World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in Backcountry South Carolina, 1750-1805 1570036667, 9781570036668

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4

w ORLD

OF Toil and strife

Community Transformation

in

untry South Carolina, 1750-1805 M785wo

Peter

N.

Moore

World of Toil and strife Community Transformation

in

Backcountry South Carolina, 1750-1805

Peter

Moore

community of the Waxhaws

""'Sing the as his

N.

proving ground, Peter N. Moore

challenges the notion that the Carolina

upcountry was

a static,

undeveloped backwater

until entrepreneurial cotton planters entered the

Moore looks through the lens community a predominately Scots-

region after 1800.

of a single

—

Irish settlement in the

lower Catawba River val-

ley in present-day Fairfield, Lancaster, York,

Chester counties

—

to

document

and

the social, eco-

nomic, and cultural characteristics of a locale that

was dynamic before planters

on piedmont South

Moore shows

set their sights

Carolina.

that social tensions within the

Waxhaw community drove

its

transformation,

rather than the land-grabbing speculators aggressive planters.

change

as

rivalries,

He

and

identifies the forces for

immigration patterns, neighborhood

population growth, and developing

markets for slaves and wheat. By

haws bore

little

1

800 the Wax-

resemblance to the backcountry

community of the

late colonial period.

Moore

complicates the broader picture of the trans-

formation of the southern

interior.

He

also

contributes to the debate over the rural transition to capitalism

and engages the

literature

of the evangelical Great Revival to demonstrate the influence of revivals, familial loyalties, and

on the region's religious more inclusive story than

doctrinal differences culture. Telling a

many

studies of the late-colonial piedmont,

World of Toil and

Strife

points to the importance

of Indian-white conflicts in shaping both the

World of

Toil and Strife

World of

Toil and strife Community Transformation

in

Backcountry South Carolina, 1750-1805

peter

N.

Moore

Ml The University of South Carolina

Press

——

©

2007 Peter N. Moore

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress

Manufactured

United States of America

in the

10 09 08 07

16 15 14 13 12 11

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore, Peter

N.,

1961—

World of toil and 1750-1805 p.

/

strife

Peter N.

:

community transformation

in

backcountry South Carolina,

Moore,

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN- 13: 978-1-57003-666-8 ISBN- 10: 1-57003-666-7 1.

Waxhaws

(cloth

(cloth

:

:

alk.

alk.

paper)

paper)

(N.C. and S.C.)— History— 18th century.

Waxhaws

2.

(N.C. and S.C.)— Social

— 18th Waxhaws (N.C. and — 18th —Church Presbyterians —Waxhaws (N.C. and — History— 18th Waxhaws (N.C. and —History— 18th Presbyterian Church —Waxhaws (N.C. and — History— 18th Catawba Indians— History— 18th Catawba Indians — conditions — 18th —United History— 19th conditions

century.

4. Scots-Irish

history

S.C.)

3.

century.

S.C.)

century.

S.C.)

century.

S.C.)

Social

8.

century.

I.

century.

5.

6.

century.

7.

century.

9.

Revivals

States

Title.

F277.W39M66 2007 975.675502— dc22

2006032561

This book was printed on Glatfelter Natures Natural, a recycled paper with 50 percent

postconsumer waste content.

.

To

Mom and Dad

1

Contents

List

of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

ix

xi

Introduction: William Richardson's

Prologue:

Chapter i Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Communities, Colonists, and Conflict

The Boundaries of Community Toil

and

Home

32

60

Front

New Light

6

76 90 106

Appendix

1

Appendix

2:

Kinship and Migration Networks

Appendix

3:

Marriages and Church Affiliation, 1745-1808

Appendix

4:

Church Membership and Adherence, 1801

Notes

Population

125

Bibliography

Index

151

169

About the Author

1

77

1

18

Beyond Competency: The Rise of the Slaveholding

Epilogue

:

1

44

Strife

1785-1800

Chapter

World

The Lower Catawba Valley, 1 540-1 750

111

115

119

123

Class,

Illustrations

Figures

Following page 38

William Richardson's gravestone, Old

Waxhaw

churchyard

Robert Crawford's 1775 tract

Old Waxhaw meetinghouse Gravestone of Alexander

Cams

Maps Following page xii

The Waxhaws and surrounding

regions,

1

770

Settlement patterns, the Waxhaws, 1750-1765

Neighborhoods,

ca.

1795

Tables Table

4.

1

in the

:

Comparison of time of enlistment with length of residency

Waxhaws

64

Table 4.2: Comparison of time of enlistment with place of residence in the

Waxhaws

65

Table 4.3: Average family landholdings of enlistees, 1780

66

Acknowledgments This book began as an effort to understand the ordeal of Agnes Richardson, a young

widow,

who

in 1771

was suspected

prove her innocence (or so have taken Agnes through nar paper in 1999, and

Winship

many

comments

interpretive twists

have accumulated a great

originally steered

invaluable nicity.

I

murder of her husband and was forced

in the

me

and turns

many debts

along the way. Michael

toward Agnes and the Waxhaws and has provided

ever since, especially relating to religion

its

local context,

her story into the full-blown

and he gave

and importance of eth-

me

He

me the tools I

community study presented

son and Claudio Saunt reminded story of this white

in this

challenged

to book.

an honest, yet constructive,

book. Charles Hud-

of the significance of Native Americans to the

Always engaged,

critique,

me to

needed to develop

immigrant community. And Peter Hoffer shepherded

from seminar paper

I

since the initial semi-

John Inscoe's enthusiasm for the project never wavered.

place Agnes's ordeal in

to

then believed) by touching his decomposing corpse.

I

available, supportive,

this project

and ready with

he has been an ideal guide and an expert book

doctor.

This study has further benefited from the helpful suggestions of numerous colleagues

and

friends.

My thanks to Allan

Kulikoff,

Gregory Nobles, John Boles, Cathy

Matson, Chris Schutz, Evan Ward, Todd Bennett, Richard Byers, John Keeling, Matt Hale,

and Randolph

South Carolina siastic I

Press.

I

along with the

and

also like to

as

reviewers at the University of

Alex Moore.

thank the

many

retrieve source materials.

Georgia and Texas tesy; their

anonymous

have also had the good fortune to work with such an enthu-

and supportive editor

would

locate

Scully,

The

people

who worked hard on my

behalf to

interlibrary-loan staffs at the University of

A&M —Corpus Christi have been exemplars of professional cour-

patience

knows no bounds. The

archival staffs at the South Carolina

Department of Archives and History, the Presbyterian Department of HistoryMontreat, the South Caroliniana Library, the North Carolina State Archives, the

Southern Historical Collection, and the

Camden Archives were

In addition two outstanding local historians, Louise Pettus

provided friendly advice and source materials in the Crockett

is

a direct descendent of

always eager to help.

and Nancy Crockett,

latter stages

of

my project.

Agnes Richardson and cares about her

Ms.

historical

Acknowledgments

xii

fate far

more than

early stages of

Financial

do;

I

I

only regret that

I

did not

work more

closely with her in the

my research. several sources enabled me to finish this projA year-long dissertation-writing fellowship from the Univerpermitted me to set aside my teaching responsibilities and focus on

and in-kind support from

ect in a timely fashion.

of Georgia

sity

research

and writing. The

and graduate school the Colonial Early

Dames

UGA history department, Center for Humanities and Arts,

also provided generous support, as did the Georgia

American Studies provided the

during

this southerner's cold

My father pages.

He was

did not a

winter stay in Philadelphia.

live to see

the final product, but his spirit runs through these

product of the South Carolina upcountry, having grown up in the

barren sand-hill country just east of the Waxhaws. tion

and

this

book

is

his fascination is

in part

an

He

passed along to

with the Souths rural and agrarian past.

effort to

connect with him.

It is

to

I

me his

erudi-

cannot deny that

him and my mother

that

it

dedicated. Finally, this

patience, friend,

so

Chapter of

Dan Richter and the McNeil Center for warmth of office space and good conversation

of America. In addition

I

book would not have been

and not

least

possible without the love, encouragement,

of all the financial support of my long-suffering wife and best

Kim, who believed

in

me when

I

doubted myself and postponed her dreams

could pursue mine. Her tolerance and unwavering faith

made

the ordeal of re-

turning to school and shifting careers in midlife bearable; her companionship and friendship

made

it

a joy.

The Waxhaws and surrounding

regions,

1770

Settlement patterns, the Waxhaws, 1750-1765. The lightly shaded area shows white

ment between 1750 and 1761

as colonists

trend toward compactness after 1761, as

McKenzie

moved outward

shown

into the creek bottoms.

in the darkly

shaded

area.

settle-

Note the

Drawn by AH

Neighborhoods,

ca.

1795.

Drawn by AH McKenzie

Introduction William Richardson s World

He lived to purpose; He preached with fidelity; He prayed for his people; And being dead he speaks. Inscription

on William Richardson's headstone, Old Waxhaw churchyard

In

1759

settled,

the Reverend William Richardson came

to the

Waxhaws,

a

newly

predominately Scots-Irish community in the lower Catawba River valley

of South Carolina's remote upcountry. At thirty Richardson

still

had much of his

youthful idealism intact, and he was surely ambivalent about the prospect of a settled ministry. According to

Samuel Davies, Richardson's mentor and

Presbyterian divine, Richardson's heart was primarily set

on

Virginia's leading

Christianizing the "Indi-

an Savages." Accordingly Davies dispatched Richardson on a missionary tour to the Cherokee er,

in 1758.

It

was

a bitter

and disheartening ordeal punctuated by fever, hung-

exposure, and delays. Frustrated by an angry and unreceptive Indian audience on

the brink of war with the British, Richardson was

mented by self-doubt. "I think I'm incapable end of his

tour,

accepted the

"and only take up the Place of a

call

left

exhausted, despondent, and tor-

for the Undertaking," fitter

he confessed

Person." But that

at the

same year he

from the Waxhaw congregation. Defeated though he was, Richard-

warmed to the prospect of the new position. It would, after new congregations in the burgeoning Carolina piedmont, to

him

son soon

all,

to plant

earn the salary

enable

of a settled minister and start a family, perhaps even to redeem himself by continu-

among the neighboring Catawba. He bought land in the heart Waxhaw settlement and shortly thereafter married Agnes Craighead, daughter

ing his Indian mission

of the

of Presbyterian preacher Alexander Craighead of nearby Sugar Creek.

1

World

2

The world

of Toil and Strife

now

that William Richardson

what we think of as

tered most. Kinship ordered immigration

Richardson's sister

haws

in

inhabited had

Mary

Davie,

was

many

of the features of

a

world where kinship mat-

and settlement

patterns, as in the case of

traditional agrarian societies.

who brought

It

her family from Scotland to the

Wax-

1764 and settled on a tract adjacent to her brother's farm. Kinship lubricated

the local exchange economy, providing a social framework for sharing land, tools, livestock, food,

and

with church

labor.

reinforced sectarian identity, for marriage was interwoven

It

affiliation,

and even seemingly arcane disputes over doctrine and wor-

ship played out along kinship lines.

The

local kin

group

also insulated

from intimidation and harassment, a lesson Richardson's widow, Agnes,

and

the hard way. Childless

subject of malicious gossip

band's murder.

The

sudden death

kinless at his

in 1771, she

its

members learned

later

found herself the

and the victim of an informal prosecution

for her hus-

2

insularity conditioned

for Richardson's

by kinship was deepened by the

world was also a dangerous one, crouched

as

perils of frontier it

was

life,

shadow

in the

Waxhaw

of the Catawba villages. Clustered in a half-dozen towns just upriver from

Creek, the Catawba had suffered greatly from their encounter with Europeans, and

they were in no

mood

Indians burned white their

to convert to Presbyterianism, despite Richardson's heart.

settlers' fences, killed their cattle, stole their horses,

homes, and threatened

their lives. Colonists

wisely traded in liquor, and in one case

and nearly

killed her child.

Nor were

murdered

a

Catawba

Catawba the only

the

burgled

encroached on Indian land, un-

woman

in cold

blood

threat to white settlers'

peace and security. Richardson reported a Cherokee raid on the Catawba towns in 1763, "which caused such Terror, that there was nothing but running

ever safety could be had." Such experiences conditioned

and

fear,

making

for a cohesive but also

and

flying

where

Waxhaw settlers to

suspicion

whom

outsiders

an insular community to

were suspect and often unwelcome. 3 William Richardson's world was also one of small farmers. Land was plentiful in Richardson's day, and land ownership in the evenly distributed. As the

first

Waxhaws was broadly and more

or

wave of migrants from Pennsylvania and Virginia

less

set

about clearing and plowing and fencing their land, they did so largely with the labor

own families, for there were few slaves in the Waxhaws; Richardson's four made him one of the owners with the most slaves in the community. Access to the coastal market, some two hundred miles to the south, was severely hampered by poor of their

roads and unnavigable streams. With limited access and surpluses for the commodities market, first-generation

little

incentive to produce

Waxhaw farmers

vigorous system of local exchange, meeting their basic household needs

growing surpluses to ership, labor,

barter, loan,

developed a

first

and then

and sell to neighbors. In short, patterns of land own-

and production made the Waxhaws a thoroughly yeoman community. 4

Finally, Richardson's

world was a deeply religious world.

ized themselves into a congregation

arranged to hire a settled minister

—

and constructed a rare

Settlers quickly

a church.

organ-

By 1758 they had

achievement in the colonial upcountry.

— Introduction

3

Church adherence was accordingly high, with "seldom in regular

Sunday attendance,

strong. Religious outsiders rents of abuse

from

—

as

less

than

one observer noted. And sectarian identity was

Baptists

and

in particular Anglicans

their Presbyterian neighbors.

nic heritage,

and

social, cultural,

it

was

—came

in for tor-

The people of the Waxhaws thought

of themselves primarily in religious terms. Their identity was Presbyterianism as

1200 people"

9, 10,

bound

as tightly to

to their local kin group, their race consciousness, their eth-

their status as a class of

independent small farmers. These various

and economic strands interwove

to give

Richardson and his neigh-

bors a sense of themselves as a distinct people. 5 Traditional though isolated backwater

was, in

fact, a

was, however, William Richardson's world was not the

it

static,

commonly associated with the colonial backcountry. The Waxhaws

bustling community,

dynamic and evolving, constantly

in

motion,

responding to the push and pull of global markets, population pressures, and imperial politics.

indeed, even as he lay dead in his upstairs study

and

other,

sudden death

In the years following Richardson's

more

on

age forty-two

a hot July evening in 1771

were working to transform

subtle, forces

at

his world.

themselves increasingly to creditors as consumption increased and the integrated into the regional commodities market.

duced

class,

unified

—

these

Farmers bound

Waxhaws was

A new stream of immigrants intro-

neighborhood, and religious tensions that tended to paralyze the once-

and dynamic congregation. Population growth, changing land markets, and

out-migration eroded the kin-based neighborhoods, just as surely as slavery and

commercial farming weakened the web of neighborly dependencies that framed the

And

exchange economy.

local

fading memories of an Anglican establishment diluted

the sectarian identity of the rising generation and opened

forms of religious experience. Thus while the .

