Colin Woodard (14 page)

 

Like Tidewater's aristocracy, many of the planters had ancestors who had fought for the king in the English Civil War, and they embraced the trappings and symbolism of the British nobility, if not the social responsibilities that were supposed to attend them. Thrilled by the end of Puritan rule at home, they had named Carolina and Charleston for the restored king, Charles II. The Barbadian-born aristocracy trumpeted their genetic association with English knights and nobles by displaying coats of arms on their imported French porcelain. These often included the heraldic symbol for a younger son: a crescent moon tilted with the horns to the wearer's right. This device was later incorporated into the South Carolinian flag and worn as an emblem on the uniforms of its revolutionary-era military forces, loyalist and rebel alike.
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While not particularly religious, the planters embraced the Anglican Church as another symbol of belonging to the establishment. Locke's charter for the colony had guaranteed freedom of religion—Sephardic Jews and French Huguenots emigrated to the region in great numbers—but the elite overturned these provisions in 1700, giving themselves a monopoly on church and state offices. Their Anglican religious orientation also gave the Deep South elite unfettered access to London high society and the great English universities and boarding schools, milieus generally denied to Puritans, Quakers, and other dissenters. Whether English or French in origin, the Deep South's planters would also come to embrace the Tidewater gentry's notion of being descendants of the aristocratic Normans, lording over their colony's crass Anglo-Saxon and Celtic underclass.
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The low country's wealth depended entirely on a massive army of enslaved blacks, who outnumbered whites nine to one in some areas. To keep this supermajority under control, the planters imported Barbados's brutal slave code almost word for word. Their 1698 law declared Africans to have “barbarous, wild, savage natures” that made them “naturally prone” to “inhumanity,” therefore requiring tight control and draconian punishments. The law's provisions focused on guaranteeing that no slave escaped. Runaways were to be severely whipped (after a first attempt), branded with the letter R on the right cheek (after the second), whipped and have one ear chopped off (after the third), castrated (after the fourth), and then either have an Achilles tendon severed or, simply, be executed (after a fifth attempt). Masters who failed to mete out the required punishments were fined, and anyone—white or black—who helped the runaways was subject to fines, whipping, or even death. The oligarchs reserved far more severe punishments for runaways who attempted “to go off from this province in order to deprive his master of mistress of his service.” Such slaves were executed, along with any whites found assisting them. Capital punishment was mandated if a slave “maimed and disabled” a white person. If a white person out of “wantonness or only of bloody mindedness or cruel intention” were to kill a slave, he would be fined a mere £50, about the cost of a good gentleman's wig. But tellingly, if the murderer happened to be a servant, he would be given a far stronger sentence: thirty-nine lashes, three months in prison, and four years indentured servitude to the murdered slave's owner. Slaves were not allowed to leave their plantations without a pass from their masters, and should they have been caught stealing so much as a loaf of bread they were whipped forty times; repeat offenders had their ears cut off, or their nostrils slit, and, on the fourth conviction, were put to death. But the code was not without compassion . . . for the slave owner. If a slave was killed while being apprehended, castrated, or whipped, the master would be compensated from the state treasury. The act also allowed for slaves to be baptized because “the Christian religion which we profess obliges us to wish well to the souls of all men,” but it made clear that such an act “may not be made a pretense to alter any man's property” by releasing slaves from bondage. Such provisions would remain on the books until the end of the Civil War, and served as the model for the slave codes of the future governments of the Deep South.
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Of course, the Deep South wasn't the only part of North America practicing full-blown slavery after 1670. Every colony tolerated the practice. But most of the other nations were societies with slaves, not slave societies per se. Only in Tidewater and the Deep South did slavery become the central organizing principle of the economy and culture. There were fundamental differences between these two slave nations, however, which illuminate a subtle difference in the values of their respective oligarchies.
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We've seen how Tidewater's leaders, in search of serfs, imported indentured servants of both races—men and women who could earn their freedom if they survived their servitude. After 1660, however, the people of African descent who arrived in Virginia and Maryland increasingly were treated as permanent slaves as the gentry adopted the slaveholding practices of the West Indies and Deep South. By the middle of the eighteenth century, black people faced Barbadian-style slave laws everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Even so, in Tidewater, slaves made up a much smaller proportion of the population (1 to 1.7 whites, rather than 5 to 1), lived longer, and had more stable family lives than their counterparts in the Deep South. Tidewater's slave population naturally increased after 1740, doing away with the need to import slaves from abroad. With few new arrivals to assimilate, Afro-Tidewater culture became relatively homogeneous and strongly influenced by the English culture it was embedded within. Many blacks whose ancestors had come to the Chesapeake region prior to 1670 had grown up in freedom, owning land, keeping servants, even holding office and taking white husbands or wives. Having African blood did not necessarily make one a slave in Tidewater, a fact that made it more difficult to dismiss black people as subhuman. Until the end of the seventeenth century, one's position in Tidewater was defined largely by class, not race.
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The Deep South, by contrast, had a black supermajority and an enormous slave mortality rate, meaning thousands of fresh humans had to be imported every year to replace those who had died. Blacks in the Deep South were far more likely to live in concentrated numbers in relative isolation from whites. With newcomers arriving with every slave ship, the slave quarters were cosmopolitan, featuring a wide variety of languages and African cultural practices. Within this melting pot, the slaves forged a new culture, complete with its own languages (Gullah, New Orleans Creole), Afro-Caribbean culinary practices, and musical traditions. From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South's great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll, as well as the Caribbean-inspired foodways today enshrined in Southern-style barbeque joints from Miami to Anchorage. And because the Deep South's climate, landscape, and ecosystem resembled those of West Africa far more than they did those of England, it was the slaves' technologies and practices that guided the region's agricultural development. “Carolina,” a Swiss immigrant remarked in 1737, “looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people.”
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In the Deep South, African Americans formed a parallel culture, one whose separateness was enshrined in the laws and fundamental values of the nation's white minority. Indeed, the Deep South was for at least the three centuries from 1670 to 1970 a caste society. And caste, it should be noted, is quite a different thing from class. People can and do leave the social class they are born into—either through hard work or tragedy—and can marry someone of another class and strive for their children to start life in a better position than they did. A caste is something one is born into and can never leave, and one's children will be irrevocably assigned to it at birth. Marriage outside of one's caste is strictly forbidden. So while the Deep South had rich whites and poor whites and rich and poor blacks, no amount of wealth would allow a black person to join the master caste. The system's fundamental rationale was that blacks were inherently inferior, a lower form of organism incapable of higher thought and emotion and savage in behavior. Although pressed into service as wet nurses, cooks, and nannies, blacks were regarded as “unclean,” with Deep Southern whites maintaining a strong aversion to sharing dishes, clothes, and social spaces with them. For at least three hundred years, the greatest taboo in the Deep South was to marry across the caste lines or for black men to have white female lovers, for the caste system could not survive if the races began to mix. Even the remotest suspicion of violating the Great Deep Southern Taboo would result in death for a black male.
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However, like so many institutions in the Deep South, the caste system had convenient loopholes for the rich white men who created it. Having sex with your enslaved women and girls was perfectly acceptable, so long as you did it only for “fun.” Many Tidewater and Deep Southern oligarchs raped or had affairs with slaves and housemaids—from colonial segregationists such as Virginia's William Byrd (born in 1674) to modern-day ones such as South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond (who died in 2003). “The enjoyment of a Negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common thing,” a Yankee guest of South Carolina planters reported in 1764. “No reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter.” Any children that resulted from such liaisons were, by law, assigned to the black caste and were explicitly denied any claim on their father's property, a practice that also continued into the late twentieth century. Many planters did, however, take an interest in their illegitimate children, often assigning them to be household servants and sometimes even paying to send them to school in Yankeedom, where such things were permitted. This helped foster the creation of a privileged mulatto social group that came to dominate the middle and upper classes of the black caste, and their later successes in trade, business, and other fields challenged the underlying justification for the entire apartheid system.
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Greatly outnumbered, the planters were haunted by the fear that their slaves would rebel. They organized themselves into mounted militia, training regularly to respond to any uprising and awarding themselves honorary ranks like “colonel” or “major.” Their fears were not unfounded. In 1737, a group of Catholic slaves who had probably been warriors for the Christian kingdom of Kongo—a West African kingdom recognized by the Pope—tried to fight their way to freedom in Spanish-controlled Florida. This disciplined force of twenty to thirty men sacked an armory in Stono and marched south with drums beating and banners flying, drawing hundreds of slaves to join their exodus, and slaughtering planters who stood in their way. Most died in pitched battles with militia units, who then decorated the road back to Charleston by impaling a rebel slave's head on each milepost. “On this occasion every breast was filled with concern,” South Carolina legislators reported shortly thereafter. “We could not enjoy the benefits of peace like the rest of mankind [because] . . . our own industry should be the means of taking from us all the sweets of life and rendering us liable to the loss of our lives and fortunes.”
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Deep Southern society was not only militarized, caste-structured, and deferential to authority, it was also aggressively expansionist. From their cultural hearth in the South Carolina low country, the planters expanded to similar terrain both up and down the coast. To the north lay North Carolina, a sparsely settled backwater whose coastal region would soon be split between poor Tidewater farmers (in the northeast, along the shores of Albemarle Sound) and wealthy Deep Southerners in the southeast. But south of the Savannah River in Georgia, the South Carolina planters encountered resistance to the spread of their way of life.

