Here's a bittersweet romantic tale to ponder as you cross the Cosgrove bridge over the Ashley. We've always known that those moss-draped water oaks were concealing secrets of a bygone time. Now, thanks to southern novelist William Gilmore Simms, we have a clue about one of the oldest and most haunting legends of the Carolina Lowcountry.

Haunting legends of Accabee on the Ashley

Simms was the son of a tradesman in Charleston and he rose by his wits to become a rival to James Fenimore Cooper in writing antebellum fiction. Had not the Great War for the Union brought calamity to his household, Simms likely would have surpassed Cooper with his greatest work, The Cassique of Kiawah. Yet, it was his epic poem, The Cassique of Accabee, that reveals the shadowy tale of passion, intrigue, and betrayal that is still whispered by the pines and oaks that remain along the bend in the Ashley River that boatmen called Accabee.

The tale told by Simms has its origin in Scotland where Henry Erskine, Lord Cardross, was ordered by King Charles I to be imprisoned for giving aid and comfort to the religious nonconformists -- the Presbyterians there. After grievous years and much suffering in prison, Erskine was liberated only to find his estate destroyed by English forces.

Sometime in 1683 Erskine, Lord Cardross helped finance the immigration of several dozen Ulster Scots' families seeking safer asylum in Carolina. Aware that there were a significant number of royalists in Charles Towne, Erskine directed the persecuted Scots to St. Helena 80 miles south of here. Their new settlement was named Stuartstown in honor of Erskine's wife.

Worthy Scottish surnames such as Callender, Yester, Hume, Polwart, Cockburn, Ferguson, Douglas, Lockhart, Gilmour, Oghiltree, and others worshipped free from fear in the Scots Kirk built by Erskine. He funded a full-time clergyman, the Reverend William Dunlap, who was brought over from Paisley. Thus free from religious persecution for the first time in a generation, these bonnie scots believed they'd live out their days watching their progeny prosper in this new Eden. Meanwhile, Henry Erskine, Lord Cardross took up residence on Charles Towne neck, up the Ashley River on a large tract known by its Indian name, Accabee. He associated with the likes of Lady Axtell and her son, Daniel, recently exiled from England for their connection to Daniel Axtell, Esquire, the signer of the death warrant of King Charles I. Erskine would have been a welcomer of Edmund Bohun, the Colony's first chief justice, and of the sons of proprietors who did a stint in Carolina as part of le grande tour.

Upon the ascendancy of Catholic James Stuart II to the throne in 1688, the banishment to Carolina of belligerent protestant Scots became standard practice. More names appear on land plats around Port Royal -- Montgomerie, Hamilton, Alexander, Urie, Gibson, Cunningham, Buchanan, Black, Syme, and others. Most were rounded up and ushered out as a result of the so-called Bothwell Bridge Rebellion. That was a gathering of unruly Presbyterians who refused to accept the kingly authority of the papist James in London.

Regrettably, the Port Royal Scots saw an excellent opportunity to mix politics and commerce as powerful elixer for controlling the Yemassee Indians who roamed the lower coastal third of Carolina. Some accounts allege that the Scots shaved their deals a little thin for the Yemassee. Other accounts relate how the Spanish in St. Augustine sent a Jesuit priest among the Yemassee to rile them up against the greedy protestants.

It's a known fact that the Scots and Charles Towne's English colonials combined in 1680 to raid and plunder Spanish Guale, the northernmost province of Spanish Florida. Today, tabby ruins of old Spanish Guale can be seen along the sea islands of the Georgia coast. Around this time Henry Erskine ordered the arrest of Doctor Henry Woodward, the original settler of Carolina, dating back to 1666 when he alone remained from Robert Sandford's 1664 expedition. Woodward was accused of arming the Yemassee and cozying up with the Spanish. Plus Woodward had converted to Catholicism on a recent sojourn in St. Augustine.

Feisty Scots enlisted the Yemassee and led them on a plunder and destroy mission to the Santa Elena Franciscan Missions along the Georgia sea islands. This was a tragic blunder, for the Spanish showed that they too could play this game.

Spanish conquistadors persuaded the warlike Yemassee to retaliate against the Scots who'd taken Yemassee land and skimmed them on trade deals. On a chilly, moonless November night in 1686 three Spanish warships sailed into Port Royal harbor and disgorged 150 heavily-armed men. From the mainland crept hundreds more war-painted Yemassee bent upon scalps and loot. The Scots, who were lax in defense and ill with yellow fever, had barely 25 men to defend their garrison. It was over in a matter of minutes and Stuartstown was no more.

The most intriguing part of it all to us today is the rest of the story that is told by Simms in his poem, The Cassique of Accabee, A Tale of the Ashley. Simms, in a style similar to Henry Longfellow's narrative poems, unveils the miraculous moment where a blood-crazed Yemassee chief, war club and torch in hand, froze in his tracks as he was about to crush the skull of a terrified, fair-haired Scottish girl. There was terror, fire, tomahawk and sword wreaking destruction upon all that was holy. Yet, this painted savage spared the life of a child amidst the carnage.

Upon the prearranged signal of a war whoop, the Yemassee warriors fled in many directions, each carrying their spoils of war. The chief scooped up the fair-haired girl child and ran away with her under his arm. Through the swamps and pinelands they fled, she fearing death at every bend, he bent upon reaching land promised him by Spanish lords.

Finally, the exhausted chief reached his lonely destination, the wild barony he knew as Accabee upon a river he knew then as the Kiawah; we know it as the Ashley. There he built a crude Indian hut for the child and he doted upon this white-skinned, fragile thing that he spared amidst the violent revenge against the Scots. She grew up amidst the Indians who settled there around the charred ruins of the English settlement. The captive maid grew winsome in way and fair of face and before long white men, Indian traders, made note of her presence there.

This blonde girl was spirited away by her jealous captor to the banks of the Pon-Pon a hundred miles north and west. That would be the Edisto near Orangeburg on today's maps. But soon the fur traders spotted her and aroused suspicions within her of her own race and the culture. Her chief and protector stalked and slew one white trader who'd won her affections. Simms tells that the chief believed that the white man was unworthy of his fair-haired prize, and he whisked her back to Accabee.

The death of the prominent trader brought cries of retaliation from his brethren in Charles Town. The old chief fled Accabee and left his precious adopted one forever. Broken-hearted at the death of her lover and the desertion of her red-skinned benefactor, the beautiful Scot lass, attired in squaw garb, made her way to live amongst her own kind in Charles Town unable to speak but a few words of the King's English.

As you drive over Cosgrove Bridge, look out over Ashley River there for you are in the heart of old Accabee and the pines and oaks whisper this legend still. Accabee became the country seat of Burnaby Bull and his bride, the daughter of Edmund Bohun, Chief Justice of the Carolina Judicial System.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site online at www.historyslostmoments.com.)