The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670–1825 9781512824391

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The Enslaved and Their Enslavers

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670–1825

Edward Pearson

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2024 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN 978-­1-­5128-­2438-­4 eBook ISBN: 978-­1-­5128-­2439-­1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

For William, Danny, Emily, Kathy, and Angus And in memory of my parents, Ronald Pearson and Sheila Pearson

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

ix

1

Chapter 1. Triangular Links: England, Barbados, and Carolina

13

Chapter 2. Colonizing Carolina

52

Chapter 3. The Enslaved in Town and Country

90

Chapter 4. “This Wild Remote Part of the World”: The Making of the Eighteenth-­Century Upcountry

129

Chapter 5. Planters “Full of Money”: The Self-­Fashioning of the Eighteenth-­Century South Carolina Elite

171

Chapter 6. The Road to Revolution

211

Chapter 7. Loyalists, Slaves, and Revolutionaries at War

245

Chapter 8. Cotton and Slavery in the Postwar Backcountry

287

Chapter 9. Denmark Vesey and the Culture of Resistance in Early Nineteenth-­Century Charleston

331

Chapter 10. In the Wake of the Storm

365

Epilogue 391

viii

Contents

Notes 407 Index 495 Acknowledgments 507

ABBR EVIATIONS

AH AHR BHO CCA CLS CSP DAR DUL

JAH JBMHS JNH JSH MESDA

PHL

SCBHC

SCDAH

Agricultural History American Historical Review British History Online. Version 5.0. Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London City of Charleston Archive, Charleston County Public Library, Charleston, South Carolina Charleston Library Society, Special Collections and Archives, Charleston, South Carolina W. Noel Sainsbury et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, 45 vols. (London, 1860‒1994) K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770‒1783 (Colonial Office Series), 21 vols. (Shannon, 1972‒1981) Manuscript Collections, William R. Perkins Library (David R. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Collection), Duke University, Durham, North Carolina Journal of American History Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society Journal of Negro History Journal of Southern History Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Anne P. and Thomas A. Gray Library and MESDA Research Center, Winston-­Salem, North Carolina David R. Chesnutt, George C. Rogers Jr., Philip M. Hamer, et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, 16 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1968‒2003) South Carolina Baptist Historical Collection, Special Collections and Archives, James B. Duke Library, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina

x

SCG SCHS SCL SCMH  SHC TNA WMQ

Abbreviations

South Carolina Gazette South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia South Carolina Magazine of History (before 1951: South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine) Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, Richmond, Surrey William and Mary Quarterly

INTRODUCTION

Carolina is in general a plain champain Country . . . and there is no Place in the Continent of America, where people can transport themselves to greater Advantage. —Thomas Nairne, A Letter from South Carolina (1710)

Taking up pen and paper in late 1737, Samuel Dyssli wrote to his family back in Switzerland about his new life in Purrysburg, a small settlement established a few years earlier on the lower reaches of the Savannah River. Along with a “great number of Swiss and other poor Protestants,” he had recently migrated to South Carolina; in his letter, Dyssli described his English master who provided “a plentiful board, food and drink in abundance,” discussed how dysentery had laid him low for several months as well as his close brush with death when “a mighty large oak” came crashing down and missed crushing him “to atoms” by inches. He also commented on the racial composition of his new home; the coastal plain, he noted, “looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people.” It was an astute observation. By 1740, thousands of enslaved Africans, who had been transported directly in “large shiploads . . . from the African negro country,” constituted around 66 percent of the colony’s population, with the vast majority laboring in the rice fields that had transformed the coastal plain into a hydraulic empire dedicated to plantation agriculture; in 1737, enslaved plantation laborers harvested around twenty million pounds, or approximately nine thousand metric tons, of rice. In that same year, nine slave ships transporting more than twenty-­two hundred enslaved people from markets and trading posts on the coastlines of Atlantic Africa, such as Bonny and Calabar in the Bight of Biafra, and Cabinda and Malembo in West-­Central Africa, dropped anchor in Charles Town Harbor. Not only had enslaved African laborers turned a wilderness of swamp and woodland into productive fields where they cultivated rice and indigo for export and other crops for local consumption, but

2

Introduction

Charles Town’s workshops, boatyards, wharves, and houses also depended on enslaved workers to provide the labor, the goods, and the services necessary to keep the region’s major port town functioning effectively.1 The rise of South Carolina to become the wealthiest mainland colony in British America by the eve of the American Revolution is, at its core, the story of slavery as an institution and “slaveries” as a set of varying lived experiences in contrasting environments. In the century and a half between the arrival of English and Anglo-­Barbadian colonists along with a few dozen enslaved Africans in 1670 and the early 1820s, when the state had become the intellectual and ideological center of the antebellum South’s rapidly expanding empire of cotton and slaves, South Carolina evolved from a sparsely settled frontier where enslaved field hands raised provisions, enslaved herdsmen grazed cattle, and enslaved lumbermen felled trees, into a complex and diverse social order with distinctive local cultures. Over this longue durée, enslaved labor transformed the province from a modest outpost of empire into a thriving plantation society. With the advent of cotton production in the 1790s, South Carolina entered a new era. Not only were its upcountry counties a focal point for the first phase of the “cotton revolution,” which entered its twilight when large numbers of planters migrated west to exploit fertile lands along the Gulf of Mexico and in the Mississippi Valley in the 1820s and 1830s, but the state also grew in political influence as its ruling class, which included prominent figures like John C. Calhoun and James Henry Hammond, began to regard itself as the leading defender of states’ rights and as a Praetorian guard for the defense of slavery throughout the South.2 Several significant historical events also had a profound impact on the lives of free and enslaved Carolinians over the longue durée. In a series of short conflicts against the region’s Indigenous peoples during the early eighteenth century, the colonists aggressively secured the lowcountry frontier for the expansion of plantation agriculture, hostilities that culminated with their victory over the Yamasee and their Native American allies in 1716. The backcountry was the setting for the next major conflict when, after a series of incidents along the frontier between settlers and the Cherokees, war broke out in 1760. After mounting two brutal campaigns of attrition against the most powerful Native American nation in the Southeast, an army of provincial and regular British soldiers defeated the Cherokees, enabling white settlers to move onto lands in the interior opened by the Cherokees’ defeat and displacement. A decade later, the Revolutionary War (1775‒1781) devastated large swaths of the southern lowcountry and the backcountry, a region where

Introduction

3

the conflict was both a civil war as loyalists and revolutionaries engaged in a bitter partisan conflict and a conventional war when British and Continental soldiers fought for control of the Carolinas in 1780 and 1781.3 From the boisterous demonstrations against the Stamp Act in 1765 until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War a decade later, Charles Town’s streets regularly became the setting for public protests as its tradesmen and artisans vented their grievances against British policy. In the late 1760s, meanwhile, a tidal wave of violent crime swept across the backcountry. To meet the threat of bandit gangs, its farmers embraced vigilante justice to protect their families and property. Calling themselves Regulators, settlers took to their horses to pursue and punish the outlaw gangs who threatened to destabilize the new commercial order, built around farming and slave labor, that they were establishing. Likewise, enslaved people behaved in ways their enslavers deemed disobedient, ranging from “intolerable Insolence . . . blaspheming, [and] talking obscenely” to truancy, flight, and marronage to open and violent acts of resistance, including assault, murder, and, as happened along the Stono River in the lowcountry parish of Saint Paul’s in September 1739, full-­scale rebellion.4 This is the stuff of compelling historical narrative, but it obscures the quotidian and messy details of how enslaved people experienced slavery not simply as a generic form of domination but as an experience particular to specific contexts and arrangements. Only by disaggregating slavery in South Carolina—the mosaic of distinctive relationships  between enslaved people and their enslavers across time and space—may we grasp the diverse ecologies, populations, economies, practices, and traditions that gave each moment of rebellion or mundane survival its unique dynamic. Only by looking at the fine grain of each locality’s patterns of coercion, extraction of labor, and articulation of power can we understand how slavery, writ large, became the primary motor of historical change in the colony and, later, the state. The synthetic narrative I offer here features a settler society founded on and thoroughly infiltrated by the institution of slavery but ultimately only decipherable as a mosaic of highly varying local “slaveries.” Dramatic changes in slavery, including its expansion into different environments, gave the province a unique historical trajectory which more closely followed the path taken by Caribbean slave societies than their British North American counterparts. During the first decades of settlement, enslaved labor transformed the coastal littoral into a prosperous plantation zone; at the same time, Charles Town became the region’s leading port city, while the use of military force resulted in the defeat and displacement of the region’s Indigenous people after a series

4

Introduction

of short conflicts. Not only did colonists secure the plantation order in the southern lowcountry after local militias defeated the Yamasees, but British regulars invaded and captured the western backcountry for settlement in the aftermath of the Cherokee War in 1760. In each case, military success opened new lands for exploitation and the introduction of commercial agriculture which, in turn, led to new transformations in slavery. In part, the story that I tell here is a familiar one of how a small seventeenth-­ century settlement on the southeastern coast of North America, initially established to supply Barbados with much-­needed provisions and sponsored by the Lords Proprietors, a syndicate of English aristocrats, came to influence the politics and culture of the antebellum American South in significant and, ultimately, devastating ways. The expansion of plantation agriculture in the early eighteenth century profoundly changed the topography and demography of the coastal plain; enslaved Africans, who were transported from their homelands in growing numbers during this period, cleared woodlands, dug ditches, and shifted thousands of tons of earth to turn the lowcountry into a landscape suitable for irrigable agriculture. Plantation owners, growing wealthy from raising and exporting rice and other agricultural commodities, along with Charles Town merchants, who were also getting rich by trading in enslaved people and shipping staples, used their newfound wealth to erect elegant private houses and public buildings that embodied their ambitions to consolidate their power as the ruling elite. By 1775, protests against British policy had metamorphosed into a political revolution followed by a war that not only secured independence but also guaranteed slavery’s future. A decade or so after the end of the war, South Carolina became the epicenter of the cotton revolution, a development that only enhanced the state’s political and economic power.5 Even though slavery formed the bedrock upon which the province’s social and economic order rested, enslaved men and women led lives embedded in one or another form of its highly variable “slaveries.” The experience of enslavement in a particular location depended on several factors, including the organization of time and space, the type of labor being performed, the density of the population of enslaved people and their ethnic origins, the decisions made by individual slaveholders as well as  how enslaved people, constrained by the disciplinary machinery of their enslavement, responded to their masters. Regardless of whether slave owners ran large plantations, operated small farms, or owned a few laborers in the city, they drew their ideas and prejudices from the same cultural and ideological well. The order

Introduction

5

over which they presided was shaped as much by the sociological and geographical environment in which they lived and worked as by any universally held attitudes about slaves and slavery. In each locale—the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the rural lowcountry; the workshops, warehouses, and wharves of Charleston; and the commercial farms and smallholdings in the backcountry—an array of unique factors shaped social relations between the enslaved and their enslavers. The density and settlement patterns of enslaved people and their owners, the effectiveness of the machinery of law and order to police and regulate slaves, the depth and resilience of cultural practices from Atlantic Africa, the ability of the ruling class to project its power, and the organization of work all influenced the configuration of productive relations in each locale. Geography also had a significant impact; the lattice of the lowcountry’s extensive system of rivers, swamps, and grasslands provided a good environment on which to cultivate rice while its epidemiological climate influenced its demographic makeup. From this perspective, enslaved people did not experience a generic form of slavery; it was, rather, a form specific to each setting, although the insults, humiliations, physical punishments, and emotional abuse that they suffered at the hands of their owners was universal. In turn, the material conditions of these different locales shaped how masters and slaves interacted and how they forged their own practices and beliefs.6 In addition to highlighting geographic and demographic variation, Ira Berlin’s grouping of enslaved people into “generations” whose contexts changed over time remains salient to this study. First, there were “cosmopolitan men and women of African descent” who, arriving in the opening phases of colonization in the late seventeenth century, constituted a “charter generation.” They were followed by “plantation generations,” the hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women transported from the trading forts and slave markets throughout Atlantic Africa to produce agricultural commodities for markets in Europe. The revolutions that swept through the Atlantic world—in North America, in France, and in the colony of Saint-­Domingue— from the mid-­1770s until the early nineteenth century led to the emergence of a “revolutionary generation.” With the rise of commercial cotton production, its expansion, triggered by the invention and widespread adoption of the cotton gin in the 1790s, led to the emergence of a “migration generation,” which was composed of tens of thousands of enslaved people who were “propelled across the continent” in a “second Middle Passage.” Enslaved men and women, forced to abandon the social and familial networks that they had

6

Introduction

established over the decades as well as the plantations and farms on which they labored, were now marched overland from the southeastern states to the fertile lands of Alabama, the Mississippi Valley, and beyond.7  Berlin’s work thus provides a very useful macro-­historical framework for understanding regional and chronological variations, but recent scholarship on slavery in colonial, revolutionary, and early antebellum South Carolina also informs this study. In our case, the prominent trends are the continued dynamic growth of African and African American history during this period; the “Atlanticization” of the history of British North America, the new scholarship on the era of the Atlantic Revolutions, and the amalgamation of the “new” social history, perhaps the dominant paradigm in historical writing at the end of the last century, with more recent approaches, triggered in large part by the “cultural turn” that introduced gender, race, class, and other sociological factors into the analysis.8 With race and slavery central to the history of South Carolina, it is perhaps no surprise that African American historiography sits at the center of scholarship on the province. Since the publication of Black Majority (1974), a book that cracked open the history of slavery in the lowcountry by placing enslaved Africans at its analytic and narrative center and also pointed to fertile areas for future inquiry, a number of significant studies have examined subjects ranging from the organization of plantation management to the cultivation of rice to slave rebellion and resistance. Furthermore, several of these works have looked at the configuration of race, class, and gender relations in Charleston.9 The Atlanticization of early American history has significantly revised scholarly thinking on the processes that shaped colonization. By placing slavery in British North America within the broader context of the Atlantic world, historians of the Atlantic slave trade have brought new perspectives to bear on the complex web of ethnic, cultural, and aesthetic traditions that enslaved ­people brought from their indigenous societies to the plantation societies of the New World. Accordingly, the marriage of histories of the slave trade with histories that examine, say, the migration of farming practices across the ocean— Judith A. Carney’s Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas is one example and Edda L. Fields-­Black Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Disapora another—have enabled historians of American slavery to offer far more sophisticated analyses of the colonial experience of enslavement, the development of slave culture and community, and the making of plantation societies. Likewise, the Atlanticization project has

Introduction

7

brought the relationships and affinities between the revolutions of the period and slavery into sharp focus. By locating South Carolina within this broader context, historians can more effectively assess the impact of the era’s broader intellectual and political currents on enslaved people and its white communities. Events in metropolitan France and in its Caribbean colonies in the 1790s had, as we shall see, a significant impact on South Carolina, its slaves, and its political culture, influencing its trajectory for the next six decades.10 In recent years, the dialogue between historians of early modern West Africa and the Atlantic World has transformed the scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade. With the creation of the Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database (first available in 1999 on compact disc and then online from 2008), an extraordinary electronic archive (www​.slavevoyages​.org) that contains the digitized records of more than 36,000 voyages, historians can now examine every facet of the trade from its commercial organization to the ethnicity of the captives to the mortality rates on individual voyages to the length of passage, and the composition of the crew. In The Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010), the project’s participants have presented an elegant and visually arresting synopsis of their findings in a series of maps, graphs, and charts. Using this quantitative data and other records, including merchants’ correspondence and log books, historians have been able to explore individual journeys in astonishing detail, with Sean Kelley’s account of the voyage of the Hare, a sloop that transported more than seventy enslaved Africans from Sierra Leone to Charles Town in 1755, and Robert Harms’s book on the French slaver The Diligent, which sailed in 1731 from the French port of Vannes for the African coast where its captain purchased more than 200 slaves for Martinique’s plantations, serving as ­models of this type of scholarship on the Atlantic trade.11 The colonial settlement of Carolina demanded the dispossession of its Indigenous inhabitants. For historians of Native Americans, the colonial Southeast provides an opportunity to examine the devastating impact of encounter and conquest from the broader perspective of the Atlantic World; looking at the trade in enslaved Indians as well the occupation of their territory within this framework has deepened our understanding of the devastations and dislocations suffered by the Cherokees and other Indigenous groups. The historiography on the European occupation of the backcountry, a region that has not received the same scrutiny as its coastal counterpart, has benefited from expanding the analytical frame. Although the renewed interest in borderlands and frontiers has occasionally led historians to subsume the Carolina backcountry into broader studies of the southern Appalachians that

8

Introduction

transcend the artificial boundaries drawn by surveyors who traipsed through its forests, we now have a better sense of how empire, sometimes in the form of soldiers, sometimes in the form of traders, sometimes in the form of ministers, and sometimes in the form of frontier farmers, played itself out in the piedmont’s woods. Generational transitions triggered other changes. The advent of large-­ scale rice cultivation fueled significant demographic and cultural shifts in the lowcountry when thousands of enslaved men and women shipped directly from Atlantic Africa arrived. No longer a frontier society where enslaved Africans were counted as just one of several types of agricultural workers, which also included free white laborers, indentured servants, and enslaved Indians, the lowcountry became a full-­blown slave society in which planters relied exclusively on bound African laborers to provide the energy and labor power necessary to run their plantations. With slavery now center stage, each interaction between master and slave became “the model for all social relations,” notes Berlin, “from the most intimate connections between men and women to the most public ones between ruler and ruled, all relationships mimicked those of slavery.” But the emergence of a slave society prompted more than new forms of racial etiquette between individuals; it demanded that other institutions—for example, the church, the judiciary, and the agencies of government—orient their structures and ideologies to meet the disciplinary requirements of this new social order as slavery penetrated more deeply into the bricks and mortar of the state. At the same time, the most ambitious and entrepreneurial planters turned themselves into a powerful ruling class who, taking up the material trappings and attitudes of a landed aristocracy, dedicated their energy and influence to the expansion and perpetuation of slavery. Residing in elegant town houses in Charles Town and waited on hand and foot by enslaved domestics, members of the “gentry generation” fashioned a cultured sensibility that found expression through conspicuously lavish social occasions, and articulated their authority by their control over the apparatus of the state.12 Berlin applied his “generational” schema only to enslaved people, but it can be used equally effectively with white Carolinians. The men and women who colonized the coastal plain in the late seventeenth century constituted a charter generation just as much as did the slaves who worked in the woods and fields alongside them. Likewise, the colonists who defied imperial rule in the late 1760s and then took up arms against the British a decade later constituted a revolutionary generation (clearly, the province’s sizeable loyalist community

Introduction

9

falls outside this category), although white definitions of “liberty” differed significantly from how enslaved Carolinians understood it. Berlin’s schema is, moreover, a useful tool by which to analyze the backcountry’s development; the families that settled the region in the 1730s and 1740s also constituted a charter generation. With the backcountry’s commercial rise—a process disrupted by the Cherokee War in 1760 and by a wave of gang violence between bandits and vigilantes a few years later—another plantation generation came into existence in the early 1770s. Only after the Revolutionary War—a particularly bloody affair in the interior—did this plantation generation consolidate its position, when cotton became the leading staple at the turn of the century. The upcountry’s development mimicked the lowcountry’s development in several ways; in the space of a few decades, it evolved from a frontier to a plantation society, although rice planters often grew far richer far faster than did their counterparts, who raised tobacco, indigo, and other crops, in the interior. A number of backcountry families, such as the Hamptons, did establish themselves as plantation dynasties with the cotton revolution, but no inland town ever had the cultural cachet or commercial importance of Charleston.13 Along with Berlin’s scholarship, the work of James Scott on the mechanics of dominance and dissent has also influenced this book. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Scott traces how the behavior and beliefs of the ruling class constituted a “public transcript,” making its power tangible and concrete through its dominance of the state, its political and economic institutions, and its grip on the production of knowledge and ideas. But lowcountry gentlemen also used their wealth to enhance their social and political capital. Participating in lavish social events and spending money on fashionable luxuries, they displayed their cosmopolitan elegance and sophistication; in so doing, they not only enhanced their families’ prestige but also differentiated themselves from the unlettered farmers, humble artisans, and, most obviously, enslaved laborers. With elite behavior conforming to public expectations about the ways in which a ruling class should conduct itself, ordinary white South Carolinians acknowledged and accepted that prosperous planters with their extensive holdings of land and slaves as well as their civic prominence constituted a cadre of authentic and legitimate leaders.14 Like their counterparts throughout the New World, South Carolina’s slaveholders never exercised complete dominion over their enslaved laborers. Unwilling to accept their owner’s absolute sovereignty over their bodies and labor, Black Carolinians responded in various ways to white hegemony. Determined by the specific form of slavery in which they were rooted, enslaved

10

Introduction

laborers shaped their own informal institutions and practices and, in so doing, created hidden transcripts with which they critiqued their enslavement behind the backs of their masters, often fashioning their judgments and analyses in taverns, backstreets, and alleys or in remote corners of the countryside. Drawing deeply from the ethnic traditions of the various kingdoms in Atlantic Africa from which they had been forcibly taken, slaves most frequently pursued prosaic forms of insubordination that included feigning illness, truancy, making insolent remarks, or spitting in the soup; at times, they engaged in more audacious acts, such as arson, murder, and flight. On very rare occasions, their defiance turned into organized violence and open rebellion against individual owners or against the regime itself. But enslaved people did more than analyze the carceral system in which they were embedded; they also drew from the intricate and complex aesthetic, linguistic, and belief systems of their birthplaces to shape dynamic cultures in the town and the countryside that demonstrated resilience, ingenuity, and innovation. Lowcountry cabins, backcountry farms, and grogshops in Charleston became the nurseries of the syncretic forms of religion, vernacular art, and speech central to the cultural and intellectual lives of enslaved people. For Black Carolinians, this constellation of beliefs and practices endowed the chaotic experience of slavery with purpose and direction, and it invested enslaved people with a sense of collective identity.  Although slaveholders unquestionably held the upper hand when they confronted their enslaved workers, slaves themselves also influenced how masters behaved. As cultural critic Raymond Williams has argued, “A lived hegemony is always a process . . . a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits.” Power, moreover, is “continually resisted, limited, altered, and challenged.” Thus, for slaveholders to remain dominant, the modes of subjugation needed to be “renewed, recreated, defended and modified” continuously to remain effective. The daily interactions that occurred on city streets, in rice and indigo fields, and in backcountry farmyards shaped the contours of the interplay between slaves and masters as they constantly negotiated and renegotiated their relationships. The cotton revolution in the backcountry in the 1790s along with the renaissance of plantation agriculture in the postwar lowcountry, further complicated matters. Embracing evangelical religion and the ethos of Christian stewardship, some masters sought to promote themselves as their slaves’ benevolent guardians. Using a combination of scripture and Sunday school, they hoped that their enslaved laborers would assimilate the ideals of obedience and compliance, and come to view Paul’s injunction in his letter to the Colossians, “Servants,

Introduction

11

obey in all things your masters according to the flesh . . . in singleness of heart, fearing God” as an unassailable and inviolable truth.15 Unlike their counterparts in other plantation societies, particularly in the Caribbean, the slaveholders of South Carolina only rarely came face to face with an existential threat to their social order. The occasions when the hidden transcript turned lethal were very few and very far between, and they failed to bring about the destruction of slavery. But this did not mean that slaveholders blithely went about their daily lives in an unruffled state of nonchalant insouciance or carefree ease. Far from it. They demanded obedience from their enslaved laborers and often grew enraged when it was not forthcoming. They constantly fretted about ineffectual and infrequent slave patrols, regularly slept with pistols under their pillows and often imagined dangers and threats against them where none existed. Never knowing the true intentions of the enslaved men and women they daily terrorized, distrust and suspicion became part of the psychological constitutions of white Carolinians. But this sense of dread, rarely acknowledged either publicly or privately, insinuated its way into the slaveholder’s collective consciousness. No matter how hard they tried to convince themselves of their paternal benevolence and humanity, whenever they encountered a truculent slave or were forced to deal with trivial forms of resistance, such as theft or truancy, a profound fear of impending doom came to dominate their thinking which, in turn, shaped their responses. The Stono Rebellion, which took place in early September 1739, stands as a major moment of collective resistance by enslaved men during the colonial era while Denmark Vesey’s plan to raze Charleston eighty-­three years later constituted the most significant threat to the state’s slaveholders in the antebellum period. That the authorities swiftly and ruthlessly crushed the rebels on both occasions suggests the power and resilience of the culture and practice of domination. Unlike the enslaved plantation workers on Saint-­Domingue who launched a massive rebellion in 1791 that ultimately brought about the abolition of slavery in the French Empire, Black Carolinians were unable to exploit the upheavals of the American Revolution and its attendant war, its dislocations making it impossible for them to mount a collective challenge against their masters to effect their own liberation. Yet, although they did not gain their freedom, they learned much from these moments of seismic political and social unrest, incorporating the language and ideas that shaped the actions of revolutionaries into their own culture of resistance. By parsing the language of liberty and revolution and connecting it to their own circumstances, enslaved people recognized the universality of the idea of liberation,

12

Introduction

unearthed the ideological inconsistencies  in the machinery and rhetoric of state power, and appropriated the discourse of rights for themselves.16 A critical and controversial moment in the history of slavery in South Carolina, Denmark Vesey’s intended uprising against Charleston in 1822 provides a vivid capstone to this study. Had not a careless conversation between two enslaved men led to the plan’s discovery at the very last minute, its protagonists might well have breached the fortress of domination that urban slaveholders, with varying degrees of energy and vigilance, manned. Responding swiftly and mercilessly to the crisis, civic leaders incarcerated more than one hundred enslaved and free Black people, executing or exiling those found guilty by a specially convened tribunal. On this occasion, Vesey had sought to bring the hidden transcript of opposition and defiance from prayer meetings held in the city’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, from whispered conversations in warehouses and workshops along the waterfront, and from discussions in taverns and grogshops in quayside alleys into the open to speak “directly and publicly in the teeth of power.” He, along with his fellow rebels, blended the liberationist language of scripture and the Atlantic revolutions with sacred traditions from Atlantic Africa. His actions inspired radical African American abolitionists to incorporate his message into their writings and speeches. Local slaves began to cherish the memory of a man who had tried to end their bondage and raze Charleston, which was now emerging as the intellectual headquarters for the defense of southern slavery, to the ground.17 Thirty-­nine years after the execution of Vesey and his followers, the war that ultimately resulted in the destruction of slavery broke out when artillery batteries around Charleston Harbor bombarded Fort Sumter. Having successfully led the movement for secession of the southern states following Abraham Lincoln’s election in late 1860, the political leaders of South Carolina now embarked on the conflict that they believed would secure the independence of the newly established Confederate States of America and guarantee the future of slavery. In 1865, four years after Fort Sumter fell to Confederate forces, soldiers from the regiments of the United States Colored Troops (the 21st Regiment and the 55th Massachusetts) marched through Charleston’s devastated streets to the loud cheers of the city’s newly liberated slaves. With the short-­lived slaveholders’ republic consigned to the dustbin of history, the enslavers were no longer masters of the enslaved.

CHAPTER 1

Triangular Links England, Barbados, and Carolina

The Downs, August 1669 From the deck of The Carolina, Joseph West looked across the grey and choppy waters of the English Channel to The Port Royall and The Albemarle that were “ridinge att an Anker” at the Downs, a sheltered anchorage off the east Kent coast. Retreating to his cabin, he wrote to Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, a prominent government official, a member of the aristocracy and confidante of the monarch, and the mastermind behind the project to establish a new colony on the North American mainland, informing him about the preparations for the Atlantic crossing. The ships would head first for Kinsale, a port on the southern coast of Ireland; having been provisioned for the ocean voyage, the fleet would set course first for Barbados before embarking on the final leg of their journey to the Carolina coast. Six years had elapsed since the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, a small consortium of influential aristocrats, had received a charter from King Charles II to establish a new outpost of empire between England’s Chesapeake colonies and Spanish Florida. Now, in August 1669, Sir Anthony received the news that the expedition in which he had invested considerable time, energy, and capital was ready to set sail.1 In the ships’ holds, the crew stowed the hardware of the colonizer and empire builder. Alongside crates packed with hoes, axes, saws, hammers, and nails was a small arsenal that included “fyerlock muskets [and] two hundredweight of Musquett shot” and a dozen suits of armor. In addition, they stowed barrels filled with glass beads, hatchets, cloth, and other goods for trading with the Native Americans along the coast as well as “a flagg” that further signaled their intentions. Crammed between the cargo were the passengers and

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their personal belongings; on The Carolina, which displaced about two hundred tons, about twenty masters, thirty-­six servants, and several dozen free men and women jostled for room in the cramped quarters below decks. Even though The Albemarle, a thirty-­ton sloop, and The Port Royall were considerably smaller, about one hundred and fifty English men and women embarked on the voyage across the Atlantic.2 With a “faire wind” blowing down the English Channel, West ordered Henry Brayne, John Russell, and Edward Baxter, the masters of The Carolina, The Port Royall, and The Albemarle respectively, to make sail and get underway. In late August, the ships arrived in Kinsale, where West tried to enlist additional servants for the expedition. Perhaps recalling Oliver Cromwell’s ruthless conquest of Ireland twenty years earlier and the transportation of prisoners taken during the conflict to Barbados, local farm laborers ignored his appeals. Why leave “the smoke of their owne cabin[s]” for a miserable existence under the yoke of plantation masters, who had a well-­deserved reputation for “ill practice” toward their laborers? With the harvest in full swing, moreover, nobody wished to embark on a dangerous ocean journey with autumn approaching. In fact, not only did West fail to draft any new recruits, but several servants took the opportunity to abandon the expedition, choosing to desert during the brief stop in Kinsale.3 Not until mid-­September did the fleet leave Ireland. Six weeks later, it dropped anchor in Carlisle Bay on the west coast of Barbados. In early November, a tropical storm hit the island, damaging The Port Royall and driving The Albemarle onto rocks, wrecking it beyond repair. With the expedition’s progress jeopardized, Sir John Yeamans and Thomas Colleton stepped in. They organized repairs to The Port Royall and acquired a new ship, The Three Brothers, to replace The Albemarle. At the same time, Yeamans chose to take command of the project, summarily dismissing West from his post. An influential political figure, a slaveholder, and sugar planter, Yeamans had served during the British Civil Wars (1642‒1651) in Charles I’s army as a colonel before going into exile in Barbados around 1650, where he rapidly ascended to a position of leadership. He was, moreover, an advocate for the project of colonizing Carolina; in 1665, he received a commission to mount an exploratory voyage under the auspices of the Barbadian Adventurers to find a suitable location for a settlement. Thomas Colleton was also a wealthy planter; his father, Sir John Colleton, who had also commanded royalist forces during the war, left England for Barbados in the early 1650s. He soon became a planter, the owner of seven hundred acres and sixty-­five enslaved

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laborers. Returning to England in 1660 after the restoration of the monarchy, Sir John became a leading figure in organizing the Lords Proprietors, and he lobbied tirelessly to establish a new colony on the southeastern coast of the North American mainland, an endeavor enthusiastically supported by Thomas after his father’s death in 1666.4 With their ships either wrecked or undergoing repair, the Carolina colonists now prepared to spend the next few weeks on Barbados. Encountering plantation agriculture for the first time, they watched legions of enslaved African laborers at work in the cane fields and refining sugar in the withering heat of the boiling house. They also witnessed firsthand the harsh disciplinary regime imposed by planters on their enslaved laborers. The small farms that the migrants had left in southern England stood in stark contrast to large-­scale sugar cultivation and the quasi-­industrial character of processing cane. With the migrants’ arrival coinciding with the busiest time of the agricultural year—planted between August and November, the cane was harvested sixteen months later between January and March, and processed immediately—the newcomers witnessed plantation operations at their most relentless and intensive. The servants hired out by the expedition’s leaders to work temporarily for Thomas Colleton and others in Saint Peter Parish also briefly experienced its reality. Living in a colony where plantation owners, as one enslaved laborer grumbled, “make the Negro work, the Horse work, the Ass work, the Wood work, and the Winde work,” the Englishmen perhaps saw Barbados as a machine, designed by a ruling class for the ruthless extraction of labor and the generation of immense wealth for its planters.5 The sharp demarcations and inequalities between rich and poor, free and servile, Black and white struck other newcomers. The island’s social order was, wrote royalist émigré Richard Ligon in 1657, “divided into three sorts of men: viz Masters, Servants, and Slaves.” Constituting three distinct and unequal communities, these groups interacted primarily in the plantation’s work spaces. By the late seventeenth century, the soldiers and sailors of Europe’s imperial armies and navies and the men who crewed the merchant ships that plied the Atlantic’s shipping lanes along with the plantation owners and the merchants who bought and sold human beings, inhabited a world where enslaved Africans and indentured servants were central to the project of colonization as well as to the production and circulation of people and tropical commodities. But whether free or servile, these people held their own ideas, customs, and traditions that were rooted in their own specific experiences.6

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The Carolina colonists caught the enslaved and their enslavers at a particular moment in their respective histories. By 1669, Barbados had become a full-­fledged slave society, replete with the legal codes and police apparatus to maintain discipline and order. With the expansion of the sugar economy in the 1650s, enslaved African laborers replaced indentured servants as the backbone of the labor force, a fundamental demographic transformation that led to the emergence of a Black majority by 1660. In 1640, there were approximately 13,500 colonists, both free and indentured, and 500 enslaved people on the island; 30 years later, there were more than 40,000 slaves and 22,400 white people. Put another way, for every 27 whites in 1640, there was just one slave; in 1670, there were 56 white people for every 101 enslaved people. The plantation regime’s intensification combined with the widespread use of enslaved Africans altered the very foundations of island life. Slavery—an institution legally sanctioned by law, regulated informally by the planters’ disciplinary practices, and defended by the militia—saturated every relationship. It sat at the heart of the colony’s economic and political life.7 The rhythms of plantation life organized the working lives of free and enslaved people. Planters shaped the productive process; they dictated the management of their enslaved laborers and they established the disciplinary practices necessary to maximize profits and productivity. With the levers of political and economic power firmly in their grip, they emerged as the island’s ruling elite, creating a culture of domination to maintain their authority. But planters did more than rule from above; determining the organization of work on their own estates, they stamped their authority on every aspect of agricultural production. Furthermore, using their immense wealth, they differentiated themselves from the majority of the island’s white population, reinforcing their claims to leadership through extravagant displays of consumption and their hold over the island’s administration.8 The enslaved and indentured men and women subject to their regime did not passively accept their subordination. Laboring in the blazing sun under their owner’s vigilant eye for ten or more hours a day, enduring squalid living conditions, surviving on inadequate rations and subject to whippings and other punishments, bound laborers developed a powerful critique of the regime, which occasionally led to open rebellion. The popular political traditions that emerged in rural England in opposition to the enclosure of the common land provided one lens through which indentured servants might consider their circumstances. The radical ideas that circulated during the civil wars that convulsed the British Isles in the 1640s and during the

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Commonwealth in the 1650s provided another dimension to their analysis. The arrival of Irish servants, who had been either captured or displaced during the conquest of Ireland and who harbored a deep hatred of all things English, only increased the potential for disorder.9 Disoriented by alien circumstances, enslaved Africans confronted a formidable task in their efforts to survive the unyielding routines of plantation labor. Transporting enslaved Africans against their will in horrific conditions by the thousands from their homelands in the 1650s and 1660s, planters rapidly incorporated these newcomers into a harsh work regime built on the demands of cane production. Salvaging what remnants they could from their own ethnic traditions and slipping them by their masters to create a new, hybrid culture, enslaved Africans fashioned strategies to adapt to the grim new reality of Barbados. Like the indentured servants they replaced, enslaved laborers, too, turned to violence at times in an effort to challenge their owners’ almost unassailable power. The world to which they now struggled to adapt had not come about through a fit of absentmindedness or through a series of uncoordinated or random decisions; rather, it came about by planters acting in calculated and deliberate ways in an effort to discipline their slaves, maximize their profits, and dominate the colony’s political and social order. The arrangements and institutions that matured on Barbados in the first half of the seventeenth century would prove decisive in the colonization of Carolina. In many ways, Barbados became an unwitting laboratory for the practices and customs that soon flourished on the mainland, a rehearsal for the expansion of plantation slavery along the coastal plain, and a proving ground for the legal and cultural infrastructure that provided the scaffolding for the development of a slave society. Slaveholders asserted their power over their workers, assessing the ways in which they might extract the greatest profit from land and labor. When a contingent of Anglo-­Barbadians joined the Carolina expedition, they brought along the ruthlessness and management techniques that had so effectively transformed an insignificant island into “that fair jewell of your Majesty’s Crown.” These “lively spirited men” had a major impact on the new mainland colony; not only did Carolina become the northern boundary of the English Caribbean and English America’s southern frontier, but the customs, manners, and practices of the island’s rulers profoundly influenced lowcountry society. Even though the links between Barbados and South Carolina gradually declined over time, the politics and culture of the former inflected the latter for a lengthy period. Of the roughly thirteen hundred white settlers who arrived in the late seventeenth century,

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more than half came from Barbados. The “considerable men . . . from the Barbadoes” who arrived did more than establish and run plantations; they bequeathed their ideological and cultural DNA to the new colony, making it a very different place from the other plantation societies in Anglo-­America.10

Colonizing Barbados One of the early connections linking the fates of Barbados and Carolina came in the late 1640s when a man who later played a major role in the colonization of Carolina sailed for Barbados. John Colleton, who had spent thousands of pounds raising a regiment for the Royalists went into exile in 1649 after Parliamentary forces confiscated his estate, and following the trial and execution of Charles I in January. Colleton soon acquired a plantation on the island’s west coast near the settlement of Speightstown just when planters were turning to the commercial production of sugar, a crop that soon turned Barbados, observed mariner and soldier Henry Whistler, into “one of the Riches Spotes of ground in the wordell.” Had Colleton arrived several years earlier, he would have encountered colonists “in a very low condition . . . very much indebted both to the Merchants and also to one another,” exhausted and demoralized by a string of agricultural failures. Two years after John Powell stumbled upon this uninhabited island during a voyage from Brazil to London in 1625, eloquently described by army officer Thomas Walduck as “risen out of the Sea, buffeted on each side by Neptune,” Sir William Courteen formed a syndicate of fellow merchants in London to bankroll a colonizing expedition. Spring 1627 saw the first group of ninety settlers slashing and burning their way through the forests, clearing land for tobacco cultivation. The fields yielded a substantial harvest; a year later, colonists shipped about one hundred thousand pounds to England. Following their initial success, they cleared more land for tobacco, bolstering their ambitions that “the most plesante Iland in all the west Indyes” was on the path to becoming a prosperous and successful colony.11 Within a few years, however, the tobacco bonanza had collapsed, caused primarily by the crop’s poor quality. So superior was Virginia tobacco that islanders preferred to smoke leaf imported from their mainland rivals rather than their homegrown product; nevertheless, they persisted in growing and shipping large quantities to London merchants, who found few buyers. Acting for his son Henry in 1628, Puritan leader John Winthrop, who, having just recovered from “a dangerous, hot malignant fever,” decided to free

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himself “from the bondage . . . [of] the immoderate use and love of Tobacco,” dismissed his offspring’s product as “verye ill conditioned, fowle, full of stalkes, and evill coloured,” forcing him to sell it at rock-­bottom prices. Hoping to persuade its planters to diversify their crops, and to prevent the English population from asphyxiating on “tobacco and smoke,” Parliament placed a twelve-­pence levy on every pound of Barbadian tobacco while taxing Chesapeake planters only nine pence per pound. Unable to compete with their counterparts in Maryland and Virginia, island planters abandoned tobacco farming, turning to other crops in order to make money. But, with intensive tobacco cultivation leaving fields drained of nutrients and with many planters in debt to English merchants, the prospects for a bright future looked dim.12 Colonists hoped that growing cotton would stave off ruin. Visiting in 1632, Sir Henry Colt encountered planters with a renewed sense of optimism, noting that “the trade of Cotton fills them all with hope.” Along with proprietorial agent Peter Hay, they believed that the island’s “cotton of all is esteemed best . . . and is a staple commodity that will ever be worth money.” And, for several years, planters proved Hay right. But cotton brought neither long-­ term prosperity nor economic stability. Overproduction soon led to a glut, forcing London merchants to sell at prices so low that planters found themselves with no money with which “to buye necessaries.” In addition, by using farming practices that devastated the environment, planters had jeopardized the c­ olony’s prospects. Clearing acres of forest for fields had led to significant erosion; hurricanes and storms washed away topsoil while the tobacco plants themselves leached away essential nutrients, leaving land nearly infertile after a few years. In his efforts to grow cotton in ground so badly exhausted and depleted, Daniel Fletcher estimated that on his plantation only “one acre in ten” would support the plant while another claimed that “most parts of the country will bear no cotton.”13 A decade after its settlement, the island’s initial commercial promise had all but evaporated. The slump in tobacco and cotton prices bankrupted many planters; in debt to London merchants, they were often unable to secure credit for new ventures. A short-­lived attempt at indigo cultivation failed; few had the necessary resources for planting and processing it. History repeated itself when overproduction drove down prices. Planters next turned to cereal crops, hoping that Barbados would become “the granary of all the Caribbee Islands.” This too proved unsustainable. Using land already depleted from intensive cotton and tobacco cultivation, planters harvested grain that was “burnt and blasted.” Without a “profitable New Invention. . . to make a

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commodity,” they looked forward to a dreary and impoverished future of subsistence farming; with the promise of a prosperous tomorrow rapidly vanishing, the “desolation of this Plantation” now seemed inevitable. Barbados, it appeared, was destined to become “a Dunghill wharone England doth cast forth its rubidg [rubbish]” where “Rodgs and hors [rogues and whores] and such like peopel” eked out squalid and destitute lives.14 It was Saccharum officinarum that prevented “the decaying condition of the Island” from becoming a terminal state, rescuing the colony from languishing as a minor backwater of empire. In the early 1630s, planters raised modest amounts of sugar cane for cattle fodder and fuel, but they had not exploited it commercially. Several factors, both international and local, contributed to its rise in the 1640s. Locally, the resolution of legal problems over land tenure provided an impetus for the expansion of plantation operations. In 1643, the Assembly of Barbados granted planters permission to own land in fee simple (i.e., as free holders) and provided for hereditary tenure whereby owners could pass their land to their heirs rather than have it revert to the state on their death.15 An uprising in northeastern Brazil also contributed to the development of the sugar economy on Barbados. In 1654, after three decades of Dutch rule, Portuguese colonists in Recife and other settlements in Pernambuco, a region dedicated to sugar production, successfully rebelled against their northern European masters. Expelled from some of the richest plantation lands in the Americas, the Dutch looked for new opportunities and sensed investment potential in Barbados. In many ways, they were ideally positioned to take advantage of a colony in search of a new commodity; not only did Dutch planters possess the agricultural expertise required to raise sugar, but they also could tap into Amsterdam’s credit markets to obtain the capital necessary for land, technology, and workers. Dutch mariners and merchants, moreover, had considerable experience in the Atlantic slave trade, operating primarily along the Gold Coast and importing nearly twenty-­eight thousand enslaved Africans to the province during their short occupation of the region. With the Dutch West India Company a ubiquitous commercial presence in the Atlantic, planters had access to a steady source of bound laborers.16 But the resolution of land tenure or the availability of Dutch capital did not mean that sugar would automatically come to monopolize agriculture in Barbados. Success came incrementally; not until the 1650s did cane fields come to dominate the landscape when, noted Father Antoine Beit, a French Catholic priest who spent three months on the island in 1654, sugar grew

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“as far as the eye can see.” Only after a period of trial and error did planters finally unlock “the secrets of the work” and discover the most effective way to grow and process cane, with their early efforts resulting in a finished product that was, noted Ligon, “very inconsiderable, and [of] little worth,” an echo of earlier refrains from London merchants who had dismissed the island’s harsh and acrid tobacco as unpalatable and unsaleable. Had the canes smuggled in from Pernambuco perished or had experiments at refining sugar failed, then the economy of Barbados would have taken a different course. The island, versified planter Nicholas Foster, which had earlier “laboureth for breath” and anticipated “nothing lesse than sudden death,” had discovered the transforming power of sugar, and “now Barbada far exceeds the rest, And is become the Glory of the West.”17

Plantations and Planters The primary productive unit on Barbados, the plantation, was an integral part of the social and economic landscape from the first days of colonization. The demands of cane cultivation required that planters only modify their laborers’ existing routines rather than fashion new configurations of work from scratch. Growing tobacco, indigo and other crops forced planters to come to terms with the organization and practice of cultivating tropical commodities, the management and control of bound laborers, and the uncertainties of the marketplace. Bound laborers felled trees, cleared ground, constructed barns and sheds, and carved out rudimentary roads. With tobacco and cotton fields now lying fallow, planters had open land on which to plant cane. Although turning raw cane into a product ready for export required planters to supplement their operations with new buildings, such as mills, boiling houses, and curing sheds, the basic infrastructure for growing and processing sugar was already in place.18 Furthermore, the adaptability of the labor process was another key factor in the successful transition to sugar. Servants who had raised staple crops during the first years of colonization were only too familiar with the discipline, regimentation, and order of plantation agriculture. Tobacco farming provided a template for arranging work that planters later transferred to growing sugar. Because tobacco was a labor-­intensive crop, its cultivation required significant inputs of energy; servants spent their days weeding, pruning, and deworming plants, and, after picking, sorting and hanging the

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leaves to dry. For a successful harvest, planters reckoned on assigning one worker per acre (an acre is 43,560 square feet, or slightly smaller than an American football field, which is 48,000 square feet, or 1.3 acres) and, anxious to ensure that the plants received proper care and attention, they began supervising field hands. Surveillance and discipline thus became integrated into the labor process. By organizing laborers into gangs, moreover, planters departed radically from English agricultural practices. For landowners as well as for the laborers in the fields and in the sugar mill (sometimes referred to as an ingenio, the Spanish term for a cane mill and its associated facilities), the plantations on Barbados were something new under the sun.19 Growing sugar, which took sixteen months to mature, was also a labor-­ intensive process. Enslaved laborers were a constant presence in the fields, the mill, and the boiling house, with planters allocating one laborer for every two acres while assigning several dozen laborers to refining newly harvested cane into sugar for export. Adapting plantation-­management practices from elsewhere in the Atlantic World, planters used the clock rather than specific and well-­defined tasks to order the laboring lives of their hands. Living on Thomas Modyford’s plantation, Ligon watched servants trudge out to the fields soon after dawn after being “rung out with a Bell to work.” Under the overseer’s gaze, they worked until 11:00 a.m., when another bell signaled a break. Back in the fields in the early afternoon—with the sun at its zenith, it was the hottest part of the day—they worked until dusk when the last bell sounded, signaling an end to more than nine hours of exhausting and monotonous labor, returning to their shacks and an unhealthy and dreary meal.20 The gang became the main organizing principle for sugar cultivation. Son of the pioneering sugar planter James Drax, Henry jotted down his observations on how best to arrange his workforce, assigning laborers to various gangs for the backbreaking work of growing cane in a disciplined manner. The agricultural year began in January with hands performing two laborious and unpleasant tasks. Employing the latest farming techniques from England, planters first enriched the soil using manure; a single acre required laborers to transport about thirty carts of animal excrement. The “vast quantities of Dung we must use, the carrying it to the field, and disposing it there,” wrote Edward Littleton in 1689, “is a mighty Labour.” Enslaved laborers then dug a pit for each plant, spacing each hole (hence its name, “holing”) about two feet apart. The most effective way “to make the Negroes do their Work properly,” Drax concluded, was “constantly to Gang all the Negroes in the Plantations at the Time of Planting.” Accordingly, he split his enslaved men

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into two groups, with “the ablest and the best by themselves for Holeing,” and using “the more ordinary Negroes in a Gang for Dunging.” The division of labor was just one hallmark of a productive process that turned plantations into the agricultural equivalent of a factory. Thus Bryan Edwards, author, politician, and a sugar planter on Jamaica, noted that the plantation was “like a complicated machine, whose parts must act always in unison”; it required skilled management for its constituent parts to function efficiently before “its effect can be properly produced.”21 The rise of the sugar economy had a significant impact on the structure of the planter community. Families with sufficient economic resources to consolidate their holdings—estates of about two hundred acres provided the greatest efficiencies of scale—sought to streamline their operations. James Drax, Henry’s father, was one man who had skillfully navigated the transition to sugar cultivation. The younger son of a landowner in the English Midlands and caught by the inheritance trap of primogeniture, James left Warwickshire for Barbados, arriving as a free man with the first fleet in 1627. He began by raising tobacco, using the profits to acquire more servants; when its price fell, he switched to cotton before that market too collapsed. By 1640, he owned 225 acres on which seventeen indentured servants and twenty-­two slaves worked. After visiting Pernambuco in the early 1640s, where he surreptitiously acquired plans for roller mills and boilers, he started to cultivate sugar. In 1664, “using soe much Sugar or other . . . commodities as shall amount to 726 sterling,” he purchased another thirty-­four enslaved laborers. Within a few years, he had exchanged cotton for sugar, servants for slaves, and penury for prosperity; from his elegant rooms in Drax Hall, James commanded a plantation empire that ultimately grew to more than seven hundred acres on which more than two hundred enslaved Africans labored.22 The lives led by Drax and other prominent planters became a subject for Richard Ligon’s pen. Like many English men and women who fled to Barbados during the 1640s and 1650s, Ligon supported the royalist cause. And, like many exiles, he made his living in the sugar business, purchasing a small share in a sugar plantation with several partners in 1647. Three years later, after the collapse of his plantation enterprise, Ligon returned home to London and a cell in the city’s Upper Bench Prison where he wrote A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, which he published in 1657. By the 1660s, the consolidation of small estates into large plantations along with the profits generated from sugar production had generated a chasm between wealthy planters with extensive holdings in land and enslaved laborers, and

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those who stumbled along in abject poverty. The elite, which consisted of around 175 families, owned half of the island’s arable land and about 60 percent of its enslaved people. Wielding immense economic and political power, and enjoying unparalleled status, James Drax and his fellow planters began to act in ways that they believed members of a ruling class should behave, conducting themselves in a manner “equal to many of our Nobility and Gentry, of the first rank in England.”23 Despite their lands and their slaves, the upper echelon of the island’s planters could not ground claims to leadership based on aristocratic lineage. Many who arrived during the first years of colonization came either as indentured servants or as free men from humble backgrounds. Rather, they had to purchase the trappings of power and status. “Extravagance,” wrote Father Antoine Beit in 1654, “is very great among the English in these parts.” No longer satisfied with the crude huts and lean-­tos in which they had first lived, the colonists who had successfully negotiated the twists and turns of the island’s agricultural fortunes now built “buildings very fair and  beautiful,” furnishing their rooms with four-­poster beds, chairs, carpets, and cupboards for their elegant clothes, with “ladies and young women . . . as well dressed as in Europe.” In 1667, one commentator estimated the value of luxury items, including “plate . . . [and] jewels,” acquired by the wealthiest planters at several hundred thousand pounds. The families who occupied the apex of the island’s social order conducted themselves like a landed aristocracy and, remarked Whistler in 1655, lived “far better than ours doue in England.” At one particularly lavish dinner held at Drax Hall, the guests sat around a table laden with roast pig along with “four Ducklings, eight Turtle Doves, and three Rabbets . . . pickled Oysters, Caviare [and] Anchovies.” To wash this feast down, Drax provided flagons of “Claret-­wine, White wine, rhenish wine, Sherry [and] all the Spirits that come from England.” No wonder the diners wore “as chearful a look . . . as any man can give to his best friend” when they toasted their host for his largesse and hospitality before they staggered home.24 Characterized by excessive amounts of food and drink, such occasions enabled elite planters to differentiate themselves from impoverished servants, unpolished smallholders, and artisans, and provided incontrovertible proof that they had successfully become rich and powerful. These events also allowed the wealthy to replicate the modes and manners of the English aristocracy and to reinforce their claims to leadership. Feasting alongside fellow planters provided a temporary respite from the burdens of plantation

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management, but such extravagant attempts to convey authority through conspicuous consumption perhaps indicates that the men enjoying the food and drink on Drax’s lavishly appointed table were not completely at ease. Not so long ago, many at his table had themselves lived in hovels built from “sticks . . . and Plantine leaves,” living not on roast pig and caviar but on a starchy diet of beans, potatoes, and porridge and who had labored in the fields from sunup to sundown under the watchful eye of the overseer. With enslaved domestics waiting at their tables inside their new houses—Beit recalled one banquet where “well built young slaves refill the pipes, which they present [to the guests] on their knees”—and with disgruntled servants, ex-­servants, and enslaved field hands outside, they assuaged their anxieties about disorder and rebellion with jugs of claret.25 To replicate “the Customes, and Fashions of England . . . as to Apparell, Household-­Furniture, Eating, and Drinking,” planters set about importing English goods, customs and institutions in an effort to anglicize the island’s public life. Every April 23rd, they marked Saint George’s Day (England’s patron saint) with considerable fanfare; they duplicated English administrative institutions, organizing the island into six parishes, establishing a court and other administrative bodies. They looked to London for fashionable consumer goods, and they hoped to turn their new home into a little England by retaining the modes and manners of their home country. This trend reached its apotheosis when, following the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660 and the coronation of Charles II, several planters received knighthoods, providing this parvenu elite with the crown’s imprimatur, further adding to their luster and legitimacy.26 Planters used statutory law to institutionalize their authority over their bound laborers, passing an act for “the good governing of Servants, and ordering of Rights between Masters and Servants” in 1661. Equating “the Interest and Substance of this Island” with their own collective interests, they clamped down on activities that might threaten public order, punishing any “Unruliness, Obstinacy, and Refractoriness” that challenged their authority. Any servant found guilty of laying “violent Hands” on his or her owner or overseer had another year added to the contract while theft led to an additional two years of service. The law also regulated sexual behavior; any female servant who bore a child had to work another two years while the father had to “serve the Owner of such Servant Three Years” to compensate for hours lost, and the expense of “bringing up the Bastard Child.” Even minor infractions—for example, leaving the plantation without a “License or Ticket” resulted in a

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further one day’s service for every two hours absence—all increased the time spent as a servant. And whenever servants challenged any rule, no matter how trivial, they soon found “their time . . . doubled.”27 Dispersed widely across the island, the spatial distribution of plantations allowed their owners, observed John Oldmixon, an eighteenth-­century historian of the island, to rule their estates “like Little Sovereigns.” Often isolated from its nearest neighbor, the plantation resembled a medieval village. Observing the island from the sea, one traveler noted that plantations along its western coast looked like “so many small towns.” With their “houses built for making and preserving sugar” and “their Negro huts . . . defended by its ­castle,” planters might easily see themselves as feudal lords, presiding over their own fiefdoms and disciplining their workers with impunity. The ­“castles,” which the writer thought “very fair and beautiful,” protected the planter and his family from more than the elements. With their thick walls and small windows, these fortified houses became part of the island’s defensive network of “forts and platforms,” built to “defend so valuable a country” against invaders from without and rebellious workers from within.28 Consistent with its decline in England, the ethic of paternalism had no place on Barbados. Masters viewed their relationship with English and Irish servants through the lens of contract law, enabling them to dispense with any traditional duties that would have been part of their obligations in England. Indentured contracts stipulated the length of service and compensation due at the term’s end, while the law codified the limits of servants’ activities along with penalties for any violations; servants regarded their freedom dues not as a humane gesture from a paternalistic master but, notes historian Hilary Beckles, as “a deferred and accumulated wage payment.” With no legal obligation to attend to their servants’ welfare, planters spent the bare minimum on basic necessities, housing them “in sties worse than hogs in England” and providing a wretched diet high in carbohydrates and low in protein. Unless “an Oxe dyed,” noted Ligon, servants had “no bone meat at all” and led “very wearisome and miserable lives.” Even masters who provided sufficient “meat, drink and lodging” still had to maintain discipline. Planters regarded any servant who had been incarcerated in one of England’s “bridwells . . . and other such places of education” before they left the country as a threat, but even those without a criminal record rarely received better treatment. Shackled by draconian laws and supervised by overseers who “act like those in charge of galley slaves” and who, reported Beit, readily used the whip “when they do not work as fast as is desired,” ex-­convicts no doubt thought that they had

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exchanged one prison for another while servants who had immigrated voluntarily possibly saw their master as no better than their jailer.29 Only with the advent of sugar production did landowners fully take on the attributes of a recognizable planter class. With plantations integral to the economy from the first days of colonization, it was their owners who established the practices and institutions that shaped island life. In this way, they were a charter generation, establishing standards in an environment dominated by staple agriculture, with the plantation standing at the heart of the enterprise. These men equated their own specific economic and disciplinary interests with the interests of the colony as a whole. Moreover, the elite faced few existential challenges to their rule—unlike the mainland, there was no Indigenous population on Barbados to challenge their occupation of the land—and, even though they invariably exaggerated any threat to their authority from servants or enslaved laborers, they had few qualms about using excessive force to extinguish any hint of unrest. With its ability to crush any challenge to its power with military force, the island’s ruling class further enhanced its legitimacy.

Servants and Slaves The intensification of the plantation regime over time led servants to nurture an alternative culture away from their masters’ surveillance, challenging their authority in ways both subtle and overt. Rum endangered productivity as well as discipline and order; not only were servants incapacitated by drink prone to alcohol-­related illness, incapable of putting in a full day’s work—heading for church one Sunday, Thomas Verney had to step over the incapacitated and prostrate bodies of servants “soe drunk” that land crabs had “bitt of some of their fingers, [and] some of their toes”—but drunkenness also had the potential to encourage grumbling and dissent. The numbers of “unlicens’d Tippling Houses” that sprang up in the countryside as well as in the coastal settlements of Bridgetown and Holetown suggests the presence of a lively drinking culture. One historian estimates that in Bridgetown alone, there was one tavern for every twenty inhabitants, with Beit noting that “drunkenness is great, especially among the lower classes.” In 1652, seeking to prevent the “loose, idle and wickedly inclined” from gathering on Sundays “in Houses, Highways, Woods, Fields or any other place,” and engaging in the “vicious and ungodly” pursuits of “Swearing, Cursing, Whoring, Shooting, Gaming

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[and] Quarreling,” the Assembly fined or punished anyone who failed to attend church. In 1668, lawmakers again attempted to shut “Brandy and Rum Houses,” the places where indentured laborers might find some temporary escape from the drudgery of daily life. And here, the “hidden transcript” of dissent might find expression; in these ramshackle places, patrons could develop and articulate their own critiques of the plantation order, recall the egalitarian visions of mid-­seventeenth-­century English radicals, and perhaps plan to take matters into their own hands while they smoked tobacco, grew groggy on “kill-­devil,” as rum was appropriately called, and damned the day that they sailed for Barbados.30 When contemplating their lot, servants might draw on several sources of popular politics. Servants from southern and eastern England had spent their formative years in regions undergoing a significant economic transformation, with commercially minded landowners imposing sweeping changes on the countryside. Of all these modernizing efforts, which resulted in an unprecedented growth in agricultural production, it was the eradication of common land and its enclosure by landowners that had the greatest impact on rural life; it prompted widespread resentment and, on occasion, triggered riots as smallholders, tenants, and other villagers violently protested these measures. Commenting on changes in rural Cambridgeshire, Thomas Fuller observed in 1662 that where “a Pike or Duck fed formerly, now a Bullock or Sheep is fatted . . . that if they be taken in taking that Bullock or Sheep, the rich owner indicteth them for felons.” Henry Hastings, godfather to Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper and owner of land that bordered on his godson’s estate in Dorset, set aside the traditional garb of the paternalistic landlord and donned the attire of the hardheaded agricultural innovator when he enclosed fields and redirected streams to create water meadows for grazing livestock. Denied access to the commons, villagers in Wimborne Saint Giles directed “many vehement complaints . . . divers calumnies and slanders” at the man who had jettisoned customary practices for modern farming methods. The servants that Sir Anthony recruited to work on his plantation on Barbados doubtless knew, and perhaps were even participants in this and similar incidents that were legion in southern and southwestern England.31 Even though the “green revolution” ended the specter of famine in England, agrarian modernization led to significant dislocations in the countryside. On occasion, turning common land into enclosed fields or elegantly landscaped parks triggered disorder and rioting. This legacy of rural unrest perhaps influenced an attempt made by servants on Barbados to rebel. In

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1634, John and William Weston along with several other servants planned to kill their master and escape to another island. Prior to taking passage for Barbados, the Westons had participated in anti-­enclosure riots in Gloucestershire in southwest England; with other villagers in the Forest of Dean, they had ripped up hedges and fences and threatened local officials. Now on Barbados, they again challenged the authority of the ruling class.32 The wars and political crises that roiled the British Isles in the mid-­ seventeenth century also had a major impact on the servant community. The interlocking conflicts between the Charles I and his supporters and Parliament from 1639 until 1651 combined with the years of the English Commonwealth, inspired an era of profound debate on how to build a new society from the ashes of the old as a wildly eclectic collection of preachers, soldiers, philosophers, pamphleteers, and poets thrashed out “political and religious questions of fundamental importance” in various forums that ranged from books and broadsides to homilies delivered from pulpits and tree stumps. At one end of the spectrum lay lengthy and dense works of political theory, such as Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) or James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), or epic literary works like John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); in the realm of popular culture, the authors of dozens of cheaply produced tracts called for comprehensive change while orators exhorted their audiences to “turn the world upside down.” In his England’s Troublers Troubled (1648), Oxford-­educated lawyer Henry Marten attacked those “fat and swollen with wealth, that you esteem far less of plain men than you do of your horses and dogs,” while “Free Born” John Lilburne championed religious tolerance, equal rights before the law and, as his sobriquet indicated, the liberties of freeborn Englishmen. Embracing radically alternative visions for a country that they had rescued at great cost from the royalists, men like Joseph Salmon, an officer in the New Model Army and pamphleteer who was affiliated with the Ranters, migrated to Barbados after his arrest for street preaching, and Quaker John Perrot along with other like-­minded ­people openly rejected, write historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, “slavery, dispossession, the destruction of the commons, poverty, wage labor, private property, and the death penalty.” Thanks to the writings of radical pamphleteers as well as to men like Salmon and Perrot, these subversive ideas did not remain confined to the British Isles but circulated throughout the Anglo-­Atlantic world.33 Plantation owners found such dangerous and seditious ideas a profound and alarming threat. They had not moved to this small island in the eastern

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Caribbean with its stifling tropical climate, diseases, and truculent laborers in order to build a new Jerusalem. Far from it; they had one goal in mind, observed Beit: “to become wealthy.” The preamble to the law on the conveyancing of estates reinforced the point, noting that “few men come to this Island with the intention to settle themselves . . . but for the most part to gain or increase their Estates.” With the arrival of thousands of prisoners and displaced people who were deported from Ireland in the early 1650s, the pursuit of profit became an even riskier proposition. Out to obliterate Catholics along with any vestige of royalist support, Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland in mid-­1649 and, after slaughtering some three thousand at Drogheda in September, which served as a bloody prelude to his conquest of the country, he secured his reputation for ruthlessness. Passed in 1652, the Act for the Settlement of Ireland triggered the systematic confiscation of land along with the dispossession of its occupants. Enclosure and eviction followed, leading to a massive growth in the number of refugees who, along with prisoners taken during the fighting, were transported to Barbados. By 1669, at least eight thousand Irish servants were on the island, harboring burning resentment and anger against their English masters.34 The deportation of embittered Irishmen, who were regarded by English officials as “a bloody and perfidious people,” coincided with a sharp rise in the number of enslaved laborers on the island. In the eyes of the authorities, it was a volatile mix. As Governor Daniel Searle reported in 1657, not only did some Irish servants refuse to work, becoming “vagabonds,” but others turned to a life of crime and “put themselves on evil practices, as pilfering, theft, robberies and other felonious acts for their subsistency.” Irish servants such as Daniel Malisee—sentenced to stand naked in the stocks under the broiling sun for having insulted his master—or Cornelius Bryan, whipped for “mutinous speech,” raised concerns that similar hotheads would make common cause with enslaved Africans. Sir Francis Willoughby spoke ominously about the dangers that “a strange combination of blacks, Irish and servants” presented; on rare occasions, his fears were almost realized. In 1655, planters in Saint Philip Parish, in the southeastern corner of the island, complained about “several Irish servants and negroes out in rebellion in ye thickets and thereabouts” who were eluding patrols by day and raiding plantations at night. The governor mobilized the militia, instructing its commanding officer to “use his utmost endeavours to . . . destroy them” should “servants and runaway Negroes make any opposition . . . and refuse to come in peaceably.” A visible and exaggerated show of force appeared to have been an effective

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deterrent; even though individuals still escaped to remote corners in the island’s northern parishes, such as Saint Lucy and Saint Peter, servants and enslaved people never again collaborated to overthrow their masters.35 With patrols and the militia ubiquitous and with bound laborers persistently failing to organize successfully, individual forms of resistance became the most common form of defiance against the plantation order. Laborers, enslaved and indentured, regularly engaged in acts of “resistance short of rebellion,” writes historian Michael Craton. Many tried to escape, but geography often conspired against them. Although the sparsely settled northern parishes offered a temporary haven, patrols frequently used dogs to track and terrorize their quarry or they simply waited until the fugitives, unable to live off the land for a sustained period, gave themselves up. Others sought freedom either by masquerading as sailors or by stowing away; these attempts frequently failed as outbound ships were often searched, with captains arresting anyone who had clambered aboard without permission in an effort to leave. Alternatively, fugitives might steal a boat or build a raft and sail for Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, or Tobago, which lay about one hundred miles west of Barbados; a combination of winds, currents, and the vessel’s seaworthiness rather than nautical skill often determined the outcome of these journeys. Traveling to Saint Vincent in 1700, Father Jean-­Baptiste Labat observed that the island was “populated by negroes, most of whom have escaped from Barbados” because it lay “to the windward of St. Vincent,” a relatively easy passage for escapees “in canoes and rafts.” Cracking down on seaborne escapes, the Assembly added three years to the terms of servants caught “in the Act of running away, upon Board of any Ship, Bark, or Boat.”36 To meet and eradicate any threat to their power, planters worked tirelessly to keep order and to suppress dissent, ultimately turning the island into an armed camp by building “Forts, Gallerys, and Ramparts” to protect the island from “any tumult . . . either by white servants or Negro slaves,” and purchasing “great guns, and small arms” for the island’s arsenal. In addition to constructing sturdy houses able to withstand “any uproar or commotion,” planters also built up a powerful militia, recruiting from the ranks of former servants and smallholders, instructing its officers to muster and train regularly, and “to be ready on the beat of a Drum.” Their public presence, combined with mounted and foot patrols, appeared to have effectively discouraged rebellion. Contemplating why enslaved laborers had not committed “some horrid massacre . . . and become Masters of the Iland,” Ligon concluded that the militiamen’s dramatic and intimidating displays of

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marksmanship and military power had cowed any potential rebels; no sight or sound was, he claimed, more terrifying than the noise, smoke, and flame from muskets discharged by well-­armed and well-­drilled men. With eight militia regiments and defensive works, Barbados presented “a formidable prospect” to any enemy, whether domestic or external.37 Although “indentured servants” and “slaves” were both officially defined as bound laborers, their servility differed significantly. Both groups found plantation work equally monotonous, physically demanding, and unrelentingly violent. But slaveholders held exclusive property rights over their enslaved laborers; owners could sell them, hire them out, or hold them until their death and then bequeath their human property to family members. Servants, however, could anticipate freedom after their term of service, a period determined by a legally binding contract. Moreover, servants could entertain the idea, however fanciful, that they might one day own land and perhaps acquire either their own servant or slave for their own use, although most never achieved this goal. Instead, they ended up working on their former masters’ plantations, supervising and disciplining enslaved laborers who now did work that the servants had formerly done, drifting from one menial job to the next, or turning to crime. The use of informal or non-­state-­sanctioned discipline also varied; masters certainly whipped servants for infractions and minor offenses, but few servants suffered the brutal punishments that owners and overseers inflicted on slaves. In one particularly sadistic case, an overseer chained and whipped an enslaved man on a daily basis for a week after he stole a pig. He then took the slave, who was in chains, and “cut off one of his ears, had it roasted, and forced him to eat it”; witnessing this gruesome scene, Beit had to persuade the torturer not to slice off “the other ear and the nose as well.” There were significant cultural differences, too; although servants came from different regions of the British Isles, they shared a similar cultural vocabulary, spoke the same language (although servants from Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland spoke Gaelic), and were nominally Protestant or Catholic. Enslaved Africans hailed from a large number of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, communicated in different languages, and inhabited a sacred cosmos that was fundamentally unlike the Christian world of white servants.38 During the colony’s first years, enslaved people constituted a small, but important, part of the workforce. Listing new arrivals in 1627, Henry Winthrop counted “3 score christyanes and forty slaves of negeres and Indyeres”; 13 years later, there were about 13,500 white colonists and only about 500

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slaves. Between 1640 and 1650, however, the enslaved population expanded at an astounding pace, rising to around 12,800. In contrast, the white population increased from roughly 13,500 to 30,000 over the same period, with servants constituting the majority. The consolidation of the sugar economy continued the demographic transformation of the island; between 1650 and 1660, the number of enslaved people increased from 12,800 to 27,100 while the white population fell to 26,200. With the numbers of servants leaving England for Barbados falling in the 1650s and 1660s (between 1654 and 1659, about 1,500 sailed from Bristol; from 1660 and 1669, however, fewer than a thousand departed), and with planters determined to expand their operations, they turned to purchasing enslaved laborers from Africa. When the Carolina migrants sailed from Barbados in 1670, the white population had again fallen (to 22,400) while slaves numbered about 40,400.39 The growing participation of England’s merchant marine in the Atlantic slave trade accelerated this shift as individual planters opted to expand their workforces with enslaved Africans rather than with English or Irish servants. With the trade’s development and reorganization—merchants formed the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa in 1660, a forerunner to the Royal African Company, which was founded in 1672—planters could now conduct business with English slave traders sailing English ships bankrolled by English merchants based in London and other port towns in England. Sailing to Senegal aboard The Friendship in late 1651, James Pope, an agent for the Guinea Company, carried instructions to load “as many lusty negers as shee can well carry and so despatch her to the Barbados.” With the Africanization of the labor force shifting into high gear in mid-­century, planters purchased greater numbers at lower prices. In 1640, a prime enslaved laborer cost about £32; between 1663 and 1666, enslaved African men fetched between between £18 and £22. However, servant prices had doubled over the same period, rising from £7 to £14. Making a comparison between the value of the labor that could be extracted from an enslaved laborer as opposed to an indentured servant, planters concluded that the former met their needs more effectively and profitably. With planters ready to “keep three blacks who worked better and cheaper” than a single servant, the demand for enslaved Africans rose substantially. Between 1641 and 1665, more than eighteen thousand enslaved Africans were transported to the island, with a majority originating from the markets in the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and New Calabar. The planned obsolescence of an enslaved sugar worker contributed to the devaluation of Black life. Stationed on the island at the end of the century, Walduck

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estimated that if “a planter pays thirty pounds for a Negro, and he lives one year . . . [then] he payes for himself.”40 The decline of indentured servitude combined with sparse opportunity for former servants further contributed to the emergence of an enslaved majority. Petitioning Parliament in 1675, planters observed how “in former tymes . . . wee were plentifully furnished with Christian servants from England and Scotland, but now gett few English, having noe lands to give them at the end of their tyme, which formerly was their main allurement.” During the 1660s, Parliament had discouraged emigration, fearing that an exodus overseas would drain the nation of its reservoir of unskilled workers and young men who could fight in the wars that England was constantly waging. Furthermore, the reputation of island planters as ruthless and unyielding disciplinarians had spread far and wide. The crofters encountered by the Carolina migrants around the southern Irish town of Kinsale in 1669 clearly had no desire to go “to the Caribda Islands” where, they correctly believed, they would be treated badly and “branded with the epithet of white slaves.”41 By the 1660s, former servants faced a bleak future on Barbados. With land “monopolized into so few hands,” noted one report, they had little opportunity to acquire property. Many found that enslaved laborers, particularly those who had performed the skilled work that they had once done, stood in the way of their progress. “The planters,” noted Francis Willoughby, “design to have all their tradesmen, sugar boilers &c. of their blacks.” With enslaved artisans occupying these posts, former servants often found themselves washed up on the margins of the island’s social and economic order. Unable to purchase even “a bit of fresh meat . . . or a dram of rum,” they relied on the charity of those who might “sometimes give the poor miserable creatures a little rum or fresh provisions” or they sought alternative means of survival outside the law. Faced with the threat presented by “Loose, Idle [and] Vagrant Persons,” who had neither “certain Employment” nor “constant residence,” lawmakers compelled them to perform “necessary Work for the Defence of this Island,” which included construction work and military service.42 Having supplanted indentured servants, enslaved Africans were a common sight in the cane fields by the 1660s. Working as bound laborers on the island’s plantations, however, was the final stage in the long and traumatic process of enslavement, which began with their captivity and sale in Africa. Shackled and marched from the interior to the coast by their captors, they were then sold to Atlantic traders before they had to endure harrowing weeks at sea during which many died. On their arrival at Bridgetown, the men,

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women, and children who had survived the middle passage had to confront yet another trauma: adjustment to the harsh realities of the plantation regime. They arrived as neither a coherent community nor a culturally homogeneous group; as they struggled to adapt to their new circumstances on the island’s plantations, a new identity emerged from the integration of the distinctive ethnic traditions of their West and West-­Central African homelands with the new environment in which they found themselves.43 With planters conducting business primarily with slavers from London, Liverpool, and Bristol, a large number of enslaved laborers originated from the forts and trading posts on the coastal littoral, where the English had a commercial presence. Between 1641 and 1670, 132 slave ships carrying 24,338 enslaved Africans arrived on the island, with 7,470 souls dying during the crossing. For 97 of the voyages, there is information about the point of departure. More than 9,000 (9,204) came from the Bight of Biafra, with Calabar, New Calabar, and Cap Lopez being the main points of departure. Another 3,299 Africans came from Arda and the markets along the Bight of Benin. The next major embarkation point for enslaved people bound for Barbados was the Gold Coast (3,137), followed by Senegambia, the Cape Verde Islands, and Sierra Leone (323). Even two ships from Madagascar on the east coast of Africa sailed to Barbados in the 1660s, but the 8,500 mile journey cost 102 lives; of the 335 enslaved people loaded aboard The Lion and The Eagle in 1664, only 231 reached the island. Interacting with slaves from other ethnic groups before they passed through “the door of no return” onto the ships that would transport them across the Atlantic, the captives created new cultural formations that ultimately shaped culture and community on plantations in Barbados and elsewhere in the Americas.44 Prompted by the rapid rise in the numbers of enslaved Africans, the legislature drafted laws to institutionalize slavery. In 1661, with slaves constituting over half the population, it codified racial difference, stipulating that the Africans’ “Barbarous, Wild, and Savage Natures” rendered them “wholly unqualified for be governed by the Laws, Customs, and Practices of our Nation.” Such language uncoupled the cultural and racial categories that constituted “servant” (white, English, and nominally Christian) from “slave” (Black, African, and heathen). Although both servants and slaves were bound laborers, the former benefited from legally binding contracts and their place of birth. By defining Africans as “barbaric and savage,” the Assembly distinguished enslaved Black people from English servants who were merely unruly, obstinate, and truculent. Seven years later, acknowledging that enslaved Africans

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constituted “a very considerable part of the Wealth of this Island,” the Assembly defined “our Negro Slaves” as “Estate Real,” thus legally classifying them as property, and subject to their owners’ authority and control.45 Legal practice also differentiated servants from slaves. Defining Africans as “naturally prone” to “Disorders, Rapines, and Inhumanities,” English settlers excluded enslaved people from the legal protections that they themselves enjoyed. Rather than face “Twelve Men of their Peers” as did white defendants, accused slaves were tried by two justices and three freeholders. The law also prohibited enslaved people from becoming Christian, with planters claiming that “converted Negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others.” Furthermore, baptism had significant implications for public order; the members of the white community, argued Peter Colleton along with his fellow planters, “have no greater security than the diversity of the negroes’ languages, which would be destroyed by conversion, in that it would be necessary to teach them all English.” Should an enslaved person convert to Christianity then, as Ligon learned, the slaveholder “could no more account him a Slave [and] so lose the hold they had of them as Slaves.” In theory and in practice, the law enshrined racial difference as a naturally ordained phenomenon rather than as a socially constructed concept.46 The law might have identified Africans as “barbaric and savage,” but enslaved people defined themselves differently with reference to West African homelands and connections to fellow laborers. Embedded and ensnared in the plantation regime, they had to reconstitute their lives in captivity without the aid of the institutions and traditions that had provided structure and meaning in their societies in West and West-­Central Atlantic Africa. The small number of enslaved people during the first years of colonization arrested the development of the dense social networks central to the formation of community and culture. Only with the arrival of large numbers of enslaved Africans did the demographic environment change significantly, enabling a distinctive slave culture to emerge. Between 1650 and 1670, slave traders transported about twenty thousand enslaved laborers from Africa to Barbados, an influx that constantly renewed and reinvigorated African traditions within the slave community. Even though cane fields and sugar mills bounded their world, they established practices that would shape the lives of subsequent waves of enslaved plantation laborers.47 For enslaved people, cultivating, cooking, and consuming food became an activity rich with meaning. Raising maize and other produce, some tobacco, and a few chickens provided enslaved people with the opportunity to exert a

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modest degree of control over their lives. On plots set aside for these activities, enslaved people exercised control over the productive process and consumed the fruits of their labor, inverting the discipline and order of the cane fields and sugar mills. Cooking meals from food raised on provision grounds, slaves fashioned a cuisine that united New World cultigens with the diverse culinary practices of the various ethnic groups that had been transported to Barbados. Tastes, textures, and smells summoned up memories of the past, connecting enslaved men and women with their former lives and the cultural heritages of the societies along the Gold and Windward Coasts, and elsewhere in Atlantic Africa.48 Provision grounds, often located on land unsuitable for cane cultivation, offered enslaved people a place to engage in subsistence agriculture and to produce food to supplement their diets. With the passage of a law in 1661 that required planters to give enslaved people “time to plant or provide for themselves,” masters now had to allocate land for this purpose. Slaves came to regard the soil that they tilled and the crops that they grew here as their own. Not only did the harvest from these plots supplement insufficient rations, but they also had exchange value; enslaved women, replicating the practices of West Africa where women grew food for their families and the marketplace, began selling surplus food in markets that soon became part of the landscape. Moreover, working to produce food and chickens for their own use was a welcome departure from the drudgery of gang labor in the cane fields, and it contributed to the creation of a hybrid cuisine that integrated African techniques with New World plants and animals.49 The monotony of plantation rations often became a point of contention between the enslaved and their enslavers. “There is no nation,” wrote Beit, “that feeds its slaves as badly as the English” while Ligon observed that provisions doled out by planters regularly prompted loud complaints. Enslaved people, he observed, preferred toasted maize to the corn gruel (sometimes known as “loblolly”) that they often received. This unappetizing dish led to considerable grumbling from disgruntled slaves, who cried out “O! O! No more Lob-­ lob” when it was ladled out. More nourishing, plantains were a favorite with enslaved people, who “took great delight” in eating them. Furthermore, when mashed and distilled, plantains were the main ingredient for a powerful alcoholic drink that was, noted Ligon, “stronger than Sack [fortified wine], and apt to mount up into the Head.” On Saturdays, an “able Negro,” appointed by his owner as “the keeper of the Plantine grove,” distributed the weekly ration to slaves who took a single bunch to their huts. “But ‘tis a lovely sight,” Ligon

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continued, “to see a hundred handsome Negroes, men and women, with everyone a grasse-­green bunch of fruits on the heads . . . all coming in a train one after another”; this moment also marked the beginning of their “free time” when they could turn their attention to the provision grounds.50 Raising and trading food allowed enslaved people to build networks of conviviality and commerce, provoking the Assembly to introduce passes “to restrain the Wandrings and Meetings of Negroes.” Relationships between enslaved men and women also created dense social networks between plantations. Ligon noted that enslaved men often complained that “they cannot live without Wives,” requesting that their owners “buy them Wives.” Planters perhaps recognized that purchasing enslaved women might act as a stabilizing influence in the slave quarters. Atlantic traders also contributed to the emergence of a balanced sex ratio, which helped put slavery on a firmer demographic footing. Of the slave ships that transported enslaved Africans to Barbados in 1663, we have evidence on the ratio of males to females for four voyages, which indicate that as many men and boys as women and girls were imported (322 males to 320 females). These efforts apparently paid off, prompting Whistler to note that “thes Negors they doue allow as many wives as thay will have, sume will have 3 or 4.” By 1673, Sir Peter Colleton estimated that of the island’s thirty-­three thousand enslaved people, there were seventeen thousand female slaves (or 51 percent of the enslaved population).51 Plantain groves and other remote corners of the plantation became sites for cultural expression. Under the shelter of plantain trees, Ligon watched one enslaved man cut air holes from discarded cane until “he had brought them to the tunes.” Playing pipes and drums fashioned from “hollow tree trunks over which an animal skin is stretched,” enslaved people used these spaces for ritual and ceremony, holding funerals at night, “clapping and wringing their hands and making a doleful sound with their voices.” Swiss physician Felix Christian Spoeri witnessed a similar nighttime event during which enslaved people danced and drummed for many hours at a ceremony held “in honour of their God,” which they accompanied with “terrifying shrieks and bodily movements.” Such rituals—occasions that were deeply infused with the traditions of West African religion but which took place on unfamiliar ground—became vital moments in the lives of the enslaved; it not only linked them to the web of habits and collective memories of their past but also saw them adapting customary traditions to new surroundings. In so doing, enslaved people forged the resources that enabled them to survive the strange and alien environment of the plantation.52

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Such occasions, moreover, provided the space and opportunity to discuss resistance and rebellion. In 1649, a number of “high spirited and turbulent” enslaved men planned “secretly to be reveng’d upon their master.” Exhausted by endless backbreaking labor, repeated beatings, the incessant humiliations and degradations of slavery, and constant hunger, a group of enslaved laborers planned to rebel. Learning about the plot, several slaves who, according to Ligon,“hated mischief,” informed their owner of the impending unrest. The militia quickly rounded up the rebels, leading to the execution of at least eighteen slaves. The revolt was to begin in the plantation boiling house, where the rebels first intended to incinerate the mill and its adjacent buildings. With the heart of the plantation operation ablaze, the insurgents hoped to trigger a full-­ scale rebellion. Discussing the planned “muntinie,” Ligon concluded that several enslaved laborers, who harbored a specific grievance against their owner, were responsible for the plot. He also noted that the rising had been arranged “when Victuals were scarce, and Plantins were not then so frequently planted, as to afford them enough.” Food shortages and hunger rather than broad opposition to slavery had, he concluded, provoked anger, leading enslaved laborers to organize against their owners.53 Ligon identified the ringleaders as the “Firemen . . . in the furnaces,” the enslaved laborers who worked in the boiling house, the structure that emblematized the discipline of the sugar plantation at its most intense and uncompromising. The process of sugar refining began with slaves extracting juice from freshly harvested cane in the millhouse, and then continued as the “firemen” boiled and distilled the liquid over many hours in a series of copper kettles. It ended with enslaved laborers pouring molten sugar into molds, where the liquid hardened into loaves for shipment. In stifling heat, slaves regulated the fires that blazed under kettles filled with cane juice, and transferred scalding liquid sugar between vats in a process that ran continuously. Throughout, they remained vulnerable to serious burns and other injuries; adhering “like Glew” to the skin, boiling sugar splashed onto unprotected bodies and the mill’s wooden rollers caught the limbs of the exhausted or unwary. Distilling rum from cane juice or molasses was equally hazardous; inflammable vapors occasionally resulted in fires that consumed “all about it that is combustible,” while anybody unfortunate enough to fall into a “Rum-­ Cistern” faced “sudden death,” overcome by toxic fumes and a liquid that “stifles in a moment.” 54 Furthermore, enslaved laborers in boiling houses had ready access to fire and never lacked a “store of drie wood.” The immensely destructive power

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of fire could reduce “boyling houses and Still-­Houses” to ashes in minutes as well as turn cane fields into blazing infernos. As planter Edward Littleton observed in The Groans of the Plantations, “our Canes, on which we rely and which are our Estate, are too often burnt down before our faces when they are ready to cut” by either enslaved workers or servants. Accordingly, the Assembly imposed laws specifically aimed at “the Prevention of Firing of Sugar Canes.” Arsonists received harsh punishments; slaves who set fields alight were often executed, while indentured servants who engaged in the practice were whipped, branded, and ordered to work for “the Party or Parties that shall be so damnified by the burning . . . [of] the said Sugar Canes, for the Term of Seven Years.”55 The ingenio was also a rendezvous point. Not every plantation had the facilities to refine sugar, leaving planters without a mill or boiling house dependent on neighbors to process their harvest. Enslaved laborers assigned to cart freshly cut cane to a nearby estate were ideally placed to establish networks that crossed plantation boundaries. Moreover, the slaves who processed sugar faced even greater challenges than their counterparts in the field. Refining cane was not only dangerous, but it was a job that required skill and dexterity. In addition to keeping the fires under the kettles burning at a steady temperature, they also had to skim impurities from the boiling sugar and transfer the searing hot syrup from one cauldron to the next. Working at the end point in the chain of production and well positioned to organize enslaved laborers from the home as well as from nearby plantations, slaves assigned to this job perhaps saw themselves as potential leaders.56 The efforts of the 1649 rebels proved fruitless. With their plans unmasked, other enslaved laborers came forward with information. Faced with “so many witnesses against them,” the ringleaders, probably after being tortured, confessed. Rewarding the informants, the planter instructed that his enslaved laborers receive “a double proportion of victual for three days” and “a dayes liberty to themselves and their wives.” However, they rejected these offers, leading the puzzled owner to suspect yet more “discontent among them.” Accordingly, he summoned several enslaved laborers, asking them “why they refus’d this favour.” Demurring, Sambo, the enslaved man chosen as their “Orator,” claimed that they had turned down “recompense for doing that which became them in their duties to doe.” Concluding that these slaves were “as loyall to their Masters, as any that live under the Sunne,” Ligon concluded that these enslaved plantation workers had chosen loyalty to their owner over “mischiefe.”57

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It is more likely, however, that the informants were dissembling before their master, hoping that their feigned fidelity might yield further dividends. Their refusal to accept additional food and time “to doe what they would” provided a convincing appearance of loyalty, but it may also have protected them from fellow laborers who resented their betrayal. Organizing and executing a rebellion was a project fraught with difficulty and danger; to succeed required absolute secrecy, careful organization, a stock of weapons, a considerable element of luck, and real optimism by the participants that neither the plan nor their courage would fail on the appointed day. In Barbados, a successful uprising would require capturing and holding an island that had become a fortress; there was, notes historian Richard Dunn, “no opportunity for halfway measures; Black rebels could not simply seize a few guns, kill a few whites, burn a plantation or two, and disappear into the woods.” Living in a militarized plantation society and recognizing that failure would result in death, the informants of the 1649 plot perhaps calculated that subterfuge, insincerity, and dissimulation, which became part of the repertoire of resistance, were better options than joining an enterprise that had only a very slim chance of success.58 The enslaved fought back in other ways. Running away was a popular form of resistance, but enslaved escapees faced the same problems as servants who fled from their plantations. Visiting in the late 1640s, Beauchamp Plantagenet claimed that there were “many hundred Rebell Negro Slaves in the woods.” Caves also became “the Sanctuaries of such Negro-­Slaves that run away,” providing refuges for fugitives who hid during daylight hours, only venturing out after dark to “range the Countrey and steale Pigs, Plantains, Potatoes.” Tracking and terrorizing their quarry with “Liam Hounds” (large, aggressive hunting dogs that originated in Bavaria), militia patrols frequently returned with captured enslaved fugitives who had “harbour[ed] themselves in the Woods and Canes.” For the majority who stayed on the plantation, feigning illness, deliberately misconstruing instructions, foot dragging, engaging in petty vandalism, general truculence, and theft comprised the main forms of self-­protection from killing labor routines.59 The establishment of plantation agriculture from the colony’s first days meant that early Barbados bore some traits of a slave society even though the number of enslaved laborers remained relatively small until the advent of sugar. For the island’s charter generation of planters, the “revolutionary” moment came when those planters first organized their workers to grow tobacco; raising cotton, indigo, and sugar did not require Drax and his peers

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to experiment or innovate with new ways to organize their bound laborers. They merely modified methods that had been tried, tested, and proven successful. Subject to arrangements that denied bound workers control over the productive process, enslaved people had to endure a regime that had institutionalized order, commanded by men who had assembled powerful disciplinary structures to maintain authority. To a significant degree, these practices would influence the plantation order of the Carolina lowcountry.

