Recounting more than three centuries of Spanish and French exploration, English and Huguenor agriculture, and African slave labour, this text traces the history of one of North America's oldest settlements, covering what are now Jasper, Hampton, and part of Alllendale countries.

Manuscript for first volume (published 1996) of history of Beaufort County, S.C., discussing period ca. 1514-1861; including editorial suggestions and correspondence.

This study offers a new and challenging look at Christian institutions and practices in Britain’s Caribbean and southern American colonies. Focusing on the plantation societies of Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Nicholas M. Beasley finds that the tradition of liturgical worship in these places was more vibrant and more deeply rooted in European Christianity than previously thought. In addition, Beasley argues, white colonists’ attachment to religious continuity was thoroughly racialized. Church customs, sacraments, and ceremonies were a means of regulating slavery and asserting whiteness. Drawing on a mix of historical and anthropological methods, Beasley covers such topics as church architecture, pew seating customs, marriage, baptism, communion, and funerals. Colonists created an environment in sacred time and space that framed their rituals for maximum social impact, and they asserted privilege and power by privatizing some rituals and by meting out access to rituals to people of color. Throughout, Beasley is sensitive to how this culture of worship changed as each colony reacted to its own political, environmental, and demographic circumstances across time. Local factors influencing who partook in Christian rituals and how, when, and where these rituals took place could include the structure of the Anglican Church, which tended to be less hierarchical and centralized than at home in England; the level of tensions between Anglicans and Protestants; the persistence of African religious beliefs; and colonists’ attitudes toward free persons of color and elite slaves. This book enriches an existing historiography that neglects the cultural power of liturgical Christianity in the early South and the British Caribbean and offers a new account of the translation of early modern English Christianity to early America.

Thomas D. Wilson’s Charleston and Savannah is the first comprehensive history of Charleston and Savannah in a single volume that weaves together the influences and parallels of their intrinsic stories. As two of the earliest English-speaking cities founded in America, Charleston and Savannah are among the nation’s top historic sites. Their historic characters, which attract millions of visitors each year, are each a rich blend of cultural, environmental, and socioeconomic elements. Yet even with this popularity, both cities now face a challenge in preserving their authentic historic character, natural beauty, and environmental quality. Wilson charts the ebb and flow of the progress and development of the cities using various through lines running within each chapter, constructing an overall character assessment of each. Wilson charts the economic rise of these port cities, beginning with their British foundations and transatlantic trade in the colonies through to their twentieth-century economic declines and resurgences. He examines the cultural and economic aspects of their Lowcountry landscapes and their evolution as progress and industrialization made their mark. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in his comparisons of the two cities, he considers their histories, natural landscapes, weather patterns, economies, demographics, culture, architecture, city planning, and infrastructure. While each has its own civic and cultural strengths and weaknesses, both are positioned as historically significant southern cities, even as they assess aspects of their problematic pasts.

The forgotten stories of America maroons—wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slavery Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women’s proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.

After years abroad, Jasper Wainwright returns to Beaufort, South Carolina, home of his unruly youth. Slavery and Sea Island cotton have made this summer seat of plantation owners one of the wealthiest and most cultured cities in America . . . and also the most hotheaded, secessionist city in the South. Jasper's cousin, Henry Birch, wants him to marry his niece, Cara, a pianist and the prettiest girl in the county. Believing slavery doomed, Jasper has no desire to settle in the South again and so resists both Henry's matchmaking and his growing fascination with Cara. Then anonymous letters in The Charleston Courier give Jasper an inkling that maybe the South could change. Though his freed slave, Jim, who travels with him, is antsy to leave, Jasper lingers in Beaufort. Amid a whirl of parties, waltzes and duels, Cara is never far from his eyes or his thoughts. As cries for secession grow louder, Jasper works desperately to convince Beaufort planters that gradual emancipation and transition to a wage-based economy could avert the coming storm of war. Will Beaufort be another Pompeii, its civilization disappearing in a cataclysm it refuses to foresee?

The South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to the Counties of South Carolina documents the defining aspects of the forty-six counties that make up the state, from mountains to coast. Updated to include data from the 2010 census, these entries detail the historical, economic, political, and cultural character inherent in each location, noting major population centers, enterprises, and attractions. The guide also includes an appendix of entries on the state's original parishes and districts existing prior to alignment into the current counties. An introductory overview essay outlines the history and function of county development and authority in South Carolina. The resulting volume provides a concise guide to the state at the county level, from Abbeville to York.

In 1820, the Catholic Diocese of Charleston was established, and Bishop John England arrived from Ireland. His new diocese encompassed North and South Carolina, Georgia and, for a time, Haiti. From 1859 to 1885, when Patrick Lynch and Henry Northrop were bishops of Charleston, the diocese included the Bahama Islands. However, the history of Catholics in the diocese--which now covers all of South Carolina--began much earlier. The arrival of Spanish settlers and missionary priests dated back more than 150 years before there was a diocese on American soil. Sister Pam Smith charts the history of the diocese from the first words of prayer uttered on Santa Elena in the sixteenth century through the interfaith singing of a reformed slaveholder's hymn at a painful funeral in the twenty-first century.

***Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize*** Henry Louis Gates, Jr: "A stunning tale of a little-known figure in history." Candice Millard: “Be Free or Die makes you want to stand up and cheer.” The astonishing true story of Robert Smalls’ amazing journey from slave to Union hero and ultimately United States Congressman. It was a mild May morning in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, when a twenty-three-year-old slave named Robert Smalls did the unthinkable and boldly seized a Confederate steamer. With his wife and two young children hidden on board, Smalls and a small crew ran a gauntlet of heavily armed fortifications in Charleston Harbor and delivered the valuable vessel and the massive guns it carried to nearby Union forces. To be unsuccessful was a death sentence for all. Smalls’ courageous and ingenious act freed him and his family from slavery and immediately made him a Union hero while simultaneously challenging much of the country’s view of what African Americans were willing to do to gain their freedom. After his escape, Smalls served in numerous naval campaigns off Charleston as a civilian boat pilot and eventually became the first black captain of an Army ship. In a particularly poignant moment Smalls even bought the home that he and his mother had once served in as house slaves. Cate Lineberry's Be Free or Die is a compelling narrative that illuminates Robert Smalls’ amazing journey from slave to Union hero and ultimately United States Congressman. This captivating tale of a valuable figure in American history gives fascinating insight into the country's first efforts to help newly freed slaves while also illustrating the many struggles and achievements of African Americans during the Civil War.