South Carolina’s Legendary Past as Seen by Historians

Topic: Gullah History - Early Legends
Early histories of South Carolina mentioned in the post for 5 June 2022 discussed either the origins of Charleston’s social life or the political manipulations of the early years.  In 1973, Richard Dunn began his study of the planter class by reciting the names of migrants from Barbados to Charleston. [1]  He quoted Jack Greene, who listed political leaders who had come from the island, including John Yeamans, Arthur Middleton, and Robert Gibbes. [2]

Dunn changed the focus from slavery to plantations as economic institutions.  These men were important because the state’s “planter class took shape initially and most decisively in Barbados.”  They produced “the most perfectly articulated colonial aristocracy in English America.” [3]

Some of the credibility for Sugar and Slaves came from the fact Dunn was not from the South, and thus could not be suspected of harboring the provincial views of local historians.  He was raised in Minnesota, and his degrees were from Harvard and Princeton. [4]  His previous work had been on John Winthrop’s family. [5]

More important, his book happened to coincide with the introduction of globalization into the American economy.  Historians were starting to look at the United States as part of an Atlantic community that had developed after the Spanish began colonizing the Caribbean in the early 1500s.

Greene trained as a political historian specializing in the period after Charles II’s brother was deposed in 1689. [6]  He was teaching at John Hopkins in 1986 [7] when Donald Meing published a geographical history of the Americas that focused on the contributions of two cultures: the Muslim and the Christian. [8]  He introduced the term “cultural hearth” to describe an area where “new basic cultural systems and configurations are developed and nurtured before spreading vigorously outward to alter the character of much larger areas.” [9]

Greene published an article a year after Meinig’s book that applied the term “cultural hearth” to Barbados. [10]  His argument that the particular type of sugar plantation, which developed in Barbados, was taken to other Caribbean islands can be substantiated.  As mentioned in the posts for 23 January 2022 and 5 June 2022, migration to other lands that could grow sugar began early.  Thomas Modyford went from Barbados to Jamaica as governor in 1664. [11]

Greene went farther to claim “the extension of Barbadian culture went beyond the West Indies to the North American mainland.” [12]  This was not a wholly new thesis; it had been anticipated by Arthur Chandler.  In 1946, he wrote: “the significance of Barbados as a source for the growing American colonies has been largely overlooked.” [13]

Chandler showed the primary movement of planters from Barbados to South Carolina occurred between 1678 and 1682, and suspected that the underlying reason was decreased profits caused by the exhaustion of the soil. [14]  In a repeat of the consolidation of land ownership that occurred when sugar became profitable, the planters who stayed had to have had the wherewithal to improve their soil.  The cost of wood was also a factor, and those who wanted to stay out of debt began investing in wind power. [15]  Once those who couldn’t afford to upgrade their operations had left Barbados, the migration ended.

To prove Greene’s hypothesis, one needs names of individuals like Modyford who were planters in Barbados and moved to a new location where plantations were introduced.  Greene quoted Dunn to list the early “important immigrants” who “held the best land, sold the most sugar, and monopolized the chief offices on the island.”  They included Edward and Arthur Middleton, and Robert and Thomas Gibbes. [16]

Apart from the circularity of  Greene quoting Dunn who had quoted Greene, not all these people meet the criteria needed to support Greene.  Agnes Leland Baldwin found evidence they all appeared in records in South Carolina at the right time:  Edward arrived before 1678, [17] Arthur by 1672, [18], Robert by 1678, [19] and Thomas before 1680. [20]

However, as Peter Campbell made clear, not all were planters in Barbados.  Arthur’s brother was there, but Edward seems to have only stopped over. [21]  Brice McAdoo Clagett found evidence eight different families named Gibbes were on the island in 1708, [22] and that the records for the area where Robert and Thomas lived did not survive. [23]  Another person’s search found Thomas Gibbs had at least 68 acres in 1659 when he sold 48 to one man and transferred 20 to Robert. [24]

Greene was writing at a time when the nature of writing history was changing.  More people were earning PhDs at a time when the numbers of academic jobs and professional publications were declining.  A feeling arose that primary research may be necessary to write a dissertation, but one did not get published without contributing some new idea.  Young scholars grasped at new ways to reformulate known facts.

