Carolina began as a royal payout. After Charles I’s 1629 patent to Sir Robert Heath collapsed, partly because the king limited it to members of the Church of England, Charles II used a March 1663 charter to repay eight loyal noblemen, the Lords Proprietors, with land from Virginia’s southern border at 36 degrees north down to 31 degrees, running all the way to the Pacific. A 1665 charter pushed the line to 29 degrees, swallowing Spanish St. Augustine on paper. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, became the driving force and brought in his secretary, John Locke, to draft the Grand Model and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, with a powerful grand council, a weak elected parliament and new titles such as landgraves and caciques.
Geography split the colony. The Albemarle settlement, founded around 1653 by settlers drifting down from Virginia, sat behind shoals that deep draft ships could not cross, and it endured the Chowanoc War from 1675 to 1677. In the south, William Sayle, then in his 80s, led settlers from Bermuda to found Charles Town on the Ashley River in 1670, and its deep harbor drew Barbadian planters and their slave based plantation system. After Cary’s Rebellion, the Tuscarora and Yamasee wars and proprietors who would not send help, the colony was partitioned in 1712, South Carolina colonists ousted the proprietary governor in 1719, and seven of the eight proprietors sold out to the Crown in 1729.
- The name Carolina comes from Carolus, the Latin form of Charles.
- The Spanish held a military occupation of Parris Island in South Carolina until as late as 1655, according to the episode.
- Shaftesbury personally laid out the street plan for Charles Town from across the Atlantic.
- John Carteret, the second Earl of Granville, refused to sell and kept a 60 mile wide strip along North Carolina’s Virginia border until revolutionaries seized it.
- The population grew from about 1,000 in 1660 to more than 26,000 by 1710.
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