.

.

piety"

and "devotion

to

God"

lingered for

memory

it

to

new and

controversial

of Richardson's "remarkable

more than

a quarter century after his

death, the world he inhabited changed profoundly in this

same period. By 1800

more

world of the South than

the

closely resembled the slaveholding, staple-producing

yeoman communities

It is

the purpose of this

its

early settlers

book

to chart

had

left

behind

it

in the mid-Atlantic region.

and make sense of this important

transfor-

mation. 6

To the extent that

it is

known

at all, the Waxhaws

is

most often remembered

as the birthplace of Andrew Jackson. Regardless of whether he was born in North or

South Carolina, no one disputes that he was born and came of age in the Waxhaws. It

was the Waxhaws, biographers have long argued, that nurtured

ties that

tion.

made him legendary:

his

embattled

life,

him

society,"

ambi-

wrote one biographer,

"the virtues and faults of an entire people." His was "an

close to nature

and uninhibited by traditional

the "natural man," the archetypal fighting, boasting,

in Jackson the quali-

his prejudices, his passion, his

"Reared in a crude, violent, Back Country

Jackson had within

by

temperament,

backwoodsman weaned

social restraints";

he was

in a "society characterized

and short tempers." Jackson's personality was conditioned by

World

4

of Toil and Strife

his "chaotic environment," a lawless, disrupted, unstable, fragile

vagrancy, illegitimacy, crime, violence, and barbarity,"

all

community "beset by

of which contributed to his

"impetuosity, boastfulness, recklessness, daring" As raw and rough and volatile as the frontier

itself,

Jackson was formed by and came to

embody

the early

American West,

beginning with the crude backcountry community in which he was nurtured. 7 In their desire to explain the sources of Jackson's stormy temperament, however,

and biographers have too frequently viewed the place of his birth through

historians

on the Waxhaw set-

the lens of his personality, superimposing the Jacksonian mythos

become

tlement. As a result, the place has

many ways

man

nearly as mythic as the

himself. Yet in

Jackson was the antithesis of his native community. Born into a world of

family farmers, Jackson disdained farming. Baptized by William Richardson, raised in

an intensely religious community whose central institution was the church, reared

by a pious mother who encouraged her son

Andy was

instead wild

and

reckless, overly

to seek a career in the ministry,

fond of horse racing, and inclined to pur-

Most important, Jackson was

sue distinctly worldly ambitions.

family in a world ordered and knit together by family

both of his brothers and later

his

bereft of

Born

ties.

immediate

fatherless,

mother during the Revolutionary War. He was

remembered, "homeless and

young

friendless"

by age

fifteen

and was thus

he

left,

lost

as

he

free to strike

out on his own. Such a shattered childhood suggests that Jackson's temperament was

shaped as much, or more, by homelessness because he

the

left

to avoid viewing the

Waxhaws through

The complex and

It

shifting history of the

may be

more

seen

there.

It is

therefore important

Jackson's strong personality, for this obscures

rather than clarifies the kind of place he grew

teenth century

by home. He became who he was

as

Waxhaws, not because he grew up

easily

up

in. 8

Waxhaws

once

it is

second half of the eigh-

in the

stripped of

Jacksonian mythos.

its

was a history shaped by the dynamic interplay of distant and

one hand,

rising populations

and declining economic prospects

local forces:

on the

in northern Ireland,

the ever-expanding market for rice and slaves, imperial wars that fueled Indiancolonist conflict,

and the

market for wheat

insatiable

demand

in the sugar islands;

for sugar that in turn created a

growing

on the other hand, the peculiar configuration

community alert to seemingly minor ethnic and religious

of rival neighborhoods in a

enthusiasm of small farming families for reproducing themselves and

differences, the

thereby creating population pressures and land shortages, the determination of colo-

farmers to

nial

live

comfortably on the land and their willingness to capitalize on eco-

nomic opportunities. These

local

and regional

one another, continually creating new

new

opportunities, and

new

forces existed in constant tension with

historical conditions

layers of conflict.

The

new imperatives, Waxhaws and by

with

story of the

extension the story of the early southern backcountry as a whole

—

—

cannot be under-

stood apart from this complex interplay of distant, external forces and internal com-

munity dynamics

that

combined

to transform

William Richardson's world in the

closing decades of the eighteenth century. 9

This study

economic,

is

driven by two interlocking questions.

political,

and demographic changes of the

late

How

did the sweeping

eighteenth century affect

Introduction communities

in the

southern backcountry?

their distinctive local conditions,

5

And how

did these communities, given

respond to these changes? These are large questions,

which, though funneled through the experience of one community, the

Waxhaws

address two similarly large historical issues: the economic orientation of small farmers

and the engagement of

communities

rural

in the Atlantic market;

and the com-

plex ethnic, religious, racial, class, and local sources of identity, or stated differently, the relationship between ies:

community and

the texture of relationships within

late-colonial frontier;

The second

identity.

issue has

two

corollar-

and between communities and peoples on the

and the ambiguous place of

slaves in a developing society of

slaveholders.

Of

many ways

the

historians have depicted the market behavior of Anglo-

American family farmers

in the late eighteenth century,

yeoman farmers were

two views stand

One

out.

neither profit-hungry entrepreneurs nor

self-

conscious peasant producers but something in between: middling farmers

who

argues that

combined household with limited commercial pro-

established composite farms that

duction in their drive to achieve competency. They were opportunists but not speculative profit

minimized

maximizers. Practitioners of safety-first agriculture, these farmers

risk in

mercial purposes

marily to

New

order to maintain their autonomy, producing surpluses for com-

when

their resources allowed. This

model has been applied

pri-

England and the mid-Atlantic region and only by extension to the

southern backcountry. 10 In contrast, a second view highlights the regional context

but glosses over the complex picture of production and consumption so prominent in the other literature. Placing the story of southern

backcountry farmers

in a south-

ern narrative, this view stresses their isolation from commercial markets, the subsistence strategies they pursued, and their destruction by a revolutionary planter class

upcountry around 1800. 11

after cotton entered the

The

Waxhaws

history of the

suggests that both of these models oversimplify the

economic development of southern backcountry communities and the market behavior of

backcountry farmers. The commercialization of the Waxhaws was a halting

process, proceeding in

other times not at

all.

fits

and

starts, at

times slowly, at other times

The economy developed gradually

in the first

swiftly, at still

two decades of

white settlement. Limited land speculation, a brisk household exchange system, and the construction of a commercial infrastructure in the early years

the

and

—characterized

this frontier

—hardly more than an afterthought

economy. By the early

more ambitious of backcountry farmers had mills

aries at

and established trade

Camden. They were

a result, commercial

ties

1

770s, however,

created an infrastructure of roads

with coastal merchants through their intermedi-

also using the

new local-court system

to secure credit.

The onset of the Revolutionary War probably stimulated wheat production, in Virginia's

As

wheat production, consumption, and debt increased noticeably. as

it

Shenandoah Valley, but eventually the war ravaged the countryside,

ing waste to fields, farmers,

and

mills

and

setting

back the

local

economy

did lay-

for the

duration of the 1780s. 12 Conditions changed dramatically in the 1790s. Population pressures drove

up land

prices,

prompted

a flurry of speculation,

and forced scores

— World

6

of Toil and Strife

of farmers to migrate into the newly opened western lands. Those

Malthusian

this

crisis

who remained met

through economic intensification, shifting more resources to

commercial wheat production, purchasing

augment

slaves to

existing or replace lost

family labor, and leveraging their farms to acquire the credit needed to commercialize.

Between 1790 and 1800 the white population declined while the

nearly doubled;

more than

commercialization of the tion, started so

the

Waxhaws

—which lagged

for

twenty years

after coloniza-

promisingly in the early 1770s, and collapsed so completely during

—was an accomplished

war

international

slave population

now owned one or more slaves. The

half of all households

demand

by 1800, the product of population growth, the

fact

for wheat, the

opening of the West, and the

availability

of slave

labor. 13 It

man

was

also

accomplished by the ambitions of small farmers. In the 1790s the yeo-

households of the Waxhaws were eagerly looking beyond competency. Wheat

was fetching

a

good

Land values were

price,

rising,

and the

cost of slaves put slave ownership within reach.

and Waxhaw farmers knew

saw one. With increasing frequency they risked their family lands to turn a profit, cleared

a

good opportunity when they

their farms to acquire credit, sold

and plowed more acreage

country and West Indian planters, and purchased

slaves,

who

freed

to feed low-

them from the

worst drudgery, permitted them to educate their sons, and gave them a competitive

edge with their neighbors. 14 Whether spurred on by Malthusian pressures or simply availing themselves of

from

planter revolution

own

market opportunities, the yeomanry oversaw the transition

a society with slaveholders to a slaveholding society. If they anticipated the

right. 15

and blunted

its

impact, they were also a revolutionary force in their

The choices they made deepened

class divisions,

eroded the kin-based

neighborhood, weakened the neighborly economic interdependency of the nial years,

and commodified land and

labor, the

two

factors of

late colo-

production that once

expressed social and not merely economic relationships.

This economic transformation had profound social consequences. For the eighteenth century,

Old World

crises

and

with the help of land speculators, provincial

New World

officials,

and recruiting agents

hundreds of thousands of European immigrants to the lina officials

worked, sometimes

feverishly, to

much

of

opportunities conspired

British colonies.

—

to

draw

South Caro-

guarantee themselves a share of these

immigrants. Increasingly worried over the growing slave majority and smarting from the nearly disastrous Yamassee War, officials sought to reduce the dual threat of slave

uprising and Indian attack by persuading "free poor Protestants" to settle their frontier.

Generous land

these townships.

and other incentives drew

policies

strategically located

colonists

by the thousands

to

townships across the interior and into the rich lands between

The

result

what Charles Woodmason

was a cultural patchwork of backcountry communities,

called a "mix'd

medley" of languages, religious

sects,

and

ethnic groups living in sometimes remote, sometimes adjacent enclaves. 16 In

one way or another, recent historians have tended

in considering

how

to

emphasize compatibility

these diverse groups related to each other.

One

variation

on

this

Introduction

theme

7

accommodation. The backcountry was

stresses

a

meeting place, a multicul-

mixing zone where various ethnic, national, and religious groups traded,

tural

inter-

mingled, shared worship space, or quietly submitted to English cultural hegemony.

Another view emphasizes

class unity.

Despite their religious and cultural differences,

the people of the backcountry shared a ducers,

yeoman

farmers,

story of the

Waxhaws, or

identity as small, independent pro-

this identity in their class-based sectional

and colonial

struggle with lowcountry planters

The

common

and they drew on

officials in the late 1760s. 17

for that matter a close analysis of

any single com-

munity, complicates this picture. While class and sectional conflict might have knitted upcountry communities together, ethnic

them

apart.

The economic and

divergent peoples together.

more

likely to

and

religious differences

political forces of the Atlantic

worked

to drive

world had thrown

They were keenly aware of their differences, and they were

engage in conflict with their neighbors than with distant lowcountry

nabobs. They might indeed be "free poor Protestants" ing families of modest

—

means and roughly compatible

a class

of autonomous farm-

religious traditions

—but be-

neath this surface they were eager to keep to themselves and quite capable of indulging their sectarian hatreds with zeal.

Attempts to overcome these differences through

class

unity were superficial and temporary; appeals to racial unity were utterly fruit-

less.

Moreover, the dangers of living in an Indian borderland only deepened colonists'

suspicion and insularity. In this environment cooperation was just as likely to trigger fear

than

it

was

to signal

accommodation. Historians who overemphasize accommo-

dation or cooperation do so by ignoring the fine-grained differences that were magnified in the eyes of colonists

who

inhabited a culturally and physically threatening

frontier.

As microhistorians learned long ago, many of these differences surface only at the

community level.

In the

Waxhaws

identity

was constructed around very

localized ethnic, religious,

and

hoods developed: an

settlement planted

the river bottom,

initial

class

on the

nomically; and more-recent immigrants

and planted themselves and

mills

—

higher

in the

and

and well-watered

soils

of

Scots-

and increasingly comfortable eco-

who came

from northern Ireland

directly

more remote uplands with

and meetinghouse, farming poorer

more

fine

composed of second- and third-generation Americans of

Irish descent, evangelical in their Presbyterianism

practicing a

specific

markers. 18 Over time, two distinct neighbor-

restricted access to roads

soils, living in

poorer households, and

conservative Covenanting Presbyterianism. Because the stakes were

locating the meetinghouse, hiring the minister, taking sides during the war,

maintaining worship traditions these similar groups than

it

—

conflict

was even more frequent and intense among

was between the Presbyterians of the Waxhaws and out-

siders with completely different religious conflicts heated

up during the tumultuous

ization heightened existing class

and ethnic backgrounds. These 1790s.

The uneven

and neighborhood

effects

divisions.

internal

of commercial-

The Presbyterian

Church, the community's central institution, was increasingly hard put to bridge these

widening

rifts.

Instead of healing social divisions,

it

became the

stage

upon which

— World

8

of Toil

and Strife

they were acted out, a scene and ultimately a casualty of social conflict. By 1803 the

economic transformation of the Waxhaws had

two

slave

community quietly forming amid the

Slaves

had been

early 1750s.

a part of the

Some belonged

to farmers migrating

ginal in the

wake

its

a shattered

church and

toil

Waxhaw

and

strife

of a commercial revolution.

settlement from

its

establishment in the

households pushing up from the more commercial-

to

communities

ized, slave-rich

in

left

neighborhoods, along with the emergence of a third, nascent

bitterly divided

in the

down from

midlands and lowcountry; others were attached

Pennsylvania and Virginia. 19 They remained mar-

household exchange economy through the Revolution; by a generous

made up one-tenth of the population of the Waxhaws by the 1770s. As is the case for the backcountry generally, little is known of slave life in the Waxhaws their work regimen, their family life, their place in the white community surprising, estimate slaves

—

perhaps, given the rich

Waxhaws Too

body of literature on

suggests, however, that

thinly scattered to

form

colonial slavery. 20

The evidence from

the

backcountry slaves inhabited a kind of social limbo.

their

own community and

develop a shared subculture,

they straddled the margins of white society, uncertain of

who

they were and where

they belonged. This uncertainty was shared by the white community,

were new to slaveholding, and was further compounded by

many of whom

their insularity

and the

powerful pull of ethnic and religious identity. There was no agreement on

how

to

incorporate African Americans into the church, households, and community. As a result, slaves

occupied an ambiguous place in the colonial Waxhaws, able to form

only a minimal community

life

of their

fortable place in the white society to

own and

unable or unwilling to find a com-

which they were attached.

