Document Type

Article

Publication Title

South Carolina Law Review

Abstract

In March 1663, Charles II granted a charter making a group of eight highly placed confidants proprietors of a new colony encompassing what is now most of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Virginians had already begun settling the northeast corner of the new colony along the Albemarle Sound, and the proprietors immediately directed one of their number, Sir William Berkeley, who was also governor of Virginia, to establish a government for them. Over the remainder of the 1660s, however, two efforts to establish settlements further to the south, one by New Englanders and one by colonists from Barbados, failed. Following the two failures, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who as Earl of Shaftesbury subsequently became Charles II's Lord High Chancellor, assumed management of the proprietorship. With assistance from his personal secretary, John Locke, Lord Ashley made plans for the settlement and government of South Carolina. In devising his plans, Ashley made intelligent use of earlier English experience in settling Atlantic colonies. Although most of his planning went awry, key elements contributed to the early economic success of his South Carolina settlement, and that economic success, in turn, quickly produced one of the most sophisticated legal orders in mainland North America. In Part I, this Article will discuss Ashley's plans, especially those elements that brought early economic success to his colony. Part II will then turn to the creation of the colony's legal system in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, while Part III will examine its mid-eighteenth century maturation. Part III will show that the South Carolina legal system, unlike those of Pennsylvania and Virginia, for example, did not attempt to govern large expanses of territory or provide administrative mechanisms ultimately adaptable to governance of a continent; rather, it established law for a tiny city-state centered around Charleston that was closely linked to the Atlantic and especially England. Finally, Part IV will analyze how the pre-Revolutionary crisis of the 1760s and early 1770s transformed South Carolina's law into something more akin to that of the other original thirteen colonies.

First Page

1

Volume

61

Publication Date

2009

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