The 1701 "Act for the better ordering of Slaves": Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina

L. H. Roper

ON August 28, 1701, the leaders of South Carolina paused in the latest chapter of their internecine political struggle to ratify the fourth version of "An Act for the better ordering of Slaves" in their colony's history and the first in five years (Figure I). The text of this legislation, which had disappeared from the historical record by the nineteenth century, fills the gap in the record of the development of the law of slavery in South Carolina that had existed between the statutes passed in 1696 and 1712, and it supplies evidence of the strong link among politics, social relations, and the development of slavery during the province's early history. Most particularly, the endemic factionalism of the proprietary period (1670–1719) continually cracked the political leadership, thereby encouraging slave resistance to such an extent that those who generated the factionalism felt obliged to issue periodic reminders of the proper relationship between blacks and whites and had to take increasingly harsher steps against slaves in their effort to maintain control of that relationship.1	1
Figure I First page of the rediscovered manuscript of "An Act for the better ordering of Slaves" (1701), in Rawlinson MSS C155, fol. 273r, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Eng. Courtesy, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
By the dawn of the eighteenth century, South Carolina had already readily proceeded down the slippery slope of race-based slavery. Migration from Europe had never met expectations, thanks to a demographic plateau in Britain, competition from other colonies, and well-warranted fears of the low country climate and of frequent epidemics of malaria and yellow fever. Explosive politics also discouraged immigration. At the same time, South Carolina's planters, a number of whom had connections with the West Indies, found Barbados a handy model for creating a New World society, and the enslavement of neighboring Indians furnished an early and lucrative economic lifeline. White South Carolinians quickly began importing an unprecedented number of Africans, pursuing in earnest the cultivation of rice for export. They recognized the importance of African and Indian slave labor to their situations and recommended it to prospective immigrants.2	2
Indeed the need to control and preserve the Indian slave trade was the raison d'être for the Goose Creek faction (so named for the location of its members' plantations), whose ruthless behavior supplied the fuel for the political fire that threatened several times to consume the province during the first fifty years of its existence. Those Carolinians who objected to the Indian slave trade, which the Lords Proprietors had prohibited, did so not on moral grounds but in the belief that the cycle of war and enslavement that ensued threatened peace on the colony's frontiers and stymied orderly settlement of Europeans.3	. . .