The South Carolina low country has long been regarded--not only in popular imagination and paperback novels but also by respected scholars--as a region dominated by what earlier historians called ""a cavalier spirit"" and by what later historians have simply described as ""a wholehearted devotion to amusement and the neglect of religion and intellectual pursuits."" Such images of the low country have been powerful interpreters of the region because they have had some foundation in social and cultural realities. It is a thesis of this study, however, that there has been a strong Calvin