John Carroll University Carroll Collected Masters Essays Theses, Essays, and Senior Honors Projects Summer 2015 The meE rgence of the Gullah: Thriving Through ‘Them Dark Days’ Brian Coxe John Carroll University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://collected.jcu.edu/mastersessays Part of the African History Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Coxe, Brian, "The meE rgence of the Gullah: Thriving Through ‘Them Dark Days’" (2015). Masters Essays. 19. http://collected.jcu.edu/mastersessays/19 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Essays, and Senior Honors Projects at Carroll Collected. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Essays by an authorized administrator of Carroll Collected. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Emergence of the Gullah: Thriving Through ‘Them Dark Days’ An Essay Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts & Sciences of John Carroll University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts By Brian Coxe 2015 Spanish moss clings to the branches of oak trees south of the sand hills which run the width of South Carolina from Aiken to Chesterfield County separating what is known as the “Up” and the “Low” Country of this region. The geographic barrier of the Sandhills created two distinct regions with vastly different climates. The Low Country’s sub tropical climate left it nearly uninhabitable in many places due to malarial swamps, with Charleston as the exception. The city of Charleston became a major commercial hub and one of the most populated cities in America during the antebellum era.