“Foreword to the Reissue” in “Origins of a Southern Mosaic: Studies of Early Carolina and Georgia”
Foreword to the Reissue
The four essays that compose Clarence L. Ver Steeg’s 1975 Origins of a Southern Mosaic: Studies of Early Carolina and Georgia began as three lectures given as part of the celebrated Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, in March 1974. The first three essays explicitly compare and contrast the early development of the Carolinas in the 1660s and then, decades later, of Georgia. The fourth essay offers a specific examination of the development of slavery in early Carolina. Each essay takes advantage of rich primary sources and hints at what were already becoming emerging trends in these areas, slavery most of all. All four are aimed at identifying “the South” and the principle characteristics of southern culture. These pieces also, however, describe a world that feels alien to a historiographical time traveler returning after the past fifty years of historical scholarship. Ver Steeg’s is a world of white male elites contesting political power in a colonial, but not yet Atlantic, world.
The first two essays explore the proprietary era that defined the Carolinas in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ver Steeg dedicates considerable attention to the drafting and impact of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in roughly the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the later impact of this so-called Grand Model in order to understand the emerging political culture and also the sources for political upheaval under the proprietors. The era of proprietary rule was short lived, however, and by the 1690s settler colonists in South Carolina were able to successfully assert political power even as the proprietors remained ascendant in North Carolina. The South Carolina Commons House of Assembly, among the most powerful legislatures in British North America, found its footing in this period as it contested for power with the proprietors. Going forward, the Commons House would, time and again, thwart the initiatives of governors, both proprietary and royal.
Continuing his exploration of Carolina politics into the early eighteenth century, Ver Steeg identifies differences that persist between North and South Carolina. In the southern and western border areas especially, he notes that dangers from Spanish aggression and control over the Indian trade would play a role in the political order. Those features would resonate with contemporary authors like Bryan Rindfleisch, Steve Oatis, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Allan Gallay, and others for whom the Indian trade and the enslavement and forced sale of Native Americans is a defining feature of South Carolina prior to 1729.1 The limits of this scholarship even in the 1970s is apparent, however, as Ver Steeg failed to recognize the significance of the Yamasee War and the role of violence between Natives and settlers in his “mosaic.”
Also missing from this work is any notion of the “Atlantic world.” Today it would be scarcely imaginable to contextualize colonial social and cultural development without placing colonies in an Atlantic perspective. For Ver Steeg, while the metropolitan-peripheral relationship is visible in terms of appointed governors and efforts to establish the Anglican Church, the Carolinas are not integrated in any meaningful way into a larger Atlantic.2
The chapter on colonial Georgia further enables Ver Steeg to lay out the differences among southern colonies, even those that would seem to have the most common in South Carolina and Georgia. He reminds us that the very reason for settling Georgia, to serve as a defensive barrier between the Spanish in Florida and the French in the Mississippi Valley, as well as Native Americans, was strikingly different from that of the Carolinas and England’s previous North American colonization efforts. While the creation of a model society may have been used as part of the justification, Governor James Oglethorpe and the Trustees were clear that imperial motives were the driving factor. This even extended to the initial prohibition against slavery. Ver Steeg saw this decision arising out of fear that a large population of enslaved people, like that in its northern neighbor, could weaken the colony in its military role on the southern frontier.
Despite this, Georgia would attract a diverse range of settlers, including Jews, Moravians, a group of Irish convicts, and Germans. Ver Steeg presents this social diversity in contrast to the colonization of Massachusetts Bay, adding that this diversity was never lost. If one were to draw comparisons, early Georgia would look like the more religious and ethnically diverse middle colonies than the lower southern ones. The introduction of slavery a generation after settlement would quickly make Georgia look more like the Carolinas.