This began to change in the 1790s. The same forces that weakened economic interdependency, heightened class and neighborhood tensions, and eventually divided the white

community also served

demographic foundation slave

community left few

assumed on the a slave lies,

to increase the slave population rapidly

for a rich

traces in the local sources,

basis of a

and

lay the

and autonomous black community. This nascent and

its

existence

must

largely be

growing population. Questions about the development of

economy, the construction of a

slave culture, even the

formation of slave fami-

remain unanswered for the Waxhaws and indeed for the early national back-

country as a whole. There are signs, however, that the lingering social ambiguity of the colonial years was causing troubles of

shook the church

in the early

1

790s

its

own. The psalmody controversy that

may have had

a racial dimension; the revival that

marks of African American

shattered the congregation in 1802 certainly bore the ual;

and there

is

ample evidence of black participation

in these revivals.

rit-

The borders

of Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, once so carefully guarded but never fully closed to

Waxhaw

slaves,

society. In the

of the

were being stretched and weakened by the

end white Presbyterians

Waxhaw

retreated,

and

meetinghouse, wholly occupying

it

shift to a

a loss of

community

as

it

pews

in the years after the Civil War.

Thus was William Richardson's world transformed. To some extent mation represented

slaveholding

slaves gradually filled the

this transfor-

existed in Richardson's time.

It is

a

Introduction mistake to idealize this precommercial society. bigoted,

and exclusionary

one does not have

as

It

9

was, after

all,

as clannish, narrow,

was neighborly, interdependent, and tightly knit. Yet

it

to look far to see a distinct

weakening of economic interdepend-

ency in the postwar period, an erosion of the kin-ordered neighborhoods, and a

growing tendency to regard land and labor in narrowly economic terms. Economic

and demographic processes took ardson's day, deepening

its

a

heavy

toll

on the and

ethnic, religious,

stable, cohesive society

of Rich-

racial fault lines. Yet theirs

was no

simple story of a world lost to capitalist transformation. Neighborliness remained, with or without

its

economic underpinnings, and

marriage choices and thus remained religious identity. slave

The

religious identity long figured into

at least partially

narrative of the decline

within the familiar confines of

further complicated by the rise of the

is

community. The wheat revolution of the 1790s gave the black population of the

Waxhaws

a

measure of autonomy and

a

wider range of social and cultural choices

than they had enjoyed in the colonial period. The losses of the white community were the gains of the slave community. Still,

William Richardson would doubtless have frowned on the changes wrought

during the 1790s. that

made room

alike;

he

He had

struggled for a

more expansive concept of community, one

for slaves, Indians, Covenanters, evangelicals,

and non-Presbyterians backcountry

strove, often successfully, to bridge the cultural borders of his

neighbors. In

and mourned

troubled generation of the 1790s

fact, that

his absence. In the very

midst of the

upheaval of that decade, John Davis, the clerk

penned a

at

itself attested to his

social, religious,

Waxhaw

Presbyterian Church,

brief history of the congregation. Davis wrote especially

liam Richardson, extolling his "remarkable

.

.

.

piety," his

success

and economic

movingly of Wil-

"devotion to God, and

charity to the poor." Richardson's sudden death in 1771, Davis noted,

was "deeply

lamented by the people of his congregations." Davis's voice betrayed a tone of longing

and lament nearly

was missed

as

much

a quarter century after Richardson's death, suggesting that he

or

more

1794 than he was in 1771. This

in

is

not surprising, for

Davis was writing in the midst of crisis. The church had reached an uneasy truce over relocating the meetinghouse after the war,

it

ministers since Richardson's death and was

weathered a bitter dispute over kind of earnest

piety, devotion,

hymn

had suffered through two unsatisfactory still

warming

to a third,

and

and charity

that Richardson practiced

spirit

and untiring devotion, would have strained

Davis's time. His

much

as

command

just

The

wisdom and

to heal the

world had changed profoundly in the years since

he might

had

were in short

supply in the tumultuous 1790s. But even William Richardson, with his

generous

it

singing that divided the congregation.

wounds of

his death,

and

as

the hearts of his people, Richardson could not have

stopped the forces that were undoing his church and dividing his community. 21

For the most part this study is structured chronologically, with the Revolutionary War at the center (but not the thematic core) of the narrative. The prologue briefly treats the history of the lower

Catawba

valley before

and immediately

after

World

10

Indian-European contact, looking

and through the

into after

valley

features of the early

in particular at the historic

movement of people

and the impact of disease and trade

European contact. The

economy of the Waxhaw

of Toil and Strife

first

in the

two centuries

and

three chapters describe the culture, society,

settlement during the colonial period.

community was

its

One

of the defining

cohesiveness and insularity. Chapter

1

locates

the sources of this insularity in the kin-ordered, grass-roots settlement process devel-

oped by white

settlers,

the formation of kin-based neighborhoods,

the colonists' proximity to the attack.

Catawba Indians and

Chapter 2 explores the

social

and

especially in

cultural consequences of this insularity.

Conditioned by a hostile frontier and huddled

in tightly knit

neighborhoods com-

and acquaintances, the people of the Waxhaws were

prised of kin

and

their subsequent vulnerability to

fearful

and

suspi-

cious of anyone outside their carefully circumscribed world. Non-Presbyterians were

excluded and ridiculed, and slaves inhabited a limbo defined by their partial inclusion in the white religious

economic relationship ity

theme

to

community on on the

to whites

examine the

the one

other.

hand and

civil

and economic

ties that

more fundamental

and economic structure of the community. Even

social

they acquired their habits of insularity, the people of the

the colonial period the

their

Chapter 3 moves beyond the insular-

Waxhaws

reached beyond the lower Catawba

community had evolved from

as

also established

valley.

By the end of

a remote, largely subsistence-

based backwater settlement into a marginal player in the provincial economy.

Economic integration came with

a price, however, for

it

heightened inequality, exac-

erbated neighborhood tensions, eroded local autonomy, and led to

civil strife.

Chapter 4 explores the impact of the Revolutionary War on the Waxhaws, looking in depth at

Waxhaw

how the war

ravaged the community but concluding that

social structure intact.

tion of the 1790s,

it

left

the

Chapter 5 examines the pivotal economic transi-

when population pressures and rising land prices propelled outmade widespread slave ownership possible, and

migration, a strong wheat market

debt and foreclosure increased. The combination of out-migration and sales of inherited lands

weakened the kin-based neighborhoods. At the same time, mounting

tensions between the established neighborhood of the river less

developed neighborhood of the uplands played out in a

bottom and the poorer, series

of disputes within

the Presbyterian congregation. As chapter 6 argues, these disputes

during the revival of 1802-1803,

when

came

to a

head

the church split permanently, signaling a larger

Waxhaws into two communities. Yet even as the white population of Waxhaws was sundered by new religious controversies and old ethnic and class tensions, a third community was forming in its midst, comprised of growing numbers of African American slaves, completing the transformation of the Waxhaws from an extension of the mid-Atlantic yeoman society from which it came to a southern division of the

the

slaveholding society.

Prologue The Lower Catawba

Waxhaw Creek when

o one lived on

lands there in 1751. A*.

bottom between

^1

Valley,

The Waxhaw Indian

river

1540-1750

the

first

white

villages that

and trading path were long gone, burned, aban-

doned, and washed away. First-growth forests had reclaimed the old half-century earlier Indians had the Small of a Man's Leg." clustered

A

grown corn, according

and

one

to

forests,

river bearing their

traveler, "as thick as

name, might

and overgrown Indian paths

seemed, in the parlance of the times, vacant. Indeed, to the it

where a

lay claim to

—amid —the land

but in the lower Catawba River valley

virgin hardwoods, thick canebrakes,

settled there,

fields,

few miles upriver the Catawba Indians, their villages

between Sugar Creek and the

the surrounding fields

patented

settlers

once stood in the rich

probably seemed as though

it

first

always had been.

the

certainly

white families

who

1

But the lower Catawba valley was not a place without history. These Anglo-

American

tomed

families

to the

were only the most recent

movement and mixing of

thriving towns near that, a

arrivals to

people.

Waxhaw Creek belied

A

the destruction that was to come. Before

wave of intruders washed into the piedmont and

west, turning the lower

before that the earliest

Catawba valley

human

early settlers

coastal plain

into a bicultural borderland

from the south-

community; and

migrants to the southeastern interior had subsisted for

centuries, hunting, fishing, farming, trading,

the creeks and rivers of the

an area that was long accus-

generation earlier the bustling,

hill

country.

and

scattering their small villages along

The transformation

that

began with these

and continued with the southwestern intruders was accelerated

two centuries

after

European contact by

disease, trade,

and war

as the

in the

people of the

southern interior were integrated into the Atlantic market and European biological

community. The Waxhaw Indians were a casualty of their lands

might be unoccupied

this transformation.

in 1750, their neighbors,

But while

and perhaps some of their

descendants, endured in the Catawba towns upstream, where they had forged a

munity out of the remnants of the piedmont and the European encounter. 2

coastal peoples

who had

com-

survived

World

12

It

was by accident

that

Country" of the southern

ing path north

Waxhaw Indians. Lawson was who journeyed through the "pleasant and health-

John Lawson stumbled on the

an English trader and adventurer ful

of Toil and Strife

interior in the winter of 1700-1701, following the trad-

and west from Charlestown (which became Charleston

the heart of the Carolina piedmont.

Lawson

would have missed the Waxhaw villages

rarely strayed

had not one of his men

entirely

in 1783) into

from the main

trail

fallen

and

behind

made its way into the lower Catawba valley. Fearing that "some heathen had killed him for his Cloaths, or the savage Beasts had devoured him in the Wilderness," Lawson was contemplating sending out a search party when his missing companion suddenly appeared, accompanied by a Waxhaw Indian. "He told us he had as the party

missed the Path," Lawson wrote, "and got to another Nation of Indians but three Miles

off,

who

at that

time held great

The Waxhaw guide

feasting."

party "to take up our Quarters with them" rather than "make our a

invited Lawson's

Abode with such

poor Sort of Indians, that were not capable of entertaining us according

Deserts."

Lawson accepted. The account he

wonderfully rich and detailed.

and

"frightful" people

It

The

Ground farmed

all

three miles

to

The headman had

among

son had seen

Lawson or

to

anyone

to be a thriving native

from the trading path

the Way," indicating that the

extensively.

else in 1701,

the Congaree

Waxhaw were

a "large

was even

walls,

a well-established people

larger than the

its

full

Waxhaw were

son marveled

at a

also

who

prepared

of Meat, from Morning its

headman's cabin. Here the

embedded

who

coastal plain. This

pyramidal roof and

tained foreign emissaries, such as the Sapona ambassador

Lawson. The

were on

community at Waxhaw

and Wateree Indians of the

The council house, distinguished by

and

is

and lightsome Cabin" unlike any Law-

"barbecues" and kept "the Pots continually boiling

ing

our

to the village consisted of "cleared

"house of great resort" was the province of a fastidious "she-cook"

Night."

to

Waxhaw

3

Lawson encountered what seemed Creek.

the

remains the only description of these "extraordinary"

who, unknown

the brink of extermination.

among

of his night

left

who

thatched

Waxhaw

till

ceil-

enter-

attended the feast with

in the international-trade network:

Law-

massive iron pot standing at his bedside and noted the European-

made bells adorning the

dancers.

The Waxhaw's proximity to

the trading path as well

as their eagerness to entertain

Lawson's party (and disparage their competitors as "a

poor Sort of Indians") further

attest to the

growing importance of the English trade,

which engendered competition among native communities and gradually oriented

them away from

the rivers and toward the trade routes. 4

However, despite the vast cleared

economic and

Lawson nor

political ties, the

his

Waxhaw

fields,

"sung

a

two old men, one beating

mournful

Ditty."

festive

atmosphere, neither

hosts could escape the sense that these were a people in

decline. In the hot darkness of the council

cling the fire as

the impressive architecture, the distant

abundant food, and the

Waxhaw women danced, cirdrum and the other rattling a gourd,

house the a

"The Burthen of their Song was,

in

Remembrance of their

former Greatness, and Numbers of their Nation, the famous Exploits of their Re-

nowned

Ancestors, and

all

Actions of

Moment

that had, (in former Days,)

been

Prologue

13

Amid the feasting, dancing, and sexual frolic of Waxhaw told a story of depopulation, political dependency, For those who could remember, the pleasures of their winter feast made

performed by

their Forefathers."

their corn festival, the

and

decline.

only more bitter the memories of a happier time. 5

The Waxhaw had apparently hundred

years,

Hernando de gold.

De

little

army marched up

Soto's

Catawba River

lived along the lower

although there was

for several

evidence of their "former Greatness" the

Catawba

when

valley in 1540 searching for

Soto was en route from Cofitachequi, a relatively advanced Mississippian

chiefdom near present-day Camden, South Carolina, to Joara, the northernmost extension of the piedmont Mississippians near present-day Morganton, North Carolina.

The Mississippians were

relative

newcomers

to the

piedmont, and their intru-

sion after 1200 was profoundly disruptive to the smaller, decentralized communities settled

by Siouan-speaking migrants such

as the

guished by their highly developed religious

and temple worship,

their relatively

life

Waxhaw

built

centuries earlier. Distin-

around

advanced agriculture, and

mound

construction

their centralized poli-

Mississippian chiefdoms such as Cofitachequi exerted political influence for

ties,

hundreds of miles beyond the bounds of

their chief towns.

munity on the Pee Dee River was probably the lower and central

Catawba

valley

The Town Creek com-

a Cofitachequi colony; the hill tribes of

were apparently subject to the Mississippians

as well. 6

But in 1540 there were few signs of either

hill

communities or Mississippian

outposts in the lower Catawba valley. Pushing up what was probably the same

Lawson followed 160 years

later,

men were unimpressed

with what would become

Catawba

River, de Soto

Waxhaw

country. According to Luys Hernandez de Biedma, the land was "poor

lacking in food"

and

his

—and apparently unpopulated,

either people or dwellings.

It

since

was "the poorest land

Waxhaw village.

and

Biedma made no mention of in

maize seen," according to

another account. The only Indians they encountered were upriver from Lawson's

trail

slogging through the swollen streams that fed the

at

Chalaque, several miles

Probably Siouan, the people of Chalaque had

exhausted their corn reserves and lived "on roots of herbs which they seek in the open field

and on game.

weak." Most of

.

.

.

The people

are very domestic, go quite naked,

them had abandoned

their villages

and

and

are very

fled into the forest as the

la Vega, who kept the most complete record of summed up the journey through the lower Catawba valley: leaving Cofitachequi on May 14, they reached Chalaque by the "public high-

Spaniards approached. Garcilaso de

the expedition, perhaps best

way" two days later'Vithout anything worth mentioning having happened

to

them

on the way." 7 Twenty- eight years

later,

however, Juan Pardo found a string of Indian villages

along this same route. Between 1566 and 1568 Pardo led two expeditions into the

southern interior, both of which took him through the Catawba ing the quest for gold, Pardo's Spanish superiors ordered

mont with

a

view toward establishing an agricultural

him

estate.

valley.

