Carolina, Province of (English Colony)
Substate | Defunct
1663 CE to 1729 CE
The Province of Carolina is an English and later a British colony of North America.
Carolina is founded in what is modern-day North Carolina.
Carolina expands south and, at its greatest extent, nominally includes the modern states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi, and parts of modern Florida and Louisiana.
Sir Robert Heath, attorney-general of King Charles I of England, is granted the Cape Fear region of America, incorporated as the Province of Carolina, in 1629.
The charter is unrealized and ruled invalid, and a new charter is issued to a group of eight English noblemen, the Lords Proprietors, on March 24, 1663.
Charles II grants the land to the eight Lords Proprietors in return for their financial and political assistance in restoring him to the throne in 1660.
Charles II intends for the newly created province to serve as an English bulwark to contest lands claimed by Spanish Florida and prevent their northward expansion.
Led informally by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the Province of Carolina is controlled from 1663 to 1729 by these lords and their heirs.
In 1691, dissent over the governance of the province led to the appointment of a deputy governor to administer the northern half of Carolina.
The division between the northern and southern governments becomes complete in 1712, but both colonies remain in the hands of the same group of proprietors.
A rebellion against the proprietors breaks out in 1719, which leads to the appointment of a royal governor for South Carolina in 1720.
After nearly a decade in which the British government seeks to locate and buy out the proprietors, both North and South Carolina become royal colonies in 1729.
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Cash crops include tobacco, rice and wheat.
Extraction industries develop in furs, fishing and lumber.
Manufacturers produce rum and ships, and Americans are producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply by the late colonial period.
Cities eventually dot the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs.
English colonists are supplemented by waves of Scots-Irish and other groups.
Freed indentured servants push further west as coastal land grows more expensive.
Europeans will often be offered fur, food or other items as gifts when they first encounter a tribe.
The Europeans do not understand they are supposed to take on an alliance with the natives, including helping them against their enemies.
Native tribes regularly practice gift giving as part of their social relations.
Because the Europeans (or most of them) do not, they are considered to be rude and crude.
After observing that Europeans want to trade goods for the skins and other items, natives enter into that commercial relationship.
As a consequence, both sides become involved in the conflicts of the other.
The Europeans in New France, Carolina, Virginia, New England, and New Netherland become drawn into the endemic warfare of their trading partners.
King Charles charters a new colony to the south of Virginia (and north of Spanish Florida) named Carolina after his father and centered on the recently established settlements of Albemarle sound.
The Charter of Carolina establishes the Province of Carolina on March 24, 1663, and divides it between eight of his loyal friends, known as the Lords Proprietors, as a reward for their faithful political and financial support of his efforts to regain the throne of England.
Sir John Yeamans establishes a second permanent settlement on the Cape Fear River in 1665, near present-day Wilmington, North Carolina, which he names Clarendon.
Carolina’s 1663 charter had granted the Lords Proprietor title to all of the land from the southern border of the Virginia Colony at thirty-six degrees north to thirty-one degrees north (along the coast of present-day Georgia).
The charter had been revised slightly in 1665, with the northerly boundary extended to thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north to include the lands of settlers along the Albemarle Sound who had left the Virginia Colony.
Likewise, the southern boundary had been moved south to twenty-nine degrees north, just south of present-day Daytona Beach, Florida, which had the effect of including the existing Spanish settlement at St. Augustine.
The charter also granted all the land, between these northerly and southerly bounds, from the Atlantic, westward to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
The Lords Proprietor named in the charter are: Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon; George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle; William Craven, 1st Earl of Craven; John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton; Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury; Sir George Carteret; Sir William Berkeley (brother of John); and Sir John Colleton.
Of the eight, the one who demonstrates the most active interest in Carolina is Lord Shaftesbury, who, with the assistance of his secretary, the philosopher John Locke, has drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a plan for government of the colony heavily influenced by the ideas of the English political scientist, James Harrington.
Some of the other Lords Proprietor also have interests in other colonies: for instance, John Berkeley and George Carteret hold stakes in the Province of New Jersey, and William Berkeley has an interest in Virginia.
Operating under their royal charter, the Lords Proprietor are able to exercise their authority with nearly the independence of the king himself.
The actual government consists of a governor, a powerful council, on which half of the councilors are appointed by the Lords Proprietor themselves, and a relatively weak, popularly elected assembly.
Although the Lost Colony on Roanoke Island represented the first English attempt at settlement in the Carolina territory, the first permanent English settlement had not been not established until 1653, when emigrants from the Virginia Colony, with others from New England and Bermuda, settled at the mouths of the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers, on the shores of Albemarle Sound, in the northeastern corner of present-day North Carolina.
The Albemarle Settlements, pre-empting the royal charter by ten years, comes to be known in Virginia as "Rogues' Harbor".
The island of Eleuthera had been the site of the earliest permanent European settlement in the Bahamas, which had occurred in 1647.