Details no longer mattered.  The concept of “cultural hearth” was taken up by historians, who repeated it in their own ways.  With the loss of particulars, it was easy for readers with less knowledge to become confused or draw false conclusions.  In the early 1990s, Russell Menard went to Barbados to verify parts of his 1985 economic history of British North America. [25]  He was shocked to discover that many of the things, which he had accepted as true, were not supported by evidence in the archives. [26]

Menard noted that Philip Curtin had defined the plantation complex in 1998 with precision as one that grew specialized crops for a distant market.  The owners controlled all steps of production, and relied upon forced labor that could not reproduce itself.  Curtin was clear the institution did not emerge until the 1700s. [27]

Menard focused on the large “integrated plantation” that relied upon “gangs of slaves.” [28]  He credits James Drax with developing the self-contained operation, [29] but does not note he was active in the mid-1640s.  He admits gang labor did not develop on Barbados until a hundred years later. [30]

Despite the presentation of some fairly precise data, Menard then makes the same kinds of unanchored generalizations that led him to his feeling of shock when he spent time in the Barbados archives.  He wrote that the emigration from Barbados after the end of the sugar boom in the 1650s, [31] “made the island a major “cultural hearth for the colonies of British America.” [32]  Charleston was founded twenty years after 1650.  That was thirty years before Curtin’s 1700s and his own 1740s.

If Menard’s refined view of the cultural hearth were true, then the men who transferred it to South Carolina had to have been owners of such plantations in Barbados.  However, the Gibbes brothers were middling, not grand planters on the island, the type who were squeezed out in the transition to larger plantations.  The skills they brought were ones that were being obsoleted by changes in Barbados that gave rise to the plantations described by Curtin and Menard.

Chandler implies the ones who had those skills were not the large planters.  John Godfrey arrived in 1770 [33] as the agent for one of the colony’s proprietors, Peter Colleton. [34]  Overseers were the ones who knew how to manage plantations, not men like Modyford, who purchased an already functioning operation. [35]  Campbell identified Godfrey as an owner of a medium-sized plantation. [36]

If integrated plantations and a heavy reliance on slave labor do not appear in the first generation in South Carolina, then the cause is not the emigration of planters from Barbados that occurred between 1678 and 1682.  Greene provides an alternative by suggesting information about plantations flowed from Barbados to Charleston through trade connections that continued to at least the American Revolution.  Beyond the problems of finding concrete, or even anecdotal evidence for this, is the fact that London, Bristol, and other British cities could also disperse information on what was succeeding elsewhere in the world.

Historians are a cautious lot. [37]  As Menard discovered, once a book has been published, it is assumed that all the controls of peer review worked, and that it is accurate.  Thus, when Walter Edgar wrote the contemporary textbook on South Carolina’s history in 1998, he noted Barbados was the colony’s “cultural hearth.” [38]

Even more for a local historian, the idea of a “cultural hearth” provides a variation on the transference of responsibility for slavery that was part of the early histories quoted in the post for 5 June 2022.  Edgar implicitly justified all that was negative about the past by saying “South Carolina’s cultural heritage differs from that of other English Colonies.” [39]  And so, history books, especially when they elide details, feed existing legends.

End Notes
1.  Richard S. Dunn.  Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.  112, note 41.

2.  Jack P. Greene.  The Quest for Power.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.  457–458.  Quoted by Dunn, Sugar.  112.  The origins of these men are discussed in the post for 5 June 2022.