Cooper’s Colony With the Carolina replenished, the Port Royall repaired, and the Albemarle replaced, the colonists left Barbados in late 1669. Along with barrels of cotton, indigo, and cane in their holds, the vessels also carried new passengers from Barbados, including enslaved laborers and their masters as well as the original voyagers from England. Coming from a mature slave society, the Anglo-­Barbadian migrants understood the demands of plantation agriculture, the disciplinary imperatives necessary to manage bound labor, and the administrative expertise to organize a colony based on slavery. Sir Anthony acknowledged their place in the project, recognizing that only “considerable men . . . from Barbadoes” had the experience and the expertise “to make a plantation.” In addition to the migrants from the island were the men and women who had exchanged the safety and tranquility of rural England for the uncertainties and dangers of the Carolina frontier. Unlike their Caribbean counterparts, the English immigrants had only briefly glimpsed plantation life; they knew nothing about cultivating tropical commodities and had no experience with the institution of slavery or enslaved Africans. Perhaps the only familiar feature on Barbados was the presence of a ruling class, which dominated local political and economic life; it was an arrangement that would soon replicate itself in the new colony of Carolina.60 When The Carolina and her sister ships sailed out of Carlisle Bay for the Carolina coastline, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, the leading figure in the colonization project, was three thousand miles away in London. Although he went to his grave never having visited the colony in which he had invested money as well as emotional and political capital, it was his leadership that led to the establishment of a small settlement on the peninsula between the two rivers that bear his family name. A farmer, soldier, amateur scientist, bureaucrat, and politician, Sir Anthony was intimately linked to the tumultuous

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events of mid-­seventeenth-­century England. A thoroughly modern man for his time, he personified the commercial and colonizing impulses of post‒Civil War England; his rise coincided with the period when the country became increasingly involved in imperial expansion. The Carolina project enabled Sir Anthony Cooper along with his secretary and friend, the political theorist John Locke, to envision a new colony from scratch. In 1669, Locke drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a document that delineated its political and juridical structure; the distribution of land; and the rights, privileges, and obligations of its settlers. Drawing on his secondhand experience of colonization, acquired by sitting on committees concerned with colonial issues, his business connections to London merchants, and his professional friendships with men who had lived in Anglo-­America, Sir Anthony issued orders to the expedition’s leaders providing practical instructions about setting up a new settlement in the coastal wilderness of the lowcountry.61 Born in 1621 in the village of Wimborne Saint Giles in Dorset in southern England, Sir Anthony grew up in a family that owned large estates in the county and in neighboring Wiltshire. He was, notes one biographer, “a typical member of the wealthy landed gentry, with an upbringing, education, and family connections to match his status.” He attended Oxford University and then studied law at Lincoln’s Inn before entering Parliament as the member for Tewkesbury, a market town in Gloucestershire, in 1640. His parliamentary career began amid considerable political upheaval and turmoil; Cooper’s first sitting as an MP lasted only a few weeks before Charles I summarily dismissed its members. In January 1642, the king and a squadron of soldiers marched on the House of Commons, abruptly ending its deliberations, and igniting a decade-­long series of civil wars that transformed the political and cultural landscape of the British Isles.62 Only twenty-­one years old when the war broke out, Sir Anthony faced a difficult decision. Even though he had met Charles I in August 1642, he did not participate in the conflict’s first campaigns. A year later, however, Sir Anthony set aside his reservations, and raised a regiment for the king. But after clashing with the upper echelons of the royalist army, he defected to the Parliamentarians in 1644. He fought in two engagements in Dorset in August, then he resigned his commission and returned home to Wimborne later the same year. After suffering two crushing defeats at the hands of the Parliamentary forces in the summer of 1645—first, at Naseby in Northamptonshire in June and then at Langport in Somerset a month later—the royalists were no longer able to prosecute the war effectively; the violence, however, did

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not end, with royalist remnants sparking local rebellions in 1648 and 1649. A prisoner from 1647 until his execution in January 1649, Charles I played no part in these uprisings. Found guilty of high treason against the nation after a brief show trial in London, the king was beheaded; with his death, Parliament now held supreme power.63 After the war, Sir Anthony returned to London, becoming increasingly involved in colonial affairs. Bequeathed interests in several overseas projects by his father Sir John Cooper, including the companies that had underwritten the colonization of Virginia and Massachusetts Bay, he expanded the family’s portfolio by investing in slave-­trading ventures and the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1646, he bought a share in The Rose, a slaver bound for the Guinea coast, a venture on which his syndicate broke even. He also became a partner in a Barbadian sugar plantation on which nine enslaved Africans and twenty-­one servants worked, including men and women recruited from Wimborne Saint Giles and the surrounding villages.64 Increasingly critical of government under the Protectorate, Sir Anthony began spending more time at Saint Giles House, the family seat in Dorset, taking up the pursuits of a landed gentleman and participating in the ­county’s social and political life. Concerned with the political paralysis that befell the nation following Cromwell’s death in 1658, he joined a circle of influential aristocrats determined to restore the monarchy before the country again descended into chaos. In spring 1660, he joined the delegation that sailed to the Netherlands to discuss the restoration of the Stuart dynasty with Charles II. In late May, Sir Anthony escorted the new monarch to Dover; a few days later, Charles paraded through London streets “straw’d with flowers” and thronged with crowds, noted diarist John Evelyn, “shouting with unexpressable joy.”65 A few days before Charles’s coronation in April 1661, Sir Anthony was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the ministry of Edward Hyde, the First Earl of Clarendon (Hyde later became a Lord Proprietor). Now a prominent government minister and a confidante of the new king, who advocated for expansion of the nation’s overseas holdings, he sat at the center of political power. As chancellor, he understood how the revenues generated from overseas trade could underwrite expansion, becoming “as well-­informed about England’s transatlantic trade and possessions as any man in England who had not actually crossed the ocean himself,” notes biographer Kenneth Haley, “and the nearest to a minister for colonial affairs as England had yet seen.” Sir Anthony further increased his influence by serving on committees dedicated to colonial administration, and extended his professional networks by

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befriending imperial officials who had direct experience of the administration and economies of the North American and Caribbean colonies.66 Among these men was Sir John Colleton, a royalist whose career linked the history of Barbados to Carolina. With its profitable plantation economy and its accommodating political climate, Barbados had provided a safe haven for royalist exiles, like Colleton, who kept the flame of monarchy alight. With the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660, their hopes were realized; Colleton and his friends packed their bags for home, hoping to claim their reward for their loyalty to the crown.67 Who initially floated the idea to found a new mainland colony remains unclear, but Colleton and William Berkeley, a former (and future) governor of Virginia, had compelling reasons for supporting the project. Furthermore, not only were Colleton and Berkeley cousins, but they were also close friends. Strategically, an English settlement located between the Spanish in Florida and the Chesapeake would provide a defensive cordon to protect Virginia and Maryland, the most valuable of England’s mainland colonies. An outpost in the southeast, moreover, might temper French territorial ambitions to expand east from the Mississippi Valley, and check the Spanish in the South. The Chesapeake colonies, moreover, were ideally located to supply Carolina, with Sir Anthony instructing colonists to import cattle from planters in Virginia and Maryland.68 In addition, a mainland colony would solve several pressing problems. By mid-­century, the shortage of land on Barbados, an island of only 166 square miles, was having a dramatic impact on all its inhabitants, regardless of their status. With wealthy newcomers eager to buy plantations, land prices increased significantly, with a few acres fetching exorbitant amounts. “Land,” noted Lord Carlisle in 1647, “is now so taken up as there is none to be had, but at great rates.” A transaction between William Hilliard, who was selling land before he returned home to “suck in some of the sweet air of England,” and Thomas Modyford, a recent arrival and determined to join the ranks of the island’s planters, illustrates the point. In 1642, Hilliard had purchased 500 acres for £400 (16 shillings an acre); five years later, when he sold 250 acres of the same plot along with some livestock to Hilliard, he pocketed £7,000 (560 shillings per acre).69 By the 1660s, with the island’s productive land owned by fewer than two hundred families, the elite’s younger sons found themselves caught in the inheritance trap, with primogeniture leaving them with declining opportunities. Forced to seek their fortunes in other places, they left Barbados to

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establish cadet branches of their families elsewhere in the Caribbean or on the North American mainland. Among the migrants were the children of the Gibbes and Middleton families. After bequeathing a hundred acres and forty-­ five enslaved laborers to his eldest son, Robert Gibbes left his two youngest boys with a few thousand pounds of sugar. Without land or enslaved laborers, Thomas and his younger brother Robert decided to migrate to the Carolina lowcountry where, after purchasing several thousand acres on Johns Island, Edisto Island, and in Charles Town, they became planters and prominent political figures; between 1710 and 1712, Robert served as governor. Land shortages also led members of the Middleton family to migrate; the owners of more than four hundred acres and a hundred enslaved laborers on Barbados, they looked to expand offshore. Having failed on Antigua, Benjamin Middleton sent sons Edward and Arthur to Carolina, where they established a family dynasty built on politics and plantations.70 Former servants faced an even bleaker future. The sugar economy’s expansion severely limited the opportunities of servants who had managed to survive their years of service. The servants recruited by Sir Anthony to work on his plantation received cash rather than land when their terms expired; others were compensated in sugar. With the legal system stacked against them, few servants bothered to sue. The courts were unsympathetic to claims brought by former servants against masters who had reneged on their contractual obligations and there was no legal requirement to settle such obligations. Planters, noted Ligon, had no reservations about seizing “small Plantations in poor men’s hands of ten, twenty, or thirty acres” that might thwart efforts to consolidate their estates. Small farmers, such as men like Henry Mills, who owned two acres and three enslaved laborers in Saint Peter Parish, were often “wormed out of their small settlements by greedy neigbours,” noted a report written in 1667. Its author estimated that about fourteen thousand headed for destinations on the mainland, including New England and Virginia, and in the Caribbean, such as Jamaica, Saint Kitts, and Tobago, “where they can hope for land.” In the last quarter of the century, Mills and thousands of dispossessed white people in his position left. And, as Governor Jonathan Atkins lamented, “the scarcity of land” meant that very few white migrants “come hither to stay.”71 At the same time, aggressive farming methods had led to significant environmental problems. In 1652, Heinrich von Uchteritz, an indentured servant originally from central Germany who was transported to Barbados after his capture by Cromwell’s forces at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, claimed that “the soil seems poisoned in some places, and is not entirely healthy.” It was an

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accurate diagnosis. Deforestation and tropical storms had resulted in the significant degradation of topsoil, leaving the cane fields progressively less productive. Governor Humphrey Walrond noted that intensive farming had left the land “much poorer, and makes less sugar than heretofore.” In a petition calling on Parliament to reduce the duties on sugar, planters claimed that, despite Herculean efforts to improve “impoverished lands,” fields remained “near barren and unfruitful.” Performed by enslaved workers, the “endless labours” of which they spoke demanded the application of “great quantities of dung and other extraordinary husbandry,” which they hoped might restore the island to its “former flourishing state.”72 Supplying the island with sufficient provisions also became a problem. Planting cane on nearly every available acre left little land on which to raise basic staples. “Men are soe intent upon planting sugar,” noted Richard Vines, “that they had rather buye foode at very deare rates than produce it by labour, soe infinite is the profitt of sugar.” In 1671, William Willoughby reported that the island produced less than a quarter of its food “and other necessaries,” forcing planters to import meat, grain, and other supplies. Furthermore, deforestation led planters to consider importing “Newcastle or Welch coals” to fuel their sugar boilers. Edward Littleton, owner of two hundred acres and a hundred enslaved laborers, observed how many planters were sinking under a mountain of debt, their estates “now worse than nothing, and in a starving Condition.” Furthermore, the last decades of the seventeenth century saw both Jamaica and the Leeward Islands outstripping Barbados in terms of sugar production.73 In 1663, claiming that “the planting of Carrolina” would be “a great Advantage to the Kinge . . . and particularly to the planters in Barbadoes,” a consortium of eight prominent English aristocrats (the Lords Proprietors) set out to realize their ambition. Rewarded for his part in the restoration of the monarchy, George Monck rose to a position of considerable power and influence. Out to acquire a royal charter to colonize the region between Virginia and Spanish Florida, Monck drew other influential men into his orbit, including John Colleton and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper. The proprietors received a patent from the king to expand his “Empire & Dominion” in southeastern North America in the same year. But, despite their boasts that “wee sleepe not with his grant, but are promoting his service and his subjects’ profit,” the proprietors, who each sank £75 sterling into the enterprise (or about $16,000 in 2022 dollars), initially did little to advance the colonization project other than to hold a lavish banquet.74

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A combination of personal adversity and national misfortune threatened to scuttle the proprietors’ plans even before a single colonist had set sail, however. Death (Colleton died in 1666), scandal (Hyde was impeached, and went into exile), and poor health (Monck became an invalid) thinned the proprietors’ ranks. A trifecta of calamities—war, plague, and fire—hit England. War with the Dutch Republic broke out in 1665. But even as the English navy was destroying enemy ships off the Suffolk coast in June, an epidemic of bubonic plague broke out, claiming thousands of lives each week. Only with the arrival of cool autumn weather did the death toll decline; by then, however, nearly 100,000 were dead. Then, in early September, a small fire broke out in a bakery in the City of London. It rapidly became a raging inferno, consuming adjacent houses, and then engulfing entire streets and neighborhoods. After three apocalyptic days, thousands of buildings, ranging from smallest workshops to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, had been reduced to cinders, leaving thousands homeless and causing immense economic dislocation.75 Concerned that war, plague, and fire threatened to derail the project, Sir Anthony persuaded his colleagues to fund an expedition in 1668, requesting a contribution of £500 sterling (about $126,000 in 2022 dollars) from each of the eight proprietors. He was aware that he needed to move with some speed as other groups were also trying to colonize the region, although their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. In 1662, William Hilton, along with a party from Massachusetts, led a reconnaissance expedition to Cape Fear (the windswept headland that juts out into the Atlantic near modern-­day Wilmington, North Carolina); settlers established a small colony shortly afterward, but soon abandoned it and returned north. A year later, “Gentlemen and Merchants” from Barbados hired Hilton to sail north along the Carolina coast from Port Royal Sound and the mouth of the Combahee River to Cape Fear, where they laid out a small settlement. In spring 1664, an expedition commanded by John Vassall returned to Cape Fear along with a handful of colonists, but, unable to secure adequate provisions, surrounded by hostile Native Americans, and battered by Atlantic storms, they too abandoned their small settlement in late 1667.76 With London’s rebuilding underway, with the war against the Dutch successfully concluded, and with plague no longer a threat, Locke and his employer sat down to imagine their colony. The Fundamental Constitutions was the result of their deliberations, a lengthy and complicated document that described the organization of the “sacred unalterable form and rule of Government of Carolina.” To ensure the “quiet safety and prosperity” of the

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colonists, Locke’s constitution exhaustively described the framework for the colony’s judicial system and government, the distribution of land, and the settlers’ rights and obligations. Combining contemporary sociological and political thinking with his own ideas, Locke drew on James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) in which its author imagined an ideal republic (Oceana) where land ownership and political power were tightly linked. The Constitutions stipulated property requirements for holding office and voting and required regular elections for a “biennial parliament,” replicating another essential element of English political life. In practice, notes Haley, “the political superiority of the landed interests which existed in the English House of Commons would be enshrined in the Carolina constitution.”77 But the Fundamental Constitutions also laid the groundwork for the development of other important institutions in the new colony. Hoping to promote migration, the document sanctioned religious toleration, an issue close to Locke’s heart (he would publish A Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689), guaranteeing that “no person of any other church or profession shall disturb or molest any religious assembly” and that “no man shall use reproachful, reviling, or abusive language, against the religion of any church or profession” (articles 102 and 106). Allowing people with “different opinions about religion” to live unhindered would make the colony an attractive destination for dissenters and religious refugees. Religious toleration was not to be confused with liberty. Under the Constitutions, enslaved people were allowed to join “what church . . . any of them shall think best, and therefore be as fully members as any freeman,” but membership did not change their legal status in any way. No enslaved person was exempt from the “civil dominion his master hath over him” (article 107).78 That slavery would arrive with the first colonists almost went without saying. The document legalized the institution in about two dozen words: “Every freeman of Carolina,” stated article 100, “shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves of what opinion or religion soever.” In other Anglo-­American plantation societies, colonial legislatures had codified slavery in a piecemeal fashion over a number of years; Locke, however, made it clear that slavery was to be an integral part of the colony’s political economy from its inception, an acknowledgment of the central role played by Barbadian planters in the project as well as the proprietors’ interests in the Royal African Company (RAC) and similar enterprises. Locke himself acquired stock in the RAC three years after he penned the Fundamental Constitutions. Thomas Modyford who, in addition to overseeing his plantation

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operations, was the island’s agent for the RAC; he argued that any new colony would need “Negroes and other servants” to do “such labour as will be there.” Likewise, with his deep knowledge of colonial affairs Sir Anthony doubtless recognized that, because the servant trade was in steep decline, the use of enslaved Africans rather than indentured servants for agricultural labor was the way of the future.79 In addition to the Fundamental Constitutions, Sir Anthony also handed the expedition’s leaders a long set of “Rules and Direccons.” Reading reports from governors and other colonial officials, he was well versed in the problems that confronted settlers as they began establishing new outposts of empire in distant corners of the North Atlantic world. He instructed Joseph West on nearly every aspect of the process. The colonists, he insisted, must not “take up lands within two miles and halfe of any Indian Towne” and, once they had constructed “convenient houseing for yo’selfe & yo Servants,” they should lay out a garden in order to learn “which sort of soile agrees best with ye severall things planted in them,” having consulted local Native Americans on the best time to plant corn and other crops. From the comfort of Exeter House, his mansion on the Strand in London, he no doubt felt that his “Rules and Direccons” were both practical and rational, the thoughtful application of enlightened thinking to the problem of building a colony on the coastline of a semitropical wilderness three thousand miles away.80 Yet sifting through reports in London was no substitute for firsthand experience. Despite his extensive involvement in colonial affairs, Sir Anthony had never set foot in any of England’s overseas possessions; his knowledge of the colonies came from reading formal reports along with the growing number of published narratives of voyages and expeditions, and listening to the accounts of the personal experiences of veteran imperial officers, such as Virginia governor William Berkeley. Thus, he lacked any real understanding of the profound difficulties faced by colonists. Both Locke and Cooper, ignorant of the lowcountry’s topography with its “great Creeks, and Marshes . . . [and] Rivers” had rendered the distribution of land in neat and orderly parcels completely impractical; likewise, with no sense of the workings of the region’s complex human geography, which was shaped by the interactions among several Indigenous groups as well as the Spanish, his instructions on how best to conduct diplomatic relations were equally redundant. But although significant differences existed between the colony as imagined by Locke and Sir Anthony and the stark realities on the ground, we should not dismiss their writings out of hand. Both men had lavished time and effort on

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documents that legislated for the establishment of civil institutions, the organization of political life, the allocation of resources, and instructions on how to go about the practical work of colonization. To an extent, these documents provided a road map for the survival of the colony’s charter generation.81 But when the first English colonists arrived in the lowcountry in 1670, they landed with contradictory and competing agendas. Some shared Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper’s vision for the new settlement, but others, having experienced the dynamics of plantation agriculture, wanted to exert their authority and, by reproducing the commercial success of Barbados, make themselves the new colony’s ruling class. Finally, neither the contingent of enslaved laborers nor the indentured servants who landed with the first fleet should be forgotten; they, too, perhaps recognized that a new colony might yield new opportunities as well as new challenges.

CHAPTER 2

Colonizing Carolina

The Collony is indeed safely settled and with a very propritious aspect. —Joseph Dalton to Lord Ashley, 9 September 1670

Standing on a beach near the estuary of the Santee River, a group of Sewee Indians witnessed sailors aboard The Carolina lower a boat into the Atlantic swell and watched its crew row toward the shore. Satisfied that the men hauling the long boat onto the sand were not Spanish soldiers, they advanced toward the newcomers, calling them “Bony Conraro Angles [good English friends].” Several days later, the eighty-­year-­old William Sayle, the former governor of Bermuda and appointed the first governor of the Carolina colony by Sir John Yeamans, slowly made his way ashore to “view ye Land here.” No sooner had he arrived than the Sewees again gathered, setting up an impromptu marketplace, lighting fires, and preparing food. As the newcomers traded tobacco, knives, and beads for deerskins, Sewee women roasted corn and served “nutts & root cakes.” The English met the village’s head man who carried Sayle “on his shoulders” into his “Hutt Palace” where they discussed potential sites for establishing a settlement. Escorted by a “very Ingenious Indian & a great linguist,” the colonists scouted the coast to the south; some days later, they dropped anchor in the Kiawah River (later renamed the Ashley).1 Located about three hundred miles north of San Agustin (Saint Augustine), the outpost at Oyster Point on the Ashley was in “the very chaps of the Spanish.” Even though creeks and tidal marshes offered some protection, the colonists nevertheless constructed a wooden palisade. “The Spanyard,” Sayle warily noted, “watcheth only for an opportunity to destroy us.” In August 1670, Henry Woodward, who had spent several years in the region first with

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the Westos and then briefly as a prisoner in the Castillo de San Marcos, the imposing fortress at San Agustin, looked on anxiously while Spanish and Indigenous forces prepared their assault; in an attempt to starve the English into submission, their ships blockaded the entrance to the harbor. Neither tactic worked; the “noyse of our great Guns,” recounted Joseph West, “did strike such a Terrour upon the Indians” that they abandoned their positions, leaving the Spanish with too few men to attack. Slipping through the cordon, a ship from Virginia carrying essential supplies further frustrated their plans. A powerful storm then drove the attackers back to Florida. The colonists now swapped the sword for the plow; in September, West reported that the settlers “doe continue very well in health, and the country seemes to be very healthful and delightsome” while “Corne and other things planted at our first comeing doe thriue very well,” concluding that “the Ground will beare anything that is put in it.”2 The arrival of the English destabilized the political and diplomatic arrangements that prevailed in the coastal borderlands between San Agustin and Charles Town. Unlike Barbados, which was unoccupied when the English first arrived, the coastal plain was a cauldron of rivalries and shifting alliances among the region’s various inhabitants. Only when the colonists had comprehensively defeated and dispossessed the Indigenous peoples on the littoral and had successfully stifled Spanish efforts to disrupt the course of colonization were the conditions suitable for the emergence of a plantation society. By fighting small-­scale wars at the turn of the century, the colony’s “frontier generation” ultimately displaced the Spanish and their Native American allies to become the dominant power in the Southeast.3 Constrained by a lack of laborers, the first wave of settlers began capitalizing on the lowcountry’s natural resources, exploiting its forests and grasslands. Raising stock soon became an important economic activity: swine provided meat; cattle also yielded meat as well as milk, manure, and leather; while oxen were a necessity for hauling timber, plows, and wagons. By century’s end, the stands of pine, oak, and other trees became another important source of revenue, providing the raw materials necessary for constructing the merchantmen that transported the commodities of empire, and the ships of the line that defended its sea lanes and the expanding colonial possessions. Exported to the Royal Dockyards at Portsmouth, Woolwich, and other shipyards in England, barrels of tar and pitch along with timber for masts and decking (collectively known as naval stores) contributed to the rise of an export economy as well as to Charles Town’s merchant community.

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Like their enslavers, the Africans who worked on the lowcountry frontier constituted a charter generation. Enslaved laborers transported from Barbados and other Caribbean islands were familiar with the machinery of a slave society, already having experienced plantation labor and its disciplinary regime. They now confronted a very different environment; no longer working in cane fields, their tasks ranged from herding cattle to felling trees to arable farming. Neither stock raising nor forestry required the same structured work regime as sugar cultivation; enslaved herdsmen and lumberjacks experienced a degree of autonomy in their daily lives that had not existed on Barbados, enabling them to shape the contours of a rural slave culture. In lowcountry stock pens and forest camps, enslaved people began the process of reassembling their lives by fashioning overlapping networks of community, work, and sociability. The composition of the colony’s enslaved population underwent a significant shift at the turn of the century. Slaves transported directly to the lowcountry from Atlantic Africa supplanted the first wave of forced migrants from the Caribbean, signaling the transition from a frontier to a plantation society. Its population history broadly followed the pattern on Barbados where the rise of the sugar economy had gone hand in hand with the emergence of an enslaved majority. In 1700, white migrants made up a small majority in the lowcountry, comprising 57 percent of its population (3,260 men and women), while enslaved people numbered 2,444. A census taken in 1707 provides a snapshot of the lowcountry during this shift. Not only did it count “the number of ye inhabitants,” but it also noted their legal status; of the colony’s “9580 souls,” there were 4,080 white people (divided between 3,960 free white people, and 120 white servants). The remaining 5,500 people were enslaved; of these, 4,100 were of African descent and 1,400 were Native Americans. Three years later, with rice cultivation in full swing, enslaved people made up 53 percent of the population (or 5,768 people). Over the same period, the white population grew more slowly (from 3,260 to 5,115). But the big shift came between 1710 and 1720, when the slave population more than doubled, rising from 5,768 to 11,868; in contrast, the white community experienced only modest growth, going from 5,115 to 6,525 over the same period. By 1740, of the colony’s 59,000 inhabitants, 66 percent, or 39,155, were enslaved.4 A high degree of ethnic diversity characterized these overlapping waves of forced migrants. Arriving with the first colonists were enslaved people who, although of African origin, had been brought to the lowcountry from the English Caribbean. The next wave of enslaved laborers came directly from the slave factories along the coasts of Senegambia and Sierra Leone, including

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Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River, Fort Saint James in the Gambia River, Goree Island, and smaller outposts in Upper Guinea. Rice was the dominant crop in this region for a number of different ethnic groups. Between 1701 and 1730, fifty-­five slave ships sailed to Charles Town, carrying 8,595 enslaved Africans; of these people, 2,071 originated from Senegambia, 348 from Sierra Leone while 543 came from the Gold Coast, with 631 from the Bight of Biafra (Bonny and Calabar) or West Central Africa (the Kingdom of Kongo or Angola). Five thousand captives were from unspecified locations, although correspondence and newspaper notices about slave sales suggest that a significant number likely came from Upper Guinea. Numbers, however, tell only part of the story. With planters buying more land for rice cultivation, they began importing enslaved laborers directly from Africa. Over the course of the 1720s, the traffic in enslaved Africans increased significantly. Between 1720 and 1724, just nine slave ships with 1,534 slaves dropped anchor in Charles Town Harbor; between 1725 and the end of the decade, more than 4,000 enslaved Africans arrived aboard twenty-­two ships.5 In the 1730s, however, not only did the ethnic origins of enslaved p ­ eople from Africa undergo an appreciable shift, but the number of slave ships sailing to Charles Town Harbor rose dramatically, with approximately 102 vessels arriving between 1730 and 1740. During this period, slavers involved in the Carolina trade loaded 28,780 enslaved Africans onto their ships, with 24,181 survivors disembarking in Charles Town following Atlantic crossings that lasted anywhere from four weeks (The Scipio) to nearly four months (The Elizabeth). Of these 24,000 captives, enslaved men and women from Senegambia (2,178, or 9 percent) constituted a distinct minority. More than 11,000 slaves (11,639, or 48 percent) came from the slave markets at Cabinda, Loango, Malembo, and smaller ports along Africa’s west-­central coast, with the remaining slaves originating from the Bight of Biafra (3,577, or 15 percent), the Gold Coast (298, or 1 percent), or an unspecified location (6,489, or 27 percent). In the twelve months prior to the rebellion along the Stono River in September 1739, nine slave ships had arrived in Charles Town, carrying a total of 2,317 enslaved people. Of these vessels, The Mermaid, The Hiscox, and The Shepard had sailed from trading stations along the west-­central African coast with a total of 1,080 slaves, disembarking 950 enslaved people (a 12 percent mortality rate). The remaining slaves were transported from unspecified locations (933) or from Calabar in the Bight of Biafra (434).6 The transition from being “a society with slaves” to being a “slave society”—a social and economic order built on the manual labor of enslaved

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people combined with the institutionalization of formal and informal mechanisms of discipline and order required to regulate enslaved people—involved several fundamental changes. Unlike their experience on Barbados, colonists first had to secure their settlements from coastal Indigenous peoples and the Spanish. Although the Indian trade became a central feature of the lowcountry’s early economic life, the Westos, the Yamasees and other Native American people occupied land that colonists saw as ideal for grazing cattle, raising crops, and building plantations. Unwilling to relinquish territory voluntarily and enraged by white squatters who trespassed on their lands and by unscrupulous traders, Indigenous peoples along the littoral sought to stem the tide of white settlement, turning first to diplomacy and then to warfare to assert their sovereignty. At first glance, these hostilities between Native Americans and the English appear as discreet episodes, with each clash having its own specific cause and logic; in retrospect, however, when aggregated, each individual conflict constituted one element of the larger process of dispossession. In Carolina, colonization was militarized from the first day of settlement. Dispossessing the aboriginal inhabitants and containing the Spanish in Florida meant that undeclared war, often conducted in the form of raids and ambushes, became central to the experiences of enslaved and free people in the history of the early lowcountry.7 Second, a successful plantation economy required colonists to cultivate crops that were suited to the environment and that generated sustained profits. Characterized by diverse activities, including ranching, forestry, and mixed farming, the frontier economy had generated enough goods and services to enable colonists to purchase additional slaves for their farms and plantations. The expansion of the enslaved workforce combined with the introduction of a viable staple crop laid the groundwork for the expansion of the lowcountry plantation economy in the early eighteenth century. With the technical and horticultural problems of rice cultivation solved, planters could devote resources to production and embrace plantation agriculture. Third, the importation of thousands of enslaved Africans accelerated the transition from a frontier to a plantation society. The lowcountry’s Africanization was more than a demographic phenomenon, however. It had significant cultural and political implications for free and unfree people; it resulted in the emergence of a social order that rested on enslaved labor and staple agriculture, in which interlocking sets of laws and informal customs determined productive and social relations. The colony, wrote Swiss migrant Samuel Dyssli in the late 1730s, “looks more like a Negro country than like a country

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settled by white people.” Dyssli was only half right. Yes, it unquestionably was a country in which enslaved people numerically constituted the majority, but it was their owners who controlled of the machinery of law, order, and discipline across the coastal plain. Moreover, Dyssli’s use of the term “Negro” suggests a degree of ethnic homogeneity on lowcountry plantations that failed to reflect reality. The enslaved population was drawn from the numerous ethnic groups that lived in the hundreds of thousands of square miles that ran from the margins of the Sahel on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert in the north to Angola and the Kingdom of the Kongo, which lay well south of the equator. But regardless of their provenance and torn from their own kin, customs, and traditions, captive Africans had to adjust to the harsh reality of enslavement, and adapt their customs to the lowcountry plantation order.8

War and Peace on the Lowcountry Frontier The friction and animosity between the Spanish and the English and the pressure on Indigenous communities turned the southeastern borderlands into violent and contested terrain. Caught between two competing colonial powers, Native Americans along the coast turned to diplomacy and trade in an effort to keep their place in a rapidly changing world. By trading deerskins and enslaved people, the Catawbas, the Creeks, and others hoped to demonstrate their commercial importance. In turn, the English sought to draw Native peoples into their orbit through trade, selling goods that ranged from “English cottons [and] broad cloth of severall colours” to “small fuzee gunns, powder, bulletts and small shott,” essential for hunting deer and raiding rival villages for slaves. The trade in weapons, moreover, had significant diplomatic implications; by controlling the supply of weapons, the English hoped to tie local Native Americans “to so strict a dependence on us as to keep all other nations in awe,” forcing them into a position where they would “be of great use and service in time of invasion.” Should Native American chieftains “misbehave,” as Governor Charles Craven put it, “we shall be able to ruin them by cutting off the supply of ammunition.”9 Recognizing the importance of striking an alliance with local Native Americans, the governor instructed Henry Woodward to head south and negotiate with the Westos. With “a hundred faire canoes” and “well provided with arms and ammunition” acquired from English traders, the Westos now had the mobility and firepower to dominate the Savannah River Valley. In

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return for weapons and other goods, the English received “drest deare skins, furrs, and young Indian Slaves.” Although both parties benefited from the arrangement, a series of cattle raids and the killing of several settlers by Westo warriors triggered its collapse in 1680. The colonists then brokered alliances with the Savannahs and the Creeks. With their new partners, the militia set out to destroy their former allies. A short campaign led to the Westos’ annihilation; three years later, only fifty remained. The Yamasee Indians stepped into their place, becoming the dominant power in the southern borderlands.10 Living along the coast between the Sea Islands and the northern margins of Florida, the Yamasees maintained their regional hegemony through commerce and connections to the English. Allying themselves with the newcomers after the destruction of the Westos, they began raiding Spanish posts located on the coast between Port Royal Sound and Saint Simons Island. Destroying chapels and other mission buildings built in the late sixteenth century by Franciscan friars, the Yamasees provided an aggressive buffer between the English in the lowcountry and the Spanish in San Agustin. Yet, the state of Anglo‒Native American relations did not depend solely on local conditions; the unpredictable and volatile climate of power politics between rivals in western Europe also played a part in shaping the trajectory of diplomacy in the Southeast.11 In 1701, the War of Spanish Succession (known as Queen Anne’s War in America) broke out in Europe, with the conflict spilling into the North American borderlands where the tectonic plates of empire collided. The fault lines that ran between French and English possessions led to clashes in northern New England, the Saint Lawrence Valley, and the Acadian peninsula; in the south, Spain and England fought in the swamps and forests of the Florida-­ Carolina borderlands. In 1702, Governor James Moore mounted an expedition against San Agustin; although his men failed to capture the Castillo de San Marcos on the Matanzas River, they inflicted severe damage on the town and its defenders. He then led provincial troops along with Yamasee, Savannah, and Creek warriors deeper into the borderlands, attacking scattered Apalachee and Timucua communities in northeastern Florida, and forcing the Spanish back to San Agustin. With English soldiers and Native American raiders razing missions and capturing “many Spaniards,” officials reported that “the law of God and the preaching of the Holy Gospels have now ceased,” with survivors sold “to the English as slaves.” Their lives in disarray, Indigenous people who had once lived in the missions were either taken captive and enslaved, or forced to flee.12

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Moore’s campaign diminished Spanish influence in the region. With “about five hundred men able to bear arms,” the Yamasees now controlled the Carolina-­Florida borderlands that served, noted Governor Nathaniel Johnson in 1709, as “a frontier to all the English settlements on the Maine.” A year earlier, his administration had set aside several thousand acres of rivers, swamps, and forests between the Combahee and Savannah for the Yamasees. Discussing the Yamasees’ strategic importance, Johnson wrote how they were “great warriours and are continually annoying the Spaniards and the Indians their allies,” and they provided a protective screen for the growing number of plantations in the southern lowcountry. In 1711, the Yamasees took the opportunity to demonstrate their bravery and further ingratiate themselves to the English; this time, the enemy was not Spanish, but Native American. That autumn, Yamasee warriors and a detachment of colonial soldiers headed north for the barrier islands and tidal lagoons of coastal North Carolina to fight the Tuscaroras.13 In September 1711, Tuscarora warriors attacked settlements in southern North Carolina, established as a separate colony a year earlier. Following a devastating smallpox epidemic in 1707, the Tuscarora population was in free fall. With settlers from England and the Palatinate (the principalities of the Upper Rhine) encroaching on their lands around the lower Neuse and Pamlico Rivers, and angry at corrupt traders, King Hancock, the head man of Catechna, assembled a coalition drawn from the Coree, the Mattamuskeet, the Machapunga, and others to strike a blow against the intruders. Catching the colonists by complete surprise, Hancock’s warriors descended on farms and plantations along the Pamlico and White Oak Rivers, killing around two hundred people and incinerating farms, fields, and plantations in the first wave of attacks. As survivors raced for the safety of New Bern and Bath Town, Governor Edward Hyde called on his neighbors to the south for help in early fall. Low-­country leaders responded, agreed to “succor our distressed brethren, [and] to save our sister colony from a barbarous Enemy,” allocating funds for an expedition to “extirpate a savage people with whom no peace can be made.” Led by John Barnwell, Yamasee and Catawba warriors along with militia units marched north along “a very bad Road full of Great Swamps,” reaching the Neuse in January 1712.14 Unwilling to “proceed into an unknown country” and fight “a numerous enemy,” some warriors decided to return home, but the Yamasees chose to honor their agreement with Barnwell, their decision allowing the expedition to continue. Reassured by their commitment and their loyalty, Barnwell

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lavished praise on them; “my brave Yamasees,” he wrote, would “go wherever I led them” and “live and die with me.” By March, Barnwell’s troops were deep inside Tuscarora territory; after taking King Hancock’s fort on Cotechney Creek, Barnwell dictated surrender terms, forcing the Tuscaroras to abandon “all pretensions to planting, Fishing, hunting or ranging to all Lands lying between the Neuse River and Cape Fear”; to release all prisoners; and to turn horses, deerskins, and corn over to the victors. It was a short-­lived peace, however; a few months later, the Tuscaroras made a last stand, forcing the North Carolinians to again request assistance from South Carolina, who dispatched another expedition in late 1712. By the following March, its soldiers, led by veteran Indian fighter James Moore, were laying siege to Fort Neoheroka; after a bitter struggle lasting about three weeks, he opted to burn them from their stronghold. Rather than fall into enemy hands, many chose “to perish by Fire.” By nightfall, the slaughter ended; hundreds of Tuscaroras lay dead, either killed in cold blood or incinerated in the blazing fort. More were killed or captured when the English reduced isolated pockets of resistance in the region; they took several hundred prisoners in chains to Charles Town where they were sold into slavery in the Caribbean. The shattered remnants of the Tuscaroras fled north, finding sanctuary with the Iroquois League in northern New York.15 The conflict’s repercussions reverberated throughout the southeast. The Yamasees doubtless discussed these wars when they returned to their villages around Port Royal Sound. Not only had they participated in a campaign notable for its brutality, but they had also witnessed how the English prosecuted war against Indigenous people by destroying villages, burning crops, slaughtering women and children, and enslaving prisoners. The Yamasees, although complicit in the Tuscaroras’ defeat, perhaps considered the reasons for their enemy’s defeat, possibly concluding that it would take a powerful confederation of Native American nations to defeat the English. Some might have considered that the draconian treaty forced on the Tuscaroras by Barnwell revealed the true purpose of his merciless campaign: to open Indigenous lands for settlement and exploitation unhindered by the presence of their former occupants.16 Even though neither the colonists nor the Native Americans realized it at the time, the Tuscarora wars constituted the opening stages of a lengthier conflict that ultimately resulted in the destruction of the Indigenous people along the coastal plain. Returning to their villages, Yamasee warriors came back to trouble. In early 1712, Francis Le Jau, a minister for the Society for

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the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), reported how Yamasee Indians in Saint James Goose Creek Parish had “something Cloudy in their looks,” which he correctly interpreted as a sign of “discontent.” And they had much to be discontented about. Even as Yamasee warriors were fighting alongside Barnwell in North Carolina, for which they received scant payment, their families in the lowcountry were sliding ever deeper into debt, owing English traders more than 100,000 skins for “a vast number of Guns and Ammunition” and other goods that they had purchased on credit. With fewer Indigenous enemies to raid for slaves and with the numbers of deer in steep decline, the Yamasees were unable to meet their obligations and became increasingly irrelevant in the eyes of the traders. Without slaves or deerskins to sell, their land was now their only asset. Their villages and hunting grounds centered on the Combahee’s lower reaches, a region of rivers and swamps well suited to rice cultivation, and were ideal for the expansion of the plantation complex.17 Debt was not the only problem that contributed to the collapse of Anglo-­ Yamasee relations. Although laws existed to regulate trade with the Yamasees and other Indigenous people—designed primarily to prevent coastal tribes from drifting into the orbit of the Spanish—most merchants, including Commissioner of the Indian Trade Thomas Nairne, simply ignored their provisions, often operating without restraint. William Tredwell Bull, a minister in Saint Paul’s, concluded that “ye extortion & Knavery of ye Traders” had left the Native Americans in his vast parish, which included Edisto, Johns, Kiawah, and Wadmalaw Islands, unable “to procure ordinary Cloathing to cover their Nakedness.” Ministers were not alone in criticizing traders who had earned a reputation for their “wicked and evil ways.” Writing to Tidewater planter William Byrd to discuss “the occasion of their disaffection,” David Crawley, who had visited “almost every town in the region,” recalled conversations in which other traders openly bragged about “debauching [Indian] wives;” he also remarked that traders regularly killed “hoggs [and] fowles,” took “what they please without leave” from their fields, and beat any native person who dared challenge their behavior “verry cruelly.” Further, traders routinely cheated clients, sold shoddy goods, and, openly violating the law, brought alcohol into Indigenous communities.18 To add to these indignities and humiliations, the colonial government forced the Yamasees to accept a restrictive law that limited the boundaries of their territory, limiting them to land between the estuaries of the Combahee and Savannah Rivers in the southern lowcountry. Warriors who had fought in North Carolina perhaps saw a replay of recent hostilities against

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the Tuscarora on the horizon. Faced with potential English domination, they forged alliances with other Native American peoples, planning to drive the colonists from their lands. The Yamasees regarded Governor Johnson’s decision to collect information on “the number and strength of all the Indian Nations” in the colony in early 1715 as another violation of their sovereignty and another grievance to add to the growing list of injustices, with Nairne and the other officials who took the census estimating that 1,215 Yamasees lived in ten settlements in the southern lowcountry.19 On 15 April 1715, Yamasee warriors attacked Pocotaligo, a settlement near the Combahee River in the opening clash of a conflict that would determine the lowcountry’s future. A day earlier, Nairne and several officials had met with Yamasee leaders to discuss their grievances; when the delegation departed with vague promises about tackling their problems, the increasingly skeptical Yamasees became suspicious, unconvinced by the emissaries’ flimsy guarantees. Perhaps suspecting a trap or angered by these stalling tactics, the Yamasees prepared for war. Gathering on Good Friday to worship, Pocotaligo’s inhabitants were stunned when warriors, resplendent in red and black war paint, swept into the village resembling, wrote one eyewitness, “devils coming out of Hell.” Killing its inhabitants and torturing Nairne, who soon died from his injuries, the Yamasees then moved against other isolated settlements, “dispatch[ing] . . . the White People” and leaving “most of the Houses and Heavy Goods in the Parish . . . burned or spoild’d.” Moving across the coastal plain, they razed plantations in the parishes of Saint Helena and Saint Bartholomew, leaving Port Royal “ravaged and utterly Destroy’d.” With the Native American warriors advancing unchecked and with rumors swirling around the white community, their enemies intended “to seize the whole Continent and to kill us or chase us all out of it,” Le Jau rather understatedly noted that “the Consternacon is very great everywhere” as settlers fled from the mayhem in the countryside to Charles Town. With the town quickly becoming overcrowded, which now could only be supplied from the sea, refugees and residents alike prepared for outbreaks of “pestilential Distemper” and a siege.20 To the north, Catawba warriors attacked plantations in the parish of Saint James Santee. The colonists faced “a general revolt of all the Indians” intent on “murdering the inhabitants and Destroying their Habitations, and with such numbers as have never been known to combine together since the English were settled here.” Just a few weeks after the attack on Pocotaligo, the Yamasees and their allies stood on the verge of a stunning military success, having left the southern lowcountry in ashes and driven large numbers from their

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homes to Charles Town as they “ravaged the Country.” The militia, moreover, appeared incapable of stopping the rout; the cataclysm that had earlier devoured the Tuscaroras was, it appeared, about to devastate the colonists. “If this Torrent of Indians continue to fall Upon us,” wrote the fleeing Le Jau, “there is no resisting them. . . . The time to come is in God Almighty’s Hands.” Singling out isolated farms and poorly defended settlements, the Yamasees and their allies attacked suddenly and withdrew quickly, and then lured their hapless pursuers into well-­planned ambushes. Just as the Powhatan Confederacy had nearly pushed Virginia colonists into the James River in 1622, and just as Metacom’s warriors had devastated New England towns in 1675, the Yamasees were close to sweeping lowcountry settlers into the Atlantic by the early summer.21 Terrified by the Yamasees’ unrelenting advance and fearful that enslaved people might exploit the crisis, Governor Charles Craven imposed martial law. In June, at the head of 250 soldiers, he advanced into the southern lowcountry only to discover plantations and farms in ruins, and the countryside practically deserted. William Tredwell Bull, whose house, personal possessions and church were all destroyed during a raid, noted that he “could not make a congregation of above 5 persons . . . ye greater part of ye men being out in ye Army & ye women fled for security to Charlestown,” as he joined the exodus from the countryside. The Yamasees had incinerated nearly all signs of the colonists’ presence; Craven responded by going on the offensive.22 His men first intercepted the Yamasees at Salkehatchie Swamp, the source of the Combahee River. After a fierce battle, Craven’s forces drove them into the woods and wilderness on the Savannah River’s western bank. Other detachments moved toward Pocotaligo and other settlements in Saint Helena Parish, recapturing these villages and supplies taken in the war’s opening days. These operations proved decisive; warriors who eluded capture escaped into the forests of the southern borderlands or headed to San Agustin. Craven’s success at Salkehatchie had secured the southern flank; the Creeks to the north remained a threat. Lacking the resources for another offensive, he employed cunning and subterfuge. Exploiting the long-­standing animosity between the Creeks and the Cherokees, he opened discussions with the latter, the most powerful Indigenous people in the South, who were divided over the best course of action. Only when Craven sent a small force into the Cherokee territory did a pro-­peace faction join the colonists. Setting aside old feuds, the Creeks began talking with pro-­war Cherokees about attacking

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a colony still reeling from the war. When those Cherokees, who recognized the benefits of peace and were open to English overtures, learned that the Creeks planned to ambush Craven’s men, they went on the offensive, falling “upon the Creeks and Yamusees who were in their Towns and kill’d every man of them.” Peace of a kind now descended, punctuated by occasional frontier raids.23 During the conflict, enslaved men fought alongside their owners. Using a law first passed in 1704 that allowed “trusty Slaves, to serve us against our enemies,” Craven enlisted “about two hundred stout Negro men.” By war’s end, he had recruited another two hundred men, mustering a multiracial army of “White-­men, Negroes and Indians between 13 and 14 hundred men.” Of the seventy men under George Chicken, commander of the Goose Creek militia, forty—a majority of its complement—were enslaved. The law also allowed them to carry “a good launce and hatchet or gun, with sufficient ammunition” and granted freedom to any soldier who captured or killed “one or more of our enemies,” providing an incentive for enslaved recruits to pursue the enemy. Clearly, this policy entailed a risk; arming enslaved men to wage war had the potential to backfire if slaves decided to ally themselves with the enemy Yamasees. It appears, however, that Native American warriors did not discriminate in the heat of battle; neither slaves nor settlers escaped the hatchet. In Saint James Santee, Huguenot minister Claude de Richebourg watched them “burning a plantation and killing Negroes in our Settlement.” The threat of death at the hands of the Yamasees combined with the promise of manumission perhaps provided a sufficient incentive for slaves to fight with, rather than against, the English.24 Familiar with the littoral’s topography, acquired from working in the countryside, enslaved people had created their own mental maps of the region, which allowed them to navigate its maze of rivers, woods, and swamps with relative ease. Unable to master an enemy who also had an intimate knowledge of local geography, who moved and attacked swiftly, and who then quickly melted away into the wilderness so that their pursuers “know not where to find them nor could follow them if we did,” Anglo forces depended on enslaved soldiers on several occasions as scouts. Preparing to storm Pocotaligo, “Tuscarora Jack” Barnwell used them to survey the village’s defenses before the attack. At Goose Creek, local militia along with “a body of Negroes” defended “two fortified Plantacons”; on another occasion, “a Strong Body of White Men & Negroes,” who had been “Insnared” in an

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ambush by Native American warriors, fought side by side until they forced the enemy to retreat. Such incidents dissolved, albeit temporarily, the lines of racial subordination that shaped social relations on the farm and plantation; Black and white men became brothers-­in-­arms and together experienced the terrors of combat.25 The colonists’ victory drove the Yamasees into Spanish arms. Now unable to mount large-­scale attacks against the lowcountry, the Spanish and Yamasees turned to “raiding and running,” spending the next several years sending small expeditions into the southern lowcountry to “murder our white ­people, rob our plantations, and carry off our slaves,” reported Governor Arthur Middleton. Yamasee raiders, “acting the part of bandittis, more than soldiers,” silently moved north, targeting plantations around Port Royal Sound and along the Combahee before withdrawing. By conducting operations “without any regard to peace or war,” the raiders’ speed and stealth left colonists “continually alarmed and with noe leizure to looke after theire crops,” spending their days with “the plough in one hand, and the sword in the other.” Even forts built at strategic points in the borderlands to “awe the Indians and prevent their comeing within us” proved ineffective; traveling by canoe, war parties simply bypassed them as they headed to their objectives. With settlers never knowing when raiders might next strike and “continually alarmed,” extensive tracts of Saint Helena and Saint Bartholomew Parishes remained virtually empty.26 Families that returned to their farms and plantations in the region lived in a state of constant dread throughout the 1720s. In July 1727, about thirty Yamasee warriors ambushed and scalped several white colonists heading to a trading post on the Altamaha River. Breaking into the building, they took three thousand deerskins along with muskets and other goods. Laden with plunder, the raiders then stumbled upon yet more Englishmen, taking them to San Agustin as prisoners. While the captives languished in the fort’s jail, Governor Antonio de Benavides received their captors “with a great deale of pleasure and satisfaction, and paid them for the scalps of those they had murthered.” Some weeks later, a schooner carrying about fifty Yamasees and piloted by a small Spanish crew and, Middleton noted, “our own runaway slaves,” who had escaped from the lowcountry, sailed up the North Edisto where they “surprized the Plantation of David Ferguson, Plundered it and carryed away seven slaves.” It was one raid too many; with planters in the southern lowcountry “tired out with fatigue” from the attacks, their enslaved

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property endangered, and with the militia “under arms almost perpetually,” the Assembly resolved to use force to end the “continual depredations and robberys . . . on the Southern frontiers.”27 The following year, led by Combahee River planter and Yamasee War veteran Colonel John Palmer, a small force of about two hundred men headed toward Spanish Florida, first razing “an Indian towne” before it advanced on San Agustin. Palmer’s men laid siege to the Castillo San Marcos until the Spanish called for talks. Following that humiliating surrender to just over a hundred soldiers, Spanish prestige evaporated among the Indians while the stock of the English correspondingly rose. When the victorious commander returned home, colonial treasurer and Port Royal planter Colonel Alexander Parris noted that “we have now Ballance’d accounts with them, and . . . they never will come neare us more.”28 Parris’s assessment, however, was overly optimistic; the borderlands between the lower Combahee River and Spanish Florida remained contested ground between the two colonial powers. Preparing to head north on another raid, one party of Native Americans bragged to English captives incarcerated in San Agustin that their orders were “to kill and destroy all the white persons they could and take what negroes they could.” By rewarding raiders with thirty pieces of eight for every white scalp and a hundred for “every live Negro,” the Spanish ensured that colonists and enslaved laborers in the southern lowcountry remained targets. While settlers might lose their lives at the hands of raiders or be taken to San Agustin in chains, captured slaves became “merchandize,” and were either shipped to Cuba and sold in Havana’s slave markets or put to work on the farms that surrounded the Castillo de San Marcos.29 The Yamasee War proved to be the highwater mark of Indigenous resistance to English colonization in the Southeast. After their defeat, coastal Indians and the Spanish had no choice but to accept that the English were now the hegemonic power in the lowcountry. The colonization of Georgia in the early 1730s provided South Carolina with an additional bulwark against the Spanish, further restricting their territorial ambitions. By mid-­century, coastal Georgia had become part of a rice-­growing empire that stretched from Georgetown and the estuaries of the Pee Dee and Waccamaw Rivers in the north to the islands and estuaries around Jekyll and Cumberland Islands and the Saint Mary’s River in the south. In the short term, the campaigns against the Indigenous peoples in the southern lowcountry enabled colonists to consolidate their control over the region. With neither the Spanish nor

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Native Americans presenting an existential threat to their livelihoods, planters now expanded the scale and scope of the plantation economy.

Cattle, Hogs, and Trees Lowcountry settlers did more than dispossess Native Americans, however. Their wars against Indigenous peoples completed the conversion of the coastal plain from a ragged frontier of farms and cattle ranches to the world of rice plantations. The charter generation of colonists initially monetized the coastal forests and savannahs, converting trees into lumber and naval stores and using its grasslands for grazing cattle that, in turn, generated protein (meat, milk, and other dairy products), leather, and manure. Not until the early eighteenth century did the extensive cultivation of staple crops—rice and indigo—come to dominate the economy. The enslaved men who herded cattle or worked in the woods as lumberjacks experienced a degree of flexibility in their laboring lives that imparted a sense of autonomy, fashioning a culture that rested on their various ethnic traditions and their previous experiences of slavery. The records left by Daniel Axtell and Edward Hyrne shed some light on the lives of frontier farmers and their enslaved laborers at the turn of the century. Born in 1673 and raised in Marlboro, Massachusetts, Axtell arrived in the colony around 1698, working at Newington Plantation on the Ashley River, which was owned by family member Rebecca Axtell. He also established a tannery, a saw mill, and a kiln for making tar and pitch for the trade in naval stores. These activities placed Axtell firmly in the ranks of colonists who were turning trees and grass into exportable commodities. Working at Newington, however, also put him in the vanguard of planters transforming the frontier into a plantation zone. Here, enslaved laborers raised various crops, including rice; between 1702 and 1707, they harvested more than fifty thousand pounds of the grain that would transform the region. Nine years after he arrived in the lowcountry, Axtell returned home to Massachusetts, where he established a similar enterprise, milling timber, making leather, and producing tar.30 The Hyrne family arrived a few years after Axtell. An excise collector from East Anglia, Edward had either lost tax receipts or embezzled the revenue; rather than face a trial in England, he left for Carolina in 1700. His wife, Elizabeth Massingberd, was the daughter of a prominent Lincolnshire family and had a legacy from her father that would become available after

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1705; thus, the Hyrnes began their lives in the lowcountry on shaky financial ground. Using credit, Edward acquired twenty-­five hundred acres along the Back River (a tributary of Goose Creek) of which two hundred had been “clear’d and most fenc’d” along with a hundred head of cattle and hogs. Living in “the best Brick House in all the Country,” Hyrne hoped to generate enough income to service his debt and become a successful planter by exploiting the extensive wood and grasslands on his property. To manage the livestock, cut timber, and manufacture naval stores as well as to plant and raise crops, he purchased a young Native American slave and two enslaved African boys.31 Livestock played a major part in the lives of Axtell and Hyrne. Arriving with the first settlers, cattle and other domestic animals, including sheep and goats, were ideally suited to the coastal plain. Its open grassland provided extensive grazing while mild winters freed farmers from the laborious task of making hay during the summer; animals could graze “the Year round . . . on the Sweet Leaves growing on the Trees and Bushes, or on the wholesome Herbage growing underneath,” and colonists might consume “good and wholsom Fat-­Beef ” throughout the year. Furthermore, the region’s mosaic of grasslands, brush, and woods provided ample territory on which hogs could browse for “Roots and Nuts.” Thinly populated with only a “Scattering of Plantations,” the southern lowcountry parishes of Saint Bartholomew, Saint Helena, and Saint Luke became a major center for cattle ranching.32 That ranching required few workers added to its appeal. Hyrne relied on just two people—a “stout Negro boy” and a young Native slave—to supervise cattle that grazed along Back River and Goose Creek. Likewise, James Island rancher Barnard Schenkingh, who had emigrated from Barbados during the first wave of settlement in the early 1670s, used just “One Negro man” to manage over two hundred animals while Dennis Mahone, after buying “fower calves & three steers, five sows and one boare,” assigned a single enslaved man named Cato to tend them. Furthermore, livestock required only a modest input of labor; hogs and cattle needed little supervision during the day. At dusk, enslaved cowboys rounded up the animals, corralling them in pens to protect them from “Wolf and Wild Catt,” and releasing them the following day to graze.33 The reproductive capacity of domestic animals also contributed to the growth of ranching. With cows calving annually and sows farrowing biannually, their population soon rose. “Cattle,” observed promotional writer Samuel Wilson, “thrive and increase here exceedingly . . . and are fat all the Year long.” Within a few years of settlement, the coastal plain, initially “almost

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destitute of Cows, Hogs, and Sheep,” had become home to “many Thousand Head.” Browsing the savannahs, described as an extensive area of open land with “nothing but grass, which is exceedingly good for a stock of cattle and on which they frequently settle their cow-­pens” by one traveler crossing the southern lowcountry, grazing herds became a common sight on the frontier.34 The increase in livestock had a significant economic impact. Within a short period, the “industrious labouring man” with only a small herd might substantially increase his holdings, enabling him to purchase land, and, “by degrees, slaves to work with him in his plantation.” Cattle, sheep, and hogs, moreover, provided goods that could be exchanged for cash: meat, milk, manure, leather, and wool. Oxen were essential as draft animals, used to haul wagons and pull plows among other tasks; horses were also used for similar purposes, but, most important, they, unlike oxen, provided mobility. Although the Lords Proprietors had hoped that “planters . . . and not graziers” would drive the economy, the revenues generated from livestock farming enabled “graziers” to become planters. Profits came from two main sources: the local markets where colonists bought perishable items, including meat and dairy products, and the English Caribbean. By 1700, merchants were shipping several thousand barrels of salted beef and pork to the islands. Moreover, the life of the “grazier” seemed far preferable to the life of the planter; ranching, noted Anglo-­Barbadian planter Maurice Mathews in 1680, made for “a happier life” than the drudgery and labor entailed in raising “the tedious Thousands of tobacco plants” that occupied the time and energy of “our Northern Nighbour” in Maryland and Virginia.35 Several factors shaped the lives of enslaved ranch hands. First, herding became the preserve of enslaved men, with ranchers assigning them to supervise cattle and perform a range of tasks associated with animal husbandry. In addition to acquiring a number of skills, including horsemanship and a basic understanding of animal biology and behavior, they quickly acquired a profound knowledge of the countryside through which they drove their owners’ herds, growing acquainted with local flora and fauna, and learning the location of rivers, creeks, and trails. Moreover, cattle pens did more than protect animals; they also became sites of cultural production. Leading lives of some autonomy, cattlemen established networks of friendship and sociability in these settings and, in so doing, developed community and new cultural forms. Horses were an essential part of frontier life. For enslaved ranch hands, they were vital to their working lives, allowing them to control and direct herds. Despite her family’s financial difficulties, Elizabeth Hyrne insisted

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on buying “a small hunting saddle” to enable their “Cow Keeper” to “hunt after cattle.” Owning seventy animals, Thomas Greatback provided horses for his hands while Francis Turgis, who owned a hundred cattle, bought eight mounts for his enslaved ranch hands. Moreover, skilled equestrians enjoyed a sense of accomplishment and authority as they mastered and cared for powerful animals, becoming their de facto owners. Faced with the daunting prospect of mounting “a previously unridden horse,” Lutheran pastor Johann Boltzius looked to “a skilled Negro who readied and somewhat tamed” the animal, enabling the minister to continue his journey. In this case, Boltzius had no alternative but to defer to the enslaved man who clearly had the necessary skill to control the horse. With enslaved ranch hands spending hours in the saddle as they herded cattle, horses perhaps lost their symbolic power as expressions of the slaveholder’s authority. More familiar with giving orders from the saddle to their enslaved workers standing on the ground, the owners of mounted ranch hands had no choice but to address these slaves at eye level, an occasion that perhaps momentarily diminished their sense of superiority.36 The mobility provided by horses, along with the grazing requirements of livestock, contributed to the semi-­nomadic character of ranch work, fostering a sense of autonomy among enslaved herdsmen and enabling them to acquire an understanding of the region’s geography. Selling three hundred acres near Port Royal along with cattle, horses, and other stock for a client, Edmund Bellinger noted that the property came with “a very good negro hunter” who was “well acquainted with all the woods where the stock ranges.” Herding cattle to either Charles Town or Savannah for sale and slaughter, they quickly became “better acquainted with the land than any other set of men,” knowing where to water and graze the animals, and the best routes between cattle pens. This knowledge enabled enslaved men to find secluded places where they could set up a temporary camp far from their owners’ gaze, and discover possible paths to freedom.37 Despite their male character, cattle pens required the presence and labor of enslaved women. Located some distance from the “Neighbourhood of Planters,” pens often consisted of little more than a few huts, including a cabin for sleeping and shelter, a dairy shed, and fenced enclosures for the animals. Settling the estate of planter John North on the Salkehatchie River in the southern lowcountry, his executor sold “a stock of very fine, tame and well-­governed” animals, a pen with the “necessary buildings thereon,” and “many necessary Cowpen and plantation utensils.” In his Profitable Advice

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for Rich and Poor (1712), promotional author John Norris estimated that prospective planters needed “Three Negro Women . . . [to] be employ’d either for the Dairy [and], to attend the Hogs, Washing or any other Employment” to run an effective cattle pen. Just how many took Norris’s advice is unclear, but enslaved women played a key role in running pens. Along with tasks directly associated with raising stock—milking cows, branding animals, slaughtering and salting cattle and hogs—they also performed other services, including cooking for ranch hands, tending provision grounds, and caring for the sick.38 Cattle pens became nodes of social networks among the enslaved. Riding between Charles Town and Savannah, one traveler described the pen where he passed the night as a “little sort of settlement.” Consuming game or fish caught locally as well as food from cattle-­pen allotments, enslaved ranch hands made their encampments virtually self-­sufficient, reinforcing the sensation of autonomy that they experienced when herding animals. The surrounding woods and creeks offered opportunities for hunting and fishing, activities that provided a welcome diversion from work and supplemented their rations. Living in huts and sitting around a fire, enslaved men and women cooked and ate together, told tales, exchanged news, and formed friendships, liaisons, and families.39 Enslaved people were clearly establishing such relationships. Grumbling about the “constant and promiscuous cohabiting of Slaves of different Sexes,” Francis Le Jau, a minister with the Society for the Propagation of the G ­ ospel, noted that enslaved men and women from different “Nations” formed liaisons, subtly creating new identities in the process. With no direct evidence about everyday life in cattle pens, such interpretations are speculative, but with enslaved ranch hands working outside the immediate orbit of their owners, it is plausible that they became venues of sociability for slaves, Indigenous peoples, and maybe even white settlers. Leading quasi-­nomadic lives as they drove animals “from Forrest to Forrest” and experiencing the “Solitude” that came from herding, enslaved ranch hands, concluded William Gerard De Brahm, who was the Surveyor General of the Southern District of North America, bore a similarity to “the modern Bodewins [Bedouins] in Arabia.” The cattle pen, thus, perhaps constituted the first expression of a rural slave culture in the lowcountry.40 The lives of enslaved herdsmen on the lowcountry’s frontier bore a significant resemblance to the world of their counterparts in Atlantic Africa. Some enslaved ranch hands likely had experience with animal husbandry before their capture and captivity by slave traders. For slaves taken from

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the hinterlands of the Sahel—the vast zone of scrub and savannah that lay between the Sahara Desert and the rainforests—cattle and cattle camps were a central part of everyday life. Working for the Compagnie du Sénégal as a commercial agent, Jean Barbot witnessed herdsmen driving their animals to market in the coastal settlement of Rufisque, where they were sold and slaughtered, their hides purchased by “agents of the English and French companies.” He also observed how herdsmen let their animals “pasture during the day” and corralled them “in pens formed in clearings . . . closed round with a fence of thorns and briars” at nightfall to protect them from predators. In these camps, cattlemen established rules to regulate access to grazing and water that, in turn, fostered collaboration that prevented individual interest from overwhelming the collective need to control these scarce resources, thus avoiding “the tragedy of the commons.”41 Axtell and Hyrne also exploited the region’s other natural resource. Surveying the thousands of acres of forest that ran inland from the coast for miles, Royal Navy officer Thomas Ashe, who visited the lowcountry between 1680 and 1682, saw the immense stands of pine, oak, cedar, and cypress as so many “Boxes, Chests, Tables, Scrittories and Cabinets.” For shipbuilders, this ocean of trees constituted a major strategic reserve. With England long deforested and with supplies of timber and tar from Scandinavia and the Baltic subject to the region’s stormy political climate, the lowcountry soon became a major source of the “Planks, Masts, Yards and a great many other Necessaries” upon which the navy and merchant marine depended. Shipwrights and quartermasters at the nation’s Royal Dockyards now looked to the lowcountry to keep their supply sheds, mast ponds, and dry docks well supplied with timber and tar.42 The constant series of wars in Europe at the turn of the century contributed to the expansion of the trade in naval stores. With the outbreak of war between Sweden and Russia (the Great Northern War) in 1699, Scandinavia was no longer a reliable source for these commodities. Two years later, the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession only exacerbated shortages. To ensure regular supplies, the government turned to the colonies, using the incentive of subsidies to encourage production. In 1705, it offered a bounty of £4 sterling per ton of tar and pitch from North America; by 1722, low-­ country producers were supplying nearly 80 percent of the tar and timber used by English shipyards. This virtual monopoly forced Baltic merchants, now back in business after the end of the Russo-­Swedish war, to slash prices. So profitable was the commerce in naval stores that Governor Robert

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Johnson, surveying a crowded Charles Town Harbor in 1720, remarked how “the bounty money” had boosted trade and brought “a great concourse of ships into this Port to load our bulky commodities.” Just as ranching had broadened the colony’s economic horizons, the trade in naval stores had led to “the greater consumption of British manufactories” and had “incouraged ye merchants abroad to import into this Province great numbers of Negroe slaves from Affrica.”43 Determined to benefit from this lucrative business, Hyrne decided to exploit the woodland on his property. A shortage of workers, however, thwarted his plans; unable to “compass a good gang of Negroes” and unwilling to hire enslaved laborers, claiming that it would “take away half the profit,” he grew increasingly frustrated while trees suitable for “building of ships in great abundance” remained in the ground. With “twelfe good negroes,” he estimated that he might produce “five hundred pounds of tarr” to pay off his mounting debts. “Had we a good stock of slaves,” noted his wife Elizabeth, “we might in a littell time git a very good estate of our plantation.” Telling her family back in England about their problems, she requested that they ask “friends to lend us one hundred pounds” as “it would do us a great kindness.” Pinning his hopes on naval stores, which, Hyrne believed, brought “the readyest money of any thing in this country,” he built a kiln to produce tar and pitch, although his efforts to rescue his impoverished family ultimately failed.44 In the long term, however, the naval stores trade fell on hard times, proving no more durable or successful than Hyrne’s efforts to pay his debts. If war in northern Europe had made the trade, then its conclusion undid it. With the end of hostilities, the Baltic trade reopened, with English shipbuilders resuming relations with their old suppliers. The renewed flow of supplies from northern Europe combined with the steady stream of timber and tar from the lowcountry, saturated the market. Moreover, Scandinavian stores enjoyed a far better reputation than supplies from the colonies. “The pitch and tar of the plantations,” wrote Francis Yonge, the colony’s agent in London, “did not come up in goodness to that of Sweden and Norway.” Both the quality and availability of materials from the Baltic led the government to abandon the bounty in 1724. After a series of tragedies that included the destruction of their house by fire and the death of an infant, Edward Hyrne abandoned the colony.45 Forestry work allowed enslaved laborers to build their own networks and customs as they worked in the woods. Felling trees, building and running kilns, and transporting trunks with oxen to the nearest sawmill enabled

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enslaved forestry laborers to lead lives with minimal supervision, not dissimilar from the lives of semi-­nomadic ranch hands. Like the pens scattered across the lowcountry, the small camps around kilns and tar pits became places in which production and sociability went hand in hand. At Axtell’s sawmill, tannery, and kiln on Dorchester Creek, enslaved laborers were an important part of the operation. We might imagine the scene in spring 1706 when his kilns produced more than two hundred barrels of pitch and tar. Records suggest that Axtell hired a few enslaved men—including Abram, Nero, and Randall, who also worked at Newington Plantation—to run the kiln. For the next few days, they maintained a fire hot enough to carbonize the wood stacked inside the kiln, with the heat converting the wood into charcoal and a thick, viscous liquid. Having drawn tar from the kiln, the slaves poured the liquid into either “Clay-­holes made in the earth” or “large Iron Kettles,” igniting the semisolid mass to burn off impurities. Both turpentine and resin were other by-­products of the process. Completing production, Abram and his fellow laborers filled and loaded barrels of tar and pitch onto carts, taking them to a nearby river landing for shipment to Charles Town.46 Designed exclusively for producing naval stores, kilns and tar pits were also places where enslaved laborers struck up conversations, built friendships, and exchanged gossip. On one occasion, Axtell bought beef, pork, rum, and corn for his workers, an indication that he was perhaps willing to reward them for work well done. His tannery was also a site of commerce and community. Here, enslaved people produced leather from deerskins and cattle hides purchased from Indian traders and ranchers respectively; rancher John Bransford, for example, sold hides to Axtell for tanning and then purchased the cured leather to make shoes. In the tan yard, slaves used sharp knives to remove excess flesh from the skins, and then soaked the hides in vats filled with a solution of water and oak bark (containing the tannin that turned rawhide into leather). Having completed this grimy task, James, Hemp, and Titus then applied whale oil to waterproof the leather before stacking the finished hides on wagons for transport to market.47 A range of economic pursuits shaped lowcountry life at the end of the seventeenth century. The organization of these activities enabled enslaved men to exert some control over their working lives. Plantation hands clearly led a more constrained and regulated existence, but even they appeared to have performed a variety of tasks that perhaps alleviated some of the drudgery of fieldwork. These points of production—cattle pen, tar kiln, and

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sawmill—gave the enslaved an opportunity to gather and interact, laying the foundations for community and rural slave culture.48

The “Rice Revolution” and the Transformation of the Lowcountry Frontier The advent of rice production transformed the Carolina littoral from a colonial frontier to a plantation society. Just as sugar cultivation transformed the social order of Barbados, the rise of the lowcountry rice economy also triggered a series of significant demographic and economic changes. The development of large-­scale rice production turned South Carolina into a slave society in which planters depended on the labor of enslaved men and women for their livelihoods. It was also a society that relied on increasingly sophisticated means of controlling its labor force through the deployment of formal and informal mechanisms of control. But the rise of the lowcountry’s rice kingdom reconfigured more than the colonists’ economic and ideological arrangements; it would also transform the very land itself. The development of lowcountry rice cultivation and its African antecedents is well known, but it is a story worth recounting briefly. During the colony’s first years, rice was not a major cash crop; its cultivators had very mixed results and produced only a few hundred barrels. With the demise of naval stores, planters looked for alternative commodities. The slave trade swept up captives from regions of Atlantic Africa where rice was central to their lives and who possessed, notes cultural geographer Judith Carney, “the underlying knowledge system that informed both the cultivation and milling of rice.” In the five decades between the mid-­1720s and the mid-­1770s, exports rarely dropped below fifteen million pounds annually; in 1770, slaves reaped a bumper harvest of eighty million pounds. Assessing trade figures for 1760, when around thirty-­seven million pounds were shipped, Governor James Glen commented on the importance of rice to the colony’s economy, observing how the plant was to lowcountry planters “as Sugar is to Barbados . . . or Tobacco [is] to Virginia, and Maryland.”49 The governor might have added that rice was as essential to the everyday sustenance of the inhabitants of Atlantic Africa as was bread to the English. In letters, ships’ logs, and travel accounts, slave traders noted its importance. A dietary staple, rice was thoroughly integrated into the culture of western Africa, shaping domestic life and daily labor. The “greater divisions of time,”

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observed Thomas Winterbottom, a Sierra Leone Company physician, “are generally marked by the rice harvests,” which included estimating “the age of children.” Not only did its cultivation and harvesting provide a temporal guide; it also determined the lives of female villagers along the littoral. Trading with the Mende at Sherbro Island on the Sierra Leone coast, Irish merchant Nicholas Owens witnessed women “making plantations and beating out the rice.” Several hundred miles to the north on the Rio Nuñez, Samuel Gamble, captain of the slave ship Sandown, which transported more than two hundred enslaved Africans to Jamaica in 1794, sketched Baga women in the fields, noting how they “transplant the rice and are so dexterous as to plant fifty roots in a minute,” moving young shoots from nursery beds to large fields. Barbot observed women carrying sheaves of freshly cut rice to village granaries where, after “beating and pounding the grain in wooden mortars made from thick tree trunks or in holes hollowed out in the rock,” they stored it before preparing it for the household or the marketplace. Women also produced flour from pulverized rice, mixing it with millet to make bread. Moreover, as Michel Adanson, a French botanist who lived in Senegal in the late 1740s noted, its farmers had fully mastered the techniques of irrigable agriculture, constructing “small causeys [causeways], with which to hold water in such a manner that their rice is always moistened.”50 From planting to harvesting to selling, women controlled every aspect of the crop’s production. Men played a secondary role in rice production; although they felled trees “to make a plantation” and helped during the harvest, the “whole management of the process,” noted Matthews, “is performed by women,” who were responsible, writes Carney, for “seed selection, sowing, hoeing, and rice processing.” As Winterbottom explained, following the harvest, it was common “to see a dozen women and girls ranged in a line beating rice, and while one sings, the others keep exact time, and join in on the chorus.” Having completed this job, women then removed the chaff, cleaned and washed the grain, again singing to the rhythm of work and about the place of rice in their world.51 Enslaved people also grew rice in Atlantic Africa. The internal slave trade in Sierra Leone revolved primarily around the capture and sale of prisoners of war, with captives put to work in their victors’ fields and households. Dishonored by defeat and enslavement and humiliated by performing labor defined as female work, male prisoners taken “before the commencement of the rice season” found themselves working in the fields before being sold to Atlantic traders or kept as “labouring slaves”; their captors, observed Matthews,

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“seldom dispose of their new slaves till the rice is in the ground, or until it is cut.” Men unlucky to be captured “after the harvest,” he noted, “were seldom spared.” It may be that these field hands ended up on low-­country plantations, performing the same tasks for an English rather than African master.52 But the presence of enslaved workers familiar with the grain’s cultivation did not automatically mean that lowcountry fields would be “sweetened with plentiful crops of rice.” Its development was neither linear nor preordained. Initially unfamiliar with its cultivation, planters often looked out over fields choked with weeds rather than with thriving rice plants. On his Goose Creek estate, Maurice Mathews had fields with weeds “as thick as barley” that he did not even bother recovering seed for the next season’s planting, claiming that it would take “Infinit truble and more charge than the Rice is worth.” Other farmers, failing to take the importance of irrigation, soil quality, and weather into account, watched helplessly while plants shriveled and died as “the excessive heat of the sun” baked their crops. Even those who had some success regularly had to contend with problems beyond their control, including tropical storms and hurricanes that could destroy crops in a just few destructive hours, as well as birds like the bobolink, also known as the “rice bird,” and insects that had an insatiable appetite for ripe grain. All hampered efforts to establish a growing regimen that would yield “a harvest Like that of Egypt.”53 Although English farmers were adept at grain cultivation—wheat, oats, and barley were staples throughout the British Isles—they had no experience with rice. The extensive fields and networks of ditches that came to dominate the rural lowcountry’s landscape by the mid-­eighteenth century, and which enslaved people had laboriously created by excavating thousands of cubic feet of earth, clearing acres of woodland, and draining dozens of swamps from the littoral’s riparian environment had no counterpart in England. Even the dykes and drains of the Fenlands in eastern England, where landowners raised cereal crops for the marketplace on large estates, were crude and unsophisticated compared to the lowcountry’s irrigation systems. But what role enslaved laborers played in the nascent stages of the development of the rice kingdom remains unclear. Did they alert planters interested in experimenting with the crop where and when to plant? Alternatively, they may have taken matters into their own hands, and followed the practices that had, time out of mind, proven successful in their homelands.54 At Newington Plantation, Axtell supervised enslaved laborers who raised rice in dry fields. Cultivating the grain as one would grow cereal crops, he relied on rainfall rather than irrigation ditches to water the crop. Drawn

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primarily from Barbados and other Caribbean islands, Axtell’s enslaved laborers were more familiar with sugar than with rice cultivation, but some slaves may have originated from the rice-­growing regions of Atlantic Africa and perhaps provided their owner with insights on the plant and its growing needs. Even though enslaved people were more familiar with working in fields than in swamps, they used African techniques to husk the grain with pestles and mortars. By the late 1690s, Edward Randolph reported to the Board of Trade that planters had “now found out the true way of raising and husking Rice.” Whatever techniques were used at Newington to raise and prepare the crop for the market, we do know that Axtell’s slaves grew an annual average of ten thousand pounds between 1702 and 1707; during the same period, the colony exported over five hundred thousand pounds annually.55 With enslaved laborers cultivating rice in swampland “at the head of creeks and rivers,” the lowcountry’s riparian environment—a mosaic of rivers, creeks, ponds, and swamps—became incorporated into the coastal plain’s “huge hydraulic machine.” By mid-­century, the lowland’s cultivated landscape included small reservoir ponds along with lattices of ditches through which water ran onto fields. Enslaved field hands regulated its flow by opening and closing sluice gates at certain points during rice’s growing cycle. But before enslaved laborers planted a single seedling, they had to clear acres of ground “over-­grown with underwood and lofty trees of mighty bulk.” For some, this type of work was familiar. Stationed in Sierra Leone, Lieutenant John Matthews observed villagers at work, preparing land “fit for their purposes . . . [cutting] down the trees and the bushes, which when dry, they set fire to and burn, the ashes serving for manure.” Supervising a cartographic survey of the southern colonies, De Brahm witnessed scenes similar to those that Matthews saw. Teams of enslaved women and children—classified as “the weak Hands” by De Brahm—cut, collected, and burned brush. Using axes, saws, and wagons, enslaved men cut and split timber, transporting the lumber “to the Planters and Negroe Houses for Fire Wood.” After clearing “a vast burden of large trees and underwood,” enslaved laborers then turned to the grueling and backbreaking work of excavating and moving hundreds of tons of earth for drainage ditches, irrigation channels, and ponds.56 By transforming wildernesses of swamps and woodlands into productive landscapes of fields, reservoirs, and irrigation channels, enslaved workers participated actively in the construction of a landscape that was organized around the use of immense quantities of water. Moreover, the vegetation and topography of vast stretches of the coastlines of Atlantic Africa bore a striking

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resemblance to the Carolina lowcountry. Describing the coastline of Sierra Leone in his journal, John Matthews noted that it was “covered with very lofty straight mangrove trees, and intersected with innumerable little creeks” as well as with larger rivers and smaller islands “contiguous to the coast.” Heading inland, he encountered “very extensive Savannahs where the grass grows . . . to an amazing height” along with vast stands of huge trees and dense brush. Three thousand miles away, naturalist Mark Catesby described coastal Carolina in similar terms, a landscape of “low islands, and extensive Marshes, divided also by innumerable Creeks and narrow muddy channels” with extensive swamps “over-­grown with Underwood and lofty trees of mighty Bulk.”57 Determined to exploit their enslaved field hands to the fullest, planters dissolved the gendered division of labor that had configured work not just on the lowcountry’s ranching and lumbering frontiers but also throughout Atlantic Africa. They assigned enslaved men and women to cultivate rice together, working alongside each other in wet, viscous mud as they tended the seedlings and ensured that the planted rows remained well-­irrigated and “clear from Weeds.” Several commented on this fact; Saint Helena planter Thomas Nairne used “Slaves of both Sexes” as agricultural laborers while pastor Johann Boltzius noted that planters required enslaved laborers, regardless of their sex, to work a certain amount of land every day. Enslaved men were now forced to work alongside women, planting, weeding, and harvesting rice, an arrangement that violated the customary gender practices of their homelands. Already dishonored by their capture and enslavement, male slaves suffered yet further humiliations when planters forced them to cultivate rice. Even enslaved laborers who had worked on the lowcountry frontier discovered that the “rice revolution” had changed their world. Some enslaved men, who had experienced some autonomy on the frontier, were relegated to field work while enslaved women may have felt displaced from work that they had traditionally controlled.58

On the Eve of Rebellion The emergence of the rice economy in the early eighteenth-­century lowcountry shaped the environment in which the September rebellion took place. Even if most enslaved people were only dimly aware of the demographic changes that had transformed the region into a “Negro country,” they would have been acutely aware of the changes wrought by cultivating rice, including

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the transgression of customary African gender roles by their owners. But enslaved men did not revolt solely because of adverse conditions on lowcountry plantations or the disciplinary regime imposed by slaveholders; the trajectory of international events in the early autumn of 1739 also provided a backdrop for the uprising.59 The 1730s proved to be an exceptionally volatile period as, note historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, “a furious barrage of plots, revolts, and wars ripped through colonial Atlantic societies like a hurricane.” The sugar colonies of the Caribbean were particularly prone to unrest, wracked by rebellions and conspiracies throughout the decade. On Jamaica, planters launched a protracted campaign to suppress the activities of fugitive slaves who had formed maroon communities in the mountainous center of the island. The conflict would drag on for ten years. In 1733, a rebellion broke out on Saint John (a Danish possession) and Saint Thomas (a Swedish colony) when enslaved laborers killed “all the Men and aged women they could lay their Hands on and,” reported the Pennsylvania Gazette, “debauched the young women.” Few Caribbean colonies were immune from the “contagion of rebellion.” In early 1734, slaves on Saint Kitts signaled the beginning of a revolt by “setting Six Houses on Fire” before “a Negro that had a Regard for his Master” disclosed the plan. At year’s end, “a designed insurrection among the slaves” on New Providence (the Bahamas) was exposed and put down. Two years later, planters on Antigua faced “a most dangerous conspiracy of the negroes” who, armed with “bills and cutlasses,” intended to overthrow them and, “when the whites were extirpated,” install “a new government.” Moreover, the plan was not limited to one island, with one official noting that enslaved laborers on Anguilla as well as on St. Bartholomew and St.  Martin were implicated. Such events received extensive coverage, with the South Carolina Gazette publishing alarming reports about restive slaves and the punishments inflicted by the authorities. These items even penetrated the backcountry; living in the remote community of Ebenezer on the western bank of the lower Savannah, Boltzius noted how “a credible man” had incorrectly told him that “Black Slaves had killed all the White People” and had temporarily occupied Antigua.60 On the North American mainland, both enslaved people and indentured servants challenged their owners’ authority. In March 1735, a group of Irish men, who identified themselves by wearing red strings, gathered in a Savannah tavern to discuss plans to destroy the town, murder its inhabitants, and then head inland to join local Native Americans and escaped slaves. Three

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years later, after breaking out of the jail in Prince George’s County, Maryland, several men joined other fugitives and began raiding local farms and plantations. In 1739, enslaved people in neighboring Anne Arundel County, Maryland, planned to attack Annapolis and “to possess themselves of the whole country.” Although neither the plot against Annapolis nor the “Red String Conspiracy” bore fruit, these and other disturbances throughout the New World plantation complex suggest that the “hidden transcript” of dissent continued to flourish; the desire to escape enslavement and, in some cases, bring about its destruction constantly kept breaking through the surface.61 Restiveness and disorder also struck the lowcountry. In August 1730, a group of enslaved laborers near Charles Town “conspired to Rise” only to have internal squabbles undermine their efforts, its leaders dividing over whether “Negroes on every Plantation should destroy their own Masters” or they should all rise simultaneously and inflict “the Blow at once on Surprize.” Holding a “great Dance” to attract recruits, its key figures were “apprehended and in Irons” before being tried and executed. Two years later, rumors of rebellion again swirled around, prompting Governor Robert Johnson to order the militia “to ride about to keep the Negroes in due order.” In February 1739, reports reached Savannah about plans made by enslaved laborers in the coastal settlement of Georgetown, about sixty miles north of Charles Town, to “forcibly Make their Way out of the Province,” head south, and “put themselves under the protection of the Spaniards” in San Agustin. Although the authorities thwarted this scheme, they noted that enslaved people elsewhere in the lowcountry were “privy” to this information, and many believed that the “Rising was to be universal.” Weeks later, another plot came to light on several plantations near Purrysburg on the Savannah River where slaves intended to kill their owners before making “their Way as fast as they could to [San] Augustin, either by Land or Water,” taking “Arms out of their Masters Houses” along with other supplies before “their Design was timely discovered.”62 Just how many of these episodes were credible threats against the plantation order remains unclear. In some cases, gossip by enslaved people who were perhaps fantasizing about escaping or rebelling took on the appearances of reality in the minds of their owners, leading to false accusations by men and women who believed that they were about to be murdered in their beds. With rumor hardening into incontrovertible truth, the authorities felt compelled to mobilize the machinery of state security, mustering the militia, increasing slave patrols, readying jails for prisoners, and building gallows for the accused. At times, planters conjured danger from thin air, misinterpreting

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a remark or a gesture as a sign of impending mayhem. Not all plots existed in the minds of nervous planters, however; enslaved people did make genuine efforts to achieve their freedom through violent action. Sometimes uncovered by vigilant planters, sometimes unwittingly revealed by an enslaved person making a careless or an unguarded comment, or sometimes betrayed by a slave fearful of the consequences of a failed uprising, the discovery of any insurrectionary plan often led lowcountry leaders to meet such challenges with overwhelming displays of force. These moments of open resistance, whether in the lowcountry or elsewhere, soon became common knowledge. Although the conspiracies and rebellions that roiled the Caribbean in these years took place independently of each other, the commercial networks that linked the islands to the mainland became conduits along which news as well as goods and sailors traveled, connecting enslaved people across this vast region. Looking at newspapers, talking to sailors on the docks, and picking up news in grogshops or on the street, enslaved waterfront workers would satisfy their appetite for news, learning, for example, how slaves on Antigua had “conspir’d to destroy their Masters” and had planned “a general Massacre” in October 1736. Whether enslaved laborers in the lowcountry associated the attempts of slaves elsewhere in the Americas with their own efforts to resist their enslavement is uncertain, but they surely felt a sense of common purpose and kinship when they heard about “Slaves [who] were to rise and kill all that oppos’d them.”63 To gain their own freedom, however, enslaved people in the lowcountry did not have to mount a full-­scale rebellion. From the colony’s settlement until the early 1740s, San Agustin was a magnet for “Rebels, Felons, Debtors, Servants, and Slaves that escape thither.” Its role as a safe haven became evident in October 1671 when indentured servant Dennis Mahoon escaped from his master along with two other servants “to attaine the protection of the Crowne of Spain.” A month later, the incorrigible Mahoon made another attempt to run to Spanish Florida; captured, tried, and punished, he was “stript naked to his waiste . . . [to] receive thirty-­nine lashes.” In 1688, the proprietorial government dispatched William Dunlop to negotiate with the Spanish for the return of “the ronways negroes of Carolina,” including eleven enslaved laborers owned by Joseph Morton. This mission established a long-­ standing pattern: a successful escape from the lowcountry to San Agustin followed by the aggrieved owner either petitioning or visiting the Spanish governor to request the return of the fugitive in person, an appeal that would be curtly denied.64

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The men and women who successfully navigated coastal swamps and forests, traveling on foot, by canoe, or on horseback, gained their freedom at the end of a long and grueling journey of more than two hundred miles. That these enslaved people gained their freedom was the result of an edict issued by King Charles II of Spain that freed “all Negroes Slaves that would resort thither.” After receiving instruction from Catholic priests, the new converts then received their liberty. On one occasion, a group of six fugitives who, after killing one man and wounding the son of their owner, Captain MacPherson, took his horses and headed south. Eluding mounted patrols and exploiting their knowledge of the countryside gained from their experiences as “Cattel-­Hunters,” the group then stumbled upon Native Americans, who killed one fugitive and wounded another in the encounter. They finally reached San Agustin where they were greeted by Governor Manuel de Montiano with “great honors” and received “a coat faced with Velvet” along with their freedom. The governor hoped that reports of “their good reception” would travel back north and encourage other enslaved people to head to San Agustin. The Spanish housed these and other ex-­slaves at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (or Fort Mose), where they built houses, grew crops, and tended animals, establishing a free Black community. Ready to set up their own households when they reached San Agustin, a number of enslaved people who escaped from the lowcountry not only traveled with family members but also took tools, blankets, and other practical items to begin their new lives in Spanish Florida.65 In 1738, the year in which the Spanish established Fort Mose, lowcountry merchant Caleb Davis learned firsthand that they had no intention of repealing their policy to satisfy the demands of irate planters. Determined to recover nineteen of his enslaved laborers, as well as “fifty others belonging to other Persons around Port Royal” who had stolen his boat and then made an audacious daylight passage from Beaufort to the sanctuary of San Agustin, Davis traveled south to demand that de Montiano return them. When the governor told Davis that the Spanish crown had proclaimed “Liberty and Protection to all Slaves that should desert thither from any of the English colonies, but more especially from this [South Carolina],” the fugitives from the lowcountry ridiculed his efforts to drag them back to Port Royal; witnessing their owner’s embarrassment, Davis’s slaves simply “laughed at him.” The governor’s position, however, was somewhat more precarious than his tart dismissal of Davis suggested. Even though colonial leaders wrote shrill letters to London complaining about their abrasive and uncooperative neighbors to the south, the

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Spanish lacked the military resources to mount a successful invasion of South Carolina or Georgia; in fact, the establishment of Savannah and the colonization of Georgia in the early 1730s gave the English rather than the Spanish the strategic upper hand in the region. Building coastal forts, including Fort Frederica on Saint Simons Island, about forty miles from Florida’s northern boundary, further antagonized the Spanish, who demanded that the English “evacuate all they stood possest of as far as St. Helena Sound,” a request that the colonists had absolutely no intention of granting.66 The enslaved people who Davis failed to recover constituted just a small fraction of men and women who ran off in the 1730s. Escape had long been part of the repertoire of surviving slavery. Enslaved people recognized their value as capital assets and as productive laborers, and their absence denied their owner of both. Yet published data suggests that very few slaves actually ran off. Between 1732 and 1739, the South Carolina Gazette—the leading vehicle for reporting the names and identifying characteristics of escaped slaves—listed 253 fugitives (the colony’s enslaved population rose from 20,000 to 39,155 between 1730 and 1740). How many masters posted notices for fugitives and how many relied on other methods to track them down is impossible to ascertain; the actual figure constitutes, as Philip Morgan has noted, “the tip of an otherwise indeterminate iceberg.” But this data suggests that, contrary to contemporary conventional wisdom, the colony was not hemorrhaging slaves in significant numbers; enslaved people were disgruntled and behaved in a truculent manner on occasion, but it appears that only a small percentage chose to flee. They might run from their plantation if the opportunity arose and circumstances were favorable but, in most cases, they expressed dissent in other ways.67 The act of escape can be divided into two categories. First, there were enslaved people who left their plantations to visit friends or family and, making little effort to conceal themselves, planned on returning after a short absence. Lancaster and Bristol, two enslaved men owned by Thomas Wright, likely fall into this group; reporting their absence, Wright noted how they “have been frequently seen . . . in the Streets at Night.” Likewise, Franke, an enslaved woman, also fits this pattern; her owner posted in the runaway notice how she had “been seen lately” in Charles Town, where she was “without doubt [being] harbor’d by some free Negroes or Slaves” while the owner of Cuffee, an enslaved carpenter, believed that he had gone to “Mr. Wallis’ Plantation on the Santee.” In these cases, their owners apparently had some idea of their truant slaves’ whereabouts. Then, there were fugitives who intended to extricate

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themselves permanently from their enslavement, often taking clothes and other goods, determined never to return. Bellfast, for example, took a horse, headed south—he was spotted riding south near Stono Church—and rode off with “a trunk of women’s apparel” while Owen, Abraham Mossins’s enslaved worker, also took a horse and a bundle of clothes tied “in a white Blanket behind upon the Saddle” when he escaped. Others, including Billy, Adam, and Fortune, took a canoe from owner Nicholas Trott’s plantation “in order to make their Escape out of the Province.”68 Analyzed in aggregate, the Gazette’s runaway listings yield some characteristics about the fugitives. Most escapees were enslaved men (77 percent, or 194 slaves); more than three-­quarters lived in the countryside. Invariably, flight took place during the most intensive periods of agricultural work: in January and February, when planters assigned enslaved laborers to clear and repair irrigation ditches; prepare the fields for planting, a process known as mud work; and clear new land for cultivation. The other peak period was during September and October when planters drove their slaves into the fields to harvest the crop, often forcing them to work deep into the night. Standing for hours “up to their knees and waists in water,” enslaved laborers reaped, bundled, and transported rice to plantation yards where they threshed, pounded, and packed it.69 On occasion, the notices listed the fugitives’ provenance. The data suggests that in the years between 1732 and 1739 most escaped slaves had recently arrived from Atlantic Africa. But owners could often only make a wild guess at their slaves’ ethnic background. Of the 192 men listed, sixty-­two (32 percent) were generically labeled “African” and twenty-­six (14 percent) were classified as from Angola or the Kingdom of the Kongo. Only seventeen (9 percent) were “country negroes” (born in South Carolina) or from the Caribbean. There is no ethnic descriptor for the remaining eighty-­seven slaves (45 percent); however, with 46 percent of all enslaved runaway men coming directly from Atlantic Africa, it seems likely that many whose provenance was unknown were also African-­born. Of course, knowing a fugitive’s ethnicity did little to facilitate his or her capture; to white South Carolinians, an enslaved person from Angola looked identical to an enslaved person from the Bight of Benin. Accordingly, planters regularly described the fugitive’s apparel, facility with the English language, and any visible marks on the slave’s body, including ethnic scarring, facial lesions from smallpox, or branding scars.70 Yet planters did not analyze the newspaper in this way. Glancing at the columns of runaway notices in the Gazette, they assumed that enslaved

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people were heading to Florida in droves. And the column inches occupied in the paper by notices for fugitives only helped confirm their opinion about the exodus. Furthermore, they fully understood the problems entailed in recovering their enslaved property who had reached San Agustin. The promise of freedom along with the Spanish governor’s unwillingness to negotiate the return of fugitives constituted, for lowcountry leaders, a significant danger to “the Welfare of this Province.” Fearing that an uprising might prove “more difficult to quell than the rebellion of the Jamaican Negroes,” an acknowledgment of the failure of that island’s planters to suppress insurgent maroons, the Assembly bought muskets, cannons, and boats to defend “the Water Passages to the South” in an effort to shore up local defenses. It increased the number of patrols and instituted rewards for fugitives: £40 for the capture and return of an escaped slave alive, and £20 for the scalp or ears of those “who cannot be taken and brought home alive.” Yet these measures did not stop the Spanish from infiltrating the lowcountry. In early 1739, cavalry officer Don Pedro Lamberto Rotinello, masquerading as a “Jew practicing Surgery and Physick,” secretly inspected Charles Town’s defenses. Arrested later in Savannah when his “skulking” behavior aroused suspicion, he was imprisoned after militia officers concluded “that he was no better than a spy” and “a dangerous person.” In September, a Savannah magistrate jailed a man “whom he took to be a priest” and who had been “employed by the Spaniards to procure a general Insurrection of the Negroes.”71 Don Pedro was not the only agent surreptitiously gathering intelligence. In 1737, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Broughton received reports from Commodore Digby Dent, the commander of the Royal Navy’s squadron in Jamaica, in which he learned of Spanish intentions to invade Georgia and “to execute an insurrection of the negroes of this province [i.e., South Carolina].” Dent, however, was simply the messenger; he had acquired this information from Leonard Cocke, a commercial agent in Santiago de Cuba, a port town in western Cuba. After a drunken evening with one Miguel Wall, who claimed to be Irish and to hold a commission in the Dragoons, not only was Cocke astounded to hear about the intended destination of a Spanish fleet then anchored in Havana, but he was also equally surprised to learn about plans “to have a Proclamation publish’d . . . and that all the slaves will come in.” Working on the principle, as he noted, that “men over their cups drops words,” Cocke “pretty well sifted” his guest only to expose the masquerade. He was neither Miguel Wall nor Irish, but Peter Jacob D’Tombe, who claimed to be “a lieutenant in the British service.” Again, this proved false; he was

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a Spanish spy, using another alias. His real name was John Savy. Fleeing from his hometown of London in the early 1730s to escape his creditors, he came to South Carolina, working as an Indian trader. In 1735, he returned to Europe, disembarking in Dieppe before heading first to Paris and then to Madrid, where he began his career in espionage when he sold his services to the Spanish crown along with information about the lowcountry’s defenses. Again, with “the help of the bottle,” Henry Weltden, a factor for the South Sea Company based in Havana, managed to corroborate this information by getting Savy to “disclose his scheme” about the planned invasion. Faced with a potential slave uprising inspired by Spanish provocations, the governor strengthened domestic security by increasing the number of patrols and deploying scout boats to guard the southern lowcountry.72 The rapid circulation of reports throughout the lowcountry about the Spanish crown’s proclamation offering “Freedom to all Negroes who should desert thither [to Florida] from the English colonies” only amplified the sense of dread and foreboding that invasion scares and militia musters had already generated. Furthermore, the news from San Agustin was not rumor; the Spanish had effectively publicized the edict “by beat of the Drum round the Town of St. Augustine where many Negroes belonging to English Vessels . . . had the Opportunity of hearing it, promising Liberty and protection.” That several fugitive slaves asked Indians for directions to San Agustin in August 1739 indicates that the reports about the freedom accorded “to all Negroe Slaves who would report thither” had traveled far and wide. Even though the Spanish issued the edict in their native tongue, enslaved people transported to the lowcountry from the Kongo, where Portuguese was the language of commerce and conversion, possibly had the ability to make a rough translation because, as Georgia governor James Oglethorpe remarked, “Portugeze is as near Spanish as Scotch is to English.”73 Provocative saber rattling by the Spanish was not the only problem that colonists faced at the end of the decade. Extreme weather also presented a challenge, with the lowcountry experiencing persistent drought. To prevent food shortages and the subsequent sharp rise in prices, the Assembly passed an emergency law “prohibiting . . . the exportation of Corn, Peas, small Rice, Flour and Biscuit from the Province” in October 1737. A year later, however,  the situation remained unchanged. In June 1738, William Stephens reported that “so long a Drought, and such extraordinary heats” threatened to destroy the year’s harvest, leaving crops stunted for “lack of Moisture.” After a “sultry” summer, autumn proved equally destructive. Storms and torrential

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rains proved “as Grievous as the Great Drought” earlier in the year, flooding fields and destroying crops. Along with a steep drop in rice production, which fell from twenty million pounds in 1737 to sixteen million pounds in 1738, basic foods became scarce. Bull turned to the church for help, ordering “a Day of Publick Fasting and Humiliation” to prevent the “Calamities” arising from “a Great Scarcity of Provisions” occurring. But the services held in early July were designed not just “to implore the Divine Goodness” to avert a famine but to spare the colony from the ravages of a smallpox epidemic.74 In April 1738, John Pickett, captain of the 100-­ton London Frigate carrying more than three hundred enslaved Africans, who had been purchased at Cabinda, a slave market on the coast of Angola, arrived in Charles Town. Sold by merchants John Cleland and William Wallace, the slaves were marched off to their plantations by their new owners, where a significant number began dying from smallpox. A brief inquiry revealed that all fourteen slaves who had perished during the voyage had died of “Fevers and Fluxes.” By late summer, with smallpox having claimed more than three hundred free and enslaved lives, the Assembly, acknowledging “the Spanish preparations at Havanna and St. Augustine” and that the disease “may prevent a sufficient body of forces from assembling together in defense of the Province,” passed temporary measures to prevent it spreading further. No sooner had the colonists managed to get the smallpox epidemic under control than yellow fever broke out, with “great numbers dying weekly.” Outbreaks of two deadly and contagious diseases combined with unsettling rumors about invasion and insurrection had left the colony close to crisis.75 The problems of the old year remained unsolved as the new year began. Speaking to the Assembly in January 1739, Bull not only expressed concern about the persistence of smallpox in Charles Town but that “the most Effectual Means” necessary to stop the “Desertion of our Slaves” had met with only modest success. The dread and apprehension caused by Spanish ambitions “to unsettle and invade the colony of Georgia and to excite an insurrection of the Negroes of this Province” remained firmly embedded in the minds of white colonists. Even the passage of a temporary measure for “the better Security . . . against the Insurrections and other Wicked Attempts of the Negroes and other Slaves” did little to allay the fears of jittery colonists. Furthermore, the prospects for a bumper harvest looked bleak as torrential rains and storms inundated fields and washed away crops. As diplomatic relations with Spain deteriorated over the summer, reports circulated about the “greatest Likelihood of War.” In early September, colonists learned that

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“open war is declared.” At the same time, enslaved laborers began to harvest the year’s crops, working relentlessly from dawn to dusk under the watchful gaze of overseers and owners. Some possibly interpreted the epidemics, storms, and shortages along with frenzied colonists mobilizing for war as signs of an impending cataclysm; enslaved people, perhaps aware that conflict was imminent, may have viewed Spanish soldiers in San Agustin as an army of liberation. However enslaved people read the signs, the next few weeks would have a powerful impact on their lives and on the lowcountry.76 The transformation from frontier to plantation society at the turn of the century had a significant impact on the overall structure and organization of the lowcountry’s social order. In geopolitical terms, it was an era characterized by the domination of Native inhabitants along the coast; a series of clashes and disputes with the Spanish; and, from a more parochial point of view, the end of the proprietorial regime. The emergence of a “plantation generation” of enslaved field hands along with the advent of commercial rice production demanded the reconfiguration of work routines. The self-­directed and semiautonomous work that enslaved ranch hands and forest workers experienced gave way to the backbreaking work of clearing land and building fields for rice cultivation as well as the labor entailed in growing and harvesting the crop. Moreover, planters had unwittingly demolished the gendered organization of work that had informed arable farming throughout Atlantic Africa. The institutionalization of plantation agriculture combined with the rapid Africanization of the workforce, with men unaccustomed to the conventions of this type of labor, made the lowcountry a volatile place by the late 1730s.