Charles II grants land in the Bahamas to the Lords proprietors of Province of Carolina, who establish Charles Towne on the island of New Providence, but the islands are left entirely to themselves. (New Providence’s name supposedly derives from a seventeenth century governor’s thanks to Divine Providence for surviving a shipwreck: the “New” will be added later to avoid confusion with Old Providence, the pirate stronghold off present Belize.)
During the Commonwealth period he had served in the government of Oliver Cromwell and participated in reviewing English laws and drafting the nation’s first formal constitution.
Before that, English constitutional law had been based on ancient constitutional documents such as the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.
The experience had led Ashley Cooper to see value in adopting a formal constitution for the Province of Carolina.
Because the Fundamental Constitutions are drafted during John Locke’s service to Cooper, who is much more involved in the process than the others, it is widely accepted that Locke had a major role in the making of the Constitutions.
In the view of historian David Armitage and political scientist Vicki Hsueh, the Constitutions were co-authored by Locke and his patron Cooper, known also as 1st Earl of Shaftesbury.
The Constitutions bring right to worship and right to constitute a church to the religious dissenters to Christianity and outsiders such as Jews.
They also promised religious tolerance towards idolater natives and heathens.
The Constitutions also acknowledge aristocracy in North America and constitutionalize the practice of slavery.
The notorious article 110 of the Constitutions states that “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.”
Pursuant to this provision slaveholders are granted absolute power of life and death over their slaves.
Additionally, the Fundamental Constitutions affirm the fact that being a Christian does not alter the civil dominion of a master over his slaves. (Article 107)
Apart from the slavery, the erection of hereditary nobility aside from the proprietors and recognition of noble titles raises controversies.
Because English Law prevents proprietors from granting titles already in use in England, such as Earl or Baron, they create two new titles, cazique and landgrave, that are to be be passed down from father to son.
Those nobles are granted privileges such as being tried only in Chief Justice’s Court and being found guilty by a jury of his peers. (Article 27)
The Constitutions introduce also a hereditary serfdom system, the members of which are called leetmen, in addition to slavery.
Like the slaves, the leetmen and leetwomen are under command and jurisdiction of noblemen to whom they serve. (Article 22)
Through the Constitutions, the Lords Proprietor and the noblemen own the four-fifths of the Colony’s vast lands.
By the same token, the freemen have the right to property for the rest of the land and among them who own more than fifty acres has the right to vote and who has more than five-hundred acres of land has the right to be a member of Parliament. (Article 72)
This requirement of land ownership has been considered as relatively favorable to the freemen in comparison to the laws in England.
Elections are to be held by secret ballot, which is not yet common practice in England.
Laws are to expire automatically after one hundred years, thus preventing outdated regulations from remaining on the books.
The Fundamental Constitutions is designed to formalize a “Gothic” system of balanced government in the new province.
Although described as feudalism by some authorities, the system is arguably more advanced by virtue of its constitution and emphasis on basic rights and reciprocal benefits among classes.
It is nevertheless a pre-Enlightenment system predicated on class hierarchy.
The Fundamental Constitutions provide a framework for urban and regional development consistent with and supportive of the plan for governance and economic development.
Once settlement begins in 1670 a series of “instructions” are transmitted to the colonists with details that flesh out areas that are not addressed by the Fundamental Constitutions.
The design of towns in Carolina is influenced by the intensive planning that had gone on in London after the Great Fire of 1666.
The government of Charles II had solicited plans to rebuild the city, and inspired designs were submitted by the architect Christopher Wren, the scientist Robert Hooke, the cartographer Richard Newcourt, and landscape planner and polymath John Evelyn.
Their designs influence city planning in the areas of public health and safety, land use efficiency, and urban aesthetics.
Seven years pass before Carolina's Lords can arrange for settlement, the first being that of Charles Town (now Charleston) in 1670 on the west bank of the Ashley River, a few miles northwest of the present city and well to the south of the Albemarle settlements.
It is soon chosen by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, one of the Lords Proprietors, to become a "great port towne", a destiny which the city is to fulfill.
The settlement will often be subject to attack from sea and from land: Spanish frigates attack in August, 1670, but the Colonists successfully defend the new city.
He drafts development standards for towns as well as an illustrative plan that he includes in his instructions to the colonists.
His urban plan provides detailed standards for block size, lot size, street width, waterfront setbacks, and other standards similar to modern planning and zoning ordinances.
Locke also writes guiding principles for regional development that sre remarkably similar to principles of modern planning, including aspects of sustainable development and smart growth.
Such aspects include, a) consistency of development practices with the general plan (Fundamental Constitutions); b) concurrent provision of infrastructure with land development; and compactness of development to promote efficient use of land and access to markets.
The Grand Model allocates more land (sixty percent) and representation to “the people” than to the nobility, suggesting that yeoman farmers are envisioned ultimately to become the backbone of the colony.
Nevertheless, a slave-owning elite is also part of the formula from the beginning.
Where Ashley Cooper sees slavery as playing a vital role was in the establishment of the principal estates.
In December, 1671, he advises against bringing too many of “the poorer sort” to the colony until “men of estates” can first “stock the country with Negroes, cattle, and other necessarys.”