A Look at the Past: Colonial South Carolina

In 1663, a Barbadian planter by the name of John Colleton along with a group of seven other men received a charter from King Charles II of England granting them permission to establish a colony south of the Chesapeake and north of Spain’s territories in Florida (Roark). These men, also known as “proprietors”, hoped to ship settlers from Barbados and other colonies and, “. . . encourage them to develop a profitable export crop comparable to West Indian sugar and Chesapeake tobacco . . .” (Roark). At last, in 1670 the colony’s first permanent English settlement Charles Towne, later spelled Charleston, was established. A map of the location of Charles Town or Charleston can be seen in the Appendix on page four.
Just as the proprietors had anticipated, many of the early settlers to this new colony were from Barbados. Actually, “. . . Carolina was the only seventeenth-century English colony to be settled principally by colonists from other colonies rather than from England” (Roark). Also these Barbadian immigrants brought their slaves with them to what later became known as South Carolina. While there were indentured servants in the colony, black slaves quickly outnumbered them unlike in the Chesapeake. Soon more than a fourth of the early settlers were slaves and as the colony grew in population, attracting more settlers from Barbados, the black population multiplied (Roark). “By 1700, slaves made up about half the population of Carolina” (Roark). These slaves were needed desperately in the fields to grow the colony’s main export: rice.
The proprietors of the colony had hoped to grow profitable export crops of tobacco, cotton, indigo, and olives at first but all attempts to produce these crops were unsuccessful (Roark). Then in the...

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Roark, James L. "Chapter 3." The American Promise: A History of the United States. Vol. 1. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 95-96. Print.