CHAPTER 3

The Enslaved in Town and Country

All Carolina was struck with terror and consternation by this insurrection, in which twenty persons were murdered before it was quelled . . . had it become general, the whole colony must have fallen a sacrifice to their great power and indiscriminate fury. —Alexander Hewatt, An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia

At dawn on Sunday, 9 September 1739, Lieutenant Governor William Bull and four companions mounted their horses for the journey north to Charles Town. Having visited Sheldon and Newberry, his extensive plantation holdings in Prince William Parish, and officiated over a court session in Granville, Bull was forced to return to the city to handle the latest crisis between imperial rivals in the colonial southeast: the outbreak of war between Great Britain and Spain following several months of saber-­rattling and diplomatic wrangling. A few hours later, the small party encountered not Spanish soldiers from San Agustin but a large group of enslaved men who were “killing all they met, and burning Several Houses” as they headed south “along Pons Pons, which is the road through Georgia to Augustine.” Quickly recognizing “the approaching Danger [in] time enough to avoid it,” Bull ordered Fenwick Golightly to gallop several miles to Willtown, a small settlement on the eastern bank of the Edisto River, and raise the alarm while he and his friends escaped. Racing into the church where Presbyterian minister Archibald Stobo was holding the Sunday service, Golightly breathlessly informed militia commander John Bee about events unfolding a few miles away. With “great briskness,” Bee assembled a posse. Mounting horses and grabbing

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pistols, they rode off in search of the rebels who had ignited an uprising that was spreading rapidly across Saint Paul’s Parish.1 Unlike many imperial officials who arrived in their new colonial postings with scant knowledge of local conditions, the man who had ascertained the danger on the main road between Charles Town and Savannah was the native-­born son of a prominent lowcountry family. Between the arrival of Stephen Bull (William’s father) with the first wave of settlers in 1670 and his death thirty-­six years later, he became an influential figure in colonial politics, establishing a dynasty built on extensive commercial and agricultural interests. By the time his son, William (1683‒1755), encountered the rebels on the road, the Bull family owned more than a hundred enslaved laborers and several thousand acres around Port Royal in the southern lowcountry and on the Ashley River, where they lived in Ashley Hall, an elegant brick house. William followed in his father’s footsteps; he oversaw the family’s plantation empire and continued its political traditions, becoming lieutenant governor in 1738. His son, also named William (1710‒1791), was appointed to the same office in 1759.2 The rebellion that Bull and his companions had stumbled on became known as the Stono Rebellion. Such episodes, notes historian Emilia Viotti da Costa, “made public, for a moment at least, the slaves’ secret life . . . [and] exposed in its nakedness all the brutality of the masters’ power.” The rising took place at a key moment in the lowcountry’s history; not only had planters solved the major problems surrounding rice production, thus securing the crop’s position as the engine driving the economy, but it occurred when the colony had achieved some degree of stability and security. After the defeat and displacement of the Yamasees and their allies in the mid-­1710s, the Indigenous presence on the coastal plain was now negligible. Furthermore, with the establishment of Georgia and the development of Savannah in the early 1730s, the lowcountry now enjoyed additional protection from potential attack from Spanish Florida. Now half a century old, Charles Town had become the empire’s leading commercial and administrative center along the southeastern seaboard. Colonists were moving inland, building churches and farmhouses, and establishing churches and other small communities between the coastal plain and the Appalachians. But in the fall of 1739, against the backdrop of an imminent war with Spain, a run of poor harvests, and serial outbreaks of smallpox and yellow fever—Georgia colonist William Stephens estimated that “the Pestilence” had killed about one-­ quarter of Charles Town’s white inhabitants—a group of enslaved men led

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by an Angolan named Jemmy challenged the plantation order. Even though only a very small fraction of the local slave population participated, this sudden and intense explosion of collective violence reminded slaveholders that their domination and control over their enslaved workers was partial at best. In a moment of militant resistance, a handful of enslaved men on the Stono River transformed the “hidden transcript” of dissent and disobedience into a moment of bloodshed and rebellion.3 During this period, the experiences of lowcountry slaves began to diverge, leading to the emergence of two contrasting forms of enslavement: plantation slavery and urban slavery. Following the subordination of the coastal Native peoples by the late 1710s, the curtain fell on the frontier world of ranching and forestry. Although planters grew rice during the early years of colonization, not until the new century’s first decade did it begin to dominate lowcountry agriculture. With the expansion of the plantation economy came the expansion of Charles Town. Its merchants, who often began their rise to commercial prominence trading with the Native Americans, exporting naval stores or agricultural commodities, soon embraced the market in human beings as planters increasingly turned to enslaved Africans to meet their labor needs in the early eighteenth century. Successful merchants were soon plowing their newfound wealth into land, becoming planters and slaveholders themselves, and building elegant town houses where retinues of enslaved domestics attended to their every need. With economic expansion reshaping rural and urban life, the circumstances of enslaved peoples’ working lives became more divergent. First, there were the enslaved men and women in Charles Town. Several factors informed their everyday lives: the configuration of work; the customs and practices that evolved on its streets, in its markets, and in other spaces; and the interplay between urban and rural slaves. An “urban generation” of enslaved people performed a wide variety of jobs, ranging from skilled labor (for example, masonry, bricklaying, joinery, blacksmithing, and boat building) to domestic tasks (cooking, cleaning, and needlework) to manual work (cleaning streets, driving carts, and loading and unloading ships). The enslaved worker’s abilities, along with the ways by which masters organized work, also informed urban slavery; the skilled slave carpenter who worked on hire for his owner exerted greater control over his daily schedule than did an enslaved domestic who swept floors, prepared food, and did other household chores under her owner’s watchful eye. The varied work experiences of enslaved urban workers and the city’s place as the leading commercial center on the southeastern seaboard had

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an impact on the formation of community and culture. With Charles Town’s connections to towns and cities throughout the Atlantic basin, the news and gossip that landed on the waterfront transmitted in print or through sailors and travelers offered enslaved urban laborers access to the world that lay well beyond the confines of coastal South Carolina. The warehouses and wharves on the Cooper River were more than facilities to store and ship rice and other plantation commodities; likewise, the workshops, boatyards, and sheds in the streets surrounding the docks were more than buildings where enslaved artisans worked. They were also sites where they swapped information, socialized, established relationships with fellow slaves, and built networks of community from their common experiences in the workplace. The city’s location within the Atlantic’s commercial system and its particular social ecology offered urban slaves greater intellectual and cultural resources than their rural counterparts, enabling them to acquire a cosmopolitan sensibility. Surrounding the city lay the plantations and farms that generated the wealth that enabled Charles Town to flourish. In the countryside, a majority of the colony’s enslaved men and women labored. Constituting a “plantation generation,” the lives of rural slaves were shaped primarily by the rhythms of the agricultural calendar as well as by the cultural dynamics of a population that was primarily of African descent. The widespread adoption of the task system to organize plantation work, an arrangement that had fully emerged by mid-­century, gave rural slaves a modest degree of latitude over the labor process. The organization of work to a bounded task, such as cutting so many cords of wood, erecting so many feet of fence, or cleaning debris from so many feet of ditch in a day enabled enslaved laborers to pursue their own activities once they had finished the jobs allotted by their owners; they raised vegetables in garden plots, tended poultry, or fished nearby creeks and rivers. Thus, specific work assignments, rather than the clock, divided the hours of the day: plantation labor was performed during the master’s time (which often took up a significant portion of the day and demanded considerable energy), and independent work was done on the slave’s own time in the few hours that remained.4 The transmission and elaboration of ethnic traditions from the numerous Atlantic African societies from which lowcountry slaves originated became another characteristic of rural life. The lowcountry’s cultural and demographic Africanization first got underway in the late seventeenth century when Africans directly transported from the coastlines of West and West-­ Central Africa started arriving in modest numbers; by the early eighteenth

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century, the volume of enslaved people coming from Africa increased significantly, leading to the emergence of a more ethnically diverse plantation workforce. In the six years before the rebellion, ninety-­seven hundred (or 61 percent) of the approximately sixteen thousand enslaved people transported to the colony originated from Cabinda, Loango, and other slaving ports on the coasts of West-­Central Africa, with twenty-­seven hundred from Senegambia, the Gold Coast, and the Bight of Biafra (the embarkation point for the remaining thirty-­five hundred was unidentified). 1n 1739, about twenty-­ three hundred enslaved Africans arrived in Charles Town aboard nine ships; of these, some seven hundred came from the markets of Angola/Kingdom of Kongo, with eight hundred from the Bight of Biafra, eighty-­five from Gambia, and the remaining seven hundred from unspecified regions. Drawing from their own traditions and practices, enslaved people synthesized customs from  their homelands in the context of their new circumstances to form a distinctive rural culture. Regardless of the ethnic origins of “saltwater slaves,” the plantation was a common denominator, the crucible in which enslaved people formed their own community and where they reinvented and reshaped customary practices to fashion a cultural form that was simultaneously influenced by the environment of the lowcountry even as it remained rooted in the idioms of their native societies.5

“A Countryside Full of Flames”: Unrest Along the Stono River At some point during the evening of Saturday, 8 September 1739, after a long and laborious day “making and keeping in repair the road” that ran by the North Branch of the Stono River, a group of exhausted and disgruntled enslaved men who had nothing to look forward to except more toil in miserable conditions decided to act. Forced to spend yet another night at a makeshift camp, and facing more grueling days carting stone, digging ditches, and clearing brush, the filthy and weary men were probably aware that their labor only contributed to the expansion of the lowcountry plantation economy. And they also knew that, once they had finished working on the road, they would be ordered by their owners and overseers into the rice fields, a swampy, muddy world alive with mosquitos, snakes, and other reptiles, to begin the relentless drudgery of harvesting the annual crop. The work gang may too have reflected how the field work on rice plantations had upended

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Atlantic African gender conventions in which cultivating rice was classified as female work. Returning to the fields to work alongside enslaved women to do work that African men did not traditionally perform was perhaps one humiliation too many for the laborers on the Stono.6 Led by Jemmy, the enslaved men abandoned their makeshift camp and first headed for Hutchenson’s store, a clapboard structure that sold, among other goods, axes, hoes, and hardware, along with tobacco, rum, muskets, and powder. Entering the building, they evidently disturbed storekeeper Robert Bathurst and John Gibbes, a local planter and Commissioner of the High Roads in Saint Paul’s Parish, who perhaps had organized the gang assigned to road maintenance in the first place. In the struggle, the enslaved men killed Bathurst and Gibbes and, according to one report, they “Cut their Heads off ” and, gathering them up, “Set them on the Stairs.” Snatching supplies, including “Arms and Ammunition,” they then headed down the Pons Pons Road (a section of the King’s Highway that ran from Charles Town to Savannah), and moved into the heart of Saint Paul’s Parish.7 The killings at the store prompt some basic questions about this event. What were the intentions of the men when they burst into the building? Had they discussed escape or rebellion as they shoveled dirt and cut brush? Did they intend to escape to San Agustin, hoping that Carolina’s planters, distracted by preparations for war against Spain, would fail to notice a group of enslaved men heading south? Did they just want to rob the store, take liquor and food, and enjoy their loot? Or, overwhelmed by anger and frustration by their circumstances, had they simply exploded in rage and decided to destroy as much of the machinery of the plantation regime as possible? Clearly, there are no definitive answers, but circumstantial evidence hints that a full-­blown rebellion was not initially on their agenda. That the Spanish had offered freedom to enslaved people who reached San Agustin was common knowledge throughout the lowcountry. Rather than head north from the store toward Charles Town, they went south toward the promise of liberty and land in San Agustin. That they did not set fire to the store—an act that, with flames illuminating the night sky, would have raised the alarm—suggests that flight remained the main objective at this point. But, following their actions at their next stop, escape was no longer an option. From Hutchenson’s store, they headed for the Godfrey homestead. Here, the men perhaps hoped to steal a canoe and move stealthily through creeks and marshes to reach their destination. Stumbling about in the dark, they possibly wakened its occupants and a struggle ensued; whatever the case,

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they departed having killed Godfrey, his son, and his daughter. Rather than quietly continuing their journey, they looted the house and then set it on fire, perhaps hoping to eliminate the evidence of the killings. With the building blazing away and with Godfrey and his children lying dead, Jemmy and his companions shed their identity as enslaved men and transformed themselves into rebels. They now entered, to borrow from military historian John Keegan’s description of combat, “the wildly unstable physical and emotional environment” of collective violence, in which participants experience a dizzying array of psychological states, driven primarily by powerful surges of adrenaline, that range from “exultation, panic, anger, sorrow, [and] bewilderment . . . to that sublime emotion we call courage.”8 The rebels doubtless recognized the impact of their irreversible decision; they now donned the mantle of warriors, a moment that possibly harked back to their earlier lives before their capture, enslavement, and transport to the lowcountry. During the rebellion, practices drawn from Angolan martial culture, including the use of drums and flags, became part of the uprising’s pageantry. Decapitation, too, may have had African precedents and perhaps held a specific meaning for the rebels; not only was a headless corpse unable to return to its spiritual homeland, but such rituals were integral to warfare in some parts of West Africa. At Ouidah (Whydah) on the Bight of Benin, Royal African Company captain Thomas Phillips watched warriors return home victorious from battle with “nine or ten bags full of men, women, and childrens heads,” which they then proceeded to “fling and kick about with shoutings for joy of their success against their enemies.” Enslaved people elsewhere in Atlantic Africa engaged in this behavior. Stationed in Sierra Leone, naval officer John Matthews reported how enslaved laborers held captive by the Mandinkas, rebelled, killed, and beheaded their masters, “and had their heads carried before them on poles, as ensigns of victory and liberty.” The rebel slaves headed for the rice fields, which were ready to be harvested, and set them alight.9 Decapitation was also integral to the spectacle of terror used by the authorities throughout the New World plantation complex. Executions followed by beheadings were not uncommon in South Carolina; after Quash was hanged for running away and burglary in Charles Town in April 1734, his head “was sever’d from his Body, and fixed upon the Gallows.” Caesar, an enslaved man owned by William Romsey, who was captured “deserting . . . to Augustine,” suffered the same punishment three years later. After his execution, his body was “hung in Chains at Hang-­Man’s Point in sight of all

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Negroes passing . . . by Water.” Standing above the storekeepers’ headless torsos, the rebels had appropriated the practices of beheading and public display, inverting patterns of their master’s discipline for their own purposes.10 The next encounter took place at Wallace’s Tavern “towards day break.” Rather than kill the tavern keeper and his family and set his house alight, they chose “not to hurt him, for he was a good Man, and kind to his Slaves.” Perhaps the insurgents saw him as good-­natured and humane, traits that appear to have saved his life when the rebels marched onto his property. But they may have seen him as an important part of their lives as well. Although enslaved people were prohibited from buying alcohol, Wallace perhaps turned a blind eye to the law, quietly exchanging a jug of rum for some chickens or other provisions from plantation allotments or fish caught in the Stono River. If indeed this is the case, then these gestures perhaps ingratiated him to members of the enslaved community, cementing his reputation as a fair and decent man.11 The rebels continued moving south, next attacking the Lemy household. Lemy and his family were less fortunate than the Wallaces; after killing Lemy, his wife, and his child, the slaves looted the house. From here, they headed first for the plantation owned by Thomas Rose and then on to Thomas Elliott’s property, but the response that the rebels met at both places suggest that the rebellion did not have the unanimous support of every enslaved person in Saint Paul’s Parish. At Rose’s house, an enslaved man named Wells came to the rescue, hiding his owner while he placated the rebels, although how he “pacified” them went unrecorded. At Elliott’s plantation, the rebels faced opposition from an enslaved man named July who, noted one report, “had at Several Times bravely fought against the Rebels, and killed one of them” while saving his “Master and Family from being destroyed by the rebellious Negroes.”12 Other enslaved people openly defied the rebels. An Assembly committee later identified at least twenty enslaved men and women who “behaved themselves very well” during the rebellion. Along with Wells and July, its members singled out Elliott’s slaves who were “of great service,” presumably because they protected their owner from certain death. In addition, around a dozen enslaved men participated in the manhunt ordered by Bull as soon as the militia had crushed the rebellion. For their “great service in opposing the rebellious Negroes,” cooperative slaves collected various rewards; some got new clothes tailored from “blue Strouds, faced up with Red, and trimmed with brass buttons,” while others were given £20 “in Cash.” July, however,

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received considerably more than “a Suit of Clothes, Shirt, Hat, a Pair of Stockings, and a Pair of Shoes”; he gained his freedom.13 The decision taken by some enslaved people to protect their owners rather than hand them over to the rebels to be killed reveals the fraught nature of an enslaved person’s efforts at self-­preservation. The apparent collusion between the enslaved and the enslaver in these cases suggests a degree of fragility in the bonds of community among slaves. At first glance, it may appear that enslaved people who saved their masters from rebel hands identified more closely with their owners’ interests rather than with the ambitions of their fellow slaves. Alternatively, Wells and the others may have made their decisions more out of self-­interest than solidarity. Enslaved people who watched the rebels advance toward their plantations had to make a difficult calculation; they had to assess the chances of the rebels succeeding in the face of very steep odds versus the swift and brutal retribution that would inevitably follow should the rebellion collapse or be crushed. And, as most enslaved people recognized, the presence of a well-­armed militia made defeat far more likely than victory. July, Wells, and other “collaborators” may have viewed the uprising as a foolhardy enterprise and doomed from the start. Events at the Elliott and Rose plantations suggest that the rebellious slaves had no coherent plan other than to continue marching down the Pons Pons Road. Some enslaved people perhaps regarded Jemmy and his followers as little more than a disorderly, drunken mob that the militia or even a posse of planters on horseback would easily overpower. On Sunday morning, a number of enslaved people headed down the paths and tracks that linked their plantations to the Pons Pons Road to join the revolt, which was now growing in strength and impetus. The presence of these newcomers again raises questions about the insurgents’ strategy and purpose; if they had joined Jemmy and his companions spontaneously, then it suggests that the men who attacked Hutchenson’s store had done so without premeditation. But it is also possible that one or more members of the road gang had earlier recruited enslaved people from these plantations who would then act as reinforcements, suggesting that the rebels had not acted spontaneously but had laid careful plans prior to the attack on Hutchenson’s store. However, for July and others who defended their owners and refused to join the uprising, the men that they confronted presented a real threat to their lives. Should the rebellion fail, then they would be caught up in a whirlwind of retaliatory violence where vengeance would be the order of the day. In this light, enslaved men like July who rejected the rebels’ demands out of hand or aggressively repulsed them perhaps did so out of pragmatic

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self-­interest; better to cling to the lives that they knew, constrained as they were by their enslavement, than join a futile, perhaps even suicidal, venture and then face the avenging fury of their owner. By early Sunday afternoon, the uprising reached its brutal crescendo. The rebels became increasingly ruthless, pursuing “all the white people they met with, and killing Man Woman and Child when they could come up to them.” Shouting out “Liberty” (or “lukango” in Kikongo) as they moved across the parish, they gave no quarter, burning down houses belonging to James Bullock, Alexander Hext, Royal Spry, Thomas Sacherverell, and a Mr. Nash, and killing “all the white People they found in them.” With rebels incinerating plantations and slaughtering their occupants, some long-­time locals perhaps recalled the Yamasee War when Native American warriors terrorized the countryside in their efforts to obliterate every vestige of colonization.14 Several hours later and with dusk approaching, the uprising gradually lost its force and momentum. When the rebels reached a stretch of open land by Jacksonborough Ferry on the Edisto River—at which point, they numbered, according to one estimate, “above Sixty, some say a hundred”—they stopped to regroup and to celebrate by “dancing, Singing, and beating Drums,” believing themselves, as an official later observed, “victorious over the Whole Province.” Perhaps some rebels did drink, dance, and drum, but with adrenaline rapidly draining from bodies weary from hours of mayhem and with alcohol taking its toll, it seems more likely that many were probably so physically and emotionally exhausted by their exertions that they could do little more than collapse on the ground. Some perhaps kept watch for the approach of a militia patrol, but, even if they did take such precautions, their measures proved to be inadequate; for many enslaved men, this field became their graveyard.15 The final encounter came at dusk. With the alarm spreading across Saint Paul’s Parish and Saint John’s Parish, the machinery of local security went into action. The militia set up roadblocks at crossroads, boat landings, and other strategic points, while mounted patrols went in search of the rebels. Locating them by the ferry crossing on the Edisto, militiamen now put the musket drills that they had practiced during their musters to the test. Opening fire on the rebels, who were no doubt stunned by their sudden appearance, the militia brought down about a dozen with their first volley. The skirmish quickly became ever more deadly and chaotic; some slaves fled for their lives, seeking safety in nearby woods and swamps, while others tried to put up a fight. One moment illustrates the tenor of the confrontation; holding a pistol, one rebel confronted his master, who asked him if “he wanted to kill him.” The enslaved

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man replied in the affirmative, and, “at the same time snapping a Pistoll at him, but it mist fire”; without hesitation, the owner pulled out his own weapon and, at point blank range, shot the rebel in the head. For a few seconds, the enslaved man had held the ultimate power of life and death over his master.16 Although some men “behaved boldly” during their last stand, other rebels fled into the woods in an effort to escape the butchery. One account described how a dozen or so men covered an astounding thirty miles before “Planters on horseback” overtook and captured them. Another twenty or so slipped away into the swamps and woods along the Edisto. Determined “to put a stop to further mischief,” patrols went after those rebels still at large. Bull extended the dragnet far beyond Saint Paul’s Parish, instructing mounted rangers and Native Americans to “patrole through Georgia” to prevent “any Negroes from getting down to the Spaniards.” For “hunting for, taking and destroying . . . rebellious Negroes,” Indian trackers received new clothes, muskets, powder, and “2 pounds of Paint” to decorate their bodies.17 With militia officers acting as judges, jurors, and executioners, those enslaved people who had been caught trying to escape suffered swift and merciless retribution. Summarily examined, they were often “shot on the Spot.” In one episode, a posse trapped a number of rebels who “fought stoutly” before they too were “killed on the Spot.” Passed soon after the rebellion, a new slave code retroactively justified such extrajudicial killings; the immediate threat presented by “rebellious Negroes,” claimed lawmakers, had made “the formality of a legal trial” impossible to effect, leaving the militia with no choice but “to put such Negroes to immediate death.” The revolt came full circle when, in a violent gesture to revenge the beheadings at Hutchenson’s store, and to reassert control over the bodies of their enslaved laborers, planters took “fifty of these Villains and Cutt off their Heads and set them on every Mile Post they came to”; the decapitations and display of severed heads reflected the effort to reestablish normative patterns of power and authority.18 Over the next few weeks, the white community of Saint Paul’s Parish mourned and buried its dead. The “Murders and Burnings” that had so devastated the district prompted several planters to abandon “their habitations, with their Wives and Children” for Charles Town, and led other families “to assemble together in Numbers . . . for their better Security and Defense against those Negroes which were concerned in that Insurrection who are not yet taken.” The uprising left deep and lasting scars on the collective consciousness of the white lowcountry, providing a vivid reminder

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that enslaved people could quickly seize the initiative, and turn the terror of slavery against their owners. It indicated, moreover, that if Jemmy and his followers had organized themselves more effectively and had not the militia so swiftly and mercilessly crushed the insurrection, then enslaved people collectively had the potential to destabilize, if not destroy, the plantation regime. Some enslaved people sought to exploit lingering uncertainties; in June 1740, reports about “another rising of the Negroes in Carolina” circulated. Enslaved laborers on the plantations along the Ashley River, in “Dorchester and circumjacent parts” had apparently “got together in Defiance.” On this occasion, the reports proved inaccurate; the planned revolt had been discovered a few hours before it was scheduled to begin. With “the Country being well alarmed and in Pursuit,” patrols rounded up about fifty rebels who were hanged, “ten in a day.”19 The colonial government’s response to the rebellion was twofold: First, having concluded that the Spanish presence in Florida constituted a significant threat to the colony, it decided to take military action. “That the Negroes would have not made this Insurrection had they not depended on St. Augustine for a Place of Reception was very certain,” concluded one report, “and that the Spaniards had a Hand in prompting them to this Particular Action, there was but little Room to Doubt.” Now at war with Spain (the War of Jenkins’ Ear that evolved into the War of Austrian Succession), the British promoted any form of military action against its enemy. The Assembly obliged; it bankrolled a campaign against San Agustin that collapsed when the expedition, having squandered the element of surprise after making a successful landing near the fort, wasted weeks maneuvering through the forests and swamps of northern Florida. Demoralized by James Oglethorpe’s indecisive leadership and exhausted by stifling heat, his soldiers were defeated by the Spanish and their Indian allies in June and were forced to retreat back to Georgia. Only when Oglethorpe’s men conclusively defeated the Spanish at Bloody Marsh in the southern Georgia lowcountry in 1742 was the problem presented by San Agustin finally solved.20 Second, the Assembly drafted comprehensive legislation for “the better ordering and governing of Negroes.” Passed in May 1740, the Negro Act revised and reaffirmed laws that had been on the books since the late seventeenth century and that were designed to keep slaves “in due subjection and obedience.” It added new restrictions on the lives of enslaved people, placed prohibitions on assembling together, on learning to read and write, and on

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wearing “clothes much above the condition of slaves.” But it also regulated the behavior of planters who exercised “too great rigour and cruelty” over their enslaved laborers, levying fines on those who failed to provide “sufficient cloathing, covering or food.” Any owner who “shall work or put to labour any such slave . . . [for] more than fifteen hours in four and twenty” between March and September (the limit was fourteen hours for the fall and winter) was liable to “forfeit any sum not exceeding twenty pounds current money.” Yet lawmakers had no intention of crafting a humanitarian code; the statute never explained how enslaved laborers might register a complaint against a planter who violated their “time for natural rest.” It also stipulated punishments for other crimes; any enslaved person found destroying “any stack of rice, corn, or other grain . . . or any other goods or commodities . . . of this Province” would “suffer death as a felon,” while any colonist who apprehended slaves “travelling or assembled together in high road . . . may whip them, not exceeding twenty lashes on the back.”21 For enslaved plantation workers, statutory law and the formal mechanisms of the legal system had little impact on everyday life. In the countryside, planters and overseers enforced informal disciplinary measures with various punishments, including whipping and other acts of bodily violence. They were the men who constituted “the law” that directly intruded on the lives of the enslaved. In the abstract, the laws passed by the Assembly to administer the colony’s enslaved population drew from article 110 of the Fundamental Constitutions that gave a master “absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.” But achieving this goal, however, required slaveholders to closely monitor their slaves’ activities; for example, to meet the requirement governing movement, enslaved people could not leave the plantation unless their owner signed a letter, or “a ticket,” that granted permission to travel, and if seven or more slaves took to “any High Road in this Province,” the law demanded that a white person accompany them. Likewise, similar paperwork needed to be completed before any enslaved laborer could take a firearm to “hunt and kill game . . . or mischievous birds, or beasts of prey.” Accordingly, many planters simply did not follow the letter of every article; Johann Boltzius noted how such onerous bureaucratic requirements meant that most laws were “quasi Campagna sine Pistillo” (not enforced in the countryside). The attitude adopted by planters, who regularly turned a blind eye to certain clauses of the statute, caused considerable concern among grand jurors who voiced their unease about the egregious violations of the act in their presentments.22

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Charles Town and the Countryside The rebellion along the Stono River revealed the contrasts between the texture of life in Charles Town and life in the surrounding countryside, contrasts that grew ever stronger as the century progressed. Writing pseudonymously, one traveler was so impressed by these differences that he wrote several articles that appeared in the South Carolina Gazette under the byline “The Stranger.” In Charles Town during the late summer of 1772, he witnessed the boisterous conduct of its Black inhabitants, their indifference toward municipal slave codes, and the lively exchange of gossip and goods on the streets firsthand, finding them topics worth examining and writing about. He perceived “a great Difference in Appearance as well as Behaviour, between the Negroes of the Country, and those in Charles Town,” with slaves from the countryside striking him as “contented, sober, modest, Humble, civil and obliging” people. Dressed according to their station in life, their “whole deportment,” he concluded, prompted “Such Reflections as every Man, endowed with the common Feelings of Humanity, ought to entertain.”23 He saw urban slaves in a very different light; they were “abandonedly unmannerly, insolent, and shameless.” Unlike their modest and obliging country cousins, city slaves, he wrote, were “Blasphemers, Gamesters, and Drunkards” who pursued “all Manner of LEWDNESS.” Grand jurors, who regularly complained about “the heinous and wicked custom of cursing and swearing amongst the negroes of this town” and their habits of “idleness, drunkenness and dishonesty,” shared the visitor’s concerns about the conduct of enslaved urban laborers, warning the white community to “Guard against the Machinations of so corrupt a Race.” But he did not just apportion blame only to the enslaved for their behavior. He also leveled criticism at municipal leaders for their failure to uphold the law, a failure that provided enslaved urban laborers with opportunities for “trampling on the laws.” Only when the authorities stamped out “that deluge of enormous vices which . . . prevails amongst your slaves” and appointed “Magistrates, Constables and Watchmen” ready to execute their duties conscientiously would order return to the city’s streets and public spaces.24 “The Stranger’s” observations should be treated with some caution. The timing of his visit likely influenced his comments and conclusions. Had he explored the countryside in early September 1739, for example, he doubtless would have drawn very different conclusions about rural slaves. Instead, he visited on the eve of the revolution when talk about “the blessings of Liberty . . .

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[and] the miseries of Oppression” were “topics of daily declamation” in taverns, on the streets, and elsewhere. In fact, in his final article, “Thoughts on the Dispute Between Great Britain and her Colonies,” he editorialized about the imperial crisis. The enslaved people that he encountered in Charles Town had witnessed disorderly protests against the Stamp Act in fall 1765, along with other rowdy demonstrations against Parliament, and they were familiar with the language of liberty so readily embraced by the crowd. As grand jurors often noted, enslaved people themselves were no strangers to behavior defined by the authorities as unruly and defiant; in October 1742, for example, one jury panel fulminated against “the disorderly assembling and caballing of the Negroes in Charles Town on the Sabbath Days”; things were no better nearly thirty years later when jurors again complained about slaves “profanely cursing, swearing and talking obscenely in the most Public Manner,” patronizing “Dram Shops and Tippling Houses” where they drank and became rowdy, and gathering on Sundays “playing Trap-­ball and Fives,” and “strolling about the streets.” Furthermore, “The Stranger” provided little evidence on how he differentiated between a rural slave and an urban slave, relying primarily on clothing to distinguish one from the other; while the former were “clad suitable to their Condition,” the latter, especially enslaved women, were “far more elegantly dressed, than the Generality of Women.” He also appeared unaware that enslaved people often dissembled before white interlocutors, allowing him to believe that “the civil and obliging” persona exhibited by rural slaves remained a constant while urban slaves were truculent and disobedient.25 He also did not fully recognize the complex ways in which the lives of urban and rural slaves overlapped and intersected. Charles Town was not hermetically sealed from its hinterlands. Masters often assigned their enslaved laborers to work at different locations; not only did they move them between the countryside and the town, but they also hired them out to other owners, actions that invariably took enslaved people from their primary residences. Whether selling food from provision grounds, catching fish in local rivers, transporting rice and other agricultural commodities to the Cooper River wharves, visiting family members, running errands, or, in some cases, simply running, most rural slaves could claim some acquaintance with urban life. The heightened visibility of enslaved workers on the city’s streets, wharves, and marketplaces along with the presence of slaves recently arrived from Africa going to auction occasionally led visitors to exaggerate the city’s enslaved and free Black population; visiting from Connecticut in spring 1765, Pelatiah Webster estimated that they were an astonishing twenty thousand

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people of African descent in Charles Town (in fact, it numbered about sixty-­two hundred). Webster’s visit, however, coincided with the arrival of five slave ships from Africa, carrying seven hundred slaves. Likewise, “The Stranger,” who marveled at “the Number of Black Faces that everywhere presented themselves” when he disembarked and thought himself in “Africa, or Lucifer’s Court” rather than in a British colony, arrived at the same time as nearly nine hundred enslaved Africans.26 On one occasion, “The Stranger” inadvertently provided evidence about the porous boundaries between Charles Town and its rural hinterlands. To research his articles, he disguised himself in “the habit of a Common Sailor” to explore the backstreets, alleys, and “the Interstices between the Stores upon the Wharves” unnoticed; he also traveled into the countryside one Saturday night where he surreptitiously watched a boisterous “Country Dance; Rout or Cabal of Negroes” from “a deserted adjacent hut.” Of the sixty or so people at this event, he thought that fifty had come from town with food and drink, which “without doubt, were stolen” from the pantries of unsuspecting owners. Enjoying “liquors of all sorts, Rum, Tongues, Hams, Beef, Geese, Turkies, and Fowls . . . [with] many luxuries of the table, as sweet meats, pickles &c,” the assembled revelers “danced, betted, gamed, swore, quarreled, [and] fought.” But this gathering was more than a social event; it was also an opportunity for “a secret council” of enslaved men, who wore “the appearance of Doctors in deep and solemn consultation” to meet and to apparently discuss how to assist several fugitives who had arrived “on good horses.” Such “nocturnal rendezvouses,” he concluded, were “never intended for the advantage of white people.”27 But the gathering witnessed by “The Stranger” was not unique. He learned that “such assemblies have been very common,” suggesting that enslaved people from urban and rural settings crossed paths on a regular basis and had developed connections that transcended place. Every workshop, wharf, plantation, cabin, and farm functioned as a hub from which radiated the spokes—the streets, roads, trails, rivers, and creeks—along which enslaved people moved by foot or canoe as they established dense networks of friendship, family, and community across the coastal plain. Moreover, that the traveler apparently spotted slaves on the run along with significant amounts of food and drink that he claimed had been taken from their owners’ pantries suggests another kind of organization at work: an underground and clandestine network that sought to help fugitives as well as set up occasions at which enslaved people might socialize, drink, and dance.28

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But the observation by “The Stranger” about the preponderance of people of African descent in Charles Town and the countryside was not entirely inaccurate. By 1720, the Africanization of the coastal plain was well underway; of the region’s total population of 18,393 men and women, 64 percent, or 11,868, were enslaved, a demographic fact that remained essentially unchanged until the Civil War. Between 1720 and the outbreak of the American Revolution, which led to the suspension of the slave trade for the duration of the war, the steady flow of tens of thousands of enslaved people from Atlantic Africa to the lowcountry renewed and recharged ethnic traditions and practices of the regions from which the captives had been taken. By 1775, the colony’s population numbered about 124,244 people, free and enslaved. Disaggregated, the figures reveal that 5,200 northern Europeans and 6,275 people of African descent lived in Charles Town; in the countryside, enslaved people remained in the majority (62,878, or 82 percent, while the rural white population numbered only 13,866 or 18 percent). Little wonder that the numbers of “black faces that everywhere presented themselves” made such an impression on “The Stranger.”29 His claim that rural and urban slaves conducted themselves in different ways poses an interesting question about slavery in these two settings. The social and economic organization of work on lowcountry plantations combined with the unique demographic circumstances of the countryside were fundamentally different from conditions in Charles Town, leading to the emergence of contrasting patterns of social relations between masters and slaves. By exploring the ecologies of slavery in the town and in the country, we may gain insight into the lives of urban and rural laborers and reveal how culture and geography shaped their lives during the last four decades of British rule.

On the Streets of the City: Slaves and Slavery in Charles Town On the eve of the eighteenth century, naturalist and explorer John Lawson walked along “regular and Fair Streets” lined with “good Buildings of Brick and Wood.” In the decades after his visit, Charles Town expanded significantly, occupying several hundred acres on the peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. By the eve of the American Revolution, the city had become the political and administrative center for the wealthiest colony in British North America as well as the leading port in the colonial southeast, far

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outstripping Savannah, its neighbor to the south. The growth of the lowcountry plantation economy had triggered the rise of a flourishing export business, turning merchants who traded in agricultural commodities and enslaved Africans into wealthy men; moreover, the rise of commercial farming and the expansion of slavery in the backcountry in mid-­century put yet more money into their pockets. In this period, not only did the city double in size, but the number of wharves—a handy index of growth—rose from two to eight. With the profits acquired from plantation staples, the slave trade, and other commercial ventures, the lowcountry elite transformed Charles Town from a modest port into a substantial town with “Straight, broad and airy” streets lined with elegant private houses, impressive public buildings, and churches where its members might pursue lives of cultured refinement and conspicuous display. 30 The buildings that so regularly evoked laudatory remarks from locals and visitors alike were often the result of rebuilding following natural and man-­ made disasters. With its wooden houses, stables, warehouses, and workshops, Charles Town was remarkably vulnerable to sparks from unguarded candles, kitchen fires, or blacksmith’s forges, not to mention enslaved people, who might deliberately or inadvertently cause a fire. In late 1740, a major fire broke out, although the authorities did not blame enslaved people on this occasion; the blaze consumed more than three hundred buildings, leveling “the best and most valuable part of town” along with “the greater part of the Shops, Stores, and Warehouses . . . [and] an Immense Quantity of Goods and Merchandize.” That fire was a constant danger led the authorities to regulate the types of materials that builders used while fire masters sought to ensure that every household had “a leathern bucket of six quarts . . . for every hearth” readily accessible, and that straw and other “combustible matters” had been removed from stables and outhouses.31 From late summer until the end of autumn, hurricanes and tropical storms threatened the southeastern seaboard. Five hurricanes struck the lowcountry between 1680 and 1775, with the most destructive making landfall in mid-­September 1752. Within hours, a “sky wild and threatening” had turned into a cataclysm; immense winds ripped roofs off houses, demolished warehouses, and tore down chimneys, while a storm surge brought “incredible quantities of all sorts of timber, barrels, staves, shingles, household and other goods floating . . . with great violence through the streets.” Those fortunate enough to escape floodwaters that came “up to their necks” staggered out into a devastated city, picking their way through piles of debris and the bodies of

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the drowned. The countryside was also ravaged; the “pest-­house” on Sullivan’s Island, where newly arrived slaves from Africa were quarantined, was “carried away,” while there was “hardly a plantation that has not lost every out house upon it.” Although the Gazette never published a casualty list, it noted that “many people were drowned, and others much hurt.” Just when residents had regained their equilibrium, another storm pummeled the coast.32 Out of the devastations caused by fire, wind, and water arose new buildings and new neighborhoods. In 1742, Lutheran minister Johann Boltzius reported that the “burned part of the city is nearly completely reconstructed and the building is continuing vigorously” while Swiss migrant Johannes Tobler commented how streets earlier covered with cinders were now “covered with handsome houses and other buildings built more beautifully than before.” Rebuilding Charles Town also had an economic impact; urban slaveholders hired out their enslaved carpenters, bricklayers, and masons, while local merchants profited from providing construction materials. By mid-­ century, Charles Town’s public buildings as well as the private residences of the elite reflected the colony’s prosperity and aspirations.33 After “sauntering” around Charles Town “in the great heats,” Peletiah Webster soon concluded that the “laborious business is here chiefly done by black slaves, of which there are great multitudes.” In the rooms and kitchens of the city’s town houses, enslaved domestics performed countless household chores; on the streets and on open lots, enslaved building workers repaired old buildings and constructed new ones. The “Negroes learn,” noted Bolzius, “all kinds of common and useful crafts” that ranged from cabinetry and furniture-­making to metal work to assembling saddles and bridles to building carts and carriages. In addition, there were a number of the skilled and unskilled jobs associated with the maritime economy; enslaved workers fabricated barrels, rope, rigging, and sails, and they assembled and repaired all variety of marine craft. Seeking advice about relocating to Charles Town in 1747, a textile worker from Philadelphia learned that his business “will last probably no longer than until two negro slaves shall have learned the weaver’s trade from him, and can weave themselves”; with enslaved workers learning “all the trades and are used for all kinds of business,” artisans, concluded his acquaintance, “have difficulty earning their bread there.” Bolzius concurred, noting that enslaved artisans who had learned “all kind of common and useful crafts,” had ensured that “the poor [white] craftsman cannot succeed.”34 A very visible presence on the streets and wharves, the city’s enslaved workforce was rarely out of sight of its white residents. Unlike their rural

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counterparts, who lived in quarters often at some remove from the plantation’s main dwelling, urban slaves, noted Governor James Glen, resided in “back houses, kitchens . . . storehouses, stables, and coach or chaise houses” behind the main house, never far from their owners. While enslaved plantation laborers could meet, worship, and socialize in secluded corners of the rural lowcountry far from the scrutiny of owners and overseers, urban slaves did not have access to similarly remote places to rendezvous. In contrast, they had little choice but to conduct their communal life in plain sight of the city’s white residents; alleys, yards, and street corners became the spaces for gathering. Such constraints perhaps forced them to be more creative in finding places that offered respite from their master’s gaze; or, as “The Stranger” discovered, it led them to seek out isolated places and disused buildings on the margins between the town and the countryside to gather.35 The work culture of urban slaves depended on the specific configuration of their laboring lives. These arrangements fell into two broad categories: first, those who worked under their owner’s supervision, either doing domestic tasks in their households or at their place of business or working as craftsmen or unskilled laborers and, second, the slaves who hired out their services for a day or other preassigned period to other people. In this first group, for example, were enslaved stevedores and shipwrights, who worked on the waterfront on the wharves, in the warehouses, and in the boatyards that lined the Cooper River. Skilled to one degree or another in carpentry, caulking, ironwork, and joinery, the enslaved laborers who worked under the supervision of shipwright William Tweed at his yard on Trott’s Point, spent their days repairing and refitting the vessels that plied lowcountry rivers as well as the Atlantic Ocean.36 Slaves who worked as day laborers experienced different arrangements. Although Tweed’s enslaved workers had some control over their work, perhaps deriving some sense of pride and dignity from the skills they deployed to build and repair boats, they remained subject to their owners’ supervision and instruction. Slaves who provided municipal services exerted less control over their laboring lives than craftsmen or enslaved workers who hired out their own time. Cart drivers, porters, street cleaners, laborers, and other unskilled slaves were often hired out on a daily basis; they worked for rates set periodically by the municipality, with the rate for each job listed in the South Carolina Gazette. Owners who hired their slaves for menial labor thus knew the charges for, say, moving rice barrels or “other carriage and porterage,” or cleaning wells, “or other work which oblige them to stand in water”

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(seven shillings and six pence and ten shillings per day, respectively, in 1755). Owners also earned income by hiring out their skilled slaves, with the columns of the Gazette acting as an intermediary between owner and client. People frequently posted notices seeking enslaved workers’ particular skills, such as architect and surveyor William Rigby-­Naylor, who, hiring workmen for a building project, advertised for “five or six good negro carpenters,” or James Grindlay, who needed “a good negro blacksmith to hire.” In other cases, slaveholders simply informed readers of the abilities of slaves available for hire. Thomas Sacheverell not only informed potential clients about Thom, his enslaved bricklayer, but also provided instructions about his hiring protocols, requiring them to describe the job, its cost and arrangements for payment. In another instance, slaveowner Henry Hext used its columns to explain how Tony, his enslaved bricklayer, could be hired, instructing them that John Bee, acting as his agent, was “impowered to hire the said Negro and receive the wages.”37 Self-­hire, or hiring out one’s own time, was another variation on the leasing of slave labor that blurred the lines between free and enslaved status. In this case, the burden of arranging work, collecting the cash, and turning it over to his owner fell to the individual laborer. Some enslaved people might receive money directly from the hirer, who then had the responsibility of handing it directly to the owner. In turn, the enslaved person would then receive a portion of his earnings from his enslaver. Ambiguity appears to have characterized each transaction under this arrangement, highlighting the tension between the value the enslaved laborer accorded the work performed and the value that the master placed on that labor. Given the universe of work within the city, there was no distinct boundary that divided the organization of free labor, the payment of wages for work performed, and the arrangements in which slaves who hired out their own labor were embedded.38 Unlike enslaved workers who labored under their master’s gaze, individual slaves who hired out enjoyed a degree of geographic mobility and autonomy. Their ability to move freely about the city had repercussions; they not only were conduits of news, gossip, and information but also could pursue pastimes that shaded into criminality, such as aiding fugitive slaves, trafficking in stolen goods, or visiting “Dram-­shops and Tippling-­Houses” that sold “spirituous liquors . . . whereby the morals of our slaves are debauched” and where “frequent thefts ensue.” The widespread use of hiring out in the building trades meant that enslaved bricklayers, carpenters, masons, and other construction workers moved between sites unhindered. Owned by

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Elizabeth Smith, Lancaster, a whitewasher and fisherman, was one of many enslaved laborers who readily exploited lax supervision as well as his mobility, often working for himself and pocketing his earnings without handing them to his owner.39 With its symbolic and economic power, cash weakened the foundations upon which chattel slavery was built. Lancaster’s case effectively illustrates the paradox at the heart of urban slavery. Rather than refund cash collected from selling fish or whitewashing walls to Smith, he held onto it, fully aware that white painters kept their earnings. For Lancaster, the temptation to pocket the cash proved too great. How Lancaster, who, noted his owner, “constantly earns Money,” managed to explain away the absence of earnings—she thought that he spent it in “Punch-­Houses” or lost it “gaming”—remains a mystery. Lancaster ultimately became a fugitive, provoking the exasperated Smith to post a runaway notice in the Gazette. In early 1741, she decided to put a stop to Lancaster’s activities, alerting readers about his conduct, noting how he “imposed upon his employers and defrauded me of his wages,” and demanding that prospective hirers obtain her permission to “employ” Lancaster. By fall, she acknowledged defeat; not only had Lancaster again absconded, but Smith had yet to receive any cash. She then banned “all Persons” from hiring him unless her agent—Doctor Dale—directly received “whatever Money the said Lancaster shall earn.” Simultaneously a slave and a wage earner, Lancaster embodied the contradiction of urban slavery. Legally Smith’s property and subject to her authority and the laws that governed slaves, Lancaster simply ignored his owner, sidestepped regulations, and, in all but name, turned himself into an independent operator, exchanging his labor for cash. Moreover, the ritual exchange of money between the enslaved laborer and his enslaver after the completion of a job (or, in Lancaster’s case, a transaction that never occurred) perhaps reinforced the ambiguous nature of enslaved labor in the city, highlighting the inequity at the heart of the system.40 Unsurprisingly, city authorities received endless complaints from merchants and craftsmen for failing to uphold hiring laws. Local merchants claimed that lax enforcement encouraged crime; taking full advantage of “the great Liberty and Indulgence” that this arrangement offered, enslaved laborers working on hire appeared to acquire goods in suspicious circumstances only to sell them in order “to pay their several Masters and Owners their weekly Wages.” Market overseers also wanted to curb its abuses, claiming that slaves on hire often stole food, selling it at inflated prices in order to get “money to satisfy the wages to their masters.” To combat this tactic, they threatened to

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confiscate such goods, and to proceed against miscreants “with the utmost rigour.” White artisans also took issue with hiring, complaining that skilled slaves working on hire endangered their livelihoods, leaving them with “little or no Work to do,” and reducing their families to “poverty.”41 The skills possessed by enslaved artisans shaped the organization of work and the productive process. The enslaved shipwrights and carpenters at Tweed’s boatyard had various degrees of technical know-­how and expertise, ranging from basic carpentry to the engineering knowledge needed to build, for example, the forty-­five-­foot schooner for which they laid the keel in May 1770. Recognizing their individual abilities, Tweed could assign work accordingly, teaching and monitoring novice carpenters as they cut and prepared planks for the hull and deck while allowing veteran artisans to assemble the vessel itself with little supervision. The relationship between skill and slavery in this setting complicated the lines of power between the owner and the owned. But it was Tweed rather than his enslaved boat builders who controlled the productive process; not only did he own the means of production at the yard on Trott’s Point—the facility itself with its slipway, sheds, tools, canvas, timber, and tar—but he also owned the workers and the fruits of their labor. Even while he relied on their skills and initiative to do their jobs, in legal terms, he exercised absolute power over them. Enslaved laborers who understood boat building and possessed the skill and knowledge equivalent to Tweed’s were, in some sense, equal partners in “the community of skill” and perhaps shared a sense of accomplishment when a new schooner took its maiden voyage around Charles Town Harbor. Within this realm, his enslaved shipwrights had opportunities to shape the labor process as they worked together, established customs and practices in the workplace to suit their needs and abilities, and perhaps compromised with their master in such negotiations. But as enslaved workers, regardless of their skills and abilities, they were fundamentally unequal in the relationship between Tweed and themselves.42 Dominating several occupations, enslaved workers had a dramatic impact on the fortunes of white laborers and artisans. Slaves performed work regularly disdained by white men, including scavenging, which entailed walking “through all the streets, lanes, and alleys in town to carry off all the filth and dirt”; digging and cleaning wells; and slaughtering and dressing animals. They also enjoyed a virtual monopoly on waterborne work, with enslaved and free Black men working as fishermen and ferrymen; likewise, they dominated the retail trade in meat, with “scarce any but black butchers are employed.”

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And, even though enslaved men “train’d up to be Handicraft Tradesmen,” they did not occupy every skilled job, but they provided stiff competition for their white counterparts. The Assembly bemoaned the fact that the presence of skilled slaves in nearly every trade discouraged “white subjects, who come here to settle with a view of employment in their several occupations, but must give way to a people in slavery.”43 Gender also shaped urban work. Enslaved women provided essential domestic labor, performing tasks that ranged from the intimate to the tedious and mundane. Elite white women often hired young slave women as wet nurses, often requesting “a healthy wench” with “a good breast of milk.” Along with feeding infants, wet nurses often performed other child-­care duties. Away from the nursery, enslaved domestics cooked, cleaned, and did countless other chores. Those enslaved domestics who worked within the four walls of their owners’ houses did not enjoy the same degree of mobility and autonomy experienced by their counterparts who hired themselves out. Enslaved women who were hired out often seem to have worked for one household over an extended period; Charles Pinckney, for example, advertised for “a very good seamstress” to hire by “the month or year” while Hugh Swinton sought “a good cook” for “six to nine months.” While enslaved men often learned the skills necessary for a particular trade or craft, few enslaved domestics performed work that their owners regarded as “skilled,” even though many household tasks, like needlework, required dexterity and ability. Yet owners recognized that skill and expertise increased the slave’s value. When selling enslaved domestics, vendors often listed such attributes in advertisements; auctioning several female slaves, James Comerford noted that Arrah was “an excellent Nurse, Cook and Washerwoman,” Sarah was also a good cook and an “Excellent Nurse and Needlewoman,” while Susannah was “fit for any Thing about a House.” But whatever their particular assignment in the household, enslaved women were at their owners’ beck and call throughout the day. With very little time to themselves, they perhaps relished any chance to run errands that took them into the unsupervised streets.44 Not all enslaved women worked within the confines of the house. The lives of enslaved laundresses, who did perhaps the most demanding and unpleasant household chore, sheds further light on domestic labor. As household managers, white women often advertised for enslaved females to “wash Cloathes . . . by the month,” and “pleat and iron” freshly laundered garments. James Laurens hired out Chloe to “work at a stated Washerwoman’s & to bring in her wages weekly [of] thirty shillings.” After Laurens had collected

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his portion of the week’s earnings, she used the remainder of the money to care for herself and her son, Stepny. That Chloe worked for a “stated Washerwoman” suggests that she worked under an experienced slave laundress who probably traveled from house to house, washing for individual families in their houses, perhaps in another building dedicated to this task. In other cases, enslaved laundresses carted soiled garments to “negro washing houses,” the eighteenth-­century equivalent of the modern-­day laundromat, to clean clothes alongside other enslaved women.45 The laundry was also a place of female sociability where enslaved women might swap news, gossip, and stories. Washerwomen might lampoon their customers while they scrubbed clothes, using elegant garments from their elite clients as props to mimic their habits, perhaps commenting on the contrasts between their plain garb and the garments being washed. For the twenty-­four-­year-­old Kate, an enslaved woman owned by Christ Church Parish planter Paul Villepontoux and who had run off with her young son Billy to Charles Town, laundry work provided an opportunity to earn money and evade her master. Changing her name to Delia, she moved “about town” as a washerwoman and “was suspected to be . . . concealed by some white people who have received wages of her.” With their arms aching from carrying clothes, carting wood, and scrubbing garments in tubs of hot water, enslaved women contributed to the creation of an urban, female-­centered work culture.46 This work perhaps served yet another function. Enslaved laundresses possibly used their access to clothes to acquire the “excessive and costly apparel” that grand jurors found so troubling; they regularly complained about the failure to enforce statutes that banned slaves from wearing “any sort of apparel whatsoever . . . of greater value than negro cloth, duffels . . . checked cloth or Scotch plaids.” Such violations, they argued, suggested criminal behavior, with enslaved women singled out as the main culprits for their habit of wearing “Apparel quite gay and beyond their Condition.” How else, jurors inquired, could slaves “support the present Extravagance of their Dress” unless they engaged in theft or “other Practices equally vicious?” That they might have obtained these garments from among their owners’ discarding clothes appears not to have crossed their minds. Passing shops, such as William Lloyd’s store on East Bay Street, with its shelves stocked with “poplins, ladies ruffles, printed and white calicoes, plain and strip’d muslins, cotton velvets . . . [and] silk and worsted hose,” where elite women inspected and purchased such merchandise, enslaved men and women perhaps considered how clothes had become

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another marker that defined status. Moreover, having access to newspapers containing notices for fugitive slaves, enslaved people knew how masters invariably described the type of garments worn by escaped slaves, again highlighting the significance of wardrobe.47 For enslaved women, the marketplace was a lively and dynamic site of economic and social exchange. Arriving from the countryside laden with poultry, eggs, vegetables, and other produce from plantation allotments, enslaved women from the country traded goods in a setting where they had some leeway to set the rules of engagement and influence the market’s invisible hand. Standing at the corner of Broad and Meeting Streets, “The Stranger” saw “a great number of loose, idle, disorderly negro women” trading “on their own account” and engaging in various subterfuges to manipulate sales; he witnessed them deliberately create shortages by hiding certain products in order to drive up prices, and reselling items that they had sold earlier. Observing enslaved women “engross many articles,” which suddenly appeared again for sale “at 100 or 150 percent advance”; watching them snatch goods from white customers, claiming that they had been sold earlier only to “expose the same again . . . for their own benefit”; and “surround[ing] fruit carts . . . and purchas[ing] amongst them, the whole contents, to the exclusion of every white person,” he concluded that enslaved women, who charged “exorbitant” prices for goods, were colluding to manipulate the market.48 Grand jurors echoed “The Stranger’s” conclusions about practices that distorted the orderly functioning of the market. Never shy about registering their annoyance at the activities, entrepreneurial and otherwise, of Black Charlestonians, they argued that unregulated commerce hurt the livelihoods of white traders and encouraged criminal behavior. Few petitioners failed to note “the great hurt” inflicted on white businesses by “Negroes . . . retailing Goods, Wares, and Merchandize through the streets,” along with countless complaints about how “Negro Wenches . . . are allowed to huckster and sell all Sorts of Dry Goods, Fruit and Victuals about the Markets and Streets.” Filed by “sundry Inhabitants,” these complaints noted how enslaved women distorted the operation of the marketplace by “buying up Provisions which come to Town for Sale and again retailing the same to the Inhabitants at dear and exorbitant Prices,” contending that the cash used to buy these items had been acquired illegally. By exploiting their owners’ “Indulgence . . . and free from the Government of their Masters,” slaves were allegedly engaged in a full-­blown crime spree, breaking into houses to acquire goods to sell to unsuspecting customers. Only when the Assembly tackled these problems,

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and effectively enforced the law would “many poor and industrious [white] families” be able to obtain “an honest livelihood.”49 The city, however, made only feeble efforts to manage the boisterous and rowdy life of its streets, alleys, and markets. Public spaces provided urban slaves with sites where they might subtly undermine the codes that purportedly regulated them. Enslaved men flaunted the law by gaming, drinking, and engaging in other disorderly activities, while female slave vendors hustled white customers in the marketplace; but the streets provided a stage for other subversive activities. Rather than respect “the Lord’s Day,” urban slaves instead passed the time “strolling about the streets.” Visiting Charles Town from Boston in early 1773, Josiah Quincy joined the chorus; to the consternation of pious churchgoers, enslaved people spent Sundays playing “pawpaw, huzzle-­cap [and] pitch penny” and “quarreling around the doors of the Churches in service-­time.” City streets were also the place where slaves could openly violate sumptuary laws by wearing clothes that were suspiciously fashionable, thus giving grand jurors more ammunition to demand that those attired in dress “beyond their means and Stations of Life to obtain in a just and honest Way” be disciplined.50 For enslaved Africans transported from Sierra Leone or the Windward Coast to Charles Town, the bustle and energy of its markets had a ring of familiarity. At Cabo Corso, a market and “a good trading place” adjacent to the slave fort of Elmina on the Gulf of Guinea, Fante women displayed their entrepreneurial skills. Observing a day in the life of the market in 1602, Dutch trader Pieter de Marees watched female villagers, whom he thought “very eager traders,” arrive with baskets laden with produce, and set out their stalls with “necessaries as people in Coastal towns need to buy,” including poultry, fruit, maize, and rice. Dutch mariners also participated, trading “Linen or Cloth . . . Knives, polished Beads” and other items. Positioned around the square, every trader knew “the place where they must stand with their goods or Wares”; female fruit sellers “have their place on one side” while stallholders “who come with wood, water, and bread, have their place to sit or stand on another side.” By arranging space in this way, each trader was able to keep an informal eye on their neighbor, enabling them to price goods more competitively. Only at the stand selling palm wine did order break down; their patrons, noted de Marees, were “so keen on this particular drink that they often come to blows about it.” At the end of the trading day, the women headed back to their villages “as heavily loaded as when they set out,” carrying their purchases along with any unsold provisions as well as the latest

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news and gossip, the embodiment of the locality’s cultural and economic networks.51 Gender, skill, and the specific configuration of work all shaped the experiences of enslaved men and women in Charles Town. In turn, these factors had an impact on enslaved people’s participation in the cash economy. Getting and spending, albeit at very modest levels, gave enslaved people some degree of economic independence, perhaps blunting the profound material deprivations that they experienced. In some cases, money bought more than a length of colorful fabric, a pipe of tobacco, a glass of rum, or a bowl of food; it also had the potential to buy freedom. In his will, local merchant Benjamin Stead stipulated that his slave Bevis be manumitted once he had earned £500 in local currency “arising from his labours.” In 1762, two and a half years after Stead’s death, Bevis had enough cash to purchase his freedom. Likewise, an enslaved woman named Sarah saved £150 to purchase her daughter Mary and “the future issue of Mary from all slavery and bondage” from her owner Richard Lambton.52 Even though hiring out proved to be one solution to meeting Charles Town’s labor requirements, it generated a series of problems that ranged from fraud to theft. Its widespread use was also a tacit recognition of slave autonomy; each enslaved person became vulnerable to experiencing the tensions and contradictions of being a slave as well as an independent and valued wage earner. Many enslaved men, perhaps ambivalent about their quasi-­free status (as revealed in their potential as wage earners, through recognition of their skills and through their right to move about the city), may have perceived the arrangement of urban slavery as a vehicle that simultaneously defined them as free and bound. While the cash in their pockets possibly made slaves feel that they were on a path to an independent existence, they won little in the way of immediate compromise within the system. The immediacy of this tension between bondage and freedom experienced by urban slaves may explain the comments by “The Stranger”; it may also explain the slaves’ receptivity to the radical strains of political thought that gained currency during the last quarter of the century.

Lowcountry Life: The Making of a Rural Slave World With dusk approaching, the enslaved women who had spent the day selling produce on Charles Town’s streets and in its markets returned to their

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plantations on foot and in canoes through a countryside that had undergone a significant transformation since 1670. The development of commercial rice cultivation had turned the lowcountry into a plantation society. By shifting rice cultivation from dry fields to the margins of the rivers and creeks that crisscrossed the lowlands, planters could now raise the grain in fields with ample moisture. Irrigation canals and reservoirs also became part of this new hydraulic landscape, with ditches and ponds allowing planters to control the volume of water flowing across the fields. Building fields along river estuaries and using the power of an ebbing tide to draw fresh water over the fields complemented earlier innovations in cultivation over the course of the eighteenth century.53 Lowcountry plantations constituted more than just ditches, reservoir ponds, barns, cabins, houses, and hundreds of acres of fields. They were, to a significant degree, self-­contained units of production where enslaved laborers not only cultivated and processed rice and indigo but also grew vegetables in provision grounds, raised poultry and other domestic animals in plantation yards, and hunted and fished. To meet their estate’s productive requirements, planters constructed the sheds and barns necessary for commercial farming; buildings that also served the plantation’s domestic economy. Here, enslaved laborers milked cows, churned butter, pounded rice, forged iron for hoes and horseshoes, and repaired carts and other farm equipment. The infrastructure—fields, ditches, sluices, barns, cabins, and dairy sheds—combined with its enslaved labor force turned the coastal plain into an agricultural empire. The rice field became the center of the slaves’ laboring lives, with the rhythm and tempo of planting, irrigating, harvesting, and processing the crop determining the course of the agricultural year. Clearing land and preparing fields for the coming year was perhaps the most arduous form of work, requiring determination, strength, and stamina. It was not uncommon to see gangs of enslaved laborers clearing swampland. In the summer of 1765, naturalist John Bartram watched over a hundred slaves “digging ye ditch both men and women . . . alike in their labours as is common in the Carolinas. . . . Ye women works in ye field with ye men.” Visiting John Moultrie’s plantation on James Island, Bartram noted its “surpriseing improvements”; enslaved laborers had cleared and drained acres of salt marsh, sluicing away the salt with rainwater to create “excelent rice fields” that yielded “rice in great plenty.” But clearing “new Ground of its Woods” and carving new fields from wilderness required more than the collective effort of dozens of enslaved workers shifting tons of earth and cutting down dozens of trees; it also required the

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technical expertise necessary to build irrigation systems that would water the crops effectively.54 The success of the agricultural year depended heavily on the effective irrigation of thousands of acres of rice fields. With the plant requiring immense amounts of water to mature and ripen, overseers regularly reported to their employers about the state of the plantation’s drains, reservoirs, and ditches. No advertisement for a plantation sale was complete without a description of the property’s water resources; selling five hundred acres on the Combahee River in 1760, for example, Joseph Andrew alerted prospective buyers to its “Fine fresh water lake” and irrigation system that provided “an exceeding good reserve for watering the rice land.” Alerting prospective buyers to his plantation in Saint John’s Parish, William Mazyck boasted how its system of dams ensured a steady supply of water even during “the greatest droughts.” Owner of several thousand acres on the Cooper River, Henry Laurens often discussed the subject of water and its availability in his correspondence. He voiced concern about the severe lack of rain when, prior to the harvest in 1762, he and his fellow planters found themselves “suffering under a long spell of dry weather,” and concluded that those “who have not great resources of Water damn’d in will lose their Crops.” Contemplating expanding his agricultural interests into East Florida several years later, he demanded that his agent thoroughly examine potential plantations for their “Ponds, Lakes or Creeks of Fresh Water” to assess their “capacity of holding reserves of such Water” and to estimate how they “drain’d in gluts of Rain.” While a wet spring and early summer allowed planters to sleep easy, drought or torrential rains led to sleepless nights later in the year. Too much water, however, led to other problems; hurricanes and tropical storms inundated fields, flattening crops ready for harvest, while drought resulted in parched fields, withered plants, and poor yields. In late May 1771, an “uncommon quantity of rain” fell, causing widespread devastation as rivers burst their banks, drowning “a great quantity of cattle and hogs,” resulting in the loss of “more than a third of the crop of Rice and corn,” and forcing people who lived on the Pee Dee’s flood plain to flee “for their lives after losing all their provisions and moveables.”55 Along with water and “wet, deep, miry soil,” labor was the other critical element in the cultivation of rice. With the rice kingdom’s expansion in the early eighteenth century, planters became increasingly interested in the provenance of their enslaved laborers. It remains unclear the extent to which planters understood that the fields, ditches, and ponds constructed by slaves had their antecedents along the rivers and estuaries of the Senegambia

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and Sierra Leone, but slavers trading in the markets along the African coast understood that their clients on the other side of the Atlantic often demonstrated preferences for certain ethnic groups. Laurens, who began his career as a merchant in the slave trade before becoming a planter, was particularly attuned to this aspect of the business. Slaves purchased in the Calabar markets in the Bight of Biafra, he noted, “wont go down when others can be had in plenty,” while enslaved people from Gambia regularly fetched a good price. “Our Planters,” he informed Gidney Clarke in 1756, “are desirous of large strong People like the Gambias & will not touch small limb’d People.” Fearful that saber-­rattling between England and France would “damp” the auction of slaves from “Gambia and the Windward Coast,” he was delighted to learn that “planters were so mad after them” that they continued to fetch high prices. Writing to his partner Richard Oswald, a Scottish merchant who ran a major slaving operation on Bunce Island, a trading post located in the lower reaches of the Sierra Leone River that served as “a general rendezvous” for traders throughout the Upper Guinea, Laurens urged his partner to acquire more enslaved laborers from this region as they “are preferr’d to all others.”56 New arrivals rapidly found themselves embedded in the work regime of the lowcountry rice plantations. For enslaved laborers, the task rather than time shaped their lives, with planters arranging labor around preassigned jobs. Boltzius noted that planters took several factors into account when classifying tasks. Not every job or crop, or so planters calculated, required the same input of labor; planting half an acre of potatoes was equivalent to weeding a quarter of an acre of a rice field, while splitting one hundred rails (about twelve feet long and four inches in diameter) constituted a single task. Discussing the cultivation of corn, he noted that “a good Negro man or woman must plant half an acre a day,” while slaves assigned “to cultivate the rice . . . must complete 1/4 acre daily.” The agricultural calendar also informed work arrangements; when the rice crop ripened during the mid-­summer, Boltzius reckoned that planters tasked one slave to “take care of an acre or more.” Tasking eventually regulated the allocation of nearly every type of job on the plantation, becoming an established yardstick by which to measure work, and eventually evolving into a set of customary rights and obligations. It was, noted a planter visiting the region from Jamaica, where gangs of enslaved laborers worked in the cane fields, “the mode in which all their negroes are put to labour.”57 The specific tasks performed by enslaved laborers required considerable effort and absorbed a significant part of the day. Planting half an acre

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of potatoes was not a job that one enslaved laborer could complete in a few hours. And it is worth reiterating that an American football field occupies just over an acre. When the assigned work was completed, however, slaves could turn to their own pursuits. “If the Negroes are skillful and industrious,” noted Boltzius, “they plant something for themselves after the day’s work.” The provision ground became an important site for the development of culture and community for enslaved people, becoming as central to their lives as were the rice fields. They also took advantage of other features of the plantations to supplement their diets, using its ponds and old rice fields, as Bartram noted, “to breed & nourish great numbers of fish as pike, gar, mullett, trout, mud fish, bream [and] carp.” The central role played by provision grounds on the lowcountry frontier ensured the slaves’ persistence even after rice had supplanted ranching.58 Provision grounds prompted the rise of other economic arrangements. First, its produce led to the rise of an internal, or micro-­economy, on the plantation itself. Even if enslaved people raised only modest amounts of food on their allotments, planters could still reduce their overheads. Although plantation owners were responsible for supplying their enslaved laborers with clothing, shelter, and basic rations, food raised on provision grounds afforded planters an opportunity to achieve some degree of self-­sufficiency. When lowcountry planter Peter Gordon observed that the “expence of the master in supporting his negroes is but very small,” it was no idle boast; by raising food that they then consumed, slaves might supplement and enrich their own diets as well as their owner’s profits. Second, home-­grown produce enabled slaves to become economic actors themselves. Besides taking pride in making meals from the vegetables, poultry, and fish that they had raised or caught themselves, they could draw on culinary practices from Atlantic Africa, creating a hybrid cuisine in the process that incorporated local foods with ethnic cooking practices. And, as we have seen, the surpluses generated from their plots also had exchange value. Riding to Charles Town on one occasion, Boltzius encountered this informal economy; needing to feed his horse, he spoke with an overseer who “directed me to the Negroes” from whom he purchased two quarts of corn from a slave for “a half crown of local paper currency” only to find the grain was “so dirty that the horse did not wish to eat it.” Boltzuis did not reveal how the cash was spent, but he later noted that enslaved people sometimes used money “to buy themselves some old rags.” The cash obtained from this and similar transactions, along with the earnings of rural enslaved women in Charles Town’s market brought

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consumer goods, albeit on a very modest scale, to the cabins of the slave quarter, improving the material conditions of its inhabitants.59 Using the task system to organize the labor of enslaved people was not a common feature of other New World plantation societies. It remained sui generis to the coastal lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia until the destruction of slavery at the end of the Civil War. In most plantation regimes, planters regularly organized their enslaved laborers, who raised cotton, coffee, and sugar, into regimented gangs. Of course, task and gang labor were not mutually exclusive ways to configure work; they constituted, as historian Philip Morgan observes, “two extremes in a range of labor systems” with individual tasking located at one end of the spectrum and regimented gang labor at the other, with planters deploying appropriate variations when circumstances demanded. Tasking could not effectively accommodate the demands of every single job on lowcountry plantations; at harvest time, for example, planters simply set tasking aside and opted for the gang system, organizing their slaves into teams to work throughout the day and, when the moon was full, at night as well, reaping, binding, and preparing the crop for the marketplace.60 For enslaved laborers, the task system possessed some advantages over gang work, enabling them to exercise an element of control over the productive process while ganging limited opportunities to regulate the pace of work. Supervised by an overseer and subject to the specific needs of the crop, the gang performed a series of laborious, exhausting, and mind-­numbingly repetitive jobs, hour after hour, day in and day out. To some extent, tasking enabled slaves to shape their own work habits, and perhaps to feel some sense of accomplishment when they completed their assigned job. Enslaved people who wanted to work on their garden plots, go hunting or fishing, or pursue some other activity might work harder to complete their task sooner. Those who worked with “moderate diligence,” noted one traveler, might finish their task by mid-­afternoon. Moreover, able to exercise some control over their work at the point of production, enslaved people could take shortcuts to finish their task more quickly and then turn their energies to their own enterprises.61 The organization of slave labor on the frontier may help explain the task system’s persistence in the plantation lowcountry. Although settlers from Barbados were very familiar with the gang system, having deployed this innovation unique to plantation agriculture to raise tobacco and sugar, it was unsuitable for configuring work on the lowcountry frontier. Neither cattle ranching nor the production of naval stores lent themselves readily to such

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arrangements. Rather, the enslaved ranch hand’s daily life revolved around a series of specific jobs: milking cows, slaughtering cattle, supervising grazing, branding livestock, and penning animals. Likewise, converting pine trees into naval stores required slaves to complete several discreet jobs, work that was better suited to the task system. It may be that patterns of labor established by the frontier generation informed the organization of work that determined production on rice plantations.62 The practices of African agriculturalists, too, may also have influenced the overall shape of tasked labor, evolving syncretically when enslaved workers brought familiar agricultural methods to bear on lowcountry plantation work. In many societies in sub-­Saharan Africa, slavery exhibited wide variation, but it seems that slaves worked until midday for their masters and then devoted the afternoon to their own plots. Enslaved laborers in western Africa perhaps distinguished between labor done for their masters on “communal” property and work performed in the “household” for their own families. For herdsmen in the Sahel, the rhythms of grazing, watering, milking, and then corralling the animals at nightfall organized their daily lives; for these pastoralists, who moved across the immense region between the southern margins of the Sahara and the northern edges of western Africa’s forests, the execution and completion of these tasks partitioned the day into preordained periods. Similar working practices also shaped the lives of the lowcountry’s enslaved ranch hands. Domestic life in western Africa was organized around the completion of specific jobs, with women working in the fields until midday before they turned to their household chores, which included spinning, weaving, brewing, and “dressing victuals for sale, and carrying merchandises to market.”63 Those who lived between the Gambia and Sierra Leone Rivers apparently assigned different values to the work performed for the household’s upkeep and other forms of labor. Stationed on the Sierra Leone coast, a major catchment area for a large number of lowcountry slaves, Thomas Winterbottom wrote that “the plantation is cultivated by all the inhabitants of the village in common, and the produce is divided to every family in proportion to its numbers.” On family plots, which villagers considered “not as public, but as private property,” he noted how they occasionally used “their own labor, but generally slaves for that purpose.” Part of their masters’ households, these slaves undoubtedly recognized the difference between the work they performed for the community at large and that for the households in which they lived. This division perhaps influenced how lowcountry slaves came to regard work in terms of “plantation labor” and “independent labor.”64

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It would be naïve, however, to claim that enslaved Africans simply transplanted farming practices from Atlantic Africa to the lowcountry whole cloth and then succeeded in getting planters to accept their methods without question. Other factors influenced the adoption of the task system. Planters understood the relationship between a plant’s particular growing requirements and the organization of labor necessary to cultivate it effectively; for example, raising tobacco or sugar required significant inputs of labor throughout their growing cycles, while corn or wheat needed only minimal attention. Moreover, planters wanted to organize work so that it achieved the three desiderata of economics: high productivity, maximum profits, and minimal overhead. At the same time, planters had to balance the ambition of running a disciplined and profitable estate against the need to prevent their enslaved laborers from engaging in acts of resistance, small and large. With enslaved people constituting the majority of the rural lowcountry’s population, maintaining order without constantly resorting to the whip required that planters adroitly navigate between the twin poles of compromise and coercion, incentive and punishment. Remarking that “the tasking of a Negroe is one of the Planters’ principal Studies,” surveyor William De Brahm perhaps understated the case; the task system not only structured the organization of plantation work, it provided the basic structure within which slaveholders and slaves established their relationship. Masters clearly held the upper hand, but using the task system—an arrangement that exhibited a degree of stability and was implicitly accepted by both slaves and masters—enabled the latter to gain a degree of compliance from the former by using incentives (in this case, working and growing produce for their own consumption or the market) that blunted the necessity to use coercive methods on a regular basis to extract labor from slaves.65 Rice, moreover, proved highly adaptable to the task system. Only at a few critical points in its growing cycle did the plant require significant attention; thus, it lent itself more readily to flexible labor arrangements than did some other staple crops. Yet, it would be equally naïve to suggest that growing rice was an unexacting and simple job. Not only did enslaved rice laborers spend hours in semi-­submerged fields and viscous mud, but a number of specific tasks—repairing and cleaning irrigation ditches (“mud work”), planting rice, pulling weeds, and repairing irrigation ditches—all required considerable stamina and endurance to complete. In addition, at certain times, planters temporarily jettisoned the task system; digging channels to drain and create new fields, bringing abandoned fields back into production, and bringing in the harvest led planters to turn to the gang system.66

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Some anecdotal evidence suggests that enslaved laborers informally allotted different values to different tasks. The seasonality of slave flight, as we have seen earlier, suggests that the weeks of “mud work” and harvest, when planters abandoned tasking in favor of gang labor, constituted the periods of greatest flight. Thomas Coffin, a planter on Saint Helena who owned fifty slaves, noted that he lost sixty-­seven days in March (“mud work”) through illness, either real or feigned, and fifty-­seven days in April (planting); for the rest of the year, he lost about thirty days per month. Rather than adjust the workload, some planters tackled “absenteeism” by offering additional incentives to their enslaved laborers for completing certain tasks. Josiah Smith, a resident manager for George Austin in the early 1770s, sought to incentivize fieldwork and “encourage their perseverance” during the backbreaking weeks of hoeing and weeding, by treating the enslaved laborers under his supervision to new clothes along with “a Beef and some liquor . . . after hoeing is all over.” Faced with acres of “very bad” grass, Smith again used the “encouragement of a Beef and some Rum” to get the land cleared. Such tactics appeared necessary; enslaved field hands did not hesitate to complain about work assignments. Visiting one plantation under his supervision, Smith encountered slaves who “complained that they had been hard worked” during harvest.67 A plantation’s commercial effectiveness depended to an extent on the men hired to supervise enslaved laborers. The overseer, the rural equivalent of the factory foreman, found his managerial skills and authority tested daily. Besides assigning tasks, the overseer also had to balance his employer’s interests against his ability to control the enslaved laborers under his command. When Saint Stephen’s Parish planter John Colhoun hired John Courturier, the contract stipulated that he manage “all the negroes, stock, . . . all the plantation business, banking, ditching and all other improvements of land, buildings, or machinery.” This required technical know-­how, including a basic understanding of arable agriculture, animal husbandry, bookkeeping, and engineering, as well as the temperament to manage and discipline enslaved workers. To meet their contractual obligations, some overseers often overworked slaves and punished them for minor transgressions; others, determined to keep peace in the quarters, might turn a blind eye to bad behavior or let poor work slide. Others, including James Barclay, an overseer who worked on Benjamin Verin’s Dorchester plantation in the mid-­1770s, apparently let slaves get on with their tasks with minimal supervision. “All I had to do,” he later wrote, “was to overlook the negroes twice a day.”68

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A good overseer, Smith believed, did not “overdrive or otherwise oppress” the laborers under his supervision. Recognizing that the welfare of the plantation’s enslaved workforce had a significant impact on its overall efficiency, Smith instructed his overseers to keep slaves “well fed . . . [and] attended to when sick”; this policy, he concluded, was “most proper for continuing them in usefulness,” making them “more willing to do their duty, than unmercifully driving them.” He also recognized how the judicious use of incentives helped get recalcitrant slaves into the fields. With weeks of unremitting fieldwork on the horizon, Smith ordered his overseers to encourage slaves to “stand firm to the Heavy Part of the Work” by giving them “a present of meat and Liquor” once they had completed the job. He also claimed that inducements discouraged absenteeism, noting that they “had the effect of keeping them at home” as he had not heard that “so much as one hath runaway.”69 Not every plantation agent proved as skilled as Smith in managing overseers. In spring 1770, an incident between Peter Manigault, who was temporarily supervising the business interests of absentee planter Ralph Izard, and James Postell, an overseer, suggests that effective estate management demanded more than keeping the books; the successful manager had to understand the subtle gradations of the plantation hierarchy as well as the psychology of the men on the payroll. On learning about the whipping of Rose, a heavily pregnant enslaved women, “in a Manner cruel beyond description” by an overseer named Player, Manigault intervened on her behalf. To prevent any more “Ill Usage” by Player, he sent Rose to The Camp, another Izard plantation, located in Saint James Goose Creek Parish, where Postell worked. Her arrival led Postell to complain that Manigault’s decision had undermined his authority. The aggrieved Postell told Manigault, “I don’t imagine after this, it will be in my Power to carry that command over the Negroes I have hitherto done, and which I’ve an undoubted Right to.” That Rose’s transfer came hard on the heels of Manigault’s decision to let an enslaved boatman rejoin his family at Izard’s Goose Creek plantation further eroded his effectiveness. Such interference, Postell wrote, “will prove of Great Disadvantage to the Plantations” with every enslaved person now expecting “the same Indulgence as another.” Already “afflicted with Sickness” and with “his undoubted Right” to run the plantation as he saw fit now compromised, Postell resigned. Manigault, who was incredulous that his “trifling Orders” had led the overseer to quit, now took direct control of Izard’s estates, where he proceeded to produce “superior Crops” that convinced him that his “Management . . . is as good [as] anyone I can employ.”70

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The agricultural labor supervised by such men constituted the heart of plantation life in the countryside. The task system became the instrument and product of negotiation whereby enslaved laborers informally exerted a modest degree of control over the amount of labor that they would willingly perform. By allowing slaves time to cultivate crops for their own use, planters presumably hoped to create an environment that resulted in higher productivity, although it may have also resulted in jobs left incomplete. Planters, however, may have reckoned that the gains accrued from this arrangement outweighed its disadvantages. In fact, the solution to this problem may have been the fulcrum upon which the task system balanced, forcing planters to assign work that their enslaved laborers could be reasonably expected to finish. Even though tasking gave enslaved people some degree of control over their fieldwork, it did not free them from supervision entirely. The broad expanses of the rice fields provided planters with the opportunity to inspect and monitor their enslaved laborers at work. Mounted on horses and riding along the banks of irrigation ditches, planters and overseers could look down on the expansive fields that had been carved out by enslaved laborers and in which they now worked, cultivating rice. From the wilderness of woods and swamp, slaves had unintentionally created a form of panopticon, providing their masters with another mechanism whereby they could manage, control, and discipline the labor force. In contrast, working on their provision grounds away from the main plantation buildings, enslaved people could escape the gaze of their owner and enjoy some temporary relief from the sense of domination engendered by constant surveillance. Even though enslaved people held no legal rights of ownership over the provision grounds, the soil that they tilled to grow food for themselves were important not solely for their productive capabilities, but also because they served as a sanctuary from the master.71 The arrangement of labor stands as the most significant difference between slavery in the city and slavery in the countryside. Rural slaves, whose struggles generated the compromise of the task system, directed their power internally, situated as they were within the system that organized their daily work. They won concessions within that system, constantly seeking to expand and extend its benefits. The task system effectively diffused the tensions of the slave’s dual role as chattel and person by formally separating work performed for the plantation owner and work performed by and for the individual. Thus, the design of this particular arrangement of work through the division of the day into “planter time” and “slave time” meant that enslaved people more often

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sought not to overthrow the plantation order, as their Stono predecessors had done, but to strengthen their position within it. In 1770, thirty-­one years after William Bull had encountered rebellious slaves on the Pons Pons Road, his son William undertook an extensive tour of the colony. In his report, he painted a picture of a dynamic province, its prosperity built on commerce and plantation agriculture. In addition to his observations about the condition of the militia, the judiciary, local government, education, and the arts, Bull concluded that “the state of slavery is as comfortable in this province as such a state can be.” Not only had the colony’s enslaved laborers become dutiful and obedient workers, but, he further noted, they had not rebelled since 1739. To explain their deferential and docile behavior, Bull claimed that “the general humanity of the master,” along with “the mildness of the law and prudent conduct of masters and patrols,” had led the emergence of an acquiescent and tractable workforce. He also noted the coastal plain’s transformation from a wilderness of forests and swamps to a profitable and productive plantation empire; Bull unsurprisingly failed to mention the legions of enslaved laborers who had performed the backbreaking work of clearing the land. “Many large swamps, otherwise useless, and affording shelter for deserting slaves and wild beasts,” he wrote, “have been drained and cultivated.” Now an important and valuable colony of Britain’s empire, it had become a mature plantation society, replete with the laws, institutions, and customs that governed the lives of its inhabitants, both free and enslaved.72

CHAPTER 4

“This Wild Remote Part of the World” The Making of the Eighteenth-­Century Upcountry

Not many Years past [this beautiful country was] A Desert, and Forrest, overrun with Wild Beasts, and Men more Savage than they, but now Peopled and Planted to a degree incredible for the Short Space of Time. —Charles Woodmason, 1769

In early September 1734, three generations of the Witherspoon family gathered to bid farewell to their friends and relatives in Knockbracken, a small village near the port town of Belfast in northern Ireland. Forty years earlier, the oldest members of the group—John, Janet, and their children—had left the Scottish Lowlands for Ulster. Now, they “resolved to seek relief from civil and ecclesiastical oppression by removing” to South Carolina. Several weeks later, the Witherspoons, along with seventeen other families from the region, began a long and harrowing Atlantic voyage aboard The Good Intent. After two days at sea, the sixty-­three-­year-­old Janet Witherspoon died, her family interring her “in the raging Ocean.” Then, autumn storms struck, forcing the passengers to endure mountainous seas as the crew manned the pumps “day and night for many days” to prevent the ship from sinking. No sooner had the family arrived in Charles Town in early December than tragedy again struck when Sarah, John’s granddaughter, died. After burying her in the graveyard of the Scottish Meeting House, the surviving Witherspoons set off for their final destination.1 Along with other colonists, they boarded another vessel in Charles Town. With “tools and a year’s provisions” safely stowed, they sailed up the coast to

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Georgetown and then up the Black River, a tributary of the Pee Dee River, about sixty miles inland to Potatoe Ferry, where they disembarked at “a Bluff three miles below the King’s Tree.” From there, they continued overland to the tiny settlement located in Williamsburg Township. Billeted in “a very mean dirt house” with no door and surrounded with “nothing but a wilderness,” the new arrivals passed their first night wide awake as wolves howled in the surrounding forest. Terrified that they would be “devoured by wild beasts,” Robert, who was John’s grandson and only six years old at the time, later recalled that “we all sincerely wished ourselves again at Belfast.”2 Having survived the five-­month journey from Belfast, the family now turned to the hard labor of carving out a viable settlement from the “wilderness.” As there is no indication that the Witherspoons or their fellow immigrants hired enslaved laborers to do this work, we must assume that families worked cooperatively to fell trees, burn brush, and clear land themselves. After preparing several acres for cultivation, the Witherspoons planted and harvested their first crops, which yielded a surplus of five hundred bushels of corn. They also raised chickens, grazed cattle along the Black River, and hunted deer while their hogs foraged for mast (acorns, berries, and nuts) in the woods. The little settlement soon took shape. By 1736, it boasted a meeting house and a small congregation, leading its members to hire a minister from Ireland, with the arrival of Presbyterian minister Robert Herron marking an important milestone in the new community’s development. A year later, sixty-­ seven-­year-­old John Witherspoon died. Having buried their father in the graveyard of the church that he had helped build, the Witherspoon children could now claim King’s Tree as an indispensable part of their family’s story, perhaps as important as Knockbracken had been to their parents. As thousands of white migrants began arriving on ships like The Good Intent from Scotland, Ireland, and the islands of the British archipelago, as well as from the Palatinate of southwestern Germany during the 1730s and 1740s, the European colonization of the backcountry moved into high gear.3 The household, an institution that functioned at several different levels, stood at the center of the lives of most backcountry families. First, it was a physical space, a plot of land on which stood a house or cabin with a few adjacent outbuildings and fenced enclosures for animals, and surrounded by some fields and woodland. The cabin itself provided shelter and warmth, both material and psychological, to the men, women, and children who lived within its walls, as well as a place to gather. A notice for the sale of five hundred acres near Saxe Gotha in 1739 provides a thumbnail description of the

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physical characteristics of the backcountry household. Put on the market by Joseph Crell, who had immigrated with his family from the Upper Rhine Valley in the mid-­1730s, the five-­hundred-­acre property had several large fields suitable for raising corn, beans, potatoes, and hemp, along with enclosures for cattle and horses. It also boasted farm equipment that included a plow and a wagon, “a new fram’d Dwelling House and other Buildings,” including a grist mill that, driven by the flow of Thames Creek, turned wheat into flour. With its location on the “Trading Road” close to the Santee River, it was ideally located for an enterprising settler to build a dry goods store.4 Second, the household was a center of production where its members produced the goods and services that enabled them to supply the family’s immediate needs, to engage with the marketplace, and to generate profits that would allow them to expand and develop their farming operations. Labor and kinship often went together; the family that migrated together invariably lived and farmed together. In 1736, other members of the Witherspoon family left Ireland to join those already at King’s Tree, where they supplemented the labor force of an already productive household. As we shall see, the family worked together to raise and process flax and to produce and sell linen. In addition to selling his family’s farm, Crell also put three enslaved laborers on the market, who, along with their skill at dressing deerskins, were also “acquainted to manage the Hemp,” a plant that provided the raw material for rope, sacking, and, when combined with other fibers, such as flax, a wearable fabric. By incorporating a small number of enslaved laborers into the household’s workforce, farmers gradually embedded slavery into their everyday lives, beginning the process whereby the institution became part of the social order of the backcountry.5 Finally, the household was a center for reproduction, where women bore and raised children. Again, the Witherspoons provide an apt example; in 1758, Robert married Elizabeth Heathly, the daughter of Mary Hamilton and William Heathly, who were among the first wave of settlers to Williamsburg Township. Elizabeth bore and raised nine children in the family farmhouse by Ox Swamp on the Black River, a few miles from King’s Tree. For the Witherspoons, the networks of family and kin remained within a day’s ride of the small settlement where they had first put down roots. Households also became the building blocks for the region’s political and social order. In its kitchens and outbuildings, fields and orchards, men and women wove cloth; made cider; churned butter; slaughtered and salted hogs; grew corn, potatoes, and other produce; raised children; and performed countless other

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tasks that turned modest timber structures into vibrant places of domestic manufacture as well as consumption.6 The center of everyday life for families across the backcountry, the household was only one of the four institutions that shaped backcountry life. The church, as we have seen in the case of King’s Tree, became an equally important feature in the landscape. Not only did regular services provide moral and spiritual community for its participants, but the meetinghouse itself provided a gathering place for families scattered throughout the woods. Furthermore, ministers took on the mantle of local leaders, often adjudicating disputes, dispensing advice and charity, and ensuring that parishioners stayed on the path of righteousness and avoided the temptations of the tavern. The dry goods store became a prominent economic institution in backcountry life. It provided a range of goods and services to its customers and linked the household to the marketplace. The institution of slavery, the other major feature of backcountry society, rose to prominence in the 1740s and 1750s, becoming embedded in many households that used enslaved labor to perform agricultural work. Slavery also became entwined with the church, as ministers drafted regulations designed to provide slaveholders with a guide to conduct, fashioning a vernacular proslavery ideology that used the metaphor of family in an effort to unite the church with the household. In practical terms, the infrastructure for slavery’s expansion inland was already in place; backcountry planters had established relationships with Charles Town’s slave traders, and the laws and legal structures for “the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes” had long been in place, normalizing the practices that regulated relationships between the enslaver and the enslaved. But slavery in the uplands evolved somewhat differently from its coastal counterpart; not only was the household, rather than the plantation, the main center of production, but its farmers initially raised food for local markets rather than staples for export. Furthermore, unlike lowcountry planters, who owned large numbers of enslaved laborers, slaveholders in the backcountry only numbered a few hundred by mid-­ century, and they often owned only a few slaves, a demographic fact of life that contributed to the slow development of a distinctive slave culture among its enslaved people. Not until the late eighteenth century, when commercial cotton production got underway and the Atlantic slave trade reopened, did the dense cultural and communal networks familiar on lowcountry plantations appear in the interior. Only gradually did the region take on the hallmarks of a “slave society.”7

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The backcountry provides another example of South Carolina’s “slaveries.” Whereas Charles Town’s slaveholders structured the lives of their enslaved laborers around distinct arrangements, such as hiring out, and lowcountry planters deployed the task system to configure plantation work, the hybrid character of backcountry farm labor required equally fluid arrangements; enslaved laborers worked in the fields but also performed other skilled work. With most enslaved people laboring on small farms, the relationship between enslavers and the enslaved had a more intimate dynamic than on the large plantations that dominated the coastal plain. Enslaved people in the upcountry were often incorporated in their owner’s household; living and working alongside the white family, they grew familiar with their habits and customs. Thus, unlike slaves in the rural lowcountry, where most plantation laborers had little direct knowledge of their owner, backcountry slaves lived and worked in close proximity to the white people who enslaved them. By mid-­century, local ministers began highlighting the relationships that linked family, household, and slavery, fashioning an ethic that combined the language of evangelical Christianity with the idea that slaveholders should see themselves as the moral guardians not just of their white family but also of the men and women whose labor they exploited in the region’s fields and farmhouses. Just as the lowcountry’s transition from a frontier to a plantation society led to yet more fighting in the borderlands between British North America and Spanish Florida, the movement inland of white settlers combined with the rise of commercial farming triggered a new crisis between Native Americans and the colonists. Furthermore, this took place against the backdrop of the Seven Years’ War. The combination of maladroit diplomacy and poor leadership by Governor William Lyttelton, along with constant intrusions by settlers onto Native American lands, triggered Cherokee attacks on frontier posts across western Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, leading to war in 1760. Two years later, after prosecuting a brutal attritional war, British and provincial forces had all but obliterated Cherokee settlements east of the mountains; with the Cherokees in the piedmont dispossessed, colonists now pushed further west into the Appalachian foothills, occupying lands once inhabited by Native Americans. Rather than bringing a degree of stability to the frontier, the end of the Cherokee War prepared the ground for further violence. The lack of any government institutions to keep order and enforce the law, combined with large numbers of families displaced by the fighting, provided the ideal climate in which “Banditti and Freebooters . . . Villains and Vagabonds” flourished.

