Thomas Smith

Topic: Gullah History - Early Legends
The Charles Town colony survived the upheavals of John Yeamans.  It began to resemble the experiment envisioned by Anthony Ashley Cooper, with more new settlers coming from England than Barbados. [1]

South Carolina did not have a commercial crop that returned profits to the grant’s proprietors, but settlers had developed some trade with Barbados in dried meat, animal skins purchased from friendly Native Americans, and slaves taken from hostile groups.  Many still preferred evading the Navigation Laws by patronizing pirates, and a vocal group continued to resent any interference in their lives by the proprietors who owned the land.

Joan Atkins may have been typical of the second generation of immigrants.  The widow arrived in the summer of 1684 with her four children and several servants.  She had sufficient resources to purchase 1,600 acres from Benjamin Waring ten days after she registered with the colony. [2]  He had arrived the year before with a large retinue, and claimed 700 acres. [3]

Her daughter Barbara and her husband and two sons may have lived there until early 1685 when Thomas Smith claimed 650 acres for the entire group. [4]  By then, he had had an opportunity to reconnoiter the area, for he selected land up river from Goose Creek at the junction of Back River with the Cooper.  Later that year, he protested a proposal to cut a canal through his land because he would lose marsh land he used to graze cattle. [5]

Raising livestock was the occupation for poor settlers who shipped four tons of dried meat to Barbados in 1680.  They began with their head-right claims and an animal purchased from another settler.  As the animals increased, they invested their profits in more land or, later, labor. [6]

Since colonist foraged their hogs and cattle on unclaimed woodlands along waterways, [7] they selected “high ground overlooking navigable streams” for their homes. [8]  Smith’s river location provided a natural pasture that needed no fences.

By 1687 he had accumulated enough capital to become active in politics.  James Colleton, the brother of the proprietor Peter Colleton, [9] was battling entrenched colonists who defied the proprietor’s rules.  As governor, he appointed a committee to recommend changes in the constitution, and included men he saw as allies.  Smith was one of the group. [10]

The proprietors’ interest in the colony fluctuated.  Many had died and been replaced by heirs or their agents; some had sold their shares. [11]  Cooper got embroiled in plots to prevent Charles the Second’s Roman Catholic brother James from succeeding to the throne.  He was in and out of jail between 1678 and his death in 1683. [12]

In 1681, Cooper began actively promoting Carolina as a refuge for Protestant dissidents in London, Dublin, the United Provinces, and the Palatinate.  It was in this period that Huguenots began moving to the north of Charleston [13].

Johan van Aerssen was granted 12,000 acres [14] to bring a group from Wernhout in Brabant.  Andrew Johnson and Carolyn Arena have shown Johan and his cousin, Cornelis van Aerssen, were planning a colony in Surinam to be supported by the one on the mainland. [15]  Unfortunately, Johan died in 1688, [16] before he could begin his part.

Soon after, the then widowed Smith married van Aerssen’s widow. [17]  He had her husband’s land grant transferred to him in 1689. [18]  This acquisition placed him among Charles Town’s elite.

James Colleton’s governorship straddled the years from Charles II to the ouster of James II by William of Orange.  When colonists rebelled against Colleton, the Proprietors made Smith a landgrave [19] in anticipation of naming him governor in 1690.  [20]   Instead, a man who had purchased a share in the grant took power until 1692. [21]  When the next governor left in November 1694, Smith rose to the office. [22]  It was more than anyone could handle. [23]  He resigned in November 1694, and died soon after. [24]

Smith may have been the first governor with the background similar to that of many of the settlers, but he only interests historians as a pawn in the conflict between the proprietors and the group who called themselves the Goose Creek Men.  They make no comment on his background, except to assume he was a dissenter. [25]

Few facts exist about Smith’s early life.  Agnes Leland Baldwin says he and the Atkins provided no information when they registered with the colony. [26]  His descendants, naturally, wanted to know more, and when details do not exist, legends fill crevices.