Abandon-

to explore the pied-

His reports

reflect this

concern, emphasizing the land and virtually ignoring the people of the Catawba

World

14

The

valley.

of Toil and Strife

expedition's chief chronicler, Juan de

la

Vandera, noted that Tagaya (on

present-day Beaver Creek just south of the Waxhaws) was "without swamps. is

plateaus with

little

[The

tree cover.

soils are]

blackish

and bright

The land

red, very good.

—

[There is] much good water [from] fountains and creeks." At Gueca on present-day Waxhaw Creek, from which the name Waxhaw is derived the land was "just like that above and abundant" in resources. As for the people who inhabited these promising

—

lands, Pardo seized their corn

which

seemed

acts

Pardo's

was

Gueca was an by

either missed

like their

to have

and declared them

to

be Spanish subjects, neither of

any appreciable long-term impact. 8

historically

Siouan community that antedated de Soto and

by

his chroniclers.

Perhaps the Gueca,

Chalaque neighbors upriver, had heard of de Soto's

atrocities at Cofi-

his expedition or ignored

tachequi and fled into the forest or crossed the river at the nearby shoals, while de Soto, eager to

push north toward Joara and

its

rumored

gold, ignored the paths lead-

ing from the public highway to the Gueca's riverside villages. In any event the

Gueca

of de Soto and Pardo's day seemed to be a mixed people. Their Siouan/Catawban

name and hill tribes

small-village polity suggest that the

Gueca were

ethnically related to the

of the piedmont and had probably settled in the lower Catawba valley sev-

eral centuries before

de Soto. 9 At the same time Gueca was well within the sphere of

Cofitachequian influence. By the sixteenth century Gueca had surrendered its

political

autonomy

to the Mississippian intruders,

and

it

much

absorbing Mississippian culture as well. 10 For example, John Lawson described the

of

had probably begun

how

Waxhaw flattened the heads of their infants by mechanically pressing them against making "the Eyes stand a prodigious Way asunder, and the Hair

their cradle boards,

hang over the Forehead

like the

Eves of a House, which seems very frightful."

deformation was a distinctly Mississippian cultural practice. 11 In cavated

mound

at

Gueca during the ture could have

and small even

its

a place

Waxhaw Creek

late prehistoric

left

a

suggests that Mississippians

may

Head

a small, unex-

fact,

have colonized

or early historic period. Such a failed colonial ven-

mixed culture

at

Gueca, one that retained

Siouan language

its

ways but embraced Mississippian head deformation and perhaps

village

temple-mound worship. 12 In any between two worlds

case

it is

fairly certain that

in the early historic period,

Gueca occupied

embodying the

bicultural-

ism and perhaps the bilingualism of a borderland community. 13

The changing encies for

politics

new dependGerman explorer

of the seventeenth-century piedmont created

Gueca a century

after the

Pardo expedition. In 1670 the

as

he journeyed

Virginia. According to Lederer, the

Wisacky were

John Lederer claimed to have encountered the "Wisacky" Indians into the southern

piedmont from

"subject to a neighbor-King" of the populous Ushery, or Catawba. Lederer's con-

tention that the Ushery lived his claim that

his

he ever

made

it

hedged by mountains

on

a great salt lake

to

Catawba country, suggesting instead

knowledge of the Wisacky and Ushery secondhand. However,

the Wisacky were tributaries to the clearly in decline

Catawba

is

casts

doubt on

that he acquired

his assertion that

not so farfetched: Cofitachequi was

by the mid-seventeenth century, and the Gueca/Wisacky proximity

Prologue

more populous Catawba makes

to the

15

and

their cultural

political affiliation, if

not

their subordination, likely. 14

Lederer's visit to the Carolina interior

came on

the eve of a

more

development that had profound consequences for the lower Catawba etration of English traders into the piedmont. River, English

mont

15

far-reaching

valley: the

pen-

Previously centralized at the Roanoke

merchants from the Chesapeake established direct trade

ties

with pied-

Indians after 1676. As trade and contact increased, native populations dropped

sharply, declining

Depopulation

by

set in

much

as

motion

as 85 percent

by the end of the seventeenth century. 16 remnants of these diminished

a consolidation process as

piedmont communities relocated and joined neighboring groups. Indian coalescence was further propelled by South Carolina's emergence

piedmont trade and drew native communities into

Nearly tral

all

its

at the

Virginia rival to trade with

and Creek, South Carolina slowly drove Virginia out of the

the Catawba, Cherokee,

tural landscape of the

major trade partner

as a

turn of the eighteenth century. Better positioned than

piedmont bore only

its

By 1700

trade orbit.

the cul-

a vague resemblance to that of 1650.

the Virginia communities were gone; the once-populous Tuscarora of cen-

North Carolina were

severely diminished;

and the Siouan remnants of the North

Carolina interior were scattered along the trading path, perhaps contemplating a

move south It

the

to join the Esaw, Catawba, Sugaree,

Catawba

the lower

was

this rapidly

piedmont

least

and Waxhaw, who were clustered

in 1701.

changing world that John Lawson encountered on his tour of

By Lawson s time the lower Catawba

valley

had witnessed

two waves of migration. As the meeting place of two disparate peoples,

mixing zone with a bicultural lescence

on

in

valley. 17

past.

their bodies: "called

by

people, a people apart from their

among them. But Lawson also more rapidly now than it had

The Waxhaw bore their

marks of

the

it

this earlier coa-

Neighbors flat-Heads," they were a hybrid

more purely Siouan neighbors and

living uneasily

recognized that the piedmont was changing in the preceding centuries.

Greatness" of Cofitachequi that the

at

was a

Waxhaw

It

much

was not the "former

musicians mourned, but the "numbers

of their Nation" that had declined so steeply within their living memory. Depopulation

had thrown the demography of the piedmont

settlers

who

abandoning

in reverse.

long ago scattered their towns across the their

the English trade

homes, and drawing together.

on the lower Catawba

valley

And

had

hill

the transformation

just

all

wrought by

begun.

In the half-century after Lawson's visit the native

Catawba

The descendants of

country were dying out,

communities of the lower

valley slowly realized that trade with the English

the benefits they derived from European guns, beads,

was a mixed

and iron

blessing. For

pots,

piedmont

Indians paid a price by importing European diseases and alcoholism. But while they

coped with disease and complained about rum, the

Waxhaw and

their neighbors

could not tolerate abusive traders. In South Carolina, Indian claims that they were cheated, unjustly indebted, unlawfully seized of their property, exploited as carriers,

and increasingly enslaved by unscrupulous traders mounted

after 1710.

Although the

World

16

of Toil and Strife

Yamassee settlements of the coastal plain

the brunt of this abuse, frustration was

felt

mounting among the piedmont groups

1716 these groups joined the

as well. In

Creek, Cherokee, and Yamassee in an all-out assault on the English, an assault that ultimately failed.

The Catawba soon made peace with

held out, according to colonial

officials,

"which obliged the Catawbaws to

them." Most were killed by their neighbors and former

Waxhaw

allies.

joined the Yamassee in Florida and continued to

fled to the

Cheraw

Waxhaw

the whites, but the

A band

resist

fall

on

of twenty-five

the English; others

South Carolina and may have eventually coalesced with

in eastern

the Catawba. 18

The destruction of the Waxhaw permanently demographic landscape of the lower Catawba the

altered the political, economic,

valley. It

good graces of South Carolina, affording them

a privileged diplomatic status, a

firm political and military alliance that lasted until the Revolution, and, later,

limited protection from encroachment by white settlers.

Catawba a monopoly on the the

Waxhaw

lucrative

intercept travelers

piedmont deerskin

on the trading

and

propelled the Catawba into

trade.

somewhat

also assured the

It

Never again would

path, vying for English favor

and

dis-

paraging the "poor sort of Indians" upstream. Having eliminated their downriver competition, the Catawba towns were eling north. 19

ened

On

the other

their self-sufficiency

now the

first

stop for lowcountry traders trav-

hand Catawba dependency on European goods

and autonomy. Craft

skills

threat-

were forgotten; dependence on

guns and cloth deepened; and by the 1730s the Catawba had become the weaker partner in the piedmont trade.

Once determining

the forms and rules that governed

now suffered

Indian-white exchange in the interior, the Catawba and their neighbors slights

from traders and colonial

haw made pelled

officials alike. Insofar as the

them down

the path to dependency

The demography of the Catawba after the

sisting

destruction of the

the Catawba the undisputed masters of the piedmont trade,

it

Wax-

also pro-

and obsolescence. 20

valley

was

also

transformed in the two decades

Yamassee War. With the exception of a small body of Wateree Indians sub-

below the

fall line,

the entire Santee-Wateree drainage was

now

vacant from

the Atlantic coast to Sugar Creek. In the quarter century after the war, Indian refugees

from the piedmont and the

coastal plain trickled into the

cases establishing separate villages but huddling close

the

Catawba peoples were speaking

refugees, however, could not

at least

twenty different

400

in 1743,

dialects.

in

some

core.

By 1743

The

influx of

stem the decline in native population. Periodically beset

by major epidemics, the Catawba population in 1715,

Catawba towns,

by the Catawba

fell

from 1,500 warriors

in

1700 to 570

240 in 1755, and 100 in 1775. By the middle of the eighteenth

century the lower Catawba valley was a melting pot of far-flung native peoples who, despite a steady stream of migrants, were declining precipitously. 21

And yet

over time the polyglot peoples of the Catawba River

culturally disparate

ing

though they once were

—melded

into a single

—

as ethnically

and

community. Declin-

numbers combined with the gradually fading ethnic memories of a

rising genera-

tion to fuel interethnic marriages, while colonial diplomatic pressure slowly forced

Prologue political

17

cooperation and even unity on the semi-autonomous towns. By the 1750s

the Catawbas had evolved from a confederation of refugee villages for

banded together

mutual protection into a localized community linked by kinship and loosely sub-

ject to a single

headman.

It

was

that white settlers encountered

this localized, kin-based, yet intermixed,

when they pushed

into the lower

community

Catawba

valley at

midcentury. 22

These new

arrivals

were themselves organized into communities. 23 Through the

mid-eighteenth century the native people of the lower Catawba valley had encountered fortune seekers, adventurers, travelers, traders, diplomats, agents, refugees,

armies, and

men came

— from

to trade,

a distance

—

planters, but these

gawk, explore, negotiate, or

mont home. They could be reasoned community, nearly always

lished

by the Indians. Diminished though these

particular. This

munities of white

local Indian

was not the case

settlers

much

bound by kinship

interested in incorporating Indian

pean. Unlike the Indian refugees

after

communities might

in general

ties,

dared not

suspicious,

settle

be,

and the lower

when the Catawcominsular, and no more

midcentury,

like themselves,

ways than the Catawba were

who

Such

the pied-

and even integrated into the

midcentury they dominated the Carolina piedmont

Catawba valley in

call

were familiar to and usually estab-

in terms that

ba peoples confronted a flood of people

fleeting encounters.

but they did not

with, dealt with,

native

until

were

fight,

transplanted

in

becoming Euro-

downcountry from

their

Ca-

tawba hosts, these new people eagerly established themselves on the ruins of the Waxhaw villages. The meeting of these two mutually exclusive communities defined the history of the lower Catawba valley in the two decades after 1750.

Chapter

i

Communities, Colonists, and Conflict

HE REPEOPLING OF THE CAROLINA HILL COUNTRY Was the historical

JL

earlier.

1

development

in the

piedmont

In sharp contrast to the gradual depopulation that had reduced the

interior to a ghost region over the preceding century, in the 1750s

mont was

profound

ITlOSt

since the Siouan migration centuries

literally

booming. Driven from

sion, rack renting, famine,

far-off

and depressed linen

and Virginia by population pressures,

and 1760s the pied-

northern Ireland by religious exclu-

prices, or

pushed out of Pennsylvania

rising land prices,

and the promise of abun-

dance in a new country, unprecedented numbers of both new

arrivals

and

native-

born Americans were pushing southward into the creek bottoms of the Carolinas. 2

The

results

were staggering. Between 1755 and 1767 the white population of western

North Carolina grew by 229 percent. South Carolina experienced less

a similar if slightly

War of more

dramatic increase of 50 percent in just four years following the Cherokee

1761. 3 So rapid was the peopling of the southern

than a generation the Carolina upcountry was

piedmont

full to

that within

overflowing.

Such changes did not escape observers. The three thousand fighting

thew Rowan found

in western

up mostly of "Irish

Protestants,

North Carolina

in 1753

little

men Mat-

were "dayley increasing," made

and Germans brave Industerous people." One James

River ferryman counted five thousand passengers in a single

Carolina governor William Tryon noted that in the

fall

week

in 1756.

North

and winter of 1766 "upwards

of one thousand wagons passed through Salisbury with families from the northward." Traveling from Charlestown to Cherokee country in 1769, John Stuart found that these families

were bound for the remote piedmont, ignoring the more easterly

vacant lands between the

fall

line

Carolina-North Carolina] line

is

and the seaboard. "The Country near the [South very

grants from the Northern colonies;

full

it is

of Inhabitants," he noted, "mostly Emi-

remarkable that in going hence

I

rode

at

times 30 and 40 miles without seeing any house or hut yet near the Boundary, that

Country

is full

as their best

of Inhabitants, which in

hunting Ground, such

is

my memory was

considered by the Indians

their rage for settling far back." Indeed, the

Communities, Colonists, and Conflict "very fruitful fine Spot" of the Waxhaws, wrote Charles

"most surprisingly thick

beyond any Spot

settled

in

19

Woodmason

in 1768,

was

England of its Extent." 4

This chapter explores the social dimensions of migration and settlement from the vantage point of the

drew the

Waxhaws. While the

"fruitful fine" lands

of the upcountry

south and dotted the region with "thick settled" communities such as

settlers

Waxhaws,

this

movement of people was

first

and foremost a

social process. 5

Tryon noted, the thousand-plus wagons passing through Salisbury ried families. Unlike the seventeenth-century

which had been

initially

network of

larger

As

1766 car-

Chesapeake or the Carolina lowcountry,

populated with forced and unfree laborers, the peopling of

the southern backcountry was a family

much

in late

relations,

affair.

These families were embedded in a

a network stretching along the British-American

periphery and across the Atlantic to Ulster and northern England. In other words the

European

settlers

of this remote country "near the Boundary" were far from isolated;

indeed, they were intensely interconnected. Resettlement was a social process, accom-

web of

plished within a complex

friends, acquaintances,

fundamentally social act whose end result was a region in discrete, kin-ordered

The

social

patterns.

needs of the

To be sure

where they

communities, cohesive,

new

arrivals also

insular,

but the desire to

offered shared resources, companionship, trust,

more

to

kin.