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By the summer of 1766, a major crime wave was underway, leaving several upcountry localities in “a state of . . . disorder and confusion” as armed gangs robbed houses, assaulted their residents, stole horses, burned crops, and, on occasion, committed murder. Determined to end the epidemic of lawlessness, farmers, acting independently of the colonial government, mustered their own patrols to pursue, catch, and punish bandits who endangered both their families and their property. Calling themselves Regulators, they brought their own brand of vigilante justice to bear on bandits who were threatening  the new commercial order that they were busily creating.8 With mounted Regulator patrols riding against outlaws, the region descended into chaos at the end of the 1760s. More concerned with the crisis over the Stamp Act and other issues regarding the politics of empire, lowcountry leaders initially paid little attention to the crisis unfolding in the interior. This neglect allowed Regulators to assume the mantle of the region’s de facto rulers. Only the passage of new laws that redressed the region’s second-­class status, along with the intervention of the Moderators—farmers outraged by the excesses of the Regulators—brought an end to banditry and vigilante justice in the early 1770s. By the time of the American Revolution, the upcountry occupied a temporary political and economic location between its past as a frontier and its future as a plantation society.9

Native Americans and Colonists The European occupation of the Carolina upcountry took place at an astounding pace. For countless generations, Native Americans had lived on the land and hunted in the woods where the Witherspoons and thousands of other immigrants from northern Europe now raised crops; grazed animals; and erected cabins, mills, and churches. In late 1701, John Lawson, acting on a commission from the Lords Proprietors to survey the interior, led a small party deep into the piedmont. Encountering a dozen different Native American groups, including the Congarees, the Santees, and the Tuscaroras, Lawson’s expedition crossed a region on the cusp of irreversible demographic change and the displacement of its original inhabitants. By mid-­century, the combination of white colonists moving inland along with “Intemperance and [the] Foul Distempers introduc’d amongst them by Carolina traders” had devastated the Indigenous population. The number of Catawbas, for example, plummeted from about forty-­six hundred to around a thousand

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between 1690 and 1754, with James Adair, an Indian trader who worked alongside them, laying the blame for their demise at the door of “Smallpox and intemperate drinking.” In 1770, as William Bull reflected on the twilight of the centuries-­long tenure of Native Americans in the forests and river valleys between the Atlantic and the Appalachians, he noted that nothing “but their names” now remained of their presence.10 Had Lawson ventured deeper into the mountains, he would have entered the heart of the Cherokee nation, the dominant power throughout the southern Appalachians and the piedmont. For the colonial government, maintaining good diplomatic relations with the Cherokees was a major objective. In James Glen, governor between 1743 and 1756, the Cherokees had an ally and a student of their culture. He worked assiduously to keep them within the British orbit. In talks held to seal the alliance in 1745, Cherokee paramount leader Cukaaouskassatte made a dramatic gesture. Removing his elaborate headdress made from “Silk and Badger’s skins, dyed yellow and red,” he placed it before Glen, telling him that “I lay my Crown at Your Excellency’s feet, which is the same as I had laid it at the feet of the great King George; I desire that it may be sent over to great King George, as a Token of our Friendship lasting forever,” concluding that the “enemies [of George III] shall be my Enemies.” Glen recognized the Cherokees’ strategic importance within the geopolitical context of the imperial rivalries that existed in the southeast. They were, he noted, “the greatest nation that we now have in America,” acting as “a Bullwark at our Backs” from any potential French campaign to extend their influence from the Mississippi Valley east into the southern Appalachians.11 The meeting also highlighted fundamental differences between Cherokee leaders and colonial officials. Addressing the delegates, Skiagusta, an elder from the Lower Town settlement of Keowee, spoke about the challenges faced by his people. He recognized the dynamic and fluid character of the frontier. Although the villages of the Lower Towns were still “a great Way from the white People,” Skiagusta knew that the colonists were on the move, and “every Day come nearer and nearer, settling up towards us,” aware that land unoccupied in autumn might well have a cabin on it by spring, particularly as “white Men are great and numerous as the Sand on the Sea shore.” He also recognized the difficulties caused by any written agreement. Unable to “write and read as the White men do,” any document was, in the eyes of the Cherokees, “like A Darkness to us,” a sheet of paper covered in writing of which “we do not know the meaning.” Finally, he also acknowledged the corrosive role played by trade in Cherokee life. Not only were the Cherokees reliant

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on English goods, with Skiagusta noting that his people were unable to “live independent of the English. . . . We use their Ammunition with which to kill Deer. . . . Every necessary Thing in Life, we must have from the white people,” but he complained that traders often abused their position, stealing skins and selling rum illegally. Even though Skiagusta recognized that the presence of English traders meant that his people “should want for nothing,” it was a relationship that eroded the autonomy of the Cherokees.12 By the early 1750s, the consolidation of the British military presence in the Anglo-­Cherokee borderlands triggered a series of crises that culminated in war. Built in 1753 ostensibly to protect the Cherokees from the Creeks, Fort Prince George was regarded by some Native peoples as an unwarranted intrusion on their land. Was this new fort on the banks of the Keowee River on the edge of the Lower Towns, they wondered, built to safeguard them from an old enemy or to defend settlers who were beginning to appear on the margins of their territory? The timing of its construction was also problematic. With war clouds gathering over the Ohio Valley after clashes between a scouting party led by George Washington and a group of French and Native Americans in western Pennsylvania in 1754, the South Carolina government had to tread carefully; colonial leaders hoped that the Cherokees would spurn French overtures, and they endeavored to secure the Cherokees’ loyalty by increasing the volume of gifts heading inland. Even though the major campaigns of the Seven Years’ War took place in colonies to the north, fighting in western Pennsylvania and Virginia had a significant impact on South Carolina. In 1756, William Lyttelton replaced Glen as governor. Not only did the new governor lack his predecessor’s deft diplomatic touch, but he also arrived with instructions from London, notes historian Robert Weir, “to roll back some of the assembly’s power.” In fact, his tenure as governor of Jamaica in the early 1760s would be dominated by a similar issue, a stand-­off between the island’s House of Assembly and his administration. With reports about clashes between Cherokees and white settlers along the Virginia‒Carolina frontier landing on his desk in Charles Town, Lyttelton saw an opportunity to assert his authority over fractious representatives and to impose the crown’s control over the interior. His decisions precipitated the disintegration of relations with the Cherokees, leading to war, which broke out in very early 1760.13 Already “cramped in their Hunting-­Grounds” and overwhelmed by “great numbers of lawless Vagabonds” who had fled south from western Pennsylvania after General Edward Braddock’s defeat on the Monongahela in July 1755,

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the Cherokees protested that the refugees were committing “all kinds of Misdemeanours,” including murder, in order to collect bounties on their victims’ scalps. Concerned about the frontier’s volatility, Lyttelton intended to cut off the violence at its source by placing an embargo on the sale of weapons to the Cherokees; it was a spectacular miscalculation. Unable to obtain the muskets and powder necessary for the approaching hunting season, the Cherokees sent a delegation to Charles Town for talks. At the same time, the governor learned about the murder of several settlers by Cherokee warriors; he immediately imprisoned the delegates and demanded the surrender of the men responsible for the killings. In fall 1759, he marched to Fort Prince George, personally escorting the hostages, along with gunpowder, to exchange for the killers. It proved to be a fiasco. In early January, the governor and his party trudged back to Charles Town with little to show for their efforts; a treaty not worth the paper on which it was written, and the smallpox virus, which soon claimed dozens of lives in the lowcountry. The Cherokees then laid siege to the fort; in February, its terrified defenders took the captives and, wrote army surgeon George Milligen-­Johnston, “butchered them to Death, in a manner too shocking to Relate.” Bent on revenge, Cherokee warriors intercepted settlers from Long Canes who, aware of the events at Fort Prince George, were hastily heading for the safety of Augusta on the Upper Savannah. No sooner had they left their farms than their convoy was ambushed; after thirty horrifying minutes, about forty settlers had been captured or lay dead. Other Cherokee warriors moved against Ninety-­Six, a trading post in the western backcountry, cutting it off from the outside world. With reports reaching the lowcountry about fighting on the frontier in late February, the South Carolina Gazette announced, “The whole Province is now in Arms to repress the Invasion of the Perfidious Cherokees.” Soon it was not just families from Long Canes who sought sanctuary from Cherokee raiders.14 Within weeks, the Cherokees had pushed white settlement back by nearly a hundred miles. Not only were they raiding households throughout the Upper Savannah Valley, but they were advancing on the lowcountry; in May, they attacked farms near Orangeburg, about eighty miles from Charles Town, where they “surprised, tied, and carried off all the Negroes belonging to Mr. Henry Young,” who were planting corn. By summer, the conflict had left the western backcountry virtually uninhabitable. Families abandoned their farms, with some choosing to shelter in the woods where, noted Milligen-­ Johnston, they often got “lost . . . and miserably perished.” Others either fled for isolated garrisons, often little more than fortified houses surrounded by a

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wooden stockade, which were soon overflowing with destitute families and were breeding grounds for disease, despair, and hunger. Some were captured and “carried into Captivity, suffering every Species of Distress a Savage and Provoked Enemy could inflict upon them.” Within a few months, a lot of families had been “reduced from Affluence, Plenty and Independence to Poverty, Beggary and Want.” Not since the Yamasee War forty-­five years earlier had Native Americans inflicted such damage on the colony.15 Publicly attacked for the diplomatic blunders that led to the war and unable to mount an effective counterattack to blunt the Cherokee onslaught, Lyttelton urgently requested that Lord Jeffery Amherst, the commander in chief of British forces in North America, send regulars to the beleaguered colony. In April 1760, thirteen hundred Scottish Highlanders under Colonel Archibald Montgomery landed in Charles Town and quickly headed inland alongside provincial soldiers. Cutting a destructive swath through the settlements of the Lower Towns, which Montgomery’s men “plundered and laid in ashes,” the army advanced deeper into the southern Appalachians toward the Middle Towns where it encountered stiff resistance. Having “taken possession of a very advantageous Post on the road,” the Cherokees successfully ambushed the column in a steep wooded valley outside the settlement of Etchoe, driving it back to Fort Prince George. Montgomery, who was wounded in the engagement, abruptly halted operations and withdrew to Charles Town with his men. The borderlands between the colonists and the Cherokees, however, remained lethal; the few settlers who had not fled were either killing or getting killed.16 In early January 1761, another British expeditionary force, under Lieutenant Colonel James Grant, arrived. It was the prelude to the war’s final phase; in April, his soldiers set out for the western backcountry, mounting a campaign even more ruthless and attritional than Montgomery’s offensive. Advancing through the ruins of the Lower Towns, Grant marched for Etchoe, where the Cherokees had halted the British a year earlier. Lightning almost struck twice when the British, advancing along the Cowhowee Valley, a pass bounded by steep hills on one side and by a river on the other, were again ambushed. On this occasion, Grant’s men drove off their attackers, captured Etchoe and, reported Captain Christopher French, “tore [it] to pieces,” burning orchards, fields, and houses. Grant then ordered French’s company to destroy neighboring villages and “put every Soul to Death.” Without any military targets, British soldiers then systematically set about destroying the infrastructure of Cherokee society. At Watogui, a squad “pull’d up all the

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Corn, cut down the fruit Trees, & burned the Houses”; a few days later, they “destroy’d about 100 acres of Indian corn & burned five Houses.” Columns of smoke rising from burning fields and villages marked the path of devastation cut by Grant’s men. With no chance of striking an alliance with the French who, having been defeated at Quebec (1759) and Montreal (1760), were now incapable of prosecuting the war effectively, and with the Lower and Middle Towns smoldering ruins, Cherokee leader Attakullakulla signed a treaty of surrender in late 1761.17 The havoc wrought by Grant’s campaign, which began “when the Leaves were first shooting out,” Henry Laurens poetically noted, “& continued till the Leaves were all fallen again,” had left the Lower and Middle Towns nearly uninhabitable. Burning fields to the ground, cutting down orchards, and leveling houses had left hundreds with no shelter and facing starvation, while the deaths sustained in battle left the Cherokees defenseless. The “subsistence of at least half of the Nation,” observed Laurens, “is rooted up and cut off,” with the Cherokees subsisting on “grains of Corn and beans . . . [and] the Offals of mangled Horses.” With the Cherokees now forced deeper into the Appalachians, settlers gradually returned to their farms, repopulating the Upper Savannah Valley. In early 1762, the Gazette reported that “the Long Canes ­people are re-­settling their plantations, and many others [are] returning to the frontiers”; several months later, a dispatch from Fort Prince George noted that “new settlers . . . in great numbers” were traveling along roads and crossing bridges built by military engineers during the war to reach their destinations. By the year’s end, surveyors were busily mapping out new townships in the Upper Savannah, including Boonesborough (20,000 acres), Hillsborough (28,000 acres), and Londonborough (22,000 acres).18

Settling the Backcountry Frontier The Witherspoons were just one of thousands of families who crossed the Atlantic for the upcountry. The steady flow of immigrants met the needs of several constituencies in Charles Town. Acquiring land by taking advantage of the government’s land-­grant policy, new arrivals became landowners and now had a stake in the colony’s future. The town’s merchants saw these families as new customers; not only would they turn to local traders to facilitate the sale of their crops, but backcountry householders were also eager consumers, ready to buy a wide range of goods to furnish and equip their houses and

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farms. Furthermore, by providing “50 acres for every white and black man . . . of which the grantee’s family shall consist at the time the grant shall be made,” the government opened the door for the expansion of slavery into the colony’s interior. Despite its claim that land grants were intended to “incourage the importation of white people” because enslaved people constituted “too great a population to the number of whites,” colonists obviously recognized that the more slaves one owned, the more land one was eligible to acquire in the backcountry. For example, of the six hundred and fifty acres along the Santee River that the Governor’s Council granted in 1749 to Joseph Murray, father of two children and owner of eleven enslaved laborers, five hundred and fifty were obtained by virtue of Murray’s slave ownership. Providing the foundation for the development of commercial farming as well as for the rise of slavery in the region, the grants of land to white settlers contributed to the economic growth of several backcountry localities, including the Upper Pee Dee Valley and the countryside around Camden, but colonial administrators failed to introduce other key institutions of civil society, leaving the region without political representation or convenient access to the judicial system.19 The idea of establishing a series of inland settlements was initially floated in the early 1720s when colonial leaders called for the construction of a series of forts to deter any invasion of the lowcountry from either foreign armies or Native American warriors. It was not until 1730, however, that Governor Robert Johnson unveiled plans to establish eleven settlements, with each occupying twenty thousand acres “contiguous to the river where ye townships lyes.” The program not only provided for “surveying and laying out townships” but also funded “the purchasing of tools, provisions and other necessaries” and offered generous land grants, giving settlers fifty acres along with fifty additional acres for every dependent household member (defined as bound laborers, children, and spouses). Surveying and mapping townships, granting land to successful petitioners, and passing laws for ferry crossings and bridge-­building not only broadened the reach of the colonial government but also imposed its sovereignty over the region.20 The townships were also intended to meet the needs of colonial leaders concerned about the lowcountry’s security. Located between forty and sixty miles from the coast and at the confluence of major rivers, the townships constituted the first line of defense against an attack launched from the interior. Any imperial official examining maps of the colonial southeast in the early 1730s would have instantly recognized the geopolitical threats presented by the Spanish and the French. Discussing proposals to settle new

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immigrants, one administrator instructed the governor to “grant them land and settle them in such a place, and in such a manner as you shall judge most conducive to the interest and security of said province.” Even with the colonization of Georgia in the early 1730s, the zone between Spanish Florida and the southern lowlands remained contested ground. Although the French footprint in the Mississippi Valley was light, their presence combined with their diplomatic skill at striking alliances with Native Americans threatened the security of the western margins of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Should an invasion take place, moreover, the colonial government believed that the farmers to whom they had granted land would readily take up arms and muster with their local militias to suppress any threats.21 Accordingly, a campaign to promote the townships was launched. It is impossible to assess the impact that advertisements, pamphlets, and recruiting agents had on potential settlers, but the chance to become an independent landowner led thousands in Ulster, western Scotland, and its islands to leave their crofts and farms for the nearest port to make the trans-­Atlantic journey. By the eve of the American Revolution, roughly 150,000 had migrated to British North America, often bound for the western margins of the Carolinas, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, from Ireland’s northern provinces and another seventy-­five thousand had left Scotland for new opportunities in the southern uplands. Men and women from the British Isles were not the only ones on the move. In the 1730s and 1740s, migrants from the cantons of northern Switzerland and the principalities of southern Germany joined the flow to the southern colonies, traveling up the Rhine to Amsterdam, Antwerp, or Rotterdam before taking passage across the Atlantic.22 In 1735, a party of immigrants from the Palatinate in southwestern Germany established Saxe-­Gotha, a settlement at the confluence of the Broad, Congaree, and Wateree Rivers. For Loduwick Ryen, “the bounty allowed . . . to foreign Protestants becoming new settlers in the townships” contributed to his decision to leave his canton in Switzerland and cross the Atlantic for South Carolina, where he joined three hundred other “tradesmen and Farmers . . . young men and Maids,” escaping a region suffering food shortages and economic instability during the early 1740s. After successfully petitioning the Assembly in Charles Town “to settle at Saxagotha amongst his relations,” Ryen received fifty acres and “the bounty of provision” with which to launch his new life. Besides the presence of family members, the choice of Saxe-­Gotha may have been influenced by a pamphlet written by immigrant recruiter Hans Jacob Riemensperger, a Swiss native and former resident of

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the township, who noted that “many miserable poor people . . . who scarcely know how to make a living in Germany or Switzerland . . . now live in plenty here.” Crossing the backcountry in the early 1750s to gather material for his account of the region, Johannes Tobler, who, prior to migrating to South Carolina in 1737 and settling in the Upper Savannah Valley had been the provincial administrator of the Swiss canton of Appenzell-­Ausser-­Rhoden, wrote that the village was “a good, spacious, and densely occupied place,” where farmers raised “much livestock” and “Negroes plant much wheat,” which was milled locally and then transported to Charles Town either down the Santee or overland by wagon.23 The promise of land attracted settlers from other colonies in British North America as well as from northern Europe to head for the Carolina backcountry. At a single sitting in February 1749, the Governor’s Council granted land to newcomers from places as nearby as North Carolina and as far away as Switzerland. It was at his hearing that Ryen received his fifty acres in Saxe-­Gotha. On learning about “the encouragement . . . given to all new comers,” Jacob Pennington, a blacksmith and farmer, uprooted his wife and five children from southern Pennsylvania, moving them south after he received 350 acres in the Upper Savannah Valley. By the eve of the Cherokee War, Pennington had also acquired land on the Enoree River in the western backcountry, fortifying his farmhouse as the fighting swirled around the locality.24 For many new arrivals, Charles Town was their first experience of the colony before they traveled inland. A brief sojourn in the city allowed them to obtain supplies, establish relationships with local merchants, and petition for land. Not everyone bound for the interior experienced the port’s bustling streets or saw enslaved Africans on the auction block, however. Families from western Pennsylvania and Virginia moved south down the Great Wagon Road into the Carolina piedmont and surrounding countryside. A major route for moving goods and people, it ran west from Philadelphia to York (now U.S. Route 30) and then turned south at Hagerstown into the Shenandoah Valley (the current Interstate 81), crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains at the Roanoke River Gap, and into North Carolina. From there, the track passed through Salem, Salisbury, and Charlotte, entering South Carolina at Rock Hill. In peacetime, it was a leading artery for European immigrants who, having landed in Philadelphia, were heading to Virginia and the Carolinas; in wartime, it became a vital escape route from the frontier.25

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Clearly, the waves of migration by free and enslaved people into the uplands had a significant impact on its demography. By the early 1740s, the population had risen from a few hundred to several thousand white settlers, although the number of enslaved people remained negligible. Two decades later, the figures had changed significantly; drawn primarily from the upper Rhine Valley and the cantons of northern Switzerland, the windswept crofts of the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides and the Orkneys, the villages and farms of Ulster, or the settlements of western Pennsylvania and Virginia, nearly eighteen thousand Europeans now lived in the interior. More notable, however, was the growth of the enslaved population; between 1760 and 1764, their numbers rose from 2,417 to 4,791. Although the expansion in numbers was considerably less dramatic between 1764 and 1768 (from 4,791 to 6,548), the growing cohort of enslaved people in the upcountry contributed to the region’s transformation from a frontier economy to a society grounded in slavery and commercial farming.26 The northern Europeans who constituted the first migrant generation brought the cultural practices of their homelands with them. In Saxe-­ Gotha and Amelia Townships, for example, German was the lingua franca, while settlers from Scotland and Ulster in the townships at Williamsburg and Fredericksburg primarily spoke Gaelic along with some English. Settled by Swiss and French Protestant migrants in 1737, the farmhouses of New Windsor would have echoed with the sounds of French. Yet, despite originating from different countries and cultures, they shared several characteristics: most people belonged to one of the major Protestant denominations—the Presbyterians were perhaps the most numerous, followed by the Baptists, with settlers from the Upper Rhine attending Lutheran services—with their sectarian affiliation central to their identity. Furthermore, many families had left isolated and remote rural regions—the Western Isles off the Scottish coast or the mountains and valleys of the Upper Rhine, for example—where hardscrabble farming, herding, and household production rather than commercial agriculture dominated the local economy. In many cases, new arrivals from these places had left behind a world of high rents and exorbitant taxes, the petty humiliations and tyrannies of the landlord and the laird, and the authoritarianism of the recruiting sergeant and feudal princeling for the autonomy imparted by land ownership. Hailing from the geographic, social, and economic margins of their homelands that were located far from the major towns and cities of northwestern Europe, these

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newcomers transplanted their distinctive traditions, both religious and secular, into their new environment.

Fields, Farms, Households, and Enslaved Laborers Recovering from their first sleepless night in the woods, the Witherspoons and the other newcomers to King’s Tree now faced the laborious task of felling trees, clearing land, and establishing farms along the Black River. Families generally adopted a strategy that placed the household before the marketplace; Robert Witherspoon recalled how its farmers worked “diligently . . . clearing and planting as long as the season would admit.” Only when they had harvested enough food to sustain their families for the coming months did they sell surpluses for goods and services. Within a short period, however, enterprising householders left the world of subsistence farming and gradually embraced commercial agriculture, expanding their holdings and turning unimproved land into a valuable commodity. A few years after the founding of King’s Tree, land in the area began changing hands, with each seller highlighting his property’s commercial potential. In 1736, a thousand acres on the Black River went on the market; not only would the buyer acquire a house, a barn, outbuildings, and “a Stock of cattle and Horses” but also three hundred acres suitable for rice. A year later, Charles Town merchant Charles Starns advertised five hundred acres near King’s Tree for sale, with the vendor highlighting its potential. Along with its stands of “good Oak and Hickory,” the property also had “about 150 acres of . . . good Rice Swamp.” Buying large parcels of land and clearing a few dozen acres on which to raise crops while leaving the remainder for future agricultural use or for speculative purposes appears to have been an important strategy pursued by entrepreneurial settlers.27 Raising crops and animals for domestic consumption as well as for the marketplace required the labor of every household member. Surveying the boundary line between North and South Carolina at the Waxhaws, William Moultrie watched farmers cultivating “their lands by manual labour of their own numerous families.” In economic terms, the household constituted “an income-­pooling unit of production,” providing the goods that drove the local economy, raising food for local consumers, growing staples for the lowcountry market, and exchanging services with neighbors. But householders were more than economic actors; they also embraced a set of values that historian Richard Brown has termed “the homestead ethic.” Emphasizing the

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freehold ownership of land sufficient to sustain the household, the absence of excessive debt, and an expectation of protection from the colonial government from external threats, this ethos gave material substance to the idea of property ownership. With the rise of cereal farming along with tobacco and indigo production at mid-­century, upland farmers expanded the definition of the “homestead ethic” to include the right to own enslaved people, initiating the process whereby slavery became intertwined with the institution of the household and the church.28 In his Letters from an American Farmer, first published in 1782, Hector St. Jean Crèvecoeur captured the essence of this powerful idea. In his writings, he contrasted the profound differences between feudal life in the northern French province of Normandy, where he grew up in a minor noble family in the 1730s and 1740s, with his life as a farmer in the Hudson Valley, where he thought long and hard about the political and cultural meaning of land and its ownership. In Normandy and elsewhere in northwest Europe, the tenant farmer and day laborer “had nothing,” but the colonies offered the enterprising migrant “land, bread, protection, and consequence.” The motto of the immigrant was, he concluded, “Ubi panis ibi patria” (where there is bread, there is my country). Inspecting his “own land” in Orange County, New York, Crèvecoeur found “the bright idea of property, of exclusive right, of independence” intoxicating, with “possession of the soil” that enabled him to act autonomously, casting a powerful spell. “What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil?” he asked. Transforming wilderness into “a pleasant farm” invested householders with “power as citizens . . . [and] importance as inhabitants of such a district.” This ensemble of ideas, which became known as “agrarian republicanism” and was later embraced by Thomas Jefferson as an integral part of his political vision for the country, exerted a powerful grasp on the imaginations of settlers in the upcountry long before it became a major ideological principal in the new nation.29 In practical rather than philosophical terms, gender organized the working lives of household members. Husbands and sons worked in the fields and woods, raising corn, herding cattle, and hunting deer, while wives and daughters labored in the house and its immediate surroundings, turning milk into butter and cheese, flour into bread, and flax into linen, with textile production an activity in which men also participated. Women were also responsible for raising children, running the household, and preparing meals. Painting a picture of domestic bliss, Crèvecoeur wrote lovingly about “my wife, by my fireside, while she either spins, knits . . . or suckles our child.” No

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woman, he later noted, “spun or wove better linen,” a fabric that was familiar to most farming families, including the Witherspoons. Before migrating from southern Scotland to Ulster in 1695, John and Janet Witherspoon had worked in the linen trade. It was a skill that easily crossed the Atlantic. Along with farming his family’s three hundred acres, Robert Witherspoon helped his uncle John Fleming on his Black Creek River farm, where he raised flax and other crops. Like countless farms, Fleming’s household was a center of textile production. Janet Fleming processed raw flax before spinning its fibers into linen thread. In addition to doing other farm chores, Robert wove cloth from the thread; Janet then sold bolts of homespun fabric to local merchants who, in turn, sold it in Charles Town. By 1748, the “Linnen Cloth” woven by Robert and other weavers from Williamsburg Township had gained such a good reputation that even the governor “deign’d to wear it in Shirts himself.”30 The Flemings were not the only family producing agricultural commodities for the marketplace. Undeterred by “the distance of carriage to market,” which added to their costs, farmers raised “quantities of excellent tobacco” for sale, reaping solid profits from their crops. Although upcountry farms never rivaled the output of the tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake, its planters raised about 380,000 pounds annually during the 1750s; by the early 1770s, enslaved laborers were loading around 500,000 pounds onto boats and wagons bound for Charles Town. Indigo was another important cash crop, requiring a modest capital outlay for the steeping vats and tanks that were essential to the dye’s production. Prior to his ordination in the Church of England in 1766, Charles Woodmason raised indigo on his plantation on Black Mingo Creek, using several enslaved laborers to cultivate, harvest, and process the crop. Drawing on his experience as an indigo farmer, he wrote an essay on the plant as well as a poem that opened with the couplet: “The Means and Arts that to perfection bring, The richer dye of INDICO I sing.” The Witherspoons also grew indigo, purchasing the equipment necessary to process the plants. The other major staples were cereal crops, with the cultivation of barley and wheat employing “not an inconsiderable Number” who placed “their whole dependence on the raising of that grain,” with farmers, millers, and wagon drivers all putting money in their pockets.31 With the expansion of commercial agriculture, the demand for household goods as well as luxury items rose, making consumption part of everyday life. The dry-­goods store became increasingly important in upcountry communities. Often standing by a river landing or at a crossroads—Woodmason, for example, ran a dry-­goods store on Black Mingo Creek, a tributary of the

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Black River, and perhaps counted the Witherspoons among his customers— they provided vital connections between local households and the broader market. Although often little more than a plain log or plank building, the store fulfilled several functions. The merchant offered a range of services to his patrons; along with hardware (nails, axes, buckets, rope), he sometimes offered processing, storage, and transportation facilities, as well as credit arrangements to trusted patrons. Along with farm tools and other hardware, the shelves also displayed more luxurious items. The “Tobacco, Hemp, Butter, Tallow, Bees Wax and . . . other articles” produced in backcountry households enabled their owners to acquire “Rum, Sugar, Salt, and European Goods.” At Ely Kershaw’s Cheraw Hill store, farmers’ wives could purchase fabric while husbands might buy playing cards or a backgammon table along with the ledgers in which they recorded commercial transactions, and inventoried their goods and chattels. Even farmers who worked only a few acres might purchase a few modest wares; Ninety-­Six settler Thomas Wilson owned “a pocket bible, razors, a knife [and] a trunk,” while his more prosperous neighbor James Forsythe had “a wine decanter, german flute, [and] a pocket looking glass,” along with a small library with a dictionary, several law books, and a volume of John Locke’s essays.32 The complexity of the relationship between the household and the marketplace is well illustrated by the mercantile operations run by Joseph Kershaw from his store in Camden. Migrating from the market town of Sowerby in the West Riding of Yorkshire to Charles Town in 1748, Kershaw first worked for Henry Laurens while establishing contacts with other local merchants, including Lambert Lance, William Ancrum, and Aaron Loocock, with the last two later becoming partners with Kershaw. Working as their agent, Kershaw set up a store in Pine Tree Hill, later renamed Camden in 1768 to honor Lord Camden, a supporter of John Wilkes and colonial rights. Here, farmers and their families from the Wateree Valley could buy everything from scythes to silk and from rum to ribbon. In addition, Kershaw built facilities for farmers to process crops; at his gristmill on Pine Tree Creek, he ground and stored flour, and he arranged its shipment to Charles Town. Likewise, indigo farmers used his vats to produce dye. Kershaw also acted as a land agent, brokering arrangements between buyers and sellers. Straddling the world of the backcountry farmer and the world of the low-­country merchant, Kershaw was well placed to influence his clients’ commercial lives. Located at the junction of several trails and on the Wateree, a navigable river that flows into the Santee River, Camden was ideally located to become an important commercial

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center. With the entrepreneurially minded Kershaw running a successful operation that met the needs of his customers, Camden soon emerged as “the most considerable town in this part of America.” Encouraged by his success, Kershaw extended his commercial networks by opening a “commodious” store at Cheraw Hill on the Upper Pee Dee, and at Granby on the Congaree.33 Although the consumption habits of backcountry families were modest when compared to the activities of the elite in Charles Town, their spending constituted a small, but important, shift in their economic and cultural lives. Growing familiar with the mechanics of the marketplace and acclimating to “the consumer revolution” that was sweeping British North America, upcountry farmers turned to the dry-­goods store to purchase items necessary to run their farms and plantations, as well as nonessential items, including imported fabrics, porcelain, and rum. By the late 1750s, commercial farmers around Camden were investing more heavily in enslaved laborers, relying on Kershaw’s ties to Charles Town’s merchants, including Henry Laurens, to supply their labor needs. Getting and spending now became incorporated into the everyday lives for backcountry households. The store and its ancillary services not only offered clients a number of services, ranging from extending credit to providing storage facilities and transportation, but also brought the machinery and the ethos of the marketplace to places like Camden and the Cheraws, an ethos that included the exploitation of enslaved laborers.

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers in the Backcountry Not only did Joseph Kershaw and other merchants help facilitate the expansion of commercial agriculture, but their activities also contributed to the rise in the number of enslaved laborers on farms and plantations in the uplands. In November 1774, for example, planters in the Wateree Valley had the opportunity to buy enslaved laborers when, following the dissolution of Kershaw’s partnership with John Chesnut in April, a parcel of “about One Hundred Valuable Negroes,” which included “Coopers, Millers, Bakers . . . Jobbing Carpenters, Boatmen and Field Hands,” were auctioned at Camden Court House. The absence of detailed records makes it hard to assess the texture of everyday life for enslaved farm laborers, but the work performed by the slaves (four men, two women, and three children) owned by Robert Fisher offers a few clues. A blacksmith near Eutaw Springs on the Santee, Fisher worked with Toby in the forge, making and mending farm tools and other hardware, including nails,

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horseshoes, hoes, scythes, and axes. Away from the smithy, Tyrant and Caesar did other agricultural jobs, planting and harvesting corn and wheat, tending their owner’s eighty cattle and ninety hogs that “ran in the woods.” The two enslaved women—Dorcas and Phillis—worked in and around the household, washing and mending clothes, cooking, looking after the children, churning butter, baking bread, and dressing meat. The owner of a still, Fisher had his slaves harvest fruit from his orchard and probably assist with the distillation process and, perhaps, enjoy a jug or two of the finished liquor. The enslaved children—Jack, Jenny, and Will—no doubt helped around the house and in the fields, learning the tasks that one day would dominate their lives.34 Living and working in close proximity to their owner, Fisher’s enslaved laborers probably knew a good deal about his life. They perhaps acted on his behalf at times, doing business with local merchants and farmers. From these and other interactions, such as running errands or taking produce or driving cattle to Charles Town or elsewhere, Toby and Fisher’s other slaves developed connections with enslaved laborers on neighboring farms and became aware of their central role in the household’s economy. If Fisher hired additional workers at harvest time, then his slaves would have had yet another opportunity to connect with other enslaved people in the locality. Embedded in the local community through the goods and services that he offered local farmers, Fisher and his enslaved laborers would have been acquainted with their neighbors and their neighbors’ activities. A loyalist during the American Revolution, Fisher petitioned the British government for compensation at the end of the war for his losses, claiming “book debts” of more than £150, suggesting that he perhaps provided credit to his neighbors.35 The organization of agricultural labor hampered the ability of enslaved people in the upcountry to fashion their own lives. Working in small numbers at a variety of jobs, enslaved people had limited opportunities to develop the semi-­autonomous work practices that emerged on lowcountry plantations. The record remains silent on the relationship between Fisher and the people he enslaved, but he may have regarded them as an integral part of his household. That he perhaps viewed his enslaved laborers in this light—as dependent members of a fictive family whom he compelled to work in his house and in his fields—did not preclude harsh punishments for infractions or sexual exploitation. As his property, however, enslaved people remained subject to his authority.36 Many of the thousands of enslaved people transported across the Atlantic to Charles Town in the 1750s and 1760s became integral parts of upcountry

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households. With four enslaved workers and three hundred acres on the Wateree River, George Platt, like Fisher, was also representative of this emerging generation of slave owners. Devoting only thirty acres to cash crops— tobacco, wheat, and oats—he used the remaining land for grazing cattle and sheep or as unimproved woodland for hogs. In addition, he provided services for his neighbors; he built a gristmill that he kept at “constant work in grinding corn” and operated a wagon service to take flour and other commodities to market. Rather than accept cash from farmers who used the mill and wagon, Platt bartered these services in exchange for “pork and cows,” thus providing food for his table and fresh stock for his herd. In this way, he met his household’s needs from his own fields and from goods exchanged with his neighbors; his cattle yielded manure, meat, milk, and other products; his fields provided cereal crops and vegetables; his mill produced flour; his woodlands yielded timber and provender for pigs and hogs; and enslaved farmhands provided the labor necessary to perform these tasks.37 Lowcountry merchants were only too happy to service the upcountry’s needs for enslaved laborers. Peter Manigault noted the great lengths to which planters went to acquire slaves. Not only did they willingly make the long and exhausting journey to the coast, estimating that some traveled around three hundred miles, but he also noted their unwillingness to return home “without Negroes, let the Price be what it will.” The amount of money that changed hands soon reached an “Extravagant” level. Laurens concurred; not yet burdened with “bad debts,” they paid the “highest prices” for enslaved laborers and needed little encouragement to buy “Cargoes” of newly imported Africans. Furthermore, thanks to his connections to Kershaw, Laurens quickly recognized the region’s immense commercial potential. The combination of the colonial government’s township scheme and land grant program had turned the region into “a large field for trade”; coffles of enslaved laborers and wagons carrying consumer goods traveled inland, while tobacco, wheat, indigo, and cattle moved in the opposite direction. Along with the profits made from selling enslaved Africans, Laurens also bought land in the uplands, purchasing more than thirteen thousand acres near Ninety-­Six on which to raise indigo.38 On the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved laborers from Africa constituted a significant proportion of the region’s workforce. Historian Rachel Klein estimates that slave owners around Camden and between Lynches Creek and the High Hills of Santee owned an average of nineteen enslaved laborers. Importing enslaved people from Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River, from where his partner Richard Oswald ran a major slaving

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operation, Laurens sold Senegambians to backcountry farmers. The slave markets of West-­Central Africa were another source of enslaved people. Runaway notices also provide some information about their provenance. Three enslaved men from “Bambara country” (Mali and the Guinea coast), who spoke no English, were apprehended near Augusta in the Upper Savannah Valley before being taken to the Charles Town workhouse in spring 1765. A few years later, Welsh Neck farmer David Williams reported the flight of “five new Negro men of the Angola country,” noting that they had traditional facial scarring, spoke little English, and were, he claimed, heading for the coast, “thinking that they could return to their own country that way.”39 At times, other runaway slaves joined the bandits that roamed the backcountry in the late 1760s. In March 1768, the authorities locked up several horse thieves along with “four Negroes” in Charles Town’s jail; of the imprisoned men, three belonged to lowcountry planter John Drayton and the fourth to William Williamson, a farmer in the Upper Savannah Valley. Eight months later, Williamson reported Ben’s absence. Taking a horse from Williamson’s stock pen and “well acquainted with most parts of the backcountry,” Ben had escaped and soon found himself “in company with Tim Tyrell, Govey Black, John Anderson, Anthony Distow, Edward Wells and others,” a violent gang of outlaws and horse thieves. Although it seems that Ben was one of a very small number of escaped slaves who found refuge with bandits, it sparked concerns that more enslaved people might find refuge in the woods with outlaws, posing further problems for a government already struggling to keep order in the region.40 Yet, enslaved laborers in the upcountry neither rebelled nor conspired in large numbers to kill their masters or burn down their houses. In a distinct minority, enslaved laborers did not benefit from the density and complexity of networks that prevailed in the lowcountry. Most upcountry slaves, like the enslaved men and women who worked on Robert Fisher’s farm, were possibly integrated into the household; white people may have viewed them, to borrow Charles Woodmason’s phrase, less as anonymous field hands and more as “family Servants,” but whether this made the daily lives of enslaved labors any less fraught is doubtful. While enslaved people in the rural lowcountry inhabited an increasingly Africanized world over the course of the eighteenth century, their upcountry counterparts lived in a society firmly grounded in their owners’ own traditions and practices. Even if they were newly arrived from Africa, their numbers and distribution limited their cultural integrity and autonomy.41

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Churches and Ministers The church was the other major institution in the upcountry that gave slavery and white society in the region its distinctive cast. Most white immigrants arrived with their denominational loyalties firmly in place, ready to establish new congregations in their new homes. As we saw earlier, no sooner had King’s Tree survived its first year than its inhabitants “began to form into a religious society,” with the newly arrived Presbyterian minister Robert Herron holding services in the newly built meetinghouse. Across the region, the charter generation of backcountry settlers placed the construction of churches and the appointment of ministers high on their communities’ agendas. Vital to the region’s Christianization, the church not only met the spiritual needs of individual families but also became the driving force behind the regulation and policing of the communities that it served.42 The story of the first generation of white settlers in the Upper Pee Dee Valley vividly illustrates the major role played by the church in colonizing the region. In 1736, following a dispute among members of the Pencader Hundred Baptist Church in northern Delaware in 1736, a number of congregants left for South Carolina, establishing a thriving community on the Welsh Tract in Queensborough Township. Under the leadership of Philip James, about fifteen families established a new church the following year. Not only did the church continue to grow, but the Welsh Tract itself underwent a period of significant growth, with farms producing corn, indigo, tobacco, and wheat. Between 1760 and 1768, its white population increased from 3,500 to 5,000 and the number of enslaved people went from 300 to 1,276. The church soon became a center for the region’s Baptists and a node for the establishment of other congregations throughout the Upper Pee Dee. By the early nineteenth century, nearly 30 upcountry congregations could trace their roots back to James’s first Baptist church.43 For every congregation, ministers were key figures. In constant motion, they organized and presided over services, kept the meetinghouse in good repair, delivered sermons, tutored and brought converts before the church, married couples, baptized their children, and buried the dead. The meetinghouse was the center of the minister’s public life, the place around which community became a material reality where congregants met to worship, socialize, and exchange news and gossip. The minister also had to fulfill his obligation as the congregation’s moral steward, attending to its welfare, a job that included punishing the impious and immoral, dispensing charity, and

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adjudicating disputes between church members. With no courthouses in the backcountry, ministers helped fill the vacuum created by the absence of a local judiciary. They also had to confront the growing importance of slavery, endeavoring to incorporate it into their church’s polity. In addition to meeting their religious and pastoral obligations, ministers often held other jobs, running farms or other enterprises. Edmund Botsford, for example, divided his time between his Baptist church in the Pee Dee Valley and his carpentry business. Working men, ministers quickly became community as well as spiritual leaders, familiar figures who could converse about mundane secular issues as well as parse Scripture.44 The mission statement for the Baptist church at Cashaway Neck in the Upper Pee Dee Valley, founded by Joshua Edwards, two other ministers, and fourteen lay members in 1756, outlined the church’s spiritual and pastoral obligations. Not only did its ministers instruct church members “to walk with each other in all Humility and Brotherly Love,” but they were also required to “warn, rebuke and admonish” any member who might stray from the path of righteousness. With farmhouses scattered throughout the township, the injunction “to watch over each other” had the potential to foster community with neighbor looking after neighbor; it could also threaten its stability should some people be too zealous in their duties. The covenant defined conduct that might result in dismissal or excommunication; by signing it, members were obliged to uphold articles that included prohibitions against attending “any horse race, shooting match or public place of Carnal mirth or diversion whatsoever.”45 Unfortunately, even the Reverend Joshua Edwards failed to meet such exacting standards. On Christmas Day 1759, he confessed to his congregation at Cashaway that he had been “overtaken and intoxicated with liquor,” an admission that resulted in his suspension from his ministerial duties. Other congregants broke the rules governing the consumption of “spiritous liquors,” including Richard Ponder, who was suspended for “excess of drinking” in September 1759. Several months later, the church reviewed his case, upholding his suspension as he had ignored their “Admonition” and continued “drinking to excess.” Over a year elapsed before church leaders, tired of “his persisting in drunkenness, swearing and paying no regard to the Admonition of the Church,” chose to excommunicate Ponder. By June 1760, he had apparently recovered and “was restored again to his place” in the congregation only to relapse and find himself excommunicated again in November. Neither Edwards nor Ponder were alone; elders adjudicated

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numerous cases of members who, “overtaken and intoxicated with liquor,” were unable to curb their drinking and had systematically ignored counsel from their peers.46 On occasion, the meetinghouse also functioned as an informal courtroom. In early 1770, the church elders at Cashaway mediated a dispute between Benjamin James and William Owens, who had appeared before them on charges of drunkenness on several occasions. After buying a horse from James, Owens claimed that the seller never delivered the animal, requesting that the church settle the matter. The church instructed James to compensate Owens with twenty-­five bushels of corn immediately and another forty in the autumn, an arrangement “to which all parties concerned agreed.” No sooner had Owens received the first payment of corn than church elders suspended him for being “overcome with Liquor.” The following spring, after receiving frequent warnings about his excessive drinking, Owens was excommunicated for failing to attend church, continuing “his bad ways of living,” and breaking his pledge to quit “Drinking Spiriteous Liqueor.”47 The rules that Ponder, Owens and other church members persistently broke that led to their excommunication were listed in the church’s discipline. For members of the Baptist church at Welsh Neck, the directives called on church members to follow the path of morality, instructing them to resist “wicked company and vain pleasures, such as playing cards—dice and other unlawful games, and from going to dances—balls—and sinful assemblies, and horse races.” Drafted in 1756, the Welsh Neck church discipline was more than a rulebook, however; it was also a guide to leading a pious and godly life. To prevent immoral or disorderly conduct from disrupting family or community life, it promoted the idea of Christian stewardship by encouraging members to police themselves, to guard against corruption, and to raise children according to church rules. In an effort to graft the church’s moral imperatives onto the congregation, Botsford instructed members to set “good and wholesome examples” to their offspring, requiring that they maintain “a strict watch over their conduct,” and to provide “advice, admonition, and correction as their cases shall appear to require.”48 The rubric that structured the moral lives of Welsh Neck worshippers required them to become models of diligence, sobriety, and Christian morality. But households were not simply places where parents raised children; they were also where enslaved men and women worked and lived. Defining themselves as biological as well as surrogate parents over the household, slave owners claimed an authority that could extend beyond the four

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walls of the farmhouse itself. The connection that Botsford and his peers made between church governance and family discipline laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new set of cultural practices whereby householders defined themselves not only as guardians of their own families but also as stewards of the enslaved men and women whom they exploited. Out of the disciplines that governed the lives of the members of Welsh Neck and other churches emerged an early iteration of a vernacular proslavery ideology that would come to play a major role in the white mind in the years to come. Religion also became an arena in which backcountry settlers played out their ethnic animosities. With each family belonging to one of several Protestant denominations, including the Anglicans, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians, sectarian rivalries became an important feature of church life. Staunchly Presbyterian like the vast majority of Scots Irish immigrants, the Witherspoons had “a great adversion to [the Anglican] Episcopacy” and embraced “the reformed protestant principles of the church of Scotland.” Many evangelical worshippers, who had undergone conversion and spiritual rebirth during the Great Awakening, harbored similar hostile opinions about the Anglican Church, attitudes that eventually evolved into implacable opposition to all British institutions. At times, worshippers openly expressed their opposition to the Church of England. On one occasion, one Anglican minister had to remove “Excrements on the Communion Table” before he could begin the service. At Little Lynches Creek, Presbyterians told the Anglican itinerant Charles Woodmason in no uncertain terms that “they wanted no D—d Black Gown Sons of Bitches among them” before threatening to set him on fire. A lightning rod for frequent verbal attacks, he often had his services disrupted by drunks “hooping and hallowing like Indians,” churchgoers wanting “to enter into Disputes” with him during worship, with barking dogs and rowdy children only adding to the pandemonium.49 Such belligerent attitudes allowed Scots Irish settlers to assert their ethnic and religious identity as well as their independence from the Church of England. But their behavior highlighted the cultural gulf between the refinement of the lowcountry, symbolized by Charles Town with its elegant houses and cultured inhabitants, and the rough, coarse farmers of the upcountry, between scholarly Anglican ministers and unschooled evangelical “field preachers.” In 1736, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the Church of England’s missionary arm, dispatched John Fordyce to organize Prince Frederick Parish. After three years, Fordyce estimated that of the parish’s twelve hundred Christians, only about thirty-­five were Anglican

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communicants. Despite some early success at bringing worshippers into the Anglican fold, he decided to “quit this ungrateful parish” after the vestry— lay members who administered the church—complained bitterly about his conduct. But he was constantly at loggerheads with dissenters as well. He accused the parish’s Baptists of evading tax, arguing that they failed to declare how much property they owned, insulting them further by claiming that the land they did hold was “ill bestowed on a people that will never answer to the Intentions of the Government’s Indulgence to them.” He frequently locked horns with Baptist preachers. Fordyce not only dismissed field preachers as “ignorant” but also complained that there were simply too many of them, remarking that “one can scare beat a bush but out pops a preacher.” Although Fordyce failed to plant the Anglican flag deep into the region’s soil, his secular career proved to be a success. At his death in 1751, he had accumulated an estate valued at over £4,000 that included fifteen enslaved laborers.50 In part, the Anglican Church’s failure to attract new adherents can be attributed to an inability to understand the cultural and spiritual lives of the people that it hoped to attract. Fordyce, Woodmason, and others who tried to expand the church’s reach from its lowcountry enclave often adopted a condescending tone toward potential recruits. Confiding to his journal, Woodmason was appalled by the settlers’ “abandon’d Morals, and profligate Principles” and their “Rude and ungarnish’d Minds.” Moreover, his animus against Baptists and Presbyterians, as well as their ministers, did nothing to further his efforts to develop the Anglican Church in the region. Lacking formal theological training, evangelical preachers conducted services that were, claimed Woodmason, filled with “Wild Extempore Jargon” that was “nauseaus to any Chaste or refin’d ear.” Services led by “field preachers” left him slack-­jawed in horror; congregations, he noted, behaved like “a Gang of frantic Lunatics broke out of Bedlam” with “Women falling on their Backs, kicking up their Heels, exposing their Nakedness to all Bystanders.” All this noise, chaos, and physicality was too much for the staid and conservative Anglican minister, who wished “to teach these Clowns their Duty,” a task that could only be accomplished, or so he believed, by embracing the Anglican Church’s “Solemn, Grave, and Serious Sett Forms.”51 When people assembled to hear Woodmason, they frequently came to evaluate and critique his performance rather than to become Anglicans. After preaching to “above 500 people” at Cheraws and baptizing sixty children, he was excited to learn about the “great Multitude of People” at nearby Lynches Creek, who were apparently thrilled at the prospect of witnessing

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“the 1st. Episcopal Minister they had seen since their being in the province.” Believing that the congregation, having endured an endless parade of “Itinerant Teachers, Preachers, and Imposters from New England and Pennsylvania” were either bored or confused by their sermons, he enthusiastically launched into the service. Only later did he realize that they had come “with Itching Ears only, not with any Disposition of Heart, or Sentiment of Mind,” attending, he reluctantly concluded, “out of Curiosity, not Devotion.” He could only envy Presbyterian minister William Richardson, who regularly drew a thousand people “of a Sunday” when he preached to congregations around the Waxhaws.52 Furthermore, Anglican ministers failed to provide a message that resonated with the settlers’ sensibilities or experiences. Born and raised as Baptists or Presbyterians, most upcountry worshippers had assimilated the theology and liturgical practices of their denomination during childhood. The apparent disorder that characterized services, as well as the emotional register of the congregations that so troubled Anglican ministers, was deeply woven into their religious culture. Where Woodmason saw “frantic lunatics broke out of Bedlam” rather than disciplined and orderly congregants assembled “to celebrate the most sacred and Solemn Ordinance of their Religion,” evangelical preachers saw exuberant worshippers openly demonstrating their faith with a physicality and an emotion that Anglican services regularly lacked. For families that had migrated to the region, attending services that drew on the traditions of the meetinghouses and chapels of villages like Knockbracken, where the Witherspoon family had once worshipped, provided a sense of continuity with their past, a memory of events that recalled their earlier lives, and helped forge community in the present. Likewise, for children born and raised on the frontier, churchgoing was essential to their notion of community and identity.53

Bandits and Householders In the late 1760s, however, the sense of righteousness and discipline that Botsford and other ministers wished to instill in upcountry settlers evaporated when a tidal wave of violence swept over the region. No longer “A Desert, and Forrest, overrun with Wild Beasts, and Men more Savage than they,” commercially minded settlers who lived in the Upper Pee Dee Valley and around the Broad/Saluda/Wateree watershed, had transformed the

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countryside from a wilderness into a land “Peopled and Planted to a degree incredible for the Short Space of Time.” The region’s rising population of free and enslaved p ­ eople, combined with the expansion of commercial agriculture, all indicated that it was gradually exchanging its frontier identity for the market, with Camden—the only settlement of any significance in the region—becoming an important center for merchants and trade.54 As upcountry slaveholders engaged with the market, they started seeing themselves as planters, but this act of self-­definition did not automatically mean that they lived in a plantation society. Even though evangelical churches sought to foster the basic structures of community, the region lacked the formal administrative institutions necessary to govern an increasingly complex society. The absence of local courts to enforce civil and criminal law proved particularly troublesome; in a petition that voiced the concerns of many settlers, farmers along Lynches Creek noted not only “that the frontier here is a place of refuge for many evil disposed people . . . such as Horse Stealers and other Felons” but also that “trade and commerce among them was greatly obstructed for the want of a County Court.” Rarely, however, did lawmakers address these issues. Lacking political power in the Assembly and without the machinery of justice, farmers and merchants had no alternative but to conduct business in an institutional vacuum, forcing them to tackle legal and other problems without the benefit of courthouses and the apparatus of colonial government.55 Living in a region where “the Bands of Society and Government hang Loose and Ungirt,” people regularly took matters into their own hands, settling disputes with knives, guns, or fists, resulting in altercations that frequently left adversaries “highly inflam’d and boiling over with Rage and Resentment,” nursing physical injuries as well as grudges. A ubiquitous presence, firearms sometimes made these brawls fatal; sixteen-­year-­old servant Baikia Harvey, a migrant from Orkney, noted how skilled marksmen could “kill the Bigness of a Dollar Betwixt Two & three hundred yards Distance.” The peaceful alternative entailed traveling to Charles Town along roads that were little better than rutted, potholed tracks; not only was this expensive and time-­consuming, but neither plaintiff nor defendant had any guarantee that the court would hear the case.56 In sharp contrast to backcountry farmers and storeowners, who were increasingly embedded in the marketplace, were men and women who, through temperament, misfortune, or the legacy of the Cherokee War, found themselves marooned on the margins of a burgeoning commercial society.

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They neither participated in the institutions that underpinned the backcountry’s social order nor embraced its new values. Taking to the woods “with their Horse and Gun,” squatting on uncleared and unimproved land away from settlements, and building crude shelters and camps, they survived by hunting and poaching, drifting between legal and illegal conduct. “To steal,” noted David Ramsay, an early historian of South Carolina, “was easier than to work . . . the former was carried on extensively, and the latter rarely attempted.” Others similarly judged those unable or unwilling to find a place in the new social order as lazy, criminal, or both. “There are many people,” noted New Windsor farmer and store owner Johannes Tobler, “who avoid work and . . . wander around in the woods and support themselves by hunting.” Camden’s commercially minded residents concurred, petitioning the government to regulate “idle and disorderly vagrants” who hunted rather than followed “some honest method for gaining subsistence”; at the same time, evangelical ministers spoke out against the shiftless, the intoxicated, and the promiscuous, incorporating strict prohibitions against their behavior in church disciplines.57 Even though hunting was legal, householders often conflated it with banditry. Not only did they regard hunters as vagrants, leading seminomadic lives whose culture stood in direct opposition to the values of the householder, but hunting deer was equated with Native American life, and was thus synonymous with savagery. Moreover, their hunting practices further antagonized farmers. Tracking their prey at night and using blazing pine torches to blind their quarry, hunters often set fire to the woods; they frequently mistook cattle for deer, shooting cows rather than game. Gutting and butchering animals after the kill, hunters carted away the meat, but regularly left behind entrails and other viscera. On one occasion, they dumped so much offal in the woods around Ninety-­Six that wolves not only swarmed to the spot to feed, but then began killing and eating sheep and cattle, terrifying local farmers. Whether shot in error or on purpose, cattle and other domestic animals often found their way into hunters’ pots.58 Hunters were not the only people who spent their days with a gun rather than with a plow. In 1766, bandits began raiding isolated farmhouses, fostering a climate of fear. In many cases, they did not simply rob their victims; they terrorized them, brutally beating householders as they stole cash, horses, and other valuables, and wrecked their cabins. Led by Jeremiah Fulsom, his gang attacked John Scott, a magistrate and storeowner in New Windsor in the Upper Savannah Valley (because he kept cash on hand, he was known as “Ready Money” Scott), and his wife. Invading the house, Fulsom’s associates

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blinded their victims by throwing snuff in their eyes; they “tied and blindfolded” Scott until he handed over “some pennies.” Enraged by this insulting gesture, claiming that “they had not come 500 miles for his coppers,” they tortured him, burning his face “in a shocking manner” until “his eyes were ready to start out of his head, burned his toes almost off . . . [and] branded and burnt him” before he revealed the location of “gold, silver, and paper money.” The gang then assaulted his wife; they jammed a beehive on her head, bound her with a blanket, ran “a brand’s end of fire into her face,” and tossed her into the fireplace. Leaving the house, they crossed the Savannah into Georgia where they divided the spoils.59 Fulsom’s men were not the only bandits menacing the upcountry. Perhaps the most notorious band was led by Govey and George Black, and Thomas and James Moon, who “infest[ed] the Forks of the Saludy, Broad, and Savannah Rivers” in late 1767, plundering farmhouses, assaulting their occupants, and burning their crops. Declining family fortunes, changing economic circumstances, and the impact of the Cherokee War all contributed to the Blacks and Moons becoming violent criminals. Born into a family that owned land in Fredericksburg Township, Govey inherited land on the Wateree River from his father John, which he sold to Camden merchants Joseph Kershaw and Samuel Wyly in 1759. Soon afterward, Black sold another plot; after this transaction, notes historian Richard Brown, Black “ceased to seek an honest livelihood.” The Moon brothers took a similar path to banditry. In 1765, Kershaw took Thomas to court for unpaid debts. James came to the rescue by selling another hundred acres to meet his brother’s obligation. Not only had debt forced both sets of brothers to sell family land, but they had also tangled with Joseph Kershaw, who was consolidating his position as a leading upcountry merchant. Moreover, the court cases had left the Moons neither land nor any visible means of support. Perhaps unwilling to become wage workers to earn their livings or at odds with the emerging economic order, they turned to crime, looking for targets of opportunity in the Broad and Upper Savannah valleys, about fifty miles west of their childhood home.60 In mid-­June 1767, the Gazette reported the first in a series of “Robberies and Cruelties” committed by the Black‒Moon gang, attacking Cherokee War veteran Captain Basard on the Broad River, shooting him in “the Breast and Shoulder.” Returning some days later, they looted the house and stole his horses. Moving on, they assaulted a Mr. Wilson, burning him with “red hot Irons in a shocking Manner” and stealing “everything of value he had.” In late June, they robbed storeowner Dennis Hayes. Painted “like Indians,” the gang

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bound Hayes, stealing “three thousand pounds and upwards.” Before escaping with their loot, they attacked his wife and ten-­year-­old daughter, treating “them worse than the most Savage Indian.” Leaving them naked, battered, and bleeding, they headed for Charles Kitchen’s farm on the Broad where they “beat out one of his wife’s eyes, and burned the poor man cruelly.” Taking a short break from the mayhem, they struck again several days later, beating Gabriel Brown nearly to death, and making off with money and other items. Their spree ended in late July when they assaulted a Mr. Hack, taking “what Cash he had about him.” Over the next nine months, the gang rampaged across the upcountry districts of the Carolinas. In March 1768, trapped by a Ranger patrol near Mount Airy, a small settlement in western North Carolina, Black and sixteen other outlaws were captured and summarily hanged.61 Initially, the militia proved incapable of stemming the tide of violence. Its efforts to track and apprehend bandits often ended in humiliating failure. On one occasion, a patrol escorting a prisoner to Charles Town blundered into an ambush during which two officers were fatally wounded; the outlaws freed the captive, whipped the other guards and then vanished into the woods. On another occasion, local residents proved more effective than the militia. In July 1767, a gang led by James Tyrrell, began ransacking farms, burning crops, and attacking travelers near Long Canes in the Upper Savannah, where Cherokee warriors had attacked a convoy of settlers seven years earlier. Six men led by William Watson and his sons William and Michael set off in pursuit, cornering them near the house of Robert Ford, an associate of the outlaws. After an exchange of gunfire, three members of the Watson posse and two bandits lay dead, killed by Michael Watson who, having been wounded during the skirmish, managed to shoot them before he took his knife, and “ripped two of them open.” A militia unit led by Lieutenant Francis Sinkfield caught up with Tyrrell, who was looking for John Anderson, a gang member who had earlier fled from the carnage at Ford’s house, and ordered the outlaw to surrender. Tyrrell instead told Sinkfield “to fire away and be damned.” His men duly obliged and, with their opening volley, brought “down one of the most barbarous Wretches among the Whole Crew.” With Tyrrell dead and with night fast approaching, Anderson slipped away into the woods.62 Bandit gangs were more than just blunt instruments for robbery and violence. For Govey and George Black, they provided a way for the family to retain some cohesion; not only were Govey and George siblings, they were also the half-­brothers of Thomas and James Moon. They had all grown up together in Fredericksburg Township, had shared a parent, and sold or lost

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the extended family’s land at the hands of Camden merchants before turning to banditry. The brotherhood of crime extended beyond the Blacks and the Moons; several other sets of brothers became outlaws, including Hezekiah, James, and Timothy Tyrrell; James and Silvester Stokes; and Charles and Daniel Higden, horse thieves who “lived in open defiance of the whole country” near Augusta in the Upper Savannah.63 But the gang also functioned as a surrogate family. Even though the wave of violent crime crested several years after the end of the Cherokee War, that conflict had led to the destruction of many white families, resulting in a “Great Number of Orphan and Neglected Children scatter’d over these Back Countries” who, noted Woodmason, lived “expos’d in a State of Nature.” His call for the establishment of local schools to prevent young people from drifting into “Vice and Wickedness” fell on deaf ears in Charles Town. With no institutions to provide practical or emotional support, adolescent children who had been abandoned or orphaned “were oblig’d almost to associate with Villains and Vagabonds for Subsistence.” In some cases, the gang became a refuge for fugitive slaves, including the enslaved man who escaped from William Williamson’s Savannah River cattle pen and who had been spotted riding with bandits toward “Holsen’s River [the Holston River watershed drains the Great Smoky Mountains in northwestern North Carolina] to steal horses.” For enslaved laborers on the run, the gang provided sanctuary and perhaps the only feasible means by which to stay free and survive in the upcountry.64

Regulators and Outlaws Banditry threatened to destabilize the emerging social order built around church, household, marketplace, and, increasingly, slavery. Determined to end “the Depredations of Robbers,” farmers gathered their neighbors into mounted patrols to end the “Cruelties committed by these barbarous Ruffians.” With no formal authority from the government in Charles Town, they chose to police their own communities and track down the bandits themselves in an effort to impose order on a region that was sliding into unchecked violence. By late fall 1767, prominent planters had recruited men to defend their neighborhoods, appointing themselves commanders of their local units; for example, Cheraws planter Claudius Pegues organized farmers in the Upper Pee Dee Valley, Moses Kirkland commanded Regulator patrols in the lower Saluda, and James Mayson in Ninety-­Six. Drawn from the ranks of the first

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generation of colonists who had settled the region in the 1730s and 1740s, the men who mounted their horses to ride out against the “banditti” saw themselves as the standard bearers for property rights, law and order, and the ethic of the marketplace. In its two-­year existence from 1767 until 1769, between five and six thousand men participated in the movement. Moreover, by using the discourse of law and order to frame their actions, Regulators not only set about pursuing and punishing bandits, but they also looked to lay claim to political leadership in the backcountry, a claim based on their ambition to build a society grounded in commercial farming and slave ownership.65 Regulators, in many cases, enjoyed some degree of social and economic standing in their own communities. The transition to commercial farming had profound cultural implications; in addition to engaging with the market, planters started moving away from the material and imaginative world of the frontier and toward the modes and manners of the lowcountry gentry in an effort to achieve position and respectability, qualities that would further reinforce their claims to leadership. Replacing log cabins with substantial houses, buying consumer goods (now readily available thanks to merchants like Kershaw and others), and turning to enslaved laborers to work their fields were signs that backcountry families were increasingly embedded in the marketplace and embracing the values of their coastal counterparts. Casting themselves as community leaders, Regulators recognized how the absence of courts and the other institutions of government, combined with the continued activities of bandit gangs, threatened to undermine the project to transform the upcountry into a dynamic plantation society. Claudius Pegues, a Huguenot immigrant who had arrived in the lowcountry in the 1730s and then relocated to the Upper Pee Dee in 1758, embodied this new generation of settlers. Owner of four thousand acres and sixty enslaved laborers, Pegues planted indigo and other cash crops near the Cheraws, where he lived in an elegant two-­story residence with porches, columns, and other architectural features that mimicked large lowcountry plantation houses. Its interior also replicated its coastal counterparts; his furniture was made from imported mahogany rather than local pine, the walls were adorned with mirrors and pictures, including a mural that depicted the local countryside over which he exercised his authority. And, like his lowcountry counterparts, he parlayed his wealth into local political power; he held offices that incorporated charity with commerce, serving as Overseer for the Poor and as Commissioner of High Roads in addition to his position as the leader of the Cheraws Regulators.66

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By early 1768, Regulator patrols were enjoying greater success than the militia. On one occasion, they caught a gang after a fifteen-­mile pursuit through the countryside near Camden, with the posse recovering stolen horses and other goods after a short exchange of shots. Unencumbered by procedure and ignoring due process, Regulators took it “upon themselves to punish such offenders as they catch” rather than take their prisoners to Charles Town and trial. Capturing Edward Waties and Anthony Distow (or Distoe) in June 1768, one posse administered “500 lashes each” on the spot. Some months earlier, Upper Savannah River planter William Williamson had spotted horse thieves, including Distow and Ben, his enslaved farmhand who had escaped from his cattle pen, heading off to rob farms along the Holston River in western North Carolina. Gradually gaining the upper hand over bandit gangs and with the Assembly providing some support by sending out Ranger patrols into the backcountry, the Regulators began disciplining people for offenses that fell into the broad category of vagrancy, punishing women accused of prostitution or adultery and men who seemed reluctant to put in a hard day’s work, turning themselves into guardians of their community’s morals.67 The Regulators sought to enhance their political power by petitioning the Assembly to address their grievances and, later, by fielding candidates for local elections. Turning to Charles Woodmason to draft their statement, known as “The Remonstrance presented to the Commons’ House of Assembly by the Upper Inhabitants,” Regulator leaders had found an ideal spokesman for their cause. Before becoming an Anglican minister in 1767, he had raised indigo on his Black Mingo Creek plantation, owned slaves, run a dry-­ goods store, and served in the Black River militia and as a churchwarden. He was also an ardent defender of property rights, an advocate for law and order, and a champion of morality. Furthermore, he had served in the colonial government, working as a tax collector, a coroner, and a justice of the peace. And he had firsthand experience of the men who ranged “the Country with Their Horse and Gun.” At one point, bandits ransacked his lodgings, taking books, linens and “many little Articles”; in September 1767, he ran into “an Ambuscade of the Horse Thieves” and was briefly taken prisoner. A week later, a number of “rogues” abruptly ended his service at Camden when they “beset several Houses and robbed them,” taking “ev’ry thing they could carry off.” The congregation immediately “took to Arms,” chasing the culprits for fifteen miles until the pursuit ended with a gunfight and the recovery of “several Horses, and much Goods.” And, as one determined to effect “a Reformation of Manners,” Woodmason held strong opinions about men and

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women who embraced “Prophaneness and Infidelity,” led lives of “Ignorance, Vice and Idleness,” and readily welcomed “abandon’d Prostitutes Gamblers and Gamesters of sorts” into their communities.68 In November 1767, Woodmason drafted “The Remonstrance” for the Regulators. In the petition, which included twenty-­three separate demands as well as a long preamble, he described how the absence of institutions to organize and structure civic society combined with the presence of bandits and the lack of representation in the Assembly had hobbled the region’s progress. “Our Lands,” he noted, “lye useless and unclear’d, being render’d of small Value from the many licentious Persons intermix’d among Us, whom We cannot drive off without Force or Violence.” Building courthouses and jails in the backcountry would allow judges to preside over criminal and civil cases, enabling the government to prosecute the “licentious” and allow settlers to resolve disputes over commercial transactions and property claims without resorting to violence. Furthermore, the establishment of new parishes would give political voice to the region, bringing its farmers and planters into the colonial polity. Should the Assembly continue to let “Indolent, unsettled, roving Wretches” remain at large and fail to address the interior’s institutional problems, then its “Vales and Woods” would never realize the potential to become “the brightest Jewels in the Crown of Great Britain” and would remain a region where “No improvements are attempted . . . [and] No New Plans can take Place.” He concluded that “Poor the Country ever will be, if it long remains in its present disorder’d State.”69 The Regulators’ lobbying efforts paid dividends. By early 1768, Ranger patrols had broken the back of the outlaws; no longer did they constitute an existential threat to the lives and livelihoods of backcountry settlers as they had a few months earlier. A year later, the Assembly passed the Circuit Court Act for “the more convenient Administration of Justice” by establishing four new judicial districts. In addition to holding “courts of the general sessions” at Orangeburg, Camden, Ninety-­Six, and the Cheraws twice a year, the law also provided funds for constructing courthouses and jails, organized new administrative districts, and appointed sheriffs to uphold “Rights, Liberties, and Properties, and the Public Peace.” Even though a lengthy dispute over the judges’ tenure and compensation delayed implementation of the Circuit Court Act for nearly three years, the day in early November 1772 when Chief Justice Thomas Gordon and Judge John Murray mounted their horses to ride first to Camden and then on to Cheraws, and when Judges Edward Savage and Charles Cosslett took the road for Orangeburg and before traveling on

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to Ninety-­Six to preside over Courts of Common Pleas marked a significant moment in the backcountry’s history.70 Eradicating banditry and imposing order were not the Regulators’ only goals. No longer threatened by outlaws, they turned on the promiscuous, the vagrant, and the idle, whose presence offended their morality, discipline, and work ethic. The squatter camps that dotted the region had become, claimed Woodmason, home to too many people who spent their days engaged in “Adultery and Fornication . . . Gaming and Gambling—Rioting and Drunkenness—Gambling and Wagering—Fighting and Brawling.” After their success at suppressing banditry, the Regulators pursued the “baser sort of People” who lived on the margins of the law. Appropriating the language of the church discipline, which was steeped in the rhetoric of righteousness, virtue, and self-­ control, they embarked on a campaign to clean up the backcountry.71 At a large gathering at the Congarees in June 1768, Regulator leaders proposed putting “idle persons, all that have not known a visible way of getting an honest living . . . or known to be guilty of mal-­practices” to work and bringing “the baser sort of people” to heel. Their “Plan of Regulation,” a program designed to bring a regime of work, discipline, and morality to men and women who were, in Regulator eyes, dissolute, indolent, or shiftless, and to punish those who challenged their authority. Wayward husbands were summarily dealt with; for failing to provide for his wife and children, Bennet Dozier was lashed to a tree and whipped by Samuel Boykin, a planter and a Regulator. The efforts to dictate morality and impose discipline garnered several critics, but the Regulators did have some success. A correspondent in the Pee Dee Valley informed the Gazette that the Regulators had “reigned . . . in all the remote parts of the province” and, in the process of performing their “Regulation Work” had “brought many under the lash, and are scourging and banishing the baser sort of people.” Regulator patrols destroyed squatter settlements, prompting Woodmason to note that “the Country was purged of all Villains. The Whores were whipped & drove off. . . . Tranquility reign’d. Industry was restor’d.”72 An incident triggered by Gideon Gibson and his men at Marr’s Bluff in the Upper Pee Dee Valley a month after the Congarees meeting marked the beginning of the end for the Regulators. A leader of the Pee Dee Regulators, Gibson was unique in the movement; the owner of several hundred acres and several enslaved laborers, he was also a free man of African descent, although it appears, as Henry Laurens noted, that Gibson had “more red and white in his face than could be discovered in the faces of half the French refugees

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[Huguenot immigrants] in our House of Assembly.” Not only was the number of free Black people in the upcountry infinitesimal—in 1790, of the eighteen hundred free Black people in South Carolina, more than nine hundred lived in Charles Town—but free Black men who owned slaves and held a position of leadership were even rarer. Gibson’s ability to pass—his children had, Laurens also noted, fair complexions—probably provided the cover that allowed him to become an influential figure in the Upper Pee Dee.73 In August 1768, Gibson’s Regulators kidnapped Joseph Holland, a lieutenant in the Pee Dee militia, who had little sympathy for their agenda. Robert Weaver, a magistrate who also shared Holland’s opinion of the Regulators, issued a warrant for Gibson’s arrest and ordered Captain George Thompson and his men to Marr’s Bluff to execute it. Marching onto Gibson’s property, they were soon in trouble. After a brawl, during which several people were badly injured, Thompson and his men were captured and whipped by ­“People of different Colours, (viz.t) Whites, Blacks and Mullatoes.” Determined to assert his authority, Provost Marshall Roger Pinckney, accompanied by Colonel George Powell, traveled to Marr’s Bluff; on this occasion, Gibson’s men verbally rather than physically abused the two men. Leaving empty-­handed, this “outrageous Opposition . . . to civil Authority” reinforced the perception widespread in the upcountry that the government in Charles Town had neither the authority nor the legitimacy to rule effectively, further strengthening the hands of men aware that they could rule the region with impunity.74 Facing the alarming prospect that a “numerous collection” of “outcast Mulattoes, Mustees, [and] free Negroes,” along with horse thieves and other “vagabonds” from “the Borders of Virginia and other Northern Colonies,” had “taken up Arms to carry on their Villainy with Impunity,” the government had no option but to act decisively and tackle the problem of lawlessness in the upcountry. To blunt the growing power of the Regulators, who were consolidating their position as the region’s de facto rulers, the government acknowledged their political demands and, rather than bring the movement to heel by force, Lieutenant Governor Bull chose to bring them into the polity. After learning about Regulator plans to march on the lowcountry in an effort to intimidate voters on the eve of local elections, he placed a ban on all “unlawfull Assemblys,” instructing participants “to disperse and repair peaceably to their respective Houses and Occupations.” Bull issued an amnesty to the Regulators, noting that “the Great and repeated Losses they have sustained” had driven them to embrace vigilante justice, although the pardon excluded Gibson and his men. His olive branch received mixed reviews; even though

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Woodmason noted that the “Seditious Multitude refuse[d] to embrace the Governor’s Proclamation,” a degree of peace descended on the backcountry. On the eve of the election in October 1768, the Regulators mobilized supporters to vote for their candidates for the upcountry parishes of Saint Mark’s, Saint Matthew’s, and Saint David’s. Despite the very low turnout of voters (in Saint David’s, for example, only 166 voted), Regulator candidates, including Claudius Pegues from Camden and Moses Kirkland from Saluda, performed well at the polls, carrying the inland parishes along with Saint James Goose Creek in the lowcountry.75 Not all backcountry settlers accepted Regulator tactics. Some believed that the movement had taken a sinister turn. In early summer 1768, the Gazette reported on “new irregularities,” with Regulator patrols still “rooting out . . . desperate villains” and punishing “such offenders as they can catch.” With banditry no longer a threat and with the idle and immoral in retreat, the Regulators rounded on their critics. Edward Musgrove was an early target; a surveyor, mill owner, militia officer, and magistrate, he embodied the Regulators’ commercial and modernizing values, but his uncomplimentary remarks about vigilantism and the Regulators’ arbitrary methods of dispensing justice enraged them. For the Saluda Regulator Moses Kirkland, he “was a very bad person, and [an] encourager and conniver of thieves and robbers.” Musgrove, however, was fortunate to escape with only a verbal attack; for Jacob Summerall, a justice of the peace in New Windsor Township in the Upper Savannah, his critique of Regulator tactics nearly cost him his life. Angered by his reappointment to the bench after earlier engineering his removal from the post, Regulators dragged him from his house, stripped him, and flogged him. He began legal proceedings against his attackers who not only again beat him as the court date approached but also lashed him to a tree for a week. Only after Summerall’s wife had appealed to Colonel John Stuart, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, who was in Augusta, was a party dispatched to rescue the justice from the tree to which he had been bound.76 Such attacks had more to do with consolidating the Regulators’ authority through terror and intimidation than with their wish to instill order and discipline. Far exceeding “the powers wherewithal they were invested,” their behavior led Musgrove and Beaver Dam Creek magistrate Jonathan Gilbert to discuss with Governor Charles Montagu in 1769 how best to regulate the Regulators. Unable to recruit “gentlemen of rank and property” to ride against them, they turned to Orangeburg farmer Joseph Coffell who, despite his reputation as an “illiterate, stupid, noisy blockhead,” had the necessary

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bravado to take on the Regulators. Soon, he had recruited several hundred farmers into the ranks of the Moderators. Although both Moderators and Regulators shared similar values and ambitions, they found themselves facing off against each other in late March.77 Ready to reassert their control and to teach these pretenders a lesson, more than five hundred Regulators rode to John Musgrove’s plantation at the confluence of the Bush and Saluda Rivers. With the prospect of violence looming, the governor prepared to dispatch soldiers. Only the intervention of Richard Richardson, William Thompson, and Daniel McGirt, who were “gentlemen of great reputation and highly esteemed by the whole body of back settlers,” prevented the bloodshed. Persuading each side to return to their homes, these men engineered the truce that marked an end to the movement.78 With this agreement in place, the Regulators rode home and demobilized. Of course, criminal activity remained part of backcountry life; people still assaulted one another, horses continued to be stolen, and farms still got robbed, but organized banditry had become a thing of the past. After nearly two years in the saddle, the Regulators could look back at their efforts with some pride. Not only had the Circuit Court Act brought the machinery of the state to the backcountry, but their candidates had performed well in the local elections of 1768, granting them political recognition. Their campaign to impose their brand of moral order on the idle and dissolute had enjoyed modest success. Their patrols had successfully suppressed banditry and, even though they had failed to eradicate every “Vice and Wickedness” among backcountry settlers, they had articulated and defended the values necessary—such as the sanctity of property rights and an ethic of order and discipline—for the formation of a society built on the twin pillars of enslaved labor and commercial agriculture.79 Botanizing in the Upper Savannah Valley in 1772, the naturalist William Bartram rhapsodized about the countryside, marveling at its “hills & Vales . . . beautified by numbers of salubrious waters.” But such lyrical descriptions of fields and meadows that “smile in their Vernal Robes” obscured the dispossession, disorder, and violence that had informed the colonization of the backcountry. To meet the challenge of banditry, the “industrious hardy Race of Men,” to use Bull’s description of its settlers, took matters into their own hands and organized a movement to defend their lives and livelihoods. For white families in the upcountry, the church and the household, which met their economic, emotional, and spiritual needs, stood at the heart of their

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society. With the rise of commercial agriculture, the household and the church became the foundations on which slavery rested; accordingly, the institution’s trajectory in the upcountry took a different path from the lowcountry plantation complex.80 Between John Lawson’s journey across the interior at the beginning of the century and Charles Woodmason’s sojourn in the region sixty years later, the backcountry had been transformed beyond all recognition. Its population of free and enslaved people had risen dramatically while the numbers of Native Americans had fallen equally dramatically. Its economy had become increasingly intertwined with that of the lowcountry; livestock, wheat, indigo, and tobacco all headed for the coast, bound for Charles Town’s markets or its wharves, while consumer goods and growing numbers of enslaved laborers moved inland. Ministers who had established congregations had not just instilled community and a sense of moral order, they also had laid the intellectual foundation for the emergence of the ethic of Christian stewardship that would shape social relations between the enslaved and their enslavers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But, on the eve of the revolution, the backcountry had neither shed its identity as a frontier society nor taken on the attributes of a plantation order.

CHAPTER 5

Planters “Full of Money” The Self-­Fashioning of the Eighteenth-­Century South Carolina Elite

You have no idea of their extravagant mode of living here, nor would it be of any service to you if you had. —Benjamin West to Samuel West, February 1778

Taking his physician’s advice, Josiah Quincy sailed from his native Boston aboard The Bristol Packet in early February 1773 in order to “take a tour of the southern provinces for my health.” From a town synonymous with riots and radicalism—Quincy was a member of Boston’s Committee of Correspondence— he also hoped to assess the political climate of the Carolinas and the Chesapeake during his travels as relations between the colonies and Britain steadily deteriorated. Arriving at the end of the month, he was immediately impressed by Charles Town’s prosperity and vibrant commercial life, telling his wife, Abigail, that “in grandeur, splendour of buildings, decorations, equipages, numbers, commerce, shipping, indeed in almost every thing, it far surpassed all I ever saw, or expected to see, in America.” Over the next few weeks, he immersed himself in its social and civic life, “traversing the town from one end to the other, viewing the publick buildings and most elegant mansion houses.” Along with his sightseeing, he also attended a number of grand public events along with smaller private gatherings. He soon became a familiar figure at the dinner parties, card evenings, horse races, concerts, and balls that formed the fabric of daily life for the prosperous and privileged. Not only did he enjoy the hospitality of “opulent and lordly” families, but he

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also became a close observer of the manners and behavior of the lowcountry elite at the dinner table, at the theater, and at the racecourse.1 A few days after his arrival, Quincy enjoyed his first taste of elite life when he attended a musical evening organized by the Saint Cecilia Society. He encountered gentlemen “dressed with richness and elegance” accompanied by ladies whose “richness of dress” far surpassed “the daughters of the North.” Meeting Charles Town’s beau monde at a post-­concert reception, Quincy found “nothing that . . . raised my conception of the mental abilities of this people,” although the presence of Governor Charles Montagu who, as a symbol of British authority, “enkindled” his “wrath.” A Harvard graduate, a prominent lawyer, and a scion of a leading Boston family (his father was Harvard’s president), Quincy was no stranger to such formal occasions, but he brought a sharp and skeptical eye to a society that was simultaneously noted for its “good-­breeding and politeness” and, by its wholehearted embrace of slavery, “great barbarity.”2 Returning home to Massachusetts, Quincy rode across the rural lowcountry, first visiting Thomas Lynch’s Santee River estate, where enslaved Africans labored in its rice fields to create what physician David Ramsay assessed to have “more value than mines of gold and silver.” Next, he visited plantations owned by Joseph Allston, a gentleman with “an immense income all of his own acquisition” who had five estates, totaling about thirteen hundred acres along the Waccamaw River near Georgetown with “a hundred slaves on each.” Thirty-­seven years old, Allston had risen from the ranks of the lowcountry farmers, owning just five enslaved laborers at the beginning of his adult life, to become a prominent planter and among the colony’s wealthiest men. But Allston did not embody the power of the lowcountry elite solely through his ownership of land and slaves; he also did so through his conduct and bearing. He readily offered bed and board to a stranger, offering Quincy “more true hospitality and benevolence . . . than any I met with.” Quincy discussed horticulture with Allston, learning about his “great success” growing “Lisbon and Wine-­Island grapes,” and touring his elegant garden. Enjoying a picnic prepared by Allston’s wife as he made his way to North Carolina, he silently thanked his gracious hosts “with more warmth and affection and hearty benizons, than I have ever toasted King or Queen, Saint or Hero” as he enjoyed a lunch of bread and chicken on the roadside.3 Quincy’s diary captures the colony’s ruling class at the height of its power and provides an ethnographic portrait of “the gentry generation,” which governed British North America’s most prosperous province. Even though Quincy

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claimed that he “blended with every order of men as much as was possible and convenient,” his diary suggests otherwise; he clearly spent much more time with the wealthy than with the humble, and he recorded no encounters with enslaved people, although they were a presence everywhere that he went. The men with whom Quincy socialized were, to borrow a phrase from prominent planter Henry Laurens, “full of Money.” They grounded their claims to leadership through their commercial activities, their monopoly over government, and their ownership of extensive plantations and enslaved laborers. But they also secured their place in the social order by comporting themselves in the manner of Englishmen who ruled. By maintaining the outward appearance of wealth and power through performance and consumption, elite men saw themselves as natural rulers, projecting that image of authority to the colony’s population.4 Maintaining a credible performance of authority on a daily basis required more than wealth, however. It demanded that elite men and women deploy their economic power to fashion personas of cultural refinement. In its effort to project mastery, the elite looked to polite society in metropolitan England, aware that genteel manners and the acquisition of fine consumer goods from London would invest them with the mystique of power, a hybrid of confidence, gravitas, and presence. With the highest per capita income in British North America, its wealthiest inhabitants became avid consumers of new fashions and luxury goods. “Plenty,” noted Governor James Glen, “is often the parent of Luxury.” Moreover, by defining the standards of taste through the purchase of elegantly tailored clothes and the construction of fine houses filled with imported furniture, elite men and women not only radiated cultural authority but also created a boundary between themselves and people unable to afford “the good things from England,” including the china cups and silver spoons that adorned the mahogany tea tables in beautifully appointed drawing rooms.5 The manners, furnishings, and social occasions that connoted refinement became “representations of power in action,” distinguishing the patrician from the plebeian, the gentleman from the farmer, and the farmer from the enslaved. “Nothing, at first sight, seems less important than the external formalities of human behavior,” noted French critic Alexis de Tocqueville when he toured the country fifty years after Quincy’s sojourn in the South, “yet there is nothing to which men attach more importance.” Echoing the author of Democracy in America, historian Richard Bushman has observed how “gentility bestowed concrete social power on its practitioners,” a resource for

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impressing and influencing the wealthy and powerful along with those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. The discourses of refinement and taste— gesture, speech, behavior, and consumption—played an integral role in the construction of elite identity as prominent planters and merchants turned the cash in their silk-­lined purses into practices that articulated social power and class distinction.6 Consuming entails more than just the purchase of objects; it is an act woven into the presentation of self. Clothes, teacups, and chairs are also “goods to think with, goods to speak with.” The social occasions that formed a significant part of elite life—enjoying fine food and vintage wines at a supper party or attending the races—also constituted moments that enabled the elite to advertise its status. The houses and rooms through which lowcountry men and women moved became sites of elite affirmation. Then, as now, owning luxury goods, hosting lavish parties, attending concerts and other marquee events, and the easy use of elegant manners signaled not simply wealth but cultural refinement and authority.7 Performance was a major component of elite culture. The elite’s confidence, self-­assurance, and self-­possession, were essential to its articulation of power and had a studied theatrical style about it, with Charles Town becoming “an auditorium of the theater of class hegemony and control.” Houses and carriages functioned as “props” (the word itself is a diminutive of “property”) in the theatrical sense of the word. Surrounded by the trappings of wealth and status, imbued with a cultivated and urbane sensibility, and possessed of elegant manners and gentility, elite families sought to put on self-­assured and confident performances for public consumption that reinforced their position as the colony’s natural leaders and confirmed that they alone had the rare and exclusive qualities required to command and govern. Without such “props,” they risked a performance that lacked conviction and authority in the eyes of a distrustful and dissatisfied audience.8 The undisputed masters of the lowcountry’s social order, elite men saw themselves as absolute rulers over their own dominions. Considering his own power, Henry Laurens designated himself “an absolute Monarch” on his plantation, governing his subjects with an iron fist in a velvet glove. Sovereign of all he surveyed from Mepkin, his three-­thousand-­acre plantation on the Cooper River, he had to behave accordingly. Not every planter reflected on his role in the same way as did Laurens, but planters nonetheless sought to portray themselves as benevolent rulers over both their heirs and their acknowledged biological family as well as their “fictive” (sometimes

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biological) families, who would inherit nothing and who labored in the fields. Behind this mask of affection, however, lay the brutal coercion integral to slavery. Even as they performed in public in a refined and gracious manner when attending the theater or hosting a dinner party, these self-­proclaimed gentlemen held absolute power over enslaved people, ready to brutalize the truculent or disobedient with the rod or the whip. Moreover, they had no qualms about deploying the apparatus of state terror to execute any enslaved person who challenged their authority. It was no coincidence that the men who derived their power and position from the “great barbarity” of slavery took the performance of refinement so very seriously.9 Yet the presence of enslaved people served as a reminder that, the formal and informal mechanisms of control notwithstanding, the elite presided over a society in which rebellion and unrest was a constant and potent threat. The ubiquity of enslaved people—by 1770, they constituted about 50 percent of Charles Town’s population and were the overwhelming majority in the countryside—meant that urban public spaces were contested ground. In only a few places could enslaved people escape the gaze of masters, who had to maintain a façade of authority and command at all times. Moreover, in a culture in which enslaved people exhibited great skill at dissimulation and concealment, masters constantly harbored suspicions about their motives and actions. How many guests who attended elegant dinner parties, one wonders, consciously considered whether the cooks had tampered with the food they were about to eat? And, while enslaved cooks might not have poisoned the meal, they had perhaps “spat in the soup” before serving it.10 The nagging sense that elite families lacked the ancient lineages of English nobility only added to the sense of insecurity generated by the presence of so many enslaved people. Laurens and his fellow planters may have been “full of Money,” but their family trees did not have roots that might be easily traced back to the medieval era. With their claims to leadership based largely on their commercial skills, entrepreneurial acumen, and political influence, displays of conspicuous consumption became a vital tool in legitimating their authority. A life in which the most important question facing a gentleman was how much to wager on the next horse race appeared to many as frivolous and inconsequential. Quincy tartly observed that “he who won the last match . . . or the last horse race assumed the airs of a hero or German potentate.” Yet elite men took such activities very seriously indeed; wagering on the outcome of a race provided them with more than an opportunity to exhibit their knowledge of “the sport of kings;” it also allowed them to display their

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cavalier attitude toward money, and to demonstrate publicly their self-­ assurance and confidence by placing large sums on the outcome of a race yet to be run. Moreover, if their hunch was successful, they could then bask in the compliments of other racegoers who congratulated them for boldness and insight, further enhancing their belief in their own abilities.11 A study of the “civilizing process,” to use sociologist Norbert Elias’s phrase, which unfolded in the eighteenth-­century lowcountry, discloses the ways in which its elite fashioned an identity and embodied authority through behavior that distinguished those in the elite class from the men and women they coerced and governed. These patterns of conduct and consumption that broadcast distinction would endure until obliterated by the Civil War. Most visitors to the city invariably commented on the elegance of elite houses, the refinement of their prosperous inhabitants, and the luxurious lives that they led. But elite style was not only about ostentation and displays of gentility; it was also about an authority that retained its effectiveness only through constant exercise. Power, as Michel Foucault has observed, “exists only when it is put into action.” But unlike the candles that illuminated the dinner parties and card evenings held by the prosperous and prominent, their power could not be extinguished and relit at will. Rather it was a form of social energy that had to circulate through the lowcountry’s social order, demanding constant upkeep in order to maintain the obvious entitlement to power that the elite had so carefully crafted.12

Politics, Planters, and Prosperity In the century between the colony’s settlement and the outbreak of the American Revolution, a powerful ruling class emerged in the lowcountry. Discord and division had initially defined South Carolina’s early political history. The proprietorial government was continually at loggerheads with the Goose Creek men, a group of Anglo-­Barbadian planters and traders that included Sir John Yeamans and Sir Peter Colleton, who confronted their political adversaries at every opportunity, treated the administration with open contempt, and sidestepped the law whenever it suited their own purposes. The Church of England’s agent in the colony, Gideon Johnston, viewed them as “the most factious and Seditious people in the whole World” while the proprietors regarded them as little better than a gang of ill-­disciplined opportunists, seeking to line their own pockets and undermine their authority. In

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a political climate that “vibrated with factional tension,” there were no fewer than twenty-­two different administrations between 1670 and 1719, which struggled and largely failed to calm stormy political waters. Frustrated by constant squabbling and a string of incompetent and indecisive governments, colonists demanded that Parliament free “the Country from the Yoke and Burthen they labour’d under from the Proprietors” and place them under royal rule. With most white settlers “prejudic’d against the Lords Proprietors,” petitioners collected signatures from “almost every body in the Province.” In 1719, a bloodless coup ended proprietorial rule. After an election, the new representatives formed a new administration, drafting a petition to Parliament that laid out the rationale for their actions along with a litany of complaints about the ineffectiveness of earlier administrations.13 The Board of Trade appointed Sir Francis Nicholson, a blunt Yorkshireman and an experienced imperial official who had earlier administered several colonies, including Maryland, New York, and Virginia. Between Nicholson’s arrival in 1721 and Lord William Campbell’s hurried departure in September 1775, the lowcountry’s white residents lived in a well-­administered colony, although backcountry settlers found government less effective. This is not to say that the political waters remained tranquil; a number of major political storms rocked the government, including struggles over official appointments, contested elections, and, from the late 1760s onward, the ever-­deepening conflict over colonial rights. By mid-­century, the Commons House of Assembly in Charles Town was perhaps the most powerful colonial legislature in British North America; it was certainly among the busiest, passing several hundred bills into law during this period.14 With representatives receiving no pay and with restrictive property requirements for office holding, the elite dominated political life. Quincy noted how the Assembly was composed of “almost if not wholly rich planters” (candidates had to own five hundred acres and ten enslaved laborers or hold property valued at £1,000). These requirements often forced prospective candidates to weigh their financial obligations against the demands of political life. Not every member elected to the House took his seat; chosen by voters to represent All Saints Parish in the late 1760s, Allston decided not to serve. But for most representatives, the prestige and influence that attached to membership in the legislature trumped other considerations. Moreover, holding office enabled elite men to demonstrate their civic responsibility and commitment to public service, reinforcing the idea that not only did they willingly embrace their obligation to lead, but they were, in fact, natural leaders. Those who sat in the

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House rubbed shoulders with other wealthy men; more than half owned sixty or more enslaved laborers (the average was ninety-­two), with Daniel Blake and Arthur Middleton holding more than seven hundred each. Other metrics reinforce this conclusion; even the assets owned by representatives from Prince Frederick Parish, home to the least prosperous members, were valued at £2,000 each, “nearly twice the net worth of free whites in the colony.”15 Familiar faces would have greeted representatives when they entered the assembly chamber. Through marriage, elite families constructed dense networks of cousins and in-­laws, creating bonds of familial loyalty and allegiance. Over 60 percent of the men who served between 1721 and 1775 were descended from a few leading lowcountry families who had arrived in the colony in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For example, John Rutledge, who served as the representative in the Commons House of Assembly for Christ Church Parish, could look at its sixty-­eight other members in the chamber and tip his hat to no fewer than thirteen to whom he was related by blood or marriage.16 This arrangement smacked of oligarchy, with family ties and economic interests knitting government together. “I am well acquainted,” noted Speaker of the House Peter Manigault, “with the Circumstances of most of our Inhabitants.” Besides drafting, debating, and passing laws, representatives also set up commissions designed to address specific problems; Allston, for example, served on a committee to oversee the construction of a new jail and courthouse in Charles Town while Manigault participated in a feasibility study for a new college. This helped foster a climate in which representatives, Manigault observed, preferred “to sail with the Stream;” the consensus that prevailed in the Assembly only grew stronger as the Governor’s Council lost its prestige when influential men favored sitting in the Assembly rather than with the governor. Unable to use the power of patronage to achieve his goals, Governor James Glen complained that “the people have got the whole administration into their hands and the crown is . . . despoiled of its principal flowers and brightest jewels.” In 1764, after declining an invitation to join, Laurens observed that he was “sorry to see that Honourable Board so much slighted” which had “reduced its character with some people almost below contempt.”17 The “gentry generation” powerfully promoted its own interests. Its grip on the machinery of government and control over the colony’s political life fostered significant consensus, especially when elected representatives challenged the governor’s efforts to rein in their rights and prerogatives. To a great extent, these men proved to be reasonably capable and effective

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administrators. Quincy’s remarks about the inability of elite men to engage in sophisticated political discourse notwithstanding, ruling the colony was a task that they took seriously; after all, not only did effective governance enable elite men to enhance their status and legitimacy as leaders, but it also helped guarantee that their own businesses and enterprises remain on a stable footing. Moreover, maintaining political stability not only burnished the reputations of the lowcountry patriciate; it was essential to the colony’s security, providing a bulwark against potential unrest from both disgruntled whites and truculent slaves.

