Moultrie, Pringle, Manigault, and Horry, having heard the eloquence and felt the force of the arguments of the great English leaders, returned to their homes filled with the spirit of resistance to royal pretensions and oppressions. These Carolina names can be put side by side with the English orators, and those equally acquainted with the speeches of the two would have

LORD CAMDEN

hesitation in deciding in favor of the greater merit of the English group. Graduates, as were these Carolinians, of the colleges and inns of the court of England, they were the equals of the English leaders in mental training and equipment, and the questions they were called upon to consider and decide had in America new phases more difficult of solution than under the

forms in which they presented themselves in England. Christopher Gadsden.-It may be understood that the merchants of Carolina were naturally on the side of uninterrupted trade with England, because they were prospering greatly under that trade; and the lawyers, while advocates of resistance to oppression, wished, like the English advocates, to resist like proud and faithful

British subjects. The aristocratic doctors and clergymen would be expected to be found on the side of the patricians in England, favoring the limiting of kingly authority and the government by an aristocratic ministry, but shuddering at the thought of separation from the mother country. Christopher Gadsden, the merchant prince of Charles Town, stands alone, not only in Carolina, but in America, in advocacy from the start of the great struggle for ultimate independence, and he had so stirred up the industrial, as distinguished from the professional, classes in South Carolina, in his talks to them under the "Liberty Tree" (a tree in Charleston so called because it was used as a meeting place of the Revolutionary patriots), that the conservatives, Rutledge, Middleton, Lynch, and Heyward found the less cultured mechanics and artisans their ready supporters when they came home to explain how circumstances had forced them to sign the Declaration of Independence.

CHAPTER IX

COLONY AND MOTHER COUNTRY

Spirit of Independence.-The popular song that declares,

"Here's to the Old Dominion,

For she has her own opinion,"

could be applied as an expression of independence to South Carolina quite as appropriately as to Virginia. From the very first settlement of the State, geographical

conditions made the people independent in thought and self-reliant in action, and this spirit began to exhibit itself very distinctly in the beginning of the controversies that resulted in the separation from the mother

country. The relationship between Carolina and England had been unlike that of any of the other colonies. The intercourse of the people of lower South Carolina with England had been of the most intimate sort; and in a commercial and an educational way, it had been of great advantage to the colony. For many years before the Revolution, the rich planters about Charleston, Georgetown and Beaufort had considered a course of study in England as an essential part of their sons' education, and to be a Carolina "gentleman" in the full acceptation of the term was to have finished the educational scheme of life in some English college. Thus it came about that the pride of Americans in the past of England, in British achievements on battlefields, in senate chambers, and in the fields of literature, was greater in Carolina than in any other part of her possessions. So the ultimate decision of South Carolina to make common cause with her sisters in their resistance to British authority rested more distinctly upon the principles of political freedom than did the political action of the other colonies.

Gadsden First to Suggest Independence.-It is, too, a most remarkable fact that, though so situated that material interests would seem blinding to mental perceptions, the first man who saw that independence must ultimately come was a Carolinian-Christopher Gadsden. From the time, 1774, when he rose in the first Continental Congress and announced that Carolina's great product, rice, must not be excepted from the list of non-exportation articles, down to the end of the great struggle in 1783,