Migration was a

of Inhabitants" clustered

and interdependent.

determined their peculiar settlement

their search for rich, well-watered

specifically located,

and

"full

farmland

settle

in part

determined

and protection

—did

as

—

who much or

near friends and kin

shape settlement than the hunger for prime farmland. Put another way, the

bottoms and pushed

desire for choice land that drove settlers deeper into the creek

people apart was counterbalanced by the need for and demands of the kin group that pulled

them

together. This

shaped settlement

in

push and pull of land and kinship was the dynamic that

communities such

as the

Waxhaws. Thus,

despite the absence of

towns and the dispersed settlement pattern of an agrarian community, kinship made for

an extraordinary

The lies

who

people

level

of social cohesion and insularity. 6

social cohesion of the

Waxhaws had

yet another source, for the white fami-

flooded the piedmont after 1750 were more than settlers seeking land or

bound by kinship; they were

also colonists intruding

on

hostile ground.

They

colluded with colonial authorities to populate the so-called vacant lands of the Carolina interior, agreeing to place their bodies

coastal planters in exchange for land. 7

into the piedmont, assee

War

four decades

truders, they diverse,

one marked by a earlier.

They

between unfriendly Indians and anxious brought a new wave of conflict

As a

result they

level

of violence not witnessed since the Yam-

created a danger zone where, as colonizing in-

were ever vulnerable to

attack,

not an innocuous mixing zone where

mutually accommodating groups met and exchanged goods, services, and

cultures. 8 Unlike the colonial Virginia backcountry, the Carolina

piedmont of the

mid-eighteenth century was a colonial frontier marked by conflict, not accommodation. 9

There was no middle ground in the encounter between Indians and

only the

ill

will

colonists,

and mutual exclusion of two polarized communities. This encounter

World

20

of Toil

and Strife

contributed to the cohesion of the Waxhaws, for in the Carolina upcountry colonists

huddled together

for

mutual protection

mutual

as surely as they clustered together for

assistance.

the colonial southern interior moved within

In general, settlers in

more-or-less distinct settlement systems. In

much

three

of Virginia and western North

Carolina and parts of South Carolina, speculator-developers pried massive tracts of

land out of the crown's hands in exchange for promises to establish large numbers of

taxpaying

vacant interior. Chief among these speculators was Henry who took up 1.2 million acres in western North Carolina, some of which up among other speculators, some of which he sold to squatters, much of

settlers in the

McCulloch, he divvied

which he returned

to the

crown

taxes. Colonial authorities also

and none of which he paid a

unsettled,

shilling

organized settlement. In South Carolina, coastal

on

in

elites

developed an aggressive settlement system in the township plan, which offered generous land giveaways, ship passage, and start-up funds in order to attract "free poor Protestants" to strategic points ever, the

on the

Despite

frontier.

township system could not match the success

into the interior

—of the

its

—

in

grass-roots, settler-driven system

generous funding, how-

terms of drawing

on

public,

settlers

nontownship

lands in communities such as the Waxhaws. 10

This grass-roots settlement process took place within an administrative frame-

work that optimized function.

The

the agency of settlers and enabled their social networks to freely

centerpiece of this framework was the system of royal land grants,

through which most early

settlers

procured their property. Crown lands in the mid-

eighteenth-century Carolinas included

vacant lands except the Granville

all

which sprawled over the northern half of North Carolina, and Indian

Catawba River and west of the Appalachian mountains. able to grantees varied slightly in the right system,

abandoned

which granted

this

fifty

11

district,

territory

on the

The amount of land

avail-

two provinces. South Carolina used the head-

acres for each

household member; North Carolina

system in the 1750s and based acreage on the household's general

"condition to cultivate and improve"

townships (generally

For colonists settling in

it.

below the

at or

fall

line

its

strategically located

and hence south of the piedmont),

South Carolina offered an additional bounty, which included funds for purchasing tools

and provisions plus

a

generous tax break. In the wake of the Cherokee War,

South Carolina briefly extended the bounty to nontownship lands to lure the

most vulnerable

enough

incentive to

The process

frontier regions.

draw

settlers into the

for acquiring land grants

First, a petitioner applied to the governor

land.

Carolina piedmont.

was nearly

a plat

showing

its

identical in the

two provinces.

and council for an entry or warrant

The approved warrant was then passed on

ized a survey for the designated acreage.

drew up

settlers into

Otherwise the land giveaways alone provided

to the surveyor general,

The deputy surveyor marked

who

on the

author-

off the tract

and

boundaries and dimensions. Once the plat was recorded

and the survey approved, the petitioner applied

for a patent, paid the required fees,

Communities, Colonists, and Conflict

and received

and quit

title

to the land. Provincial taxes

rents (an annual royal tax based

grant was finalized, tempting

some

21

were due when the survey was

settlers to

delay the final processing and risk los-

ing their surveys to avoid paying quit rents. Although the taxes

—around

ten pounds, depending

modest

tively

filed,

on acreage owned) came due when the

on the

and

fees

were

rela-

—they could

of the survey

size

be prohibitive to small farmers strapped for cash. In South Carolina the inconvenience of traveling to Charlestown to process a claim might also produce delays. But

end the cost was

in the

still

far

below the purchasing

price,

worth the expense and inconvenience: grantees held

and the

final

product was

their titles in fee simple

and

could freely convey their land by will or deed, with no worry-some mortgages threat-

ening their autonomy in the event of

On the whole the headright

illness

or a bad crop. 12

system met the needs of migrant farm families and

functioned well as a vehicle for populating the interior. Setting individual tracts, cially in

it

maximum

limits

on

generally kept wealthy speculators out of the land market, espe-

South Carolina;

at the

same time

it

enabled large migrant households to

acquire surplus lands for the purpose of petty speculation, leasing, or resettling family

members. Moreover, the headright system gave

their

own communities

settlers the

freedom to establish

outside the narrow limits of the townships. White settlers

were quick to take advantage of these choices. By 1759 approximately seven thousand people (including three hundred

above South Carolina's 1760 and 1765 eight

this

thousand

fall line,

nearly

slaves) all

had

settled

on the nonbounty lands

of whom had arrived since 1750. Between

upcountry population increased by 50 percent. By contrast, only

settlers

(one in

six

of

whom

were

slaves)

moved onto

the

bounty

lands of the townships in the three decades before 1760, while the group-settlement

schemes of private speculators and developers townships such as Purrysburg essentially

permanent

in parts

of North Carolina and in

failed to attract significant

numbers of

settlers. 13

The Waxhaw settlement

typified the public,

nonbounty spaces of the Carolina

piedmont. As a border community located along an undefined provincial boundary,

it fell

under both colonies' land

policies simultaneously during the first

two

decades of white migration and immigration. Settled mostly by Scots-Irish migrants

from Pennsylvania and

Virginia,

it

partook of that same movement of people that

flowed into central North Carolina in the 1740s, central South Carolina in the 1760s, nities

and northeast Georgia before and along the Great

after the Revolution. Like other

Wagon Road from

commu-

Pennsylvania to South Carolina,

experienced rapid growth. By 1759, only eight years after the

first

up land along the Catawba

hundred people

along

Waxhaw and Cane

River, there

were more than

creeks. 14 This

six

in the

Waxhaw

total

also

took

living

non-

stop for northern

settlement was the fastest growing area

upcountry during the 1750s and early 1760s, with

twelve people per square mile by 1761. 15

first

it

settlers

was almost one-tenth of the

Indian population of the South Carolina backcountry. As the

migrants into South Carolina, the

white

Growth continued

a population density of at a slightly

slower pace

World

22

through 1766,

in part

due

of Toil

to the density of

sparsely settled lands to the west

and Strife

Waxhaw

population relative to the more

and southwest. However, while fewer than

3 percent

of the 1,100 grants issued in the backcountry between 1760 and 1765 were for land in the

Waxhaws

—

new

the fewest

grants of any backcountry

—the sharp

community

decline in land grants was partially offset by a sudden increase in land purchases. 16

new wave of settlement began to increase at a rapid clip

in the

as Charles

ingly thick settled" this remote place lution the population of the

An the

in the

home

ever, land,

to

is little

to

had become by 1768. By the time of the Revo-

Waxhaw settlement approached one

network that made settlement

social

church, and court records

in the 1750s

thousand.

and prolonged settlement of

surviving correspondence between settlers and relatives

document the

neighbors, siblings, in-laws, church

Waxhaws

War comment on how "surpris-

decade following the Cherokee

Woodmason

extensive kinship network facilitated this rapid

Waxhaws. There

back

mid- 1760s, and Waxhaw population continued

—by 50 percent

—prompting observers such

A

show

possible. 17

How-

a high level of prior relationships

members

—between people who moved

and 1760s. Richard Cousar was

typical. In

moved

1752 and took headright grants on Cane Creek and

Waxhaw

to the

tributaries.

its

as

1742 Cousar and

Samuel and Robert Dunlap purchased adjacent lands on the Borden Tract County, Virginia. Cousar and Samuel Dunlap

—

to the

in

Augusta

settlement in

Robert followed

seven years later and purchased a Cane Creek tract from Robert Ramsey, another

Augusta County neighbor and fellow church member. One year sold his

Waxhaw Creek

tract to

John and Moses Davis,

who

earlier

Ramsey had

paid with Virginia cur-

rency and whose surname likewise appears in Augusta County church records. 18 In all,

nearly one-half of the sixty-two surnames appearing in

during the

first

decade of settlement were also

church records. The complete names of one in in

Waxhaw

land records

Augusta County Presbyterian

listed in

six settlers

during

period appear

this

both communities. Augusta County was the most important feeder community

the early years. Although this connection grew thinner after 1760, Augusta

in

County

continued to supply migrants through the Revolution. 19

The

haw

Irish Settlement in

migrants.

western North Carolina was another key source of Wax-

Henry White moved

again and push

down

into the

brother John had both joined larly brief sojourn.

him by

from Pennsylvania

1758. John, James,

Irish Settlement in

other early migrants apparently

especially Lancaster

in

1

749, only to

settlement in 1752. His father

Moving from western Maryland

1746-47, the Lynns were in the

Many

there

Waxhaw

moved

and Chester Counties.

out his

and Andrew Lynn had a simi-

into the

Shendandoah Valley

1752 and the

directly

Also, a

sell

Hugh and

Waxhaws by

in

1753.

from southwest Pennsylvania,

much

smaller but

still

important

number of settlers drifted up into the Waxhaws from the South Carolina middle country. Not until the close of the Seven Years' War did any considerable number of immigrants come into the Waxhaws directly from Ireland. 20 The comparative data show that Cousar, the Whites, and the Lynns typified the migration pattern of early

Waxhaw

settlers. 21

Land and church records not only

confirm contemporary observations that "families from the northward" peopled

Communities, Colonists, and Conflict

23

show that these families were interconnected. As moved through space, they also moved along a social the abundant lands that promised autonomy and com-

the Carolina piedmont, they also

migrants into the backcountry

moved into moved into

network; as they

familiar communities.

petency, they also

The peopling of the

early south-

movement where groups transplanted themselves in This pattern would hold even when a new stream of immigrants

ern backcountry was a social

piecemeal fashion.

poured into the backcountry

directly

from northern Ireland

in the 1760s

and 1770s,

although the connections would eventually grow more tenuous, leading to the emergence of

rival

kinship groups. 22

Kinship ordered migration and settlement; the search for land drove always had been land

— cheap, abundant,

southern piedmont in the

first

place.

fertile

And

it

land

—

it. It

was and

that lured settlers into the

was good land

in particular, with

its

promise of a good crop and a comfortable subsistence, that drew them in such great

numbers

to places such as the

Waxhaws. At the same time, the

social

network that

guided settlement into the Waxhaws continued to play a prominent role locating

by

new settlers within

their desire for

Settlers'

choices were thus framed

good land on the one hand and the need

—who often helped newcomers — on

neighbors lands to

neighborhoods.

specific

after arrival,

for trusted, reliable

locate vacant tracts, arranged surveys, or leased their

the other.

Upcountry communities were shaped

in part

by

the tension between these two kinds of needs.

Unlike the tidewater south, where the choicest lands lay along navigable streams for easy access to markets, access. tury,

good land

in the

Few streams were navigable above

and

settlers

viewed

the

piedmont had fall

little

line until the

rivers as obstacles at best,

do with

to

mid-nineteenth cen-

dangers to be avoided

at worst.

Rather, backcountry settlers looked for a combination of rich, well-drained soil

easy access to water, preferably fresh springwater or easily

river

dug

wells

and

and

a nearby

creek to provide water and forage for livestock. Settlers especially relished the recently

abandoned old cated

fields

of Indian farmers, which were easy to clear and usually indi-

soil. 23

good

These Indian old settlers in the

fields

almost certainly would have been the

Waxhaws. Although first-growth

forest

first

1753 reference to disputed claims in "the

were

Indian old

fields

any event,

settlers

still

Waxaw

fields" suggests that

recognizable and aggressively pursued by white

found what they were looking

among

Waxhaw Creek

of the extensive stretches of cleared ground John Lawson found near in 1701, a

choice

had probably reclaimed much

for in the

settlers.

In

Waxhaws. While Lawson

when he described a soil "so durable that no Labour of Man, in one or could make it poor," producing corn stalks "thick as the Small of a Man's

exaggerated

two Ages,

Leg," later observers nonetheless

Waxhaws. "It

is

as fine a

Country

confirmed the high quality of farmland in the

as

any

in America,"

of Trade in 1754. Fifteen years later Charles fine Spot,"

and

that

same year James Cook

Matthew Rowan

Woodmason

called

extolled the

"many

larged prospects" afforded by the "rising grounds, rivers,

Waxhaws. 24

and

it

told the

Board

a "very fruitful

pleasing and en-

fruitful vallies"

of the

World

24

Modern

of Toil

and Strife

surveys confirm these contemporary observations about

soil

and

give a clearer idea of

row

strips

how soils were

of poorly drained

suitable for forage

and

soil quality

distributed throughout the settlement. Nar-

along the Catawba River and in creek bottoms were

soil

for locally

consumed crops such

would not produce wheat, and they were

as

corn and oats, but they

subject to flooding.

The

best soils lay along

the gently sloping country in the western end of the settlement, extending about

seven miles inland from the

river. Relatively

high in organic content, these

soils

were

capable of producing excellent crops of corn, wheat, and later cotton. Soil quality gradually diminished in the uplands at the eastern end of the settlement. Lower in

organic content, these upland soils were mostly suited for pasture. The worst

were located along the headwaters of Cane,

Gills,

and Bear creeks

at the

extreme

soils

east-

ern edge of the settlement. 25

Eighteenth-century farmers had no sophisticated scientific equipment for testing soils,

but they could

of native

flora.

still

distinguish soil types, relying primarily

Indian old

would have been

fields

on

their

knowledge

cleared or covered by first-growth

pine forest. Otherwise settlers shunned the pure pine stands, taking up the richer lands dominated by virgin

hardwood

forests

of oak, hickory, and yellow poplar, often

and shortleaf pine. They would

mixed with

loblolly

soils in the

blackjack country of the eastern uplands, so called because of the pre-

dominance of the blackjack oak, to

poor

a small, scrubby, thick-barked tree especially suited

soils. 26

Settlement

were

also have recognized the poorer

at the

two streams and Bear

initially

followed this pattern of

soil distribution.