The young colony of Georgia didn't start as part of the Deep South. Founded in 1732, it had been a lofty philanthropic endeavor planned by a group of upper-class British social reformers who sought to address urban poverty by moving the poor to the American south. There the people the philanthropists termed “drones” and “miserable wretches” would be put to work on their own farms, an experience expected to cure them of their alleged laziness. The philanthropists banned slavery from Georgia, as the presence of slaves was thought to discourage poor whites from hard work, and they limited farms to a maximum size of fifty acres in an attempt to prevent plantations from forming. Georgia's benefactors even forbade liquor and lawyers, as they thought both eroded moral character. Once redeemed, Georgia's paupers would continue to serve the empire's geostrategic interests by forming a buffer state against Spanish attack from the south and by helping intercept South Carolina slaves as they tried to make their escape to freedom in Spanish Florida.
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The dream was not to be. The planters of South Carolina needed new land for plantations, and the paupers of Georgia were eager to buy slaves to relieve them of the most unpleasant menial tasks. In the 1740s and 1750s, South Carolinians seized control of Georgia's government and ensured that the best land was granted to themselves and their friends. A strict Barbadian-style slave code was adopted; plantations sprung up throughout the coastal lowlands, and Savannah was turned into a little Charleston. Lowland Georgia would become not a yeoman farmers' utopia but rather an extension of the West Indian slaveocracy that got its start in Charleston.
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The Deep South was on the move, and, unlike Tidewater, it would face no competing European civilization to block its path to the Mississippi and beyond.

CHAPTER 8