The Lords Proprietors and the Founding Colony

In sixteen sixty-three, King Charles the Second of England signed a charter granting eight men an enormous tract of North America stretching from the thirty-first to the thirty-sixth parallels. They called it Carolina, in the king's honor. The eight Lords Proprietors, men like Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, whose name would later attach to two South Carolina rivers, imagined a feudal paradise in the New World, complete with a nobility of landgraves and caciques.

The philosopher John Locke drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in sixteen sixty-nine, an elaborate blueprint for a society with a built-in aristocracy. It was one of the strangest governing documents ever written for American soil. Almost none of it survived contact with reality.

The colonists who arrived at Charles Town in sixteen seventy had their own ideas about how things should work, and the feudal hierarchy of landgraves never truly took hold. What did take hold was the land itself, and the trade that could be extracted from it. The colonists traded in deerskins and, almost immediately, in people, enslaved Native Americans sold to Caribbean planters in large numbers in the decades that followed.

This early economy of coercion set patterns that would define South Carolina for two centuries. The Proprietors eventually lost their grip. By seventeen nineteen, the colonists essentially overthrew their rule in a bloodless revolution, and in seventeen twenty-nine the Crown bought out seven of the eight proprietary shares, making South Carolina a royal colony.

The Lords Proprietors left behind a state named for a king, two rivers named for an earl, and a debt to enslaved labor that the colony had already decided it could not do without.