In 1855, Smith’s great-great-great-granddaughter published a family history that said Smith was born in Exeter, and emigrated with his brother James, who moved to Boston. [27]  Before he left England, Smith married a young baroness, the widow of “Bernard Schencking, whose brother Benjamin accompanied them.” [28]  They settled on the Back River where they “engaged in the art of arts, agriculture, without which man would be a savage.” [29]

Four generations of oral tradition had kept a few details — Smith knew someone named Benjamin and married an heiress — but interwove them with suppositions and received history.  Poyas took her recitation of Smith’s career from Ramsey. [30]

Her or Ramsay’s mention of Exeter prompted others to look for a suitable Smith ancestor.  They lit upon the heirs of George Smith.  This is the same Smith, mentioned in the post for 3 July 2022, who refused to honor the marriage contract of his daughter with George Monck.  George’s son Nicholas had five sons, one of whom was named John.  Compton Reade reprints the pedigree Nicholas registered in 1620, [31] and marks John has the “ancestor of the Landgrave of Carolina.” [32]

The only mention of a location in England was made by Joan’s son Aaron’s wife Mary.  She named a number of relatives in Chard and on the Isle of Wight. [33]  Chard was  a textile community over the border from Devon on the watershed between the Bristol and English Channels. [34]  It was near the area that bred Henry Walrond. [35]

Most of the genealogies for Smith that have been posted on the internet follow Reade.  Constance Fenimore Woolson tried to make the brother James into the ancestor of Abigail Adams in 1875. [36]  Another spent a great deal of space trying to avoid the term “incest” because Smith mentioned Joan as his mother.  While Alexander Salley warned about the problems with kinship terms in the seventeenth century, [37] they apparently did not think about “mother” being an endearment for “mother-in-law.” [38]

Genealogies depend of written documentation.  So far, no baptismal or marriage records have been found.  That may be because people only have looked in Exeter, and may not exist if his parents were dissenters.  However, until something is found, he remains one of the many men without history who arrived in Carolina, some as indentured servants, and some with the resources to hire them.  Woolson, the great-niece of another author of American legends, [39] calls Smith “one of Locke’s Carolina nobility.” [40]

End Notes
References to multiple historians are given in chronological order.  This follows the pattern established in the posts for 19 June 2022 and 10 July 2022.

1.  Yeamans and Cooper are discussed in the post for 21 August 2022.

2.  A. S. Salley, Jr.  “The Family of the First Landgrave Thomas Smith.”  The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 28(3):169–175:July 1927.  169.

3.  Joseph Ioor Waring.  “Waring Family.”  The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 24(2):81–100:July–October 1923.  81.

4.  Salley.  169.

5.  Michael J. Heitzler.  Goose Creek.  Volume One: Planters, Politicians and Patriots.  Charleston: The History Press, 2005.  83.  He says Smith lived on Goose Creek

6.  John Solomon Otto.  “Livestock-Raising in Early South Carolina, 1670-1700: Prelude to the Rice Plantation Economy.”  Agricultural History 61:(4):13–24:Autumn, 1987.  20.  Otto noted “given the small investment, livestock-raising provided a means of economic advancement for even the poorest settlers.” [46]

7.  Otto.  16.
8.  Otto.  18.

9.  James Colleton is the one mentioned in the post for 10 July 2022 who was born after his father, John Colleton, left Exeter.  Peter Colleton is discussed in the posts for 26 Jule 2022 and 21 August 2022.  J. E. Buchanan thinks it was another, Edward, was the one involved in the duel with the son of John Yeamans mentioned in the post for 21 August 2022. [47]

10.  Alexander Hewatt.  An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia.  London: A. Donaldson, 1779.  Volume 1, chapter 3, section A.D. 1687.

Edward McCrady.  The History of South Carolina under the Proprietary Government, 1670-1719.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897.  225.

11.  McCrady.  268–272.

12.  L. H. Roper.  Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.  Chapter 5, Plots.

13.  Roper.  69–70.
14.  McCrady.  170

15.  D. Andrew Johnson and Carolyn Arena.  “Building Dutch Suriname in English Carolina: Aristocratic Networks, Native Enslavement, and Plantation Provisioning in the Seventeenth-Century Americas.”  Journal of Southern History 86:(1):37–74:February 2020.  Aerssen’s name and title often are misspelled.

16.  Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum entry for Johan van Aerssen II on Netherlands Archiven website.

17.  Wm. Jas. Rivers.  A Sketch of the History of South Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: McCarter and Company, 1856.  170.  He calls him John D’Arens.