Artisans, Merchants, and Money For the families that constituted the lowcountry elite, the “rice revolution” along with the commerce in enslaved Africans generated the considerable wealth that provided the foundation for their social position. Using profits from the plantations, planters sought to “live very handsomely,” plowing their new fortunes into town houses, which they filled either with furniture imported from England or with tables, chairs, and cabinets made by local craftsmen who replicated the designs of London cabinetmakers. On occasion, successful artisans accumulated sufficient capital to join the ranks of their clients. With the elite’s appetite for elegant furniture, cabinetmaker Thomas Elfe, who crafted pieces that ably reproduced Thomas Chippendale’s work, made enough money to purchase real estate in Charles Town, a plantation on Daniel’s Island, and enslaved laborers, several of whom worked in his woodworking shop as joiners and carpenters. Trades essential to the maritime economy also opened the door to wealth. John Rose, a shipwright who had learned his craft building frigates and ships of the line at the Royal Dockyard at Deptford in England, opened his own yard on Hobcaw Creek in the 1750s, accumulating a fortune that enabled him to purchase more than fourteen thousand acres and nearly two hundred slaves by the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Even those who failed to amass a similar fortune enjoyed a standard of living rarely achieved by their counterparts in England; over 50 percent of the city’s artisans had enough money to own land and at least one or two slaves.18 By the time Quincy ambled along the waterfront, Charles Town’s merchants had made countless connections throughout the Atlantic basin. One was Robert Pringle who, between the 1730s and his death in 1776, had forged commercial ties with merchants in Belfast, Hull, Lisbon, London, and other

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European ports as well as along the eastern seaboard; merchants in Boston, Edenton, New York, Philadelphia, and Wilmington were all in his address book. Writing to Richard Thompson, a merchant in Hull on England’s east coast, he outlined the wide selection of items that he stocked, ranging from “Indian Trading Guns with two Sights & Gun Flints” to “Cables, Hawsers, & Running Rigging” to “Course Worsted Stockings for Negroes” to linens and silks to “Bohea Tea in Cannisters . . . Black Pepper & Spices of all sorts.” Charles Town merchants involved in the slave trade also cast their net across the Atlantic, making connections with trading houses in London, Liverpool, and Bristol whose agents ran slaving operations along the coasts of West and West-­Central Africa. Laurens, for example, established a very lucrative partnership with London-­based merchant Richard Oswald, who shipped enslaved Africans from Bunce Island, a large trading post in the lower reaches of the Sierra Leone River. For every enslaved laborer purchased in Charles Town’s slave market that originated from Oswald’s Bunce Island operation, Laurens collected a 10 percent commission, enabling him to accumulate a significant fortune from the thousands imported.19 By mid-­century, Carolina merchants were making handsome livings by providing goods and services to the lowcountry planters, profiting from exporting rice, indigo, and other agricultural commodities overseas, and from importing enslaved Africans along with the consumer luxuries, such as furniture and fabrics, that were so essential a part of elite identity. The careers of the Wragg brothers, Samuel (1690–1750) and Joseph (1698–1751), illustrates the mobility that successful merchants might enjoy. In the early eighteenth century, they left Chesterfield, a market town in the English Midlands, for South Carolina. Joseph initially traded with Native Americans, buying deerskins and Indian slaves, before joining the growing ranks of merchants in the Atlantic slave trade, sometimes partnering with his older brother, who had become involved in colonial politics. Between 1735 and 1739, his syndicate, which owned at least five slave ships during this period, imported twenty cargoes of enslaved Africans. After the Assembly lifted the brief moratorium on the trade imposed in the wake of the Stono Rebellion, Wragg and his associates resumed buying and selling slaves. By the time Samuel and Joseph died, the two brothers had imported more than ten thousand slaves into the colony. Using the profits from his commercial activities, Joseph bought more than fourteen thousand acres, which he divided into four plantations on which more than two hundred enslaved laborers worked. Even though he had now become a landed gentleman, he retained his interest

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in overseas trade, co-­owning ships that sailed between the Caribbean, Philadelphia, London, and Bristol. He also built an elegant town house with a library that contained more than two hundred volumes in Wraggborough, a neighborhood close to the wharves and warehouses on the Cooper River, where thirty enslaved domestics attended to the needs of his household.20 In addition to running a commercial and agricultural empire, Joseph Wragg also participated in political and civic life. Representing Saint Philip’s Parish at several points in the 1720s, he sat on the Governor’s Council, served as a justice of the peace, and was appointed to a committee that distributed funds after fire devastated several neighborhoods in 1740. He later played a role in the Friendly Society, a fire insurance company, and was a founding member of the Charles Town Library Society (CLS). By the 1740s, Wragg not only presided over profitable plantations and a successful commercial enterprise, but he had accumulated a considerable fortune and enjoyed considerable political influence. He had further enhanced his position in polite society with his generous hospitality and sociability, his house becoming a place where his guests, noted Philadelphia merchant William Logan, who dined with Wragg, found themselves “Very Genteely and handsomely Entertained.” In addition, matrimony further enhanced his social position; his children married into equally prominent lowcountry families, including the Manigaults and the Gadsdens.21 Henry Laurens was also a leading member of the “gentry generation” that emerged in the mid-­eighteenth century. Unlike the Wragg brothers, who were immigrants, Laurens was born into a relatively prosperous Charles Town family in 1724. His father, John, was the colony’s largest retailer of saddles, harnesses, and other tack, importing his goods directly from England. In 1744, the twenty-­year old Henry sailed for London, where he trained to become a merchant under the tutelage of James Crokatt, who had made his fortune in the colony by trading with the Creeks and Chickasaws, owning several houses and a wharf in Charles Town as well as several thousand acres in the lowcountry, and by extending credit to local planters. Relocating to the center of empire to further his commercial and political interests in 1739, Crokatt became the colony’s agent and lobbyist ten years later. Laurens spent three years apprenticing in London, establishing connections with merchants in Liverpool, Bristol, and elsewhere. This strategy later paid handsome dividends when he entered the slave trade. In 1748, a year after he returned to Charles Town, he formed a partnership with George Austin, who had left England in the early 1730s to become a merchant. For the next decade, the commercial

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activities of the trading house of Austin and Laurens made both men wealthy. Writing to Liverpool merchant John Knight, Laurens listed the commodities that might be “turn[ed] to advantage” in the Charles Town market, ranging from nails, linen, and sail cloth to “Wines from Madera . . . Rum & Sugar . . . [which] are always in demand.” In a letter to another Merseyside merchant, he went straight to the point. Rather than trade cloth or rum for modest returns, Laurens told Edward Trafford that the real money lay in buying and selling enslaved Africans: “There’s a prospect of most advantage to be made by the Guinea Trade as we have reason to expect good Sales for Negroes.”22 Laurens commented on the climate of prosperity and optimism that prevailed in the ranks of planters in the mid-­1750s, observing that they were “in full spirits for purchasing Slaves and have almost all their money hoarded up for that purpose . . . every Article from our Colony sells mightily well at home.” By 1755, Austin and Laurens carried about a quarter of Charles Town’s trade in enslaved Africans, importing about seven hundred captives that year, and making a 10 percent profit on each one. His partner bought plantations on the Pee Dee and Ashepoo Rivers along with sloops to ship rice and other goods between Charles Town and his estates on which two hundred enslaved people worked. In 1762, Austin had accumulated enough money to return to his birthplace in England, retiring to Aston Hall near the market town of Shifnal in Shropshire. Laurens also joined the ranks of the lowcountry planter gentry; in 1762, he bought three thousand acres on the Cooper from John Colleton (a descendant of original proprietor Sir John Colleton). Here at Mepkin, about thirty miles north of Charles Town, he embraced the life of the plantation owner and landed gentleman. In the following years, he expanded his holdings in land and slaves; when he died in 1792, the saddle-­ maker’s son left behind an empire of twenty thousand acres and more than one hundred enslaved laborers along with a national reputation that he acquired during the American Revolution when he served as President of the Continental Congress between November 1777 and late 1778, later becoming Minister to Holland, and then a member of the diplomatic delegation that negotiated the peace treaty in Paris in 1783.23 Laurens’s ascent into the upper echelons of colonial society overlapped with his entrance into politics. He entered public life when he became churchwarden and fire master for Saint Philip’s Parish. In 1757, after winning election to the Assembly, he sat on several commissions, including committees that looked into the prevention of smallpox, funding for the Cherokee War in which he served, and the construction of a new Exchange and Customs House.

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During the Stamp Act crisis in autumn 1765, he criticized the actions of Charles Town radicals when they invaded his house; several years later, however, he was speaking out against imperial officials, fighting a bruising legal battle with customs officers, and engaging Sir Egerton Leigh, the colony’s Attorney General in a bruising war of words (see Chapter 6). In 1775, he joined the Provincial Congress, the first iteration of South Carolina’s revolutionary government; from 1777 on, he became deeply involved in national politics.24 Now “opulent and lordly,” Laurens and his peers wanted to establish more than commercial empires; they sought to build dynasties, enhancing their position through matrimony, a time-­honored instrument of class formation with leading families becoming intertwined through marriage. For Laurens, this moment came in 1750 when he married Eleanor Ball, the daughter of Elias Ball, the patriarch of a prominent lowcountry family. A member of the first generation of planters, Elias had left the small village of Stokeinteignhead in Devonshire at the end of the seventeenth century for the lowcountry. By the 1710s, he had acquired thousands of acres, becoming the proprietor of Comingtee, the family seat on the Cooper River’s western branch. Dying a year after his daughter’s marriage to Laurens, Elias left the bulk of his estate to his son, John Coming Ball. Between Elias’s death in 1751 and John’s in 1764, the family’s assets increased dramatically following the purchase of another seven thousand acres and more than two hundred enslaved laborers. Laurens participated in the creation of this plantation empire when he and his brother-­ in-­law together purchased three thousand acres. With only “a poor Notion of Plantation business,” Henry turned to John, who was a neighbor, for “advice” in his farming efforts to “improve my knowledge by study & application.”25 Joseph Wragg and his wife Judith Du Bosc, who bore nine children between 1718 and 1737, watched their offspring take a similar path. His daughters married into well-­established families. Elizabeth married Peter Manigault, the wealthiest man in British North America. Ann became the third wife of Christopher Gadsden, a leading Charles Town lawyer, the owner of several rural dry goods stores, a wharf on the Cooper River, and several vessels and a plantation on the Pee Dee. Ninety slaves worked these properties while another twenty-­four enslaved domestics worked in Gadsden’s town house. Attending the wedding of a friend “to a very pretty young Lady . . . wt a handsome Fortune of 3000 str [sterling],” the young Scottish immigrant Alexander Cumine noted the frequency of “fine advantageous marriages,” expressing the hope that one day he too would find “matrimonial happiness” that would supply emotional satisfaction as well as financial security.26

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Elite men expressed the privileges of their material lives through their participation in civic life. To a large extent, their hold on the colony’s politics fulfilled these ambitions, but other elements of public life also enhanced their credentials. Besides planting and politics, gentlemen “delight in acts of universal Charity, kindness, and beneficence, and in promoting, to the utmost . . . the general good and happiness of all men.” Touted as “the most beneficent Thing a Man can do,” charitable works established the elite as people concerned with their fellow white colonists’ welfare. The Free School was one such charitable institution. Although some students paid to attend the school, the fees for poor white children were paid by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). The South Carolina Society, founded in 1737 by Huguenot settlers as a social club, raised money for scholarships for poor children while the Saint Andrew’s Society, established two years later by Scottish immigrants, paid tuition for twenty pupils.27 These charitable efforts often dovetailed with other civic activities. Founded in 1748 by a small coterie of civic leaders, which included Joseph Wragg and Peter Timothy, the printer and editor of the South Carolina Gazette, the Charles Town Library Society (CLS) did more than provide books, periodicals, and pamphlets to its subscribers. Determined to prevent white colonists from falling prey to “the savage disposition” that, or so claimed its mission statement, characterized the province’s Indigenous people and, by implication, its enslaved Africans, the Society aimed to “pursue every Method in our power, to prevent our Descendants from sinking into a similar Situation” by “handing down European arts and manners” to its patrons. Two years after its founding, the society had more than a hundred members on its books. By 1772, the library, which was located in the Free School on Broad Street, held some two thousand volumes, including classic texts of political theory, history, mathematics, philosophy, geography, and contemporary law and politics. Browsing the latest journals from London, such as The Gentleman’s Magazine, its members not only caught up on the latest news and cultural trends from the metropole, but also associated themselves with the refined and polite sensibilities of the imperial capital rather than with the “wolfish and brutish” world that lay beyond the “civilizing” influence of its walls.28 The library was more than a privileged space for its members to browse the latest periodicals and newspapers; it was also where they might engage directly in intellectual pursuits. In May 1765, its reading room provided the setting for William Johnson to show off “EXPERIMENTS . . . accompanied

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with lectures on the nature and properties of Electric Fire.” During the demonstration, Johnson used electricity to create “Electrised Money, which scarce any one will take when offer’d to them,” and to power an “artificial Spider, animated by the Electric Fire so as to act like a live one,” closing his presentation by making “Fire dart from a Lady’s Lips or Cheeks so that she may defy any Gentleman to salute her.” Moreover, prominent members of the CLS, including physician and naturalist Alexander Garden, who corresponded with the Royal Society in London and with Swedish scientist and father of modern taxonomy Carl Linnaeus, and John Lining, another physician who wrote an analysis of the yellow fever epidemic that broke out in Charles Town in 1748 (A Description of the American Yellow Fever) were all part of a growing trans-­ Atlantic network of scholars who exchanged knowledge between the colonies and the metropole. A major institution in civic life, the CLS was a place where men interested in the enlightened world of science and philosophy might gather for conversation—and to admire electric spiders.29 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the elite exhibited an impressive degree of cohesion. The dense network of kin relations generated by marriage strengthened the ties of class. Overall prosperity, moreover, fostered a significant degree of social mobility that further contributed to stability and consensus within the elite white community. One key to its long-­term success lay in its ability to incorporate fresh talent into its ranks, and then transmit its values and practices to new recruits, thus reproducing its modes and manners for the next generation. Laurens and Wragg were not the only men to take advantage of “such vastly superior opportunities of making a fortune than a British farmer can possibly enjoy.” Many small planters, tradesmen, and artisans, such as Thomas Elfe, also joined the elite’s ranks. Moreover, with most white Carolinians scrambling to improve their lot, the concept of upward mobility became an article of faith. The desire to ascend the social and economic ladder, noted the South Carolina Gazette in 1773, had developed into “one continued Race” where “everyone is flying from his inferiors in Pursuit of his Superiors, who fly from him with equal Alacrity.”30 By 1774, Charles Town and the surrounding countryside was home to nine of the ten richest men (according to their net worth) in British North America, led by Peter Manigault who, at the age of forty-­two, was worth £32,737 (or about $7 million in 2021 figures). Only Boston merchant William White, the second-­wealthiest man in the colonies and whose fortune was less than one-­half of Manigault’s (£15,303), presented any kind of competition

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to the financial might of lowcountry grandees. Possessing immense wealth, the colony’s leading elite families could pursue elegant and cultured lives of refinement and gentility, making Charles Town a stage for “the grandiose display of splendour, debauchery, Luxury, and extravagance.” Furthermore, ambitious newcomers recognized the colony’s potential for their own economic advancement; South Carolina was, noted Scottish migrant Alexander Cumine, who arrived in 1763, “a Countray very good for a poor man; for any person who will be industrious & carefull will get his Bread here.” After a brief apprenticeship with a Charles Town merchant, Cumine moved to Beaufort to take up a post as a Latin teacher.31

“Molatto Gentleman”: In Search of Gentility and Refinement Both the prosperity and the social life of the lowcountry’s ruling class caught the attention of visitors and local commentators alike, prompting inquiries into its constitutive elements. In sociological terms, it was a straightforward exercise to define the term “planter.” For Thomas Nairne, the colony’s Indian Commissioner and owner of nearly four thousand acres in the southern lowcountry in the early eighteenth century, the word served as “a common Denomination for those who live by their own and their Servants’ Industry, improve their Estates, follow Tillage or Grasing, and make those Commodities which are transported from hence to Great Britain, and other places.” Others offered definitions also couched in the language of work rather than in terms of political and cultural authority. John Norris, who authored a pamphlet that promoted the colony’s “Fruitful, Pleasant and Profitable Country,” defined the planter as an “industrious labouring man” who, with “care and industry” might acquire the capital to “purchase more land, and . . . more slaves to work with him,” relying on his own resourcefulness and enterprise to build a prosperous plantation. The term, however, proved imprecise. In his sketch of the colony, Governor James Glen chose not to define the word itself; he instead suggested that the planter elite consisted of about five thousand people who enjoyed “plenty and the good things in Life” while the rest of the white population had access only to “the Necessarys of Life,” and led lives of “bare subsistence.” Any person who owned a few acres and a handful of enslaved laborers who cultivated a few acres might designate himself “a planter,” but the planter who aspired to leadership required other attributes. Planters still planted and owned land and enslaved laborers,

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but the men who constituted the elite were far more than farmers in fashionable clothes.32 The acquisition of an elite sensibility was a more complicated task than owning a plantation. On a practical level, it required that elite men secure the material foundations of their prosperity. But land and slaves, no matter the extent of the holdings or the profits that they generated, did not automatically validate claims to leadership. Sharing common backgrounds along with similar political and economic interests, the elite had to ensure that it displayed its central place in the social order effectively and constantly. The ruling class, in short, not only had to exhibit the material trappings of a ruling class but also had to behave in an appropriate manner. In the years since SPG Commissary Gideon Johnston dismissed most colonists as “the Vilest Race of Men on earth . . . being a Perfect Medley or Hotch potch made up of Bankrupts, pirates, [and] decayed Libertines” with “neither honour, nor honesty . . . [or] any tolerable character,” a number of planters and merchants had embraced the ethic of refinement and a cultured sensibility that enabled them to demonstrate their excellent taste, signalling to the rest of the white community that they were no longer “poor and spiritless” but had become “opulent and lordly.” Accordingly, elite men and women inaugurated various practices and institutions to give the ownership of enslaved people the gloss of civility, to furnish themselves with the cultural capital that enabled them to effect nobility, and to maintain a presence in Charles Town, the epicenter of lowcountry life.33 The constitutive elements of elite status in the colonies were somewhat slippery. In an article printed in the South Carolina Gazette in 1734, which had appeared a year earlier in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin, writing under the intriguing pen name “Blackamore,” tackled this problem, using the language of race to analyze status. Claiming somewhat disingenuously to be “an ordinary Mechanick,” the Philadelphia printer, scientist, and polymath noted how “Molattoes,” who stood outside the normative categories that organized relations between Europeans and Africans, “are seldom well belov’d either by the Whites or the Blacks.” People of African descent, he continued, try “to avoid as much as possible their Company and Commerce,” while whites were also “little fond of the Company of Mollattoes.” Franklin considered those who, through “Industry or Good Fortune” had become wealthy, were subsequently seized by “an Ambition . . . to become Gentlefolks.” For “Blackamore,” it was no easy task for “a Clown or a Laborer” to effect “the natural and easy manner of . . . [the] genteely educated.” The

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commoner masquerading as a gentleman was, in fact, no better than “a Monkey that climbs a Tree” because “the higher he goes, the more he shows his Arse.” Without the “Experience of Men or Knowledge of Books, or even common Wit,” he would expose himself as a fraud or a counterfeit gentleman, concluding that “none appear . . . so monstrously ridiculous as the Molatto Gentleman.” Race and class collided in Franklin’s use of explicit racial characteristics to classify the person intent on escaping humble origins for refinement. Racial impurity, as Franklin depicted it, connoted class impurity.34 Franklin’s insights notwithstanding, elite men and women found ways to disguise their origins. Visiting in the mid-­1780s, Milanese traveler Luigi Castiglioni acidly remarked how some “insist on playing up the antiquity of their families, even though their origin is not very remote.” The elite families of the Chesapeake and the lowcountry had gained their position not through military prowess, service to the monarch, or membership in the traditional English nobility but through commercial wealth. Regardless of the scale of their holdings of land and enslaved laborers, their pretensions to aristocracy often rang hollow in the ears of English peers who served as colonial governors or military commanders. Accordingly, this parvenu elite, who had risen to local prominence through its own entrepreneurial zeal, and who grounded its claim to political authority through its economic power, had to work hard to fashion itself as a credible and convincing ruling class. In a place where “everybody is flying from his inferiors in Pursuit of Superiors [where] every Tradesman is a Merchant, every Merchant a Gentleman, and every Gentleman is one of the Noblesse,” the ability to define self and to successfully embody refinement became of paramount importance.35 For Humphrey Sommers, this act of self-­definition proved straightforward. Migrating from southwest England in the early 1740s, he entered the building trades, first advertising his services as a “slater” and then as a “bricklayer” before he became a contractor, providing services for the construction of Saint Michael’s Church. Accumulating enough money to buy property in Charles Town, he then began identifying himself as “a gentleman” rather than as a builder. Continuing his ascent up the ladder, he acquired land in Saint Paul’s Parish and in Dorchester along with enslaved laborers, exchanging construction for planting. When he died in 1788, his estate consisted of more than two hundred slaves, over three thousand acres, and several houses, including an impressive two-­story town house on Tradd Street, maintained by nine enslaved domestics and replete with elegant wood paneling and a carved staircase.36

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Sommers also marked his entrance into high society by commissioning Jeremiah Theus to paint portraits of his wife and himself for his house, which he furnished with fixtures and fittings made by Thomas Elfe who, using English pattern books, built chairs, chests, tea tables, long-­case clocks, and other pieces in the style of Thomas Chippendale and other prominent London cabinetmakers. Sommers also held several offices during the 1760s, serving as Commissioner of the Work House, Markets, and the Poor, and as a representative for Saint Paul’s Parish, where he owned land and was its Commissioner of Roads. How others regarded his transformation from builder to gentleman in the space of a few years is not recorded, but he recognized that to be acknowledged as one depended not just on the skill of the actor but also on the receptivity of the audience.37

Pictures and Clothes The portraits that adorned Sommers’s drawing room were important markers of social status. The earliest portraits of prosperous lowcountry residents first appeared in the early 1700s when Henrietta Johnston, the wife of Church of England commissary Gideon Johnston, got out her paints, brushes, and canvases to relieve her family’s perilous financial situation, beginning a career that lasted until her death in 1729. The central figure in lowcountry portraiture, however, was Jeremiah Theus, the artist who painted Humphrey and Mercy Sommers in the early 1750s. Migrating with his family from Switzerland to Orangeburg Township on the Edisto River in 1735 when he was nineteen years old, Theus moved to Charles Town a few years later and began advertising his availability for portraits, along with “Crests and Coats of Arms for Coaches and Chaises,” a clever marketing strategy aimed at ­people eager to establish their credentials with bogus heraldic symbols. From his arrival until his death in 1774, this jobbing artist painted nearly every leading family in the colony (there are more than two hundred pictures attributed to him). Technically and aesthetically, Theus was no Thomas Gainsborough or Joshua Reynolds; his pictures were significant more as statements of aspiration and ambition than for their artistic excellence. Lowcountry grandees who traveled to England often commissioned professional court painters for their portraits. For his portrait, Peter Manigault hired Scottish artist Allan Ramsay who, as Principal Painter in Ordinary to King George III had painted a full-­length portrait of the monarch in his coronation regalia, was

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regarded as “one of the Best Hands in England.” Manigault reported that the finished canvas was “not only an Exceeding good Likeness, but a very good Piece of Painting” that displayed his elegant “Taste in Dress” to its viewers. Keen to embroider a fine lineage from plain cloth, Manigault hired another artist to adorn his “four wheel Post Chaise” with a coat of arms of “a White Cornelian [a semiprecious stone] pretty large set in Gold . . . with a Compass on the other.”38 Such props enhanced the composition and offered a visual commentary on the sitter’s accomplishments. In 1782, John Singleton Copley painted Henry Laurens, recently paroled following his incarceration in the Tower of London, where he spent fifteen months after the British captured him at sea in September 1780. Painted to mark his presidency of the Continental Congress, the picture shows Laurens seated on an elegant carved chair upholstered in a deep blue fabric; he wears a fine suit made from deep red velvet along with white stockings, lace cuffs, and buckled shoes, with his sword resting between his leg and the chair’s arm. To acknowledge Laurens’s political and diplomatic career, Copley painted bundles of papers and scrolls on a table covered with a decorative cloth. Looking through a classical arch in the background, the viewer can see trees, an allusion to Laurens’s identity as a landed gentleman.39 Fashionable clothes reinforced the sense of refinement and theatricality. Recognizing the importance between elegant attire and social acceptance, Alexander Cumine noted that it was “necessary for one to be Gentilly drest when they go into Company.” Lacking “Ruffled Shirts” in his own wardrobe, Cumine thought that he cut “a poor figure” when he attended social occasions. A visitor from Providence in early 1778, Elkanah Watson had a similar insight about the place of appropriate apparel when, caught up in a fire that destroyed a significant portion of the city, including his lodgings from which he fled when it caught alight, he found himself without any fresh clothes. Trying to retrieve a bag he had left in storage, Watson failed to collect it because of his bedraggled appearance. He turned to a friend, who provided the disheveled Watson with a new shirt and a wig. Now properly dressed, he was “politely received” by the man who had earlier cast him “a suspicious glance.” The episode, Watson concluded, demonstrated “the importance of external appearances to a man’s success in the world, and more particularly among strangers.”40 Elite wardrobes, in contrast, were well-­stocked, enabling wealthy men and women to select clothing best suited to the day’s activities, with their

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finest outfits resembling styles fashionable in London. Elite women owned several elegant dresses for the numerous events that filled the “season’s” calendar, such as the “Gold Brocaded Night Gown with blew Silk Tail” that Ann Le Brasseur, the wife of merchant Jacob Motte, wore to formal evening occasions. At her death in 1772, Margaret Nelson owned four silk and five linen gowns along with silk petticoats, cloaks, and ruffles, which she accessorized with “a Morocco (leather) Pocket Book.” Elite men likewise had clothes to suit every occasion, attending legislative sessions in formal attire in embroidered waistcoats, lace cuffs, and fine shoes with silver buckles. Some men, as Quincy noted when he attended a concert at the Saint Cecilia Society, affected the style of military officers by wearing a sword, an accessory that reinforced hereditary claims to leadership. Relying on local tailors, dressmakers, and milliners to copy the designs from London journals, the elite could mimic the haute couture of the imperial capital, differentiating themselves from residents clad in plain styles, and bringing them closer to metropolitan modes.41 The elite’s habits of consumption had political overtones, becoming a litmus test of attitudes toward British policy by the early 1770s. In fact, the course of the imperial crisis may be traced sartorially. To advertise opposition to British policies, many refused to buy imported cloth or clothes, turning instead to homespun. More accustomed to conducting business in elegantly tailored jackets and silk shirts, one planter had no qualms about appearing “completely clad in the Product and Manufacture of his own Plantation” that included buckskin breeches, a coat made from fustian, and a linen shirt. Only his hat was not homemade. Wearing blue homespun rather than traditional black garb to funerals became common. By late 1769, the Gazette noted that “scarves and [mourning] gloves at funerals is now totally abolished here.” With the collapse of nonimportation, however, men and women shoved the buckskin breeches and the blue gloves into the back of the closet and set off to buy the latest fashions from merchants like James Wakefield. In October 1774, Wakefield advertised the newest arrivals from London: “Silk Morea Gowns much in fashion . . . Waistcoat Suits of Gold and Silver, spangled Lace interspersed with Rich Tambour and Brocade Flowers . . . [and] Ladies new fashion Riding Hats.” Women who wished to express their fashion sense and their loyalty to the patriot cause as the revolution got underway embraced French styles, with seamstresses using patterns from journals such as La Gallerie des Modes to make hats, dresses, and other apparel.42

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Schools and Lessons By the eighteenth century, formal schooling had become an essential part of elite life, providing youth with the knowledge essential to its agricultural and commercial interests, along with the aura of command essential to authority. If clothing was an external sign of status, then the gloss of a formal education distinguished the elite from the rest of society. “Knowledge of Arts and Sciences,” noted one commentator, “not only enlarges our Mind, and opens new Scenes to the Understanding, but creates in us an awful Reverence for Truth, and confirms our Abhorrence of its Contrary.” Education, claimed another, was “the secret way to Riches and Honour,” while yet another discussed how “religion, education, and good breeding preserve good order among the superior order of mankind.” The acquisition of these traits reinforced the elite’s cultural authority locally and enabled its most prominent members to move in aristocratic circles in England and elsewhere; exquisite manners were essential to “transact Affairs at . . . the Politest Courts in Europe.” Moreover, such civility would undermine the reputation of boorishness that dogged colonial Americans whenever they ventured to England. Peter Manigault, who attended an inauguration of the Knights of the Garter at Windsor Castle in 1750, and Alice De Lancey Izard (wife of Ralph Izard), who was presented at King George III’s court in 1770, were among very few South Carolinians who had the social cachet and knowledge of the etiquette necessary to navigate these regal events.43 To achieve their goals, schoolteachers gendered the curriculum, as Lieutenant Governor William Bull noted, to “fit men for the busy world, and ladies for the domestic social duties of life.” Boys learned the skills necessary to master the practical aspects of government, commerce, and planting. Besides instructing their pupils in reading, writing, and arithmetic, George Brownell and John Pratt also taught penmanship “in all the Hands us’d in Great Britain” as well as in “Merchants Accompts in the true Italian Method of double Entry.” Other teachers offered a more technical and scientifically based curriculum, with classes on “Arithemetick, Geometry, Trigonometry, Surveying, Navigation, Gauging, Dialling, Geography, Astronomy, Algebra, Conic Sections, Fluxions, or any part of MATHEMATICS, or NATURAL PHILOSOPHY.” Male pupils also had to acquire the explicitly masculine skills of leadership that were more important to elite identity than mathematics, geography, or some knowledge of the classics. Without Greek and Latin, noted one essayist, the humanities and the sciences would remain impenetrable because no other

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languages “furnish more excellent examples of correct writing, and regular living, than what are contained in the classics.”44 The daughters of elite parents received an education significantly less technically demanding or diverse. No school for girls ever advertised that its curriculum included “the most requisite propositions of Euclid.” They learned arithmetic rather than algebra, sewing not surveying. Writing to his daughter Martha, Henry Laurens encapsulated the attitude widely held by elite men on female education; he suggested that she continue to read but must also “be virtuous, dutiful, affable, courteous, modest,” telling her to “think of a plumb pudding and other domestic duties.” For eligible young women, navigating the socially treacherous waters of the drawing room in which romance might flourish or marriage be proposed, the ability to “make judicious remarks on Opera Airs and Stage Plays . . . Romances, and Other Books” was as important a skill as embroidery, itself a popular after-­dinner activity. In fact, Quincy often remarked on the needlework skills of several hostesses, observing that one crafted a bag that “far surpassed anything of the kind I ever saw.” Required to cultivate a genteel and feminine sensibility to make them attractive marriage partners ready for “the domestic and social duties of life,” Elizabeth and Rebecca Woodin alerted prospective parents that their daughters would learn “reading, writing, English, French, arithmetick; and music, dancing taught by proper masters” along with needle­ work and riding at their school on Queen Street.45 Education also took place outside the classroom. Elite mothers shaped the practices of gentility in less public ways. In their parental role, they could exert influence over their children, schooling them in the manners that befitted members of a ruling class. For Eliza Pinckney, raising daughter Harriott was “one of the greatest Businesses of my life,” noting how satisfying it was “to cultivate the tender mind.” Stored among her papers, Pinckney kept a list on which she enumerated her moral duties as a wife and a parent. Not only did she resolve to be a good and dutiful daughter, but she was also determined “to be a good Mother” to her children (Charles Cotesworth, Thomas, and Harriott), making a note to herself that she should “root out the first appearings and buddings of vice . . . and never omit to encourage every Virtue I may see Dawning in Them.” She also attended to her sons’ education. Trying to instill the epistolary art in her children, she enthusiastically noted the arrival of their letters, informing her children’s guardian to “tell the dear saucy Boy [Thomas] that one scrip of a penn from his hand would have given his mama more joy than all the pleasures of Bath could him.” Along with

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teachers, mothers of elite children instilled polite manners and gentility from one generation to the next.46 Even though gender determined the education received by elite children, there were times when these barriers were temporarily erased. In addition to learning the arts of household management, girls had to cultivate a refined and polite sensibility to become successful marriage partners. Likewise, boys not only had to acquire the skills necessary to become successful planters and political leaders but also had to demonstrate their urbanity and good breeding. The ability to dance, necessary for elite social occasions, was perhaps the most important skill to acquire. Most schools had dance classes in which students learned the “Minuet, Minuet Dauphin, [and] Minuet by four” as well as “English Country Dances . . . Bretagne, New Cotillion [and] Allemande.” For elite men and women, equestrian skill was also important; again, schools devoted to teaching “Young Gentlemen and Ladies, with the same Safety, Ease, and Gentility, as is now practiced in the best Riding-­Schools in London” were well patronized.47 Not every child attended schools like those run by Pratt or the Woodins. Some families hired private tutors while the sons of the very wealthy often went to England to complete their education. “All our gentlemen,” remarked Bull, “who have anything of a learned education, have acquired it in England.” British Army officer Lord Adam Gordon concurred, noting that it was “the fashion indeed to Send home all their Children for education.” The older children of the elite attended Oxford and Cambridge Universities as well as London’s Inns of Court, where they received legal training. Between 1764 and 1769, the only students from British North America at Cambridge were from South Carolina; at Oxford, they outnumbered other students from the colonies by two to one between 1761 and 1775. A student at the Inns of Court in 1734, Charles Pinckney (1699–1758) was one of many prominent sons of the elite educated in England. His two boys by second wife Eliza Lucas—Charles Cotesworth (1746–1825) and Thomas (1750–1828)—attended Westminster, a public school for the children of the prominent and wealthy, and then entered Oxford; after graduation, both received a legal education at the Inns of Court and studied at the Royal Military College in the French city of Caen.48 An English education paid dividends. Quincy believed that Charles Pinckney’s “bright natural powers” had been “improved by a British education at the Temple” (another name for the Inns of Court). Returning to Charles Town, Charles Cotesworth began a career that would lead to national prominence. In local politics, he represented the parish of Saint John’s

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Colleton between 1769 and 1775, eventually holding the office of Deputy Attorney General for the colony. He then served in the Provincial Congress from 1775 until 1776 and later in the newly established General Assembly. On the national stage, Pinckney was a member of the South Carolina delegation to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and later ran for national office on several occasions. He also used his military training during the Revolutionary War, serving as George Washington’s aide-­de-­camp, fighting at Brandywine and Germantown in fall 1777 before the British took him prisoner when they captured Charles Town in 1780. Thomas also had a distinguished military career, fighting at the Battle of Camden in 1780 before he too was captured by the British. After the war, he entered politics, becoming governor in 1787, and later serving as the U.S. minister to England and in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1797 and 1801. In addition, his peers regarded him as “the best Hellenist we ever had in America.”49 London provided the sons of the lowcountry elite with other social and business opportunities. In its trading houses, Laurens and other apprentice merchants learned the intricacies of Anglo-­Atlantic commerce while Peter Manigault, Arthur Middleton, and John Rutledge among others attended the Inns of Court, the center of the nation’s legal profession. Living and learning at the very heart of the empire enabled these young men to experience English culture and politics firsthand. For some, living in the imperial capital bred contempt rather than awe. Not only did they witness extravagant behavior, reckless gambling, and excessive drinking along with the scandals, political and otherwise, which were all part of the fabric of metropolitan life, but they also walked through streets filled with the impoverished and the destitute. Moreover, they were in England when a small number of activists were mobilizing against slavery, including Granville Sharp, who initiated a court case to free James Somerset and orchestrated the publicity that surrounded his trial in 1772 (see Chapter 6). Of the five South Carolinians who signed the Declaration of Independence, four (Thomas Heyward, Thomas Lynch, Arthur Middleton, and Edward Rutledge) were alumni of the Inns of Court. Even as their education at the crossroads of the British Empire had given them the education essential to their political and commercial careers, it had also enabled them to generate a powerful critique of English political culture.50 The largest metropolis in the Atlantic world, London had countless diversions, offering “so many Ways of Spending Money that one would never have thought of.” During Manigault’s four-­year sojourn, he attended to his education while working alongside Benjamin Stead, a Charles Town merchant who

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had relocated to the capital with his family. He also found time to acquire the attributes of a cultivated gentleman. In one letter, he informed his mother that he had overcome his “foolish Bashfulness to learn to dance,” rejoicing that his knees no longer trembled before he took to the floor to perform a minuet in public. Determined “to keep the best Company I can get into, & do nothing inelegant,” he also noted that he “refused to sit in the Pit at the Play-­House, to have Tobacco spit upon me . . . but chose to go into the Boxes, because that is the proper place for a Gentleman to be seen in.” He did not, or so he claimed, fritter away the hours in taverns or “lounge away my Mornings at that Most Elegant Place the Carolina Coffee House” on Birchen Lane in the City of London. Summoning his metropolitan wisdom, he dispensed advice to younger family members. Writing to nephew Francis Huger, Manigault advised him that his “Business is to study” and that he should spend his time “in a close Application to Literature and the polite Arts.” Increasing the young man’s allowance so that he might “purchase . . . [his] Improvement,” Manigault thought that acquiring these skills would yield “greater Advantages” when his nephew made his entrance into “the Great World.”51 Perhaps Manigault succeeded in avoiding the numerous temptations of the metropolis, kept “the best Company,” and managed to do “nothing inelegant” during his time in London, but the city offered “pleasures, debaucheries and libertinism” unimagined even in Charles Town. Although many argued that an English education was essential, not everybody agreed. David Ramsay, a Charles Town physician and historian, believed that schooling children “in distant countries is often injurious,” producing offspring who “may be better scholars, but . . . are generally worse planters.” Laurens, who had lived in London in his early twenties, concurred, and questioned the relevance of a classical education in a society devoted to commerce and agriculture, believing it to be an “impediment to the success of young men.” Nevertheless, he set aside his reservations when it came time to educate his own sons. John (b.1754), Henry (b.1763), and James (b.1765) all spent some time in schools and colleges overseas. Concerned about “the Relaxed state of Education at Oxford & Cambridge that I tremble to put my Son to either,” he chose to educate his two oldest boys in Geneva. With its Calvinist heritage, the city was far less corrupt and decadent than London. His youngest son studied at the Inns of Court. Laurens was not alone in his concern; not only did its critics claim that English schooling lacked depth and practical application, but they were appalled by the conduct of a ruling class knee-­deep in debauchery and corruption, awash in alcohol, and often in debt from losses accrued at the card

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table. Writing home to his father, Thomas Heyward Jr., who would later sign the Declaration of Independence, openly disparaged “the People of Quality” who, “after spending their time in Dissipation at Bath,” then returned to London only to devote themselves to “as much Indolence and Luxury as the ancient Romans did on the decline of their Empire.” Despite the attachment that most South Carolinians felt toward England, the experience of living there often proved decisive in their personal and political lives.52 Even though some aspects of metropolitan life may have caused concern, the colony’s elite looked to London’s beau monde for guidance, devouring reports on English design and clothing so that cabinetmakers, tailors, and dressmakers could replicate the latest styles in furniture and clothes. “As they thrive,” noted Governor Glen in 1751, “they delight to have good things from England,” with merchandise “lately arrived from London” enjoying a cachet that items produced locally failed to possess. Lord Gordon went further in his assessment of this devotion to the mother country, suggesting that the lowcountry elite was “more attached to the Mother Country than those Provinces which lie more to the northward.”53 Just as the arrival of large numbers of enslaved plantation workers had resulted in the rural lowcountry’s Africanization during the early eighteenth century, Charles Town grew increasingly anglicized through its personal, commercial, and institutional links with Britain. Its white inhabitants, noted Eliza Pinckney, lived “very much in the English taste.” Master builders like Ezra Waite, a migrant from London who worked as a “Civil Architect, House Builder in general and Carver,” made significant contributions to Charles Town’s urban fabric and transformed its streets into places that replicated the county towns of Georgian England. Neither Saint Michael’s nor Saint Philip’s Church would have looked out of place in the market towns of the English shires, while Charles Town’s double houses, influenced by Georgian architectural styles, bore a strong resemblance to the manor houses that dotted the English countryside. Only the city’s single houses, with their wide piazzas and verandahs—influenced by Anglo-­ Caribbean building forms—would have seemed incongruous in a country known primarily for rain and gray skies.54 Public celebrations further emphasized ties to the metropole. Fireworks, formal dinners, and other festivities greeted royal birthdays, major military victories, and other noteworthy events. In 1742, a “Crowded Audience of Gentlemen and ladies” that included Eliza Pinckney, attended a “very gentile entertainment” to mark King George II’s fifty-­ninth birthday. Seven years later, Charles Town celebrated the military successes of his forces when

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reports arrived that the Treaty of Aix-­la-­Chappelle had been signed, marking an end to the War of the Austrian Succession (King George’s War) and a victory for Britain and her allies. The governor and the council promptly organized a dinner during which guests drank numerous toasts to “all the Royal Family” and others “suitable to the happy Occasion.” The celebrations continued with soldiers from the local garrison marching down Broad Street to the accompaniment of “Drums and Musick” to the “loud Huzzas and Acclamations of the People.” The day ended with “Illuminations, Skyrockets, and other Demonstrations of Joy.” The death of George II in September 1760 and the subsequent accession of his grandson, George III, to the throne triggered public mourning as well as muted celebrations. Ships in the harbor hoisted their flags to half-­mast followed by a 21-­gun salute. In the evening, the mood became less somber, with Governor Bull entertaining his council and members of the Assembly at a dinner “where many loyal healths were drank,” followed by “illuminations and bonfires.” Such occasions provided elite men with an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty and patriotism to the crown and, clad in uniforms at the head of their regiments, the colony’s natural leaders. But public celebrations of empire and monarchy were also celebrations of hierarchy, order, and stability, the values that the lowcountry elite most cherished.55

“This Is Charles Towne, How Do You Like It?” The Elite and the Public Stage The cosmopolitan sensibility instilled by an exclusive education was best exhibited during the hectic schedule of events that took place in Charles Town during the fall and winter. Take the social calendar of the sixty-­four-­year-­old Ann Ashby Manigault (the mother of Peter) during the first six weeks of 1767, for example. When Ann was not bedridden with rheumatism or other ailments or attending funerals, she not only hosted about half a dozen dinner parties and put in an appearance at as many weddings but also visited countless friends and family members. The relentless whirl of suppers and other gatherings was seasonal; by early summer, Ann received far fewer invitations to dine and take tea with friends as wealthy families either headed inland or, like Humphrey Sommers and his wife and children, traveled north to Rhode Island in order to, as Pelatiah Webster observed, “avoid the intense heats and confined air of the city.” With debilitating heat and humidity blanketing the

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city during the summer’s height, the place became “so dull,” as Peter Manigault informed Miles Brewton in July 1768, “that there is no bearing it.”56 Public events provided a significant forum for wealthy men and women to conduct themselves in the manner that befitted a ruling elite, displaying leadership as if it were a natural characteristic so that they did not have to engage in coercive measures to uphold their authority. This required that they engage in “continuous performance” in which they demonstrated their command and mastery, a task that required considerable confidence, stamina, and money. For these people, such performances were “unrelenting.” Charles Town, moreover, had more than enough venues—assembly rooms for dances and concerts, a racetrack, and a theater—for elite men and women to express their cultural authority. Stepping from their houses into their carriages or mounting their horses to ride through Charles Town’s streets, the elite sought to radiate the charisma and prestige of a successful ruling class, displaying a self-­confident hauteur that derived not just from running profitable plantations, trading houses and legal practices, but also from their cultural practices and spending habits.57 Charles Town was no longer the “miserably thin, and disconsolate” settlement that Gideon Johnston had found so dispiriting when he walked its dusty streets in 1711; by 1760, with a population of nearly ten thousand free and enslaved people, it was the fourth largest city in British North America. In part, major fires in 1731 and 1740 combined with devastating storms, particularly the immensely destructive hurricane of 1752, often led to rebuilding that helped account for the city’s “handsome appearance.” The desire to create an urban environment that expressed elite taste also drove the construction of “handsome houses and other buildings.” Returning to Charles Town in 1764 after a twenty-­year absence, Newport merchant Moses Lopez arrived to find a building boom in progress, noting how “one cannot go anywhere where one does not see new buildings and large and small houses started, half-­finished, and almost finished,” which stood in stark contrast to “poor, humble Rhode Island.” Both the architecture and the materials used in the construction of public buildings instantiated the state, with the extensive use of stone and brick expressing solidity and authority.58 Attending the theater provided another opportunity for display. Besides a diet of Shakespearean drama, audiences also enjoyed more contemporary plays, including George Farquhar’s The Constant Couple, Henry Fielding’s The Mock Doctor, and Joseph Addison’s The Tragedy of Cato in which Cato fought for liberty against the tyranny of Julius Caesar, a subject that

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resonated with audiences growing daily more familiar with such issues. Plays offered both political commentary and guides to conduct. Writing to his brother Edward in London, John Rutledge recommended that he attend the theater as often as he could during his time in the city. Nothing, he noted, was “more entertaining and likely to give you a graceful manner of speaking than seeing a good play well acted.” In the Gazette, the “Humourist” analyzed what audiences might gain from an evening at the theater; the comedy of manners, he claimed, exposed “with Humour and Ridicule, a Variety of smaller Vices and Failings by holding the Mirror up to Folly,” while a tragedy “paints in the most lively Colours, the Evils arising out of every evil passion . . . [and] the Struggles of the Human Soul,” concluding that “dramatic performances promote good purposes: They purify our Minds and enlarge our Understanding.” After watching Edward Moore’s The Gamester, a play about the perils of gambling, a habit common among elite men, one patron noted how it conveyed the message that “the Want of Prudence is the Want of Virtue.” These lessons notwithstanding, the Reverend Josiah Smith, an ally of evangelical preacher George Whitefield, had no time for either plays or playhouses, censuring theatergoers along with those who attended “BALLS AND ­MIDNIGHT ­GATHERINGS” in a jeremiad that appeared in the Gazette where he concluded, “Nor will I ever believe that Religion and Virtue can thrive under the Shadow of Theatre,” places that encouraged, as a grand jury later noted, “the Corruption of Youth, and the Injury of many Families.”59 The theatricality and the plays’ production values also shaped elite style. Reporting on two comedies—A Word to the Wise by Irish playwright Hugh Kelly and High Life Below Stairs by James Townley—one critic noted how a combination of music, the actors’ performances and “the disposition of the lights” created a spectacle that led the audience to express “their highest approbation of the entertainment.” Wealthy theatergoers perhaps drew on the stagecraft of such plays to inform their own performances in the complicated drama of refinement and gentility that took place in their own drawing rooms and around the dining tables of Charles Town. Furthermore, the balls, the supper parties, and other public events that constituted the season all had a “studied and elaborate” theatrical element about them.60 Along with a night at the theater, a day at the races was another important pastime for the lowcountry elite. Held at the New Market track, so named to evoke England’s premier course outside the Suffolk market town of Newmarket, the racetrack became an important venue where elite men could, by pursuing “the sport of kings,” display their wealth along with their judgment of

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horses and their nerve as they gambled on the outcome of races where large sums of money changed hands. Attending a race meeting in mid-­March, Quincy watched as “a prodigious fine collection of excellent, though very high-­priced horses” were put through their paces. Not only was it expensive to buy a thoroughbred and equip its jockey with the necessary attire of “waistcoat, Leather Breeches, Leather Boots . . . and a Cap of Silk or Velvet,” but gambling also required significant amounts of cash; Quincy estimated that £2,000 were “won and lost” at the racetrack. In addition, placing a bet that might result in a big win required expertise in “the singular art and mystery of the Turf.” Owning and backing a winner not only enhanced one’s reputation but also brought trophies and cash, which helped offset the considerable expense of racing horses. As Quincy noted, the man who won the “last horse-­race assumed the airs of a hero or German potentate.” No sooner had the owner of Flimnap pocketed his winnings than he sold the animal for £300 to a local planter who put the animal out to stud on a plantation in Saint Paul’s Parish.61

The Private Stage Away from the public world of the ball, the theater, and the track, the town house provided another setting for the articulation of elite life. The lavishly appointed rooms of Miles Brewton’s house, which had been designed and built by Ezra Waite between 1765 and 1769 (it still stands on King Street), would have provided a more than adequate set for a comedy of manners. Guests entered through a mahogany door framed by a two-­story portico supported by pillars (a proscenium arch, if you will) and found themselves standing in the “grandest hall” that “azure blue satin window curtains, rich blue paper with gilt, mashee borders, most elegant pictures, excessive grand and costly looking glasses” made even grander. Paneling and carvings adorned its mahogany staircase, and its marble mantelpieces only added to the overall impact. No other colonial city, with the possible exception of Philadelphia, could compare with “the beauty of its houses and the splendour and taste displayed therein.”62 The dinner party, a semiprivate occasion attended by friends and family, functioned at several levels. For the sons and daughters of the elite, it was an opportunity to dip their toes into the waters of courtship, demonstrate their accomplishments by offering to dance a minuet or play a piece on the

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harpsichord or other instrument, and to expand their circle of friends and acquaintances. For the host, it was an occasion to make new connections, discuss business and politics, catch up on recent gossip, and meet social obligations. For Quincy, who attended several such gatherings, the evening spent with Brewton, his family, and guests was an ideal time to take the political temperature of the colony’s leaders, to enjoy their company and conversation, and to learn more about the lowcountry elite. From the ornamentation of the dining room to the elegance of table settings to the quality of the food and wine served, power and authority, manifested as “taste,” were embedded in the words spoken and the meal consumed. Such attributes were on full display at the dinner hosted by Brewton. From the opulently decorated hall, the guests entered an equally ornate dining room, furnished with a large table and chairs imported from London that signaled the owner’s unparalleled taste as well as his wealth. After admiring an elegant mahogany sideboard on which Brewton had displayed “very magnificent plate [and] a very large exquisitely wrought Goblet,” the diners sat down, ready to be served by Brewton’s enslaved domestics. The quality and quantity of the meal, which included “jellies, preserves, sweetmeats . . . almonds, raisins, three sorts of olives, apples [and] oranges,” further confirmed Brewton’s wealth and sophistication.63 Tables laden with an assortment of poultry, meats, fruits, and carafes of excellent wine distinguished the elite from the rest of the population. The varieties of food served as well as its provenance set its cuisine apart from the daily fare of most Carolinians, free and enslaved. While enslaved domestics prepared lavish dinners, their own daily diet was far more pedestrian. Likewise, few white families had the wherewithal to buy imported luxuries such as almonds, olives, or pineapples for their tables. The dinner party was an act of conspicuous consumption. Few rose from the table hungry; a number of ailments related to excessive eating and drinking often afflicted elite men, with gout, widely believed to be caused by “Indolence, Intemperance and Vexation,” and indigestion perhaps the most common. Served to accompany the food, wine not only lubricated the diners but also signaled the host’s taste. Quincy often made “tasting notes” in his journal; Brewton, for example, provided his guests with wine that was “the richest I ever tasted,” replete with “flavour, softness, and strength.” Visiting the Monday Club a few evenings later, Quincy tolerated the “indifferent” wines on offer. A connoisseur with money enough to keep an excellent cellar, Manigault also recognized the link between fine

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wines and sophistication, informing one merchant that he “would spare no price to have the best Wine the Island [Madeira] can afford.”64 Eating and drinking constituted only one part of the evening. At one point, “a very fine bird” (possibly a parrot) flew about the room, “picking up the crumbs . . . and perching on the window, side board and chairs.” But success depended on more than the antics of an exotic bird; it also rested on the quality and elegance of the conversation. Keen to express their opinions and demonstrate their knowledge about current events, guests turned to the imperial crisis, a topic with which Quincy was well acquainted. “Politicks,” he commented, “started before dinner,” with guests silently listening to a monologue from local merchant Thomas Shirley, a “hot flaming Tory,” who claimed that Boston’s radicals intended to expel the British and aimed “at nothing less than sovereignty of the whole continent.” At the table, the conversation moved onto other topics, although when it turned to a discussion about the different penalties handed down for stealing and killing an enslaved person (“to steal a negro was death, but to kill him was only fineable”), Quincy perhaps saw another controversial exchange in the making; he demurred, quietly noting how they constituted “Curious laws and policy!”65 Conversation played a central role in elite self-­fashioning, with sparkling table talk integral to the success of any gathering. Designed “to promote good Humour and good manners; to increase in Knowledge and Virtue; and to tie the Knot of Friendship,” lively verbal exchanges allowed its most skilled practitioners to display their wit and intelligence, bringing knowledge that is “most useful” or “most fashionable” to the table. Such people soon gained reputations for “intellectual and emotional vitality” with their exhibitions of “wit, repartee, [and] knowledge.” Furthermore, conversation had its own etiquette. In an article about “the Government of the Tongue,” which appeared in the Gazette in 1732, the author recommended that one should “scorn Idle Prattle” and remain silent rather than talk about trivial matters such as “Horse-­races, Cock-­Matches . . . Fashion, Cookery, and Wines.” And although it is unlikely that men and women conversed solely on topics of “Substance and Business” at table, prescriptive literature often encouraged gravity rather than frivolity. Those who did traffic in the banal might “grow by Degrees into a licentious Privilege of saying what they will, [with] no Shame, nor Sense of Decency.” To prevent conflicts that might arise on these occasions, he suggested that table talk be directed toward “more manly and becoming Topicks” or that diners remain silent to display their discomfort, the tactic adopted by Quincy

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when the subject of slavery came up at Brewton’s table. Rather than see conversation as the free-­flowing and equal exchange of ideas and opinions, one satirist equated conversation with competitive sport, observing that “Your Business is to shine; therefore you must by all means prevent the shining of others; for their Brightness may make yours less distinguished.” The determined conversationalist should “engross the Whole Discourse . . . and shine on without Fear of a Rival” showing off his “wit and learning” by regularly contradicting, interrupting, and criticizing anybody who stood in his way. How many gentlemen stooped to such aggressive tactics to win the conversational game remains unknown, but this sharply observant essay spoke volumes about the underlying dynamic of table talk.66 Dinner parties also provided elite women with opportunities to display their genteel sensibilities and intellectual prowess. From planning to execution, women’s labor was critical to these events. Under their mistress’s direction, enslaved cooks prepared and cooked the food while domestic slaves cleaned and prepared the house for the occasion. As hostesses, wives participated fully in the meal itself, talking with guests and ensuring that plates and glasses remained full. With her “uncommon strength of memory . . . so highly cultivated by travel and extensive reading,” Eliza Pinckney enjoyed a reputation among her circle as a talented and enlightening conversationalist. The most ritualized and public moment of any dinner, the toast enabled women to affirm widely held sentiments and, on some occasions, allowed them to express their own veiled opinions on recent issues. On one occasion, Quincy watched as “two ladies were called on for the toasts;” the first one offered (“delicate pleasure to susceptible minds”) was somewhat generic, possibly taken from one of the period’s numerous etiquette books that listed “celebrated Toasts & sentiments” while the second toast—“when passions rise may reason be the guide”—perhaps referred more directly to the current political climate. Adjourning to the drawing room after the meal, women chatted and embroidered, leaving the men to argue, drink, and smoke before they joined the women for more conversation, cards, or music.67 Other events provided wives and daughters with further occasions to demonstrate their conversational abilities, dancing skills, and new additions to their wardrobes. The ball, an occasion that entailed a musical performance along with conversation, cards, and supper, served a particular useful role in the articulation of female refinement. For Eliza Wilkinson, a ball held in the Assembly Rooms was an ideal occasion for spending “some agreeable happy hours” with friends, exchanging gossip, and spinning around the dance floor.

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Following a hectic afternoon spent “powdering! and frizzing! Curling! and dressing,” she and her companions set off to hear “Musick play’d sweetly” and spend the evening in genteel pursuits. Although Wilkinson chatted with several “powder’d Beaus,” a fire broke out in the building that thwarted her “Strong Inclination for dancing.” With smoke filling the room, the mask of propriety and refinement slipped as revelers “scamper’d away” to escape the blaze that rapidly reduced the “Elegant Rooms” to “dust and ashes.” Had not fire interrupted the event, Wilkinson would have shown off her skills as a dancer (“I could not,” she wrote, “keep my feet still”), compared notes on hairstyles and outfits that had so preoccupied her and her friends earlier in the day, and continued talking with other “powder’d Beaus.”68 A party held at Phoebe Fletcher’s Pinckney Street house provided elite women with another opportunity for display. Decorating the rooms with “festoons of myrtle and gold leaf ” and illuminating them with candles, the host transformed an ordinary space into an exotic and orientalized setting designed, surmised the Evening Gazette, to transport “the imagination to the paradise of Mahomet.” Having set the stage, Fletcher animated the scene with “an Ethiopian band [that] lulled the soul to peace and soft delight” with its music. The evening’s highlights included dancing, a performance by Fletcher, who sang “several songs clear as a bell,” and a table laden with “cold tongues, oisters, hams, [and] salt herrings” that the male guests consumed with great gusto, washing it down “with bumpers of generous wine.” In contrast to this display of gormandizing, Fletcher’s female guests did not “swallow a morsel” of this spread, perhaps out of concern for the smooth fit of their gowns or to avoid public displays of appetite.69 The “cotillions [and] rigadoons” that were a highlight of Fletcher’s soiree enabled female guests to demonstrate their grace in mastery over a series of dance movements. The posture and gestures integral to these dances, moreover, required participants to display seemingly effortless control and discipline over their bodies as they moved through space in a predetermined sequence of steps. Some women had not yet fully assimilated the choreography, prompting one witness to note how “these nymphs were at a loss in crossing over,” resulting in “contortions, [and] animated gestures” that disturbed the flow of the dance. The successful exhibition of the refined body did not depend only on elegant apparel and well-­coiffed hair but also on proper movement and posture. That Fletcher’s female guests declined to join the men at the supper table to eat and drink may also indicate a heightened awareness of the role that their bodies played in conveying cultivated feminine grace.70

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At many occasions, elite men socialized in a single-­sex environment and shied away from the heterosocial environment of the dance or dinner party. These informal forums, which often had colorful titles like “The Ancient, Venerable and Honourable Society of Brooms” (a club for unmarried men) and “The Right Worthy and Amicable Order of Ubiquarians,” an association that followed “the Virtue and Morality of the Ancient Romans,” allowed them to gather over “solid, plentiful, good tables, and very good wines” where they conversed, dined, drank, and gambled in an all-­male setting. Such spaces allowed men to behave in ways that might offend female sensibilities, ranging from boisterous discussions on politics to excessive eating and drinking. Even though wives were not privy to their husbands’ conversations or to their overindulgences in these settings, the enslaved domestic workers, who poured the wine, served the food, and cleared the tables while Charles Town’s “substantial gentlemen” exchanged opinions on “negroes, rice, and the necessity of British Regular troops to be quartered in Charlestown [the settlement across the Charles River from Boston]” among other subjects—topics that were discussed during Quincy’s evening with the Friday Night Club—might learn much about their owners’ private habits and political leanings.71 Clubs may have bestowed a sense of distinction and exclusivity, but membership demanded a degree of conformity. Through their rules, these organizations defined the broad contours of male gentility, with any transgression constituting conduct unworthy of a gentleman. Any visitor who spent time with the Laughing Club, the Segoon-­Pop Club, or the Smoaking Club quickly learned that members were often less interested in weighty political issues than in “cards, dice, the bottle and horses” or in “eating, drinking, lolling, smoking, and sleeping.” Yet these clubs, of which there were about forty by 1775, performed a useful function for the lowcountry oligarchs. Within their fraternal circle, members had the opportunity to discuss commercial news, broker deals over land and slaves, and even talk about subjects pending in the Assembly. Enjoying a glass with friends and colleagues at a remove from the racket of the streets and wharves, these men mutually reinforced their claims to leadership and their position in lowcountry society.72

“Luxury . . . [and] Dissipation.”73 The sociable pursuits of gaming and drinking not only contributed to a sense of fraternity but also became vehicles of competitive masculinity. Elite men

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wagered on every conceivable contest, from cards to cockfighting to the prospective yield of the annual rice harvest. In May 1735, a number of “gentlemen” from Port Royal challenged “several gentlemen” from Christ Church Parish to a cockfight. By the end of the contest, the Port Royal birds had taken “seven battles in eight,” prompting the Gazette to note that “a considerable Sum of Money was won and lost on the Diversion.” Racing, as we have seen, was also a potentially lucrative pastime; not only might owners make money—in March 1768, for example, the purse for winning two out of three races at Newmarket stood at £200—but fortunate gamblers might hit the jackpot. The Gazette regularly carried the reports on the condition and bloodlines of the competing horses, the latest odds, and the results. The elite’s enthusiasm for spending “prodigious portions of time and attention” to gambling prompted Quincy to observe how the intellectual achievements of a John Locke or an Isaac Newton paled into insignificance when compared to a gentleman’s ability to know “when to shoulder a blind cock or start a fleet horse.”74 Drinking was also integral to the lives of lowcountry gentlemen. Travelers as well as locals frequently commented on the consumption of alcohol. David Ramsay observed that “drunkenness may be called an endemic vice of Carolina.” Wine as well as spirits, such as rum and brandy, were consumed at most gatherings, with the drinking of toasts a commonplace at dinner parties and other events. Although free and enslaved men also drank and gambled, many elite men made the pursuit of risky excess a signature of their behavior, conduct that set them apart from the rest of society and created a boundary between themselves and their wives and children. Gambling and heavy drinking may have provided elite men with a sense of distinctiveness, but such behavior perhaps indicated apprehension over the social and cultural implications of their position as a prosperous ruling class in a colonial setting. Running large plantations and coercing labor from enslaved people in order to maintain their display-­oriented cultural and political authority may have led elite men to drink one glass too many. The toasts that lauded the durability and enterprise of lowcountry patricians perhaps disguised the apprehension of those who made them.75 Becoming “free with Sir John Strawberry,” getting “as Dizzy as a Goose,” or having one’s “Head full of Bees,” to borrow from The Drinker’s Dictionary, a collection of expressions compiled by Silence Dogood (a pseudonym for Benjamin Franklin) from “the modern Tavern-­Conversation of Tipplers” that appeared first in the Pennsylvania Gazette and then in other colonial newspapers, including the South Carolina Gazette, was not an activity universally

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admired by every lowcountry inhabitant. In An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South Carolina (1748), Sophia Hume, an elite woman who became a Quaker in 1740, excoriated the indulgent frivolities of the wealthy. Rather than attend to their spiritual welfare, they squandered their time and money on “Balls and Dancing . . . [and] Card Playing,” slavishly devoted to “every Foppery, Luxury, and Recreation.” Writing to the Gazette, the pseudonymous “Margery Distaff ” complained about men who “injure their fortunes by GAMING in various ways, and their health by Intemperate Use of Spirituous Liquors” and throw away “Hundreds, nay Thousands of Pounds in one Evening without the least remorse,” demanding that they “shew us better examples of Oeconomy than many of them have hitherto done.” Even Eliza Pinckney, no stranger to elite life herself, wondered whether the endless round of “airy pleasures” might not take “intire possession of the mind,” leaving her fearful that “the rational faculties . . . for want of use will degenerate into down right dullness.” Clearly, the conduct of some elite men troubled ministers; Johann Boltzius not only railed against their extravagance, complaining that “splendour, lust, and opulence . . . has grown almost to the limit” but also reproached them for their sexual conduct. The presence of “half-­white children running around” on the streets, the result of “dreadful excesses” committed by white men with “Negro girls,” confirmed his suspicions that Charles Town was “a sinful city,” where, observed another colonist, “the wicked outnumber the godly.”76 Physician and botanist Alexander Garden was less concerned with the elite’s moral failings than with its reluctance to innovate and experiment. Always ready to bet on the result of a horse race or cockfight, planters were less willing to take a chance with new crops or farming techniques that might increase productivity and profitability. An advocate for the introduction of mills to clean harvested rice, Garden argued that the technology would improve the health and efficiency of enslaved field laborers. Growing rice, he observed, was a “Tedious, Laborious and slow” undertaking, but preparing the crop for export was an even more taxing job; pounding the newly harvested grain with wooden mortars to remove the outer husks was, he noted, a “very hard and severe operation” during which “the poor Wretches are Obliged to Labour hard . . . and often Overheat themselves,” resulting in injury and illness. But rather than introduce new technologies, however, Garden observed that most planters remained on the “heavy well trodden Path, that they have been accustomed to, and never Spend One Thought on the Toils and painful sweat of the poor Slaves.” Their unwillingness to diversify

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their mix of crops also drew fire; most planters, Garden claimed, “have never made themselves Masters of any one thing but the Management of Rice.” Recognizing that introducing new crops required “courage and resolution,” he observed how “one bad Market disappointment” stopped innovation dead in its tracks, leading planters to return to rice cultivation “which is the . . . sure way of getting rich.”77 Although Quincy enjoyed their hospitality, he also looked askance at certain aspects of the lives elite men led, critiquing their pursuit of pleasure and their apparent indifference to politics and the life of the mind. The elite’s domination of colonial government had, he believed, turned the Commons House of Assembly into an unrepresentative body; with its “unparliamentary appearance,” he thought it little more than “a friendly, jovial society” where members “lolled and chatted,” and dedicated themselves to trivial exchanges rather than to the sober and deliberate work of administering the colony. Quincy, who was disappointed by the Assembly’s lackluster response to British policy in the early 1770s, thought its representatives showed “little solicitude about the concerns and interests of the many,” ignored the needs of “the labourer, the mechanic . . . the farmer, the husbandman or yeoman,” and instead pursed their own agenda, which made, he claimed, “the fittest instruments to enslave and oppress the commonality.” But Quincy failed to mention or never knew about the occasions when members had openly challenged imperial power; Christopher Gadsden and several others had been vociferous opponents of British policy, the Assembly had embraced the cause of radical English journalist John Wilkes, and Henry Laurens had conducted a very public and bruising legal battle against the colony’s customs officers and Attorney General Sir Egerton Leigh. South Carolina lacked a radical firebrand like Sam Adams (Gadsden perhaps came closest), but many shared his passionate embrace of colonial rights. By 1774, Gadsden, too, openly expressed concern about the extravagance of elite life. Calling for a boycott on British goods, he argued that “too long has luxury reigned amongst us, enervating our constitutions, and shrinking the human race into pigmies,” calling on the Charles Town gentleman to put aside “all his gaudy decorations” and “his powder and pomatum [a perfumed hair oil]” and put on “sober homespun.”78 During the American Revolution, a number of leading figures of the lowcountry elite played prominent political and military roles. Laurens, as we have seen, held several important posts in the national government. His son,

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John, who fought alongside George Washington at Brandywine and Germantown in 1777 and served on his staff, was killed in action on the Combahee River in 1782. Gadsden became a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congress before taking command of the 1st South Carolina Regiment; he was captured following the fall of Charles Town in 1780 and imprisoned in Saint Augustine. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney suffered a similar fate; after fighting at Brandywine and Germantown, he was also taken when the British captured Charles Town. The poise and presence necessary for leadership that elite men acquired from their education, their pursuit of refinement, their ownership of land, and their command over their enslaved laborers imbued “the gentry generation” with an imperious and haughty sense of self that enabled them to challenge the might of the British Empire. From this perspective, the colony’s elite had come of age by the mid-­1770s; it now prepared to take the men and women over whom they ruled in a new direction.

CHAPTER 6

The Road to Revolution

AWAKE, my countrymen. . . . It is our duty to prolong the Life of Liberty, and not to let the shackles of slavery be imposed upon this, or any future generation. —South Carolina Gazette, 7 November 1775

From the deck of The Prudence, enslaved mariner Olaudah Equiano (also known as Gustavus Vassa) watched “bonfires and other illuminations” light up the night sky over Charles Town. With “salutes fired from the forts” and church bells ringing, the city threw a grand celebration in June 1766 to mark the repeal of the Stamp Act as well as King George III’s twenty-­eighth birthday “with all possible demonstrations of affection, loyalty, and joy.” Lieutenant Governor William Bull inspected the city’s militia, a light infantry company, and an artillery unit led by Captain Christopher Gadsden, after which he “expressed great satisfaction with the appearance and behaviour of the whole.” After a noontime cannonade marked the royal birthday, Bull presided over “a very elegant entertainment” at Dillon’s Tavern where guests drank “many loyal and constitutional toasts.” With the Stamp Act, regarded throughout the colonies as “grievous, oppressive, and unconstitutional,” now repealed, white Charlestonians openly and unabashedly celebrated their membership in an empire that prided itself on defending the rights and liberties of freeborn Englishmen, which included the freedom to buy, sell, and own enslaved people like Equiano. A decade later, the same people would celebrate their victory over the British following the battle of Sullivan’s Island and their independence from Crown and Parliament.1 Owned by merchant and slave trader Robert King, who was also Equiano’s master, The Prudence, a thirty-­two-­ton sloop captained by Thomas

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Farmer with a five-­man crew had sailed from Montserrat with a cargo of seventy-­two “poor, oppressed natives of Africa and other Negroes.” Having sold seven in Savannah’s slave market, Farmer sailed north to Charles Town, where he unloaded the remaining sixty-­three enslaved men and women on Sullivan’s Island at its “pest house.” Equiano now headed into town determined to sell a cask of rum purchased earlier on Monserrat, and hopefully add the proceeds from its sale to the money he was saving so that he could buy his freedom. With some difficulty, he sold the rum after which he went to the city’s marketplace where an irate tradesman “abused him for offering to pass bad coin” and threatened to have Equiano arrested. Evading his accuser and others who had witnessed the fracas, the young sailor showed “the bastinadoes . . . a good pair of heels,” racing back to The Prudence where he hid “in fear” until it sailed for Savannah.2 In the decade after the repeal of the Stamp Act, most colonists became increasingly disenchanted with imperial rule. White men and women from all walks of life engaged in countless discussions about liberty, tyranny, and the rights of freeborn Englishmen; their conversations, however, drove awkward questions about slavery’s hypocrisies into the open. Although a large majority of white colonists in British North America saw slavery as an integral part of the social and economic order, a small number of activists, including Quaker campaigners like John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, openly questioned the continued existence of an institution that denied freedom to people of African descent in an era dedicated to the defense and expansion of liberty. Intentional or not, slavery in all its forms—not just the political enslavement that colonists feared from an oppressive British government but also the unfree status of hundreds of thousands of people of African descent—sat at the center of the revolutionary project.3 By the late eighteenth century, Equiano had emerged as a prominent figure in the struggle to end British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. A few months after visiting Charles Town, he bought his freedom from King for “seventy pounds current money.” In July 1766, having collected his manumission papers from the Registry Office on Montserrat, he was now a free man; for the next decade or so, he worked as “an able-­bodied sailor,” sailing on voyages to the Arctic Circle and Nicaragua before settling in England in the late 1770s. By the early 1780s, he was busy addressing abolition meetings; running the Sons of Africa, an antislavery society; and drafting his autobiography. In 1783, he brought the drowning of more than a hundred enslaved Africans

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aboard The Zong, who had been thrown into the ocean for insurance purposes, to the attention of fellow activist Granville Sharp, who turned the incident into a cause célèbre, and a court case. He also told his own story in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an inventive and lively combination of travelogue, memoir, and abolitionist tract, which appeared a few months before the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789.4 The revolutions in British North America, France, and Saint-­Domingue transformed the lives of planters, farmers, merchants, artisans, and free Black and enslaved men and women alike. Defending slavery from any form of attack, whether political, moral, or military was the fundamental and nonnegotiable article of faith for the men and women who enslaved people of African descent; although they embraced the American Revolution, many slaveholders believed that the French Revolution, which took a more radical and violent path than its American counterpart, particularly as it unfolded in France’s Caribbean holdings, constituted an existential threat to the plantation order. When South Carolina’s ruling class decided to throw off colonial rule and go to war in 1775, it took an immense gamble. Not only were the members of the ruling class risking huge fortunes accumulated from their plantations and from the trade in enslaved people, but the military struggle for independence on which they embarked had the potential to undermine and destroy their political power along with the material sources of their wealth, perhaps resulting in the liberation of the men and women whom they kept in captivity. Their actions endangered the very foundations of the social order that had proven so profitable. Unquestioningly loyal to the empire in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, most white colonists had become “a revolutionary generation” a decade later, openly rejecting British rule. Yet, for the colony’s white population, the revolution was more than a conflict with the British to achieve independence; it was also a struggle to defend and secure the institution upon which their status, power, identity, and livelihoods all depended. Enslaved people analyzed the struggles that preceded independence, as well as the war and its aftermath, in very different terms from their owners. Possessing a panoply of legal and political rights, which included rights over the property they owned, white men regarded the defense of their liberties as a vital task; of course, neither their spouses nor daughters enjoyed similar rights, their lives constrained by the lack of political and legal privileges. For enslaved people, however, the concept of liberty was central to their lives. The law defined them as property; they had no formal rights or privileges.

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The seismic upheavals generated by the Atlantic revolutions gave enslaved people unprecedented opportunities to seize freedom, define liberty on their own terms, and recast their identities. Recognizing that the ideas undergirding revolutionary movements might potentially effect profound change, enslaved people incorporated them into their own vocabulary. Politicized by the events taking place around them and by the era’s liberationist thinking, they too became members of the “revolutionary generation.”5 A volatile mix of political instability and public disorder combined with fears of frontier violence, slave rebellion, and invasion by British forces infused the years prior to the outbreak of war in late 1775. Not every white colonist fully embraced the cause of American liberty at the start of the conflict, however; even those who opposed Parliament remained deeply conservative, constantly concerned about how their actions might affect the enslaved population, possibly triggering widespread disorder that might spin out of control. Many members of the “gentry generation” who protested British policy did so reluctantly; for every firebrand like Christopher Gadsden, there were others, such as Henry Laurens, who exhibited considerable caution before finally embracing the revolution and the struggle for independence. The colonists were “the most improbable of rebels,” their ambivalence about the patriot cause grounded in the centrality of slavery to their lives. Even after the war broke out, not every white colonist rallied to the American flag; in the backcountry, a significant number of planters and farmers remained loyal to the crown as did some lowcountry merchants and planters.6 By the early 1770s, some slaveholders began to associate Britain with quasi-­abolitionist sentiments, an opinion fostered partly by a small community of radicals and dissenters in London who opposed slavery on moral grounds. The opinion handed down by the Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, at the end of James Somerset’s trial in June 1772, as well as the publicity it generated, suggested that their concerns about slavery’s future within the empire were not entirely misplaced. In November 1775, the decision made by Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, to grant freedom to any slave willing to take up arms against the rebels by joining his regiment further confirmed their suspicions. Rather than remain loyal to a government that was mobilizing its military to impose its political will on its troublesome colonies and that appeared ambivalent about defending slavery, most white Carolinians opted for a revolution led by men who, slaveholders themselves, had no intention of liberating the enslaved laborers who worked in their houses and workshops and on their plantations and farms.7

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The Stamp Act Crisis in Charles Town In the summer and early fall of 1765, large crowds took to the streets in a series of unruly and boisterous demonstrations in port towns along the Eastern Seaboard to protest the passage of the Stamp Act. On 19 October, Charles Town’s laborers, artisans, and tradesmen followed in the footsteps of angry colonists in Boston and elsewhere. They built a gallows at the intersection of Broad and Church Streets from which were suspended straw effigies of Caleb Lloyd and George Saxby, appointed by Parliament to administer the new tax. Banners draped around the figures proclaimed “all internal duties . . . to be grievous, oppressive, and unconstitutional,” with “LIBERTY and no STAMP ACT” daubed in “very conspicuous characters.” Learning about the protest through word of mouth or by handbills posted around town that announced “opposition to oppressive and unconstitutional burthens,” people began gathering in the center of town.8 As dusk approached, the “great concourse of people,” now numbering about two thousand, began a torchlight procession. Throwing the effigies into a cart, the crowd moved off toward Mazyck’s Field. Stopping outside the house of George Saxby, recently arrived from England to serve as Inspector of Stamps, the more boisterous members of the crowd had to be dissuaded “from leveling it with the ground.” Learning that Saxby, along with Lloyd, had taken refuge in Fort Johnson, a stronghold on James Island that guarded the harbor entrance, they smashed a few windows, forcing its reluctant occupants to let them search its rooms for stamps. Leaving empty-­handed, the crowd headed for its destination on the edge of town where “to loud and repeated shouts,” it threw the effigies on a bonfire and ceremoniously interred a coffin on which the words “American Liberty” had been scrawled. Retiring to Dillon’s Tavern, the protesters drank “damnation to the Stamp Act” to the sound of the muffled bells of St. Michael’s Church.9 The unrest continued throughout the week. Trapped in his house, the colony’s Chief Justice Charles Shinner and his pregnant wife watched in terror while a rowdy mob “ruin’d his Garden, broke his Windows and did other Mischief,” and “so affrighted Mrs. Shinner” that she gave birth prematurely; neither mother nor infant lived long enough to see the act’s repeal the following spring. Midweek, Laurens found a group of angry men on his doorstep, making “a most violent thumping and confus’d Noise,” shouting “Liberty, Liberty, and Stamped Paper.” Disguised with “Soot, Sailors habits, Crape Masks, [and] slouch hats,” they erroneously believed that the stamps

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were “lodged in the house of a gentleman at Ansonborough.” Acting on the tip, the men, “many of them heated with Liquor & all armed with Cutlasses & Clubbs,” demanded that Laurens let them search the house. Once inside, they spent more than an hour traipsing through its rooms, cellar, and stables “in a riotous and tumultuous Manner,” terrifying the heavily pregnant Eleanor Laurens as they did so. Finding no stamps, they left as Laurens announced his opposition to the law and his willingness “to procure its annihilation in a constitutional way.” Opposed to “the nonsensical fashion of burning . . . Straw Devils” and averse to the theatrics and disorder of the popular politics of the street, he thought that the crowd had “assumed the wrong Motto [and] instead of Liberty, they should write Licentiousness on their Banner, for they were now trampling Liberty underfoot.” Setting these doubts to one side, he noted that he had “openly declar’d myself an Enemy to it” and drew “three cheers” from the men who headed off empty-­handed into the night.10 On the following Monday, Lloyd and Saxby left their sanctuary for the city. Before a boisterous crowd gathered on Motte’s Wharf, the two men announced that “to restore the public peace,” they would not enforce “a tax so odious to the people” until Parliament had deliberated further on its future. With “hearty shouts of approbation,” the crowd serenaded the now-­redundant tax officials with “the music of bells, drums, hautboys, violins, huzzas” before leading them off to Dillon’s Tavern, where they were toasted and treated and then “conducted to their own houses.” By 1 November, the day on which the tax was to go into effect, the stamps remained in the hold of HMS Speedwell. With Saxby and Lloyd unwilling to act in their official capacity, the law had essentially been nullified; the protest’s leaders now ensured that the Stamp Act remained unenforceable.11 The streets now became “remarkably composed.” With the machinery of the colonial government falling silent, the members of the Fellowship Society and the Charles Town Fire Company took over municipal affairs. Trade soon came to a standstill while the South Carolina Gazette, having informed its readers that “most of the business in public offices will cease” by the end of October, also closed its doors. The Sons of Liberty policed the wharves, preventing the movement of goods bound for England or any colony that levied the tax. By December, Bull reported that the courts had fallen “silent, no grants of land are passed, all the ships remain in the harbor as under an embargo, every transaction requiring stamps is at a stand.” With wharves piled high with the autumn’s harvest and with merchants frustrated by the “irksome restraint” on trade, they called for the port to be reopened.

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Following negotiations, Bull ordered customs officers to clear vessels once a sum equal to the stamp tax had been collected. Commercial life gradually returned to normal; in February, Laurens noted that “an uncommon number of ships” that had been “entrapped” in the harbor were now ready to transport rice and other goods.12 In early May 1766, the Gazette announced the repeal of the Stamp Act, issuing a special edition “for the Satisfaction of our Town Customers.” A few weeks later, Charles Town became the stage for the celebrations that Equiano witnessed. The glare from the “Illuminations,” however, obscured the profound constitutional problems that the crisis exposed. On the same day that Parliament repealed the Stamp Act (18 March), it passed the Declaratory Act, a statement that explicitly articulated its sovereignty over British North America; the colonies were, it proclaimed, “subordinate unto, and dependent upon . . . Great Britain.” It also gave itself “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force . . . to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” This blunt declaration of parliamentary hegemony alarmed Gadsden. Speaking under the Liberty Tree at Mazyck’s Field, he warned his audience neither to indulge in “the fallacious hope that Great Britain would relinquish her designs and pretensions” nor to relax “their opposition and vigilance” and to be ready “to break the fetters whenever again imposed.”13 Despite Gadsden’s concerns, the Declaratory Act did not trigger another round of protests. The situation slowly stabilized. In June, to “demonstrations of joy” and yet more “illuminations,” Lord Charles Montagu arrived to take up the post of governor. The Assembly reconvened, allocating funds to commission a statue of William Pitt to mark “his assistance in procuring the repeal of the Stamp Act.” Not wishing to slight the “signal service” of the c­ olony’s delegation to the Stamp Act Congress, which had been held in New York the previous October, the Assembly set aside money for portraits of Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Lynch, and John Rutledge. Even though Laurens discussed the political climate and “the durability of present seeming happiness” in his correspondence, he soon returned, as he told William Fisher, “to my proper sphere,” and began devoting more space on the page to discussions about his commercial concerns, demanding reports from his overseers on the state of his “Barnes & buildings, Dams & Drains,” and the prospects for a successful harvest.14 For the white community of Charles Town, the protests served as a nursery for a “revolutionary generation.” Of course, the people who marched,

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burned effigies, smashed windows, and shouted for “liberty” on that October night had no conception whatsoever that they were living in prerevolutionary times, nor that they would declare independence a decade later and fight a long war against their former imperial masters to secure it. “The Word Rebellion,” noted Laurens, “is most discordant and ungrateful to the Ear of a British American.” Writing those words in 1769, Laurens and most colonists saw themselves as loyal subjects of the crown. But they also believed that they were constitutionally entitled “to all the inherent Rights and Liberties of his Natural Born Subjects within . . . Great Britain.” Just what constituted their rights and liberties became the subject of countless editorials and essays that appeared in print over the coming years and provided the topic of lively exchanges between “Gentlemen and Mechanic, those of high and low life, the learned and the illiterate” who debated “the blessings of Liberty and the miseries of oppression” in taverns and workshops, on the wharves and street corners, around the dining tables in the houses of the elite, and even among the enslaved in their quarters.15 The public displays of political outrage that paralyzed Charles Town in October doubtless led some slaves to discuss its meaning and draw some conclusions about its possibilities. Unlike Boston, Charles Town had no tradition of popular street politics. Not since the bloodless coup against the proprietorial regime in 1719 had so many publicly engaged in political protest. For several days, enslaved people witnessed misrule on a grand scale; masters had donned disguises and blackened their faces with soot, broken windows, invaded houses, buried an empty coffin, and built a scaffold from which they suspended straw effigies that were later incinerated. At least temporarily, the world seemed to have been turned upside down; no ships sailed from the harbor, dummies stuffed with hay hung from a mock scaffold, white men wore blackface, and ordinary workmen and artisans had taken over the city’s administration. Of course, how the slaves interpreted the carnival of street politics is a matter of speculation, but colonists shouting “liberty” and demanding an end to the abridgement of their rights likely resonated with their own circumstances. It was an article of faith among the city leadership that slaves would try to exploit any lapse in the maintenance of public order. Grand juries regularly complained about “idle and useless slaves” who behaved in “irregular and disorderly” ways. Moreover, infrequent and ineffective slave patrols and militia musters combined with the absence of a sizable garrison— even before the October demonstrations “only part of three companies” defended the colony— only added to the sense of unease

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that pervaded the white community. Writing in her diary in early December 1765, Ann Manigault noted that “it was feared there would be some trouble with the negroes.”16 Manigault’s concern was not misplaced. Although some enslaved laborers used “the days of festivity and exemption from labour” granted by their masters in late December to rest, others appeared ready to mount “a general insurrection.” On learning from Isaac Huger that his wife Elizabeth had overheard two slaves apparently discussing such a plan, Bull convened the Council, which immediately issued a ban on “private people Firing Guns by way of rejoycing on Christmas Eve.” That two enslaved laborers from John’s Island later corroborated Huger’s report only strengthened the conviction that unrest loomed on the horizon. Although the holiday season passed quietly, more than one hundred fugitives remained in the secluded swamps and woodlands of Colleton County. After the exposure of this “intended insurrection,” the authorities learned that its leaders had concealed “many fire arms” on local plantations, intending “to massacre the white people throughout the province” on Christmas Eve and “over the holidays.”17 Furthermore, that there was an unusually large number of recently arrived enslaved Africans in the colony during these weeks only contributed to the pervasive sense of dread. From the start of the protests in October until early January, five ships carrying over seven hundred captives from Africa dropped anchor in the harbor. This marked a significant rise in the volume of traffic of enslaved Africans; between 1764 and 1765, the number of slave ships arriving in Charles Town rose from eighteen to forty-­two while the number of enslaved captives disembarked rose from nearly four thousand to seven thousand. That so many new arrivals were either in transit between the auction block and the plantation or were struggling to adapt to the hardships and privations of enslavement in the colony after the horrors of the Middle Passage further contributed to the climate of fear and unease that prevailed in the aftermath of the Stamp Act demonstrations. When the crisis finally abated, the Assembly responded to collective white anxiety by imposing a temporary moratorium on shipments of enslaved laborers from Africa.18 The lowcountry now became an armed camp. Patrols rode “day & Night for 10 or 14 Days” across the region while “all were Soldiers in Arms” in Charles Town. In an echo of the colonial government’s response to the Stono Rebellion twenty-­six years earlier, Bull recruited the Catawbas to drive fugitives from “the hidden recesses where runaways conceal themselves from the usual searches of the English” and “to Strike terrour into the Negroes.” Enslaved

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people who had escaped to Colleton County returned to their plantations. Even though the Catawba dragnet only resulted in the capture of a handful of enslaved fugitives, Bull reported how the “vigorous execution of our Militia and Patrol Laws for 14 days before and after Christmas Day [had] . . . disconcerted their schemes.” To ensure that the “present appearance of tranquility” did not foster a false sense of security, he instituted regular slave patrols.19 As the militia monitored the countryside and constables policed Charles Town at the turn of the year, an incident occurred that fleetingly caught the attention of Henry Laurens, who skeptically noted that “there was Little or no cause for all that bustle.” In a letter to his friend John Lewis Gervais, he briefly noted how several slaves had been seen “crying out ‘Liberty’” over the holiday. Dismissing the episode, Laurens claimed that they had “simply mimick’d their betters,” suggesting that these slaves were simply out to waste time and resources by unnecessarily forcing “the White Men to Watchfulness.” But despite Laurens’s brusque dismissal of the “trouble” over Christmas, the events at year’s end suggest that enslaved people were not merely impersonating their owners. Two months earlier, the word itself had been on the lips of the protesters; a quarter of a century before, it had been the cry of rebel slaves along the Stono River who, witnesses later recorded, had shouted “Liberty” (or “lukango,” the Kikongo word for liberty) as they marched across Saint Paul’s Parish. In the context of the Stamp Act protest and the slave com­ munity’s collective memory of the Stono Rebellion, Laurens perhaps misread the situation; rather than impersonating their owners, they were busily incorporating the language of liberation and political protest into their own vocabulary, perhaps intending to turn words into deeds.20 Living in a climate of political instability and sporadic disturbances, slaveholders recognized how these conditions might trigger an insurrection. By the early 1770s, as the imperial crisis grew increasingly intractable, “slavery” and “enslavement,” with their multiple charged meanings, gained greater prominence in print, with essayists recognizing the metaphorical power of the words when discussing British policies. John Dickinson, in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania that appeared in the Gazette in 1768, observed that any people who are “taxed without their own consent . . . are slaves” (letter 7). This motif also found its way into sermons; in 1774, Presbyterian minister William Tennant wondered “whether we shall continue to enjoy our privileges as men and Britons, or whether they shall reduce us to a state of the most abject slavery.” In private letters, correspondents frequently used “slavery” to describe the relationship between the colonies and the metropole;

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Laurens reported to Lachlan McIntosh that the southern colonies would “stubbornly resist all Ministerial Mandates . . . tending to enslave them,” while Gadsden informed Samuel Adams that his fellow colonists would use “every means in our Power to halt the abject slavery intended for us and our Posterity.” Addressing Governor William Campbell in June 1775, his tenure as governor rapidly approached its swift and rancorous conclusion, Laurens told him, “We prefer death to slavery.” Distinguishing between enslavement by a tyrannical Parliament and the enslavement of Africans, the lowcountry’s political leaders were determined to break the chains of the former and defend the latter at any price.21 The problem of slavery and freedom garnered a different response from activists in London. While pamphleteers on both sides of the Atlantic warned of tyranny’s threat to liberty, Quakers and other dissenters looked to advance the abolitionist cause. In 1772, Granville Sharp, an outspoken critic of slavery, brought the case of James Somerset, an enslaved man from Virginia, before Chief Justice Lord Mansfield, hoping that it would settle the legal status of enslaved people of African descent in England. Somerset had found himself against his will on The Ann and Mary, after his owner sold him to the ship’s master, John Knowles, in late 1771. Waiting in London to sail to Jamaica, Knowles received a writ of habeas corpus, which temporarily released Somerset to appear in court. Using his connections, Sharp ensured that the case to determine Somerset’s legal status received extensive publicity. Mansfield handed down his opinion in June 1772; Somerset, he wrote, was under no obligation to return to his owner. He ordered that “the Man must be discharged” from servitude and that “no Master ever was allowed here to take a Slave by force to be sold abroad, because he had deserted from his service, or for any other reason whatever.”22 Although Mansfield’s decision applied to Somerset and Somerset alone, the press claimed that the judge had, “with one sweeping judicial blow, destroyed the institution of slavery in England.” Infuriated by people who misconstrued his ruling, Mansfield emphasized that only Parliament had the constitutional power to abolish slavery; the courts, noted the judge, did not have the legislative authority to settle the issue. Around twenty colonial papers carried reports on the events inside the courtroom of the King’s Bench. Describing the scene when Mansfield delivered his opinion, they noted how Somerset and “many other Blacks” in the public gallery greeted the news with the “most extravagant Joy,” with some editorializing about “the Genius of that Government, which thus dispenses Freedom to all around it.”