The

earliest grants

lower end of Waxhaw and Cane creeks and in the rich lands between these east of the river.

some

creeks,

A few early grantees took up land at the mouths of Gills

three to four miles

from the

river,

but most early

settlers

were

concentrated further west, moving gradually eastward along the creek bottoms over the course of the for this pattern,

But there

is

first

The search

decade.

which was

typical for

for

prime

and

access to water accounts

another pattern discernible here, one that mirrors the regional migra-

tion patterns noted earlier: as settlers followed

moved

soils

upcountry settlements. 27

into social spaces occupied

good

soil

and creek bottoms, they

also

by members of their kin group, creating kin-based

neighborhoods. Although neighborhoods were heterogeneous, with several families

occupying

a particular spot, rarely did a single family live in

borhood. Thus

six

Adamses had accumulated

land was interspersed

Montgomery

families

among

more than one neigh-

1,200 acres collectively

the tributaries of upper

were also concentrated

by 1775,

all this

Cane Creek. The Douglas and

in this area, while the

Robinsons, Crocketts, and Crawfords lived almost exclusively on

McCullochs,

Waxhaw Creek. This

when John Belk and Ananias new neighborhoods on Hannahs Creek and Turkey Quarter. Belk

pattern was evident later in the colonial period as well,

Black established

owned

1,200 acres by 1789,

all

concentrated on the margins of the blackjack area.

Overall there were five identifiable neighborhoods in the nial period:

on Waxhaw Creek, on the

river

bottom

Waxhaws during

the colo-

between the two creek systems

and surrounding the church, on lower Cane Creek and

Rum Creek, on Gills and Bear

Communities, Colonists, and Conflict creeks

and

their tributaries,

Camp

and on upper Cane and

ordered process.

The

embedded

alluring of early

network and served

munities such as the Waxhaws. 29 In 1754

Thompson

on lower Cane Creek and an additional 200

Rum

creeks.

Three years

later

profits to

developing com-

acquired two grants, a 450-acre

acres near the fork of

he conveyed the Cane Creek

Rum Creek property for his own

1753 grant of 300 acres on

American market ventures, was

a social function in

tract

owner. Like

a kin-

Thompson and Felix Kennedy show that even land specu-

most maligned and

and used the

more than

Waxhaws, neighborhood formation, like migration, was

in the kinship

retained his

all,

28

cases of Benjamin

lation, that

creeks. In

one neighborhood during the

eight in ten families limited their residence to only colonial period. In the

25

use. Likewise, Felix

Cane and

two kinsmen but

tract to

Kennedy

Waxhaw Creek to John Kennedy for fifty pounds

sold his

currency

purchase an adjacent 325-acre tract from an unrelated land-

Thompson and Kennedy, about one

in speculation during the initial land

in five resident

landowners dabbled

boom, but approximately one-third of

the

acreage they sold speculatively went to family members. For such men, surplus land

way to strengthen family presence

was both a source of profit and

a

hood. Thus, while some

did engage in land speculation, acquiring then liqui-

settlers

in the neighbor-

dating surplus property for a quick profit, they frequently sold these speculative tracts to kin

and

friends, suggesting that land speculation served to build

community as well

as generate cash. 30

The push and pull of land and kinship thus structured haws, steering

settlers into the

the settlement of the

Wax-

lower Catawba valley and from there into compact,

kin-ordered neighborhoods. The reasons for this are obvious, though not always apparent in the limited sources of a single community.

numerous advantages. Knit together borhoods,

settlers

ties

more

spacious,

framed the

local

more

as

barn

ity,

and

and

society offered

affordable lands at the edge of the

com-

economy of agrarian communities such

as the

Waxhaws. For example, the borrowing system livestock,

A kin-centered

compact, cohesive family-based neigh-

enjoyed the security, social power, help, and companionship denied

to those living in the

munity. Kinship

in secure,

services, either

raising, quilting bees, religion. Reciprocity

—

on an individual and harvests

was

the necessary exchange of labor, tools,

basis or

through group

—was structured by

essential in developing

ties

activities

such

of kinship, ethnic-

communities where labor and

other resources were scarce, and kinship greased the wheels of reciprocal exchange

by wedding

it

to family, patriarchy,

and inheritance. Moreover, because nuclear and

extended families were essentially cooperative, not competitive, the tensions arising

from these reciprocal obligations could be resolved openly, as could disagreements over

thus comes as stay put

no

surprise that, once settled

and not move

and informally,

among their own

kin, families

It

tended to

into the unfamiliar, perhaps unfriendly, territory of nonkin. 31

As new settlers arrived neighborhoods

directly,

boundaries and property damage caused by livestock.

as they

in

the late

1750S, they were folded into the kin-based

continued to follow the creek bottoms in search of choice

— World

26

farmland.

of Toil and Strife

Then something curious happened.

In the early 1760s settlers

began show-

ing a decided preference for purchasing lands near the heart of the settlement, ignor-

ing the

much

cheaper granted lands to the

The geographic expansion of

east.

the

settlement froze for the better part of the next decade, but population growth slowed

Only new grants ground

little.

to a halt, while purchases of previously granted lands

The

increased by 130 percent. Soil type alone cannot account for this

shift.

land these settlers neglected in the early 1760s was of the same

type as that of the

soil

eastern

higher-priced western lands they were purchasing. Moreover, the western tracts

between the two creek systems and did not afford ready access after 1761

was

clearly

to water.

fell

The trend

toward compactness. Instead of venturing into the well- watered

uplands through the expansion of kin-based neighborhoods,

settlers

were

filling

the interstices at the center of the settlement. As a result the lands to the east re-

mained only

partially settled until a

second wave of settlers arrived

The even-more-distant blackjack country remained vacant

in the late 1760s.

until the eve of the

Revo-

lution. 32

The land-kinship dynamic a decade sion,

The

that

had determined settlement patterns

was disrupted because kinship was only one

for

more than

factor contributing to the cohe-

compactness, and insularity of piedmont communities such as the Waxhaws.

threat of Indian attack

Cherokee war parties Scots-Irish

three

and

fell

community at

was the

other. In

February 1760 that threat was realized.

The

on

several white settlements west of the

Broad

the

Long Canes was

Between twenty-

fifty-six settlers

were

killed

and

refugees fled to the relative security of kin

particularly hard hit.

several

more were captured.

and acquaintances

in the

River.

A

flood of

Waxhaws. The

Cherokee War came on the heels of a smallpox epidemic that had severely diminished the Catawba,

had

who had a long history of conflict with white settlers but who also

partially shielded

neighboring whites from Iroquois raiding parties during the

northern Indians again raided the Catawba and

preceding decade. Three years

later,

Broad

murdering the Catawba headman Hagler and

river valley settlements,

ing another der, the

wave of refugees

into the

Waxhaws.

weakening of the Catawba, and the Cherokee War came

flow of settlers into the

Waxhaws

trigger-

was no accident that Hagler's mur-

It

at a

time

when

the

slowed, geographic expansion halted, and the set-

tlement pattern took a decided turn toward compactness. 33 If

the people of the

Waxhaws were

ever tempted to forget that they were coloniz-

ing intruders, their Indian neighbors were usually ready to send a painful reminder

Catawba

as well as

a direct assault

on the

all-out conquest

Cherokee

—

Cherokee and Iroquois. Though the Waxhaws never experienced scale of the

Long Canes

on the order of the

British

relations of white settlers with

were regularly marred by

conflict.

—

just as the

Catawba never suffered

and American campaigns against the

Catawbas and other Indians of the

interior

This conflict was determined largely by the collu-

sion of white colonists with colonial authorities to scatter white settlements strategically across the interior.

changed over the

first

As the demographic make-up of the lower Catawba valley

two decades of white settlement, so too did the substance of

Indian-white conflict and the texture of upcountry violence.

Communities, Colonists, and Conflict

Although land policy

two Carolinas was similar by virtue of the headright

in the

system, the two provinces had different policy objectives the other did not slaves

and

little

raid the interior

—leading

27

—one concerned

North Carolina could afford

fear of Indian attack,

and line their pockets with

profits

Carolina, where colonial authorities faced a

to let land grabbers

from speculation. 34 Not so

much

Indians,

With few

to vast differences in actual land distribution.

in

South

demographic, responded

different

with a different agenda, and took measures to limit large-scale speculation. In the

and

rich rice-growing district of the lowcountry, white planters racial

minority and never

Land policy was that an Indian

a

composed

mass

a

revolt.

demography: fearing

a direct response to South Carolina's unique

war would trigger

officials

of the dual threat of Indian attack and slave

lost sight

slave uprising, colonial officials

implemented

the township plan in the 1730s for the express purpose of placing "free poor Protestants" at strategic sites along the frontier.

visions for tools,

and

in

some

cases

The

pull of land giveaways, tax breaks, pro-

payment of

transatlantic passage

with the push of poverty and population pressures

—assured

coastal

—combined

South Carolini-

ans that a steady stream of white settlers would create a buffer between lowcountry plantations

and Indian

colonists in the 1750s

land. In the

and again

Waxhaws,

as elsewhere in the

in the early 1770s

showed

piedmont, waves of

that free

poor Protestants

were eager to cooperate. 35 In the

Catawba

valley these white colonists planted their settlements in the

shadow, and sometimes at

at the

Waxhaw Creek grew up just

very doorstep, of the Catawba towns. thirty miles south of the

"best hunting Ground," as John Stuart

remembered

it.

The community

Catawba core

By 1753

as

in the Indians'

many

as five

hun-

dred white families reportedly lived within the actual bounds of the Catawba Nation.

From Sugar Creek, Hagler and his people eyed this white encroachment with mounting frustration and repeatedly complained to colonial authorities. To appease their

Indian

allies,

in

1754 South Carolina

thirty miles of the

officials

prohibited colonists from settling within

Catawba towns, but North Carolina refused

to cooperate.

As whites

continued to pour into the Catawba River valley in the 1750s, Indian-settler tension

mounted and

the threat of violence

loomed

increasingly larger. 36

This tension was a regular part of life near the Catawba towns in the early 1750s.

As early as 1749 John the said settlers

Ellis,

a Virginia trader, allegedly "disturb [ed] the Peace

Catawba Indians and the Inhabitants" by telling Catawbas nor even the king had rights to certain Indian lands

incorporated parts of the

Waxhaw settlement. The North

immediately issued a warrant for the arrest of Ellis and

our to

raise jealousies

all

in

between

that neither white

Anson County, which

Carolina governor's council

such persons

who "endeav-

and Fears among the Inhabitants." That same year Anson

County whites charged the Catawba with the murder of

a white

woman,

a

charge

they denied, placing the blame on Seneca and Tuscarora raiders. Three years later

neighboring whites complained of young Catawba "going into the Settlements, robbing and stealing where ever they get an Oppertunity," even entering occupied homes

and robbing

gunpoint. Hagler, the Catawba headman, believed these The accused men "took mostly Eatables," he replied, "and they

settlers at

charges were unjust.

World

28

of Toil and Strife

were mighty hungary." In Hagler's view the

"By their being

settled so near us,"

ing nothing with which to pay the debts of

than complain: just months

home on

problem was white encroachment.

men who

life

stole

from

us," leav-

died in battle. Others did

his

Waxhaw settlement), sparing his

but burning his house and sending him on his way. 37

intermittent conflict of the initial years of Indian-settler contact

a fever pitch at least twice during the 1750s. In 1754 the governor of

mounted

against their Indian neighbors. Settlers charged

to

North Carolina

Anson

dispatched two agents to investigate several "gross abuses" alleged by whites in

County

more

group of Catawba drove Andrew Clewer from

later, a

Fishing Creek (opposite the river from the

goods and

The

real

he complained, "our Horses are

Catawba men with attempt-

ing to destroy property, threats of assault, robbery, attempted kidnaping, and theft of

horses and livestock. Hagler dismissed

blamed others on

ings,

recalcitrant

some of the charges

young

as simple

responses to the greed of "churlish and ungreatfull" settlers

men

from

as they returned

battle.

Indian-settler tensions to white

Drink" in

distilled

and sold by the

which Hagler promised

And once

encroachment settlers.

misunderstand-

and excused others

warriors,

who

as legitimate

refused to feed his

blame

again, Hagler shifted the

as well as to "the Effects of that

for

Strong

Tensions were temporarily cooled by a treaty

to enjoin his warriors not to

ation to the white people," pledged his "friendship

"misbehave on any consider-

and kindness" toward

his neigh-

bors in return for the same, and offered his military assistance against the French. 38 Five years later tempers flared again, this time in the

Waxhaw

settlement.

The

intervening years had been relatively quiet, save for tensions over food following a

when North

severe drought in 1756,

vent

them from "oppress [ing]

Carolina purchased corn for the Catawba to pre-

the planters." In April 1759, however, twenty-one whites

from the Waxhaw settlement petitioned South Carolina governor William Lyttleton to address

had

Catawba aggression

in their

killed several of their cattle the previous winter. In

"made attempt to rob our houses and Indians "as to set

sum

take

sum

Charlestown." Worse yet, one Catawba

in

own home. She

both

his

hands

fled the

laid

house and

time to

lest

live,

The

"we

deveilish"

On

were these

way

to

they take to pine tree [Camden] and

sum

to

and burned them."

fell,

whereupon "the

that

when he thought

by

all

fellow haveing the shovel

breast with

all

his

might

appeirance shee had but a short

shee was finished

petitioners pleaded with the governor to "put an

will

Precisely

company of Catawba their

fier

on the womans head and neck and

so this Indian

a

man attacked Widow Pickens with a shovel in

and he wounded and mortifyed her so

way."

March

what they please." "So

of our fences on

Charlestown they "got our horses

her

community. Catawba, the petitioners charged,

end

made

the best of his

to such proceedings"

be obliged to come to blows, a thing that we are very unwilling to do."

what course of action would be best was

left

to

Governor Lyttleton

to decide,

but the petitioners did suggest one strategy: to end the practice of gift giving, "for the

more gifts they get the more proud and Deveilish they become." Incensed by Catawba aggression,

Waxhaw

settlers

rewarded the very people

could not tolerate the way South Carolina authorities

who

robbed, vandalized, and brutally assaulted colonists. 39

— Communities, Colonists, and Conflict Indians and settlers did not

come

to

29

blows in 1759 because the blows they had

exchanged over the preceding decade provided an outlet for their tensions

when

all-out

settlers

war would have been mutually

disastrous.

recognized, the two sides had reached parity and were both "very unwilling"

to fight.