18.  McCrady.  266.  He calls him John d’Arsens, Seigneur de Wernhaut.

19.  The charter for Carolina granted by Charles II allowed the proprietors to establish a nobility so long as they used different titles.  Thus, the head proprietor was the palitinate.  Below him were landgraves and caciques.  Each title brought a right to land.  As in England, where the governor of a an overseas colony was expected to have a title, so too a governor was expected to be a landgrave.  As mentioned in the post for 21 August 2022, Yeamans gained his title when he was named governor of the Clarendon colony on Cape Fear.

20.  Hewatt.  Chapter 3, section Thomas Smith appointed governor.

David Ramsey.  The History of South-Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: David Longworth, 1809.  Reprinted as Ramsay’s History of South Carolina.  Newberry, South Carolina: W. J. Duffie, 1858.  1:25.

McCrady.  231.

21.  Ramsay.  1:22.
Rivers.  155.
McCrady.  231.

M. Eugene Sirmans.  Colonial South Carolina: A Political History 1663–1764.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966.  48.

22.  McCrady.  266.

David Duncan Wallace.  The History of South Carolina.  New York: American Historical Society, 1934.  1:124.

Sirmans.  53.

23.  Charles M. Andrews.  The Colonial Period of American History: The Settlements III.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937.  233.  “It was more than anyone could handle.”

24.  Hewatt.  Chapter 3, section John Archdale appointed governor.
McCrady.  267.

25.  Ramsay. 2: 113.  His source was probably a descendant of Smith, since he supports this section with a note that “a tradition has been regularly handed down among the descendants of Thomas Smith.”

Sirmans.  40 and 53.

26.  Agnes Leland Baldwin.  First Settlers of South Carolina, 1670–1700.  Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1985.  Atkins, 7; Smith, 217, 219.

27.  Elizabeth Anne Poyas as the Octogenarian Lady, of Charleston, S. C.  The Olden Time of Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: Courtenay and Company, 1855.  3.

28.  Poyas.  18.
29.  Poyas.  19.

30.  She specifically quotes Ramsay on Smith’s role in jury trials that Ramsay had attributed to Smith family tradition.  Since she was born in 1792, she was too young to be Ramsay’s source.  

31.  Nich. Smyth.  “Smyth.”  264–265 in The Visitation of the County of Devon in the Year 1620, edited by Frederic Thomas Colby.  London: Taylor and Company, 1872.  George’s father married into a family that traced itself back to Edward I.

32.  Compton Reade.  The Smith Family.  London: Eliot Stock, 1904.  56.

33.  Mary Atkins.  Will, 1684.  Quoted by Salley.  172–174.

34.  Clare Gathercole.  An Archaeological Assessment of Chard.  Taunton, UK: Somerset County Council.  Available on Somerset Heritage website.

35.  Henry Walrond is mentioned in the post for 17 April 2022.

36.  Constance Fenimore Woolson.  “Up the Ashley and Cooper.”  Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 52(307):1–24:December 1875.  She was a northerner who toured the south when she spent her winters in Saint Augustine, Florida. [48]  She borrowed from Poyas.

37.  Salley.  174.  “It would all be very simple but for the fact that at the time of making of these records brother-in-law was used interchangeably with half-brother and step-brother, and nephew was used interchangeably with cousin.”

38.  Aaron Atkins.  Will, 1684.  Quoted by Salley.  171.  He says “my brother in Law Mr Thomas Smith” and further identified him as the father of Atkins’ “two nephews Thomas and George.”  After disposing of his goods, he names “Tho: Smith my Deare brother” as his executrix.”

39.  She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper. [49]

40.  Woolson.  15.  John Locke was the secretary to Cooper, and responsible for writing much of the colony’s governing constitution. [50]

45.  “Thomas Smith (Governor of South Carolina).”  Wikipedia website.  This proposes that the son of Nicholas Smith of Exeter married Joan Atkins, mother of Thomas Smith’s wife.

46.  Otto.  21.

47.  J. E. Buchanan.  “The Colleton Family and the Early History of South Carolina and Barbados 1646-1775.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Edinburgh, 1989.  81–83.

48.  “Constance Fenimore Woolson.”  Wikipedia website.
49.  Wikipedia, Woolson.
50.  Roper.