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The Gazette reported that “near 200 Blacks” drank to Mansfield’s health and toasted “the triumph which their brother Somerset had obtained over . . . his master” in a Westminster tavern. Striking a blow against slaveholding, the decision further contributed to growing antagonisms between Parliament and the colonists, particularly its slaveholders. Living in London at the time, Benjamin Franklin told abolitionist and fellow Philadelphian Anthony Benezet how the British establishment had smugly congratulated itself on “its Virtue, Love of Liberty, and the Equity of its Courts, in setting free a single Negro” while continuing to promote “the Guinea Trade,” further noting that “Several Pieces have been lately printed here against the Practice.”23 Even before his involvement with the Somerset case, Sharp had established his abolitionist credentials, writing Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery (1769) and several other tracts condemning the institution. His was not a lone voice in the wilderness. In his Plan for the Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies (1772), colonial administrator Maurice Morgann argued for emancipation and proposed the establishment of a new colony for freed slaves. Methodist founder John Wesley, who had witnessed slavery firsthand during his brief ministry in Georgia in 1735, entered the fray; in Thoughts Upon Slavery (1775), he asked where lay the justice in “tearing them [Africans] away from their native country, and depriving them of liberty itself.” Slavery was, he concluded, “as Irreconcilable to Justice as to Mercy.” Written by men from different walks of life, their essays and pamphlets might have passed unnoticed in the colonies had it not been for the web of transatlantic networks between activists. Benezet struck up a correspondence with Sharp, incorporating sections from Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery into his Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771). Their activities and writings naturally drew fire from the West India or proslavery lobby. In Candid Reflections upon the Judgment Lately Awarded by the Court of the King’s Bench (1772), Edward Long, a plantation owner on Jamaica, noted that Mansfield “shall henceforth become more popular among all the Quacoes and Quashebas of America, than that of patriot [John] Wilkes once was among the porter-­swilling swains of St. Giles.”24 Slaveholders clearly saw any attack on slavery as an existential threat. The question posed by the Somerset case—“Whether a Slave, by coming to England, becomes free”—had profound ramifications for the institution’s future. That a small cadre of abolitionists could openly gather and publish essays that denounced slavery at the center of the empire, where many

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wealthy South Carolinians had been educated, perhaps led some lowcountry grandees to believe that slavery’s future was not as secure as they wished. Even though the New York Journal’s prediction that Mansfield’s decision “will occasion a greater ferment in America (particularly in the islands) than the Stamp Act itself ” did not materialize, the question of slavery’s future within the empire had become a front-­page issue. Not only did it appear that the property rights of slaveholders were in jeopardy, but the British government’s commitment to defending the liberties of freeborn Englishmen throughout the empire was also at risk. “Liberty,” however white people defined the term, seemed to be under siege from a number of quarters.25 The riots that followed the imprisonment of John Wilkes, who had been arrested and jailed after his return from France where he had fled following his acquittal on charges of libeling King George III in his newspaper, the North Briton (edition 45), constituted one such moment. In May 1768, crowds gathered on Saint George’s Fields outside the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark where Wilkes was incarcerated; violence broke out during which soldiers killed several protesters. The inner circle of government also seemed unwilling to compromise, taking an increasingly hard line by the mid-­1770s. Writing from London in March 1775, William Lee informed Ralph Izard, who was living in Rome, that he was “quite mistaken in supposing anything conciliatory toward America is intended. The ministers . . . are violently blowing the coals into a flame, that will lay waste the whole British empire,” concluding that “civil war is inevitable.” Days later, Izard learned from another correspondent that Parliament was now “determined to exert every nerve to make America buckle.” Following the skirmishes on Lexington Green and in Concord a month later, Lee’s prediction came true; in South Carolina, the “inevitable” happened in November 1775 when neighbor exchanged shots with neighbor at Ninety-­Six, triggering the outbreak of war in the backcountry.26

A City in Revolt Between the Stamp Act crisis in late 1765 and the end of royal rule a decade later, Charles Town became the major center of protest and dissent in the southern colonies. Yet the imperial crisis did not occupy the minds of the colonists during every waking hour. In the late 1760s, farmers in the interior were more concerned with suppressing banditry and bringing order to the region than with imperial politics. Nor was the rural lowcountry a hotbed of

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political activity. The white community devoted its time and energy to running farms and plantations; ensured that the region’s thousands of enslaved workers remained quiet; and went about their everyday lives, attending church, mustering for militia drills, and riding out on slave patrols. This does not mean that they remained oblivious to events either in Parliament or in towns and cities along the Eastern Seaboard; they read the newspapers, visited Charles Town, drank in its taverns and chatted with other patrons about current events, and listened to sermons that addressed the crisis. The Boston Massacre in March 1770 and the subsequent trial of Captain Thomas Preston and his men eight months later, for example, received extensive coverage in the Charles Town papers and generated editorials that excoriated “the execrable hands of the diabolical tyrants” who had bathed the streets of Boston in “the BLOOD of innocent AMERICANS.” Such dramatic rhetoric no doubt inspired discussion, leading to conversations about the killings on King Street or about Paul Revere’s graphic rendition of the event. But, unlike Boston’s residents who encountered British soldiers on the streets daily, Charles Town was not under military occupation. Thus, only when the imperial crisis directly impinged on their lives did they respond, reacting to events rather than initiating them.27 The boisterous enthusiasm that characterized the October protests had let the political genie escape from the bottle. Sensing their growing influence, artisans and tradesmen in Charles Town became increasingly confident and surefooted in the political arena. Taxes were a key issue; not only were they taxed on the assessed value of their houses and workshops, but they paid a levy for each enslaved person that they owned. On learning that the Stamp Act would tax nearly every piece of paper that passed through their hands, they established a coalition with the city’s lawyers and merchants, whose businesses would also be affected by the new law. They looked to Christopher Gadsden for leadership; a prominent lawyer, planter, and politician, he had an impressive resumé for the part of the radical firebrand. During the Cherokee War, when he served as an artillery officer, he had openly criticized British commanders for their failure to hunt down the enemy and “cut the throats of as many as they could have come up with.” In 1762, Gadsden was again at the center of controversy when he clashed with Governor Thomas Boone about his election to fill a vacancy to represent Saint Paul’s Parish. Boone, who regarded Gadsden as a troublemaker, refused to administer the oath of office, choosing instead to dissolve the Assembly, which triggered new elections. Only after the Assembly reconvened following the elections

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and Boone had departed for England did Gadsden take his seat. A leading critic of colonial officialdom, Gadsden became the architect of local resistance, attending the Stamp Act Congress. He was also in the vanguard calling for colonial unity, arguing that “there ought to be no New England men, no New Yorker &c, known on the Continent, but all of us Americans” standing on the “broad and common ground of . . . natural and inherent rights.”28 The Stamp Act crisis provided such men with the opportunity to wield their political influence and demonstrate their loyalties in public. After Lloyd and Saxby resigned, trade came to a standstill, leaving the harbor “exceedingly crouded with ships” unable to sail and the streets filled with large numbers of idle sailors who, without work or money, began panhandling and menacing passersby for cash. Keeping order now became as important as upholding the boycott. To police the city, Gadsden turned to the Sons of Liberty, whose members were drawn primarily from the ranks of the Charles Town Fire Company, and the Fellowship Society, an organization primarily dedicated to providing welfare for widows and orphans. Not only did they arrest the rowdy, but they also policed the boycott. Threats to burn any vessel whose owner violated its terms were taken seriously, forcing merchants John Ward and Peter Leger to reconsider their plans to ship rice to Georgia. Reflecting on the current “Confusion and Anarchy,” along with possible loss of their ship and its cargo, they thought it “prudent to submit” to the Liberty Boys.29 During local elections in October 1768, artisans again demonstrated their growing assertiveness, assembling a slate of “proper persons to represent them.” Gathered around “a most noble Live Oak Tree in Mr. Mazyck’s pasture,” they began a meeting rich in political symbolism and theater. After dedicating the tree to “Liberty,” they cheered the “glorious NINETY-­TWO Anti-­Rescinders of Massachusetts Bay,” an act that recognized the defiance shown by representatives in Boston who refused to retract the Massachusetts Circular Letter. At nightfall, the crowd illuminated the tree with “45 lights” and fired off “45 sky-­rockets” to mark their support for John Wilkes (publication of issue 45 of Wilkes’s North Briton had led to his arrest in 1763); the gathering then adjourned to Dillon’s Tavern, where it admired a table on which stood “45 lights . . . 45 bowls of punch, 45 bottles of wine, and 92 glasses.” Between endless toasts, they selected six candidates of whom three were elected to the Assembly. Other occasions provided patriot leaders to openly demonstrate their allegiance to the protest movement; when the statue of William Pitt was unveiled, they spoke about the political giant “who had gloriously defended the freedom of the Americans” along with the

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broader implications of British efforts to muzzle their liberties. Moreover, it also provided yet another opportunity for a convivial evening at Dillon’s Tavern during which “45 loyal and constitutional Toasts were drank.”30 Despite widespread colonial opposition to the Stamp Act and its “oppressive and unconstitutional burthens,” as it endangered the “essential and common rights of Englishmen,” colonists remained “unshaken in their loyalty” to the crown. In E. P. Thompson’s classic formulation of collective action in eighteenth-­century England, the crowd’s response to the Stamp Act and the other measures later taken by the British government to rein in truculent colonists suggested that a “moral economy,” grounded in the language and practices of customary and political rights, had been violated. Rather than riot over bread prices, usually the trigger for unrest in English towns, Charles Town’s artisans had taken to the streets to make a fundamental point about constitutional rights that had been abrogated by government acting in a tyrannical and arbitrary manner.31

Defying British Authority In July 1767, Henry Laurens embarked on a journey that ended a decade later with his appointment as president of the Continental Congress. Like many political odysseys, it began with a trivial incident. Daniel Moore, the local Collector of His Majesty’s Customs, claimed that Laurens had sidestepped regulations governing the inspection of coastal vessels; accordingly, Moore seized the Broughton Island Packet and the Wambaw as they moved provisions to Laurens’s plantations on the Altamaha River in Georgia. Demanding “a determination upon the fate of either Vessel,” Laurens became embroiled in a protracted legal battle that became a cause célèbre. Not only did Moore challenge Laurens to a duel, but the two men scuffled on the street, with the merchant twisting his adversary’s nose. On paper, Laurens derided customs officers as “Miscreants who were driven out of the Temple by Jesus” and concluded that Vice Admiralty courts were “a curse tenfold worse than the Stamp Act.” He wrote a long pamphlet on the imbroglio—Extracts from the Proceedings of the Court of Vice Admiralty (1769)—in which he spelled out the legal issues. With no resolution in sight, customs officers seized another vessel owned by Laurens, the Ann, adding more fuel to the fire. Sir Egerton Leigh, the colony’s attorney general, then stepped in to adjudicate the case, publishing The Man Unmasked as a riposte to Extracts. Replacing argument

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with ad hominem, Leigh humiliated Laurens, claiming that he was no gentleman, but “a mere marker and shipper of Rice, a weigher, [and] a broker,” whose writings were “a farrago of . . . reflections and conjectures bundled together, in a confused and motley heap” and the scribblings of “a mistaken and deluded man” who intended to poison minds with his “palpable piece of hypocrisy and deceit.” Advertising a new edition of his Extracts, Laurens excoriated the “contemptible” Leigh for his “false and infamous . . . Insinuations and Aspersions,” labeling him a “POLECAT.” Not surprisingly, this conflict turned Laurens into an ardent defender of American rights.32 The “polecat” controversy took place against the backdrop of growing unease with British rule. In 1769, the Assembly took up the cause of the radical journalist and political firebrand John Wilkes, a decision that triggered a crisis that ultimately led the governor to dissolve the Assembly, a decision that, for all practical purposes, marked the beginning of the end of royal rule. To help offset the legal costs of a man notorious for attacking the British establishment at every opportunity, the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights sought funds from sympathetic colonists. Even though his name was synonymous with liberty throughout British North America—he soon gained the status of folk hero and no other English political figure, historian Pauline Maier has noted, “evoked more enthusiasm in America than the radical John Wilkes”—only South Carolina formally responded to the appeal. Without consulting the governor, the Assembly set aside £1,500 “for the Support of the Just and Constitutional Rights and Liberties of the People of Great Britain and America.” Incensed that lawmakers had acted in “a very hasty manner,” Governor Montagu embarked on a protracted feud that pitted elected representatives against the crown. Summarizing the colonists’ position, Arthur Lee argued that “the Rights and Privileges of the Commons House spring from the Rights and Privileges of British Subjects and are coeval with the Constitution. They were neither created, nor can they be abolished by the Crown.” Parliament, however, saw matters rather differently; the crown, they claimed, could revoke the rights of assemblies just as easily as it could grant them. Its power, as enshrined in the Declaratory Act, trumped “local practice and precedent.” Such claims only heightened fears that Parliament might force direct rule on the colonies, using military power to impose its fiat.33 Fundamental disagreements over the relationship between imperial and local rule produced an intractable controversy. With representatives in the Assembly arguing that they and they alone had sole authority to disperse funds as they saw fit and with the governor claiming that the appropriation

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to assist Wilkes with his legal costs had neither received his approval nor contributed to the colony’s welfare, which violated the 1721 constitution, the document that had formally inaugurated royal rule, the two sides had reached an impasse. Unwilling to compromise, the governor dissolved the Assembly on no fewer than four separate occasions. In October 1772, Montagu further antagonized its members by convening a session in Beaufort, a coastal backwater sixty miles south of Charles Town, a tactic that backfired badly. Doing very little for several days before returning to Charles Town, lawmakers then condemned the hapless governor for openly abusing “a Royal Prerogative” and for his contempt for “the People’s Representatives.” With both sides deadlocked, the machinery of government came to a halt; from 1771 until its final dissolution in 1775, the Assembly did virtually no legislative business whatsoever.34 By the late 1760s, the protest movement had drifted into the doldrums. The duties introduced by Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend in 1767 on glass, lead, paper, paint, and tea produced more grumbling than unrest, and Charles Town remained quiet. To pay for the duties on the enumerated goods, merchants simply raised prices and prayed that demands for protests would vanish from “silent neglect.” Artisans, however, argued that by embargoing English imports, domestic production would increase and help restore their flagging fortunes. Boycotting these goods voluntarily, many proudly “cloath[ed] themselves in homespun.” One planter conducted his business “completely clad in the Produce and Manufacture of his own plantation,” wearing clothes made from “Flax and Cotton grown on his own place . . . spun, wove, and knit by his own People,” and perhaps failing to recognize the irony of having enslaved people produce garments to display his patriotism. With merchants, whose livelihoods depended on good relationships with London trading houses, becoming ever more isolated, the voice of the radicals in towns like Boston began holding sway, with “their loud cries,” noted Bull, drowning out the “weaker voice of moderation.”35 The Tea Act of 1773 reignited the crisis. Although the first shipment of East India Company tea to arrive in Charles Town did not generate the same dramatic response as it had in Boston, it brought the crowds back into the streets. With The London at anchor, Bull considered how to diffuse the situation; he ordered the tea seized for nonpayment of duty and brought ashore. His decision nearly triggered a “tea party”; only when a detachment of soldiers arrived at the dock at the last minute was a riot averted. In July 1774, with reports about the Coercive Acts circulating, the Magna Charta arrived, with its hold

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filled, somewhat ironically, with tea. Only the quick thinking of its captain, Richard Maitland, who slipped the cargo ashore, prevented a disturbance. Charles Town finally held its own “tea party” a year after Boston when, with “a numerous Concourse of People” crowding the waterfront, artisans made “an Oblation . . . to NEPTUNE”; busting open chests seized from the Britannia, they dumped tea into the Cooper River to the sound of loud cheering.36 For the revolutionary generation, the months between the passage of the Coercive Acts in spring 1774 and the colony’s de facto declaration of independence the following July proved decisive. With royal government now moribund, lowcountry leaders took it upon themselves to run the province. In early July, representatives from every parish gathered in Charles Town to elect delegates for the First Continental Congress; Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Lynch, Henry Middleton, John Rutledge, and Edward Rutledge (all of whom were slaveholders) were chosen to travel to Philadelphia.37 Their return in early November ignited more politicking. South Carolina now had two rival administrations. Lacking popular support and incapable of projecting authority, the colonial government no longer had the power to rule. Real political power had passed into the hands of the Provincial Congress. Meeting at Pike’s Tavern on Church Street, it had now become the legitimate government, with slaveholders monopolizing its membership. Its composition closely resembled the now-­shuttered Assembly, with forty-­three of its forty-­eight members participating in the new body. Forming a number of committees to supervise local affairs and to enforce directives issued by the Continental Congress, the new administration set up a Council of Safety as an executive branch. On 4 July 1775, a year before the Second Continental Congress formally declared independence from Great Britain, William Henry Drayton, regarded by royal officials as “one of the most virulent Incendiarys in the Province,” noted that “we already have an army and a treasury with a million of money, in short a new government is in effect erected. . . . See the effects of oppression!”38 The new government now consolidated its authority. No sooner had reports about the decision to send additional redcoats to the colonies reached Charles Town in April than the Provincial Congress seized a ship carrying gunpowder and emptied local magazines and arsenals. It appropriated funds to raise fifteen hundred men to beat off “the Cruel Designs of Government against us distressed Colonists.” In July, the Committee of Intelligence obtained British dispatches that discussed plans to use military power to return the colonies “to a state of due obedience to the constitutional authority

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of Parliament.” Following the evacuation of Fort Johnson, when British soldiers carted away guns, ammunition, and stores, the new government, fearing an imminent invasion, rushed to shore up local defenses, allocating money to hire workers, both free and enslaved, to strengthen Charles Town’s fortifications.39 It also enforced resolutions from the Continental Congress. Throughout the decade of crisis, the colonists had periodically deployed boycotts and embargoes to nullify imperial legislation. In October 1774, the First Continental Congress declared economic war, announcing that colonial ports would remain closed until Parliament repealed the relevant laws. Concerned that shutting Charles Town Harbor would ruin the lowcountry economy, the province’s delegation nearly broke ranks with the rest of Congress. Determined to maintain unity and momentum, however, Gadsden brokered a compromise that placed an embargo on indigo but allowed merchants to ship rice. Congress now called on every colonist to join the Continental Association, with refusal regarded as an act of treason and with the Committee of Observation assigned to supervise this particular task in South Carolina. In February 1775, it persuaded Captain William Carter of the Lively to dump several tons of potatoes into the harbor; a few days later, “the Whole Cargo” of the Charming Sally” went “into 7 Fathom Hole at Hog Island Creek.” The revolution in South Carolina was now underway.40

Tipping Points: From Summer to Fall 1775 In early May 1775, colonists in South Carolina received the “alarming Intelligence” about the clashes on Lexington Green and in Concord a month earlier. The accounts from Massachusetts arrived just as intelligence about British intentions to use “our Slaves to act against us” landed on the Provincial Congress’ desk. Discussing “the threats of arbitrary impositions from abroad & the dread of instigated Insurrections at home,” the new government called on the “Inhabitants of this unhappy Colony” to unite “under every tie of Religion & of honour & associate as a band . . . against every Foe . . . ready to sacrifice our Lives & fortunes in attempting to secure her Freedom & Safety.” People unwilling to accept the new regime risked being tarred and feathered by boisterous crowds now imbued with the sense of rage militaire. So powerful was the spirit “for Liberty and Freedom” that nearly every white man “with the Greatest Avidity and Cheerfulness” signed the Association.

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“In regard to War and Peace,” noted Peter Timothy, the Gazette’s radical editor, “I can only tell you that the Plebians are still for War” with some readers enthusiastically arguing for “storming Boston, and totally destroying the British Troops.”41 Into this volatile climate sailed a new royal governor, Lord William Campbell. No stranger to the colony, he had been stationed in Charles Town during the Seven Years’ War when he had met and married Sarah Izard, a member of the powerful Izard plantation dynasty. A detachment of soldiers and royal officials greeted his arrival in June 1775 with “a genteel entertainment.” Perhaps unwittingly, Timothy printed a brief report about Campbell’s arrival next to a list of “Gentlemen elected by the Provincial Congress” to command “the two Regiments of Foot, and one of Rangers now raising.” On a single page, the Gazette reported on Campbell’s inspection of red-­coated grenadiers, as well as naming the officers in newly mustered provincial regiments against whom they might conceivably fight. If these two items in the newspaper did catch Campbell’s eye, he did not mention it when he addressed the Assembly in early July, expressing his grave concern “at finding the Province in the distracted State it is now in . . . [and] the Administration of Justice obstructed” before chastising members for advocating “the most Dangerous Measures” that only exacerbated the crisis. “I think myself indispensably bound,” he noted, “to warn of the Danger you are in.” The assembled lawmakers sharply rebuked the new appointee; no longer awed by the prestige of his position as the crown’s representative, they gave him a blunt summary of the current state of affairs: “Alarmed and roused by a long succession of arbitrary proceedings by wicked administrations, impressed with the greatest apprehensions of instigated insurrections, and deeply affected by the commencement of hostilities by British troops . . . [and] solely for the preservation and in defence of our lives, liberties, and properties, we have been impelled to associate, and to take up Arms.”42 Campbell’s words had fallen on deaf ears. Recognizing that power had shifted decisively and irreversibly to the revolutionaries and that he had “scarce a shadow of authority left,” the governor acknowledged the new political reality when he informed them how “the Happiness of Generations, yet unborn, will depend on your Determinations.” And circumstances outside the paneled Assembly chamber fundamentally influenced their “determinations.” By early summer, Charles Town was in a febrile state. In June, Laughlin Martin and John Dealy who, having generated “the Resentment of the Populous” by ridiculing the Association were “furnished with a new Suit

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of Cloathing” in the form of tar and feathers; “thus garbed,” the victims were paraded through the streets. Martin recanted, apologizing publicly for his “shameful Conduct” while Dealy took the first ship for England, appropriately named the Liberty. Rumors also circulated about British plans to provoke raids by Native Americans against backcountry settlements and uprisings by enslaved laborers in the lowcountry. Campbell believed that such “notorious falsehoods” had driven colonists, who readily accepted innuendo, rumor, and idle gossip as incontrovertible truth, to a “pitch of madness and fury.” Yet people began reading signs and gestures in ways that transformed the conjectural and speculative into a reality that called for a swift response from the new regime in Charles Town.43 Josiah Smith, who managed plantations owned by George Austin, noted the impact of rumor and unsubstantiated gossip on enslaved people. Writing to his employer, he observed how “some villainous Person” had spoken with the slaves. During the exchange, he had put “the notion of being all sett free on the arrival . . . of our new Governor” into their heads. The idea that liberation would follow hard on the heels of Campbell’s arrival soon became “common Talk throughout the Province”; not only were enslaved laborers engaging in “impertinent behavior,” but these fears prompted the Provincial Congress to redouble its efforts “to keep those mistaken creatures in order.” William Henry Drayton noted that enslaved people “entertained ideas, that the present contest was for obliging us to give them their liberty.” Although Smith applauded “the very martial spirit” that had gripped the lowcountry, slaves still had opportunities to escape or behave in a disorderly manner. Any enslaved person who witnessed one militia muster at which only “seven private men without any officer [and] insufficiently armed” paraded and then stumbled chaotically through their drills may have believed that insurrection and liberation were possible.44 The summer of 1775 proved long and grueling for white South Carolinians who were caught in the middle of political turmoil and growing economic dislocation, constantly wondering if they would wake up to a large-­scale slave insurrection. Commercial life had ground to a halt, with Laurens noting in early July that he “never saw Charles Town harbor so naked,” with only “two Topsail vessels in it.” For the slave population, the crisis held out some hope that their days of enslavement were perhaps numbered. David Margrett, a free Black preacher from the Bethesda orphanage outside Savannah that George Whitefield had established in 1740, visited Charles Town in late 1774 and told “several white People and Negroes . . . [that] God would send Deliverance

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to the Negroes, from the power of their Masters, as He freed the Children of Israel from Egyptian Bondage.” He apparently saw himself as their liberator and was determined, noted Reverend William Piercy, who ran the orphanage and was well acquainted with the preacher, to “deliver his People (meaning the Slaves) from their Taskmasters.” Before Margrett could turn rhetoric into action, however, the authorities, who unsurprisingly regarded his message as dangerous and subversive, issued a warrant for his arrest. Now a wanted man, he turned to Piercy, who organized his escape, and the preacher slipped away to England aboard the Georgia Planter. Margrett was unwilling to acquiesce to the demands of his sponsors at Bethesda that, as Savannah merchant and colonial official James Habersham noted, his “Business was to preach a Spiritual Deliverance to these People, not a temporal one.”45 Two months later, another insurrection alarm sounded. Planters along the Chehaw River in Saint Bartholomew Parish sensed growing restiveness in the local population of enslaved people. In July, Thomas Hutchinson reported to the Council of Safety that slaves were trying “to bring abt. a General Insurrection.” Holding “Nocturnal Meetings of the Slaves . . . In the Woods-­and other Places,” Scottish-­born minister John Burnet had told his audience that “they were equally intitled to the Good things of this Life in common with the Whites.” Regarded by local residents as subversive and “extremely Obnoxious,” Burnet had linked the language of liberty to the egalitarianism of evangelical religion. Interrogated about Burnet’s activities, one enslaved man claimed that “the Young King [George III] . . . was about to alter the World & set the Negroes Free,” an observation that supported other rumors about British intentions and the potential role of British soldiers as liberators. Quizzed by Charles Town’s Committee of Safety, Burnet claimed that “he had never any thing more in View than the Salvation of those poor Ignorant Creatures” and had always sought “to impress upon their Minds; the Duty of Obedience to their Masters.”46 That enslaved laborers on Austin’s plantation, noted Smith, had become increasingly truculent—he noted that they were “indifferent” to his instructions, and “not taskable”—may be explained by persistent rumors of an impending war that would bring an end to their enslavement. Moving along creeks, paths, and roads between plantations and farms and Charles Town, enslaved plantation workers had developed, as John Adams learned from Georgia planters and political figures Archibald Bulloch and John Houstoun, “a wonderfull Art of Communication of Intelligence,” able to transmit news and information “severall hundreds of Miles in a week or Fortnight.”

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Frequently, however, hard intelligence coexisted alongside fabrication and invention; it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish signal from noise and to untangle unsubstantiated gossip from hard fact. Army surgeon and loyalist George Milligen noted that stories had circulated widely about enslaved laborers who, on one plantation, “had refused to work, that in another they had obtained arms & were gone into the Woods, that others had actually murdered their Masters & their Families.” Although such tales were, he claimed, “without any Foundation,” they provided yet more proof of Britain’s treacherous designs and demanded a response. But imposing further constraints on slave life by dispatching more patrols or passing laws to limit their movement only threatened to create the conditions where widespread disorder became a distinct possibility. Campbell questioned the “constant exercising of the militia.” Such demonstrations of force perhaps enabled white people to sleep more easily at night, but he believed that constant “martial appearances” simply ratcheted up the level of distrust and paranoia, a tactic that the new government was deploying for its own political ends.47 The discovery of another plot directed against Charles Town around the same time that the Council of Safety learned about events in Saint Bartholomew’s was an important milepost on the road to revolution. Jemmy, an enslaved wharf hand, reported that free Black harbor pilot Thomas Jeremiah (or Jerry) had asked whether Jemmy could transport guns and powder to Dewar Tweed, formerly an enslaved shipwright in William Tweed’s yard until he ran off, to help “fight against the Inhabitants of this Province.” The authorities quickly arrested Jeremiah for encouraging “our Negroes to Rebellion & Joining the King’s Troops if any had been Sent here.” With his encyclopedic knowledge of the rivers and creeks that flowed into the harbor as well as the patterns of tides and currents, and well acquainted with the community of enslaved boatmen and waterfront workers, Jeremiah became a prime suspect. For any Royal Navy officer planning an amphibious attack against Charles Town, Jeremiah possessed invaluable information about the region’s coastal topography.48 The court heard testimony about “the great war coming soon” that would “help the Poor Negroes,” a reference to rumors about the imminent arrival of British troops to put down the colonial rebellion. Jemmy also divulged specific details about the planned attack; Sambo, another enslaved waterfront worker, received instructions to set a schooner alight at a prearranged time before jumping “on Shore and Join the Soldiers.” Presumably the blazing ship was either to act as a navigation marker for men landing under Jeremiah’s

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direction or to provide a diversion while soldiers came ashore elsewhere. With guns now “in Negroes hands” and with redcoats on dry land, this combined force could then take up “the fight against the Inhabitants of this Province.”49 The period that elapsed between Jeremiah’s arrest in June and his trial in August suggests that the Council of Safety manipulated the entire episode for its own ends. A few people, including royal officials, thought Jeremiah had been “sacrifice[d] to the groundless fears of some and the wicked policy of others.” Why, Campbell pointedly asked, would a free man “universally acknowledged to be remarkably sensible and sagacious [and] possessed of slaves of his own” (one report noted that he had “property valued at upwards of £1,000 sterling”) endanger his life on “so wild a scheme . . . without support [and] without encouragement?” The governor also condemned the court when he learned about its use of perjured testimony to obtain a conviction, a tactic that caused his “blood to run cold” as it “had doomed a fellow creature to death.” On the night before his execution, Jeremiah insisted on his innocence to an Anglican minister. Campbell made a last-­ditch effort to save the condemned man; rebuffing the governor’s plea, the judges argued that commuting the sentence would “raise a flame all the water in the Cooper River would not extinguish.” On 18 August, Jeremiah was executed. In a sinister inversion of the funeral held for American liberty in October 1765, the executioner hanged Jeremiah and then burned his corpse at the stake. The grim reality of a cold-­blooded political execution had replaced the theatricality of the gallows erected on Broad Street a decade earlier.50 This incident reveals much about the lowcountry’s volatile political climate on the eve of independence. By describing Jeremiah as “a forward fellow, puffed up by prosperity, ruined by Luxury & debauchery & grown to such an amazing pitch of vanity and ambition—withal a very silly Coxcomb,” Laurens deployed a rhetorical style that bore similarities to the language used by polemicists in their attacks on British politicians who, in addition to threatening the liberties of freeborn Englishmen, often led lives of unparalleled dissipation and corruption. Regardless of Jeremiah’s innocence or guilt, the positions adopted by white residents had less to do with his crime, real or imagined, than with the political climate. The case became a Rorschach test of allegiance. Those who thought him innocent asked their opponents, as had Campbell, why would “a sensible and sagacious” man with a good livelihood, risk his life on such a capricious and foolhardy scheme. He had, thought George Milligen, become a victim of the stifling atmosphere of suspicion, mistrust, and

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paranoia that cloaked Charles Town during the summer. The revolutionaries, however, who were simultaneously prosecuting Jeremiah and receiving information about British intentions “to grant freedom to such Slaves as would desert their Masters and join the King’s troops,” saw the episode as symptomatic of a truculent and confrontational Black population, determined to probe and test the chains of their subordination for weak links, and perhaps seize their freedom at an opportune moment. Not only was Jerry’s extravagantly gruesome execution designed to deter other enslaved people from making common cause with the British, but it also sent a signal to the governor and his entourage that it was only a matter of time before the revolutionaries formally took “Government into their own hands” and dismantled royal rule.51 The revolution gained momentum elsewhere during the summer of 1775. In June, the Americans inflicted significant damage on British forces at Bunker Hill; in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress established the Continental Army and took the first steps to becoming a national government. Asserting its right to resist “the increase of arbitrary impositions from a wicked and despotic ministry and the dread of instigated insurrections” and to challenge “force by force,” the provincial government in Charles Town, for all practical purposes, declared itself independent of British rule. The next step was to secure the revolution in the province, a task that would bring bloodshed to the backcountry by the end of the year, and to ensure that slavery remained sacrosanct. William Drayton stated that, “Peace, peace is now not even an idea . . . civil war in my opinion is absolutely unavoidable.” British officials apparently concurred. From East Florida, Governor Patrick Tonyn informed the Earl of Dartmouth that Charles Town had become the center of “every excess of outrage and sedition.” Only when “the wicked tumultuous spirit gets a check by a proper application of force,” he argued, would the crown’s authority be restored, and the colonies returned to their proper and subordinate place in the empire.52 Unbeknownst to them, enslaved people also figured in these calculations. Scattered reports from London and Virginia suggested ways in which the British might incorporate slaves into their military plans to crush the rebellion. Enslaved laborers under Smith’s management thought that Campbell’s arrival would bring freedom; they believed, he noted, that “such an Act of Grace was in contemplation among the Cabinet Oppressors.” From Saint Augustine, John Stuart, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern District of North America, seemed to confirm the news that had so unnerved Smith, telling Dartmouth that “it was given out that the Negroes were immediately

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to be set free by the government and that arms were to be given them to fall upon their masters.” That the British planned to use emancipation as a way to break the rebellion in the South gained further credence when reports reached Charles Town from Williamsburg about the proclamation issued in November by Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, that offered freedom to any enslaved person who joined his small contingent of redcoats and took up arms against the patriots in his Ethiopian Regiment. For southern slaveholders, the potential alliance of British soldiers and thousands of enslaved laborers constituted an existential threat to their authority.53 Mustered from “Indentured Servants, Negroes and Others” who had made their way to his camp, and wearing sashes on which “Liberty to Slaves” had been embroidered, Dunmore’s men began operations in the Tidewater toward the end of the year. Charles Town radical Edward Rutledge thought that Dunmore’s incendiary statement and the use of enslaved men as soldiers would be more effective “than any other expedient” in creating a permanent breach. Struggling to forge an army from the motley bands of militia and part-­ time soldiers that he encountered on Cambridge Common outside Boston in the summer of 1775, George Washington believed that unless Dunmore’s campaign was rapidly crushed, he would become “the most dangerous man in America.” Even though Dunmore’s force had some early successes, it soon fell into disarray following its defeat at Great Bridge by the Virginia militia, which forced Dunmore to abandon Norfolk. By summer 1776, with Dunmore’s small army marooned on an island in Chesapeake Bay and with smallpox rampaging through its ranks, he abandoned Virginia, disbanded the regiment, and evacuated its survivors to Saint Augustine, Bermuda, or New York.54 The campaign’s significant military shortcomings did not diminish its psychological impact, however. For slaveholders in the southern colonies, the mere fact that their enslaved laborers had run to the British and then fought alongside them was more significant than any battlefield success. Even before accounts of Dunmore’s operations reached Charles Town, reports that Parliament intended “to liberate slaves and encourage them to attack their masters” had thrown South Carolina into “ferment.” Addressing the House of Lords, former governor William Lyttelton argued that the presence of thousands of enslaved people made the colony the weakest link in the revolutionary chain. “If a few regiments were sent there,” he said, “the Negroes would rise, and imbrue their hands in the blood of their masters.” Fears that the British would don the liberator’s mantle, arm slaves, and deploy them in operations pace Dunmore did nothing to calm a white population that

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had grown sensitive to the slightest whisper of conspiracy. Even without redcoats adding to the confusion, the presence of more than seventy-­five thousand enslaved laborers in the lowcountry presented a formidable challenge to revolutionary leaders determined to keep order and ensure the institution’s survival.55 John Adams also learned that the promise of emancipation threatened the revolutionary cause in the South. Should the British land just one infantry regiment along the coast and proclaim “Freedom to all the Negroes,” then, or so his acquaintances from Georgia claimed, about twenty thousand enslaved laborers “would join . . . from the two Provinces in a fortnight.” Clearly, enslaved laborers armed and led by British officers invading a region lightly defended by “raw, undisciplined, half armed untried provincials” conjured visions of a catastrophe that was too awful for white residents to contemplate. With slaveholding families holding “imprudent conversations at their tables before their domestics,” with newspapers carrying reports “calculated to excite the fears of the People,” and with rumors swirling around about “Massacres and Instigated Insurrections” that found their way “into the mouth of every child,” the white community in the lowcountry stood on the verge of panic.56 In Charles Town, there was ample evidence that the radicals held the upper hand. In September, men dragged an artillery man from Fort Johnson off the street and demanded that he drink “damnation to King George III and all the rascals about him”; instead, Gunner George Walker drank “damnation to the rebels.” No sooner had he cursed his captors and their cause than they stripped, tarred, and feathered him, and then they “carted [Walker] thro’ the Town,” an ordeal that ended only when they unceremoniously dumped him outside the house of loyalist George Milligen and his family. Yelling, “hissing [and] threatening,” the crowd demanded that “the scoundrel” Milligen show himself before it tore into the house, terrifying its occupants, and forcing him to flee. Although Milligen escaped the agony of tar and feathers, he, like many colonists loyal to the crown, recognized that his time in South Carolina was rapidly coming to an end.57 Campbell also recognized that his days were numbered. Seeking sanctuary on HMS Tamar, he made a hasty and undignified departure on 25 September that brought the curtain down on over half a century of royal rule. On the same day, the Commons House of Assembly dissolved itself for the final time. For the British government, reconciliation was no longer an option; the appointment of the hardliner Lord George Germain as Secretary of State

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for the American Department in November further signaled its intentions to restore royal rule using force. In Charles Town, local leaders also spurned any talk of compromise, and they considered “a concerted plan to establish independency.” Acting on instructions from the Continental Congress, the revolutionaries formed a committee to “establish such a form of Government, as, in their judgment, will best produce the happiness of the people, and most effectually secure peace and good order.” In late March 1776, the revolutionary government in Charles Town adopted a new constitution; a document that not only formally announced the province’s independence from British rule but also guaranteed that the elite would retain its grip on political power, thus ensuring that slavery would remain untouched.58

“Between Scylla and Charybdis”: Slavery and Independence in South Carolina The departure of Campbell and the creation of a new government were signal events for the revolutionary generation. Protests against Parliament that integrated performance and politics by using effigies, mock funerals, rough music, and other popular rituals, along with newspapers and pamphlets, brought natural rights to a large audience. The Gazette offered readers opinion pieces, polemics, and extracts from a variety of essayists, as well as news bulletins from Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Those wanting to engage more deeply with the constitutional issues at stake could obtain classical and modern works as well as recent reprints of sermons and essays from booksellers like Robert Wells or the Charles Town Library Society. The theater also provided food for thought. Those attending William Shakespeare’s Richard III at the theater on Church Street doubtless made the connection between the drama of monarchical malfeasance and despotism in the 1480s being played out on the stage and the current situation, while audiences watching Joseph Addison’s Cato perhaps reflected on the similarities between their circumstances and a world in which the liberty-­loving Cato resisted the tyranny of the imperious Julius Caesar.59 Whether conducted around a table in Dillon’s Tavern, in the open air under the Liberty Tree, or in chamber of the Assembly, political life revolved around protecting the rights and privileges of white colonists won over the years. Only by tenaciously defending their long-­standing rights—the protection of private property and trial by jury, for example—and opposing governments

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bent on their destruction, would their liberties survive. The imposition of absolutist rule not only jeopardized these rights but also placed those who lived under a tyrant in a state of slavery. Within this discursive frame, the term “slavery” did not define the legal status of bound laborers nor did “liberty,” its antonym, describe the condition to which they aspired. For white colonists, in contrast, these words held precise political meanings that centered on the imposition of arbitrary laws as well as a disregard for the legislative privileges of colonial assemblies. Even though the major texts that delineated the concepts embraced by the revolution’s intellectual leadership were often dense philosophical treatises that frequently drew on classical political theory, their authors made a series of arguments that, once popularized in pamphlets or newspaper articles, resonated with the public who were witnesses to and sometimes participants in large demonstrations. When the language of rights “enters into common speech,” historian Jack Rakove writes, “it will no longer be heard only in the salons of the gentry; it will pass into wider usage, come to be spoken in new venues, and be put to new uses.” This proved to be the case in South Carolina with enslaved Africans who, hearing such popularizations on Charles Town streets when their masters marched against the Stamp Act and in other settings, both public and private, recognized the relationship between their condition and the imperial crisis.60 Laurens also grappled with the problem of slavery. With the American victory over the British off Sullivan’s Island in June 1776 and the Declaration of Independence a month later still fresh in his mind, he wrote an extraordinary letter to his son John, then living in London, in which he reflected on the institution. Perhaps he knew Samuel Johnson’s remark on the subject: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Laurens noted that his enslaved laborers had remained loyal, claiming, “My Negroes there [his plantations at Wright’s Savanna] all to a Man are strongly attached to me,” a fact that he attributed to his stewardship, while slaves owned by other masters on other plantations had either fled or “been stolen & decoyed by the Servants of King George.” He then discussed the slave trade from which he had made an immense fortune, disingenuously claiming that Parliament had “established the Slave Trade in favour of the home residing English & almost totally prohibited the Americans from reaping any share of it.” Having profited from the trade at the expense of the Americans, the British were now, with the war underway, engaged in “the inglorious pilferage” of slaves sold to the colonists earlier. Donning the mask of humanitarianism by “pretending to set the poor wretches free,” the

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hypocritical British had condemned them to “ten fold worse Slavery in the West Indies, where probably they will become the property of English Men again.” For a man who had lived and apprenticed in the imperial capital and had enjoyed a hugely profitable partnership with London-­based merchant Richard Oswald, who headed a consortium that ran slaving operations on Bunce Island in Sierra Leone, it was all too much, provoking his lament, “O England, how changed! how fallen!”61 Then, in a confessional moment, he wrote that he “abor[red] slavery.” Born “in a Country where Slavery had been established by British Kings & Parliaments . . . Ages before my existence,” he had readily accepted it as part of the order of things; now, however, he appeared willing to challenge it. Perhaps he acknowledged the conventional wisdom circulating in the white community about the possibility of slave unrest or perhaps he found some merit in arguments that exposed the hypocrisy of the colonists’ demands for liberty while keeping enslaved people in chains. Whatever the case, claiming that he now had doubts about the legitimacy of slavery not only put Laurens in a very small minority but also would offer, or so one imagines he thought, some security should a large-­scale rebellion occur. Estimating that his enslaved property would fetch around £20,000 “if sold at public Auction tomorrow,” he noted, perhaps over-­egging the pudding, that “I am not the Man who enslaved them, they are indebted to English Men for that favour.” He was, he told John, “devising means for manumitting many of them & for cutting off the entail of Slavery,” acknowledging that this decision would generate a firestorm of opposition from his fellow planters, who would no doubt view him as a “promoter not only of strange but of dangerous doctrines.”62 In his reply, John observed that the community of colonial planters who resided in London and owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean invariably asked critics of slavery how “is it possible for us to be rich” without enslaved laborers. Furthermore, “advancing such Men too suddenly to the Rights of Freemen” would, they claimed, lead to political and economic chaos. Like his father, John knew that any proposal for abolition would trigger “great Opposition.” More telling, however, was Laurens’s acknowledgment of the shared humanity of free and enslaved alike; slavery had “sunk Africans & their descendants below the Standard of Humanity, and almost render’d them incapable of that Blessing which equal Heaven bestow’d upon us all.” His observations previewed arguments later used by both proslavery advocates and abolitionists, with the former arguing that emancipation would cause widespread instability while the latter used the language of humanitarianism

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and morality to argue for their liberation. In December, John sailed for Charles Town to join the Continental Army and would later unsuccessfully lobby for mustering a Black regiment from the ranks of enslaved men.63 Although Henry’s comments to his son occupy only a few lines in a long letter, they illustrate the concerns of a powerful and influential member of the low-­country elite on the eve of war. That he expressed such sentiments in the summer of 1776 is revealing. A year earlier, rumors of “dark, Hellish plots for Subjugating the Colonies” and slave rebellion had preoccupied the white community, culminating in the trial and execution of Thomas Jeremiah. Moreover, 1775 had ended with Lord Dunmore promising freedom to any enslaved man “able and willing to bear Arms.” It was a strategy that might work equally as effectively in the lowcountry. The fear that enslaved people might become a fifth column had influenced the government in Charles Town that, Laurens noted, had to “Steer Safely from the danger [of] being dashed against Scylla or Swallowed by Charybdis.” The threat of additional “arbitrary impositions from Parliament,” along with “the dread of instigated Insurrections at Home,” he argued, “are causes sufficient to drive an oppressed People to the use of Arms.” Should the British foment rebellion in the lowcountry with its attendant “Butcheries of Innocent Women & Children” or on the frontier where “Inroads by Indians are always accompanied by inhuman massacre,” they would create fissures in the ranks of the Americans, resulting in “Civil discord between Fellow Citizen & Neighbor Farmer.” Most people would, he believed, choose to defend their families and livelihoods rather than the revolution. To meet this challenge, the government recruited two thousand men to prevent “any hostile attempts that may be made by our domesticks” and “to oppose any Troops that may be sent among us.”64 If British policy raised the specter of slave rebellion, then signs of rising abolitionist sentiment in certain sectors of metropolitan society proved equally troubling. Laurens was caught between his own Scylla and Charybdis, the mythical sea monsters. On the one hand, he was a major figure in the revolutionary movement in South Carolina, the president of the Provincial Congress and Council of Safety, and the leader of a government that had no intention of freeing its enslaved population. He had played a part in Jeremiah’s trial, had bragged about his slaves’ loyalty, embodied the ambitions and power of the lowcountry elite, was a slaveholder and plantation owner, and had made his fortune trafficking in enslaved people. Yet, taking his words at face value, Laurens’s desire to manumit his own enslaved laborers brought him closer to the pseudo-­emancipationist position of the

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British, whose policy was driven primarily by military needs rather than by humanitarianism. With the collapse of royal rule in fall 1775, the province’s revolutionary leadership consolidated its position, beginning by building the administrative and political apparatus necessary to govern the province. It oversaw the mustering of local regiments to protect its citizens. But the revolution in South Carolina was, at best, partial; even though the new government was no longer subject to Parliament and had a new constitution, its leaders had not effected radical transformation. To the question “who should rule at home,” the answer was simple and straightforward: the elite would rule at home, the men who had governed in the colonial era would not relinquish their power or authority, continuing to act and behave as a ruling class who rooted their claims in leadership in the ownership of land and slaves. The social, political, and economic order remained unchanged; however, the new government faced a daunting and immediate challenge that could decisively undermine its authority. It had to fight a war on two fronts. Not only did its militia have to defend the province against the military might of the British Empire, but it also had to contain internal enemies—Native Americans and loyalists in the backcountry as well as thousands of enslaved people on the coastal plain—in order to protect the society over which it now presided. Defending the status quo meant mounting a robust defense of slavery. Even though a majority of white people sought to throw off the oppressive shackles of British tyranny, they had no intention whatsoever of dismantling the shackles of slavery. The language of liberty remained central to the period—and revolutionary leaders fully believed in the concept of liberty for the white population—but it was the rights of property holders and the protection of their goods and chattels that remained a paramount concern. And, for white Carolinians, enslaved people constituted the most important form of property. With British policy toward slaves ambivalent at best, slaveholders had no desire whatsoever to live in a society without slavery. No matter that Dunmore’s Proclamation was a desperate gamble, born out of the exigencies of war; for slaveholders, however, it was a document tantamount to an emancipation proclamation, an option that they refused to entertain. For slave owners in South Carolina, defending slavery was integral to the revolutionary project.65 Enslaved people drew very different conclusions from their analysis of the events unfolding before them. The language of liberty, which had contributed to the mobilization of the white community, spoke directly to their

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circumstances. With a discourse about rights in wide circulation, slaves now had the opportunity to understand their enslavement in political terms. The enslaved, however, were less interested in liberty as an abstract concept than in its practical application; they sought to grasp it for themselves. With rumors circulating about the redcoats as potential liberators, enslaved people looked to the impending war as a war of liberation that would emancipate them from the tyranny of slavery just as their enslavers sought freedom from the tyranny of their British overlords.66

CHAPTER 7

Loyalists, Slaves, and Revolutionaries at War

The Blow is Struck! Hostilities Are Commenced! —South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 6 June 1775

In the summer of 1775, the pace toward war between the British and the colonists in South Carolina quickened. In Massachusetts, redcoats and revolutionary militiamen had clashed on Lexington Green and in Concord in April. Two months later, British soldiers assaulted the American positions on Bunker Hill in a battle that left several hundred dead on each side. Across the colonies, royal rule had either disintegrated completely or was teetering on the verge of collapse. In Charles Town, frenzied preparations for war were underway; by late May, observed Henry Laurens, its free and enslaved inhabitants had grown accustomed to the “sound of Drums & Fife” and the sight of “Grenadier, Light Infantry, Artillery & the ordinary Militia Companies” drilling “to Arms every day.” But the robust support enjoyed by the American cause in the lowcountry did not prevail in the interior where there were significant political divisions.1 In an effort to bring the backcountry into the revolutionary fold, the Council of Safety instructed William Henry Drayton along with the Reverend Oliver Hart and the Reverend William Tennent, a Baptist and a Presbyterian minister respectively, to ride inland to assess the region’s political climate. Instructed to explain “the causes & nature of the dispute,” to persuade upcountry planters and farmers to ally themselves with the radicals by signing the Continental Association, and to recruit men into the ranks of the provincial forces, the small party left Charles Town in early August. They were joined by Camden merchant and land owner Joseph Kershaw and Richard Richardson, an Upper Santee planter and a militia officer. Riding from

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tavern to church to muster field, they implored small gatherings of farmers to join the patriot cause as did Tennent when, at the Little River Meeting House in the Broad River Valley, he exhorted the audience not to “give themselves up to be the dupes of ministerial artifice” or become “the instruments of opposition and slavery.” As Drayton and his companions ventured deeper inland, however, they encountered fewer and fewer people willing “to take up arms against the King, or his Countrymen.”2 Back in Charles Town by September, Tennent reported that backcountry farmers were engaged in “a most dangerous conspiracy against the lives and liberties of these Colonies.” At King’s Creek, he encountered settlers who, “from the grossest ignorance and prejudice,” were “the most obstinate opposers of the Congress.” On another occasion, after a “desultory talk” with householders near Rocky Creek, he ruefully concluded “that nothing can be done here” because its residents firmly believed “that no man from Charles Town can speak the truth.” At Ninety-­Six, later a hotbed of loyalist support, Drayton and Moses Kirkland, an influential local planter, almost came to blows after the latter had used “every indecency of language” to excoriate the men from the lowcountry “with the highest insolence.” With “the King’s men,” who had “been very diligent in obtaining arms,” ready to turn the region into “an Asylum for all the tories,” civil war appeared inevitable. The bitter arguments and angry debates between Kirkland and his supporters and Drayton and his companions were prologues to the violence that erupted at the end of the year near the small settlement of Ninety-­Six.3 The dynamics that shaped political attitudes in the backcountry during these months differed from those that shaped the political attitudes in the coastal plain in several ways, most notably around the fear of slave rebellion. The trajectory of revolutionary politics in the lowcountry along the coast was fundamentally shaped by the fear of “domestic Insurrection” and a seaborne assault by “British Troops & Ships of War.” Not only were its planters determined to maintain control over their enslaved laborers and defend the integrity of the institution of slavery itself, but they were also resolved to thwart any invasion that might trigger an uprising. Talking with John Adams at the Second Continental Congress in September 1775 about the situation in lowcountry Georgia and South Carolina, Georgia delegates Archibald Bulloch and John Houstoun thought that the British, relying on enslaved peoples’ “wonderfull Art of communicating Intelligence among themselves” could potentially mobilize “20,000 Negroes . . . from the two Provinces in a fortnight.” Furthermore, by promising “Freedom to all the Negroes” and

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providing them with “arms and Cloaths,” the British could assemble a formidable fighting force. Unlike Charles Town and the coastal plain, the upcountry was not dependent on the labor of enslaved people. Even though slave ownership had become increasingly common, slavery neither dictated the course of backcountry economic life nor loomed as large as it did in the collective imagination of the white lowcountry. With perhaps fewer than ten thousand enslaved laborers working on the farms and plantations scattered across the piedmont, the likelihood of an effective, large-­scale, and coordinated rebellion in the region remained low.4 Furthermore, many upcountry settlers had compelling reasons to remain loyal to Britain. Not only had the crown granted colonists the land on which they raised their crops, grazed their animals, and built their cabins, but its red-­coated soldiers had defeated the Cherokees during the Anglo-­Cherokee War between 1759 and 1761 and had opened up new lands for settlement. Lowcountry leaders, moreover, had been slow to acknowledge the political and policing needs of the interior during the Regulator crisis in the late 1760s, only belatedly solving these problems by creating new parishes, thus bringing its white inhabitants into the polity, and passing the Circuit Court Act in 1769, which brought the formal apparatus of the law to the region. There were also significant ethnic and cultural differences between the two regions. Not only was the backcountry’s white population far more ethnically diverse than its lowcountry counterpart, but the region was also a hotbed of evangelical activity, with Anglican ministers regularly denigrating Presbyterian and Baptist worshippers as coarse, ignorant, and unrefined. Upcountry farmers in return often regarded the “Charles Town gentry,” clad in their “Scarlet and fine Linen,” as “overgrown Planters who wallow in Luxury, Ease and Plenty.” So, it is hardly surprising that, when Drayton and his companions arrived at Congaree Store to discuss “the situation of America” with people whom they condescendingly described as “men of little property and less knowledge and ability to conduct affairs,” they got a chilly reception.5 Insults and taunts turned to bloodshed in late November when revolutionary and loyalist militiamen exchanged shots outside Ninety-­Six, bringing war to the upcountry. A month earlier, loyalists under Patrick Cunningham, whose brother Robert was languishing in Charles Town’s jail for speaking out against the patriot cause, had captured a convoy of wagons transporting muskets, powder, and ammunition to the Cherokees, which had been sent inland by the Provincial Congress in order to gain their support. Ordered “to retake the ammunition and bring those people to justice who committed this

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act,” an expedition marched inland in pursuit of the loyalists. Arriving at Savage’s Old Fields, a plantation house near Ninety-­Six, the patriots constructed a palisade, withstanding several unsuccessful assaults by Cunningham’s men until they withdrew after an inconclusive firefight. But determined to crush upcountry loyalism, the revolutionary government ordered the militia to hunt down Cunningham. Locating his men at Great Cane Brake, deep in woods about fifty miles north of Ninety-­Six, about thirteen hundred provincial soldiers led by Colonel Richard Richardson defeated the smaller loyalist force in late December. In the battle’s aftermath, a short, uneasy peace descended on the backcountry.6 Fighting returned to the region several months later when combined Cherokee, Delaware, Mohawk, and Shawnee raiders attacked isolated farms and trading posts across the southern backcountry from western Virginia to the Georgia frontier in the summer of 1776. Faced with the prospect of repulsing a British invasion of the lowcountry and fighting Native Americans in the interior, the revolutionary government ordered militia forces under Major Andrew Williamson and Captain Andrew Pickens to end the attacks and bring order to the frontier. After several skirmishes, the Americans broke Cherokee resistance by deploying the scorched-­earth tactics that had proven so successful fifteen years earlier during the Anglo-­Cherokee War. Advancing deep into Cherokee territory, Williamson’s men destroyed the Cherokees’ ability to prosecute the war by burning crops and villages. In May 1777, a delegation led by Attakullakulla, who had negotiated with the colonial government at the end of the Cherokee War in 1761, arrived at Dewitt’s Corner, a small frontier settlement in the Upper Savannah Valley, where they signed a treaty that ceded their lands in South Carolina, with the remnants of the Cherokees seeking safety in northwest Georgia.7 War also came to the lowcountry in the summer of 1776. After abandoning Boston in March, the British no longer held a major port city from which to conduct offensive operations against the Americans. To rectify this strategic problem, Admiral Sir Peter Parker and Sir Henry Clinton targeted Charles Town, regarded by British military planners as “the seat of commerce . . . [in] that part of America and consequently the place where the most essential interests of the planters are concentered.” In early June, its residents awoke horrorstruck one morning to see “55 Sail of Hostile Ships” anchored off the bar at the entrance to Charles Town Harbor. The British commanders entertained the ambition, as Laurens later told his daughter Martha, to “Breakfast at Sullivant’s Island dine at Fort Johnson & Sup in Charles Town”; in fact,

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Clinton planned to capture the island, turn it into a safe harbor for loyalists, and then use it as a base from which to attack the city. Once Charles Town was in British hands, Clinton then intended to dismantle the revolution in the province, dissolve “all Committees of Safety and other unlawful associations,” and restore royal rule.8 Clinton and Parker launched the assault against the fort on the southern tip of Sullivan’s Island, the opening phase of the operation, on 28 June. No sooner had British gunners fired the first salvo than the attack was in serious trouble. Not only did the bombardment fail to destroy the fort, but Royal Navy helmsmen failed to gauge treacherous rips or unpredictable currents, resulting in transports running aground, which became easy targets for American artillerymen. The invasion fleet’s flagship (HMS Bristol) got hit more than seventy times, badly damaging its superstructure and resulting in the deaths of over seventy sailors; other ships suffered a similar fate, forcing the badly damaged fleet to withdraw “under cloud of night” and Clinton to end the operation. A combination of good marksmanship, poor seamanship, and the resilience of the fort, which had been constructed primarily from sand and palmetto logs, had thwarted British plans to dine in Charles Town. Four years later, Clinton mounted another seaborne attack against Charles Town; on this occasion, he gained his revenge, scoring a major victory against the Americans.9 In July 1776, however, the city’s inhabitants celebrated the astounding military success at Sullivan’s Island as well as the news that the Continental Congress issued a Declaration of Independence. But neither victory over the British invasion fleet nor the announcement of independence automatically guaranteed the province’s security. The presence of thousands of enslaved laborers across the lowcountry combined with the highly volatile political and military situation continued to make the region vulnerable. Lacking a navy, the Americans had no real ability to defend the coast or its barrier islands, enabling British raiders to attack plantations and isolated settlements on rivers and creeks with impunity. The “appearance of a Man-­of-­War or Transport,” noted Pierce Butler, “alarms the whole Country,” disrupting agricultural work as farmers and overseers mustered to fight off enemy incursions and triggering fears of an invasion. With white men “flocking to Town” to enlist, the countryside gradually emptied, reducing the number available for patrol duty, leaving enslaved laborers unsupervised, and leaving the coast more vulnerable to attack. “There is,” Butler continued, “Scarce an Overseer on any of the Plantations between Purysburg and Combahee.” He not only was concerned about the dangers of leaving “Numbers of Negroes without

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a White Man” but also feared that, with so few overseers available to drive enslaved laborers into the fields, “little . . . in the Planting way” would be accomplished. With rumors circulating about the British as the potential liberators of enslaved people along with white anxieties about possible rebellion, food shortages, and invasion, it is hardly surprising that Butler concluded his letter by noting that his “nerves are so affected I can scarce write.”10 Although the term “total war” had yet to be coined, the revolutionary struggle in the South bore the characteristics of conflicts in which the lives of civilians and soldiers became inextricably intertwined as the fighting progressed. It combined the features of a civil war (revolutionaries versus loyalists) along with a war for national liberation (Americans versus British). Moreover, these struggles created an opportunity for enslaved people to throw off their shackles and seek their freedom. By liberating themselves, however, they added yet another dimension to the conflict, leading to significant disruptions to the lowcountry plantation regime, creating a refugee crisis as they headed for British lines, and generating significant debate about the existence of slavery in an era of revolution. The combatants, whether fighting as regular soldiers for the British or Continental Army or as irregulars in revolutionary or loyalist militia units, soon abandoned the traditional conventions of warfare. Farmers and their families became enmeshed in hostilities as men from both sides ransacked farms and plantations for provisions, in some cases, destroying them to deny essential supplies to their enemy. Violence against civilians became routine; at times, militias dispensed “drumhead” justice, lynching or shooting their victims. Looting, robbery, and arson became commonplace, with the destruction and theft of crops and livestock turning several upcountry neighborhoods into wildernesses of charred fields, burned-­out buildings, and “families reduced to beggary.” In a war that lacked well-­defined front lines, moreover, no farm or plantation was safe from marauding soldiers seeking food or plunder. With soldiers exhausted from campaigning and frustrated by enemy tactics, massacres and other atrocities, committed more frequently by the British and their loyalist proxies than by the Americans, also became part of the conflict’s modus operandi. It was also a war notable for its extensive geographic reach; in the campaign conducted by Lord Charles Cornwallis that began when his army filed out of Charles Town in August 1780 and ended in surrender at Yorktown some fourteen months later, his soldiers had probably marched several thousand miles while Nathanael Greene’s men covered even more ground by the time they fought their last battle at Eutaw Springs in September 1781. In the twenty-­four months between April

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1780 and April 1782, the Delaware Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Vaughan covered more than five thousand miles during the campaign. At certain moments between the opening skirmishes at Ninety-­Six in 1775 and the British evacuation of Charles Town seven years later, South Carolina, especially between 1779 and 1781, became the most lethal place in North America; very few people, either enslaved or free, remained untouched by the fighting.11 Two years after the humiliating defeat at Sullivan’s Island, the British again looked to the southern colonies, regarding the region as a potential theater of operations where its forces could crush the revolutionaries as the conflict turned from being a colonial rebellion into a full-­blown international war involving France and Spain. Both the Americans and the British recognized the strategic value of South Carolina, with Laurens noting that, with its “expected plunder of an Abundance of Merchandize, [and] many thousands of Negroes,” its capture was “a project of the first magnitude to Great Britain.” Sir James Wright, the last royal governor of Georgia, argued that if the province was “thoroughly reduced . . . it will give a mortal stab to the rebellion, [and] in great measure break the spirit of it.” On paper, a “southern strategy” had much to recommend it. Capturing Charles Town, the “great emporium of the southern colonies,” would bring commerce to a halt throughout the region, prevent the revolutionaries from bringing in essential war materiel or exporting “the produce of the country” that was “a principle resource for the support of their foreign credit, and of paying for the supplies they stand in need of.” Second, the considerable distance between the southern provinces and the Continental Army’s main cantonments in the mid-­Atlantic would provide British forces ample opportunity to conquer the region while facing only light opposition. Third, the intelligence indicated that loyalists in the backcountry were eager to rally to the royal standard and ready to assist in the pacification of the Carolinas and Georgia. Traveling incognito through the backcountry, James Simpson, South Carolina’s last attorney general, reported to Clinton that “whenever the King’s Troops move to Carolina, they will be assisted by very considerable numbers of the inhabitants.” Fourth, the legions of enslaved laborers in the rural lowcountry, who perhaps saw the redcoats as their liberators, would be able to provide military labor and information and, having extricated themselves from their bondage, would bring agricultural work to a virtual standstill.12 Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the charismatic but ruthless commander of the British Legion, a regiment of light infantry and cavalry

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drawn from the ranks of loyalists as well as the regular army, summarized the importance of South Carolina to the war. The province, he wrote in his memoirs of the campaigns of 1780 and 1781, “suggested itself as the grand object of the enterprize; the mildness of the climate, the richness of the country . . . and its distance from General Washington pointed out the advantage and facility of its conquest.” Speaking as a highly accomplished officer, even if a somewhat impulsive and reckless one on the battlefield, he understood the province’s strategic value, but, like his fellow officers, he never fully grasped the political and ideological dimensions of the Revolutionary War. For Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for the American Department, and the array of generals, admirals, and other officials responsible for running the war, it was an article of faith that the sheer weight and strength of British military power combined with the discipline and toughness of redcoats led by experienced officers would bring about the destruction of poorly equipped, badly trained, and inferior provincials on the battlefield. Unwilling to redress the political grievances of the Americans and rebuild relationships that had fractured badly from mid-­1775 on, British officials, who firmly believed in their superiority as well as in the rectitude of their cause, had no alternative but to deploy force in order to return the colonies to the crown. That the British planned to use enslaved people against the revolution only deepened the sense of alienation and division between the two sides. In his efforts to crush the revolution, Tarleton and other officers failed to recognize that the war in the South was more than a conventional conflict; it was also a popular insurrection that enjoyed widespread support that challenged traditional military thinking that was unfamiliar with crushing an insurgency.13 The potential of enslaved people to destabilize the lowcountry did not go unnoticed by strategists. Accepting the axiom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” loyalist Joseph Galloway acknowledged that they “may be all deemed so many Intestine Enemies, being all slaves and desirous of Freedom” who would not be “averse to the bearing of Arms against the Rebellion.” Loyalist leader Moses Kirkland, who had tangled with Drayton near Ninety-­Six in August 1775, argued that rice and other agricultural staples were produced in the southern colonies for export overseas to obtain much-­needed funding for the rebel cause. Driven by “the labour of an incredible multitude of Negroes in the Southern Colonies who are daily driven by their hard Task Masters,” the region’s economy constituted “the principle resources for carrying on the Rebellion.” Should the British invade the lowcountry, capture Charles Town, and trigger a rebellion of enslaved laborers, it would have devastating military

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and psychological consequences for the local population, and perhaps inflict a fatal blow on the larger revolutionary effort. The “instant that the King’s Troops are put in motion,” Kirkland claimed, enslaved people would “rise upon their Rebel Masters.” Such provocative statements drew a response from American pamphleteers, who argued that all patriots should take up arms against “this degenerate nation” that was preparing to “arm our slaves against us” and “for whom nothing is sacred.” Of course, the remarks by Kirkland, Galloway, and others, which bore the ring of truth, helped persuade slaveholders to join the American cause to protect the institution at the center of their fortunes.14 The campaign to restore royal rule to the southern colonies got underway in November 1778 when an armada of warships and transports, carrying nearly four thousand soldiers sailed from New York to Savannah; its objective was the conquest of Georgia. If the expedition, led by Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell, who had fought in the backcountry during the Anglo-­ Cherokee War in 1760, could capture the town and mobilize local loyalists to pacify Georgia, then the British would be well placed to invade and conquer South Carolina, the major target of their southern operations. Campbell’s offensive began with a decisive victory. An enslaved man guided British soldiers through swamps and woods from the landing grounds to Savannah’s fortifications, allowing them to launch a surprise attack against its defenders. In late December, his battle-­hardened Highlanders, supplemented with Hessian troops and loyalist militiamen, overpowered a smaller and inexperienced American force under Brigadier General Robert Howe, who rapidly abandoned the town and retreated with his men across the Savannah River into South Carolina with the remnants of his army. Within days, enslaved laborers from the adjoining countryside had left their plantations and headed for British lines in search of freedom. By May, more than fifteen hundred former slaves were working for the British, digging latrines, washing clothes, cooking meals, tending horses, and performing dozens of other tasks in their camps.15 With the town in British hands, Campbell moved to establish his authority across Georgia and, as he noted, become “the first officer to take a stripe and a star from the rebel flag of Congress.” In early January, he headed for Augusta, a settlement on the Upper Savannah River that was strategically vital for controlling the Georgia‒South Carolina frontier. Here, he hoped to recruit local loyalists to provide the troops necessary to pacify the surrounding settlements. But “the King’s Friends” failed to flock to the royal standard. Unwilling to move until a superior British force was present, and

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intimidated by revolutionary militias, which were assembling near Augusta, many loyalists chose to remain on their farms, a scenario that repeated itself at several critical points over the next few years. Faced with a sizable enemy force, Campbell sent scouts into the backcountry to organize loyalists into a relief column. About eight hundred men set out for Campbell’s base only to be intercepted and soundly beaten by American partisans led by Andrew Pickens at Kettle Creek, a tributary of the Savannah River about sixty miles from Augusta. The American victory not only forced Campbell to abandon Augusta and the Georgia backcountry, but it also suggested that the loyalists were less enthusiastic about taking on the rebels than British officials had earlier claimed. Relying on reports that had exaggerated the dedication and strength of the loyalists when the “southern strategy” was conceived, British officers now discovered that a major assumption on which they had predicated their campaign was fundamentally flawed.16 The fighting in the Upper Savannah Valley, however, provided the British with an opportunity to pivot from backcountry Georgia to the South Carolina lowcountry. After moving the bulk of his army inland to threaten Augusta, Major General Benjamin Lincoln had left the coastal plain virtually undefended. No sooner had British commander Major General Augustine Prévost recognized his enemy’s error than he left Savannah with three thousand men and headed up the coast toward Charles Town, sweeping aside efforts made by American soldiers to stop the advance at the Coosawhatchie River and at Fishpond Bridge in a campaign that was as notorious for the devastation that it left in its wake as it was for its speed. Eight days after leaving Savannah, Prévost’s forces had reached the outskirts of Charles Town. Here, he learned that Lincoln was making “every exertion for the relief of Charles Town.” Prévost abruptly turned around, and retraced his steps back to Savannah, leading a retreat that was just as destructive as the advance. After defeating American forces in several minor clashes around James Island, along the Stono River, and at Stono Ferry in late June, the British went on a rampage, “burning plantation buildings, destroying newly-­planted crops, wasting provisions [and] killing cattle in the most wanton manner.” Writing about “the retreat of the enemy” to family friend John Rutherford, planter John Deas noted that British soldiers had “made very free with my House & Stock &c” when they looted his Combahee River plantation. Of his enslaved laborers, only three “thought it proper to join the Enemy” while the remainder “took to their heels,” probably seeking sanctuary in the scattered maroon communities that had sprung up in the wilderness of islands in the estuaries of the Savannah

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and Combahee Rivers. Marching through the parish of Saint John’s Colleton and across Wadmalaw and Edisto Islands where there were no American soldiers, the British ransacked plantations and farms, taking “everything they fancied.” Enslaved laborers took advantage of the chaos; those who had not fled into the woods or been relocated by their owners joined the British column as it returned to Savannah.17 Meanwhile, headquartered in a manor house in Philipsburg outside New York City, Sir Henry Clinton announced his policy to counter the American “practice of enrolling NEGROES” into their forces. Published on the front page of the loyalist New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury in July 1779, the “Philipsburg Proclamation” stipulated that any enslaved person caught serving with the Americans “shall be purchased for a stated price.” In addition, it banned any person from claiming or selling enslaved people who had sought refuge with the British, and slaves who “desert the Rebel Standard” would receive “full Security to follow within these Lines any Occupation which he shall think proper.” In other words, the policy granted freedom to any enslaved person who reached British lines, with the exception of the slaves of loyalists, who remained the property of their enslavers. But Clinton’s policy presented an existential dilemma for enslaved people: risk running to British lines and face the consequences of capture by their enslavers along with the dangers of camp life, or remain with their enslavers, a decision that might lead to their seizure by the British and their subsequent sale and re-­ enslavement to planters in the West Indies. In the end, many slaves took the risk to break free from their enslavement and, rejecting the rhetoric of liberty espoused by their American enslavers, embraced the reality of the offer of freedom made by the British.18 On many plantations, widespread destruction combined with the flight of enslaved laborers brought agricultural production to a standstill. Striking out from plantations and farms, slaves abandoned crops only weeks away from harvest; let cattle roam free; and left rice fields, which required regular maintenance, to fall into disrepair. With irrigation channels silting up, sluice gates rotting and collapsing, and reservoir ponds filling with mud and other debris, water simply flowed unimpeded across the fields, inundating the crop; on occasion, flooding caused by the combination of high tides and summer storms resulted in even more damage. Tarleton recalled that enslaved laborers who “quitted the plantations, and followed the army; which behavior caused the neglect of cultivation, [which] proved detrimental to the King’s troops.” The poor harvests and food shortages predicted by Butler at the start

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of the war now became a reality. Furthermore, the chaos generated by the British retreat also accelerated the spread of disease, with late June and July being particularly deadly. The combination of malaria, which was endemic in British ranks, and smallpox, which affected enslaved laborers and soldiers alike, further contributed to the deterioration of the plantation regime in the southern lowcountry.19 Having failed to capture Charles Town, Prévost now had to ensure that the Americans did not seize Savannah. On returning to the town with his men, he ordered its defenses strengthened, turning enslaved laborers who had previously joined the British retreat into construction workers, ordering them to dig ditches and build stockades. In September 1779, an expeditionary force comprising French troops, the Chasseurs-­Volontaires de Saint-­Domingue, a regiment of free Black light infantrymen from the island colony, and American infantry under Lincoln attacked. Plagued by bad weather and unable to concentrate the men and firepower necessary to break through fortifications defended by battle-­hardened redcoats, the attackers were soon bogged down, battling disease and insects rather than driving the British from Savannah. With dysentery and typhus spreading through the fleet, with the hurricane season approaching, and with reports of a Royal Navy squadron heading for the Georgia coast, the Comte d’Estaing, the French admiral responsible for commanding the campaign’s naval operations, ordered an end to the offensive, forcing the Americans to return to Charles Town, and bringing this stage of the war to an inconclusive end.20 From the American perspective, however, the strategic situation in the South in late 1779 and early 1780 was not an unmitigated disaster. Although the British had threatened Charles Town, it remained in American hands while revolutionary militias exerted control over the Georgia backcountry. And although the British retained Savannah, the Americans had not suffered any catastrophic defeats. The picture was gloomier for the British. The “southern strategy” had yet to live up to its promise. The countryside was firmly under American control. Loyalists often found “excuses for going home to their plantations” after a brief spell in uniform, with their intermittent presence creating significant problems for British officers who, when organizing a supply convoy or a fighting patrol, found them unpredictable and unreliable. The verdict on the contributions made by enslaved people was also mixed. Although it is impossible to know just how many slaves took advantage of Clinton’s proclamation, a significant number made their way to British lines, derailing agricultural production, supplying valuable information about

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local conditions, and providing military labor. But, contrary to the confident prediction made by the colony’s former governor William Lyttelton in Parliament in October 1775, when he claimed that “if a few regiments were sent there [i.e., to the southern colonies], the negroes would rise and imbrue their hands in the blood of their masters,” there had been no large-­scale rebellion by the region’s slaves. Moreover, with British troops carting off “rice . . . [and] other Provisions, House Furniture and Negroes in Abundance,” leaving the countryside in ruins, many white Carolinians who had earlier been agnostic about the revolutionary cause now decided to join the patriot cause. Better to take up arms alongside the forces that defended property in all its forms than side with those who not only wrecked plantations but also threatened the institution of slavery itself.21 In late winter 1780, the British reignited the war in the South when they invaded the lowcountry for the second time in two years. Having embraced the “southern strategy” after some initial skepticism, Clinton now harbored the hope that “the American war might possibly be yet finished in one campaign.” That campaign would begin with the capture of Charles Town followed by an advance inland through the Carolinas to Virginia, where the British intended to destroy the Continental Army on the battlefield. Furthermore, he assembled a formidable invasion fleet of more than one hundred ships, manned by six thousand sailors, which carried about eight thousand soldiers to crush his enemy. The first British soldiers splashed ashore on James Island in early February. Three months later, the siege of Charles Town ended when Lincoln surrendered the city on 12 May along with more than six thousand men and large caches of muskets, artillery, and other stores; it was the worst American defeat of the war. For the British, it provided Clinton with the spectacular victory that would, he hoped, break revolutionary resistance in South Carolina.22 With Charles Town and the surrounding countryside under British control, Clinton wasted no time in securing the rest of the province. In the campaign’s opening stages, the general set up the Commissary of Captures, a detachment of soldiers who had been ordered to seek out “all moveable property which might be captured from the Enemy or found on deserted Plantations,” including “negroes, oxen, horses, forage and plank,” which would then be used to facilitate other military operations. The capture and use of “rebel property,” along with its destruction, soon became a hallmark of the southern campaign. Shortly after Lincoln’s surrender, British columns marched inland and along the coastal plain to establish garrisons at strategic locations,

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including posts at Camden and Ninety-­Six in the interior, and at the small port of Georgetown about sixty miles north of Charles Town, where residents approached Major James Wemyss to inform him that they were “desirous of becoming British subjects in which capacity we promise to behave ourselves with all becoming fidelity and loyalty.” By late May, with hundreds pledging allegiance to the crown and with about two thousand volunteering to bear arms for the British, it appeared that support for the revolution in South Carolina was rapidly evaporating. “This Country is intirely conquered,” wrote Alexander MacDonald, an officer in a Highland regiment, “the People crowd in from all quarters to deliver up their arms.”23 Tone deaf to the political dimensions of the conflict, Clinton, who had established his headquarters in Miles Brewton’s elegant King Street house, where Josiah Quincy had spent a memorable evening several years earlier, made two significant administrative blunders in quick succession. First, he chose to impose martial law rather than reestablish civilian rule, a decision that antagonized white inhabitants and handed a propaganda victory to the Americans, who could rightly claim that the British had not lost their taste for tyranny. Moreover, with a military administration in charge, there was no formal recourse to the abuses committed by the thousands of soldiers now crowding Charles Town’s streets. To run the city, the British convened a Board of Police led by Lieutenant Colonel Nisbet Balfour, described by William Moultrie, a general in the Continental Army, as a “proud, Haughty Scot . . . [of] tyrannical, insolent disposition,” who “treated the people as the most abject Slaves.” Balfour’s heavy-­handed approach to municipal government, which included rounding up people suspected of sedition and throwing them in jail, rapidly alienated many, including some influential townspeople who now regretted pledging allegiance to “their former oppressors.” The city’s inhabitants adjusted to the new reality of living under an occupation where military rather than civil law prevailed.24 Second, Clinton compounded this error when he reversed his policy on pardons in early June. Under the surrender agreement, men who had served in American militia units were allowed “to return to their respective homes as prisoners on parole”; in exchange for sitting out the war without taking up arms against the British, they would not “be molested in their property” by the redcoats. Robert Gray, a loyalist militia officer from Cheraws, claimed that local farmers were far more concerned with “cultivating their farms & making money” and sending “great numbers of wagons” laden with the provisions for the army garrisoned in Charles Town than with marching off

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to war. On 22 May, Clinton issued his first statement about parole procedures. He guaranteed that, following the restoration of civilian rule, the king’s subjects would receive “full Possession of that Liberty in their Persons and Property which they had before experienced under the British Government.” Clinton also offered pardons to “the deluded and infatuated Subjects” who had misguidedly embraced the revolutionary cause once they had sworn “due obedience” to the crown, although he excluded the “wicked and desperate Men” who continued to fan “the Flame of Rebellion” from the amnesty.25 Then, on 3 June, Clinton made a stunning reversal that squandered the goodwill generated by his initial pardon policy. Now, he declared, every person “should take an active Part in settling and securing His Majesty’s Government, and delivering the Country from that Anarchy which for some Time past hath prevailed.” Anybody not pledging allegiance to the crown “will be considered as Enemies and Rebels to the same and treated accordingly.” Every white man now faced an unenviable choice: either pledge loyalty to the British, thereby consenting to take up arms against friends and neighbors or find oneself placed on a list of “Enemies and Rebels” should one refuse to swear allegiance to the crown. With Clinton demanding “every man to declare and evince his principles,” a stipulation that provided loyalists with the “opportunity of detecting and chasing from among them . . . dangerous neighbours,” it was no longer an option to sit on the sidelines while the fighting raged on. But Clinton’s attempts at “overawing the Inhabitants with menaces and persecutions,” observed William Hasell Gibbes, who was captured by the British at Charles Town and then imprisoned in Saint Augustine for eleven months, turned out to be “a foolish and . . . fatal experiment.”26 The proclamations issued by Clinton in late May and early June coincided with the first major clash between British and American forces since the fall of Charles Town. In late May, a detachment of four hundred Continental soldiers under Colonel Abraham Buford, whose men had failed to reach the city before its capitulation, was returning to its camp in North Carolina. Lord Charles Cornwallis, now in command after Clinton returned to New York in early June, dispatched the British Legion to intercept Buford’s men in order to clear South Carolina of American regulars. Tarleton’s men intercepted the column near the Waxhaws, a settlement in the Catawba Valley. Unable to resist the sheer momentum of the Legion’s cavalry charge, the Americans quickly surrendered only to be slaughtered where they stood by legionnaires who, recalled one survivor, “went over the ground plunging their bayonets into every one that exhibited any sign of life,” including a Lieutenant Thomas

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Pearson who, was “inhumanely mangled on the face as he lay on his back.” He was one of more than a hundred Americans killed or “so badly wounded as to be left on the ground” by Tarleton’s men.27 No sooner had reports about the Legion’s atrocities started circulating throughout the upcountry than its inhabitants learned about Clinton’s proclamation that demanded every adult male publicly declare for the crown or face the consequences. Responding to Clinton’s new directive, one irate American published Observations of the Paroles Exacted by the British in the State of South Carolina in which he demanded that the province’s patriots take the fight to the British immediately. “It is by attacking them in open field of battle,” the anonymous author wrote, “it is by going to seek their mercenaries in the fortresses where they are shut up . . . it behooves an American, fighting for his liberty, to shew himself to a Briton armed for the purpose of enslaving him.”28 The relative stability and calm that had characterized the first days of the British occupation vanished overnight. In the country west of the Waxhaws, loyalists under the command of Christian Huck, a former Philadelphia lawyer and a British Legion officer who had participated in the massacre of Buford’s men, began enforcing Clinton’s policy at gunpoint. Throughout June and early July, his men terrorized the local population, ransacking farmhouses, torturing and imprisoning those who refused to swear loyalty, and burning a Presbyterian church believed by loyalists to be a “sedition shop.” Only when American irregulars led by Colonel William Bratton, whose wife Martha had earlier been threatened by Huck’s men, killed Huck during a skirmish at Williamson’s Plantation in mid-­July did his campaign of violence and intimidation end. These few weeks, however, established the distinctive characteristics of the upcountry war, a conflict in which regular and irregular soldiers brutalized women and children, killed with little restraint, slaughtered livestock, razed farms and settlements with impunity, and looted on an epic scale. Informing the Duke of Grafton about the campaign’s progress, Brigadier General Charles O’Hara, Cornwallis’s second-­in-­command, did not exaggerate when he noted that “every Hour exhibits dreadfull, wanton Mischiefs, Murders, and Violences of every kind, unheard of before.”29 Bratton’s victory at Williamson’s Plantation did not bring an end to disorder and unrest in the backcountry. In fact, it triggered yet more violence. Outraged by the Legion’s conduct and by Clinton’s loyalty policy, increasingly defiant farmers accepted the call from local patriot leaders, such as Andrew Pickens, Francis Marion, and Thomas Sumter, to join the militia companies

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that they were mustering and, as one newspaper urged, to “take up arms to unite themselves to the defenders of the honourable cause of liberty, and revenge themselves for the contempt with which they have been treated by the enemy.” Now the British faced “a general revolt in the disaffected parts of the back Country” with revolutionary partisans conducting a campaign of constant harassment by attacking supply columns, ambushing patrols, and tracking down loyalists. Not every mission ended in victory, but revolutionary militias soon took control of significant swaths of the countryside, turning its hills, valleys, and woods into “bandit country,” a deadly landscape for British soldiers, who never knew what lay around the next bend in the road. In late summer 1780, Sumter’s men went on the offensive. Having failed to take the British stronghold at Hanging Rock in early August, they captured a convoy of eighty wagons traveling from Camden to Charles Town several days later. Determined to extinguish the fires of rebellion, the Legion went after Sumter’s force of nearly eight hundred men, catching it at the confluence of Fishing Creek and the Catawba River when Tarleton’s infantry killed over a hundred and fifty and took nearly three hundred prisoners. In late November, Sumter and his thousand-­strong militia gained their revenge, defeating the Legion, which numbered about three hundred, at Blackstock’s Plantation. But Sumter’s men were not the only irregulars fighting during the summer and autumn of 1780. Recruiting farmers around Georgetown, Marion prevented the British from establishing a foothold in the countryside between the Santee and Pee Dee Rivers. Tarleton again set off in pursuit of Marion’s men; however, with their superior knowledge of the local area, they vanished into the wilderness of swamps and forests of the Santee estuary. By early 1781, the activities of revolutionary partisans, combined with the logistical nightmare of campaigning in the backwoods, had left British infantrymen, now clad in ragged uniforms and surviving on inadequate rations, “completely worn out by the Excessive Fatigues of the Campaign.”30 The chaos that descended on the backcountry in the summer of 1780 had severely disrupted the British project of conquering the province and restoring royal rule. With the “spirit of disaffection” spreading rapidly among the region’s farmers, and with revolutionary militias preventing loyalists from conducting operations to pacify the countryside—the countryside “between the Pedee and the Santee” was, Cornwallis reported, “in an absolute State of Rebellion; every friend of the Government has been carried off, and his Plantations destroyed”—the time had arrived for the British to move beyond the confines of Charles Town, advance inland and subdue an increasingly defiant

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and confrontational population, and extinguish the fires of insurgency before marching into Virginia to annihilate the Continental Army.31 During a campaign that saw Cornwallis’s army advance hundreds of miles through the forests of the Carolinas and into southern Virginia, British commanders assumed that successes on the battlefield would automatically translate into overall victory for their forces. With too few British “boots on the ground” (by Yorktown, there were only 35,000 soldiers stationed in North America) and little understanding of the ideological issues that sat at the center of the conflict, they fought a conventional war against an enemy determined to gain its liberation from imperial rule. Furthermore, the physical geography of the Carolinas overwhelmed British forces who soon realized that, as Cornwallis noted, “the immense extent of the country” in which they were fighting as well as “the total want of internal navigation” made it impossible for “the army to remain long in the heart of the country” and impose its authority over the local population. Even though British regulars defeated the Continental Army in several major engagements, they failed to put down the insurgency that spread across the upcountry in the summer of 1780. Cornwallis became aware of this problem after his decisive victory at Camden in August, noting that “Disaffection . . . of the Country east of Santee is so great that the Account of our Victory could not penetrate into it, any person daring to speak of it being threatened with instant Death.” O’Hara also encapsulated the fundamental problem; how could British regulars “conquer a Country where repeated Successes cannot ensure permanent advantages.” Each fresh setback to the American war effort only seemed to inspire “every man upon this vast Continent” to exert yet more energy “in pursuit of their favorite Independency.” Fighting against a population that was “determin’d not to be our Friends,” he foresaw a bleak future for the British in the Carolinas who now began to conduct a “War of desolation . . . where the object is only to Ruin and Devastate.”32 Even though Cornwallis and his army had outgeneraled and outfought Horatio Gates and the Americans on the battlefield at Camden, the victory had neither brought about an end to “internal commotions and insurrections” nor led to the collapse of enemy resistance. On the contrary, just days after the battle, Marion’s partisans ambushed a British detachment on the Santee, freeing prisoners captured during the engagement. Cornwallis now moved his army deeper inland in an attempt to pacify and control the region. In late September 1780, Major James Wemyss informed the general that it was “impossible . . . to give your Lordship an Idea of this Disaffection in this

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Country,” further noting that every resident in the Upper Pee Dee Valley was “concerned in the rebellion, most of them very deeply,” although he failed to acknowledge the link between escalating discontent and defiance by local inhabitants and the fact that his men had recently “burnt & laid waste [to] about 50 Houses and Plantations” in the district. A month later, the depth of “disaffection” became fully apparent when revolutionary militia units from across the southern frontier routed about a thousand loyalists under Major Patrick Ferguson at King’s Mountain, a steep, densely wooded ridge about thirty miles from Charlotte in western North Carolina. The defeat left loyalists in the region “totally disheartened” and unable to mount “the smallest resistance” against American partisans. Terrified that they would be “murdered or stripped of all their property,” many loyalists packed up and headed for British garrisons at Charles Town, Savannah, or Saint Augustine. Ferguson’s defeat also forced the British to acknowledge the failure of the loyalists as partners-­in-­arms. In a charitable moment, Cornwallis noted that their numbers were “not so great as had been represented, and that their friendship was only passive”; privately, he damned them as “dastardly and pusillanimous.” Now, without loyalist militias to extinguish the insurgent blaze that continued to rage, the British had no choice but to cede ground taken earlier to an enemy that was gradually tightening its grip over the countryside. With the “King’s friends” essentially removed from the military equation, the British marched deeper and deeper into the “close and thick woods” of central North Carolina in which lurked “inveterate enemies” in the certain knowledge that, with lines of supply and communication stretched to their limits, they had no reliable access to provisions or intelligence.33 The rout at Kings Mountain was not the only bad news to reach British headquarters in late 1780. Ferguson’s catastrophic defeat, confessed loyalist officer Robert Gray, had given “new spirits to the rebel Militia,” boosting both morale and enlistment, with farmers starting “to turn out in great numbers & with more confidence.” The pressure on loyalists throughout the Carolinas to flee or capitulate increased. Revolutionary militias in the Upper Savannah kidnapped “the most zealous loyal subjects” and then “assassinated eleven persons . . . some in their beds.” Only “Goths & Vandals” would behave in such a fashion, concluded Gray. In addition, the appointment of Nathanael Greene, a talented, well-­organized, and strategically sophisticated officer, to command the Southern Department indicated the unwillingness of Congress to abandon the cause in the region. Greene, however, was less sanguine about the prospects for victory in the South; after inspecting troops at their camp

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on the Pee Dee River in late 1780, he realized that he had been assigned to lead “a shadow of an Army.” Without “Clothing, Tents, and Provisions,” his men were unable “to attempt any Thing at All.” To redress this “deplorable situation,” he set about restoring the army’s esprit de corps by appointing capable officers and imposing the discipline necessary to turn the ragged, demoralized men he encountered in the woods by the Pee Dee into an effective fighting force. But Greene also had to ensure that civilian morale did not flag; he ordered Marion’s militia “to keep up a Partizan War and preserve the Tide of Sentiment among the People as much as possible in our Favor” and expanded his espionage network as he believed himself “badly off for intelligence.” Although Greene remained convinced that regular rather than irregular soldiers ultimately won wars, observing how partisans “may strike a hundred strokes and reap little benefit from them unless you have a good army to take advantage of your success,” he recognized their importance while he readied his own army to return to the field, ordering his militia commanders to “be constantly galling to the Enemy” so that the British and their loyalist proxies remained off balance.34 The war gradually tilted in favor of the Americans after the victory at Kings Mountain and Greene’s appointment in October 1780. Three months later, in early January 1781, the stunning defeat of the British Legion at Cowpens gave the revolutionary cause additional momentum, and further degraded Cornwallis’s ability to prosecute the war. Defying conventional military wisdom in order to deny the British an opportunity to catch and destroy his entire army, Greene divided his forces, ordering Daniel Morgan into the western backcountry to threaten the garrison at Ninety-­Six while he moved his force to Cheraw, a small settlement close to the North Carolina line. Tarleton’s legionnaires hunted down Morgan’s two thousand men “like Blood Hounds,” while Cornwallis pursued Greene. At Hannah’s Cowpens in the Broad River Valley, Tarleton located the Americans, who were well prepared and waiting to engage his men. Charging recklessly into Morgan’s first defensive line, the Legion was soon in severe trouble. Caught in a hurricane of musket fire from Morgan’s second line and then ambushed by a cavalry charge, the shattered remnants of Tarleton’s force withdrew after an hour of bitter fighting. (Of the approximately eleven hundred legionnaires who started the battle, more than nine hundred were killed, wounded, or captured.) The defeat left Cornwallis with a serious strategic problem: how to advance rapidly through the North Carolina piedmont without light infantrymen whose mobility and endurance made them ideal for reconnaissance

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missions and whose speed and agility in combat enabled them to be effective skirmishers. He solved his predicament by destroying the bulk of his baggage train, making his army more mobile and allowing him to increase the tempo of his advance against Greene, which began in early 1781.35 Cornwallis now drove his army through “thick, Forrest, cut with numberless Broad, Deep and rapid Waters” in relentless pursuit of the Americans. With the British on his heels, Greene had several objectives: to rejoin Morgan’s men following their victory over Tarleton at Cowpens and unite the two wings of his army, to maintain sufficient distance between his forces and those of Cornwallis, and to reach Virginia in order to resupply and reinforce before he turned back into North Carolina to arrest the progress of the British advance. Writing from Sherrard’s Ford on the Catawba River prior to moving the army north in late January 1781, Greene informed General Isaac Huger that he was “not without hopes of ruining Lord Cornwallis if he persists in his mad scheme of pushing through the Country.” A few days later, after successfully negotiating the Yadkin River, then in full flood due to the winter rains, Morgan and Greene rendezvoused at Guilford Courthouse. On 14 February, Greene’s men successfully crossed the River Dan, entered Virginia, and began recruiting fresh troops to supplement his exhausted and depleted ranks. He then retraced his steps into North Carolina, reaching Guilford Courthouse with forty-­five hundred men just a few days before Cornwallis’s weary army of only twenty-­two hundred marched up the road leading to the small settlement; on 15 March, the British and the Americans clashed in the fields just south of the courthouse. After “one of the longest and most bloody actions I was ever in,” Greene made a tactical withdrawal from the battlefield to keep his army intact, leaving Cornwallis to claim “a compleat victory” over the Americans and perhaps to contemplate the degree to which Greene’s strategy of luring his men deep into the inhospitable territory of the Carolina piedmont might ultimately lead to the ruin of his army and the British cause.36 After his pyrrhic victory at Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis turned east, marched down the Cape Fear River Valley, again looting and plundering farms and plantations en route, reaching Wilmington in early April to refit and reprovision. No longer in Cornwallis’s sights, Greene now retraced his steps with the aim of taking “the War immediately into South Carolina,” which, he hoped, would force the British “to follow us or give up their Posts” in the backcountry. It was the stroke of a master strategist. With Cornwallis in eastern North Carolina and preparing to head north toward the Chesapeake Bay with the bulk of his army, the Americans now turned south, advancing

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into territory that was thinly defended by a few British regiments, who were garrisoned in isolated outposts. With British forces now divided, Greene’s troops could operate with relative freedom during the spring and early summer of 1781. Just three months after American soldiers reentered South Carolina, every major backcountry garrison had fallen into their hands. In late April, Greene’s army clashed with a small British force commanded by Lord Francis Rawdon on Hobkirk’s Hill, a long ridge overlooking Camden, the backcountry’s main settlement. Even though Rawdon’s troops defeated the Americans, it was little more than a tactical victory. The presence of a militia unit under Francis Marion combined with Greene’s army, which withdrew from the action relatively unscathed (of its fifteen hundred men, only nineteen had been killed), forced the British to evacuate Camden. After setting fire to “the gaol, mills, and many private houses,” the redcoats “together with the Wives, Children, Negroes, and Baggage” set off for Charles Town, soon to become the last major British enclave in the province, leaving the town’s burning ruins to the Americans.37 In early September, the last major engagement of the war in South Carolina took place at Eutaw Springs, a tiny settlement on the banks of the Santee about sixty miles north of Charles Town. Four hours after British and American soldiers first exchanged fire, the battle ended when Greene, who believed the clash “by far the hottest action I ever saw, and the most bloody for the numbers engaged,” withdrew to the High Hills of Santee. Again, the British claimed victory, but Colonel Alexander Stewart, unable to control the surrounding countryside, had no alternative but to retreat to Charles Town. It was yet another hollow victory for the redcoats; although Greene had sustained heavy losses on this occasion, his men still retained control of the interior and had a firm foothold in the lowcountry. The British, by contrast, now only held Charles Town and the adjacent countryside, a few small coastal settlements, and several isolated and vulnerable posts in the interior. 38 Six weeks after the battle at Eutaw Springs and some four hundred miles to the north, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Reporting to his superiors in London that he had endured “a most difficult and dangerous campaign” and had grown “quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventure,” Cornwallis had marched from Wilmington into southern Virginia in August 1781, establishing his headquarters at Yorktown on the south bank of the York River. With a French fleet controlling the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay after its victory over the Royal Navy off the Virginia Capes in early September, and with Cornwallis’s fortifications unable to withstand the constant

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bombardment from a combined army of French and American troops, the besieged general informed Clinton that defeat was imminent. The situation had become “so precarious” that Cornwallis could not “recommend that the fleet and army should run great risk in endeavouring to save us.” On 19 October, two days after surrendering to an American delegation, the remnants of Cornwallis’s army laid down their arms before an array of American and French officers, including George Washington, the Comte de Rochambeau, the French commander, Benjamin Lincoln, who had capitulated to the British at Charles Town seventeen months earlier, and Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, Henry’s son.39 But peace did not come to the province after the clash at Eutaw Springs. The war rapidly degenerated into a series of skirmishes and atrocities that gave neither side any strategic advantage; rather, these clashes turned low-­country settlements and the western backcountry into graveyards. With revolutionary irregulars exhausted from months of hard fighting and desperate to return to their farms, and with Greene’s soldiers, who were once again “short in the usual allowances of meat and bread” and had received no pay for months, on the verge of mutiny, the absence of any effective military presence in the Upper Savannah Valley enabled renegade loyalists under William Cunningham, who had fought at Kings Mountain and whose brother had been killed by revolutionary militiamen, to murder and plunder unchallenged. In late 1781, Cunningham’s death squad massacred nearly two dozen revolutionary irregulars at Cloud’s Creek before his men headed to Hayes Station where they killed fifteen members of the Little River militia company, and lynched Joseph Hayes, their commanding officer and a local tavern owner, from “the limb of a tree.” Only when Cunningham learned that militia companies under Andrew Pickens and Thomas Sumter were hot on his heels did he retreat to Charles Town, eventually escaping to British East Florida.40 In early 1783, as Charles Town’s streets became increasingly congested with loyalists and escaped slaves seeking to leave with the British, General Alexander Leslie, the commander who replaced Cornwallis in the southern theater after the defeat at Yorktown, was not only responsible for the basic welfare of several thousand refugees but also had to maintain law and order in a city surrounded by enemy forces and experiencing significant shortages of provisions and other essential goods. The passage of the Estate Confiscation Act by the South Carolina Assembly in February 1782, which called for the seizure of loyalist property and the expulsion of the “enemies to the independence of America,” led to the arrival of yet more loyalists and their enslaved laborers.