As

early as 1756 Hagler realized that the time for a preemptive strike against

the settlements had passed. Such a strike, Hagler reasoned, well as foolhardy.

On

the one hand, "the English

them when hungry"; on

would be ungrateful

entirely in their power."

As

now seated all round them for the white settlers, they

who were

too were constrained by their obligations to the British authorities,

on maintaining their

alliance with the

outgunned by the Catawba.

which

listed sixty-one

as

had cloathed them naked and fed

the other, "the White People were

and by that means had them

sus,

time

at a

As both Catawba and white

intent

Catawba against the French. But they were

A note appended to the

also

1755 Anson County militia cen-

able-bodied adult men, speaks volumes: "guns

wanting." 40 Unable to eliminate the Indian threat, the people of the

— 14

Waxhaws could

do little more than appeal to colonial authorities and huddle close in the river bottom near the mouths of Waxhaw and Cane creeks, guarded, suspicious, and warily eying their Indian neighbors whose path they so frequently crossed. In 1759 smallpox

Catawba-white

all

but decimated the Catawba and permanently altered

settler relations;

never again would "deveilish" Catawbas rob, vandal-

or attack their white neighbors. But the weakening of the Catawba also

ize,

Waxhaw

settlement vulnerable to assaults from the

more

distant

left

Cherokee and

the Iro-

quois and temporarily heightened white fears of Indian attacks. Cherokee assaults on

white settlements on the Yadkin and upper Catawba rivers in 1761

much alarmed," according Planting,

and others

Long Canes measures.

to the

South-Carolina Gazette.

are enforting themselves."

refugees were doubtless

And though

Cherokee, the

the

"very

"Many of them have desisted

The people of the Waxhaws and

their

among those communities taking such defensive

Catawba River provided some protection against the

Waxhaws remained vulnerable to

In the

summer

killing

and capturing

Broad

River, apparently fearing that the

the

left settlers

incursions by Indians from the north.

of 1763 northern Indians penetrated the southern piedmont twice, five

women and

Catawba

Waxhaws. In August the Indian

as

many

whites. Refugees

Cherokee were behind these

raiders

from the

attacks, fled to

murdered Hagler, "which caused such

Ter-

ror" William Richardson wrote, "that there was nothing but running and flying where

ever safety could be had." Reporting the

murder of two white women, the South-

Carolina Gazette seconded Richardson's observation about conditions in the

Wax-

haws: "the fears of the people there encrease, apprehending a general Indian war."

Richardson appealed to

and

we

officials for

"speedy assistance" in the form of ammunition

a "small scout" to patrol the lower

Catawba

valley; otherwise, "the Frontiers will,

are afraid, be immediately deserted." 41

But, as in 1754

and 1759, there was no "general Indian war"

defeat of the French

and

their Indian allies

end of red-on-white violence

in the

in 1763. In fact, the

and the decline of the Catawba marked the

Catawba

valley.

However, Catawba-settler

conflict

World

30

of Toil and Strife

did not cease altogether after the epidemic; 1

it

simply shifted direction. Before the

759 epidemic, nearly every violent encounter between Catawbas and whites was the of either Indian aggression or fateful misunderstandings; after 1760 whites

result

became the

aggressors.

That very year four white

Cane Creek, swearing "they would

woman

"poor Catawba

.

.

.

and

a

kill

the

tion.

was despaired

of."

men

sat in

Nathan

When a men spilled

of the

by, three

woman, and beat

the

boy "so much

at

Hanging Rock,

of people, 2/3 of them Presbyterians," erate effort to disrupt the service.

.

.

that

just

made "a

to a

mixed

south of the Waxhaws, a "large Body

Door"

great Noise without

"The Indians resented the

affronts

in a delib-

and fought with

which only made more Noises," Woodmason complained. Four years

several of them,

later the residue

country whites

.

In 1767 local whites provoked another violent confronta-

As the Anglican minister Charles Woodmason was preaching

Catawba-white audience

on

Barr's tavern

Indian they should meet."

boy with her" passed

out of the tavern, "cruelly murdered" the his life

first

of bitter feelings toward the Catawba resurfaced as twenty-six up-

fell

on

their deerskins. In the

a

Catawba hunting

mean time

settlers

party, beating the Indians

and destroying

continued to encroach on Catawba lands

with ever-increasing disregard for Indian claims to property. 42

There was more to tion; as the

this

changing pattern of violence than a simple

murder of the Catawba woman

suggests, there

seemed

to

shift in direc-

be a change in

the substance of Indian-settler conflict as well. Before 1760 violence between Indians

and white

made

settlers

with the unidentified

sense.

settler

It

was often provoked by disputes over property,

who

shot an Indian found

cabin, or the turning out of Andrew Clewer,

rummaging through

as

his

who was at the very least encroaching on

Catawba hunting ground and may have unwisely established himself on Catawba burial ground. 43

Even the apparently senseless assault on

from the Catawba perspective. In

fact,

Widow Pickens made

sense

piedmont women were disproportionately

singled out for violence by Indian assailants, an understandable pattern given the

demographic threat posed by white Charlestown, "the loss of one

Woman may be

families.

Woman may

the mother of

many

As Hagler once told colonial be the

children."

tion contrasted sharply with the shrinking

loss

of

many

lives

The ever-expanding white popula-

numbers of the Catawba. White women

represented the rapidly growing communities that were closing in

When

the

Catawba warrior attacked Widow

sexual overtones, sexual act

amounting

to rape

—he was crushing her

officials in

because one

Pickens in 1 759

—an

on the Catawba.

attack with strong

without penetration, a violent inversion of the

sexuality, destroying her reproductive

power and

"many lives" in the process. Catawbas targeted women not because they valued them so little, but because they valued them so much. 44 Yet neither property nor survival figured in the murder of the woman outside taking

Barr's tavern. "I authorities.

cannot conceive the meaning of

it,"

"The Path between the white people and

Hagler confessed to colonial

their Brothers the

always been wide and streight," he recalled, but by this seemingly violence

"it

Catawbas has

random

act of

has been stopped." 45 Hagler sensed something insidious in the attack at

Communities, Colonists, and Conflict

Barr's,

but he was seemingly unable to fathom the pure

This level of cold-blooded racism

may not

31

hatred that fueled

racial

have been typical in the 1760s, but

it

it.

was

not surprising: in the insular world of the Waxhaws, colonists were bred to the kind

made racial hatred possible, while the weakening of the Catawba during the epidemic made racial violence increasingly likely. In some sense the mobbing of the hunting party in 1771 was a more civilized and acceptable verof fear and mistrust that

and represented

sion of this tavern racism

not stealing the deerskins, the white

Catawba hunters and sent ans.

a clear

mob

its

logical conclusion:

by destroying and

attacked the livelihood and life-ways of the

message that the piedmont was no place for Indi-

By 1771 smallpox and colonization had made the complexion of the piedmont

white and transformed

its

hunting grounds into plowed

white way of farms, fences, and wheat

They might be

a

ritorial,

in the

conquered people, but the Catawba had

an emerging

itself attests to

dimension of Indian-settler

triumph of the

fields. 46

Waxhaws and neighboring communities. The changing white-on-red violence

and pasturage. The

fields

demographic dominance of white communities had ended

relations.

their origin in tensions with the Indians.

racial,

left

their

patterns

mark on

the

and substance of

not simply economic or

Changing settlement patterns

also

ter-

had

Although kinship provided the framework

that ordered settlement, the turn to compactness in 1760

was

a direct response to

Indian aggression. So conditioned were early colonists by the terrors of the frontier that they neglected to take threat

up the more

isolated available lands long after the Indian

had passed. Thus the complex interplay of three

—

Indian-white encounter

forces

Indeed, the effects of Indian-settler conflict were even

changing

racial attitudes

—

land, kinship,

and settlement patterns

suggest.

themselves," of hearing the horror stories of refugees

more

A

far-reaching than

decade of "enforting

and the rumors of atrocities, of

constant vigilance, of neglecting their crops for fear of going into their readiness to "run

and

that the people of the

were not their

fly" to safety at

Waxhaws

easily broken,

made

for insularity

the

first

and of

fields,

alarm, had instilled habits of suspicion

carried into other areas of their lives. These habits

and they were reinforced by the kin-centered

community. Insofar

and the

guided and shaped community formation in the Waxhaws.

as kinship

made

for cohesion, security,

and intense localism. To the extent that

and

social order of stability,

settlers

it

also

depended on

neighbors and kin, they were also controlled by them. To the extent that they placed kinship at the center of their social and economic

life,

they excluded and even

demo-

nized those outside the kin-neighbor nexus. As the next chapter shows, in the insular

world of the colonial Waxhaws, anyone outside or on the margins of the

cultural boundaries of the local cally distinct

newcomers

—were

—

community

slaves,

suspect, excluded,

social

and

non-Presbyterians, and ethni-

and vulnerable.

Chapter

2

The Boundaries of Community

1767

Charles Woodmason drafted a sermon

Inwith William Richardson. Woodmason was of England 1

who

cleric,

760s. In the few

itinerated in the

weeks since

a

for a

planned pulpit exchange

lowcountry planter turned Church

South Carolina upcountry in the

with scorn and ridicule from the "herds of Sectaries" scattered across the Accordingly he planned to preach on Christian charity, warning the terians against the dangers of their a spirit of unity

and peace. "There

an External

Common

Security, requires that

We

should

live like

at

Hand," Woodmason Prudence, and our

Brethren in Unity, be

guard against any Dangers to our Lives and Properties

Worse

ter."

yet,

Woodmason

continued,

cultivate

Common

Enemy near

reminded them. "These are our Indian Neighbors.

interior.

Waxhaw Presby-

narrow sectarianism and urging them to is

may arise from

as

"We have an

it

only to

that

Quar-

Internal Enemy," a rapidly

swelling slave population along the coast that threatens to "surprize us in an

when We warned, Death."

are not aware."

"lest [we] It

.

was thus

.

"Over these

We

critical,

Woodmason

Hour

ought to keep a very watchful Eye," he

begin our Friendships towards each other in one

.

late

"Wild Country" he had already met

his arrival in the

Common

reasoned, that the Presbyterians lay aside

"rough treatment" and "abusive Words," their "inhospitality to Strangers" and

their

"reprehensible" religious intolerance, both for their protection of It

all

own good and

of South Carolina's white inhabitants.

had not taken Woodmason long

for the

mutual

1

to realize that the white

communities he en-

countered in the piedmont were exclusive and suspicious places. The people of the

Waxhaws confirmed

as

much when

they rejected the pulpit exchange: "some of the

Kirk Elders not being agreeable" to his

mon on little

tolerance. 2 In

any event

visit,

Woodmason

his appeal to a

impression on his upcountry

listeners; the

never got to deliver his ser-

common

whiteness would have

congregations in the wealthy, black-majority coastal district munities where whites outnumbered slaves by

communities would

feel

compelled to

at least

"live like

left

sobering racial argument that chilled fell

on deaf ears

in

com-

nine to one. The day when such

Brethren in Unity" with lowcountry

The Boundaries of Community planters

was yet

33

come. For now, they could afford to ignore pleas for

to

racial unity

and indulge their sectarian hatreds. Moreover, their "Indian Neighbors" were partly

Woodmason was trying to overcome. A perWoodmason failed to see that the localism and

responsible for creating the insularity ceptive but not always astute observer, insularity of the

Waxhaw

settlement was neither a luxury nor a choice;

it

was the

such upcountry communities, their defining feature.

social condition of

This conditioning resulted in part from their encounter with the Indians. Tribal

had bred

conflict in

the Waxhaws

ened

a

more generalized fear and contempt

fears of difference, so that

of the

that pervaded social relations

waning years of the colonial period. Habits of insularity deep-

in the

community was

anyone on or beyond the cultural or

comers, Indians, Baptists, Anglicans

—

social

and therefore vulnerable.

potentially threatening

the people of the

margins

Slaves,

new-

Waxhaws seemed to be defin-

ing themselves continually against a succession of such external

and

internal enemies.

on its own made with lowcountry planters had come with a them a kind of siege mentality or social paranoia

Theirs was an ever-narrowing world that at times seemed to close in even

The bargain

people. price.

The

frontier

these colonists

had bred into

from which they did not soon

recover.

Kinship ordered and internally strengthened this insular world. The interconnections they

had brought with them multiplied

after settlement, linking families

and

neighborhoods, tying both to churches, and defining the social and geographic parameters of the community. Kinship provided a vehicle for welcoming and settling related arrivals or excluding unrelated colonists.

the network but

made

It

offered protection for those within

unrelated or weakly related persons vulnerable.

bite to sectarian differences, for religious exclusion

and

hostility did

gave a vicious

It

not have to cross

kin lines. Carrying the historical baggage of clannishness into a hostile frontier, early settlers

of the Waxhaws created a close-knit, thoroughly closed community. The same

kinship network that offered aid and protection for those within

its

borders also

crushed dissent and heightened fear and hatred of difference. The kin-ordered society that yielded benefits to

some exacted

a heavy social price

from

others.

Kinship and Indian conflict thus not only determined patterns of movement and settlement, but contributed to the social

Waxhaws as well.

In

the people of the

Waxhaws

at

its

and mental make-up

—

the identity

—of

broadest sense this chapter deals with identity formation:

the

how

defined themselves in relation to groups and individuals

or beyond the margins of the core community. This was a complex process.

sometimes took cultural forms, related nic

and

to a

religious conflict. At other times

it

much

was bound up with complex and contra-

dictory ideas about freedom, bondage, social order, and race. At

was purely local,

a function of

It

older transatlantic history of eth-

neighborhood

still

other times

rivalry or specific kin group. Yet

it

it

was

always a locally and historically conditioned process; identity was fluid, shifting in response to unique and changing circumstances and social configurations, to the varieties

and perceived

threats of internal

such as William Richardson,

and external enemies, and contested by those

who hoped

to

expand the boundaries of community,

World

34

even to redefine kinship and make

of Toil and Strife

room

for Charles

Woodmason

as well as his Indi-

ans and slaves. 3

This chapter analyzes and describes the relationship between the core

and two groups

at its edges,

non-Presbyterians and

new immigrants from northern

a third group,

slaves; the

Ireland.

community

next chapter will treat

As with the Indians,

all

these

groups were to some extent the objects of derision, violence, and demonization.

Though complex and

multifaceted, their relationship with the core

community was

always uncertain, often antagonistic, and sometimes dangerous. Kinship stood at the center of these relationships, though tion. This adversarial as

much

early

it

too was subject to negotiation and redefini-

and ambiguous relationship between core group and

as the built-in ties that

bound kin and neighbors

American backcountry communities such

as the

Waxhaws.

Despite Charles Woodmason's hope, neither the threat of

Enemy" of slaves was enough

bors" nor that of their "Internal

and Anglicans together places such as the little

lar.