3.  Dunn, Sugar.  48.
4.  “Richard Slator Dunn.”  Wikipedia website.

5.  Richard S. Dunn.  Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630– 1717.  Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962.

6.  “Jack P. Greene.”  Wikipedia website.
7.  Johns Hopkins had a particularly strong geography department.

8.  D. W. Meinig.  The Shaping of America.  Volume 1. Atlantic America, 1492-1800.  New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1986.  51.  He was influenced by Carroll Quigley’s The Evolution of Civilizations. [40]  It argued new civilizations developed when two or more cultures mixed. [41]

9.  Meinig.  52.

10.  Jack P. Greene.  “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection.”  The South Carolina Historical Magazine 88(4):192–210:October 1987.

11.  “Thomas Modyford.”  Wikipedia website.  He was governor from 1664 to 1671.  He is mentioned in the posts for 6 February 2022, 3 April 2022, 10 April 2022, and 17 April 2022.

12.  Greene, South Carolina.  192.

13.  Alfred D. Chandler.  “The Expansion of Barbados.”  The Barbados Museum and Historical Society Journal 8:106+:1946.  Reprinted by P. F. Campbell.  61–89 in Chapters in Barbados History.  Saint Ann’s Garrison, Barbados: Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 1986.  61.

14.  Chandler.  80.

15.  Laura Hollsten describes the introduction of dung farms to provide manure. [42]  Michael Bennett discusses the role of London merchants in the change to windmills. [43]

16.  Greene, South Carolina.  198.

17.  Agnes Leland Baldwin.  First Settlers of South Carolina, 1670–1700.  Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1985.  160–161.  She is discussed in the post for 5 June 2022.

18.  Baldwin.  160.
19.  Baldwin.  100.
20.  Baldwin.  100.
21.  P. F. Campbell.  Some Early Barbadian History. Barbados: 1993.  151–152.

22.  Brice McAdoo Clagett.  “The Gibbes Family of St. Andrew’s Parish, Barbados, with Notes on its Ancestry in County Kent, England, and its Descendants in South Carolina.”  Yancy Family Genealogy website.  3.  Robert’s genealogy was preserved in a Bible, which was taken from Barbados to South Carolina.

23.  Clagett.  2.

24.  “Barbados Plantation History.”  Creole Links website.  Campbell simply said Robert was a “member of a huge Barbadian family.” [44]

25.  John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard.  The Economy of British America, 1607–1789.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

26.  Russell R. Menard.  Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.  xi.

27.  Philip D.  Curtin.  The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.  10–13.  Summary by Menard, Negotiations.  104.  Note the title of Curtin’s collection.

28.  Menard, Negotiations. 1.
29.  Menard, Negotiations.  94.
30.  Menard, Negotiations.  96.
31.  Menard, Negotiations.  5.
32.  Menard, Negotiations.  106.
33.  Baldwin.  102–103.
34.  Chandler.  84.

35.  The post for 10 April 2022 makes clear Modyford was dispatched by his brother-in-law, who was a London merchant.  Thomas Kendall sent Richard Ligon to keep an eye on Modyford.  It was Ligon who learned how a plantation operated, as attested to by his book, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.

36.  Campbell, Barbadian.  154.

37.  Young historians are cautious in another sense as well.  When one never knows who might be on a committee that determines if one is hired or published, it is best to mention every possible name, with no potentially damaging caveats.  Thus, contradictory works are blurred into summaries that imply all research is equally significant.

38.  Walter Edgar.  South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  36.

39.  Edgar.  36.

40.  Carroll Quigley.  The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis.  New York: Macmillan, 1961.

41.  Meinig.  52.

42.  Laura Hollsten.  “Controlling Nature and Transforming Landscapes in the Early Modern Caribbean.”  Global Environment 1:80–113:2008.  101–102, 106–107.

43.  Michael D. Bennett.  “Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627-1672.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Sheffield, June 2020.  160–161.

44.  Campbell, Barbadian.  151.