Actually, English settlements had already been established just to the South of Virginia along what is today the North Carolina coast.  Then Berkeley convinced some of the landless of Virginia to move to his new Carolina colony, although there too they settled only in the area (Albemarle Sound) immediately south of the Virginia colony.  But further south saw virtually no settlement – until Shaftesbury convinced the partners to be more active in the enterprise.

Leading this Carolina venture was an Englishman of exceptional moral integrity – at a time when it could be very dangerous to be a man of such integrity. Cooper was something of a social optimist, yet very much a realist in the way he carefully moved towards his ideals.

Although Cooper was nobly born (both mother and father), he lost both parents by the time he was eight and was raised by various trustees named in his father's will, all of them well connected Members of Parliament.  At age fifteen, Cooper entered Oxford (Exeter College), studying under a strong Calvinist master, and then the next year switched his energies to the study of law at Lincoln's Inn, where he was influenced greatly by the Puritan perspective on society.

At this point Cooper confirmed strongly his dedication to what he understood to be the very highest Christian principles.  He was never one who was willing to follow particular doctrines and policies just because they were the political trend of the day, whether during the time of the Royalist ascendancy or the time of the Puritan ascendancy.  He learned to work with both parties, but always cautiously.  As a youth of only eighteen he was elected Member of Parliament, and at first took a position in support of the king in Charles I's expanding conflict with the growing group of Puritans in Parliament.  However when at his own expense he assembled a regiment and participated in a Royalist victory at a battle in 1643, he ended up deeply shocked at how the Royalist commander Prince Maurice ignored the negotiated peace that Cooper had worked out with two Puritan towns, and instead Maurice simply plundered the towns.  By 1644, disgusted with the Royalists' behavior – and their increasingly obvious Catholic instincts – Cooper chose to change sides and join with Parliament's anti-Royalist faction.  But even then, he showed more the instincts of the (mostly Scottish) Presbyterians than the Puritans in his willingness to find some way to bring peace to the land through compromise with the king.  At this point he held back from further political controversy and quietly took up responsibilities as a local sheriff.

Then he turned his interests overseas, purchasing property in Barbados in 1646.

When the monarchy was overthrown in 1649 and the Puritan Commonwealth took command of English society, Cooper was cautiously returned to larger political responsibilities by Cromwell's Rump Parliament and was soon voted membership into that body.  Then Cromwell appointed him to serve on the Council of State, helping to create a new legal structure for England.  But Cooper seemed more interested in limiting than in authorizing the rising power of the Cromwellian Protectorate, raising suspicions that he was still a Royalist at heart (not true). Somehow however Cooper was able to wade through the accusations and counter-accusations of both friend and foe to continue to keep his seat in the constantly evolving Parliament.

But with Cromwell's death and the inability of Cromwell's son to hold the Commonwealth together, Cooper joined in 1658 with a small group working to bring General Monck and his troops from Scotland to London to restore a degree of order to the crumbling situation.  Monck shut down the Rump Parliament, restored the former Long Parliament (itself shut down by the Rump Parliament in 1648), which then subsequently voted for the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II, before it dissolved itself in 1660.  Then Cooper traveled with the delegation sent to The Hague to escort Charles back to England.

This put Cooper in good standing with Charles, who would be looking for supporters in assuming his new responsibilities in London. Indeed, upon arrival in London, Cooper was appointed to the king's new Privy Council.  At this point Cooper became a key voice for reconciliation, convincing the king and the Cavalier (Royalist) Parliament to ease off on the severity of the Clarendon Code – rather than take revenge on those English who had been involved in the Commonwealth (excepting those who had been part of the execution of Charles I), a very wise voice in getting England to let go of the past and move on to new things. The king was impressed and in 1661 elevated Cooper to the position of Lordship as Baron Ashley. Ashley (as we will now term Cooper) thus left the House of Commons to take a seat in the House of Lords.

Soon thereafter the king named Ashley as his Chancellor of the Exchequer – the second most important position in the royal cabinet behind that of the Lord Chancellor (or Prime Minister) held by Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon – with whom Ashley would clash constantly during their years of mutual service to the king in the 1660s.

Meanwhile Ashley had not forgotten his interest in colonial affairs, and joined a group of eight Lords Proprietors (including Clarendon) in developing this huge tract of land south of the Virginia colony that they had been granted by the king in 1663. Ashley proceeded to work on his Carolina territory with John Locke, who at the time was living under Ashley's patronage as both household physician and personal secretary, to devise a major program of enlightened social structuring for the Carolina colony.  Eventually (1670) what resulted was the Grand Model.  This comprehensive plan included not only the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina but also the designs for the actual settlement of the colony.

