Caribbean Project: Origins of the Deep South

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Hunter Wallace in American South, Americanism, Caribbean Project, Culture, Diversity, Dixie, History, Race Relations, South Carolina, Southern Nationalism, Whiteness // 33 Comments

Made In Barbados

South Carolina

H/T SNN

Palmetto Patriot is plugging away at our Caribbean Project and has turned up an important find about the Barbados connection in Walter Edgar’s South Carolina: A History.

The cult of Americanism holds that the Lower South shares a common origin (the Mayflower, Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims, etc.) with the Yankee colonies in New England. It is not even remotely true.

You won’t learn about the origins of the Deep South (why do children in Dixie about learn about multicultural Yankees celebrating Thanksgiving?) in American history textbooks in the public school system. Southern culture was spawned in Barbados, a very different animal with classical authoritarian impulses, and spread up through the British Antilles to the South Carolina lowcountry:

“English adventurers established colonies on the Lesser Antilles islands of St. Christopher, Barbados, and Nevis during the 1620s. While St. Christopher, which England shared with France, was settled first, (1624), Barbados (1627) would become the cultural hearth, the model for the rest of the English West Indies – and South Carolina.

On Barbados between 1640 and 1670 there evolved a powerful local culture whose institutions, with some slight alteration, would be re-created throughout the English-speaking Caribbean and along the South Carolina coast. “South Carolina and the Lower South culture that developed out of those small beginnings,” writes a modern historian, “was as much the offspring of Barbados as was Jamaica or the other English Caribbean colonies.” South Carolina, then, arose from a different cultural tradition than the colonies of New England and the Chesapeake….

During the 1640s sugar cane from Brazil was introduced into Barbados. Within twenty years the entire nature of the colony was dramatically altered. There seemed to be an insatiable worldwide demand for sugar as well as its by-products, rum and molasses. The price of land skyrocketed. Smaller planters were bought out and tenant farmers pushed off the land, White indentured servants were replaced by African slaves. A small, fantastically wealthy elite emerged that dominated the colony….

Supplying the labor that produced this wealth were thousands of Africans. Initially the labor on the island was performed primarily by young white males. However, as white labor costs remained high and white laborers were difficult to manage, Barbadians soon turned to the Brazilian model of African slavery….

In 1638, before the introduction of sugar cane, two hundred enslaved Africans were only about 3 percent of the population; fourteen years later there were twenty thousand and they outnumbered whites….

In 1663 a group calling themselves the Barbadian Adventurers commissioned William Hilton to explore the Caroline coast….

A company of Barbadians, led by John Vassall, established Charles Town on the Cape Fear River….”

Northeastern Yankees like Marc Ferguson do not share our mentalité.

In one of the great flukes of history, South Carolina and Georgia were separated by the American Revolution – or more accurately, by the Royal Navy – from the six other British Caribbean colonies with whom we shared a common origin and domestic institutions.

In another geopolitical fluke of history, the obvious fear and self interest in maintaining independence from predatory European powers forced us into a closer “Union” with the Northern states, an unnatural association which over time proved to be far worse than the British yoke we had escaped from.

Perhaps after the entity known as the United States continues to decline and loses its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens (one day it will die from its utopian push for negro equality) knowledge of our true origins will become more widespread.