Authors: Kevin Phillips
In contrast to early Virginians, Carolinians spent little time searching for the South Sea on the other side of the Blue Ridge. They had other things to watch for, notably invading Spaniards. Through the sixteenth-century explorations of Hernando de Soto, Spain had a strong earlier claim to the region and declined to recognize the validity of any English grant. If Massachusetts and Connecticut manned New England’s northern frontier against French Canada, South Carolina took on the role of subtropical frontier guard against incursions from Spanish Florida. By the early 1700s,
that responsibility had grown to include blocking the commercial and military advance of France into the lower Mississippi and Tennessee river valleys. Here South Carolina remained preeminent even after Georgia became British North America’s new southernmost frontier.
The English colonies in the Caribbean already grew exotic crops and worried about Spain, so it is fitting they furnished Carolina’s first settlers. According to historian Walter Edgar, “between 1670 and 1690 about 54 percent of the whites who immigrated came from Barbados,” although that category often included emigrants from other islands. Another adds that “the Lowndes and Rawlins [came] from St. Kitts, the Lucases and Perrys from Antigua, the Meylers and Whaleys from Jamaica, and the La Mottes from Grenada.”
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If pride, hot blood, and quick tempers were West Indian attributes, wealth was another: “Virginia might be the Old Dominion and Massachusetts the Bible Commonwealth, but Barbados was something more tangible: the richest colony in English America.”
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In fact, South Carolina managed to do almost as well, despite sugar’s inability to thrive in the low country. By the middle of the eighteenth century, two other cultivable crops, rice and indigo, had put the province on the road to riches, and by 1774, the comparative private wealth statistics for major American urban areas were stunning. These are estimates, in pounds sterling, for mean aggregate wealth per inventoried estate: Charleston—£2,338; Philadelphia—£397; Suffolk County, Massachusetts (Boston)—£312; and New York—£278.
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Even if these figures exaggerate the differences, the comparison remains apt.
In the early eighteenth century, the colony profited from its border watchdog role. “South Carolina legislative committees,” noted one historian, “used the Spanish menace as full or partial justifications for [currency and fiscal] policies which otherwise probably would not have passed the scrutiny of British officials.”
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The early military ventures were generally successful—St. Augustine, Pensacola, and other Spanish settlements were taken and burned, and Spanish retaliation against Charleston headed off. The Carolinians also built up Indian alliances and trade networks. Then by the 1750s, the menace shifted to French power, advancing eastward and discomforting South Carolina in Alabama and Tennessee while menacing Virginian interests in the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. The South Carolina Commons House of Assembly, with its longtime role in guiding and funding its colony’s military expeditions, took a prominent role again during the 1756–1763 war.
For unusual reasons—South Carolina’s subtropical, humid climate had a decaying effect on gunpowder and munitions supplies—the House had for years appointed a special gunpowder committee. It oversaw the adequacy of provincial weapons and gunpowder, record keeping with respect to imported gunpowder, and the provisioning of South Carolina troops.
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This oversight body had a large membership during the French war, which continued in peacetime. We may wonder if the expertise developed by so many legislators might not have guided Charleston’s extraordinary 1775 prowess in obtaining gunpowder from all points of the compass. William H. Drayton chaired the province’s Secret Committee in 1775, and his son, who edited his memoirs, claimed that it was through this powder “that the American arms penetrated into Canada and the siege of Boston was continued.”
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Equally to the point, South Carolina’s influence extended far beyond her nominal borders. Charleston was the chief port and commercial center for both Georgia and part of North Carolina, notably the subtropical Cape Fear section adjacent to South Carolina and settled from there. As the Revolution approached in 1774 and 1775, Wilmington and the Cape Fear district became the center of patriot activity in the province, as we will pursue in
Chapter 25
. Georgia, as a new colony in the 1730s, had been tutored by South Carolina, and 1776 saw a movement to unite them, but Georgia ultimately declined.
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Less well known, but perhaps just as important, were the ties between New England and South Carolina. Many low-country planters summered in Newport, Rhode Island, an easy trip by sea. Few Charlestonians lived in Boston, but Massachusetts had contributed a substantial contingent of residents to the South Carolina capital. Through much of the eighteenth century, the biggest congregation in Charleston worshiped at the Circular Congregational Church, initially ministered by New Englanders. Architectural guides to Charleston invariably include the Circular Church graveyard, with many works by Massachusetts carvers as part of “the richest repository of eighteenth-century iconic gravestones in the country.”
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One persistent reason why peeved royal governors dissolved the Commons House of Assembly was its members’ frequent responsiveness to Boston viewpoints. Royal Lieutenant Governor William Bull, a Charleston insider, once complained of how Carolina minds had been “poisoned with the principles which were imbibed and propagated from Boston and Rhode Island.”
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A final enigma in the political pathology of pre-Revolutionary South Carolina is this: Why would so wealthy a colonial elite be so willing to jettison the political and social systems, the British markets and government subsidies (for indigo and naval stores), that made it rich? Arguably, from a mixture of West Indian temperament, a rich colony’s presumption of invulnerability, and a pique at seeming British lack of respect. West Indian sugar nabobs were admired in London for their wealth, many lived in England, and dozens were members of Parliament. South Carolina rice planters, although many were schooled in England, were not wealthy enough to ignore their plantations and live there. To add further insult, when London filled high positions in Charleston—admiralty judge, councillor, or attorney general—Britons were typically named, not Carolinians. Virginians, including George Washington, had their own pique at Britain, but the anger of the low-country elite seems different.