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Refugees set up a ramshackle shanty camp known as “Rawdon-­Town” on Charles Town’s outskirts; it was a collection of squalid and decrepit huts where disease flourished and a number of its inhabitants “died from want” in miserable circumstances. With Greene and his army headquartered at Dorchester, about thirty miles from the city’s defensive perimeter, the British now dedicated their sporadic excursions into the countryside to raid for food and other supplies, expeditions that often led to deadly encounters with the Americans.41 Heading up the South Santee to attack farms and plantations in February 1782, seven hundred British and loyalist soldiers clashed with about five hundred militia from Kingstree and Cheraws at the bridge over Wambaw Creek, a tributary of the Santee, and on the following day at Tydiman’s Plantation, triggering a firefight that left more than forty Americans dead. Seven months later, during a raid along the Combahee River in the southern lowcountry, British foragers skirmished with an American patrol, an exchange that led to the death of John Laurens, who had spent the previous months running spies who were gathering intelligence about British activities in Charles Town and elsewhere. With the war lost, the fighting all but over, and morale collapsing, indiscipline spread through British ranks, with redcoats behaving with “a degree of licentiousness, extremely detrimental to the inhabitants who are unfortunate enough to be within their vortex.” Loyalists as well as enslaved people, one American soldier noted, would “sally from their swamps & destroy People in Cold blood,” turning the no-­man’s land between the lines into a killing ground. With Parliament acknowledging the loss of its American colonies, with negotiations to hammer out a peace treaty getting underway in Paris in April, and with the British abandoning Savannah in July, everyone in Charles Town recognized that the days of its occupation were numbered. Leslie’s staff accordingly laid plans for its evacuation.42 Seven years after the first exchange of gunfire at Savage’s Old Fields outside Ninety-­Six in late 1775, a fleet of British transports carrying about seven thousand enslaved and free Black people, some five thousand soldiers, and hundreds of loyalists prepared to sail from Charles Town. Following the conclusion of negotiations over protocols for the evacuation, the armada hoisted their main sails and set course for the open sea on 14 December. At the same time, a detachment of Continentals led by General Anthony Wayne, who had earlier conducted operations against the garrison at Savannah, entered the city. That afternoon, soldiers and civilians alike celebrated, decorating the streets with flags, visiting friends, and cheering “the grand and pleasing sight” as “upwards of three hundred sail” departed for New York. The

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moment marked the end of a long and brutal war in the South, prompting Greene, who had devoted the last two years of his life to frustrating British ambitions in the Carolinas, to observe that their departure “gives us compleat possession of all the Southern States. . . . The people are once more free.” For “Carolinians,” added William Moultrie, 14 December rather than 4 July marked the “real day of their deliverance and independence”; for the thousands of enslaved Carolinians who did not escape on British ships, their departure closed an avenue to deliverance and independence.43 Wayne’s men entered a city bearing the scars of war; a major fire in January 1778 combined with the extensive destruction caused during the British attack two years later had devastated several neighborhoods. In addition, a detachment of British soldiers, who were stacking captured arms and ammunition in a warehouse following the American surrender in May 1780 accidentally ignited several thousand pounds of gunpowder, triggering a massive explosion that “blew up the whole guard of fifty men and many others,” leveled adjacent houses, and set others alight. In the rural lowcountry, plantations lay in ruins; weeds and brush choked irrigation ditches; sluice gates had collapsed, leaving fields underwater; the houses that remained standing had fallen into disrepair; and cabins were uninhabitable. The war had also thinned the region’s livestock populations; cattle had perished, had been killed, or had been driven to Charles Town for slaughter by the British. On inspecting his plantation after the war, John Lewis Gervais described a scene that would become all too familiar to many returning home; not only had the British taken his “Negroes to Charles Town,” but they had ransacked his house, seized his animals and his “Stock of ale,” and left him with “nothing but my land, which, thank God, they could not carry away.” But after seven years of fighting, white Carolinians celebrated not only American independence and their victory over the British but also the survival of slavery.44

The Home Front Generalizing about the experiences of enslaved people on “the home front” is difficult. A number of factors influenced the overall quality of their lives: their owners’ political loyalties; their location, particularly whether they resided in Charles Town or in the southern lowcountry, which became a major theater of operations in 1779; their proximity to the fighting; their ability to access food and other essential supplies; and the epidemiological climate. The chaos

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of war disrupted the rhythms of the agricultural year; fields went untilled, crops remained in the ground, and animals were left untended. The rural lowcountry, as noted earlier, underwent a minor demographic revolution at the start of the war when overseers and plantation owners went off to war, leaving few white men to maintain their control over the enslaved labor force. With “Numbers of Negroes without a White Man” left on lowcountry plantations, enslaved laborers cultivated their own plots rather than devoting hours to the arduous labor of producing staple crops. In addition, the remainder of the rural lowcountry’s white population was now more vulnerable to potential unrest and disorder. With enslaved laborers, noted Bull, “becoming ungovernable . . . [and] absenting themselves often from the services of their Masters” and with planters failing to devote “all attention to the care of their Negroes,” the productivity of the coastal plain’s plantation zone soon deteriorated.45 The widespread use of looting as a weapon of war had a dramatic effect on enslaved and free people alike. It was not the theft of a couple of pigs or a bushel of corn or some hens by a few soldiers that caused deadly shortages; rather, it was the systematic and extensive plundering of livestock herds and crops by entire armies that threatened starvation for a population already suffering from a compromised food infrastructure. Camped at the plantation of “the Great Rebel” John McPherson near Tulifinny Bridge during the campaign against Charles Town in spring 1780, Lieutenant Anthony Allaire and his men “lived off the fat of the land,” spending their nights in camp “roasting turkey, fowls, and pigs . . . in great plenty.” Marching on the city, they set about destroying “Rebel property,” collecting “live stock for the use of the army . . . taking all their horned cattle, horses, mules, sheep, fowls etc.” In addition to smashing windows and furniture, they used captured slaves to drive the ­cattle to their next camp. Following Lincoln’s surrender in May, British officers had the chance to assess the strategy’s impact. Inspecting plantations initially looted during Prévost’s retreat across the coastal plain in spring 1779 or damaged in the course of the current campaign, they rode through the countryside where cattle had turned feral, plantations lay neglected or abandoned, and enslaved laborers, often malnourished and suffering from smallpox, typhus (known colloquially as “camp fever”), and other ailments, struggled to survive.46 A related tactic that also caused immense hardship was “scorched earth,” a gambit that entailed the destruction of crops and animals in order to prevent the enemy from acquiring these supplies. Systematically destroying buildings,

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crops, and animals made it nearly impossible to wage war in neighborhoods earlier ravaged by soldiers determined to obliterate everything in their path. Planning to corral “all the horses that can be found” along the Waccamaw, Black, and Santee Rivers, Marion found that British raiders had already taken every animal “fit for Saddles” for their own use, leaving fewer mounts for his men. At Samuel Watson’s plantation in the New Acquisition District, John Rutledge inspected the damage inflicted by Huck’s men in the summer of 1780 where his “Iron Works, Mills, dwelling houses and buildings, even his negroe Houses” had been “reduced to Ashes.” Greene reported that “great bodies of Militia” had “laid waste all the Country in such a manner that I am really afraid it will be impossible to subsist the few troops we have.” With the arable land around the Continental Army camp on the Pee Dee River “much ravaged,” Greene’s men found themselves without “any provisions except what are obliged to collect day to day.” There was, the general further complained, “not a drop of spirits . . . nor have we soap.” Lacking a forge or blacksmith’s shop to repair broken weapons, harnesses, and other equipment, militiamen found their operational effectiveness sharply circumscribed. Lowcountry farms and plantations also became targets; in November 1781, William Harding, the militia commander at Pocotaligo, having repulsed a small British force a few weeks earlier, implored Greene to send reinforcements to prevent other raiding parties, who were “Killing & Salting up all the Beef on Port Royal Island” and burning “all the Crops they can,” from creating additional shortages.47 The theft or slaughter of livestock also hobbled agricultural work. Without mules, horses, or oxen, neither enslaved laborers nor farmers had the draft animals essential for plowing, hauling timber, or carting provisions and other goods. Likewise, with gristmills reduced to ashes, farmers could not turn cereal crops into flour, further adding to food insecurity. In some cases, farmers simply stopped harvesting their crops because, as Greene noted, “depositing their grain in their barns exposes it to be seized by their friends, or burnt by their enemies.” When the British Legion attacked General Richard Richardson’s Congaree Valley plantation in December 1780, destroying his house, herding “into the barns . . . his cattle, hogs and poultry,” and then burning down the buildings and incinerating the animals trapped inside, it did more than generate shortages of meat, milk, and eggs. Without animals to reproduce (chickens lay about six eggs a week), basic staples became scarcer for a longer period. Furthermore, the destruction of houses and cabins left free and enslaved people without shelter, leading to exposure and malnutrition.48

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With husbands and sons mustered into the ranks of revolutionary militia units or the regiments of the Continental Army, wives and daughters stepped in to perform farm work. But the absence of men made isolated farms attractive targets. Raids against farms in the Congaree Valley by the British Legion, noted John Rutledge, had driven “a vast many women . . . with their children almost naked into the woods.” Reporting on the chaos that came in the wake of Charles Town’s capture in 1780, the twenty-­three-­year-­old Eliza Wilkinson, who had recently lost both her husband and her child, expressed her concern about the safety of the remote plantation on Yonges Island to which she had fled in May. Isolated and defended only by “women, a few aged gentlemen . . . and some skulking varlets,” the house proved to be an attractive target. A month after Eliza’s arrival, a loyalist militia unit led by Colonel Daniel McGirth raided the plantation, forcing Eliza and her relatives to endure “a day of terror.” Firing guns and “bellowing out the most horrid curses imaginable” as his men galloped into the yard, they plundered “the house of everything they thought valuable or worth taking,” smashing open trunks to loot clothes, ripping buckles from Wilkinson’s shoes while her feet were still in them, and putting a gun to her sister’s head when she refused to hand over her wedding ring. Only after the looters had departed did Wilkinson, trembling “with terror,” collapse on her bed in “a violent burst of grief.” At the same time, another raiding party attacked the neighboring plantation where Eliza’s elderly parents resided, terrorizing them as the men invaded the house. Breaking up furniture and stealing clothes and other goods, the men proceeded to drink “all the wine, rum &c that they could find, inviting the negroes who were with them . . . to do the same.” During the assault, as assailants and victims screamed insults, invectives, and threats at one another, ­Eliza’s mother, Sarah Clifford, managed to make an astute observation amid the pandemonium: “I suppose you think you are doing your king a great piece of service by these actions, which are very noble, to be sure,” she yelled at the looters, “but you are mistaken—‘twill only enrage the people.” Rather than ride “about the country robbing helpless women and children,” the drunken soldiers should, she demanded, “go and fight the Men.”49 The “marauding and plundering parties” that became an integral part of the partisan conflict in the interior and, to a lesser extent, on the coastal plain, had a significant psychological impact. The raid on Richardson’s plantation was one of many conducted by the Legion. Just how Mary Richardson, who had buried her husband only a few weeks earlier, reacted when she contemplated the charred embers of her house and the burned carcasses of her cattle

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and hogs we will never know, but as reports of this and similar incidents spread, the ruthlessness and ferocity of the backcountry war only intensified. Commenting on the devastation and brutality, Greene informed Alexander Hamilton, then serving on Washington’s staff, how “the Whigs and Tories pursue each other, with little less than savage fury,” turning large swaths of the countryside into places of “murders and devastations.” Wilkinson was traumatized not just by British and loyalist raiders destroying her property and assaulting her person but also by living in a constant state of fear and anxiety. The fact that enslaved men not only had consumed her father’s wine and rum—growing more and more “insolent” and threatening as they became increasingly inebriated—but that they had done so alongside a group of ill-­ disciplined British soldiers who were, as she had discovered earlier, always ready to pull out a bayonet or pistol, only heightened the sense of dread and foreboding as her family cowered terror-­struck before their assailants.50 But neither British nor American commanders could do anything to prevent their men from engaging in these practices. Even though Greene acknowledged that his soldiers, living in camps “wretched beyond description,” had become “addicted to plundering” in order to survive, he tried to break their habit by issuing orders against this “unwarrantable, unmilitary, and licentious practice.” Furthermore, he recognized that soldiers who raided farms were “a terror to the inhabitants” and would soon alienate civilians who had to live in countryside “laid waste” by “plunder and deprivation.” The British exhibited far less interest in preventing looting. In their eyes, the enemy’s property—regardless of whether it was a farmhouse, a herd of cattle, or a gang of enslaved workers—all contributed to the American war effort, and thus constituted legitimate targets. At the same time, the British expected nothing but obedience from their loyalist allies, enabling them to exploit their farms, plantations, and slaves.51 The Wilkinsons, the Richardsons, and other white families who had suffered the violence and trauma of looting and assault often had the resources to survive and could shelter with friends, neighbors, and family. In sharp contrast, enslaved Carolinians lacked access to the basic resources necessary to endure the conflict’s devastating impact and suffered disproportionately from its depredations. By 1782, the plantations around Charles Town, reported one British officer, had not “produced any considerable crop”; not only were its enslaved laborers “destitute of all sorts of plantation tools” essential to the productive process, but they “were almost, if not altogether naked, with very scanty supplies of clothing.” Enslaved people had to navigate the conflict’s

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unpredictable course that included the constant danger of marauding soldiers and the spread of disease, which threatened to destabilize their lives and undermine community networks.52 Moreover, with the war carrying the promise of their emancipation, enslaved people now faced a set of existential choices that might determine the future trajectory of their lives and were often forced to make hasty decisions based on partial information as they contemplated how best to exploit the circumstances in which they found themselves. If the British successfully crushed the movement for independence and defeated the Americans, would they keep their promise and emancipate every enslaved person who had contributed to their victory? And in the spring and summer of 1780, following Charles Town’s fall and Cornwallis’s victory over the Americans at Camden, the restoration of royal rule remained a distinct possibility. In the negotiations to prepare for Charles Town’s evacuation, held in the summer of 1782, the British perhaps signaled their intentions when they sidestepped American demands that “all the slaves of the citizens of South Carolina” held in British custody “shall be restored to their former owners, as far as is practicable.” Enslaved people who had “rendered themselves particularly obnoxious by their attachment and services to the British . . . and had Specific promises of Freedom” were exempt. Moreover, British officials had interviewed refugee slaves in Charles Town, asking “if they wanted to return to their owners.” Evidently, an American officer had also tried to gauge their sentiments, speaking surreptitiously to several enslaved people who, “with an air of insolence,” told him that “they were not going back.” But, as the colony’s former lieutenant governor William Bull pointed out, enslaved people owned by loyalists remained “the property of His Majesty’s subjects.” The loss of their enslaved workers would prompt slaveholders to demand compensation. And after the war, the British government addressed the question of compensation by setting up the Commission of Enquiry into the Losses, Services, and Claims of the American Loyalists in 1783, which took on the monumental task of assessing the validity of thousands of petitions, interviewing claimants and witnesses, calculating the value of each slave lost as well as other property destroyed during the war and generating an immense archive in an enormously time-­consuming and costly endeavor.53 In many cases, the war’s contingent and unpredictable character dictated the behavior of enslaved people. The invasion of the countryside surrounding Charles Town by British troops in early 1780 prompted many to head toward British lines, leading Tarleton to note that “all negroes, men, women

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and children, upon the approach of . . . the King’s troops, thought themselves absolved from all respects from their American masters and entirely released from servitude.” Alured Clarke, the British commander in Georgia, complained that slaveholders, who claimed to be loyalists, demanded the return of enslaved laborers who had run to Savannah “under the sanction of Sir Henry Clinton’s Proclamation, on that subject.” In turn, enslaved people cleverly argued that, by constructing the town’s defenses and working in camp, they had in fact been enlisted into the British Army. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Clarke also informed Cornwallis about this issue, noting that military laborers often “come to me to protect them from the violence of some of the most notorious offenders that Carolina has produced,” using “certificates of service,” acquired from British officers, as a form of manumission paper.54 Parsing British intentions proved to be a complicated process for enslaved men and women; dissecting American intentions was, however, far more straightforward. Simply put, an American victory would mean that the enslavement of people of African descent would continue uninterrupted. It is worth noting that not every enslaved person “quitted the plantations and followed the army” when British soldiers were in the vicinity. Enslaved laborers greeted William Moultrie’s return to his plantation in Saint John’s Berkeley “with great joy,” allegedly taking their owner “by the hand, saying ‘God bless you, massa! We glad to see you, massa!” The homecoming, which Moultrie thought “affecting,” ended with “the old Africans” singing “a war-­song in their own language.” Of his two hundred enslaved laborers, he claimed that “not one of them left me during the war”; even those who had been “carried down to work on the British lines . . . contrived to make their escapes and return home.”55 That no enslaved people considered leaving Moultrie’s plantation or that they welcomed him home with such spontaneous gestures of happiness strains credulity. The traumas and upheavals endured by William Bull’s enslaved laborers appear more typical. A leading member of the colonial administration, Bull commanded an agricultural empire of several thousand acres and nearly three hundred enslaved laborers that included Ashley Hall, his elegant mansion on the Ashley River outside Charles Town as well as several plantations on the Sea Islands, and property in the backcountry at the Congarees at the confluence of the Broad and Saluda Rivers. Between 1777 and 1781, he lived in exile in England, leaving his affairs in the hands of four trustees—Stephen Bull, Nathaniel Russell, Gabriel Manigault, and Henry Peronneau—during his absence. In 1778, the Americans requisitioned nearly three hundred enslaved laborers from his Saint Helena plantation “as a tax on my loyalty . . . to work

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on fortifications near Charles Town.” Here, Bull’s political loyalties caught up with his enslaved property. With so many enslaved field hands now gone, plantation fields went untended and their crops unharvested while the slaves taken to Charles Town began succumbing to “diseases contracted from bad Accommodations,” including smallpox and typhus.56 The enslaved laborers who had been evacuated to the upcountry suffered an equally harrowing ordeal. Taking about twenty enslaved men from Bull’s Congaree plantation, the British ordered them to “strengthen the works” at Fort Motte, a fortified house that guarded a crossing over the Congaree River that functioned as a depot for convoys moving between Camden and Charles Town. In early May 1781, American irregulars led by Francis Marion and Henry Lee attacked, wounding three enslaved workers while the rest scattered in the chaos of the engagement and “with difficulty got through the Woods to the King’s Army at Orangeburg.” After the British surrendered, Marion took the remaining enslaved people who had not managed to escape as the spoils of war and distributed them to his men, using the enslaved laborers of an imperial official as a bounty.57 The strategic use of enslaved laborers to encourage white recruitment not only endangered their individual lives but also severely disrupted their communal and familial networks. As “money will not procure soldiers,” noted David Ramsay, “and the militia will not submit to a draught,” the Americans looked for other incentives to maintain their fighting strength. At first, the idea of “filling our regiments with a negro bounty” met stiff resistance from planters who recoiled “in horror” when the legislature discussed the topic in autumn 1779, expressing concern about the fate of their property as well as the inherent danger of providing enslaved people with firearms. In the end, however, the Americans chose to use enslaved laborers owned by loyalists to encourage enlistment of white colonists, with the political allegiance of the enslaved person’s owner leading to yet more upheaval in their lives. Each private would receive one enslaved adult while regimental commanders would acquire three adult slaves and a child slave. Greene also used this policy to keep irregulars in the field while Sumter used Bull’s enslaved laborers from his Congaree plantation to fulfill contracts “with the ten month troops.” Lowcountry planter and loyalist Elias Ball lost more than fifty enslaved laborers to the Americans “by virtue of the Confiscation Act”; anxious to “secure the remainder” of his workforce, Ball organized “a party of Dragoons” to ride to his plantation. This mission was not entirely successful; Ball only managed to round up “part of them” as a number evaded his men and “kept out of the

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way” during the raid. Of the slaves that he did marshal, several “left him afterwards in Charles Town.” Tallying the cost of his loyalty to the crown, Ball estimated that of the three hundred enslaved people he owned at the beginning of the war, he had lost more than half to death, to flight, and to the Americans.58 The flight of enslaved laborers further eroded agricultural production. In some cases, only a few enslaved children along with their mothers and the elderly and infirm, remained on plantations. After British raiders attacked Eliza Pinckney’s plantation in May 1779, her son Thomas reported that only a few enslaved children and pregnant women remained; they refused to work, and they lived “on the best Produce of the Plantation.” Raiders left Thomas Colleton’s plantation nearly empty; with the Americans taking all the able-­bodied workers that they could capture, there remained only “the young ones,” along with “sixteen old Negroes” that included a few grandmothers and “a very grey headed wench” to raise food. Pinckney alleged that his mother’s enslaved laborers enjoyed “the best Produce,” but a vast majority in the rural lowcountry who stayed on their plantations endured lives of considerable privation and hunger. Inspecting the plantations around Charles Town, a British official noted that the “plantations were in very bad condition . . . very few had even yielded provisions sufficient to support the Slaves.” Responding to this crisis, enslaved people who remained on their masters’ plantations abandoned the cash crops and turned to hunting and fishing and cultivating their own plots to raise food. Others established maroon encampments deep in the woods to hide from marauding soldiers. On the plantations managed by George Austin, enslaved laborers took similar precautions, building a camp deep in the woods and provisioning it with barrels of corn, dried fish, and other supplies.59 The experiences of Bull’s enslaved laborers at Fort Motte and at Ashley Hall had shattered networks of family and community. Now owned by new masters, the enslaved people whom Marion’s irregulars rounded up after the battle had to rebuild lives that had undergone a series of profound disruptions within a few years. How or even whether these slaves adapted to their new circumstances remains unknown, but the pressure put on David Guerard by the enslaved men and women who worked on his Port Royal plantation demonstrates the desire to maintain family and community. With “several of his Absconding Negroes” in British-­occupied Charles Town, their family members demanded that if Guerard failed to “pursue measures for getting them speedily into the country” immediately, they would “go to town and depart with them.” Yielding to their request and anxious to recover his

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property, Guerard traveled to Charles Town in late 1781 to locate the slaves who were “connected in Kinship with those he had at home” and return to Port Royal with them. On locating them, he prepared to return home only to have his “rescue” mission fail when, thanks to the “vigilance of the garrison,” the British confiscated his enslaved laborers, and he left Charles Town empty-­handed.60 On the neighboring islands of Saint Helena and Coosaw, loyalists John Orde and his wife Margaret tried in vain to keep their plantations running, but the war shattered their enslaved laborers’ community. Orde had a reputation as an efficient and productive plantation owner; not only did his neighbors claim that he owned “a remarkably fine gang of Negroes,” but they further noted that his plantations regularly yielded “one of the best crops” of indigo. Orde’s management techniques included inoculating his enslaved laborers against smallpox and issuing “new clothes” and “working utensils.” However, his political sympathies contributed to the disintegration of his agricultural enterprise. Assessing his losses in 1781, he estimated that American raiders took about seventy enslaved laborers from his Saint Helena estate, although some managed to “escape and returned to the plantation.” His plantation on neighboring Coosaw Island also suffered from the “plunderings and devastations” of American soldiers, who carried off enslaved laborers, livestock, and provisions. At one point, only “two Negroes were left upon one plantation . . . [and] a man, his wife and child upon the other.” When the “Americans again became Masters of this Country,” a number of Orde’s enslaved laborers, who had been taken first to Charles Town, found themselves in Saint Augustine after the British evacuation in late 1782. And, like the enslaved men previously owned by William Bull, some of Orde’s slaves were used “for the purpose of recruiting,” becoming the property of officers in the South Carolina Line Regiment.61 The enslaved people who were caught up in the middle of the war zone suffered not just from permanent disruptions to their family and community networks. They also had to negotiate the dangers of camp life and combat in order to survive. Whether American or British, military camps were no better than shanty towns hastily constructed from canvas and lumber. With a continent-­wide smallpox epidemic raging throughout the war and with armies functioning as effective vectors for its rapid transmission, military camps were ideal breeding grounds for epidemic disease. Boston King, an enslaved plantation laborer who, following the British invasion in 1780, “was determined to go to Charles Town and throw myself into the hands of the

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English,” contracted smallpox and soon found himself quartered in a pestilential camp along with “all the Blacks affected by that disease” about a mile from the troops’ main quarters. But, in fact, smallpox saved King from capture. No sooner had an American patrol ridden into the fetid camp than it departed when it suddenly became aware of its occupants’ ill health, rapidly turning around “for fear of the infection.” King eventually reached Charles Town and, finding a berth on a British transport ship, sailed first to Nova Scotia before he eventually made his way to London. In 1792, he was a member of an expedition that helped to establish Freetown in Sierra Leone.62 Many enslaved people requisitioned by the military found themselves working in units that resembled labor battalions, constructing fortifications, digging trenches, loading and unloading supply trains, and burying the dead. Now forced to work for the American war effort and no doubt aware of the rumors circulating about British policy toward slaves, enslaved people went about their tasks with considerable reluctance and ill will. In early 1776, inspecting progress on the defenses at Fort Johnson, located on James Island and critical to the defense of Charles Town Harbor, Barnard Elliott, a captain in a provincial artillery regiment, found about forty enslaved men doing very little work. A few were shifting logs, but the “others [were] doing nothing,” and only three carpenters were “actually at work.” In a heated exchange with the gang’s overseer, Elliott learned that they refused to shift logs “out of the river” and onto land, leading the enraged officer to slap his face, triggering a fight during which “the Negroes all went away,” leaving the job unfinished. Three years later, enslaved laborers appeared no more willing to work for the American cause. Desperately trying to stall Prévost’s advance against Charles Town, beleaguered American officers scoured the countryside trying to find slaves to construct fortifications, eventually rounding up a small gang to cut down some trees to impede the progress of the British as they approached Stono Ferry.63 The sheer physical toil and drudgery of constructing defenses combined with the harsh circumstances in which enslaved men were forced to labor, which was regularly supervised by soldiers or engineers, made military labor significantly worse than agricultural work. With the British laying siege to Charles Town in spring 1780, Governor John Rutledge ordered three hundred enslaved laborers brought from local plantations to work on strengthening its fortifications. With provisions growing ever scarcer as Clinton tightened his grip on the city, Ferdinand de Brahm, a military engineer assigned to the Southern Department, deployed this battalion of enslaved workers to dig new abatis (trenches topped with sharpened tree limbs) and to construct a

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“battery for five [artillery] pieces” while they worked under “the continued firing of shot and bombs.” The “poor Naked Blacks” that Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Allen rounded up to strengthen the defenses of the garrison at Ninety-­ Six had to work in freezing conditions in the winter of 1780 with scant rations. Months later, when the American army approached Ninety-­Six, it was an enslaved man who alerted sentries, telling them that he “had seen the rebels and that they were encamped ten miles by road.”64 On many occasions, the British used enslaved people for tasks directly related to the fighting. As they prepared to attack the American defenses at Savannah in December 1778, they hired the services of Quamino Dolly (Quash), an enslaved man owned by Sir James Wright, the colony’s last governor, to guide Fraser’s Highlanders, a Scottish regiment commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell, through a wilderness of woodland and swamp that enabled them to outflank General Robert Howe’s forces, thus leading to the British victory. Using their intimate knowledge of local geography, enslaved men could navigate the countryside with skill and stealth, gather intelligence, and observe enemy movements. In 1780, several enslaved harbor pilots would assist the Royal Navy in navigating a route through the shoals and sandbanks scattered across the mouth of Charles Town Harbor as the British launched their assault on the city.65 Some enslaved people took far greater risks by spying for the British. With royal rule in South Carolina disintegrating in late 1775, free Black fisherman Scipio Handley carried messages for Lord William Campbell, the colony’s last governor. Caught, jailed, and condemned to death “for acting against Congress,” Handley looked as if he would suffer the same fate as Thomas Jeremiah, a free Black harbor pilot accused of planning a rebellion with the British (see Chapter 6). But “by the hand of a Friend . . . [he] received a file with which he acquitted himself of his Irons.” Escaping from the Charles Town jail, he headed first for Sullivan’s Island, joining the small maroon encampment established by escaped slaves after British officials left the colony to the revolutionaries. Following a raid during which several enslaved people were killed, Handley and his companions made their way to HMS Tamar to which Campbell and his entourage had retreated in late 1775. In early 1776, the Tamar, along with Handley, sailed for New York City, where he joined the Royal Navy. Several years later, he was back on the mainland, fighting alongside the British when they captured Savannah in 1779. About a year later, when the city was under siege from American and French forces, Handley again saw action, working in the armory and bringing ammunition to the

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defenders on the lines when he was shot in the leg. Badly wounded, he was later evacuated to England, ending up in London.66 Other enslaved men went into combat alongside British forces, becoming irregular soldiers in the Black Dragoons. In late 1781, with the war approaching its end, British commander Alexander Leslie mustered enslaved laborers who had escaped from their plantations into a unit to conduct raids and mount patrols in the countryside that still remained in British hands. Armed and on horseback, they gained a reputation with British officers as tough, resilient soldiers who were “brave to the last degree.” In American eyes, the Black Dragoons constituted a real threat; the fact that armed ex-­slaves were conducting operations with British soldiers raised the specter of insurrection across the coastal plain even as their raids endangered the lives and livelihoods of local planters. Thomas Bee complained that Black Dragoon patrols had “been out four times within the last ten days, plundering & robbing” plantations around Goose Creek, and demanded that Greene dispatch American troops to prevent further raids. Moreover, Governor John Matthews advocated putting any enslaved person “taken in arms” on trial and, “if found guilty, executed,” arguing that punishing “such notorious offenders will have a very salutary effect, especially at this time.” As the date for Charles Town’s evacuation approached in late 1782, military engineer James Moncrief, who was concerned about “the fate of the unfortunate Negroes, who have followed me on every service,” suggested that the men be sent to the Caribbean where, renamed the Carolina Black Corps, they later took part in the capture of the French possessions of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Lucia, and campaigned on Saint Vincent and Grenada.67 With the war sputtering to its end, enslaved people and loyalists scrambled to reach British lines; many who fled spent an anxious fourteen months between the defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 and the evacuation of Charles Town in December 1782 trying to secure passage from North America. In July 1782, the British abandoned Savannah, with their transports carrying nearly five thousand enslaved people and “other property of the loyalists” in an exodus, reported the New York Mercury, that comprised nearly “seven eights of all the slaves in the province of Georgia.” Some slaveholders, like Saint Helena planter and shipbuilder John Rose, transported their enslaved property to Jamaica. Of Rose’s enslaved laborers who made the journey, more than thirty died on the voyage or “at Jamaica by the change of climate.” Thousands more enslaved people from Georgia and South Carolina ended up in Saint Augustine in British East Florida. By 1783, its population had ballooned

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to about seventeen thousand people, including Native Americans, loyalists and their families, free Blacks, and enslaved men and women. Confusion, disorganization, misery, and squalor characterized the journey to this safe haven as well as the camps that refugees encountered on their arrival. Disembarking “without provisions, money, clothing . . . and in the most deplorable circumstances,” the flood of traumatized newcomers soon overwhelmed Saint Augustine. Struggling to provide food and shelter, Governor Patrick Tonyn established makeshift shanty towns for enslaved people while billeting prominent loyalists in whatever houses were available. The British resolved the overcrowding crisis by shipping former slaves to other colonies, a task that did not end until late 1785. Slaveholders headed for the Bahamas and Jamaica, while some eventually returned to the lowcountry. Others sailed for Nova Scotia, where neither the climate nor the environment was “calculated for southern constitutions or for the employment of the slaves.” From there, a few sailed to London, with a small number ultimately participating in the project to settle Sierra Leone with former slaves.68 The war provoked a significant demographic shift in the lowcountry; along with the thousands who left on British transports, thousands more had died during the conflict or fled the region, with some establishing maroon encampments in the wilderness of the Lower Savannah Valley or the untamed borderlands between Georgia and British East Florida. Thousands of men and women of African descent who sailed from Charles Town to Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, or other British possessions would never return. Death and evacuation, meanwhile, had intensified planter demand for enslaved laborers to begin the arduous work of rebuilding the plantation economy, which had, noted lowcountry planter Ralph Izard, “almost been ruined” by seven years of warfare. American slaveholders were unable to claim their enslaved workers living within British lines because “they have been declared free by Proclamations, issued by Officers acting under the authority of the King of Great Britain.” This policy was, claimed Izard, “a most impudent evasion of the [Preliminary Peace] Treaty.” But, he continued, “we are not in a condition to help ourselves . . . [as] without money, and without credit we are by no means in a condition to continue the War.” Despite his animus toward the British, who had left his house in “a very ruinous condition,” he wrote “to London for a Carpenter and Builder” to repair and rebuild it.69 Planters also turned to reconstructing the rice kingdom. Taking advantage of the sale of forfeited property, they embarked on the long and difficult

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journey back to prosperity, buying new slaves and land. At a public auction in May 1783, the confiscated estate of George Saxby, who had been appointed eighteen years earlier to administer the Stamp Act, went under the hammer. Of the former stamp collector’s eighty-­two enslaved laborers, Georgetown planter Joseph Allston, who had entertained Josiah Quincy on the eve of the revolution, bought sixty-­eight men and women while Charles Town merchant Henry Geddis bought over three hundred acres of his land. By 1789, with the rebuilding of lowcountry plantations slowly getting underway, Izard confidently told Gabriel Manigault that he reckoned he would harvest at least one hundred and fifty barrels of rice from lands “now in better order than they have ever been since the war,” start paying down his debts, and imagine a future in which the lowcountry elite reestablished its hegemony.70

Slavery, South Carolina, and the Atlantic Revolutions The war for independence forever changed the lives of every South Carolinian, free and enslaved alike. With peace, enslavers across the province discovered just how prescient was John Adams when he noted how the revolution would corrode and dissolve the notions of hierarchy, deference, and obedience that tied the social order together: “We have been told that our ­Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where,” he wrote to his wife Abigail, “that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew Insolent to their Masters.” William Bull would have acknowledged the validity of Adams’s assessment. Trapped in Charles Town, Bull noted that other planters caught in the city and “not daring to go to their desolate plantations” alleged that “the Negroes . . . [were] almost ungovernable . . . a burthen rather than a benefit.” Eliza Pinckney similarly claimed that her enslaved workers simply “do now as they please” and had become “insolent and quite their own masters.” Even the British general Alexander Leslie noted, “Slaves are exceeding unwilling to return to hard labour,” adding that they might expect “severe punishment from their former masters.” Simply put, the state’s slaveholders forced their enslaved laborers to conform to the realities of postwar life, driving them back into the fields and reimposing the regime that had configured slavery during the colonial era. For the enslaved, not only had the conflict led to massive dislocations and disruptions, ripping apart communal and familial ties, but the defeat of the British had dashed their hopes for liberation.71

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Slaveholders also had to adjust to new realities. They now had to live in a world in which abolitionist sentiment was on the rise in the world beyond South Carolina. When Charles Pinckney addressed the state’s General Assembly in 1787, remarking that “the personal property of our Planters consists chiefly of Slaves, who are of such importance to our Wealth . . . the cultivation of the soil being the most permanent source of our natural prosperity [that] in no country can such an institution be more important,” he was making an observation that no one in his audience would ever doubt or question. For the state’s slaveholders, it was a self-­evident truth. But it was not an opinion universally embraced in the new United States. North of the Mason-­Dixon Line, slavery entered its long twilight; in 1780, Pennsylvania passed an Act for Gradual Abolition of Slavery and, three years later, the case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts versus Nathaniel Jennison spelled an end to slavery in that state while gradual abolition became law in neighboring Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. With the passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Confederation government banned slavery in the territories around the Great Lakes. In meetinghouses, drawing rooms, and churches across New England and the mid-­Atlantic, antislavery activists returned to the struggle, forming local and regional groups, such as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the New York Manumission Society, and the Rhode Island Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade. In 1794, the founding of the American Convention of Abolition Societies in Philadelphia broadcast that the future of slavery was now on the national agenda. Slave owners in South Carolina and the other southern states naturally saw the activities of these organizations as dangerously subversive, an existential threat to their property, power, and livelihoods.72 In England, the political shock waves generated by defeat at the hands of the Americans and French not only triggered a political crisis, leading to the fall of Lord North’s government in March 1782, but it also inspired a small group of radicals and religious nonconformists to step out of the shadows and take up the standard of abolition. Veteran campaigners like Granville Sharp and John Wesley were joined by new faces, including William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano, who had witnessed the celebrations marking the repeal of the Stamp Act in Charles Town in 1766 and who now used their talents to demand an end to the slave trade, presenting Parliament with a petition calling for its abolition in 1783. Four years later, Clarkson, Sharp and other activists formed the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade; within a short period, it had masterminded a

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successful campaign to raise public awareness about the horrors of the slave trade, using pamphlets, speeches, badges, and boycotts of shops selling “slave made sugar” to attract popular support. A long and arduous battle then ensued in Parliament; not until the passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 was the traffic in enslaved Africans outlawed within the empire. Another quarter of a century would elapse before slavery itself was abolished in its colonies.73 French radicals also took up the abolitionist standard. The Marquis de Lafayette, who had become Washington’s close friend and confidante during the Revolutionary War and would later play an important role in the French Revolution, had long opposed slavery, announcing that he “would never have drawn my sword in behalf of America could I have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.” Clarkson thought him “as uncompromising an enemy of the slave trade and slavery, as any man I have ever known.” In early 1788, Clarkson went to Paris where, along with radical essayist and pamphleteer Jacques Pierre Brissot, he helped to found the Société des amis des Noirs. The first of the Atlantic revolutions, the American Revolution had a dramatic impact on events in France, where revolution broke out in July 1789. In turn, this revolution, with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and its central claim that “Men are born and remain free and equal in their rights,” contributed to widespread unrest on the French colony of Saint-­Domingue where, in August 1791, thousands of enslaved field hands rebelled, incinerating its plantation order in the process. The ensuing revolution, which led to the end of slavery first in the colony and then throughout the French Empire, culminated in 1804 when Haiti became an independent nation. Although each revolution had significantly different outcomes, leading to the emergence of contrasting political and social arrangements, all were rooted in the concept of liberty, natural rights, and popular sovereignty, with the destruction of slavery central to the struggle on Saint-­Domingue. Just as events in France and in the Caribbean cannot be divorced from the American Revolution, the volcanic upheavals precipitated by the French Revolution would have a major impact on the new United States, and particularly on South Carolina.74 With slavery under attack by abolitionists at home and revolutionaries overseas, white South Carolinians looked to immunize their slaves from the emancipationist currents that swirled about the Atlantic World. They also set about defending slavery by subtly redefining the meaning of enslavement, portraying themselves as the benign guardians and stewards of their enslaved workers. In 1775 and 1776, the “revolutionary generation” of slaveholders had

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taken an immense gamble. By declaring independence and then fighting a war to throw off the shackles of imperial rule, they stood to lose everything. With the war won and independence achieved, the more egalitarian and liberationist impulses of the American Revolution took root north of the Mason-­Dixon line while southern slaveholders reinvigorated slavery and began to embrace the politics of reaction and counterrevolution.

CHAPTER 8

Cotton and Slavery in the Postwar Backcountry

We will not treat them with cruelty, nor prevent their obtaining religious knowledge, and will endeavor to prevent their rambling . . . and in all things endeavor to act in our families as to obtain the blessings of God. —Minutes of the Welsh Neck Baptist Church, 1785 I heard much said of the extreme difficulty of ginning Cotton. . . . There were a number of very respectable Gentlemen at Mrs. Greene’s who all agreed that if a machine could be invented which would clean the cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing both to the Country and the inventor. —Eli Whitney to Eli Whitney Sr., 11 September 1793

In 1808, Baptist minister Edmund Botsford published Sambo and Toney: A Dialogue in Three Parts, a play in which the characters, all of whom are enslaved, discuss the role of conversion and Christianity in their lives. The leader of the Baptist congregation in the coastal town of Georgetown and the owner of thirteen slaves, Botsford had devoted countless hours preaching to “that class of our poor despised fellow creatures who are too little attended by us.” Four years earlier, Botsford had confided to John Rippon, a prominent hymn writer and Baptist preacher, that “Negroes, their souls are as precious in ye light of God as any others.” Drawing on his experiences preaching to enslaved people, Botsford wrote a three-­act play in which, speaking through Sambo, Toney, and several other characters, he elaborated on the ideal relationship between enslaver and enslaved, and speculated about how evangelical

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Christianity might transform slavery. He informed fellow Baptist minister Richard Furman that the “dialogues will show to the master what we wish to inculcate, and may be the means of removing prejudice from his mind; which will be in favor of the slave: and I have not the least doubt of their being useful to the serious blacks.” But the story of Sambo and Toney reveals itself to be more than a tale about two enslaved men and their spiritual lives.1 Born in Woburn, a small market town in Bedfordshire in southern England in 1745, Botsford migrated to South Carolina at age twenty. He apprenticed as a carpenter and joined Charles Town’s First Baptist Church, led by Oliver Hart. In early 1771, he received his license to preach and began his ministry, holding services throughout the upcountry and gaining a reputation as a dynamic orator. He was ordained two years later. During the Revolutionary War, he served briefly as a chaplain with General Andrew Williamson’s troops in the Upper Savannah Valley, preaching to “the soldiers and . . . animating them in the cause of liberty.” In 1782, he became the pastor at Welsh Neck in the Upper Pee Dee Valley, where he remained for the next fifteen years, taking up a position at Georgetown on Winyah Bay in 1797. A typical coastal county, Georgetown’s enslaved population, which numbered nearly fourteen thousand in 1810, raised rice and cotton on its plantations. Between his arrival and his death twenty-­two years later, in 1819, Botsford not only performed his pastoral duties, taking “a lively interest in the instruction of coloured people,” but he also wrote dozens of essays, sermons, and plays, including Sambo and Toney, which, as one obituary noted, went “through many impressions” and was performed in England.2 Written in the vernacular so that all the characters “speak . . . in negro stile,” Sambo and Toney opens with the two enslaved men deep in conversation. The audience learns that they endured the middle passage together and were purchased by the same man. After their owner’s death, a cotton planter purchased Sambo, taking him to his plantation “up the country” while a rice planter on the coast bought Toney. In an early exchange, Sambo enthusiastically discusses his conversion to Christianity and his new role as “a professor of faith” to enslaved laborers on neighboring plantations. Sambo’s enthusiasm for his newfound faith bothers Toney, who hopes that his friend is “no one them sort a praying negroes;” Christianity, he says, is a “religion for white men, not negro.” Sambo responds by telling Toney that “the Lord speak to everybody alike, white people, black people, rich man, poor man, old man and young man” and if he fails to heed his call then he might be struck “dead in the midst of his wickedness,” leading him “to hell with devils and damned

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spirits.” Toney should “turn to God and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,” reject wickedness, and prepare his soul for the next world. But Sambo is also troubled by the unruliness of Toney’s worldly life and how he loves to “dance and frolic . . . [and] make merry now and then.” His friend’s persistent habit of stealing was another concern; he tells Toney that theft violates the eighth commandment, breaking the laws of his master on earth and in heaven. Your owner, says Sambo, “trusts you with his things . . . so if you steal, you deceive him;”; a thief, he notes, “cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” As Sambo departs “to see about unloading the cotton,” he urges his friend to reflect on his behavior, and to “think seriously upon what I have said to you.”3 By the next scene, Toney is a changed man, filled with the evangelical spirit and no longer devoted to getting “all the pleasure I can.” He recounts his conversion, an event triggered by the death of Joe, an enslaved laborer with whom Toney had “been to many frolic together.” Falling ill while at work in the fields, Joe had returned to his cabin and to his deathbed. A “very wild” slave, who openly disdained Christianity, Joe tells Toney that “I shall die and go to hell” as he draws his last breath. The distraught Toney then spends a terror-­stricken night during which he “had a dream which frighten me most to death . . . and thought I was dying.” Convinced that he is “damned” and bound for hell, and unable to “eat, or work, or know what I been about,” Toney seeks help from Davy, a “professor of faith.”4 Witnessing Toney’s distress, “Uncle” Davy prays for him, fervently hoping to lead him away from his old life of “frolic.” The troubled slave attends a prayer meeting at which he hears “such a sermon” that alerts him to the errors of his ways. After reflection, Toney finally reaches the moment when “the Lord enable me to believe in Jesus Christ, and give me peace in my soul.” On the eve of spring planting, Toney repudiates his former life and, falling on his knees before his master, confesses his sins. “I been one bad negro,” he announces, “I been curse and lie and steal and done every bad thing.” Graciously accepting Toney’s confession and the authenticity of his conversion, the owner charitably forgives him for “anything in which you may have wronged me.” This act of benevolence makes Toney “love him for true,” making him wish “that every poor negro [should] have such a good master.” Now redeemed, Toney heads off, remembering to “watch and pray and not fall into temptation.”5 With owners monitoring their enslaved laborers in the fields and with the church growing increasingly concerned about their lives away from the workplace, surveillance became a ubiquitous element of the Christianized social order that Botsford and other ministers sought to build. Botsford recognized

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that constant and close observation was important not only for monitoring spiritual health but also for inculcating obedience. In a brief soliloquy toward the end of the play, Sambo tells the entire cast that “the eyes of the world will be upon you to wait for your halting and turning back into sin.” Only when enslaved people willingly accepted and internalized the values of submission, loyalty, and obedience, and rejected “a murmuring [and] discontented spirit” would they be able to “grow in piety” and be welcomed into “that world of joy and peace, where sin and sorrow will forever cease” when they died.6 In one exchange, Sambo uses the language of the marketplace to explain why Toney should embrace these values. Not only did “your master give great price for you,” Sambo remarks, but he also provided “victuals and clothes, and then he give you land to plant, and . . . time for work for yourself.” Such humane gestures, Sambo implies, demand that enslaved people be “faithful and honest.” In the character of Sambo, Botsford has fashioned the model slave; not only does his owner trust him enough to oversee cotton shipments, but Sambo invariably conducts himself in a “sober and steady manner,” prays for the health and welfare of his master and family, and enjoins his “fellow-­ servants . . . to mind your master’s business, and be obedient to him in all things.” The play closes with a hymn in which cast members challenge unbelievers to turn to Christ: Black men, how can you turn your face From such a glorious friend? [Jesus] Will you pursue the dangerous race? Oh! Don’t you fear the end Will you pursue the dangerous road That leads to death and hell? Will you refuse all peace with God, And with the devils dwell? Only by accepting “the spring of life . . . that flows from Jesus’ side” would “Black people all” find salvation.7 By drawing the characters of Sambo and the newly converted Toney as obedient and loving supplicants to God and their master, Botsford sought to erase the intrinsically coercive and violent nature of enslavement and replace it with the intimate and domestic practices and techniques of the church and the household. Sambo and Toney speaks to how slaveholders contemplated the

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management of their enslaved workers. Botsford was not the only white man who anticipated a time when every enslaved person would embrace the values of evangelical religion, reject “murmuring and discontent” and become “steady and sober,” becoming docile and obedient workers who accepted their place in the world. Honesty, industry, and compliance rather than idleness, disobedience, and truculence would thereby inform the daily lives of the enslaved on Christianized plantations. To achieve this vision of enslavement where laborers were pliant and acquiescent required slaveholders to meet their obligations as the benevolent guardians of their enslaved property. In Sambo, Botsford created a character who had internalized his own enslavement and who had fully accepted the idea of Christian stewardship as expressed by his owner’s conduct. In this unwritten compact, enslavers would treat the enslaved in a humane manner; in return, the enslaved would reciprocate by working hard, readily obeying their owners, and accepting their disciplinary regime. It was a model intended to produce social relations between master and slave congruent with the values of white families and churches.8 Several years before Botsford wrote Sambo and Toney, he addressed the Charleston Baptist Association on the relationship between ministers and their congregations. “By what conduct,” he inquired, “are members of the church most likely to strengthen the hands of their ministers . . . in promoting the interests of vital religion?” Advocating regular prayer and attendance at church, he also spoke about the importance of the family, the “foundation of all that is good and praise-­worthy.” Parents, he continued, must instruct children on “the doctrines of the gospel and to the practices of true virtue,” which would “greatly facilitate the work of the ministry.” But he concluded his address by incorporating the enslaved into his definition of family and household: “You must,” he said, “maintain religion in your families and teach it to your children and domestics, both by precept and example.”9 In the early nineteenth century, Botsford and other ministers articulated a proslavery stewardship ethic that sank its roots into the soil of the state’s cotton-­growing upcountry. The practices prescribed in church disciplines, which outlined the governance of individual churches and the conduct of its members, instructed masters to treat their slaves so as to fulfill their obligations as paternal Christians. According to this ethic, fathers were responsible for looking after their biological offspring, which often included the children of enslaved women. In the hope that enslaved people would embrace the personal characteristics of the pious and obedient Sambo rather the truculent and unmanageable Joe, ministers sought to fashion an ideological alliance

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between their churches and slaveholding households in order to frame the upcountry farmers’ understanding of the world.10 Efforts to revitalize spiritual life and reinvigorate the evangelical church in the interior occurred in tandem with the “cotton revolution” that began in the 1790s. By the 1840s, a combination of the church, the cotton gin, and slavery had transformed not just South Carolina but the entire American South; the aggressive and dynamic nature of the cotton economy had far greater political and social consequences than the rice economy. And, as countless scholars have noted, the rise and expansion of cotton production had immense significance for the nation’s political life. Several counties in the heart of South Carolina (Lexington, Richland, and Sumter, in particular) constituted the engine of its cotton economy. Addressing the General Assembly in 1800, Governor John Drayton boasted that it was “a matter of national joy . . . that so valuable a staple as cotton is now added to the produce of the state.” At the height of his power in the 1850s, King Cotton presided over a vast empire that stretched from South Carolina and Georgia in the southeast to the fertile agricultural lands that bordered the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi Valley, where millions of enslaved people labored on thousands of farms and plantations.11 Events beyond the water’s edge also had a profound effect on the lives of free and enslaved Carolinians in the years immediately following the upheavals of the American Revolution. The volcanic unrest and turmoil in France and in its Caribbean empire from 1789 until the early 1800s had a significant impact on the state’s inhabitants. During this tumultuous period, which lasted from the outbreak of revolution in the American colonies until Haiti gained its independence, the Atlantic World was defined not solely by individual revolutions in specific places but also by a complex set of interrelationships and connections between the United States, France, and the Caribbean, with its various communities of free and enslaved people drawing contrasting conclusions about the meanings, aspirations, and promises of these revolutions. In these moments, the local and the global interacted in ways that had profound implications for society and politics in South Carolina and, in particular, on the institution of slavery. Both the enslavers and the enslaved in South Carolina were caught up in another powerful cultural movement during this period. For enslaved men and women, it was the promise of emancipation not in this life but in the hereafter; for their owners, the hope of eternal reward followed from their embrace of the ethic of Christian stewardship. During the war, the church’s

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power and authority in the province had waned. After a series of revivals organized by Baptist and Methodist ministers, upcountry farmers returned to the church, participating in the region’s re-­Christianization, with ministers reasserting their spiritual and community leadership. Grounded in the world of the meetinghouse and the household, evangelical Christianity would prove as powerful in shaping the lives of masters and slaves as the revolutions that had convulsed the late eighteenth-­century Atlantic.

The Postwar Backcountry In April 1784, planter and lawyer William Drayton clambered into his carriage and, driving along dilapidated roads, set off to inspect the upcountry, still recovering from the war. After visiting Augusta in the Upper Savannah River Valley, he moved on to Ninety-­Six and then Friday’s Ferry at the confluence of the Saluda and Congaree Rivers, soon to be the site of Columbia, the state’s new capital. Heading home via the High Hills of Santee, he stayed at Camden, and traveled past the battlefield at Eutaw Springs. Although the war had ended three years earlier, its “unhappy consequences” were everywhere visible. At Ninety-­Six, he saw its inhabitants reconstructing “all the Public & private buildings” that the British had destroyed during the fighting. At Camden, he recalled how its soldiers had razed the town, burning anything “which they could not carry away” in an act of “wanton Barbarity.” The human cost was not lost on him, either; he met a veteran wounded at Eutaw Springs as well as a farmer who had been suspended from a tree by loyalists until his captors “cut him down before he was past Recovery.” The partisan war had, he concluded, “dissolv’d not only the Ties of Friendship & Neighborhood, but even of Humanity.” But Drayton also sounded some positive notes, enthusiastically predicting that Ninety-­Six “bids fair to be a place of Trade & Consequence” and would “be soon thickly settled by Emigrants from other States.”12 Not everyone was as sanguine about the region’s prospects, however. So dreary and depressing was Camden, noted traveler John Smyth, that it barely “merited the pains, fatigue, and trouble I have taken to see it.” Collecting plants in the same region, French traveler and botanist François Michaux rode through a monotonous landscape of abandoned fields and farms “deserted by their owners,” estimating that he “scarcely saw twenty where they cultivate cotton or Indian wheat.” Visiting the Congarees in 1789, John Farquharson came to a similar conclusion; the country around Camden was “a desert.” Two

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years later, on his southern tour, George Washington seconded his comment, concluding that the region was “the most miserable pine barren I ever saw.” Depression and hard times lay behind this desolate country of impoverished farms and settlements. Like most farmers in the economically ravaged new nation, upcountry householders were crippled by debt, often facing bankruptcy. Some struggled to make ends meet, but others had simply walked away from their farms, and moved on. Yet some, like tobacco farmers, were faring moderately well even though they faced stiff competition from elsewhere. Indigo, however, was no longer profitable; unable to compete with producers in Central America or South Asia, upcountry planters watched helplessly as the market collapsed overnight. Between 1794 and 1800, indigo exports dropped precipitously, falling from 715,000 pounds to a meager 3,400 pounds at the beginning of the new century. Most farmers would have scoffed bitterly at an article that appeared in the Charleston Evening Gazette in June 1786 that celebrated the region’s prospects and bucolic delights, describing fields “filled with lowing herds” and farmhouses where “the habitations of prosperous industry” had supplanted “the drowsy haunts of indolence.”13 Debt rather than indolence presented the most severe challenge, however. The problem was not unique to South Carolina; in late 1786, the state’s newspapers began running short accounts about the uprising led by Continental Army veteran Daniel Shays in western Massachusetts as indebted and impoverished farmers seized local courthouses, forced judges to adjourn foreclosure hearings, and marched on the Federal Armory in Springfield. Unlike the situation in Massachusetts, however, the crisis in South Carolina was not limited to one region; lowcountry planters were just as likely to be on the verge of bankruptcy as their inland counterparts. The “rage for running into debt,” noted Judge Henry Pendleton, had become “epidemical.” If “credit for purchases was to be obtained,” he continued, then “no price was too high” to acquire land and enslaved laborers. Currency shortages, along with the reorganization of commercial relations with the British Caribbean, a major market for the lowcountry’s agricultural produce, further exacerbated the crisis.14 Planters’ determination to reconstruct their estates and rebuild their labor forces fed a volatile credit market in which British merchants played a leading role. Recognizing “the great demand . . . for slaves & being the only persons possessed of capital,” they had “early imported vast cargoes from Africa,” thus positioning themselves to dominate the market in slaves and credit. Local planters now had no choice but to accept their exorbitant rates for borrowing money, with some paying as much as 75 percent interest on their loans.

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But the irksome presence of British merchants as well as their extortionate rates fostered deep resentment. Led by former privateer and merchant Alexander Gillon, Charleston artisans formed the Marine Anti-­Britannic Society in 1783. Angered by the significant influence that their former enemy wielded over the local economy, its members took to the streets, published pamphlets attacking predatory lending practices, and held “a very elegant dinner” to mark the day when “the British Foe had fled from the State” on 14 December. With several British trading houses going bankrupt in the mid-­1780s, merchants closed client accounts and demanded immediate payment for all outstanding debts. By 1785, with borrowers unable to meet their obligations as the inevitable day of reckoning approached, debtors took matters into their own hands. They demanded a moratorium on cases brought by creditors for nonpayment. This, in turn, prompted “universal alarm,” as Charleston attorney Timothy Ford noted; the courthouse became the “resort” of creditors and an object of “terror and hatred” for their clients.15 In the backcountry, angry and insolvent farmers from the countryside surrounding Camden opted for direct action. Arriving at the Court of Common Pleas in April 1785, Judge John Grimké learned that they had “planted out centinals to intercept the sheriffs” arriving from the High Hills of Santee and the Black River, and planned “to interrupt the proceedings.” Learning that “Malcontents” were in Camden trying to dissuade lawyers “from appearing in their Client’s Cause,” Grimké denounced their tactics, impaneled a jury, and convened the court; he presided over a tense courtroom in which jurors, plaintiffs, and the clerks were in a state of “unusual agitation” while irate defendants announced their intention “to pay none of their old debts.” The next day, agitation turned to collective rage. With crowds gathering outside the court house, the judge was soon “a prisoner” inside the building. Unnerved by angry farmers, jurors “quitted the Town with precipitancy and apprehension” while Grimké, after learning that the demonstrators had “approved of the intermission of the proceedings of the Court of Common Pleas,” also slipped away. This was not the only occasion when farmers threatened court officers. After receiving a series of writs from a deputy, Hezekiah Maham, a backcountry war veteran, forced the official to eat the documents. In Barnwell County, Savannah River Valley farmers burned down the courthouse while elsewhere a crowd pelted Judge Thomas Waties with mud and dung as he made his way to court. 16 Disturbances outside courthouses were not the only acts of lawlessness in the postwar upcountry. The widespread destruction of property and the

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killing of civilians during the Revolutionary War—one traveler reported that there were no fewer than twelve hundred war widows in Ninety-­Six District alone—had left deep divisions that prompted acts of retribution and revenge, with an incident at Ninety-­Six in late 1784 illustrating its bitter legacy. Matthew Love, who had ridden alongside “Bloody” Bill Cunningham during his killing spree in the western backcountry in late 1781, had murdered “former neighbours & old Acquaintances” in cold blood, playing his fiddle while they were being lynched. After the war, Love returned from East Florida to Ninety-­Six only to be arrested and imprisoned; Judge Aedanus Burke dismissed the case and released Love. Enraged by the decision, a “party of men, as respectable for good character and service in the war,” kidnapped Love, who was held “in universal execration” by the community. Dragging Love to a nearby tree where, despite his pleas about “the injustices of killing a man without a trial,” the crowd hanged him.17 The end of the Revolutionary War inaugurated another crime wave. On one occasion during Drayton’s travels, horse thieves forced him to take “a safer, but a very disagreeable Road along the South Side of the Saluda.” Farmers in Orangeburg complained about patrols so ineffective that “depredations [were] committed with impunity,” while Edgefield County householders demanded an end to the activities of “the large number of strolling men” who inflicted “great injury on the peaceable inhabitants of this county.” In Ninety-­Six District, mounted robbers nearly immobilized local trade. A string of burglaries conducted “in open daylight” near Fishing Creek led William Bratton, who represented York County, to call for patrols to “clear our Country of such rascals that are now distressing the whole neighbourhood.”18 Lawlessness combined with the debt crisis forced the legislature to act. In 1784 and 1785, alarmed by the large number of “citizens . . . threatened with total ruin, by having their property seized for debt” and anxious to effect “speedy and effectual relief ” to avert any further disorder, lawmakers increased the amount of paper money in circulation, allowed debtors to settle accounts with land rather than with cash (no property could be sold for less than three-­quarters of its appraised value), and extended the period required to reach a settlement. Recalling the upheavals caused by the Regulators in 1767, the General Assembly dispatched ranger companies to round up bandits, and it passed laws “for the Suppression of Vagrants and Other Idle and Disorderly Persons” in early 1787, punishing those who go “about the country swapping or bartering horses or negroes” as well as “all persons who acquire a livelihood by gambling or horse racing.” The Assembly also set $6,000 aside

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for a new courthouse and jail in Ninety-­Six and a further $1,500 to repair the dilapidated courtroom and jail at Cheraws; it also ordered “a pillory, whipping post, and stocks” for Spartanburg.19 But the livelihoods of the region’s farmers depended on more than debt relief and new vagrancy laws. Their prospects also rested on an effective infrastructure and an ability to transport their goods to market quickly and cheaply. As Italian traveler Luigi Castiglioni noted, moving agricultural produce from its source to its point of sale, combined with “the great expense necessary to send European goods inland,” led to high prices. The transportation network was primitive, with most roads no more than muddy, rutted tracks. During fall and winter, the road from Orangeburg inland was virtually impassable; not only was it constantly “covered with water,” but exasperated travelers often had to wade “up to their middles” along its path. Using rivers to transport goods could be equally hazardous; not only were they prone to seasonal flooding but some, including the Pee Dee and the Santee, meandered through miles of dense swamp, making them nearly impossible to navigate. But rather than spend money on improving roads or clearing rivers, the legislature convened a commission to look into the state’s dilapidated transport network.20 In March 1786, a consortium of enterprising planters and merchants incorporated a company to build a canal designed to open “an inland communication between the interior parts of this State and the city of Charleston.” Twenty-­two miles long, the canal would link the Cooper River, which rises about fifty miles from the coast and flows into Charleston Harbor, and the Santee River, whose watershed includes the Saluda, Broad, and Wateree Rivers that drain the large areas of the upcountry. Among the men who gathered at Charleston’s City Tavern in late March were a number of prominent political leaders, attorneys and Revolutionary War veterans, including Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion, who recognized a new reality in the making: The uplands were no longer peripheral to the state’s economic and political life. Furthermore, the geographic origins of the men who petitioned the government to establish the Santee Canal Company further reinforced this fact, with Aedanus Burke, John Grimké, and John Rutledge among others representing the lowcountry while Joseph Atkinson, William Hill, and John Richardson flew the flag for the interests of upcountry planters. The Assembly’s decision to move the capital from Charleston to Columbia further highlighted the region’s growing influence. Funded by selling shares and a lottery (in 2021 dollars, the canal cost $14.4 million to complete), construction got underway in 1793 when, under the direction of Colonel John Christian Senf and his

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team of surveyors and engineers, more than seven hundred enslaved laborers, requisitioned from local plantations, began the exhausting work of felling trees, draining swamps, and shifting millions of tons of earth to cut a channel twenty-­two miles long, thirty-­five feet wide, and six feet deep that ran through ten locks from Pineville on the Santee to the head of the Cooper River near Monck’s Corner, a short distance from Charleston’s wharves and warehouses. With its completion in 1800, “boats of heavy burden” carried cotton and other agricultural commodities from upcountry plantations to the coast, contributing to the consolidation of commercial agriculture in the interior.21

To the Cotton Revolution In the same year that enslaved “navvies” began excavating the Santee Canal, Eli Whitney put the finishing touches on his latest invention. His cotton gin (a shortened form of the word engine) transformed not just the upcountry districts of South Carolina and Georgia but the economic trajectory of the entire American South. In May 1801, when planter William Buford piloted a vessel “built on his land, and loaded with his own crop” from Pinckney Courthouse in Union County down the newly opened canal, it was a signal moment in the agricultural revolution sparked by Whitney’s machine. Short-­staple cotton (sometimes called green-­seed cotton) proved ideal for backcountry households. A hardy shrub, short-­staple cotton had several significant advantages over its close cousin, long-­staple, or black seed, cotton. As architect Robert Mills noted in his Statistics of South Carolina (1826), not only did short-­staple cotton require a shorter growing season “to bring it to maturity,” but it could be cultivated on “weak or exhausted land.” With only a modest outlay in land, tools, and seed, farmers could join the ranks of commercial cotton producers. Mills estimated that a single acre could yield 250 pounds of clean cotton. Able to withstand “the inclemency of the seasons,” short-­staple cotton did not require the specific growing conditions demanded by long-­staple cotton, which included frost-­free winters and hot, humid summers, factors which limited its production to the lowcountry’s barrier islands, such as Edisto, Saint John’s, Saint Helena, and Hilton Head. The tedious and time-­consuming process of removing seeds from each individual boll also hampered the commercial development of long-­staple cotton. Using cotton gins that frequently broke down or were “so imperfect in all cases and so complex in some,” as Saint James Santee planter Lewis Dupré noted, that they

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hampered rather than improved productivity, many planters simply forced their enslaved laborers to clean and prepare the crop for market manually.22 Planters who farmed short-­staple cotton faced a problem similar to that of long-­staple growers. They required a robust and durable machine that was easy to maintain and operate; it also had to convert the newly harvested crop into cotton free from stems, seeds, and other debris, ready to be baled and sold. It would be a twenty-­seven-­year-­old man from Massachusetts who came up with a solution. Traveling from New England to Charleston to take up a position as a tutor in 1793, Eli Whitney met Catherine Greene. The widow of General Nathanael Greene, who had died seven years earlier, Catherine was the owner of Mulberry Grove, a plantation outside Savannah managed by Phineas Miller, who was also from New England and who married Catherine in 1796. There Whitney learned from Catherine’s neighbors about the difficulties entailed in cleaning short-­staple cotton. “If a machine could be invented,” Whitney noted, “which would clean the cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing both to the Country and the inventor.” Drawing on the mechanical skills that he had learned on his family’s farm in Westborough, Massachusetts, and using his acquaintance with earlier machines to clean cotton, Whitney retreated to a shed on Greene’s property to devise a tool to remove “trash [and] broken seeds” from short-­staple cotton.23 After experimenting with various configurations of rollers and combs to separate seed from lint, Whitney built a full-­scale device that “required the labor of one man to turn it and with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way before known and also cleanse it much better than in the usual mode.” Watching two enslaved laborers turn “green seed cotton” into “64 pds of clean cotton in about nine hours,” Pierce Butler recognized the potential impact of Whitney’s machine; it would exponentially increase the productivity of the region’s plantations. Designed, noted its inventor, with “utility [and] durability” in mind, a cotton gin could be assembled by any “inexperienced workman” with “Great Facility,” a feature that later proved to be a double-­edged sword for Whitney.24 Along with Miller, who was now his business partner, Whitney considered how best to profit from his invention. Rather than build and sell machines to individual planters, the two men set up gins “in different parts of the country before the harvest,” forcing clients to bring their cotton to their ginning yards. Resenting the fee—they paid one pound of “clean cotton fitted for market” for every five ginned—and the inconvenience, planters either built their own machines or bought pirated ones. Concerned more with

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their own profits and productivity than with Whitney’s intellectual property rights, planters continued to use “outlaw” gins, driving the furious inventor into countless lawyers’ offices and courthouses. “I have a set of the most Depraved Villains to combat,” he grumbled, “and I might almost as well go to Hell in search of Happiness as apply to a Georgia Court for Justice.” Exhausted by constantly litigating “the most unprincipled scoundrels . . . in the Southern States” for infringing his patent, which he had applied for in late 1793, he finally accepted a settlement from the South Carolina government for $50,000 in 1801. After four years and yet more legal wrangling, Whitney was still waiting to receive the bulk of his money from the General Assembly.25 By the late 1790s, the upcountry’s first cotton boom was underway with Richland County planters in the vanguard. At Woodlands, the plantation owned by Wade Hampton I on the Congaree River near Columbia, Edward Hooker, who taught at South Carolina College, watched “a number of negroes at work, very busily cleaning the cotton from its seeds” with Whitney’s machine. Earning $90,000 from his first harvest in 1799, Hampton was well on his way to accumulating a large fortune. Within a decade, he was pocketing an annual return of around $150,000 from cotton raised on his estates. He soon extended his agricultural empire across the South, purchasing land in Louisiana for growing sugar cane and plantations in the Mississippi Delta counties of Issaquena and Washington where his sons (Wade Hampton II and Wade Hampton III) managed lands on which more than three hundred enslaved laborers raised cotton. Like Pierce Butler before him, Hooker recognized the “immense benefit produced to the Southern States by the invention of the ingenious Mr. Whitney,” whose gins were now “in universal use,” concluding that “the saving of labor must be prodigious.” By the early nineteenth century, the scenes of enslaved laborers ginning cotton that Hooker witnessed at Woodlands were taking place throughout the Carolina upcountry; by 1810, the lower piedmont counties of Abbeville, Chester, Edgefield, Fairfield, Laurens, Newberry, and Union had become major producers. By 1803, Miller estimated that planters had “raised and cleaned out with the Patent Machinery . . . as much as Ten Million pounds of cotton.” Between 1800 and 1810, cotton exports from the southern states rose from six million to fifty million pounds, with the bulk of the harvest heading across the Atlantic to the mill towns of northern England where an industrial revolution based on textile production was in full swing.26 With enslaved laborers now able to clean cotton quickly and efficiently and with planters determined to expand their farming operations to reap “the

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great profit of cultivating this article,” they looked to increase their holdings in slaves. But here they collided with one of the iron laws of economics: the demand for enslaved laborers far outstripped supply, driving up prices and creating a situation where, as Charleston schoolteacher Charles Caleb Cotton noted in late 1799, “the price of Negroes at present is very high.” Along with the expense of purchasing slaves, a legal prohibition on bringing them into the state exacerbated planters’ problems. Between 1783 and 1787, when the legislature prohibited slaveholders from bringing any enslaved person into the state, more than eight thousand enslaved Africans were transported to South Carolina. The Assembly periodically renewed the law until its repeal in 1803, allowing the Atlantic trade to reopen. The prohibition on the movement of slaves further reduced the pool of bound laborers available for purchase. In Abbeville County in the Upper Savannah Valley, “Sundry Inhabitants and Freeholders” complained that the law was “a direct bar to the increase of the wealth and population of the upper and middle districts.” Rather than settle in Abbeville or other upcountry counties, aspiring planters instead moved to Georgia or Tennessee. The invention that triggered the intensification of plantation slavery and the development of an empire of cotton across the south had also generated a crisis in the market for enslaved workers. In the 1790s, as Whitney embarked on yet more rounds of litigation, state lawmakers began debating whether to reopen the trade in enslaved Africans to meet the growing demand for bound labor.27

Debating Slavery and the Slave Trade This discussion took place during a period of considerable political turbulence and unrest at national, international, and provincial levels. The question of slavery in the new nation had almost derailed the Constitutional Convention, with the South Carolina delegation—Pierce Butler, John Rutledge, Charles Pinckney, and Pinckney’s first cousin Charles Cotesworth Pinckney—presenting a united front in Philadelphia in 1787. Bristling at remarks made by delegates who argued that slavery and the slave trade had no place in the new nation, Rutledge tartly responded that it was unruly farmers in Massachusetts rather than enslaved laborers in South Carolina who threatened the established order. “If the Convention,” he observed, “thinks that North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia will ever agree to the plan [i.e., the Constitution], unless their right to import slaves be untouched, the

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expectation is in vain.” Charles Pinckney supported his colleague, warning that “South Carolina can never receive the plan if it prohibits the slave trade,” while his cousin stated unequivocally that the state “cannot do without slaves.” Eventually, northern delegates yielded ground: a fugitive slave clause enabled owners to recover their property; slaves (or, at least, three-­fifths of their number) would be counted for the purposes of taxation and representation; and Congress could not interfere with the Atlantic slave trade until January 1808, thus allowing individual states, should they so wish, to participate in the trade. But such heated debate was not limited to the floor of the Pennsylvania State House; disputes spilled over to the legislature in South Carolina where representatives, although unanimous in their support of slavery, held divergent views about the need to reopen the trade.28 The business of buying and selling enslaved people had fallen on hard times in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In the decade between the Stamp Act protests of 1765 and the beginning of the American Revolution, Atlantic traders had shipped more than thirty thousand captive Africans to Charles Town. Only when colonial leaders signed the Continental Association in October 1774 did merchants, anxious to demonstrate their loyalty to the radical cause, shutter their operations, agreeing that “we will neither import nor purchase, any slave imported after the first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave trade.” At the same time, The Maria arrived with thirty-­six enslaved Africans from Sierra Leone. Sold by Charles Town merchants Robert Powell and John Hopton, they were among the last Africans to be sold before the war. When The Catherine arrived in Charles Town in March 1775, the authorities prevented its crew from disembarking its cargo of 300 enslaved Angolans, only allowing the captain to reprovision his vessel before he sailed for St. Kitts in the Caribbean. Two months after the Declaration of Independence, the province’s revolutionary government, following a directive from Congress, resolved “that no Slaves be imported into any of the Thirteen United Colonies.” In the five years between independence and the end of the war, only one slave ship—The Fancy, with just over three hundred enslaved Africans from the Windward Coast—dropped anchor in Charles Town harbor.29 The war inflicted serious damage on the lowcountry plantation economy and its enslaved workforce. Not only did many enslaved men and women lose their lives or have their health seriously compromised by malnutrition or by the endemic diseases brought to the region by warring armies, but thousands sailed away when the British evacuated Charles Town in December 1782. For

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planters, the exodus only exacerbated their manpower difficulties. In 1785, Charleston attorney Timothy Ford summarized their problems. On returning to his estate, the planter, “finding himself much distressed at the conclusion of the war,” discovered “his plantation torn to pieces; his stock of negroes gone & his creditors pushing for payment.” Moreover, a run of poor harvests in the mid-­1780s led to greater indebtedness for planters. But with the resumption of the Atlantic trade in 1783, planters threw caution to the wind in their efforts to rebuild their workforces. The planter, who wanted again to return to his prewar standard of living now had to obtain credit “at whatever rate the British merchants were pleased to fix.” Snapping up “negroes & goods at exorbitant prices,” planters soon found themselves in financial quicksand.30 In March 1787, however, a law that stipulated that “no negroes . . . shall be imported or brought into this State, either by land or water” came into effect, inspired primarily by the state’s poor economic condition. Among the politicians favoring the ban were Butler, Pinckney, and Rutledge, who would later attend the Constitutional Convention. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the other Philadelphia-­bound delegate, opposed the embargo. How did these three men reconcile their votes at the state level with the position that they adopted at the convention? In large measure, lawmakers voted according to geography. Aggregating a series of votes held in March 1787 and then in January 1788, representatives from coastal parishes voted 61 to 17 (78 percent) in favor of the ban, while upcountry legislators voted to open the trade by 29 to 18 (62 percent). Statewide, over 60 percent of the legislature voted to prohibit slaveholders from bringing their enslaved property into the state. But this law had no power beyond South Carolina. Several other southern states continued to participate in the Atlantic trade. In each year between 1783 and 1808, at least one ship arrived in Savannah carrying enslaved Africans, with its merchants importing more than eleven thousand enslaved people over a quarter of a century. In stark contrast, only one slave ship—The Jennet transporting eighty-­one enslaved people from the Windward Coast—dropped anchor at Roanoke in North Carolina in June 1787.31 The men who voted for state prohibitions did so for several reasons. The vast majority of the population of rural lowcountry parishes remained enslaved. In Beaufort District, which consisted of the Sea Islands and the adjacent mainland, for example, there were about four thousand white people living alongside more than fourteen thousand enslaved people (approximately two white people for every seven slaves). Of the district’s 962 white families, nearly six hundred were slaveholders, with twenty-­one families owning a

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hundred or more enslaved laborers. Furthermore, the debate over the trade in 1786 took place amid concerns of growing slave restiveness, with reports circulating about “gangs of runaway negroes” in Saint John’s Berkeley County where they “infest the parish” (here, enslaved people constituted 87 percent of the district’s population). A year later, Thomas Pinckney alerted legislators to fugitive slaves who had first established a maroon community on Belle Isle in the lower Savannah River estuary and then, following its destruction in 1786, had regrouped in the forests and swamps near Bear Creek, where they were committing “divers outrages and depredations.” For slaveholders in the rural lowcountry, maintaining the ban on slave imports helped allay fears of rebellion to some degree. And, of course, there was a powerful economic incentive for enslavers to support the embargo; with no fresh supply of enslaved Africans to meet growing demand, the value of slaves already in the state rose accordingly.32 In speeches and comments to colleagues in the statehouse, lawmakers never once questioned the morality or the viability of the institution itself. Rather, they reaffirmed their unshakable commitment to slavery, using arguments based on race, finances, and social order. In September 1785, previewing an argument later deployed not only at the Constitutional Convention but also in numerous essays on slave management, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney claimed that “this country was not capable of being cultivated by white men;” no planter, he argued, “could cultivate his land without slaves.” John Pringle echoed this sentiment, remarking how the exertions of white men laboring “under the burning sun of August amounted to very little.” In sharp contrast, he continued, “the hardy Ethiopian pursued his task without appearing to feel any inconvenience from the heats that rendered his master enervated and useless.” During the mid-­1780s, the state’s troubled financial situation influenced discussions while the French Revolution and its subsequent impact on France’s Caribbean possessions informed later debates.33 Addressing the economic problems generated by “the great quantities of negroes now pouring in on us” in September 1785, lawyer and jurist Thomas Bee argued that the slave trade was “the one great cause of our present calamities.” The “rage for negroes” had thrown “the balance of trade greatly against us,” creating deficits, and further contributing to the financial problems of the profligate planter who, finding “the sight of a negroe yard . . . too great a temptation,” proceeded “to increase his stock” with little idea “of how they were to be paid for.” Between January 1783 and March 1787, about eight thousand enslaved laborers disembarked in Charleston, with many destined

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for plantations that had been “plundered, and every negroe swept away” during the Revolutionary War. Recognizing the danger of buying slaves on credit, David Ramsay argued that financially troubled planters would rapidly become bankrupt. Rather than meet their current obligations, he feared that they would seek “greater credit” to acquire more slaves.34 But the “rage for negroes” was not the sole cause of planters’ problems. Spending on fashionable consumer goods was another reason. For lowcountry planters anxious to reestablish their credentials as political and civic leaders, luxury imports were necessary accoutrements to their lives. Several travelers disapprovingly noted how, despite the hard times, elite families persisted in lavishing “much money upon the objects of luxury,” and remained in thrall to “the alluring baits of pleasure.” Castiglioni, who traveled extensively up and down the Eastern Seaboard between 1785 and 1787, was struck by how wealthy men spent large sums on “fine arts, dance, and music” in their efforts to imitate “European customs [and] those of other capitals in the United States.” They also filled their pantries with exotic foods, including coconuts, bananas, and oranges, items that signaled refinement, from “the Antilles and other southern countries.” Unwilling to forgo imports and with no domestic “manufactories” to produce consumer luxuries, the elite instead purchased “articles of foreign production,” which only deepened the trade deficit.35 The value of enslaved labor also influenced these debates. The laws of supply and demand dictated that maintaining the ban on slave imports would, as Charleston representative William Loughton Smith recognized, “greatly enhance the value of those in the state.” By selling surplus slaves to upcountry farmers eager to acquire laborers, lowcountry planters could conceivably pay down their debts. Robert Barnwell, a veteran of the war in the backcountry, summarized this position when he observed that “the value of this species of property would be considerably diminished” should lawmakers lift the ban, reducing their price by “one half of what they might be sold for.” Not everyone saw the lowcountry as a source of surplus labor, however; Smith argued that owners would be unwilling to part with their most valuable laborers and instead send any “superfluous negroes, at present sunk in indolence” from their town houses in Charleston “to their plantations.” The presence of enslaved laborers allegedly “sunk in indolence” played on white fears of slave unrest while those accustomed to the urban milieu would receive a nasty shock when their owners forced them to labor in muddy rice fields.36 Upcountry planters thought differently about the slave trade. Farmers in Abbeville District argued that the ban on allowing enslaved laborers from

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other states to enter South Carolina deterred white migrants from settling in the region. Coming from Virginia and elsewhere “with their Negroes and other property,” families who planned to settle “among us” were “stopped on our frontier.” Forced to move on, they then headed for “Georgia or Tennessee.” Accordingly, Abbeville and other Upper Savannah Valley neighborhoods had been “deprived in a great measure of the means of increasing her population, and of the wealth and industry of a number of honest and respectable settlers.” In this formulation, which echoed the township scheme of the 1730s, the future of the postwar upcountry depended less on the availability of newly imported Africans to meet the demand for labor and more on the ease with which white planters and their enslaved laborers could settle.37 The ban did not prohibit every slave from entering the state, however. Slaveholders who had evacuated their enslaved laborers away during the Revolutionary War could petition to return with their property. Barnwell asked to bring between fifty and sixty enslaved workers back from Georgia so that they could raise cotton, which had now become “so valuable.” He was not alone; planters from neighboring states, including William and George James, petitioned to return with their enslaved laborers from Virginia for “the purpose of cultivating cotton.” Some, like James McNish, petitioned to bring in nearly seventy enslaved laborers from “the Musketo coast” of eastern Nicaragua “not for the purpose of selling, but for settling and residing in the State.” Others simply sidestepped the law and smuggled enslaved laborers into the interior, a fact not lost on Governor James Richardson who berated “the citizens in the frontier districts [who] do accumulate this property without the possibility of being detected,” while planters in “the middle districts” were less successful in evading “the vigilant eyes of the government.” Regardless of whether slaveholders were complying with the law or actively evading it, their appetite for more enslaved workers remained undiminished.38

Slavery, Politics, and the Atlantic Revolutions of the 1790s The debate over the slave trade was not the only significant issue to challenge the state’s political leaders in the 1790s. In late 1791, Philibert François de Blanchelande, the governor of the French colony of Saint-­Domingue, informed Governor Charles Pinckney about the outbreak of a massive uprising by enslaved laborers on the Plaine du Nord, the heart of the colony’s sugar economy, that had broken out at the end of August. The rebellion, de

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Blanchelande reported, had created “the utmost confusion and horror” across the region, leaving dozens of plantations in ruins. Armed with machetes, blazing torches, and other weapons, thousands of enslaved laborers had, “with the most undistinguished fury,” incinerated “the richest and most valuable part of that once happy country.” By the time the governor’s letter landed on Pinckney’s desk, insurgent slaves had burned thousands of acres of cane fields, destroyed numerous sugar mills, and killed hundreds of planters as well as overseers and other white colonists. The militia, meanwhile, had collapsed “under the fatigue of incessant duty.” In late November, slave trader and commercial agent Nathaniel Cutting, who was stationed in the port town of Le Cap Français (known as Le Cap), reported to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson that the “Ravages of the Insurgents” had spread beyond “the boundaries of the Northern District,” leaving the colony on “the verge of total Ruin.” With sugar mills and plantation houses still smoldering, and with cane fields reduced to cinders, the rebels made overtures to the Colonial Assembly. In exchange for returning to work, they demanded concessions to make their lives more bearable, including a reorganization of the work week whereby slaves would perform plantation labor for three days, work their own land for three and take one day off. Implacably opposed to any sort of new arrangement, the Assembly curtly dismissed the offer; in early January 1792, the rebel slaves resumed the insurgency, raiding Le Cap for supplies, and taking control of several rural districts in the north.39 Without immediate assistance, claimed de Blanchelande, “the scourge which is now laying waste to the most valuable French properties in America” would soon spread to “all neighboring Colonies” in the Caribbean. He asked Pinckney to send soldiers and weapons with “the greatest alacrity” to suppress a revolt that threatened “the annihilation of the American islands.” Even though South Carolina sent no aid—the governor had to inform de Blanchelande that the federal government alone handled foreign policy—the stream of news from Saint-­Domingue generated considerable alarm among state lawmakers. Their concern grew ever more urgent when white refugees from the rebellion-­ravaged island began arriving in Charleston, forcing them to confront head-­on a revolutionary conflict between masters and slaves. With its maritime links to the greater Caribbean, Charleston was a leading vector for the exchange of goods and information, and its slaveholders now feared that the lowcountry might become another Saint-­Domingue.40 In the two years following the rebellions of August 1791, an incendiary combination of insurgent slaves, revolutionary politics, and violent retribution

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brought Saint-­Domingue to the precipice of complete disintegration. A month after the uprising began, U.S. consul Sylvanus Bourne reported that rebel slaves had turned the countryside around Le Cap into “a barren waste” and had adopted the mission statement of revolutionaries in France, noting how “the cry of ‘les droits de l’homme’ is echoed thru their camp.” On 17 September 1792, an army sent by the revolutionary government in Paris under General Étienne Laveaux landed at Le Cap; several days later, France became a republic. Laveaux’s men, along with several commissioners appointed by the National Assembly, which included Léger-­Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, tried to restore order and enforce the new laws that granted civil rights to the colony’s free men of color. It was a daunting task; soldiers vainly struggled to bring legions of insurgent slaves under control while the commissioners tried to convince an openly hostile white community to accept the authority of the National Assembly. In addition, the military situation had grown increasingly dangerous; in 1792, when war broke out in Europe between the forces of revolutionary France and the First Coalition (an alliance of several European powers, including Britain), the colony found itself drawn into a transatlantic conflict. Spain and Britain joined the alliance against France in early 1793, leaving the colony vulnerable to invasion from neighboring Santo Domingo (Spanish) and Jamaica (British). In Saint-­Domingue, the forces of Toussaint Louverture, who had emerged as the key political and military figure in the struggle for liberation, were gaining the upper hand.41 With white resistance to the commissioners growing increasingly violent in Le Cap, Sonthonax made a momentous decision; he granted “freedom to all the black warriors who will fight for the Republic . . . against other enemies, whether interior or exterior” on 21 June 1793. Even though the edict did not grant universal emancipation—it applied only to men ready to fight for the duration of the conflict—it was a signal moment in the history of the abolition of slavery. With reports of freedom spreading fast, insurgents descended on Le Cap from the surrounding countryside. The city exploded in violence, with “sailors on one side and the slaves on the other.” An eyewitness reported that “fire has consumed many of the houses . . . [and] the disorder continually increases.” With Le Cap in flames and its white residents either dead or fleeing for their lives, the town simply “ceased to exist.” Within a few months, the institution of slavery, too, ceased to exist throughout the French empire.42 In late August, Sonthonax completed the task begun two months earlier. Without consulting the government in Paris, and stepping well beyond the limits of his authority, he issued a Decree of General Liberty; the French

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Republic, it proclaimed, wants “all men to be free and equal with no color distinctions” and all “Negroes and Mixed-­Bloods currently in slavery are declared free to enjoy all the rights attached to French citizenship.” It marked the moment when slavery was abolished on Saint-­Domingue. The National Convention in Paris would ratify Sonthonax’s decision in February 1794. It then took an even more dramatic and revolutionary step when it voted to emancipate slaves throughout the French Empire: “All men living in the colonies, without distinction of color,” it announced, “are French citizens and enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.” For Georges Danton, a leading architect of the revolution, this vote constituted an epochal moment in a revolution in which he had played so central a part; “Generations to come will glory in this decree,” he told his fellow delegates, “we are proclaiming universal liberty.” It was a transformational moment in the history of Atlantic slavery and abolition.43 The sudden abolition of slavery on Saint-­Domingue combined with the destruction of Le Cap in late June 1793 had a dramatic effect on South Carolina. With “fire in all the streets” and with “drunken looters carrying weapons” on the rampage, the city’s white residents ran for their lives, heading to the harbor and desperate to board any ship bound for North America. In June and July, the major port towns along the Eastern Seaboard as well as New Orleans became disembarkation points for hundreds of white refugees fleeing the colony, many arriving with the men and women that they enslaved, and seeking sanctuary “from the sword and from the flames.” In Charleston, civic leaders held concerts and arranged for a special performance of Henry Brooke’s The Tragedy of the Earl of Essex to raise funds for the newcomers while the Assembly set aside money after Governor William Moultrie asked for a supplement to these charitable efforts. But refugees “destitute entirely of the Means of Subsistence” forced white South Carolinians to contemplate matters far more serious than planning another fundraiser.44 That the plantation regimes of the lowcountry and Saint-­Domingue bore several striking similarities did not escape the notice of local and national leaders. Governor Pinckney noted “how nearly similar the situation of the Southern States and St. Domingo are in the profusion of slaves” and expressed concern “for your situation” in a letter to Saint-­Domingue’s beleaguered government. The sheer scale and intensity of the 1791 uprising reignited white southerners’ pervasive fear that their enslaved laborers might follow in the footsteps of their counterparts on Saint-­Domingue, a point not lost on Pinckney who feared that American slaveholders might find

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themselves “exposed to the same insurrections.” Contemplating the geopolitical consequences of the revolution on Saint-­Domingue, Thomas Jefferson feared an impending apocalypse. Not only did he believe that slaveholders would be driven from “all the West India islands . . . sooner or later,” leaving them in “the hands of the people of colour,” but he was also apprehensive that rebellion would spread to the North American mainland. Writing to James Monroe in 1793, he issued a grim prediction of “the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of Patowmac) [will] have to wade through and try to avert them.” Four years later, with British forces on the island facing defeat at the hands of Louverture’s men, and with the general consolidating his power, Jefferson again considered the impact of the conflict on Saint-­Domingue, concluding that the rebellions constituted the “murmura venturos nautis prudentia ventos” (the breeze warning sailors of the coming gale), the prelude to a revolutionary storm that was “now sweeping the globe.”45 The concerns of Jefferson, Pinckney, and other white leaders were not entirely misplaced. With refugee planters and their enslaved retinues arriving in Charleston throughout the summer, the potential for disorder among the city’s enslaved people triggered fears of rebellion in its white community. The fanfare that greeted the arrival of L’Embuscade, the frigate carrying French diplomat Edmond-­Charles Genêt, (Citizen Genêt), further contributed to the climate of revolutionary fervor. During the summer and autumn, a series of incidents, including a string of mysterious fires that caused significant damage to several buildings and the murder of a local physician and overseer by a gang of enslaved men, all pointed toward imminent unrest. In August, Charleston militia commander Colonel Arnoldus Vanderhorst instructed his officers to break up “large meetings of Negroes,” noting that “the peace of our country and the lives of our fellow citizens are depending on our punctual and vigilant conduct.” Two months later, the New York Journal published a letter that reported on the concerted efforts of “St. Domingue negroes,” who had tried to break into Charleston’s powder magazine, to sow “the seeds of revolt.” Moreover, the city’s slaves and free Blacks had “become so insolent” that the white community was now forced “to keep a constant guard.” A month later, Jefferson learned that two refugees from the island—a “small dark mulatto,” named Castaing (possibly Charles Guillaume Castaing, a free man of color from Le Cap), and “a Quarteron, of a tall fine figure” called La Chaise—were traveling from Philadelphia to Charleston “with a design to excite an insurrection among the negroes.” Even though Jefferson exhibited

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some skepticism about the quality of this intelligence, he passed it along to Moultrie, who kept the militia on alert.46 As Jefferson feared, the politics of insurrection did travel from the Caribbean to the mainland. In April 1795, two years after Le Cap’s destruction, enslaved plantation workers in Point Coupée Parish in French Louisiana organized a revolt only to have their plans discovered at the last moment, resulting in the execution of twenty-­three slaves. Not only had reports about the abolition of slavery in the French Empire circulated through the parish, but a copy of a book containing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) had been discovered in a slave cabin on Alma Plantation, a sugar estate owned by Julian de Lallande Poydras. In Richmond, Virginia, Gabriel Prosser, who led a failed plot in 1800, drew inspiration from Saint-­ Domingue, contributing to yet more angry reactions to the French Revolution by southern slaveholders. Replying to John Cowper, the mayor of the seaport town of Norfolk, who had expressed concern about “the presence of many people of colour there from the West India Islands [i. e. Saint-­Domingue],” and the possibility of unrest, James Monroe, the state’s governor, observed that “the scenes which are acting in St. Domingo must produce an effect on all the people of colour in this and the States south of us, more especially our slaves, and it is our duty to be on guard to prevent any mischief resulting from it.” In South Carolina, Governor John Drayton followed Monroe’s lead, ordering the militia to “search all Negro houses for arms and ammunition.”47 When Genêt landed in Charleston to a rousing welcome in April 1793, planters again felt the reverberations of the French Revolution. Instructed to negotiate with Washington’s administration to forge an alliance that would give France the upper hand in the New World, Genêt also wanted American ports closed to British shipping and open to French privateers. He also hoped to gain support for incursions against Louisiana (in Spanish hands) and Canada, where he hoped its inhabitants would “free themselves from the yoke of England.” Working alongside French consul Michel-­Ange-­Bernard de Mangourit, Genêt spent many hours during his time in the city playing secret agent and agent provocateur whose efforts were more cloak than dagger; he tried to obtain “dependable and trustworthy information . . . about East Florida and New Orleans,” dreamed up expeditions against Saint Augustine and New Orleans by “a Revolutionary Legion of America,” and tried to spread the gospel of the French Revolution.48 In addition to recruiting a few sailors for filibustering expeditions against the Spanish, the two Frenchmen also monitored the city’s community of

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white refugees who, “arriving in numerous swarms from St. Domingue,” laid the blame for the destruction of their homes and livelihoods squarely at the feet of the revolutionary government, with their rage only deepening when news about Louis XVI’s execution in January 1793 arrived. Genêt’s plotting and intrigue ultimately came to naught, however. Most people in Charleston, noted David Ramsay, wanted “peace with all the belligerent powers” and had little appetite for foreign adventurism. Traveling overland to Philadelphia, the new nation’s capital, Genêt received a warm welcome in Camden, where town intendant Isaac Dubose publicly praised the French for their “invincible spirit of liberty” and “their ardent desire of making man happy by making him free.” With these encomiums doubtless ringing in his ears, the diplomat continued on his journey north. In mid-­June, however, the discussions between the French and the Americans broke down when Genêt, openly defying instructions issued by Washington’s administration, commissioned a captured British ship for a privateering expedition. By late summer, John Grimké, a judge and prominent member of the lowcountry elite, noted that the Frenchman had worn out his welcome by “transgress[ing] the bounds of prudence and common civility.” Taking advice from Alexander Hamilton and Jefferson, Washington’s administration opted for a policy of neutrality after France declared war on Britain in April 1793. Instead of returning to France, Genêt remained in America, ending his days on a Hudson Valley farm in 1834.49 By the late 1790s, the widespread support that the French Revolution had once enjoyed with the public was in steep decline. The volcanic unrest on Saint-­Domingue, as well as the end of slavery in the French Empire, only deepened white southerners’ anxieties about the revolution and its trajectory. The threat of insurrection remained undiminished; in late November 1797, aided by an informant, Charleston authorities uncovered “a Conspiracy of several French negroes to fire the city . . . [and] to act here as they had formerly done at St. Domingo.” After a speedy trial, the two ringleaders—Figaro, owned by a Mr. Robinett, and Jean Louis, the slave of a Mr. Langstaff—were executed. For the Federalists, French revolutionaries were “ruining the cause of genuine republican liberty” by recklessly pursuing policies that aimed “the most deadly blows at our independence.” The outrage fostered by the XYZ Affair in 1797, along with French-­sponsored privateers seizing American merchantmen (with Britain and France formally at war, any ship carrying so much as a button made in England might be confiscated), led to calls for action. Addressing grand jurors in Beaufort and Orangeburg in November 1798, Judge Grimké questioned French policy, entreating his audience to

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“beware of their offers and their ministers, least the unsuspecting sincerity of our hearts lull us into a dangerous security” while schoolteacher Charles Cotton noted that “the people are struck with detestation at the conduct of the French.” A few months earlier, after Congress had authorized the miscellaneous collection of ships that comprised the U.S. Navy to engage French privateers along the southern coast and in the Caribbean, the undeclared Quasi-­War broke out in early July 1798 when the U.S.S. Delaware, captained by Stephen Decatur, captured La Croyable off the coast of New Jersey.50 The turbulent political climate provided an opportunity for local commentators to air their views on slavery, generating an early iteration of the proslavery arguments that would prove so powerful a tool in the creation of southern radicalism in the 1850s. A few commentators addressed the repercussions of reopening the slave trade while others strove to paint a broader picture. Several argued to maintain the ban; in his Observations on the Impolicy of Recommencing the Importation of Slaves (1791), David Ramsay argued that “an inundation of negroes cannot fail of overwhelming the state with a new load of debt” and noted that new arrivals would endanger “our future internal tranquility,” reminding readers that it was “newly-­imported Africans” who had led the “Gullah War” (a reference to the 1739 Stono Rebellion). Reopening the slave trade at a time when “the rights of man are urged to extremes” was inviting disaster, particularly when enslaved people on Saint-­ Domingue had “beggared and butchered” its white residents.51 Writing under the pseudonym “Rusticus,” Alexander Garden worked a similar rhetorical seam. Streets filled with enslaved refugees combined with the abolition of slavery throughout the French Empire constituted an explosive combination, he claimed. Although Garden, a former Revolutionary War soldier and a member of the General Assembly, applauded his fellow citizens’ charitable impulses for taking in “the unfortunate Fugitives from Santo Domingo,” he questioned whether their benevolence served the state’s best interests. “The danger was not to be apprehended from Negroes who followed their Masters to America,” he argued, but in “the circumstances which occasioned their introduction and gave new ideas to our slaves, which the opportunities of conversation with the newcomers could not fail to ripen into mischief.” Even if enslaved refugees brought from Saint-­Domingue had not participated directly in the insurgency, they had witnessed “the dawning hope of their Countrymen to be free” and had watched, literally, in some cases, “the flame of liberty” spread across the island. France’s decision to end slavery and proclaim “the Negro race as Brothers, equally with themselves

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and eligible to all the rights and privileges of free men” was fundamentally at odds with the ideology of white supremacy, the foundation on which the slaveholders’ social order rested. How, Garden inquired, would the “Negroes of Carolina” respond to this radical and, in his eyes, deeply subversive notion that “the most enlightened nation in the world [France]” had embraced?52 Slave owners, Garden continued, had taught their enslaved laborers to “consider themselves as a race inferior to its white inhabitants.” Their efforts had been rewarded, he claimed, with enslaved people submitting “to it without a Murmur,” a gross and inaccurate generalization that stood at significant odds with the province’s long history of slave rebellion and resistance. Revolutionary leaders on Saint-­Domingue had upended that particular argument by abolishing “the slavery of the nègres,” and declaring that “all men living in the colonies, without distinction of color, are French citizens and will enjoy all the rights ensured by the constitution.” Posing a rhetorical question about the aspirations of enslaved refugees from Saint-­Domingue, Garden wondered if the new arrivals would “now tamely submit to the authority of Masters, whom they are taught to abhor as tyrants?” On the contrary. They would, he claimed, be “encouraged to mischief by the multitude of Miscreants harboured amongst us. . . . Revenge and Liberty will be their only theme.” Not only did Garden claim that slaves from Saint-­Domingue currently in Charleston would spread “the full force of this dangerous doctrine,” becoming vectors of revolution, but he also suspected that “a Society corresponding with that which the French term Les Amis des Noirs,” the leading abolitionist society in France, was at work in the city.53 He further argued that the ruling class on Saint-­Domingue had failed to live up to its duties and obligations, conducting itself in a “pusillanimous & weak” fashion during the rebellions. No longer willing to bow before “their imperious task masters,” Toussaint’s men had realized “the consciousness of their own superior strength” by driving out “Timid Colonists,” successfully beating back “the disciplin’d armies on one of the most powerful Monarchs in the World.” Some enslaved refugees in Charleston, Garden claimed, were even trying to return to the colony so that they might “take up the struggles of their countrymen to be free.” If Carolina’s slaveholders persisted in burying their heads in the sand, and maintained their insouciant pose of “languid indifference” in the face of these dangers, he feared that “the rain [will] come upon us like a Whirlwind.”54 Others adopted a less alarmist stance. In A View of South Carolina (1802), John Drayton offered a Whiggish interpretation of the history of slavery in

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the province that sought to distance the mainland colony from its Caribbean counterpart. The story of the institution in South Carolina was, he believed, a story of progress. Over time, he claimed, the material lives of enslaved p ­ eople had improved significantly; “with their houses, their gardens, their fields, their dances, their holydays, and their feasts,” they enjoyed conditions “superior to the poor whites of many nations.” He also compared their existence to “the negroes in Africa,” where “force, oppression, and injustice are great engines of their government” and where people were “sold for the luxury of their princes.” In contrast, enslaved Carolinians lived and worked under the benign guardianship of “good masters” who assigned them “certain tasks which are not unreasonable.” Moreover, protected by humane owners who provided land on which to raise food “for their own use, or sale,” slaves were, Drayton concluded, “happy and contented.” Such claims became common tropes in the speeches and essays of the post‒Haitian Revolution era; when Alexander Boling Stark addressed state representatives in 1805, for example, he noted that it was “a piece of humanity to bring them from Africa” to the farms and plantations of South Carolina to labor.55 These writings contributed to the development of a secular proslavery discourse in the postrevolutionary South. The seismic impact of events on Saint-­Domingue, combined with the reopening of the slave trade, pushed slavery back into the spotlight. The state’s political leaders reacted against the establishment and the slow but inexorable growth of organizations—the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (1789) and the New York Manumission Society (1785), for example—bent on ending slavery. Commentators expressed their unease at the growing number of free Blacks, the rebellious characteristics of newly imported Africans, and the steady drumbeat of northern interference. The destruction of slavery on Saint-­Domingue along with white fears that a Black Spartacus, who would emulate Toussaint Louverture, might appear on the American mainland to liberate the enslaved became powerful motifs in these proslavery writings. At the same time, generic arguments about the necessity of enslaved labor without which “lands of excellent quality . . . would revert to a state of nature” became commonplace as did the conceit that people of African descent were better off enslaved in South Carolina than free in their homelands. And, as we shall later see, ministers also contributed to the growing library of proslavery writings, drawing on the Bible to fashion scriptural justifications in support of the institution.56 In December 1803, the lucrative business of trading captive Africans resumed. A month earlier, Governor James Richardson noted that the

