NEW CARTHAGE, a town of the Carolina lowcountry, founded in 1844 on ground granted by the provincial constitution of that year to a company of freedmen who had served the Commonwealth's cause in the last campaigns of the Severance (q.v.) and chose, when the fighting ended, to build a town of their own rather than return to the parishes that had held them in bondage. Its founders named it, by the vote of their own first town meeting, for the African city whose ancient greatness a classically schooled generation of freedmen — several of whom, this contributor's own family among them, had been taught their letters in secret before the Act of General Emancipation (q.v.) reached them — judged a fitter inheritance to claim than any name the plantation country around them had ever given anything.
The town they built has kept faith with the ambition of its naming rather better than this contributor, writing as a citizen of it before he writes as its historian, had any right to expect of a settlement founded by some three hundred families with next to no capital beyond their own labour. Its population, twelve hundred at the first provincial census after founding, stood at above nine thousand by the Census of 1910; its waterfront, once a single wharf built by the founders' own hands, now clears more cotton and naval stores in a season than any port of the Carolina lowcountry save Charleston itself; and its own municipal government, elected without interruption since 1852 under a charter the provincial assembly has never found occasion to amend, has kept the town's streets paved, its schools open, and its accounts, on the returns this contributor has examined at the town clerk's office, in rather better order than more than one older Carolina town of comparable size can claim.
Its civic pride rests chiefly, and by the town's own unembarrassed reckoning rightly, upon the Freedmen's College (q.v.), founded within the town in 1867 and now the largest single employer New Carthage possesses; upon the four churches whose spires this contributor's own boyhood measured the town's growing prosperity by, one new spire raised in very nearly every decade since the founding; and upon the plain, seldom-remarked fact that a town whose first citizens arrived with nothing but their freedom and their own hands has governed itself, educated its own children, and buried its own dead in dignity for two-thirds of a century without once asking the Commonwealth for anything beyond what any other Carolina town of its size receives as a matter of course. This contributor, who was born within its bounds and has never found occasion to wish himself born anywhere else, does not propose to apologise for the pride with which this article has been written. (J. E. C.)