Thomas D. Wilson. The Ashley Cooper Plan: The Founding of Carolina and the Origins of Southern Political Culture.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Figures, tables. 320 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-26284; $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-2890-5.
Reviewed by Bryan Rindfleisch (Marquette University)
Published on H-SC (September, 2016)
Commissioned by David W. Dangerfield
The Man with the Plan: Ashley Cooper, Early Carolina, and the Foundations of Southern Political Culture
In this remarkably nuanced analysis of the Ashley
Cooper Plan, Thomas D. Wilson explores the ideological and sociopolitical development of the South Carolina
colony in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in
addition to connecting the Cooper vision to modernday politics and discourse. Wilson begins by asking a
very basic question, why does “American history … neglect Ashley Cooper while celebrating other visionary
founders such as Roger Williams, William Penn, and
James Oglethorpe” (p. ix)? As Wilson convincingly
demonstrates, Cooper’s “social and economic framework” for the Carolina colony was the most “comprehensive in its underlying philosophy … [and] detail” when
compared to other “colonial founding documents” (pp.
ix, 2). In fact, he argues that the Cooper Plan and the
Enlightenment idealism behind it created “a template for
a political culture that would adapt and evolve” over the
course of 350 years, a social and political model that remains relevant today (p. 2). Wilson then concludes that
the study of Cooper’s vision “offer[s] inquisitive audiences practical new insights into the genesis of presentday political divides” and opens up avenues for “attaining mutual understanding, if not agreement” within our
politically contentious society today (p. ix). Needless to
say, Wilson’s book is ambitious. At times it succeeds in
its aims, particularly when examining the ideological inner workings of the Cooper Plan and its implementation
in early South Carolina, but in other cases it misses the
mark.
The Ashley Cooper Plan is actually two books in one.
The first book is all about Anthony Ashley Cooper (the
1st Earl of Shaftesbury), his protégé John Locke (yes, the
Enlightenment philosopher), and their “Grand Model” for
the Carolina colony. Cooper and Locke viewed early Carolina “as a blank slate for launching a utopian colony,”
in the same vein as New England, Rhode Island, Georgia, and Pennsylvania (p. 1). Cooper and Locke sketched
out their vision in extraordinary detail for the Carolina
colony, unlike their plans for those other colonies. They
imagined a society that combined the best of Enlightenment idealism with England’s political and social structures. More particularly, they intended the Carolina
colony to embody “balanced government, societal harmony, sustainable prosperity, impartial justice, and religious tolerance” (p. 3). However, the social organization of the Carolina colony was quite distinctive and
at times counterintuitive to their “Grand Model,” a product of Cooper’s lived experiences as well as his tinkering with Locke’s ideals. For instance, Cooper was greatly
disillusioned by Oliver Cromwell’s failed republican experiment during the Commonwealth era, but at the same
time he abhorred royal absolutism. As a consequence,
Cooper favored a “Gothic society,” a manorial system
that revolved around a “pyramidal socioeconomic hierarchy” (pp. 32, 64). At the top were the Lords Proprietors (hereditary nobility and the officers of the colony)
followed by the “Landgraves” and “Caciques” (under nobility), and then the “Lords of Manors” (large plantation
owners) who together commanded the majority of land
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in Carolina. In contrast, the “Lesser Freemen” (such as
merchants and skilled laborers) owned small plats of land
in the colony, whereas the “toiling classes” (the “Leetmen” and “Slaves”) owed their labors and lives to the proprietors and planters (p. 72). Cooper believed this social
structure was glued together by “class reciprocity,” or the
mutual dependencies and expectations that bound each
group to one another, which he assumed “promote[d]
order, safety, liberty, and prosperity” (p. 83). In other
words, Cooper desired a “traditional and virtuous English
society” in Carolina (p. 2).
way for a distinctive “racial mythology” in Carolina, in
which race replaced class as the most important element
of social organization in the colony, and allowed white
slave-owners to claim “slavery as a positive good” (p.