In 1775, by way of conclusion, the four vanguard provinces had an importance beyond their obvious size and clout. They had half of the population and more than half of the wealth. But in political forwardness, historical gravitas, and overt confrontation, their share of the thirteen-colony total might have been 75 to 80 percent. They provided over three quarters of the soldiers fighting the British that year, largely because of Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Still, if this emphasis is a four-colony tale, the book’s overall focus is on six provinces. In addition to the aggressive quartet, we will emphasize the two wavering, skittish battleground colonies of Pennsylvania and New York. Concentrating on these six would be less appropriate in dealing with the entirety of the war, but it encompasses most of the political and military action in 1775. In the
next chapter
, which deals with the role of ethnicity and religion in launching the Revolution, the four vanguard colonies stand out again for being relatively cohesive. New York and Pennsylvania, with their complicated interplay of ethnicity and religion, turn out to be the slowest to agree to full-fledged independence.
Religious doctrine and rhetoric…contributed in a fundamental way to the coming of the American Revolution and its final success. In an age of political moderation, when many colonials hesitated at the brink of civil war, patriotic clergymen told their congregations that failure to oppose British tyranny would be an offense in the sight of Heaven. Where political theory advised caution, religious doctrine demanded action. By turning colonial resistance into a righteous cause, and by carrying the message to all ranks and in all parts of the colonies, ministers did the work of secular radicalism and did it better.
Patricia Bonomi,
Under the Cope of Heaven,
1990
Where is the man to be found at this day, when we see…bishops with indifference, who will believe that the apprehension of Episcopacy contributed fifty years ago, as much as any other cause to arouse the attention, not only of the inquiring mind, but of the common people, and urge them to close thinking on the constitutional authority of parliament over the colonies?
Former president John Adams, 1815
T
aken together, religion and ethnicity offer the best yardsticks of how Americans chose sides in the political and military clashes that became the Revolution. That is true from the Carolina backcountry through the middle colonies to the white-steepled towns of New England. Not that adequate detail can always be found.
Besides which, it’s often difficult to disentangle which identity was the motivating factor. Was being Scotch-Irish the key or being a staunch
Presbyterian? Sometimes a political or military service choice might reflect both influences.
Ethnicity was a major factor in eighteenth-century military recruitment or service, which provides a useful introduction to the era’s tendency to think in such terms. To state the obvious, both individual soldiers and military units taking part in the Revolution were frequently identified by ethnic or national origins. The name-calling could be venomous: pillaged New Jersey farmers cursing Hessian hirelings or British officers damning “black regiments” of somberly clad Yankee Congregational preachers. But some of the labeling was matter-of-fact. If Pennsylvania was to have a Germanspeaking battalion, it would perform best if everyone spoke or understood German. And when dissident Separate Baptists in Southside Virginia, making a political bargain, enlisted together in a company in which one of their lay preachers would hold frequent services, Revolutionary officials were ready to oblige.
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British recruitment for service in North America was consciously ethnic and religious. Because relatively few Englishmen would enlist in the army to fight English-speaking colonials, many of the men raised came from the Celtic fringes of Ireland or Scotland. Many were Catholics, now a prime target for recruiters. More numerous still were the “Hessian” mercenaries hired by the British Crown from a half dozen north German Protestant states allied by treaty or subsidy to George III and the House of Hanover. Patriots commented bitterly on these arrangements.
For an English monarch to use foreign troops to put down English-speaking subjects in the seventeenth or eighteenth century was innately unpopular. When American colonists criticized the king’s use of Hessians or Scots Highlanders, they did so within a historical framework shared and pointedly voiced in early 1776 by the pro-American minority in Britain’s Parliament. “Is there one of your Lordships,” said Lord Camden, “who does not perceive most clearly that the whole [arrangement] is a mere mercenary bargain on one side, and the sale of human blood on the other?”
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Others in Parliament questioned the cost and the dubious constitutionality of the king’s close relationships with Hanover and other German states.
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Stuart kings had been attacked for using Irish Catholic soldiers on English soil in the 1640s and 1680s. Criticism also ensued when Hanoverian kings introduced hired German troops into Britain, as in 1745 and 1756.
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Members of Parliament complained about the monarch’s costly web of troop-hire arrangements and subsidies to north German states. Such was
the sensitivity that the nineteenth-century English historian W. A. Lecky could write that his country’s 1776 conduct “in hiring German mercenaries to subdue the essentially English population beyond the Atlantic, made reconciliation hopeless, and the Declaration of Independence inevitable.”
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The ethnic makeup of British North America in 1775 also complicated Patriot enlistment and mobilization. Over one third of the colonists taking up arms for “the rights of Englishmen” were German, Dutch, Irish, Scottish, or Scotch-Irish. Some never assumed that they enjoyed the “rights of Englishmen,” cherishing instead Old World ties and relationships to Dutch or German state churches (which often made them Loyalists). Ethnic and religious identifications were usually central to colonists’ views and loyalties, and they cut in many ways.
Ethnicity and Religion: Germans, Irish, and Scotch-Irish
Although they were only a small minority in New England, Germans, Irish, and Scotch-Irish—inaccurate as those labels might be—probably represented 40 to 50 percent of Patriot enlistments in the middle colonies, which produced frequent epithets and references. In Pennsylvania, the singular prominence of the Scotch-Irish in both the Patriot cause and the American army prompted Quakers and Anglicans to grumble about the Revolution as a Scotch-Irish, Irish, or Presbyterian war. British officers constantly repeated the charge, with one calling the people of the Carolina Waxhaws district “universally Irish and universally disaffected,” although they were in fact Scotch-Irish.
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Even General Charles Lee of the Continental Army openly grumbled about Pennsylvania’s political “Mac-ocracy,” which he understood to mean Scotch-Irish Presbyterian.
Germans in turn became so unpopular in Pennsylvania, as their immigration peaked in the 1750s, that Benjamin Franklin had wondered, “Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements…Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us?”
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However, as their ranks grew, political criticism trailed off.