"like

Neigh-

Waxhaws, Fishing Creek, Hanging Rock, and Lynches Creek had

Religious feeling life

their "Indian

to bring Presbyterians

Brethren in Unity." The Presbyterian communities in

tolerance for non- Presbyterians in general

tional

outsiders,

together, gave definition to

and sectarian

and even

less for

Anglicans in particu-

loyalty ran deep. Personal identity, the institu-

of the community, and the complex cords of kinship were

very specific religious

beliefs, practices, rituals,

torians have tended to focus

on class-based

and

styles

sectional disputes in their treatment of

the late-colonial Carolina piedmont, religious conflict fabric of backcountry

life.

bound up with

of worship. Although his-

was very much

a part of the

Indeed, the deepest divisions between white colonial South

Carolinians were based on religious, not sectional, differences. 4

The Carolina piedmont of Charles Woodmason's day was,

in his phrase, a

Medley" of creeds and denominations. There were few Methodists prior lution;

both Separate and Regular Baptists had pushed into the upcountry and were

aggressively vying for

tawba River and rivers;

"mix'd

to the Revo-

members. Presbyterian communities sprang up along the Ca-

in the

Long Canes

district

between the Saluda and the Savannah

Lutherans settled alongside Dutch Reformed congregations in the Congarees

and Broad River ments.

Much

doubt

like the

people

Bible or Prayer

Knowledge

.

.

valley,

and Anglicans scattered themselves throughout the

settle-

of the population, perhaps half or more, was unchurched, some no

.

Woodmason found on

Book" or "the

among

them."

unchurched population:

in

least

Granny's Quarter Creek, with "not a

Rudiments of Religion, Learning, Manners or

One must be

careful,

communities such

however, not to overestimate this

as the

Waxhaws, church adherence was

nearly universal, while lay leadership played an important role in maintaining wor-

ship and piety in

more

typical

communities that lacked

settled ministers. In

any

event, church growth was steady during the second half of the eighteenth century,

fed mostly by transplanted evangelical

by small-scale

communities and punctuated now and again

revivals. Religious diversity,

competition for members, and ingrained

— The Boundaries of Community toward a remote church establishment

hostility conflict.

35

heated religious

set the stage for

5

Sectarian opposition to Anglicans ranged from inhospitality to ridicule, curses,

and vandalism. Woodmason encountered them

threats,

him

Tree Hill gave

all.

The

Presbyterians at Pine

use of their meetinghouse for regular services but would not per-

mit him to celebrate Christmas communion, saying they wanted no "Mass said in

The Waxhaw church

their House."

although

when he

about building of a small Chapel in those to dissuade isters

of

all

him preach

elders refused to let

to their people,

traveled there the following year to "consult with parts," a "Presbyterian

some Persons

Teacher" attempted

open for Minhim by claiming they "subscribed to a General-House denominations." Lost in the Waxhaws in April 1768, Woodmason could .

.

.

not hire a guide because he was "a Church Minister," was repeatedly given wrong

and was turned away from William Richardson's house under the pretense

directions,

was not home. Worse by far was

that Richardson

despite

Woodmason's hunger,

comply nor

sell

cold,

his treatment

me a Blade of fodder, a Glass of Liquor Fire. ... He looked on me as an Wolf .

nor kindle up a

devour the Lambs of Grace. Thus did

Such treatment was mild church

services. Just

sibly hired a

Telling

me, they wanted no

me

D

opposition

Fire."

me." 6

Woodmason endured

Gown

A "gang

during

Presbyterians osten-

Sons of Bitches among them

—and

of Presbyterians" disrupted services

and whooping," as they did again

the next day also, "hallooing

me to sit down

me, which they did with Impunity

to insult

d Black

behind the

nor permit

.

strayed into Christs fold to

Waxhaws at Hanging Rock, the

band of "lawless Ruffians

threatened to lay

.

this rigid Presbyterian treat

relative to the

south of the

from the tavern keeper:

and exhaustion, the tavern keeper "would not

several days later,

when

On

they provoked a fight with a group of Catawba Indians attending worship.

another occasion Presbyterians "hir'd a Band of rude fellows to come to Service

brought with them 57 Dogs fighting, Little

and I was obliged

counted them) which

upcoming

for his

and

at St.

congregation

Time of Service they at

service. In the

Mark's they

at Little

vandalism and violence.

justice of the peace

"left their

ple refus'd.

would

He

On Cane Creek in

removed Woodmason's

Excrements on the

—They

certainly have ensu'd in the

Presbyterians,

communion. 7

Communion

Lynches, just east of the Waxhaws, was hardest

threaten'd to fine

and Blood been

spilt."

set

Fishing Creek and

advertise-

Congarees, Presbyterians destroyed the pul-

Presbyterian militia captain ordered a muster

tle

in

There were similar incidents

easily turn to

Waxhaws, the Presbyterian

ments pit,

I

Lynches, where a group of drunken Presbyterians disrupted

Such disruptions could the

(for

to stop."

who

hit.

Table."

The

In 1767 the

on Christmas Day. "The Church Peo-

defy'd

Him: And had he attempted

Muster

field

between the Church

it,

a Bat-

folks

and

Presbyterians at Little Lynches later forced Angli-

cans to stop construction on a chapel. 8

The sources of this Presbyterian opposition

to the Anglican

That protesters targeted the communion service on

Church

at least three

are complex.

occasions suggests

that differences over eucharistic theology, rooted in age-old hostility

toward anything

World

36

resembling the

Roman

of Toil and Strife

Catholic mass, were driving at least

some of this

conflict. 9

Such

doctrinal differences also prevented lay people from crossing denominational lines to

marry or baptize

their children. (In fact,

Woodmason rebuked

elders in absentia for preventing Richardson

was more

there

Woodmason's

service or halted construction

the religious establishment.

It

was one thing

Sons of Bitches" two hundred miles away;

among them,

Woodmason's

sions playing out here as well. origins,

and recent turn

irascible

temperament

Irish Presbyterians

thing

as

—

This

elitism, English

phenomenon, nor Upcountry ridicule is

stamp-tax distributor

— not

among

to

mention

the poor

his

ten-

sometimes

and middling

of the backcountry. Whatever the sources of sectarian

Scots-

strife,

one

mattered in the upcountry, enough to bring neighfield.

10

strictly

anti-Anglican

that denominational relations were characterized only

and abuse. According

Man) The

Pale

to

Woodmason,

by

strife.

the Baptists called "Mr. Richardson

White Horse of Death,

for his People to ride

while for their part "the Presbyterians hate the Baptists far

and even kindness

who

as well as

ill

will.

on

to Hell,"

more than they do

Episcopalians." 11 Moreover, there were instances of cooperation,

sionary

and personal

dissenters targeted each other as well as the church establishment for

a Pale

tolerance,

one

to have

background, lowcountry

not to say that religious conflict was a monolithic,

is

Gown

to have state-supported "Black

was quite another thing

class, ethnic, sectional,

surely fueled hostility

certain: religious identity

is

it

bors to the brink of armed conflict on the muster

Hugh McAden,

the

accommodation,

a Presbyterian mis-

toured the piedmont in 1755, preached to mixed congregations and

Baptist meetinghouses at several stops along his journey. tist

at

organizing worship services and building chapels in the midst of dis-

communities. There were probably

senters'

(who

on the chapel

Lynches Creek had not come to debate theology but to antagonize, even terror-

Little ize,

at

Waxhaw church

The Presbyterians who

to sectarian conflict than religious bigotry.

unleashed their dogs

the

from baptizing non-Presbyterians.) Yet

at

When the lowcountry Bap-

leader Oliver Hart visited the upcountry to rally Whig support in 1775, the Pres-

byterian elders at Duncan's Creek "held a consultation" and at length allowed

him

to

Woodmason was treated kindly on occasion; Richardson at least was willing to accommodate him. And yet such instances of hospitality were rare; for every act of kindness Woodmason received there were a dozen others who turned him away, disrupted his services, or preach, as did the Little River congregation two days

threatened to whip

him

or lay

him "behind

later.

Even

the Fire." 12

Religious differences were dramatized in the public spaces of taverns, muster fields,

and meetinghouses, but

at a

more

basic level they were

woven

into the fabric

of upcountry society. Kinship and religious adherence are virtually indistinguishable

during flict is

this period.

The

extent to which kinship structured or fueled sectarian con-

uncertain, but there

is

no doubt

that religious affiliation

was key

in the choice

of marriage partners, adding an ideological or spiritual layer to the already- cohesive

kin-based communities.

Without parish or church records

it is

impossible to precisely determine the per-

centage of interfaith marriages in the Waxhaws, but the surviving sources suggest that

The Boundaries of Community

they were rare.

Woodmason summed up

37

the distaste for crossdenominational unions

when he declared that "a Presbyterian would sooner marry ten of his Children to Members of the Church of England than one to a Baptist." 13 In similar communia major feeder ties, such as the Opequan settlement in Augusta County, Virginia county for the Waxhaws marriage outside of the ethnic group was almost unknown before the Revolution, while the interfaith marriages that did occur often involved denominational switching by one spouse. 14 Still more to the point, there

—

—

were almost no religious alternatives

in the colonial

Waxhaw

settlement. Neither

Methodists nor Baptists established congregations before the Revolution; there were

no Moravians and only an occasional Lutheran or Reformed German the Anglicans,

who were "thinly scatter'd"

wholly dependent on the occasional

visits

in the

family;

and

Waxhaws, were unorganized and

of itinerants. Even had the people of the

Waxhaws been predisposed to marry across sectarian lines, ethnic homogeneity and the Presbyterians' near monopoly on institutional religion would have given them few opportunities to do

so. 15

Despite the absence of official marriage records, riage patterns partially

and church-cemetery the twenty-nine lines.

from family histories, family

it is

possible to reconstruct

Bibles, probate

records. These records indicate that few

and land

mar-

records,

and perhaps none of

documented marriages from the period crossed denominational

For instance, Henry Foster and

Anne

Kelso were married by a Presbyterian

minister in Paxton, Pennsylvania, shortly before migrating to the Waxhaws.

1780 their daughter Catherine married

Thomas Dunlap, whose

Around

family was promi-

nent in the Waxhaw Presbyterian Church leadership, as were the fathers, both church elders,

of Moses Stephenson and Elizabeth Dunlap,

Hagins and Mary Patton married shortly liam

is

who married

in 1783.

William

after their arrival in the early 1750s;

Wil-

buried in the Six Mile Presbyterian Church cemetery, along with several

Pattons. In contrast, neither the families of

Hugh McCain nor

Eleanor Nutt,

who

married around 1750, appear in any early churchyard records. Nor do the Doby, Massey, or Cureton families,

all

of whom intermarried before the Revolution. The

who settled along Waxhaw and Twelve Mile creeks after the Revolution also married within their group. Wyke Ivy and his wife, Anne Clarke, both came from Methodist families, as did William Wren and Mary Tomlinson. Overall, at least twenty- five of the twenty-nine Waxhaw marriages can be reasonably assumed to have taken place within sectarian lines. In fact, many of these unions were confined to single congregations; Waxhaw Presbyterians tended not to marry Six Mile Methodist families

or Shiloh Presbyterians, and vice versa. Marriages thus took place within neighbor-

hoods and congregations, not merely within denominations. (See appendix complete

This social dimension of religious affiliation bite.

3 for a

analysis.) 16

Religious conflict

came much

easier

when

is

part of what gave sectarianism

religious others

were also

its

social oth-

when one could intimidate Anglicans or ridicule Baptists without attacking one's own kinfolk. On the other hand, the kin-sect continuum could also work to underers,

mine church

unity, just as religious differences could

become

the pretext for social

World

38

divisions. In the

Waxhaws

the social

of Toil and Strife

and geographic distance between neighborhoods

eventually fomented religious discord, and the sectarian arrows aimed at Anglicans

were pointed inward. In the years before the Revolutionary War, however, when the

Waxhaw

settlement remained fairly compact and homogeneous, the kin-neighbor-

church nexus was strong enough to focus hostility outward and keep aliens such as Charles

Woodmason

close to the

fire.

The cultural and social boundaries between Anglicans and sharply drawn; slaves were another matter. for the colonial

Waxhaws,

as they are for

The sources on

for slavery studies. 17 Yet the paucity of sources,

new questions

to the surface.

munity of small farmers who had no tled

on the edge of

evangelicals

white world? racially

The

a

unexplored area

community-study

How were

And how

they negotiate the

who were

their beliefs to offer

did slaves

murky

make

who

set-

slaves incorporated

by

inclined to

them the

right

a place for themselves in this

social

and

cultural borders of the

mixed household, church, and community? Where did they belong?

do suggest

local sources speak faintly to such questions, but they

people of the agree

economy?

inequality as divinely ordained, yet

fellowship?

How did

a largely

How were slaves integrated into a com-

humanity and were compelled by

hand of religious

is

combined with

significant history of slaveholding yet

a slave-based staple

who viewed

affirm slaves'

slavery are thin

most backcountry communities before the

Revolution. Indeed, the colonial backcountry in general

approach, force

Presbyterians were

and

slaves

Waxhaws were

on the place of slaves

that the

asking these questions themselves, that they did not

in their

selves in primarily racial terms.

community, and that they did not

identify

them-

William Richardson's world was not yet southern;

notions of race and freedom intersected in complicated ways with religious beliefs and

made porous

the borders between black

and contradictory place

community

in colonial

yet separate

from

it,

and white.

Slaves thus occupied a

complex

Waxhaw society. They were at once internal to the

integrated into households but outside of the core

kinship network. In varying degrees they formed social relationships, even intimate ones, with their masters, but beneath the social surface

inescapable economic relationship. ship was never really questioned,

both whites and

slaves.

integrating slaves into

Though

its

was a more fundamental and

the legitimacy of this

economic

relation-

boundaries were fluid and were challenged by

The tension between

these

two kinds of relationships, between

and excluding them from the world of

their masters, chal-

Waxhaws to rethink the meaning of kinship and expand the boundaries of community in the late colonial period. 18 The demographic make-up of the Waxhaws accounted for much of this fluidity and ambiguity. Slaves were simply too few in number to become the "Internal enemy" imagined by Charles Woodmason. Unfortunately, without tax records it is impossilenged the people of the

ble to

measure precisely the

slave population for specific localities in

South Carolina.

Aggregate tax records for the 1760s place the slave population for both the middle

and backcountry

at

around 20 percent. Most of these

slaves

were undoubtedly in the

William Richardson's gravestone, Old the

most elaborate

and

in the churchyard,

Waxhaw

the financial resources of his widow.

Library

churchyard. Richardsons stone was one of

showing both

Nancy

his

esteemed place in the community

Crockett Collection, South Caroliniana

A

-

^?r.^.>?.5e^

.!"s'&as*si fp^-

«^

.dlW^.

'—

7

fy

'