129). Altogether, Wilson concludes that the Cooper Plan
ultimately “succeeded in settling a frontier colony, forming a rigidly hierarchical society, and designing towns
partly in accordance with its original principles” (p. 12).
The second part of The Ashley Cooper Plan is the
legacy and modern-day ramifications of Cooper and
Locke’s “Grand Model,” or what Wilson describes as the
“descendant plans that shaped growth for generations,
and remains present in America today” (p. 12). For instance, Wilson traces the influences that Cooper’s vision had on the urban design of Washington, DC (the
L’Enfant Plan of 1791), and the Land Ordinances of 1785
and 1787. Both events were critical to the creation of the
United States and “embrace[d] an urban vision” articulated by Cooper and Locke, which “matched [the new nation’s] predominant rural character [and] building cities
with strong centers,” and thereby “inherit[ing] the social hierarchy of the Ashley Cooper Plan” (p. 15). In
addition, Wilson argues that Carolina’s oligarchical and
slave-owning society—with its racial mythos and ruralurban divide—spread outward from South Carolina to encompass the rest of the Old South during the nineteenth
century, creating a regional “class pyramid and physical and social segregation” between blacks and whites
(p. 140). Within this Cooper-inspired world, Wilson
demonstrates, the Cooper Plan provided the impetus for
a distinctive “Southern Political Culture” that was rooted
in social hierarchy, race-based segregation, and a “culture of resistance to outside authority” (loosely related
to the urban-rural gulf) that later flourished in the Jim
Crow South (p. 136). In fact, Wilson even stipulates that
this “Southern Political Culture” migrated to the northern and western parts of the United States between the
1930s and 1960s, as white southerners relocated to the
Northeast, Midwest, and southern California (p. 178).
Ultimately, Wilson attributes the Republican revival of
the 1960s to this “Southern Political Culture,” given the
Republican Party’s emphasis on “southern class pyramid
psychology” (p. 141).
The Cooper Plan was more than just a political, social,
or economic vision; it established a “regional development plan” for expanding the Carolina colony throughout the South (p. 106). On the one hand, Cooper and
Locke created the infrastructure for a grand city, what
became “Charles Town,” which they wanted to embody
the ideals of their “Grand Model.” From street grids
and town lots, to the rules and regulations that governed the city, the urban design of Charleston pivoted
around building and sustaining a social hierarchy. In
short, Charleston was intended to be a “Gentry Capital”
(p. 116). On the other hand, Cooper and Locke were attuned to intellectual concerns about the “advancement
[and] spread of civilization” via cities, which in Enlightenment and republican thought were often seen as centers of corruption and vice (p. 29). Therefore, both men
subscribed to the ideals of the “agrarian state” (a precursor to Jefferson’s republican vision), in which the towns
surrounding Charleston—those designated as the “rural”
communities—should be protected from the urban infection and allowed to act independently. Consequently,
the “Grand Model” privileged a bifurcated urban and rural dynamic in Carolina, in which the many communities outside of Charleston balanced the deficiencies and
corruptions that were characteristic of urban centers in
Enlightenment and republican ideologies. From there,
Cooper and Locke hoped to imitate this model throughout the rest of the South. While Wilson admits that such
idealism faltered, as “the Ashley Cooper Plan was never
fully implemented,” it did, however, evolve over time (p.
12). This was particularly true when it came to the introduction of African slavery into Carolina during the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. With
the influx of enslaved peoples into the colony, the “Grand
Model” was transformed into an “oligarchic frame of government that empowered a class of plantation elite with
near-absolute power over a class of enslaved laborers,”
yet still remaining true to “Gothic” social structures (p.