Ver Steeg seems to be anticipating the increase in scholarly interest in the lower South that accelerated in the early 1990s and continues into the present. South Carolina has typically been the focus of scholarly research into the lower South because the colonial records and archives there are more complete than for North Carolina or Georgia. And scholars, particularly grad students, often go to where the sources are. His book would also be at home with the notion of many “Souths”—his mosaic—as opposed to a monolithic South. Yet where he is looking to political, intellectual, and religious influences, more recent scholars would emphasize staple crops, networks, and contests with European and Native rivals in an Atlantic world.
It is Ver Steeg’s final chapter, on slavery and the genesis of the plantation system, where both the strengths and limits of the book are most readily apparent. Again, writing in 1974–75, he is able to contribute to the rapidly emerging scholarship on enslaved persons in the American South. As he acknowledges, however, his analysis is based on external sources, like the production of crops for exports, including naval stores and rice, as well as deer skins, rather than any sources that can provide insight into the internal workings of this slave society and of course the enslaved themselves.
Looking back, we can recognize that Ver Steeg was writing just as major works would bring about dramatic changes to our understanding of South Carolina’s slave society and economy and slavery in colonial America more generally. He comments in a footnote that Peter Wood’s seminal Black Majority appeared in print too late for its findings to be included in his own work but that scholars would be well advised to consult the book.3 Equally interesting, the review of Origins of a Southern Mosaic in the American Historical Review was immediately followed by a review of Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom.4 Thus Ver Steeg’s conclusions, and the limits of his study, had already been overshadowed by these major publications and then, of course, by others that would follow. This highlights how rapidly the scholarship of slavery in the colonial era was changing in the early 1970s as a generation of scholars, trained during the civil rights era, led the field in new directions.
In four tightly argued chapters, Ver Steeg presents the Carolinas and Georgia as fitting comfortably in Britain’s North American colonies. Featuring different governing models, diverse populations, and a growing institution of slavery, he can showcase how the lower South was the “mosaic” he utilizes as his defining metaphor.
Of course there is a much that a twenty-first-century scholar would do differently in studying the lower South through the first half of the eighteenth century. There is almost no consideration of women, beyond the very last paragraph of the chapter on Georgia, in which he notes that the plan for Georgia was not just slaveless but womanless too. There is, unfortunately, no consideration for the larger implications that such a skewed gender balance might have on politics, violence, and social structure, among other considerations. It would seem that a colonial society without women would be doomed to fail. We are fortunate that over the past forty years much work has been done to look at these issues surrounding race, class, and gender.5
Still, the insights to be found in this slim volume remind us, ultimately, that southern society, and indeed American society writ large, were founded out of a broad and diverse array of social structures and people. Despite the efforts of elites, whether the Carolina proprietors, James Oglethorpe and the Georgia Trustees, or the men who enslaved thousands of Native Americans and Africans in the development of staple crop agriculture, first of naval stores, then rice, and later indigo, the lower South would develop as a multiracial society. As the nature of American identity has become even more hotly contested in the past few years, it remains especially important to recall the diversity of the years of settlement, from voluntary immigrants to those brought forcibly and enslaved for generations, that continue to define the region and the nation. Indeed Ver Steeg’s “mosaic” of different cultures who preserve their essence in creating a beautiful display is more apt than the oft-used “melting pot” in which different groups were liquefied, losing their unique characteristics. Scholars today would certainly agree that the politics and economics of the lower South were as complicated as Ver Steeg found them to be. Building on his work, new generations have shown that complexity for Indigenous persons, women, and the enslaved as well.
JONATHAN MERCANTINI
Notes
1. Bryan Rindfleisch, George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018); Alejandra Dubcovsky, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Allan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Steven Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–1730 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008)
2. The historiography of the Atlantic World is far too vast to be summarized here. I offer just a handful of key works: Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Alison Games and Adam Rothman, eds., Major Problems in Atlantic History: Documents and Essays (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2007); John Thornton, Africa and Africans and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking Press, 2001).
3. Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Random House, 1974).
4. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W Norton, 1975).
5. Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
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