However, like both Ashley and Locke themselves, the Grand Model was very visionary – too visionary in fact to be of much use as it was drawn up.  Locke's design provided for a very orderly division of the land into counties and land parcels assigned to a highly stratified society, from Black slaves and property-less Whites up to the largest landholders, which were the proprietors themselves.  Every Carolina inhabitant would receive from none to extensive political rights depending on the amount of property he possessed, Locke (as most of the social philosophers of his time) being convinced that property was the best guarantor of a true sense of social responsibility on the part of a citizen and thus also the amount of social authority that should be entrusted to him.

However, as things turned out for Ashley and Locke, much of the Grand Model had to be reworked according to the hard realities of life in a largely unmanageable, even highly dangerous, American wilderness.

Nonetheless this noble effort well-represented the kind of social idealism that was coming into vogue in Western culture at that time.  Ashley's and Locke's efforts stood at the heart of a rapidly changing attitude among a rising group of Western social philosophers concerning society and its ways.  The old social habits that people had long understood as the unquestionable foundation of all social organization seemingly now needed to give way to a new sense of social organization, one born of careful or rational social planning.

In short, the world at that time seemed to need enlightenment, not tradition.  Thus political ideals swung slowly toward the understanding that carefully constructed human logic would inevitably produce better ways of organizing life on this planet than had long been the case.²  And the New World offered just the perfect opportunity to put these grand ideas into practice – or so the hope was anyway, one that would never die despite the unwillingness of hard reality to give way to such idealism.

In 1667 Ashley became part of the team or "Cabal" (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale!) that governed England until 1674. Meanwhile, in 1672 Ashley was elevated to the position of Earl and received a new title, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and soon thereafter briefly served as the king's Lord Chancellor (1672-1673).  Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, had reached the pinnacle of political success in England.

But from there it would be a bumpy ride for Shaftesbury, as his political ideals constantly got him in serious trouble (especially his role in founding the Whig party) - culminating in his arrest (1681) and flight from England (1682) and death (1683) because of his participation in the effort to have Charles's brother and heir to the throne, James Duke of York, excluded from this inheritance because of James's strong Catholic sympathies.³

Meanwhile in 1670, some 300 settlers were enlisted from England to settle in the Carolina colony, although only 100 of them survived the Atlantic crossing to actually settle in the new colony along the Ashley River (named after Ashley of course!).  But the colony began to grow.  Vital in its growth was a special trading relation with the English Caribbean colony of Barbados, where the slave trade was robust (several of the Carolina proprietors themselves were involved in the slave business).  Ten years later (1680) Shaftesbury laid out nearby a new town, Charles-Town (Charleston), located where the Cooper River (also named after him) meets the Ashley River.  Charleston was soon to become the hub of an extensive trade between Indians and Europeans in furs and pelts – as well as (after 1700) rice farming, which accompanied the rapid growth in the colony's slave population.  By the mid-1700s, with the addition of the trade in indigo, Charleston had succeeded in making itself the most prominent city in the American South.

In the meantime, because the northern and southern parts of the Carolina colony were so far apart, a sense of a North Carolina and a South Carolina began to develop.  Adding to this sense of distinction was the fact that the northern part of the colony was inhabited largely by poor Whites (Presbyterian Scots-Irish brought in from an over-crowded Northern Ireland) living on small self-sustaining independent farms, and the southern part of the colony was a highly stratified society, dominated by aristocratic, High-Church Anglicans – much like Virginia society.  Fairly quickly the two areas came to understand that they had little in common, culturally, economically and politically.  From 1691 to 1708 they were united under a single governor – but separated again after two years of struggle between the two sections of the colony.  In 1729 the proprietors (descendants of the original proprietors) sold most of their rights to the English king, who turned the two Carolinas into two separate Royal colonies:  North and South Carolina.

²Tragically, in the abandoning of long-standing tradition, there would be more than just this Ashley-Locke disappointment arising from the effort to find the right utopian formula in the face of life's ever-developing challenges.  In fact, failure rather than success – and often very brutal failure at that – would be the normal outcome of such ventures ... over and over again.  But there would always be the strong temptation to try again anyway – especially on the part of those who made such armchair social design their main work in life, social philosophers, social critics, journalists, progressive politicians, social studies professors, etc. Despite the miserable historical record of failure of such social ventures, that record would be completely disregarded, so certain were such intellectuals that their newest formula would finally be the one that would bring grand social success (also making them therefore the social geniuses of their day).

³Shaftesbury and his fellow Whigs precipitated the Exclusion Crisis when in 1679 they introduced into Parliament the Exclusion Bill, in the attempt to block James's future accession to the English throne. The Whigs were also demanding that royal authority be placed under the discipline of a written constitution, a shocking idea in the days of royal absolutism. Opposing the Whigs were the Tories, supporters of James and defenders of the doctrine of royal absolutism.

These labels "Whigs" and "Tories" were terms of contempt that one party assigned to the other: Tories, the name for Irish Catholic bandits, assigned to those who were opposed to Catholic Exclusion, and Whigs, the name first for Scottish horse thieves and then later for Scottish Presbyterian rebels, eventually assigned to those favoring Exclusion!