46). These changes within the “Grand Model” paved the
According to Wilson, we still see the legacies of the
Ashley Cooper Plan and “Southern Political Culture” today. As he suggests, the roots of modern-day conservatism, or “Republican political culture,” stem from
several sources, including the “southern political idiom
of white supremacy and racial segregation,” which can
be traced back to the changes wrought in Cooper and
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Locke’s “Grand Model” (pp. 53-54, 193). In addition, Wilson identifies one of the present-day tensions between
liberals and conservatives as a direct consequence of the
Cooper Plan, in which liberals perceive the urban center as the “path leading to urbanization, industrialization, and education and upward mobility for the masses,”
whereas conservatives distrust and view the city as a
place of vice and infection (p. 98). Wilson even contends that the “Southern Political Culture” manifests on a
global scale, as evident by conservative opposition to the
United Nations Agenda 21 for “sustainable [environmental] development.” As Wilson states, rather than collaborating with other nations in hopes of a “better world,”
conservatives instead view that resolution as a “conspiracy by foreign and domestic enemies of liberty to end national sovereignty, impose tyrannical socialistic rule, and
force Americans to live in high-density containment areas in the name of the false god of environmentalism” (p.
200). All of this builds up to Wilson’s dramatic conclusion where he states that he intends to “restore meaningful dialogue” to modern political discourse in the United
States, by suggesting we need to “learn to speak each
other’s languages” (pp. 186, 258). To do so, he provides
“five strategies for rational as well as intuitive communication … when confronted with counterfactual claims,”
so Americans might be “brought back from the brink
of extreme decisions driven by conspiracy hysteria” (p.
248).
thought? To play devil’s advocate, then, has the author
put the “Grand Model” and the South Carolina colony on
a pedestal? With that said, I am thoroughly convinced
that the Cooper Plan is important to early southern history and that it has had a lasting impact on the United
States, as Wilson illustrates with the L’Enfant Plan of
1791 and the Land Ordinances. But beyond that, I question the lasting legacy of the “Grand Model” throughout
all of American history. Instead, the Cooper Plan seems
to be only one part of a much larger narrative that explains the longue durée of southern history, slavery, political culture, and conservatism. It should also be noted
that the author’s conclusions about modern-day political
discourse is timely, but his attempts to provide a way for
people to “listen and reason with” one another—which
“needs to be augmented with an understanding of the
rhetorical devices used by the Right, a mastery of facts
of history related to those devices, and a new and effective use of language with emotional as well as factual
content”—all seem rather simplistic (p. 248). I agree with
the author that modern politics lacks compromise and
understanding, but to suggest a “new” way of communicating to each other strikes me as unsophisticated.
With all of that said, Wilson offers an engaging and
important look at the ideological model that shaped the
early South during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Wilson successfully argues, “historical designs
like the Ashley Cooper Plan are often viewed as artifacts”
Needless to say, this is where my skepticism reaches rather than as living or evolving models that informed
its climax. I do not doubt the validity of Wilson’s claims how people constructed the world around them long afor his ability to tease out the nuances of the Cooper Plan ter the initial implementation of such plans (p. xi). Based
or its modern-day implications, but it all seems rather on Wilson’s work, historians will come to know the name
diffusive and amorphous. If the fundamental tenets of of Cooper and put him in the same lineup as Williams,
modern conservative ideology and politics, the Republi- Penn, and Oglethorpe as the premier utopian idealists of
can rebirth of the 1960s-80s, Jim Crow segregation, the early America. But to say that “Cooper’s perspectives
antebellum South and plantation slavery, the long his- and ideology remain with us today” is a bit overdramatic
tory of southern resistance to federal and northern in- and extreme (p. ix). However, this should not detract
terventions, and so on can all be traced back to the from Wilson’s intellectual contributions and insights into
Cooper Plan, then what is not indebted to Cooper’s vi- the early history of the Carolina colony and the South.
sion when it comes to southern history, culture, and
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
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Citation: Bryan Rindfleisch. Review of Wilson, Thomas D., The Ashley Cooper Plan: The Founding of Carolina and the
Origins of Southern Political Culture. H-SC, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46967
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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