and ending with that of George I., was the only one printed. The present copy[824] is marked as being the one from which Mr. Sparks printed an edition published in Boston in 1845,[825] in which the preface says that the original issue was suppressed, “owing to the separation of the colonies, which happened just at the season for publication, December, 1782, or the prior cause in April precedent, the dismission of a tory administration.”[826]
When Chalmers’ papers were sold, a manuscript continuation of this Introduction in the handwriting of the author was found, completely revised and prepared for the press. When Sparks reprinted the single volume already referred to, he added this second part to complete the work, and it was carefully carried through the press by John Langdon Sibley. Sparks in his introductory statements speaks of the book as “deduced for the most part from the State Papers in the British offices, or to speak with more precision, from the confidential correspondence of the governors and other officers of the Crown in the colonies.” In regard to its suppression he adds that “no political ends could now be answered by its publication, and it is probable that he thought it more politic to sacrifice the pride and fame of authorship than to run the hazard of offending the ministers.”[827]
Of the later histories it is most convenient to treat each province separately, as will be done in the annexed note.
