While Irish culture might be celebrated this weekend in the form of green beer, Celtic music and a raucous good time, there are certainly many other ways the Emerald Isle has made its mark on Charleston.
In fact, it goes all the way back to one of the first settlers of South Carolina, for whom a nearby beloved island and popular beach town is named.
Florence O'Sullivan, who was an Irishman of the 1600s working for the British crown, is a notable fellow for quite a few reasons, at least from what we know of him via few surviving documents and an 1897 text called The Shaftesbury Papers that looks back on the founding of South Carolina as a proprietary colony.
Sullivan's Island is named after him, assumingly because he manned a cannon in the area where Fort Moultrie now sits that was directed at any approaching enemy ships during the earliest days of the colony. He was one of the first nonindigenous people to survey and settle in the Lowcountry, docking at Charles Towne Landing in 1670. But he actually never owned land on Sullivan's Island.
Local Charleston County Public Library historian and the voice behind the Charleston Time Machine podcast, Dr. Nic Butler, has done some extensive research on O'Sullivan, prompted by his own Irish heritage and a fascination for learning about South Carolina's past.
Sullivan's Islanders, also hungry for knowledge of their home's origins, have turned to Butler to shine a light on this enigmatic figure of local (and beyond) historical significance.
An Irishman under the British crown?
The colonization of a land already inhabited by Native Americans, who were then decimated by Europeans through war and disease, is part of Charleston's (and the United States') complicated history. But by looking at this past, Butler and other historians can better paint a true picture of how our state, and nation, came to be and how it has informed our modern-day society and culture.
When O'Sullivan comes into play, there are some interesting politics involved that speak to one particular point of tension: the Irish and British. The fact he was an Irishman working for the British crown is a fascinating and rare occasion of the times, Butler told The Post and Courier.
It is perhaps because of his status as an Irishman that he is portrayed so negatively by his peers in the documentation we do have.
"He was depicted as this weird guy… a very one-dimensional bad character," said Butler. "He was appointed surveyor general, deemed completely incompetent, and historians write him off, that he was an idiot, and an Irish idiot on top of that."
"Some of that may be true, but many South Carolina historians are looking at South Carolina from a very English perspective, and that makes sense because this was an English colony. But most Americans are not aware of the really intricate, subtle and meaningful distinctions between Ireland and England at that moment."
Ireland was a part of the British Isles and treated repressively by England. Not only were there religious differences (English Protestants very openly despised and subdued Irish Catholics — and that goes way back to the English Reformation in the 1500s), but there was a general mistrust due to English slave traders capturing Irish people and shipping them away to work in the British Empire being established at the time alongside enslaved Africans.
Indentured servants also worked for the British, receiving passage to these new lands and some payment in return; O'Sullivan helped the British recruit some such servants when he contracted with the Lord's Proprietors of Carolina to establish where we now live.
Getting into and out of a mess
Butler suggested that O'Sullivan was possibly born between 1630 and 1640 in Barbados or born in County Cork in Ireland and quickly moved to Barbados, perhaps ousted during the Irish Confederate Wars of 1640 and British Reconquest of Ireland, 1649-53.
He likely had poor Irish parents and spoke the native Gaeilge language, Butler said, and plausibly had no choice other than to use the British crown to advance his own life with the possibility of property and prosperity, despite its maltreatment of the Irish people.
"He was probably too poor to cling to the luxuries of principles," said Butler. "O’Sullivan likely held his tongue, took the king’s shilling to fight under the English flag and pushed against adversity to escape a bad situation."
The first records of him are in 1666 in Barbados, when he was a captain of an infantry unit seeking to recapture the English portion of St. Kitts from the French. He was shipwrecked during a hurricane and had to battle with French soldiers in the jungle for survival; he was then captured and spent nearly an entire year as a prisoner of war.
Somehow he paid a ransom for his release and was transported to England; in 1668, he was unemployed, penniless and in danger of being imprisoned for debt in London.
