Episode Details

In 1690 a man stepped off a ship in Charles Town and made himself governor of Carolina by overthrowing the governor — and the strangest part was that he was one of the colony’s own proprietors. This is the story of how the most carefully designed society in colonial America became one of the most ungovernable: the Grand Model the colonists refused to accept, the Barbadian faction called the Goose Creek men who deposed governor after governor, and the fifty-year war between the men who owned Carolina and the men who lived in it. It runs from a banished governor and a usurping proprietor to the bloodless revolution of 1719, when the colonists threw off proprietary rule altogether and handed their colony to the king.

It is the story of Maurice Mathews, who arrived starving and died a faction boss; of an “unalterable” constitution that was altered five times and then abandoned; and of a slaver’s son raised up to govern the colony his father helped enrich. And it is where the season lands its hardest truth — that the men who built this place out of conscience and cruelty in the same breath were not a different kind of human being than we are, and that the distance between them and us is smaller than we would like to believe.