and gave its tone to the place. There set in, on the Ashley
and Cooper rivers, a fair urban life that yet persists.

South Carolina was trying tobacco and wheat. But in the last years of
the seventeenth century a ship touching at Charleston left there a bag
of Madagascar rice. Planted, it gave increase that was planted again.
Suddenly it was found that this was the crop for low-lying Carolina.
Rice became her staple, as was tobacco of Virginia.

For the rice-fields South Carolina soon wanted African slaves, and they
were consequently brought in numbers, in English ships. There began, in
this part of the world, even more than in Virginia, the system of large
plantations and the accompanying aristocratic structure of society. But
in Virginia the planter families lived broadcast over the land, each
upon its own plantation. In South Carolina, to escape heat and sickness,
the planters of rice and indigo gave over to employees the care of
their great holdings and lived themselves in pleasant Charleston. These
plantations, with their great gangs of slaves under overseers, differed
at many points from the more kindly, semi-patriarchal life of the
Virginian plantation. To South Carolina came also the indentured white
laborer, but the black was imported in increasing numbers.

From the first in the Carolinas there had been promised fair freedom
for the unorthodox. The charters provided, says an early Governor, "an
overplus power to grant liberty of conscience, although at home was a
hot persecuting time." Huguenots, Independents, Quakers, dissenters of
many kinds, found on the whole refuge and harbor. In every colony soon
began the struggle by the dominant color and caste toward political
liberty. King, Company, Lords Proprietaries, might strive to rule from
over the seas. But the new land fast bred a practical rough freedom. The
English settlers came out from a land where political change was in the
air. The stream was set toward the crumbling of feudalism, the rise of
democracy. In the New World, circumstances favoring, the stream became
a tidal river. Governors, councils, assemblies, might use a misleading
phraseology of a quaint servility toward the constituted powers in
England. Tory parties might at times seem to color the land their own
hue. But there always ran, though often roughly and with turbulence, a
set of the stream against autocracy.

In Carolina, South and North, by the Ashley and Cooper rivers, and in
that re