He submitted a petition to King Charles II asking for financial assistance, citing his imprisonment as a sacrifice for the crown; it was granted, along with a small catch that he must return to Barbados.
Then the Lord's Proprietors of Carolina appeared as a beacon of hope, recruiting for a new settlement in the wilderness of what would be known as Carolina. In the position of surveyor general, O'Sullivan would receive free passage and promise of land ownership in the new territory.
Charleston Scene
Settling Carolina
This is where the bad talk about O'Sullivan enters from his peers, as he begins surveying in the new settlement.
“O’Sullivan doth act very strangely and was a very dissentious troublesome young man in all particulars," one source shared.
Another complained that O’Sullivan “doth by his absurd language abuse the governor, counsel and country and by his rash and based dealings he hath caused everyone in the country almost to be his enemy.”
This "absurd language" might have been him speaking in the native Irish tongue, countered Butler. And perhaps he didn't get along with anyone because he wanted to scout out his land and then be left alone, finally escaping the British dominion that had almost entirely consumed his life and career.
Columbia
A few years later, O'Sullivan was replaced as survey general and commissioned as a captain in the nascent militia, where he likely made raids against neighboring Native tribes.
It was 1680 before he officially was granted parcels of land totaling 2,460 acres. The largest tract stretched from the northwest of Shem Creek to the southeast of McCants Drive and Rifle Range Road to Haddrell's Point northward to the vicinity of Venning Road. Another spanned Charleston Harbor to Home Farm Road in Mount Pleasant. And the smallest covered some of the Old Village.
Surprisingly, unlike his peers of the time, O'Sullivan sold most of this land to neighbors while others were expanding their territories.
“Florence O’Sullivan’s downsizing in the 1680s provides yet another example of his divergence from the contemporary norms," said Butler. "Perhaps he scorned the use of enslaved labor and cultivated far less acreage than his more affluent neighbors.”
While there is no record of a wife, O'Sullivan did have a daughter, Catherine, and withdrew to a more private life East of the Cooper, while likely manning a cannon as lookout on Sullivan's Island.
Irish resiliency
"While he might’ve just been a cantankerous, belligerent man, we can at least entertain the possibility that he was something far more interesting and sympathetic: a refugee from a broken country, a poor migrant searching for a home," said Butler. "Rather than seeking riches and possessions in the Carolina colony, perhaps he simply wanted to be left alone, free to express his own beliefs and opinions in the language of his ancestors."
This idea of Irish resiliency is one that Butler paints through O'Sullivan in an episode of his podcast on the subject.
Perhaps by considering O’Sullivan as a stoic Irishman struggling within an Anglo-centric framework, we might lift the veil shrouding his enigmatic story, he offered.
Joseph P. Kelly, director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston, notes that while O'Sullivan's story is a lesser-known one, there have been many Irish people since in the Lowcountry who have made a significant impact on society.
Take Simon Felix Gallagher, the first Irish Catholic professor at the College of Charleston, and one of the first we might associate with our modern definition of who the Irish are, said Kelly, like those behind the St. Patrick's Day parade.
The list goes on, but two organizations in particular stand out.
Today, we can look to the Hibernian Society as a melding of the Catholic and Protestant Irish. At its beginnings in 1801, it was truly a symbol for freedom of religion, a promise that had been made in the New World but not truly upheld.
Opinion
That, of course, changed with the separation of church and state in 1776, and the Hibernian Society sought to bring together Irish culture in its diverse forms that had since developed from the early days of the Carolinas.
The Ancient Order of the Hibernians, an entirely Catholic organization that had a presence in Charleston in the 1860s, sought to rebel against years of prejudice against Irish Catholics, fighting stereotyping and discrimination.
Both are still going strong today in Charleston, as local Irish culture lives on in its many forms. Perhaps we have O'Sullivan to thank for a small piece of that, a figure who defied norms, ruffled some feathers along the way and had a whole island named after him that he didn't even own.
There's something to think about next time you're walking the beach at Sullivan's Island. You might end up at Dunleavy's Pub for a Guinness and Reuben after.
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