The English and Spaniards-Slaves in South Carolina

SELFISHNESS and philanthropy went hand in hand in promoting English settlements in the country south of the Savannah River. There seemed to be an unconquerable antagonism between the Spaniards and the English, in both hemispheres. The Spaniards viewed with jealousy the rapid increase of English settlements in America, especially in the region bordering on Florida, which the Castilians held by right of undoubted first discovery. They saw the English rapidly gaining the monopoly of the trade with the Indians and exercising a wide influence over the native inhabitants in the Gulf region, who had been taught by past sad experience to look upon the Spaniards as their abiding enemies. Therefore the Castilians in Florida were disposed to cast obstacles in the way of an extension of the English colonies southward.

Early in the eighteenth century, South Carolina was well stocked with slaves from Africa, especially in the rice-planting districts, where negroes performed nearly all of the manual labor. They had become essential to the prosperity of the colony. The Spaniards believed that the most effectual way to discourage the English planters and to prevent their making settlements below the Savannah River, would be to entice away their slaves by promises of the freedom and the privileges of the Spanish subjects. This measure was successfully employed. A complete regiment was formed at St. Augustine of runaway slaves from South Carolina; and they were taught to hate the English as their enemies. This was an alarming state of things for the South Carolinians, and they anxiously sought a remedy for the evil.

Between the Savannah and Alatamaha rivers, there was a region wholly unoccupied by white inhabitants at the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The South Carolinians proposed to erect a barrier between themselves and the Spaniards in Florida, by the planting of an English colony in that region. They asked the British government to do so. There were great obstacles in the way. Voluntary emigrants preferred a settled country away from immediate danger from foes; and a penal colony for British convicts was not desirable.

At that juncture, the subject of the condition of prisoners for debt in Great Britain, was attracting general attention. These men, unconvicted of any crime, were crowding the jails of the kingdom, and enduring sufferings more horrible than those inflicted upon negro slaves in the West Indies. Disease and moral degradation were making sad havoc among them. The hearts of the benevolent yearned to relieve them. A humane and wealthy citizen of London bequeathed his fortune to the government to be employed in liberating the most deserving insolvent debtors from the jails, where they were doomed to hopeless indigence and misery by the cruel laws oftentimes more cruelly administered.

This act caused the appointment of a committee by Parliament to inquire into the condition of prisoners for debt. It was done at the suggestion of Colonel James Edward Oglethorpe, a graduate of Oxford, a brave soldier, and then a member of Parliament. That was in the year 1728. Colonel Oglethorpe was made chairman of the committee, and they entered upon their duties with vigor. The revelations of the prisons were horrible and sickening. The writings of the afterwards illustrious Howard give us vivid pen-pictures of the scenes. The pencil of Hogarth has left us actual delineations of them. The English merchant, unfortunate in his business, was often suddenly plunged from a sphere of affluence and usefulness, to the dreadful dens called prisons, there to herd with the ignorant and vile in hopeless poverty and degradation.

Oglethorpe stood before one of these men who had been a distinguished alderman, in London, when he was a boy, and had been highly esteemed for his many virtues and practical benevolence. He had also been a "merchant prince," but had been ruined by great losses. His creditors sent him to prison. In an instant he was compelled to exchange a happy home and delightful society for a loathsome prison cell and the company of the debased. One by one his friends, who could aid him in keeping famine from his wretched abode, disappeared, and he was forgotten by the outside world. Twenty-three years he had been in jail. Gray-headed, haggard, ragged and perishing with hunger, he lay upon a heap of filthy straw in a dark, damp, unventilated room. His devoted wife, who had shared his misery eighteen years, had just starved to death, and lay in rags by his side, silent and cold. An hour before he had begged his jailor, with outstretched arms of supplication, to remove her body to the prison burying-ground. The inhuman wretch, who knew his history, refused with an oath, saying, with horrid irony: "Send for your alderman's coach to take her to the Abbey!"

The man expired when he had finished his sad story. There and then, inspired by God, Oglethorpe conceived a scheme of providing an asylum for such as these beyond the sea, where they might enjoy comfort and happiness. He also resolved to bring such jailors to punishment. The records of some of the English state trials show how earnestly he pursued these felons.