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embargo on “the importation of negroes . . . has been without success,” a sentiment echoed by Charleston lawyer Thomas Lowndes in the U.S. House of Representatives when he observed that “for the last year or two, Africans were introduced into the country in numbers little, I believe, of what they would have been had the trade been a legal one.” White South Carolinians, he continued, had witnessed the unedifying “spectacle” of the state “having its authority daily violated” while planters evaded the law, blatantly purchasing enslaved Africans smuggled in by unscrupulous traders. But Lowndes’s argument that it was better to “remove from the eyes of the people” an ineffective and unenforced law was no more than rhetoric. By reopening the Atlantic slave trade, both merchants and the state would reap considerable financial benefits in the form of profits and tax revenues while planters could expand their enslaved labor forces. With the acquisition of the Mississippi Territory in 1798 and the Louisiana Territory five years later, another five hundred million acres was added to the national patrimony, land ripe for exploitation by planters now equipped with cotton gins. Addressing an audience gathered in Saint Michael’s Church in Charleston to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase, David Ramsay noted that the new territory was sufficiently vast for “plantations enough . . . for our children and our children’s children,” although he failed to mention that the laborers clearing the land for future generations and then working in their fields would be enslaved. The addition of the Louisiana Territory, along with the undiminished demand for enslaved laborers by planters in the state’s cotton counties, who were now “rich enough to buy slaves,” as lawmaker Henry DeSaussure put it, created two powerful arguments for reopening the Atlantic trade and provided Charleston’s merchants with a golden opportunity to make a significant amount of money.57 No sooner had merchants and mariners learned that the General Assembly had lifted the ban than, as Charleston bookseller Ebenezer Thomas noted, “vessels were fitted out in numbers for the coast of Africa.” And, he continued, “as fast as they returned, their cargoes were bought up with avidity.” From that day forward, Thomas watched as “my business began to decline.” With “large sums of money laying idle in the banks,” planters now purchased enslaved laborers rather than books. In the ten months between the arrival of 329 enslaved Africans from the trading posts of Bonny and New Calabar on the Bight of Biafra aboard the Governor Dowdeswell (thirty-­seven died during the ocean crossing) in February 1804 and December, when The Mary, carrying eighty-­seven slaves from the Gold Coast dropped anchor in Charleston Harbor (twelve captives died on this voyage), more than six thousand

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enslaved Africans were imported. Of the fifty-­five thousand enslaved p ­ eople who were jammed into the holds of the slave ships on the African coast between the reopening of the trade in late 1803 and 1 January 1808, when the federal ban came into effect, approximately forty-­six thousand survived the Atlantic crossing to disembark in Charleston. Although planters from South Carolina purchased large numbers of newly imported slaves—de Saussure noted that “most of them are sold to the upper country people”—a significant number of the “final victims” of the trade in humans between Africa and the United States, to borrow historian James McMillin’s phrase, were chained in coffles and, “like mules to market,” marched across the lower South to the lands opened up by the Louisiana Purchase.58

Evangelical Religion and Upcountry Churches The Revolutionary War also had an impact on religious life in the Carolina upcountry. During the conflict, the region’s major evangelical denominations had adopted a range of positions: the Methodists embraced a policy of neutrality, which neither the Americans nor the British fully accepted, while the Baptists and Presbyterians supported the revolutionary cause. Baptist ministers Edmund Botsford and Richard Furman both enlisted; Botsford served as a chaplain in General Andrew Williamson’s regiment, while Furman enlisted in a militia company led by his brother, Josiah. In the immediate aftermath of the fighting, however, the church no longer enjoyed the authority that it had previously. Even though people still attended services, ministers often complained about the “Languishing State of Religion” in the region. “Where,” inquired Furman in 1796, “is the holy fervor, that ardent desire and heavenly mindedness” while his mother-­in-­law Mary McDonald noted that “the Baptist Church is like to be extinct . . . the Methodists also decline.” She also lamented the collapse of morale among ministers, who delivered lackluster sermons and presided over dreary services that made “no impression on the minds of their hearers.”59 Determined to arrest the decline, the clergy set out to rebuild congregations and fashion a message congruent with the renaissance of slavery in the postrevolutionary south. By the early nineteenth century, their efforts to reinvigorate spiritual life had paid off, with camp meetings triggering a significant expansion in membership. Interpreting scripture to argue that slavery constituted a humane form of stewardship, ministers became spokesmen

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for proslavery Christian plantation management. Local church covenants enjoined members to treat enslaved people in the manner that befitted the true Christian; by taking Christ’s invocation that “whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12) to heart, ministers hoped to strengthen the bond between church and slaveholder. And in a clever tactical move, evangelical denominations came to an accommodation over the question of slaveholding among their members. Theological differences among evangelical Protestants along with questions about the morality of slave ownership contributed to a decline in church membership. Both Baptists and Presbyterians had to reconcile the concept of predestination with the message that redemption was available to any person who repudiated the degenerate world and underwent conversion to enter the church as a reborn Christian. Prospective members underwent rigorous tests. To guarantee that only the “truly gracious” joined their church, Baptists demanded candidates “experience an entire change of nature” by demonstrating “knowledge of the Bible to some degree” in front of the congregation before they could be admitted into “the company of saints.” Those unable to meet these exacting admission standards were “set aside” until they offered “a more satisfactory profession” to church members. Not everyone succeeded; at Welsh Neck in the Upper Pee Dee Valley in 1794, for example, forty-­eight of eighty-­six candidates were “set aside” while at Lynches Creek, just forty-­ five out of one hundred and seventeen entered the church in 1797.60 Perhaps the most intractable matter confronting ministers was the moral problem of slavery in an age of evangelical religion. At one end of the spectrum stood the Quakers who, as unequivocal opponents of the institution, had very little impact in the south outside the confines of their conferences and meetinghouses. In early 1797, Quaker Joshua Evans traveled from his home in New Jersey through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia during which he was consistently troubled by the “neglected, degraded condition” of the enslaved laborers and was deeply distressed by the abuse they received at the hands of “hard-­hearted slave holders.” Evans also railed against the children of slaveholders who “trained up in a way to domineer and tyrannize over poor slaves” and, “arrayed in gay and costly clothing,” led lives of idle pleasure in contrast to enslaved youngsters who were “half naked and dirty.” Reflecting on his experiences, he noted: “Oh Horrible! How hath my exercised mind been tried on hearing the odious actions of slave holders.” With other Quakers sharing this sentiment, the first decade of the nineteenth century saw an exodus of Friends’ congregations from the south to

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“the rich lands unpolluted by slavery” in Ohio and elsewhere in the Northwest Territory.61 The Methodists initially shared the Quakers’ revulsion of slavery, condemning the institution as “contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature,” and demanded the expulsion of “all our friends who keep slaves” in 1784. Francis Asbury, an outspoken critic of slavery, had been instructed by his former teacher and Methodist founding father to bring North America into the church’s fold. Pursuing this goal, he rode thousands of miles, preached hundreds of sermons, and wore out dozens of horses. Crossing the coastal plain from Georgetown to Charleston—a city that Asbury regarded as “the seat of Satan, dissipation, and folly”—he passed mile after mile of “rice-­ lands” along the Cooper River where, as he wrote in his journal, he saw “from fifty to two hundred slaves on a plantation in chains of bondage.” He elsewhere attacked “wicked masters” who denied the Bible and church services to their enslaved laborers. But he also recognized the fundamental problem faced by the church in the south; analyzing its antislavery position in 1794, he observed “that if we retain none among us who trade in slaves, the preachers will not be supported, but my fear is that we shall not be able to supply this State with preachers.” The next year, ministers in South Carolina and Virginia repudiated ownership, manumitting enslaved people in their possession and refusing to ordain those who still owned them.62 These efforts notwithstanding, slavery remained a divisive issue. The laity no doubt wondered when the rules preventing ministers from owning enslaved people would be extended into their ranks. The General Conference of the Methodist Church provided the forum for its leaders to thrash out this question. Condemning slavery as “contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature and hurtful to society, contrary to the dictates of conscience and pure religion,” the church remained opposed to slavery until 1804. Putting policy into practice proved to be a much trickier proposition, however. In 1780, the conference agreed to elicit promises from its itinerant preachers to manumit their slaves while making no such demands on ministers who had their own congregations. Three years later, delegates tabled a motion on how to handle “local Preachers who hold slaves contrary to the laws which authorize their freedom.” The 1796 conference urged ministers to exercise caution when admitting “persons . . . to official stations in our church” lest they violate the rules on owning slaves. But ministers gave themselves some latitude when they placed the phrase “the circumstances of the case” into the clause. This equivocation frustrated Asbury, who confided to his diary: “There is not

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a sufficient sense of religion nor of liberty to destroy it [slavery]; Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, in the highest flights of rapturous piety, still maintain and defend it.”63 At the church’s General Conference held in Baltimore in May 1800, the mood to embrace abolition appeared robust. Antislavery delegates introduced resolutions calling for members to free any enslaved child born after 1800, manumit their slaves within a year, and ban any slaveholder from joining the church. Even though the motions were defeated, the conference’s closing declaration would have given slaveholders pause with its unequivocal denunciation of the institution. “We have long lamented the great national evil of NEGRO-­SLAVERY . . . [and] considered it as repugnant to the unalienable rights of mankind, and to the very essence of civil liberty, but more especially to the spirit of the Christian religion.” This open letter ended with a call for church members to “give a blow at the root of this enormous evil,” instructing them to organize petition drives to persuade state lawmakers “in the most respectful but pointed manner, the necessity of a law for the gradual emancipation of the slaves.” Demanding that ministers and the laity “persevere in this blessed work,” its authors closed on a rousing note: “O what a glorious country would be ours, if equal liberty were every where established, and equal liberty every where enjoyed!”64 Unsurprisingly, this incendiary circular letter with the bland but unwieldy title of The Address of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church was greeted with anger when it arrived in Charleston. Although the broadside was meant for widespread distribution, City Intendant Thomas Roper ordered John Harper, a prominent Methodist minister, to burn the offending papers. But incinerating bundles of pamphlets did not prevent angry white Charlestonians from assaulting Harper, who was only rescued by the timely appearance of the city guard. The following night, a mob turned on local minister George Dougherty, who was already suspect in the eyes of many white Charlestonians for running classes for Black children. On this occasion, several men dragged him from a prayer meeting to a nearby pump, where they “turned a continuous current of water upon him till he was well-­nigh drowned.” Only when fellow Methodist Martha Kugley appeared and jammed her apron into the pump’s mouth while “a gentleman, sword in hand,” held off antagonistic bystanders was the gasping and choking Dougherty able to escape. Governor Drayton told the Assembly that the literature produced by the General Conference, which had been “transmitted throughout the state,” was “highly incompatible with the rights of all Southern States.” Concerned

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that their mission to the slaveholding states would be irreparably damaged if they continued to broadcast their abolitionist message, church fathers decided to delete antislavery language from publications bound for the region. In 1808, they mandated that the “section on Slavery . . . be stricken from the Disciplines printed for the South.” The church accordingly published two different editions: one for the southern states with the offending text excised and another for the rest of the country, which included the controversial material.65 But the position formally staked out by the Methodist General Conference and the attitudes held by ordinary ministers were not always congruent. Although many passionately opposed slavery, others were more ambivalent. Jeremiah Norman, an itinerant Methodist preacher who was assigned first to the Bush River circuit and then to the Broad River circuit in upcountry South Carolina, participated in several discussions on the topic. On one occasion, he listened to several people talk about emancipation; on another, he argued that slavery corrupted the master, leading him “to do many things that otherwise he [might] avoid.” Later, reviewing these conversations, he concluded that the enslaved person was made “a sufferer for his complexion” and hoped that masters and slaves might fashion some “equilibrium” to mitigate the institution’s worst aspects. But he remained troubled, confiding to his diary: “Lord, let me know what is right?”66 William Hammett, an Irish-­born minister who had run missions on Jamaica, St. Kitts, and Tortola, among other Caribbean islands, where he found receptive audiences among the region’s enslaved laborers in the late 1780s, moved to Charleston in 1791. Soon after his arrival, Hammett, who soon gained an enthusiastic following among the city’s Methodists, broke with the official church, establishing the Primitive Methodists. Hammett, too, wrestled with the question of slavery. Although he believed the slave trade immoral, he was convinced that tradition and history made slavery itself acceptable. “In a country where custom has been handed down from generation to generation,” he wrote, “it is as innocent to hold as to hire slaves.” Not only did this argument provide Hammett with a rationale for buying slaves— by 1785, he had joined the ranks of the enslavers—but it was also a position embraced by most white southerners. Buying, selling, and owning humans may have troubled some people, but slaveholders and non-­slaveholders alike regarded the enslavement of people of African descent as fundamental to the south’s economic order and as the most effective way to organize social relations between Black and white people. Slavery had become so deeply embedded in the lives of white southerners that they saw it as part of the natural

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order of things. But Hammett also argued that slaveholders had opportunities to prove themselves as benevolent and humane people; “a good man,” he noted, “may render to his slaves every opportunity of improvement, and may free them if he pleases.”67 Hammett expanded on this idea of stewardship in his exegesis of the Epistle of Saint Paul to Philemon. Written between 61 and 63 C.E., the letter addresses the place of slavery within the context of the church through the experiences of Onesimus, an enslaved man owned by Philemon, a Christian convert. Fleeing Philemon’s household, Onesimus ends up in Ephesus, a port on the Aegean Sea, where Paul converts him to Christianity. The fugitive then returns to his owner, delivering a letter in which Paul asks Philemon to accept Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (verse 15). From this story, Hammett concluded that if “slavery . . . was an evil or a sin,” Paul would have enjoined Philemon to free Onesimus; he instead recommended “treatment of a lenient kind,” requesting that Philemon regard the errant slave “as a beloved brother, converted and renewed.” In a few lines, Hammett had sketched the outlines for the discursive frame that would come to underpin the ethic of proslavery evangelical Christianity. The arguments deployed to defend and champion slavery leaned heavily on the pillars of tradition and custom as well as on the evangelical church’s promise to give spiritual guidance to enslaved men and women. Over the coming decades, this discourse would evolve into an elaborate and sophisticated defense of slavery, influencing how the evangelical church would meet its pastoral obligations and shaping the popular mind of the white south.68 In the early nineteenth century, the “long, tedious night of spiritual darkness” drew to a close when fresh opportunities for ministers to evangelize, to recruit new members for their churches, and to introduce the idea of Christian stewardship to the region’s households arose. In August 1801, at the immensely popular and pioneering camp meeting at Cane Ridge in eastern Kentucky attended by thousands, Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright witnessed worshippers undergoing the experience of conversion, falling “prostrate under the mighty power of God.” Sensing that this occasion presaged a seismic cultural shift in the nation’s religious life, ministers increased the tempo of their efforts to spread “the sacred flame and holy fire of God” in Georgia and the Carolinas. In 1802, Methodist minister James Jenkins, who came from the Upper Pee Dee Valley, believed that “Satan’s kingdom” would soon capitulate; in the same year, Baptist leader Richard Furman wrote that these revivals were “a blessed visitation from on High: God grant [that] . . . Thousands more

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partake in its Blessedness and Joy.” But no single denomination could claim credit for this religious renaissance; returning the word of God to the upcountry required ministers from several churches to arrange and conduct camp meetings, the main vehicle for reigniting the region’s religious life.69 Nowhere was this cooperation more apparent than at the Waxhaws, an upcountry settlement close to the North Carolina line. In late May 1802, eighteen ministers (eleven Presbyterians, four Baptists, and three Methodists) organized a revival meeting “on the same principles and plan,” noted Furman, “with those held in Kentucky” where preachers had worked tirelessly, praying, singing, and assisting worshippers “labouring in the pangs of the new birth.” Wanting to replicate the success of Cane Ridge, ministers selected the Waxhaws because of its proximity to “a large settlement of Presbyterians” and significant congregations of Baptists and Methodists. Even so, many traveled eighty or more miles to attend. Held on the old muster field on its outskirts, the nine-­acre meeting ground became a temporary home for more than three thousand, who socialized and slept in serried rows of tents while various ministers took turns preaching and praying from a stage “erected under some lofty trees, which afforded ample shade.”70 To ensure a well-­run meeting, a committee laid out a timetable of daily worship and religious observance. From Friday’s opening service, conducted by Presbyterian minister Samuel McCorkle, to the final amen on Tuesday, a busy schedule of hymn singing, prayer meetings, and sermons fully occupied the congregation. Worshippers also held devotions in small groups; Furman noted that the “voice of praise was heard among the tents in every direction, and frequently that of prayer by private Christians.” Only at Eucharist services did the ecumenical character of the meeting break down, with Baptists abstaining from communion while Methodists and Presbyterians participated.71 Conversion was the desired outcome of the meetings. Walking around the tents and campfires, Furman was impressed by “the engagedness of people.” For those “seriously concerned for the salvation of their souls,” the preaching, praying, and the presence of hundreds of other worshippers provided a fertile environment for spiritual engagement and rebirth. The moment of conversion—when one apprehended the sinfulness and “the wrath of God” before intuiting “a joyful sense of pardoning mercy through a Redeemer”— was sometimes accompanied by bodily disturbances, with some convulsing and collapsing, Furman recalled, “as if struck by lightning.” On a few occasions, however, he thought that he detected an element of theatricality or

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“affectation” among converts, but the profoundly emotional nature of conversion left a deep impression on everyone who attended, even on those people who were not born again.72 On Tuesday morning, the tents were struck, the stage dismantled, and the caravan of worshippers headed back to their farms and settlements. Furman thought the meeting a success, although he did express concern that the number of conversions “was not great in proportion to the multitude attending,” falling short of the droves who experienced rebirth at Cane Ridge. But he had high hopes that worshippers with “an enthusiastic disposition” who had participated at the gathering would find “a favourable opportunity” to breathe new life into the churches in their own communities. Over the next few months, reports trickled in about an “extraordinary revival” that had taken hold in their congregations. The fires of religious enthusiasm spread “across the upper parts of the state, in a western direction,” leading to the establishment of new communities of worshippers. The success at the Waxhaws sparked a summer of revivals. In June, three thousand assembled at Hanging Rock in Lancaster County, where fifteen Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian ministers held services; smaller meetings were held at Heath Springs, also in Lancaster County, and at Nazareth in Spartanburg County, as well as in churches meeting across the piedmont.73 Although camp meetings revitalized religious life, at least one minister questioned their effectiveness after their initial successes. Even though Methodist minister James Jenkins acknowledged that meetings were now better organized and the accommodations less spartan, he thought that the clergy had lost the emotional and spiritual vigor that had characterized the first wave of revivals. Now there were too many diversions; with “too much company in the preachers’ tent [and] too much smoking of tobacco” along with excessive “light, frothy, trivial conversation,” the intensity that had made the first camp meetings so memorable had dissipated. At a gathering on the ­Little Pee Dee, he detected a similar pattern, with participants more concerned with “pound-­cake, preserves and many other notions” than with prayer and spiritual contemplation. But Jenkins’s criticisms notwithstanding, the camp meeting had become an indispensable part of the region’s white religious life and largely responsible for its postrevolutionary re-­Christianization.74 The growth in membership experienced by individual congregations after a camp meeting took place in their neighborhood was a major factor in the institutional revival of the evangelical church. At Bethel (Jamey’s Creek) Church between the Enoree and Tyger Rivers in Spartanburg County, Baptist

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minister Richard Shackleford turned his church into “the storm center” of revival where, on one occasion, he preached to about two thousand when “many fell helpless on the ground.” Just over a hundred new members joined his congregation between 1790 and 1800; in the first three years of the new century, Shackleford baptized more than three hundred. David Lilly reported that the Bethel Association, which administered about sixteen churches in Chester, Fairfield, Newberry, Spartanburg, Union, and York Counties, boasted the addition of seven hundred members. The Methodists grew from around seven thousand to sixteen thousand between 1802 and 1805 while Baptist membership rose by 80 percent between 1800 and 1803. For the indefatigable Asbury, the combination of large camp meetings and smaller church revivals constituted “the battle ax and weapon of war” that would demolish the “walls of wickedness.”75 Enslaved people, willingly or unwillingly, also participated in the backcountry’s re-­Christianization. Led by Furman, backcountry ministers successfully lobbied to repeal the 1800 slave code so that slaves might attend religious meetings. Evangelical churches now accepted slaves into their congregations, thus meeting a major obligation of the ethic of Christian stewardship, the conversion of enslaved people to the religion of their enslavers. Like Edmund Botsford’s fictional “Uncle” Davy, many became “professors of faith,” bringing evangelical religion to the enslaved. Tom, a slave who underwent conversion at a Baptist revival at Padgett’s Creek in Union County in 1799, so impressed local ministers that they let him share “his Gift of Singing, Prayer and Exhortation” with other congregations. What he experienced when he traveled to churches at Head Cedar Shoal, Tinker Creek and elsewhere is lost, but perhaps he helped enslaved people bridge the spiritual gulf between the sacred cosmos of Atlantic Africa and evangelical religion in the backcountry. Just as the fictional Sambo had helped Toney exchange “frolics” for a pious life, Tom perhaps played a similar role on upcountry farms and plantations.76 Church disciplines spelled out how slaveholders should conduct themselves, with masters enjoined to treat their slaves in a humane manner. The covenant of the Baptist church at Cashaway in the Upper Pee Dee Valley instructed members “to avoid acts of cruelty, point out to them the course of duty, and to open the way for them to receive instruction from a preached gospel, and supply them with food and raiment becoming their station.” Although cloaked in the language of benevolence and humanitarianism, this injunction was primarily a method for slaveholders to manage the lives of

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their enslaved laborers. In return, enslaved people had to meet their obligations; “Obedience,” the covenant read, “is due from them to us.” Likewise, in mapping the ground on which Welsh Neck enslavers were to tread, the local church required that they “not treat them [slaves] with cruelty, nor prevent them from obtaining religious knowledge, but at convenient seasons will try to instruct them, and encourage them to attend public worship of the Lord.” They also committed themselves to “restrain them from connecting with sinful assemblies.” Recognizing that the enslaved and their enslavers lived in the same household, church covenants required white families to fulfill their Christian duty and break the law at the same time, by teaching them to read the Bible. Consenting to treat their enslaved laborers justly and “with the levity of the religion we profess,” Welsh Neck slaveholders perhaps believed themselves to be model Christian stewards.77 The church also provided enslaved people with access to a broader community. In May 1804, the Baptist community at Cashaway in Darlington County “met at the water” to witness “the door of experience open” when Santee, Titus, Viney, Chloe, and Dolly were baptized. Living in a county with only twenty-­three hundred enslaved people, these new members probably expanded their network of friends and acquaintances through the church. The next year, people enslaved by Colonel Lemuel Benton were baptized along with Hasty and Ned, the property of James Lide, who joined several other converted slaves on the farm. Enjoining its members “to watch over one another, warn the unruly and lay censure on disorderly and impenitent persons,” these “contracts” obliged owners to monitor and surveil every aspect of their enslaved laborers’ lives.78

Households and Politics The household stood at the intersection of the church and slavery. More than a useful tool for census takers, the household embodied the political and economic independence that planters and farmers prized. In their cabins and houses, noted William Drayton, did “health and independence dwell.” Storeowner, tavern keeper, and owner of several hundred acres on the Broad River in Union County, Michael Gaffney, a migrant from Ireland, offered an astute definition of the householder. “Every farmer or planter is,” he wrote, “his own shoemaker, tanner, tailor, carpenter, brazier. . . . Everything comes by the farmer or his family.” He also incorporated wives and

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daughters into his definition of the household as a center of production. It was their “business . . . to pick cotton and have it brought home, pick it from the seed, spin it, weave it, and make it ready for your back.” In Gaffney, both Thomas Jefferson, the intellectual godfather of American agrarianism, and Hector St. Jean Crèvecoeur, the poet laureate of household republicanism, would have found a kindred spirit.79 Men like Gaffney became the backbone of upcountry politics in the early nineteenth century. With little support, the region’s tiny community of Federalists, whose power lay primarily along the coast, drifted into “listlessness and inactivity,” ceding the field to the Democratic-­Republicans who championed the ideology of agrarian republicanism. Yeoman farmers were integral to Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the nation. They would be the guarantors of virtue and morality, the essential ingredients for maintaining a healthy and flourishing democracy. Beholden to no one and leading independent lives, they would be the bedrock upon which the new nation would be built. “Those who labor in the earth,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), “are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he had made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” By elevating white farmers to this exalted position, Jefferson invested them with cultural and political prominence, while simultaneously rendering enslaved agricultural workers invisible. The “many millions” of enslaved Africans, who “have been brought to, and born in America . . . [and] have been confined to tillage,” were not “the chosen people” even though they performed the lion’s share of cultivating “the fruits of the earth” on southern farms and plantations. Instead, he argued that they were “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” By valorizing white farmers while simultaneously denigrating people of African descent, Jefferson made their labor disappear.80 Visiting Ninety-­Six, which was “Democratic to a man,” during the midterm election season in 1810, Scottish traveler J. B. Dunlop caught these ideas in action. Notable for its “noise & confusion,” election day presented “a lively picture of a Rabble Government in which the Vulgar dictate and where Licentiousness . . . is not limited.” Four years earlier, Edward Hooker also witnessed popular sovereignty at its rambunctious best during a trip to Greenville at the height of the midterm election campaign of 1806. Lemuel J. Alston, William Hunter, and Elias Earle (the incumbent), who were running for the Eighth Congressional District of the U.S. House of Representatives, spent their time “distributing whiskey, giving dinners, talking, and haranguing” voters and

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other passersby. Earle had set up “his grog bench in the middle of the street and presided over the whiskey jugs himself ” while Alston ushered potential voters “into the bar-­room to treat them.” Only Hunter spurned such tactics, remaining in his room and “not mixing with the multitude in the street.” With crowds “drinking, swearing, cursing,” and with handbills circulating that listed “reports of a scandalous and scurrilous nature” on opposing candidates, the town was “a singular scene of noise, blab and confusion”81 Hooker had earlier attended a Sunday church service that revealed far more about local political culture than did the alcohol-­fueled revelries on Greenville’s streets. The occasion bore the hallmarks of a well-­orchestrated campaign event. Visiting a barbecue the previous afternoon, Alston indicated that he would worship at Oolenoy Baptist Church the following day, a comment that generated much excitement among locals who were “considerably prejudiced” in his favor. He proceeded to stage-­manage his appearance at church with consummate skill. When he entered, Hooker noted, “all was attention” with the congregation gazing at him “as at some strange sight.” Throughout the service, Alston paid “the strictest attention to the preacher,” participating “fervently in the prayers.” He greeted every congregant at the door, “taking care to call by name as many as possible, and putting themselves on the terms of old acquaintances.” The “perfect master of the art,” he was so gifted as “to persuade one that nobody could have more cordial attachment to him, or feel greater interest in his welfare.” Alston’s apparent sincerity paid dividends and gained the “good will of all.” A rival candidate failed to generate similar excitement when he appeared in the churchyard, coming across as “awkward,” and exuding “a more than ordinary share of clownish rusticity.”82 Following Alston’s victory, Hooker astutely analyzed the campaign. The day of the election was an important date in the calendar; it brought together people from scattered farms into places like Greenville and Pendleton to hear the candidates speak, to eat their barbeque, and to drink their whiskey. The candidates also contributed to the excitement, flattering voters by informing them that “the fate of the United States depended on their choice.” By inspecting the militia, attending church and greeting worshippers, organizing picnics, distributing whiskey, and addressing the voters, they demonstrated their familiarity with local issues and their ties to the local community. At the same time, their observations about national and international issues signaled their worldliness and qualifications for leadership. Earle, anxious to distinguish himself from rival candidates and to demonstrate his affinity with the voters by treating them because, observed Hooker, he “loved the people

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more than any of them” (i.e., more than the other candidates), sharing a glass with those “who would honor him so much as to come up and partake of his liberality.” Hooker recognized Alston’s churchyard performance for what it was: pure political theater with a consummate performer in the leading role. “A superficial observer,” he continued, “would suppose he really came thither to worship God: but an adept in the science of human nature, would (if a Yankey) be apt to guess that he came to worship the people” who would, he hoped, cast their votes in his favor (he received 40 percent of the vote, while Earle and Hunter got 30 percent each).83 The campaign was emblematic of the revolutionary spirit of ’76, with its emphasis on independence, democracy, and popular sovereignty, and therefore congruent with the ideology of upland householders. Thus, as Hooker dryly observed, Alston had come to the Oolenoy Baptist Church “to worship the people”; after all, it was farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans who constituted the foundation of his political power. Using his position in the community as a member of the local militia, a lawyer, and a landowner, Alston tried to convince voters that he embodied their values. His avuncular efforts in church, at the tavern and elsewhere proved to be a winning strategy. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Alston served alongside seven other Democratic-­Republicans, including Joseph Calhoun, first cousin of John C. Calhoun, that South Carolina sent to the 10th U.S. Congress.84 The election campaign highlighted another aspect of backcountry life. For its inhabitants, the secular world of agrarian slaveholding republicanism and the spiritual realm of evangelical Christianity went hand in hand. In their circular letter of 1812, the Charleston Baptist Association provided its members with their definition of liberty, which constituted “a manner of being, thinking, chusing and acting, free from oppressive, or unreasonable restraint” and “stands opposite to natural bondage and slavery,” a definition that accommodated the worlds of the sacred and the profane. Sinners and slaveholding householders (often one and the same) sought to deliver themselves “from the power of Satan and of sin” as well as the predations of the creditor, and believed that they thought and acted on their own terms. Perhaps the quest for salvation and household independence were not so very different after all. The ethic of the church covenant also resonated with the household; in the case of the Baptists, each church consisted of individual worshippers who, as “one distinct body, for the enjoyment of fellowship with each other,” constituted congregations, with the minister responsible for holding services and for his parishioners’ spiritual and moral health.85

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In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the institutions of the household, the evangelical church, and slavery became the central pillars that supported the region’s social order. The evangelical church provided more than the physical setting and spiritual ethos around which communities formed; it also created an ideological frame within which ministers and other commentators justified slavery with the notion of Christian stewardship. To appeal to the ordinary farmer and his family, it was clad in the language and style of the vernacular, a custom that made the connections between the church and the households of enslavers appear even more organic and natural. At the same time, enslaved men and women on plantations and farms in the interior found themselves trapped in the regimen of cotton production, working under the gaze of their enslavers, righteous in their embrace of evangelical religion.

CHAPTER 9

Denmark Vesey and the Culture of Resistance in Early Nineteenth-­Century Charleston

In 1822, Charleston’s white inhabitants approached the Fourth of July celebrations with considerable apprehension and dread. They still filled the pews of Saint Michael’s Church to hear Robert Elfe’s dramatic recitation of the Declaration of Independence and John Berwick Legaré speak about a world where “the Nations of the Earth shall unite in one great and successful effort for the overthrow of tyranny and the establishment of UNIVERSAL FREEDOM.” They attended picnics and barbeques, socialized with friends and family, and ended the day by watching “a beautiful display of Fire Works,” but they did so constantly looking over their shoulders for any sign of impending danger. Two days earlier, a crowd had gathered “between the hours of six and eight” in the morning to witness the hanging of Denmark Vesey, a free Black carpenter, and five enslaved men at Blake’s Fields, a patch of open ground on the city’s outskirts, after a specially convened tribunal had found them guilty of attempting to bring “anarchy and confusion in their most horrid forms” to the city. Over the next few weeks, the tribunal’s members examined dozens of free Black and enslaved men for “attempting to raise an Insurrection amongst the Blacks against the Whites.” By the time Judges Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker finally ended the proceedings against the insurrectionists in August, another twenty-­nine had gone to the gallows. As the city’s white inhabitants concluded their Independence Day celebrations by applauding the evening’s “display of rockets” put on by the Ancient Battalion of Artillery, more than a hundred enslaved and free Black men sat shackled in the city jail. Little wonder then that when the revelers retired for the night, more than one placed a loaded pistol on the bedside table.1

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Six weeks earlier, as a consequence of an impromptu conversation between two enslaved men, the authorities learned about a plan “to raise an Insurrection.” Bumping into Peter Desverneys, an enslaved laborer owned by John Cordes Prioleau, on the Charleston waterfront, William Paul confided that he and his enslaved friends were “determined to shake off our bondage,” adding that “many have joined, and if you go with me, I will show you a man, who has a list of names who will take yours down.” Stunned by this invitation to join a rebellion, Desverneys demurred, telling Paul that he was “satisfied . . . [and] wished no change in his condition” and was “grateful to my master for his kindness.” Now burdened with “such a secret,” Peter sought advice from William Penceel, a free Black tinsmith, who recommended that he “communicate what had passed.” Peter followed Penceel’s suggestion. Prioleau informed City Intendant James Hamilton, who rapidly convened the council. In turn, its members ordered the arrest of William Paul. Captured and thrown into “solitary confinement in the Black Hole of the Work House,” the terrified Paul, who believed that he would be “led forth to the scaffold,” revealed plans for “the indiscriminate massacre of the whites” in mid-­June. At the same time, Hamilton received information that corroborated Paul’s statement from Major John Wilson, who had persuaded enslaved blacksmith George Wilson, a member of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), to make discreet inquiries. The major subsequently confirmed this information, adding that the insurgents had recruited slaves from the countryside as well as from the city into their ranks.2 On Friday, 14 June, Hamilton mobilized the militia and the constabulary. By the end of the weekend, “the whole town,” wrote planter and politician Robert Hayne, was “encompassed . . . by the most vigilant patrols.” But even squads of armed men on the streets failed to calm the jittery nerves of the white community. One woman remarked how “the passing of every patrol and every slight noise attracted attention,” while another, who had lived through an earthquake, noted that she “never went through such a Night of Terror.” Although dawn brought “a general feeling of relief,” Hamilton’s men remained on alert throughout the week, ready to deal with any disorder. The only white casualty was a young man who, terrified by being murdered in his bed by enraged slaves, had put a pair of pistols under his pillow that accidentally “went off and blew out his brains” while he slept.3 With mounted patrols clattering through the streets, the rebellion’s leaders had no alternative but to reconsider their plans. Breathlessly returning to Vesey’s small house on Bull Street, Jesse Blackwood, who had been

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assigned to lead enslaved plantation laborers from the countryside into the city, informed the leadership that “the guard is too strong tonight.” Blackwood, who had managed to elude two patrols on his journey from the city, was stopped by a third, who ordered him to return to Charleston. The plotters now had to acknowledge that the authorities knew about their planned attack; accordingly, the rebels began to arrange their escape.4 During mid-­June, patrols rounded up and imprisoned more than a hundred enslaved and free Black men. On 22 June, with a “perfect tempest” lashing the lowcountry, Captain William Dove apprehended Vesey in the house of Beck, an enslaved woman who was probably his wife. In addition to mobilizing the constabulary and militia, Hamilton also appointed Judges Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker along with five other prominent citizens to a Court of Justices and Freeholders to examine and pass judgment on the men accused of “attempting to raise an Insurrection.” Starting on 18 June and continuing for the next two months, the tribunal listened to dozens of prisoners and witnesses tell their stories. By the time Kennedy and Parker adjourned in mid-­August, thirty-­five men had been executed and another twenty were preparing to be “transported beyond the limits of the United States.”5 The proceedings were hardly textbook examples of judicial probity. Leafing through its law books, the panel concluded that Vesey and his associates met the legal definition of conspirators—namely, people “that do confeder or bind themselves by oath, covenant or other alliances . . . to maintain their malicious enterprizes.” In these cases, the law permitted the court to hear “the confession of any slave or slaves accused, or the testimony of any other slave or slaves, attended by circumstances of truth and credit,” but it treated such statements with caution. Although Kennedy drafted protocols for the court’s deliberations, its members often fell far short in upholding their own standards. Several defendants were forced to testify in secret while those owners who spoke on behalf of their slaves appear to have been routinely ignored. Finally, Kennedy and Parker neither convened a grand jury to consider the merits of each case nor empaneled a jury to reach verdicts. The defendants’ fate rested in the hands of two justices (Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker) and five freeholders (William Drayton, Nathan Heyward, James Legaré, James Pringle, and Robert Turnbull).6 At least one person found the legal arrangements profoundly unsatisfactory. For Charleston native William Johnson, who was an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court and the brother-­in-­law of Governor Thomas Bennett, the proceedings failed to meet the most rudimentary juridical standards.

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“I have lived to see what I really never believed it possible I should see,” he complained to Thomas Jefferson, “Courts held with closed Doors, and Men dying by Scores who had never seen the Faces nor heard the voices of their Accusers.” With judges “sitting in Conclave & convicting Men upon the secret ex parte Examination of Slaves without Oath, whose names were not I believe revealed even to the Owners of the accused,” he concluded that “if such be the Law of this Country, this shall not long be my Country.” He also aired his concerns in the press. In “Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement,” a piece that appeared in the Charleston Courier in late June, he warned that “popular demand for a victim” would trigger a witch hunt that would pervert the course of justice and result in the deaths of innocent people. In To the Public of Charleston, Johnson again called upon his fellow citizens to withhold judgment until the trials ended. Once he had voiced his concerns, the city’s white residents quickly “took up the cudgels . . . [and] thundered their anathema at him.” In a moment of candor, even Kennedy admitted that the court had not always followed the principles of common law and the rules of evidence, but few had any misgivings; they were more concerned with exacting swift retribution rather than with the niceties of jurisprudence.7 What did all the sound and fury that convulsed Charleston during the summer of 1822 signify? Unsurprisingly, historians have drawn divergent conclusions; for some, the plot was the product of a nervous white population that had conjured it solely from its own fears and prejudices. Several local issues, including the activities of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church and the lowcountry’s declining economic fortunes combined with broader national problems, served to heighten the anxieties of a white community that frequently saw conspiracies where none existed. Two years earlier, the Missouri Compromise had reopened the debate about the future of slavery while abolitionist sentiment was gathering momentum in the North. Moreover, most enslavers, even if they refused to acknowledge the fact publicly, understood that resistance in its many forms was part of the price they paid for maintaining slavery. Although eighty years had elapsed since the Stono Rebellion, it remained part of the collective memory for white as well as enslaved people, with the former able to read about it in colonial histories of the province, where it was often referred to as “the Gullah War,” and the latter incorporating the events of September 1739 into their oral histories. Furthermore, a number of older free Black and enslaved people had vivid recollections of the revolution on Saint-­Domingue in the early 1790s, while white people recalled the devastating impact of the French Revolution on the

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plantation societies in the Caribbean with a shudder. Constantly waiting for the moment of explosive violence when enslaved people would collectively challenge their enslavement with force, white people inhabited a state of paranoia and dread that, following an idle remark on the Charleston waterfront, precipitated the crisis in the summer of 1822.8 Not everyone accepts the interpretation that the plot was a chimera of white Charlestonians’ paranoia. At the time, even the most skeptical believed that some enslaved and free Black people were planning some form of collective action. Johnson, who believed in the plot’s existence, told John Quincy Adams, then serving as U.S. Secretary of State, that its ambition had been “infinitely exaggerated [by] a few timid and precipitate men, who managed to disseminate their fears and their feelings.” He also informed Jefferson that Vesey and his associates were “a trifling Cabal of a few, ignorant, penniless, unarmed, uncombined Fanatics.” Bennett agreed with his brother-­in-­law, remarking that “the scheme has not been general or alarmingly extensive.”9 There are reasons to believe that the designs that Vesey and his lieutenants drew up in 1822 constituted a sophisticated attack against slavery aimed right at the intellectual and cultural heart of the slaveholders’ south. Grounded in the ideas of colonial liberation forged during the years of the Atlantic revolutions and infused with radical interpretations of Old Testament texts about escaping bondage and destroying those who obstructed the path to liberation, Vesey’s powerful critique of enslavement drew on secular and sacred sources. The material conditions in which his fellow conspirators lived and worked produced a community of rebellion comprised of men—primarily skilled and semiskilled slaves—who became politicized by living in a city that had become the crucible of southern conservatism. The decision of enslaved men like Monday Gell or Scipio Sims to become rebels was one of “those rare moments of political electricity,” as anthropologist James Scott notes, “when, often for the first time in memory, the hidden transcript is spoken directly and publicly in the teeth of power.”10 Regardless of whether one believes that the conspiracy, along with the subsequent tribunals and executions, merely reflected the collective anxieties of a terrified white citizenry or constituted a genuine attempt by Black Charlestonians to bring down slavery, the event generated a significant archive that includes private correspondence, pamphlets, and newspaper editorials, as well as trial transcripts and compensation claims from enslavers whose laborers died on the gallows. This rich trove of documents provides clues about the intellectual world inhabited by Vesey and his circle, illuminating

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the lives of people who ordinarily leave little or no trace of their activities and bringing to life the otherwise hidden worlds of the street, tavern, workshop, and meetinghouse. As historian Emilia Viotti da Costa has noted in her history of the Demerara slave rebellion of 1823, it is during times of significant upheaval that the conflicts and tensions that “in daily life are buried beneath the rules and routines of social protocol” burst through the surface into the open, exposing the weapons of the weak as well as the machinery of domination to detailed scrutiny.11 Why should we rely on such an archive to analyze the disposition of Vesey and his followers? Mainly because it strains credulity that fearful and paranoid white people, working independently of one another, could produce an archive this dense, detailed, and intricate in such a short period of time. Conversely, it is equally naïve to think that the records fully and transparently expose the intellectual and cultural lives of free Black and enslaved Charlestonians. Rather, the records generated by the conspiracy offer a view of Black lives in dynamic confrontation with white civic leaders and slaveholders at a specific point in the history of enslaved people in Charleston. The archival record generated in moments of profound crisis also reveals, da Costa further notes, “the contradictions that lay behind the rhetoric of . . . consensus, hegemony, or control.” The public writings that issued from the pens of Charleston’s community of ministers, attorneys, and slaveholders reprised standard proslavery arguments. The essays they published, the sermons they delivered, and the editorials they composed all provided rhetorical cover for the institution’s coercive and violent character. In private, however, a number of letters written by whites, and particularly white women, during the tense and febrile weeks after the plot’s exposure, reveal deeply rooted white fears about enslaved men and women as well as a faint glimmer of understanding of the terror and brutality that lay at the heart of slavery.12 The summer’s crisis was the most significant threat to Charleston since it fell to the British during the Revolutionary War in 1780. Exhibiting a classic case of cognitive dissonance, slaveholders simultaneously recognized that enslaved people had the capacity to rebel while also believing that they were content with their lot, convincing themselves that they had forged close ties with the men and women that they kept in bondage. Rather than embrace the benevolence of their owners, who had “assumed many of the duties of a parent,” the enslaved had, concluded Kennedy and Parker in their postmortem account, displayed “the vilest ingratitude” with their efforts to “destroy the

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bosom [that] had sheltered and protected” them. Enslaved coachman John Horry gave full vent to his rage when city constables arrested him in front of his owner, Elias Horry. The brief exchange between master and slave in H ­ orry’s yard demonstrated just how empty and hollow was the conceit that masters and slaves lived in a climate of familial harmony. Elias asked his slave two questions: “are you guilty . . . [and] what were your intentions?” To the first, he answered in the affirmative; to the second, he announced that he planned “to kill you, rip open your belly & throw your guts in your face.” Such hostile sentiments shook the ideological bedrock on which the social order rested.13 In the years that followed the upheavals and disruptions of the American Revolution, Charleston again became the scene of revolutionary turbulence and slaveholder fears. In 1790, it was the French Revolution that captured the public imagination. After it broke out in July 1789, the “tri-­coloured cockade,” recalled Charles Fraser, a student at the College of Charleston at the time, became “the great badge of honour . . . and the Ça’ira and the Marseillaise hymn the most popular airs.” To promote the revolution’s ideals, its supporters founded several clubs, such as the Société Patriotique Française, where members addressed each other as “citoyen.” Walking past Thomas Harris’s waterfront tavern, pedestrians perhaps heard its patrons singing “La Marseillaise.” In April 1793, the arrival of French diplomat Citizen Edmond-­Charles Genêt sparked yet more celebrations, with crowds taking to the streets wearing cockades and holding dinners where they toasted “the Rights of Man.”14 But not everyone tucked cockades into their hatbands or lustily sang along to the anthem of revolutionary France. The abrasive exchanges over slavery at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, along with debates in the state’s General Assembly about reopening the Atlantic slave trade, had exposed a deep reservoir of counterrevolutionary and reactionary thought among the region’s political elite. By summer 1793, Charleston had become an important sanctuary for white refugees fleeing Saint-­Domingue. The violent end of slavery in the colony, which was rapidly followed by the revolutionary government in Paris abolishing slavery throughout the French empire confirmed the deepest fears of enslavers about the consequences of revolution in a slave society. Writing to George Washington in autumn 1791, Governor Charles Pinckney justifiably claimed that the rebellions breaking out across the Caribbean were “a flame which will extend to all the neighbouring islands, & may eventually prove not a very pleasing or agreeable example to the Southern States” while

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Charles Nisbet, visiting from Pennsylvania, observed that any white person who demonstrated any support for these uprisings were publicly excoriated as “Madmen, Robbers . . . and enemies to the Peace of Society.”15 The arrival of white refugees from Saint-­Domingue, often accompanied by enslaved domestic workers, generated significant concerns about internal security. By 1795, Charleston was, noted French traveler François Alexandre Frédéric, duc de la Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt, “full of French men from St. Domingo . . . and many earn a livelihood by letting Negroes, whom they brought from St. Domingo.” To ensure that the city did not become another Le Cap Français, the authorities took steps to protect its citizens. After a meeting in which participants resolved that “negroes and people of colour be on no account suffered to land in any part of the state,” Governor William Moultrie ordered “all free negroes and persons of colour, who have arrived from St. Domingo . . . to depart from this state within TEN DAYS.” A few years later, Charleston merchant Christopher Fitzsimmons instructed a captain destined for the port of Le Cap “not to take any passengers going or coming here.” The legislature codified these efforts in 1803, introducing a ban on importing enslaved people from either South America or from “any of the French West-­India islands” even though captive men and women brought directly from Africa continued to arrive by the thousands until the last day of December 1807.16 The authorities tried to censor any publication that might “alienate the affection or seduce the fidelity of any slave or slaves.” In July 1804, they arrested printer and French teacher Jean-­Jacques Negrin, who had fled Saint-­Domingue in 1800, for publishing The Declaration of Independence of the French Colony of Santo Domingo, a document that clearly contained “inflammatory words.” Calling on its citizens to “live free and independent, and to prefer death to anything that will try to place you back in chains . . . [and] to pursue forever the traitors and enemies of your independence,” the Haitian message of liberation was not only anathema to slaveholding Carolinians, but it violated a law passed in late 1805 that punished any person who might “directly or indirectly . . . aid, comfort or assist any slave or slaves to raise . . . an insurrection.” Even though the court found Negrin guilty of “seditious and traitorous intentions against the peace and welfare of this country” and jailed him for eight months, other broadsides and books that trafficked in “incendiary discourse” were in circulation, including Jean-­Louis Dubroca’s La Vie de Toussaint Louverture, chef des noir insurgés de Saint-­Domingue, which French émigré, language teacher and vintner Nicholas Herbemont, who lived on Sullivan’s Island, had translated

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and published in 1801. The Charleston Library Society also carried books that vividly presented the brutality of slavery, including a copy of John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) that included graphic engravings by British artist and radical William Blake of enslaved people “being hung alive by the Ribs to a Gallows” as well as illustrations depicting the “Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave” and “A Rebel Negro armed and on his Guard.”17 Such measures apparently failed to dampen the radical spirit of some enslaved refugees from Saint-­Domingue. It appeared that several hoped to bring the struggle to the mainland and, as one enslaved man, who had been captured on the Plaine du Nord during the fighting, put it, refugees wanted “to enjoy their liberty they are entitled to by the Rights of Man.” It was a message of liberation that spread to South Carolina. In October 1793, a visitor to the city reported that “St. Domingue negroes have sown the seed of revolt and that a magazine has been attempted to be broken open.” Several years later, the city intendant received reports just before Christmas Day 1797 about “a CONSPIRACY of several FRENCH NEGROES, TO FIRE THE CITY, and act here as they had formerly done at St. Domingo.” Acting on this intelligence, the authorities arrested about a dozen enslaved refugees who planned to seize weapons and then “massacre and slaughter” white worshippers returning home from church. The execution of Figaro and Jean Louis, the two enslaved men accused of masterminding the plot as well as the transportation of the other suspects failed to dampen the fears of locals who suffered from an “Agitation of the Spirits.”18 By 1800, however, the revolutionary moment had passed. With white support for France fast evaporating, the sober ethic of proslavery Christian stewardship now began to gain traction with slaveholders and non-­slaveholders alike. In the early 1800s, ministers and others in the region’s small circle of writers and commentators wrote essays and pamphlets advocating this form of plantation management. In 1815, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson enjoined the “independent, enlightened agriculturalist” to conduct himself with “kindness, humanity and encouraging benevolence” when dealing with his enslaved laborers. For Johnson, a lawyer by training and trade, this arrangement bore the hallmarks of a legal contract by which the master provided “every thing necessary to primary wants, and every comfort that his condition admits of ” in return for the slave’s “respect and faithful discharge of the duties assigned him.” In their writings, Baptist leader Richard Furman and Zephaniah Kingsley, a slave trader, planter, and author, elaborated on

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this discursive formation. In his Exposition of the Views of the Baptists (1822), Furman discussed the moral obligations of slaveholders. The master “may, in an important sense, be the guardian and even father of his slaves”; they were, he concluded, “part of his family, (the whole forming under him a little community) and the care and ordering of it, and of providing for its welfare, devolves on him. The children, the aged . . . and the unruly, as well as those who are capable of service and orderly, are the objects of his care.” In a few sentences, he encapsulated the ethic of paternalistic plantation management. Of course, Furman well knew that countless masters were not just their slaves’ owners; they were also their biological fathers, revealing the coercive power within paternalism.19 Kingsley, who had once owned “Gullah” Jack Pritchard, a close associate of Vesey, addressed this subject in A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-­ operative System of Society (1829). He argued that masters should exhibit “feelings of affection . . . to every slave” and regard him “as a member of his own family, whose happiness and protection is identified with that of his own family, of which the slave constitutes a part. . . . The affection creates confidence which becomes reciprocal, and is attended by the most beneficial consequences.” Enslavers keen to believe that they embodied the ideal of benevolent Christian stewardship reacted with rage against ungrateful slaves in the plot’s aftermath.20 The liberationist ideals of the Haitian Revolution still retained their intellectual and cultural power among members of the Black community. Vesey had briefly lived on Saint-­Domingue as an enslaved laborer and later encountered Black refugees transported to Charleston by their enslavers at the height of the rebellion in the early 1790s. No doubt they talked about enslaved laborers burning plantations and killing their enslavers in the summer of 1791 and the dramatic circumstances surrounding the end of slavery in the colony several years later. When Vesey spoke to his followers, he alluded to the uprising’s legacy, exhorting them “not to spare one white skin alive, as this was the plan they pursued in St. Domingo.” Governor Bennett later noted that Gell, under instruction from Vesey, had written to Haitian leader Jean-­Pierre Boyer, “requesting his aid,” using “a negro from the Northern States,” a cook on a merchant ship, to carry the letter and “ascertain whether the inhabitants there would assist us.” Finally, the rebels planned to seek refuge in Haiti; after setting Charleston ablaze, they intended to seize a ship and sail for the island.21 Even if the subject of revolution no longer inspired passionate engagement in the white community, the place of slavery in the new nation did

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generate contentious and heated debate. The fractious discussions that nearly derailed the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had become a fundamental and controversial part of the national conversation. Not only had the African Methodist Episcopal Church brought abolitionist sentiment to Charleston, but local efforts to prevent antislavery tracts and similar materials from ending up in the wrong hands had very mixed results. At Vesey’s trial, Jack Purcell testified that Vesey picked up “every pamphlet he could lay his hands on that had any connection with slavery” and quoted liberally from these “seditious pamphlets.” Vesey perhaps consulted George Bourne’s The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable (1816) in which its author, a Presbyterian minister who had witnessed the brutality of slavery firsthand during a sojourn in the Shenandoah Valley in the early 1810s and was later a founding member of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, called for the institution’s “immediate and total abolition.” Vesey, too, may have read Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy’s newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation that also called for an end “to the foul and corrupting principle of slavery.” In one article, Lundy, an advocate of colonization, recommended Haiti as a potential destination for free Black people, printed a verse that promoted emigration, and unwittingly encapsulated the Caribbean nation’s inspirational role in the plot: To Hayti let us go, then We may enjoy our natural rights, For negroes there are viewed as men And there thought as good as white.22 The political crisis over the admission of Missouri in 1819 and 1820 reignited the national debate about slavery. Vesey apparently followed events in Congress, which were covered by local newspapers as well as by Niles Register, perhaps the most widely circulated magazine of the period, in depth. He purposely misinterpreted the terms of the Compromise of 1820 to suit the needs of the conspiracy. Rather than tell his followers that Missouri had entered the Union as a slave state, he claimed that the bill promised emancipation to enslaved people. Rolla Bennett, an enslaved domestic worker owned by Governor Bennett and a member of Vesey’s inner circle, accepted this interpretation, testifying that “Congress had set us free, and that our white people here would not let us be so.” In their report, Kennedy and Parker reprinted a letter from Saint John’s Parish planter James Ferguson in which he wrote that “reports of their emancipation had of late years been much

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in circulation.” For enslaved people, every major political crisis appeared to carry within it the promise of emancipation. Instead, the agreement over the admission of Missouri as the twelfth slave state enhanced and expanded the power of slaveholders.23 But the Compromise of 1820 failed to remove slavery from the front pages. The volume and vociferousness of letters written by the enraged readers of the Charleston Courier, who were responding to an account written by English traveler William Faux about an episode that occurred during his journey from Columbia to Charleston, suggests just how sensitive were white Carolinians to any attack on the institution. In June 1819, Faux witnessed the gruesome exhumation of a recently deceased enslaved man who had been “wantonly whipped until sunrise; when from excessive lashing, its bowels gushed out, and it expired.” The perpetrators then buried the corpse, which they had reduced to “a mis-­shaped mass of putrescence.” Resolved to publicize the incident, Faux dashed off a letter to the Courier’s editor in which he attacked the “Monstrous anomaly” of slavery that flourished in a country that ostensibly regarded itself as “an asylum for the distressed and oppressed of all other lands,” yet one that readily tolerated an institution that “offended humanity” with “a spectacle so genuinely hellish, or so purely demonical!” As soon as the Courier published Faux’s letter, the angry denunciations began, with his irate detractors arguing that his account would be “greedily copied and extensively read to our injury” in the north, where readers would relish how the incident stained “the character of South Carolina.” In fact, Faux, who had taken refuge in a city hotel, reported that his letter ended up being printed “in other papers, nearly 2,000 miles from this city.” Many white Charlestonians, noted Scottish traveler and textile merchant Peter Neilson, regarded northerners with the “utmost contempt” and as “a low, hypocritical pack of cheating scoundrels.” Discussing national politics with former U.S. Congressman Samuel Sitgreaves during his trip to the lowcountry in early 1821 from his home state of Pennsylvania, Charleston lawyer and “a true specimen of southern ardor” Daniel Elliott Huger told his northern guest that he fully expected the Union to dissolve “in the natural course of things . . . [and] it would probably take place in the lifetime of his children.”24 The declining fortunes of the lowcountry plantation economy further contributed to a general sense of unease and disquiet in the white community. No longer were its planters reaping the huge profits or experiencing the brisk growth that their forebears had once enjoyed. In addition to the sharp drop in the price of agricultural commodities between 1818 and 1822—short-­staple

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cotton dropped from thirty-­one to twenty-­two cents a pound, Sea Island fell from fifty to twenty-­six cents a pound, and rice plunged from $6.38 to $2.91 per hundredweight—Charleston itself had entered a period of slow and irreversible decline. Between 1800 and 1820, its white population experienced very modest growth, rising from 9,630 to 11,229 over the two decades. Several factors contributed to this stagnation; having weathered the end of the Atlantic slave trade and commercial instability during the War of 1812, the region’s planters and merchants were particularly hard hit by the Panic of 1819, with a deep recession in Britain’s textile industry only exacerbating their economic difficulties. Commenting on the sluggish economy in 1822, Jacob Rapelye, a partner in the trading house of Napier, Rapelye, and Bennett, noted that “we have had a Miserable Season of business.” Two years later, there had been little measurable improvement. No longer was Charleston “a scene of industry, activity and growing prosperity”; instead, as “Civis” informed the Courier’s readers in autumn 1824, “Indolence, apathy, poverty and misery . . . the sickening spectacle of ruin and decay” now prevailed.25 Furthermore, the sluggish economy had an impact on white workers, reducing their privileged status over enslaved and free Black laborers. Work on the Charleston waterfront was seasonal. Between late autumn and winter, the harbor bustled with vessels shipping cotton, rice, and other commodities across the Atlantic or to other ports along the Eastern Seaboard; by late spring, the wharves fell quiet. Skilled white workers also suffered from the slow pace of economic life; several craft associations petitioned for relief and the imposition of tighter restrictions on enslaved workers. A young white man who planned to become an apprentice, noted the petitioners, condemned himself “to a life full of gloom and almost one of Despair.” But enslaved and free Black laborers suffered as well from the downturn, and disproportionately so. Listing the “price of labor” for a wide range of skilled jobs, such as masonry, blacksmithing, carpentry, and plastering, in his Statistics of South Carolina, Robert Mills estimated that the average daily wage for a skilled white worker was $1.37 while a skilled Black craftsman received 82.5 cents for performing the same task.26 The man accused of masterminding the plot that would convulse Charleston in the summer of 1822 had been born about fifty-­five years earlier. He first appears in the historical record at the end of the Revolutionary War. In early 1781, Charleston slave trader Joseph Vesey sailed from a small coastal town in Massachusetts to the port of Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas, a colony of

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Denmark’s Caribbean empire and a major maritime crossroads and commercial center. An experienced mariner, Vesey had commanded a pilot boat that patrolled the South Carolina coast during the early stages of the Revolutionary War before he was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Continental Navy, sailing aboard The Providence, a sloop with a crew of nineteen men. On Saint Thomas, Vesey purchased 390 slaves before embarking for Le Cap Français on Saint-­Domingue. During this leg of the five-­hundred-­mile voyage, the crew befriended one young captive on board, admiring “his beauty, alertness, and intelligence . . . [and] calling him by way of distinction, Telemaque.” Named for a character in Homer’s epic poem, the young Telemaque began his own odyssey through the Atlantic world.27 Vesey sold Telemaque along with the rest of his enslaved cargo in Le Cap’s slave market. Now one of Saint-­Domingue’s nearly half a million enslaved laborers, Telemaque briefly vanishes from the record. With sugar and coffee planters purchasing the vast majority of the thousands of slaves imported annually from Africa—between 1781 and 1790, nearly a quarter of a million enslaved Africans were transported to the colony—he would have been plunged into a plantation regime notorious for its unremitting brutality; a world where enslaved field hands toiled under “the merciless eye of the plantation steward . . . and foremen” who maintained ferocious discipline , using “long whips” and other forms of punishment. Slaves not assigned to field labor either worked in the sugar mill or became enslaved domestics, catering to their owners’ “every need, want, or caprice.” A shard of evidence suggests that Telemaque may have worked in his owner’s household. Shortly after his purchase, he was declared “unsound and subject to epileptic fits.” The physician’s diagnosis was perhaps correct, but Telemaque might have contracted malaria, a disease endemic to the region. Malaria presents with bodily aches, violent shaking, and sweating, which may also explain the young boy’s symptoms. That anyone even bothered to seek medical advice for Telemaque suggests that he lived and worked in close proximity to his enslaver; a field hand would have suffered unnoticed. Alternatively, like many enslaved people who feigned illness to avoid work, he perhaps faked his symptoms, convincing his owner that he was unfit for manual labor. Whatever the case, his purchaser returned the slave to Captain Vesey, who put him to work as a deckhand aboard The Prospect.28 Telemaque spent the next several years at sea. Like many sailors who plied the sea lanes of the Caribbean and Atlantic, he probably picked up a smattering of languages along with the distinctive argot of maritime laborers, becoming acquainted with enslaved workers in port towns, encountering them on

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the dockside, swapping stories, and gathering the latest news and gossip. Port towns were dynamic sites of interaction between diverse ethnic, social, and racial groups: imperial officials, slave traders, merchants, artisans, shopkeepers, and laborers all resided in these places, as did escaped slaves, outlaws, drifters, prostitutes, and stowaways who constituted the Atlantic’s underworld. Transporting soldiers, colonists, and enslaved Africans along with timber, sugar, rice, and other plantation commodities, the ships that traversed the Atlantic continually reinforced this diversity. Deckhands from New York or Philadelphia clambered up rigging with sailors from Liverpool or Bristol, scrubbed decks and repaired canvas with deckhands from the Caribbean, and reefed sails with Africans and southern Europeans. In this polyglot environment, Telemaque encountered men from countless places, learning about the ideas and events that shaped the politics of the revolutionary Atlantic in their company.29 In 1790, Telemaque’s years before the mast ended when his owner decided to exchange life at sea for life on land, and returned permanently to Charleston to run his business. Joseph Vesey established a ships’ chandlery on East Bay, a street that ran adjacent to the waterfront, where he sold nautical supplies and other marine equipment to captains whose ships rode at anchor in the harbor a block away. He continued to run his import business; in July 1795, for example, he advertised the sale of “Catalonia wine and brandy in pipes . . . oil and olives in jars” along with fabrics and coffee from Saint-­Domingue. He put Telemaque to work at his ropewalk in Hampstead, close to the Cooper River and its wharves, and hired him out as a carpenter. Earning as much as $1.50 a day for his owner, Telemaque gained a reputation as a skilled artisan and became familiar with Charleston’s urban landscape as he moved from job to job. He clearly had earned enough money to enter the East Bay lottery. In November 1799, he bought a winning ticket that netted him $1,500; using $600 of his prize money, he purchased his freedom from his owner. On the last day of 1799, he pocketed the official document that freed “from the Yoke of Slavery . . . a certain Negro named Telemaque with all his goods and chattels by him already acquired.”30 Vesey greeted the new century as a free man, a member of the city’s population of about a thousand free Black people. Rather than immerse himself in their community and institutions, he appears to have retained closer ties to enslaved men and women, whose ranks included several family members whom he unsuccessfully tried to buy on a number of occasions. Likewise, there is no record of Vesey joining either the Society of Free Dark Men or the Brown Fellowship Society, a benevolent association established in 1790 by

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well-­to-­do members of the free Black community (the initial fee to join was $50) to provide assistance to widows and orphans. In the years between 1800 and 1822, Vesey left very few archival traces. Despite exaggerated claims from his detractors that he had “numerous wives and children” whom he treated with “the haughty and capricious cruelty of an Eastern bashaw (or pasha),” he apparently had few romantic liaisons, although he was captured in the house of an enslaved woman.31 We know even less about his personality. Vesey’s deep engagement with militant Old Testament texts along with his intention to replicate the cataclysmic violence and destruction that characterized the rebellions on Saint-­ Domingue suggests deep reserves of righteous anger. Perhaps driven by his inability to purchase the freedom of other family members, by the city government’s effort to shut the African Church, or by trying to navigate through a society where people of African descent lived in constant fear and terror, Vesey possibly viewed slavery as a form of warfare between the enslaved and their enslavers, a belief that drove him to organize a revolt. Organizing an uprising required that Vesey and his lieutenants work in secret as they recruited followers and planned the attack; it also required considerable determination and resolve. Using his skills of persuasion, he demanded unflinching loyalty, insisting that his men harbor no reservations whatsoever about killing their adversaries, and “not spare one white skin alive,” thus visiting upon their enslavers the violence and terror that constituted their own experience. His passion, intensity, and demeanor led Pompey Bryan to testify how “the blacks stood in fear of him and I so much so, that I always endeavoured to avoid him.” The rebels’ aim was to destroy the city; Charleston would be “wrapped in flames . . . [with] many valuable lives sacrificed—and an immense loss of life sustained by the citizens.” No matter how elegantly crafted the rebellion’s organization and strategy or how charismatic or astute were its leaders, the men who had sworn allegiance to Vesey had to pursue their goal with an intense ferocity in order to gain their freedom.32 Vesey’s religious life is less of a mystery, with the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Reid and Hanover Streets at its center. As a class leader, he was responsible for the welfare of about a dozen church members. Not only did Vesey play a pastoral role—a task that required, according to the church’s guide to its doctrines and practices, that he “carefully enquire how every soul in his class prospers,” that he “advise, reprove, comfort or exhort, as occasion may require,” and that he collect any money “towards the relief of preachers,

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church and poor”—but he also recruited among its members. Of the 131 men arrested, thirty-­six were congregants and five were class leaders. Vesey perhaps took advantage of his position to sharpen his oratorical skills during class, embracing the church’s instructions on preaching that advised speakers to “be serious, weighty and solemn . . . [and] to take care not to ramble” and to choose “the plainest text you can.” Several of the accused complimented Vesey’s speaking prowess and flinty bearing. Furthermore, the church’s policy on slaveholding, which required the expulsion of any member who bought or sold “men, women, and children with an intention to enslave them” and refused admission to “any person . . . who is a slaveholder,” found unanimous support among the city’s Black community. But the church’s explicit antislavery stance turned the most important institution in Black Charleston into a target for constant harassment from city authorities, newspaper editors, and others.33 Controversial throughout its short existence, the AME Church had a real impact on Vesey. In the early nineteenth century, Black Methodists had enjoyed some autonomy over their spiritual welfare and congregational governance, with white church leaders playing only a minor administrative role. With the arrival of Anthony Senter, a white minister who was appointed in 1815, this era of quasi-­independence came to an end. Claiming to have uncovered financial irregularities by Black congregants who had ostensibly used church funds to buy the freedom of enslaved members, Senter revoked their privileges. He dismantled their separate Quarterly Conference, and required that white church leaders supervise disciplinary hearings and collections. Responding to white interference, prominent Black church members, including free Black shoemaker Morris Brown, quietly began to organize a break from white Methodists. Slipping away north to Philadelphia in 1816, he trained at Mother Bethel AME Church, home to the denomination’s founding father Richard Allen. Brown returned to Charleston a year later an ordained minister and ready to establish an independent Black church. Soon after, more than four thousand Black worshippers (nearly 80 percent of its Black membership) seceded from the church. A number of free Blacks petitioned to buy a plot adjacent to the Methodist church on which to build their meetinghouse. In December 1817, the city guard arrested nearly five hundred Black churchgoers for “disorderly conduct.” After the legislature had rejected the church’s petition to put up a building in Hampstead, a neighborhood on Charleston Neck, its members nevertheless went ahead; again, the authorities struck back in June 1818, arresting about one hundred and forty worshippers for an

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“unlawful assemblage of free people of colour and slaves,” including Brown, who was thrown in jail for a month.34 Unsurprisingly, the determined efforts made by Black worshippers to establish their own church drew considerable fire from white Charlestonians. Newspaper editors denounced the plan as “unnecessary and impolitick,” regularly reminding their readers about Brown’s sojourn in Philadelphia, home to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and a center of abolitionist sentiment. In 1820, the AME General Conference formally admitted the Charleston congregation into its ranks. Not only was the AME’s antislavery position against the law but, the authorities argued, letting free Black and enslaved people worship independently without white supervision endangered public order. In Christopher Edwards Gadsden’s hagiographic account of the life of Theodore Dehon, the Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina who died of yellow fever in Charleston in 1817, the author recounts the cleric’s attacks on the training and suitability of Brown and his ministers. These “presumptuous men” were, he claimed, “worse than ignorant . . . known to be indolent, deceitful, and sometimes grossly immoral,” who brought “religion into discredit.” Furthermore, the church’s close ties to Philadelphia only heightened concerns that its local leaders would, suggested one newspaperman, spread “many evils.” But undeterred by constant harassment by the authorities and attacks in the press, Brown and his associates managed to hold church and congregation together until late 1822.35 The campaign against the AME Church appears to have inspired Vesey to act. In late 1821 or early 1822, he began planning. At his interrogation, enslaved harness maker Monday Gell recalled that the first time he “heard of the Insurrection was about last Christmas” (December 1821), adding that “about three months prior to June 16 . . . [Vesey] ceased working at his trade and employed himself exclusively in enlisting men.” A brief encounter with George Creighton, a prosperous free Black barber and slave owner, on East Bay Street may have also turned Vesey’s thoughts toward action. Creighton asked Vesey whether he would join him on a voyage bound for Liberia, the settlement newly established by the American Colonization Society. Several years earlier, Reverend William Meade, an agent for the organization, had visited Charleston, where he met with about twenty free Blacks who expressed interest in leaving the state to participate in the experiment on the African coast. Vesey, however, declined Creighton’s invitation, and chose to remain in Charleston where, according to Frank Ferguson, he planned “to see what he could do for his fellow creatures.” When Creighton, who also

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paid for the passage for his slaves across the Atlantic, left for a new life aboard The Calypso in October 1821, Vesey perhaps then decided to concentrate fully on organizing an uprising.36 The urban environment through which Vesey moved was characterized by manual labor; a world where the noise and clamor of the yards, warehouses, and workshops along the waterfront and in the streets around East Bay stood in stark contrast to the refined town houses in which merchants, slave traders, and planters lived only a few blocks away. Taverns, gambling dens, and brothels—often the first stop for recently disembarked sailors— were havens of petty criminality, drunkenness, gambling, sex, and disorderly and rowdy behavior. Citizens regularly complained about “the many Gambling Houses and Houses of ill-­fame” that brought “poverty and ruin” and corrupted “the morals of youths.” Of the one hundred and thirty establishments that received licenses from the City Treasurer in 1790 for “retailing spirituous liquors, keeping of taverns, and billiard tables,” nearly half were located in this neighborhood. Here, opined the Charleston Mercury thirty years later, “you may see in miniature all the nations of the world” and hear “many languages”; newspapers regularly printed exchange rates for the various currencies in circulation, including English guineas, Spanish doubloons, and even Bengali rupees, so that tavern keepers and other tradesmen could convert coins collected from thirsty sailors into dollars. With the exception of New Orleans, no other southern city matched Charleston for its cosmopolitanism or ethnic and racial diversity.37 Providing a congenial climate in which to gamble, gossip, argue, and drink, these places became spaces where the “hidden transcript” revealed itself. Through the fog of tobacco smoke, the clanking of mugs, and the thrum of conversation, patrons could praise or condemn their fellow habitués, contemplate their present circumstances, catch up on the latest news, and consider the future. Besides drinking and talking, patrons might also play chess, backgammon or draughts; alternatively, they could wager on EO, a game similar to roulette, or hazard, a dice game (craps is the modern equivalent), which city authorities condemned as an “exceedingly dangerous” game as it promoted “a spirit of gambling and idleness,” and demanded its prohibition. In these places, drinkers might drop the mask of subservience worn in the presence of their owners, turning their watering holes into “places of subversion [in which] subordinate classes met offstage and off-­duty in an atmosphere of freedom encouraged by alcohol.” Familiar with the culture of grogshops and alehouses from his days at sea, Vesey found the city’s

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ramshackle taverns a good venue in which to discuss politics and to make “some bold remark on slavery.”38 The East Bay neighborhood proved to be a fertile recruiting ground. Of the thirty-­five alleged rebels hanged, more than half worked in trades directly associated with the maritime economy. Jack Pritchard (known as “Gullah” Jack) worked as a joiner and carpenter at his enslaver’s yard on Gadsden’s Wharf while Adam, John, and Robert Robertson worked at their master’s ropewalk on Crafts Wharf. A skilled ship’s carpenter, Peter Poyas moved among several yards; others made barrels and other nautical hardware in workshops at Chisholm’s Wharf. Several rebels had jobs that regularly brought them to waterfront streets and yards, including cart drivers Smart Anderson and Caesar Smith, who moved cotton and other goods from Charleston Neck or ­Monck’s Corner, the transshipment point between the Santee Canal and the harbor. Other enslaved rebels, including Dick Simms, worked on the docks where, according to English traveler and former Royal Navy officer Basil Hall, “great bales of cotton, boxes of fruit, [and] barrels of flour” stood ready for shipment next to “a great pile of unripe bananas, plucked from the trees only four or five days earlier in the Island of Cuba” along with coffee, sugar, and other goods.39 The auction rooms where enslaved people were bought and sold were also located in this quarter; a fact that Hall discovered when he “heard the sound of several voices . . . like those of an auctioneer urging an audience to bid for his goods” during his visit. He watched as enslaved men and women, including “broad-­shouldered” laborers as well as “children at the breast . . . [and] old people quite incapable of work,” went under the hammer. Peter Neilson, noting that slave auctions were “almost [a] daily occurrence,” witnessed a number of sales where potential purchasers handled enslaved men “as a butcher does an ox” and conducted degrading and abusive “examinations” on enslaved women in order “to find out whether they are likely to have a numerous progeny.” During these humiliations, the auctioneer kept up his salesman’s patter, informing buyers that each slave for sale was “sound, sober, honest, and no runaway.” Neilson also noted the “intense anxiety” on the faces of the enslaved men and women on the auction block who, closely monitoring each bid, fervently hoped that they would not be separated from loved ones. On one occasion, he witnessed one transaction come to an abrupt halt when an “amazingly agitated” enslaved woman “rent the air with her screams” as her family was broken up. For enslaved people who worked in this neighborhood, the sight of regular auctions provided a stark and sobering demonstration of the inhumanity of the institution in which they were embedded, serving as a constant

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reminder of the physical degradations and humiliations that they and their fellow bound workers suffered.40 For enslaved people determined to escape the South permanently, the waterfront was often the first stop on their journey to freedom. Looking for ships sailing up the Eastern Seaboard or even across the Atlantic, fugitives would try to stow away on vessels bound for New York, Philadelphia or more distant destinations or, using counterfeit papers, pass themselves off as free Black mariners. Recognizing the role that outbound ships played in runaways’ escape plans, slaveholders often reminded captains to “examine their crew prior to departure” in the notices describing fugitive slaves who they suspected of making for the docks and escaping by sea. On occasion, free Black mariners assisted slaves in their efforts to gain their freedom. In July 1822, free Black mariner Joseph Lawrence from New York was arrested and tried for helping an enslaved man named Macklin hide on Fair Play, a schooner returning north. Found guilty, Lawrence spent a year in prison before he was sold into slavery while Macklin was returned to his owner.41 The problems associated with handling belligerent sailors or locating the occasional stowaway paled into insignificance when city authorities confronted the overwhelming difficulties of controlling Charleston’s Black population. Neither free Blacks nor enslaved people paid much attention to the voluminous municipal codes that sought to regulate every aspect of their lives from hiring protocols to appropriate clothing to dog ownership. Moreover, slaveholders often ignored or sidestepped the regulations, which contained numerous ambiguities and contradictions, choosing to organize their enslaved laborers’ work arrangements as they pleased. The steady drumbeat of complaints from grand jurors about the city’s conspicuous failure to enforce the law fell on deaf ears. Moreover, the sheer size of the free Black and enslaved populations along with the shortage of constables made it virtually impossible to implement these ordinances. In 1820, there were 12,652 enslaved men and women, and 1,475 free Blacks in the city itself; on Charleston Neck, consisting of neighborhoods north of Boundary Street (now Calhoun Street), another 6,799 enslaved people and 1,587 free Blacks lived. In the city, the white population numbered 10,653 with another 4,305 on the Neck. Constituting 60 percent of the city’s total population, enslaved and free Black people outnumbered its white inhabitants.42 To keep order, the municipal authorities employed about a hundred men, assisted by constables from each precinct. To protect the white population who, noted merchant Adam Hodgson, “are never free from the apprehension

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of an insurrection of the slaves,” sentries manned church steeples to monitor activity on the streets. In addition, there were guardhouses, which housed men and weapons, at the junction of Broad and Meeting in the heart of the city as well as at Meeting and Tobacco Streets on Charleston Neck. Patrols were another arm of law enforcement. At sunset, a sergeant and four privates equipped with muskets, bayonets, and rattles began their patrol, enforcing the curfew, which was announced by “ringing a great bell and a drum beat.” Whether residing in the city itself or in its northern neighborhoods, not everyone found these policing arrangements completely satisfactory. In November 1822, the Neck’s white community complained that the patrol only made their rounds “every fifth night” rather than every evening, leaving white people in that community “unprotected from the machinations of evil, designing persons.” Such failures forced “poor mechanics” and, on occasion, “professional men, unqualified for this sort of duty” to walk the nighttime streets. In addition to this haphazard and ramshackle arrangement, the city’s fire companies often supplemented the patrols.43 Home to nearly seven thousand enslaved and more than fifteen hundred free Black people in 1820, the neighborhoods north of Boundary Street on Charleston Neck were vital centers of African American life. A residential district for elite families in the eighteenth century—slave traders and plantation owners Joseph Wragg and Henry Laurens had houses in Wraggborough and Ansonborough respectively—the quarter had evolved into a modest manufacturing center, home to mills, livery stables, tanning and lumber yards, animal pens, and slaughterhouses along with some small farms and other enterprises that provided the city’s inhabitants with goods and services. It was also a transportation hub, a terminus for the roads that ran between the rural lowcountry, the upcountry, and the waterfront. On its streets stood the buildings that housed cotton factors, shipping agents, and merchants. With its boardinghouses and low rents, it became a residential enclave for enslaved people, often skilled craftsmen whose owners had given them permission to live on their own, including Monday Gell and free Blacks. Just outside the formal jurisdiction of the city, moreover, its neighborhoods escaped the rigor of municipal regulation. The Black community could therefore pursue cultural and social pastimes with some degree of freedom, including worship and the other activities that took place at the AME Church on Reid and Hanover Streets.44 By the early nineteenth century, Black Charlestonians had incorporated the sacred practices of Atlantic Africa with evangelical Protestantism to fashion

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a hybrid Black Christianity. With enslaved people familiar with the Bible, Vesey readily drew on its texts to argue that “slavery was contrary to the laws of God.” Drawing on Exodus, the archetypal story for enslaved people with its promise of liberation from bondage, he announced, “We should rise up and fight against the whites for our liberties.” He also provided an exegesis for Exodus 21:16 (“And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death”) as a compelling justification for his followers to “be ready with axes, knives, and clubs, to kill every man.” Slaveholders also recognized the metaphorical power of the account of the flight from Egypt, with Kennedy and Parker noting that “slaves were bound to attempt their emancipation . . . and that such efforts would not only be pleasing to the Almighty, but were absolutely enjoined, and their success predicted in the Scriptures.” Openly rejecting the scriptural analyses and interpretations that proslavery ideologues used as a justification for the institution, Vesey inverted and contradicted their arguments: “Slavery and bondage,” he concluded, “is against the Bible.”45 The AME Church provided a forum for discussions. Brown and his ministers conducted services where congregants combined spirituality, emotion, and physicality in powerful expressions of faith. Drawing on their performative skills in dance and music, which were rooted in African sacred traditions, worshippers sang and prayed. At the climax of one service, one white eyewitness watched female worshippers “tearing off their caps . . . [and] beating their heads on posts” in a state of spiritual transcendence. Freedom songs were also part of the service, with one song calling for “ye oppressed, ye Afric band . . . to wrest the scourge from Buckra’s hand” and “drive each tyrant from the land.” The modest building in which free and enslaved Black men and women worshipped had become a place where a subculture of dissent flourished.46 Sacred customs from Africa also contributed to the rebellion’s ideological shape, with “Gullah” Jack Pritchard emerging as the key figure. An enslaved joiner at Paul Pritchard’s shipyard, Jack had apparently arrived in Charleston sometime between 1804 and 1808, having earlier been an enslaved laborer on Zephaniah Kingsley’s plantation on the Saint Johns River in northern Florida. Kingsley, who was born in Charleston in 1765, had links to the slave markets in southeastern Africa, including Zanzibar, a small island located just off the coast. In 1806, sixteen enslaved people from Mozambique arrived aboard his ship, El Peje, to work on his Florida plantations. In the same year, two slavers (The Elizabeth and The Gustavia) carrying more than three hundred enslaved Africans from Mozambique disembarked in Charleston. Although

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Kingsley claimed to have purchased Jack when he was sold as “a prisoner of war in Zinguebar [Zanzibar]”, his new owner noticed that his new slave carried “conjuring implements with him in a bag which he brought on board the ship and retained them.” That Jack possessed these artifacts, which were possibly nkisi nkita nsumbu, ritual stones, roots, and other objects associated with healing and magical practices, suggests that he was captured in the Kingdom of Kongo and taken to the slave markets on the eastern rather than the western coast of Africa.47 Drawing on his reputation as a conjuror, Jack exuded a real sense of command and presence. Accounts suggest that he was also an imposing human being, with his large black beard so central to his self-­presentation that, or so his owner Paul Pritchard deposed, “nothing could induce [him] to cut it off.” During his courtroom appearance, “Gullah” Jack impressed James Hamilton by the theatricality of his performance, who commented on “the wildness and vehemence of gesture and the malignant glance with which he eyed the witnesses who appeared against him.” “Gullah” Jack’s “conjurations” combined with his claims that “he could not be killed nor could a white man take him” only enhanced his aura of invincibility. For those enslaved rebels who had been born and captured in Africa and then transported directly to North America, Jack provided not just an alternative conception of the world that resonated with their lives prior to their enslavement and transport, but he also offered the rebels the promise of manipulating the supernatural environment. The men who participated in the rituals over which Jack presided at Bulkeley’s Farm on the outskirts of the city enabled them to adopt new identities. Initiated into the insurgents’ ranks, they now had to conduct themselves accordingly, replacing their demeanor of servility with a posture of militant aggression.48 Both Julius Forrest and Harry Haig claimed to have fallen under Jack’s charismatic spell, with the latter testifying that he had “charmed Julius and myself . . . and we consented to join.” Convinced that everyday life was orchestrated by the spirit world, Jack viewed his ability to manage the forces outside human control as essential to the project’s success. The psychic confidence imparted by talismans, which included crab claws invested with mystical properties and the ritual slaughter of chickens, converted passive bystanders into active and engaged rebels. At several gatherings, Jack promised invincibility to those who ate smoked corn and groundnuts, and put crab claws in their mouths, a practice that bore a resemblance to nkisi charms that protected against illness. On another occasion, they killed and ate a half-­raw

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fowl, an act that participants believed would hold malevolent spirits at bay, with the gastric consequences of eating semi-­cooked poultry perhaps further enhancing Jack’s reputation.49 These forms of collective participation fostered solidarity. Orchestrating rites that incorporated the consumption of chickens and corn into his performance, Jack sought to remove Haig and his companions temporarily from the circumstances of their daily lives as enslaved workers and to transform the ways in which they perceived the world. Shedding their identities through these rituals, they became liminal figures, a condition defined by anthropologist Victor Turner as a cultural space “neither here nor there: they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” Turner concludes that initiates “are fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life . . . [and] neophytes tend to develop an intense comradeship and egalitarianism.” In turn, the consciousness generated by “Gullah” Jack’s rituals distanced Haig and others from a world in which they were subordinate to their enslavers and turn them into rebels. Removed from that relationship, they might more easily articulate anger and resentment against their owners. Deploying his formidable and charismatic presence, his ritual knowledge, and securing the acquiescence of the participants, “Gullah” Jack fashioned an alternative reality.50 Even though Jack cast a long shadow over the insurgency, he noted that his powers did “not protect him against the treachery of his own colour.” Not only did he and Vesey go to great lengths to ensure secrecy, they also demanded rebels pledge loyalty to the cause, instructing them to swear “not to tell if taken by the whites, nor will we tell if we are to be put to death.” Keeping secrets thus became an integral part of their everyday lives, creating bonds between those who had been admitted into the small circle in possession of exclusive knowledge. Standing on the gallows with the hangman slipping the noose over his neck, Peter Poyas reminded other conspirators to keep their oath, and “die silent.” Joe La Roche recalled Rolla Bennett saying that if any Black Charlestonian gave any information or evidence, the rebels would “watch for them day and night and kill them.”51 Jack Pritchard’s command of these practices sheds further light on the mental world of the conspirators. The collective “hidden transcript” that had emerged in early antebellum Charleston among a group of enslaved people incorporated various sources. In secular terms, it drew on the politics of the revolutionary Atlantic and the language of antislavery; in religious terms, it

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looked to the Bible as well as to African sacred traditions. Jack used his rituals to inaugurate new members into insurgent circles and to revitalize elements of African culture into the lives of slaves who, having lived in a cosmopolitan city, had unwittingly drifted away from the traditions and customs of the societies from which they had originated. Although the sources of Jack’s magical practices were probably grounded in the culture of the Kingdom of Kongo, enslaved people from ethnic groups elsewhere on the continent would have likely recognized their idiom. The use of Gullah, the lingua franca for lowcountry slaves, suggests the effort to draw upon a culture that had once been deeply rooted in African ways. Language became an important medium to sustain these practices. James Mall, a young white artisan, testified that enslaved harness maker Monday Gell and his companions spoke Gullah “so that I could not understand them.” A language of secret communication, Gullah allowed enslaved people to fashion a cultural space that excluded white people and some Black people from their interactions. The universal property of every person within this specific speech community, it became the primary vehicle for expressing collective values, engaging in intellectual activity, and passing information. Gullah speech thus generated distance between the enslaved and their enslavers, becoming a medium for resistance and rebellion.52 Work, rather than worship, however, constituted the central experience for enslaved people in Charleston and the surrounding countryside. Labor and the struggles that it generated “informed all other conflicts between master and slave,” according to Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, “and understanding that contest opens the way to a full comprehension of slave society.” In the city, however, the workplace environment and the configuration of work were significantly more complex than the organization of plantation labor, where field hands primarily cultivated staple crops. Living in an environment with a diversified and complex economy that produced goods and services for local and regional markets as well as for the export trade, enslaved urban laborers performed an extensive range of jobs in a number of settings under various arrangements. In turn, this led to the emergence of smaller communities of work and networks of laborers within the city.53 The work performed by enslaved urban workers fell into several categories. First, there were slaves who worked on the wharves and in warehouses on the waterfront. To this community, we may add the enslaved laborers who worked in the boatyards, ropewalks, sail lofts, coopers’ shops, and other enterprises

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that contributed to the city’s maritime economy. Second, there were the enslaved people who worked in close proximity to their enslavers. This group included enslaved domestics and skilled artisans, whose lives centered on the workshop. Finally, there were the various configurations of slave hire. This was generally organized in two ways: Either slaveholders made the arrangements necessary for the job or the enslaved person was responsible for finding and finishing the work before handing over some portion of the earnings to his enslaver. In many cases, slaves might find themselves in their owner’s workshop one week and hired out to work for a different person the next. Unlike plantation labor where owners allocated a set number of tasks or assigned slaves to a gang (although, as we have seen, these contrasting arrangements regularly shaded into one another), urban work was significantly more flexible and open to abuse by both master and slave. No stranger to the fluid nature of urban work, Vesey did a number of different jobs and experienced varied degrees of supervision during his years of enslavement. The specific environment and the particular arrangements under which enslaved laborers performed their tasks played a central role in shaping the culture of work. In shops that produced consumer durables (furniture, saddles, and ironware, for example), slave artisans acquired the skills demanded by their owner’s particular trade, learning the common wisdom, practices, customs, and jargon that defined the culture of their craft, and distinguishing themselves by attaining the “property of skill.” Amid workbenches, tool racks, barrels of nails, and other necessities, workers took raw materials and, by combining their knowledge, creativity, and dexterity with chisels, lathes, and hammers turned wood, leather, and metal into tables, saddles, harnesses, and the other accoutrements of urban life. Workshops were places not just of production but also of social interaction where enslaved craftsmen could swap gossip, exchange news, and pass the time of day. Within the conspirators’ circle, however, they became enclaves to discuss plans as well as to make and store weapons. Of these places, John Gell’s harness shop on Meeting Street became an important place to rendezvous. Monday Gell claimed that the plotters “were in the habit of coming into my Shop to talk on this business”; languishing in jail, he recalled the names of those men who had visited the shop “for the purpose of combining and confederating in the intended insurrection.” Friends and acquaintances also conversed amid its saddles, bridles, and tack. Enslaved house painter William Colcock dropped in “to hear what was going on in Congress” and to discuss “the Missouri question”; on another occasion, George Evans, an enslaved stonecutter, watched Vesey,

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who was perhaps hoping that lightning would strike twice, study “the newspaper for Lottery Reports as he had a ticket in one.”54 Hiring retained its importance in the organization of urban work, providing income for slaveholders and enabling those unable to afford their own slaves access to their labor. In some cases, enslaved laborers were leased daily to perform a wide range of strenuous tasks that included digging wells, cleaning and maintaining city streets, or transporting goods. With newspapers regularly publishing the rates for individual jobs, masters knew how much money their slaves would bring in at the end of the day’s work (for example, in 1818, an enslaved porter earned twelve cents an hour). Self-­hire or “­ hiring out their own time” was another permutation, an arrangement where the individual slave, having gained permission from his owner, was responsible for every aspect of the job, from securing the work to collecting payment. In Fifty Years in Chains, Charles Ball recalled how enslaved laborers in Savannah who hired out “acted as freemen so far that they went out to work, where, and with whom they pleased, received their own wages, and provided their own subsistence; but were obliged to pay a certain sum at the end of each week to their masters.” He encountered one slave who informed him that he “paid six dollars every Saturday evening to his master,” keeping the rest of his earnings for himself. This was an ideal arrangement for slaveholders, with slaves generating income for owners who did not have to trouble themselves with organizing or supervising the work itself. Thus, as Johann David Schoepf caustically observed during a visit to Charleston in 1784, owners lived “carelessly on the bitter sweat of the hired” and, as English traveler John Lambert later commented, made “a handsome living by letting out their slaves for $6 to $10 per month.”55 But slaveholders also recognized that hiring had significant drawbacks. Speaking to an audience at the South Carolina Institute in 1850, James Henry Hammond, an influential political figure and a prominent champion of slavery, argued that whenever “a slave is made a mechanic, he is more than half-­ freed,” becoming “the most corrupt and turbulent of his class.” Hammond was not alone in expressing concern: Neither slaveholders nor the authorities had the ability to effectively monitor bricklayers, carpenters, house painters, and other enslaved workers who moved unhindered about the city from job to job. The case of Jesse Blackwood, assigned by Vesey to guide plantation slaves from the countryside into the city on the night of the uprising, demonstrates the potential for subversion by slave hiring. Spending far too much time laying plans for the rebellion and far too little time earning money for

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his owner Thomas Blackwood, Jesse sought assistance from his fellow conspirators, asking for contributions so that he could “pay wages to his master” and provide himself with cover for his activities.56 In early 1822, Vesey and his closest lieutenants started organizing. They collected weapons, either stealing them from their owners or crafting them themselves. Bacchus Hammet acquired his master’s gun simply by taking it “out of the closet one afternoon”; he and Perault Strohecker also took gunpowder and other supplies from stores and yards. The conspirators hired enslaved blacksmith Tom Russell to make pikes; he also planned to use the molds to cast the lead sinkers on fishing nets to produce musket balls. In addition, enslaved rural and urban laborers had ready access to implements that could double as weapons, including pitchforks, knives, scythes, and axes. The plan to capture the arsenal during the first stage of the rebellion would allow the insurgents to replace their motley collection of weapons with modern firearms. During his trial, Bram Lucas recalled how Batteau Bennett spoke about himself as “one of the army.” Other rebels, anticipating their transformation from slaves to soldiers, discussed their willingness to kill their enslavers. Boasting to Robert Harth, Peter Poyas announced that the guard at the arsenal was “a gone man”; he had no qualms about getting “a gripe at his throat” and strangling him.57 The insurgent network radiated from the city deep into the countryside. To forge links between the town and the country, conspirators exploited the ties of kinship and friendship that crisscrossed the region. Several testified about how they visited family members on local plantations in order “to gather the people’s minds on the subject.” In one case, a rebel apparently disguised himself in “the garb of a preacher,” allowing him to travel through the countryside to organize enslaved plantation laborers. Lydia, a female slave owned by Edward Perry, told the court that her son Agrippa, an enslaved wheelwright, traveled from Charleston to the plantation where she lived with the intention of recruiting men. John Enslow testified that the insurgent network extended to plantations along the Combahee in the southern lowcountry and as far north as the coastal settlement of Georgetown. It is impossible to know just how many rural slaves were formally recruited and how many were only casually acquainted with the plan; in the courtroom, Joe La Roche claimed that Mingo Harth had recruited four thousand from James Island while Frank Ferguson said that “Gullah” Jack had spoken with more than six thousand on farms and plantations around Goose Creek and Dorchester. It seems more likely that Jack and the others exaggerated these

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numbers, perhaps hoping to bolster morale by suggesting that large numbers of enslaved men had decided to join the rebels.58 The plan itself exhibited a solid understanding of urban guerilla warfare. Only when enslaved plantation laborers from the countryside rendezvoused with rebels in the city could the attack begin. With superior numbers and moving quickly through the streets, killing “every person they might meet, and prevent[ing] them from assembling, or extending the alarm,” they planned first to capture the arsenal. Led by William Garner and Perault Strohecker, a cavalry force recruited from cart drivers and draymen would secure other strategic points to prevent the militia from concentrating their forces in one particular location. Then the rebels planned to destroy Charleston with “fire and sword [in which] not a single white soul would survive,” replicating the destruction of Le Cap Français in 1793. In the midst of the chaos, the rebels intended to loot banks and other properties before “hoisting sail to Santo Domingo.” The goal was very straightforward. “We shan’t be slaves to these damn rascals any longer,” Vesey bluntly told Bacchus Hammet, “We must kill everyone that we can get hold [of] and drive the rest from the City.” Noting that the plan exhibited “an address and cunning as would much surprise the community,” lowcountry rice planter John Potter concluded that “had [its] execution been as well supplanted, many of us this day would not have been left to tell the tale.” Others concurred; Anna Johnson, daughter of U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson and niece of Governor Bennett, informed her cousin that never before had she heard about “a plot more likely to succeed” than “the excellent plot” orchestrated by Vesey and his lieutenants.59 As a prelude to the uprising, the rebels intended to introduce poison into the city’s water supply. Testifying to the tribunal, Harry Haig claimed that “Gullah” Jack had given him “a bottle of poison,” the contents of which he was supposed to introduce into “as many pumps as he could about town.” He demurred, however, and claimed that using poison constituted “murder” and was “not like fair fighting,” perhaps regarding such conduct as dishonorable. Alternatively, Haig may have wanted to confront his enslavers face to face with a weapon in his hand rather than surreptitiously using poison. That the rebels considered using poison was, in itself, not an unusual tactic. Poisoning had long been part of the repertoire of slave resistance, with enslaved domestic workers resorting to the tactic most often as they had ready access to the food and drink into which a toxin could be easily introduced. But pouring poison into city wells prior to the uprising, which depended on surprise for its success, threatened to undermine that particular stratagem. When the

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city’s inhabitants began falling ill from drinking tainted water, the authorities, perhaps fearing that an epidemic of poisoning was underway, would immediately tighten security and increase the frequency of patrols, thus jeopardizing that advantage.60 But the insurgents’ careful planning came to naught when William Paul encountered Peter Desverney on the waterfront, an occasion that triggered the chain of events that led to the mass arrest and incarceration of more than a hundred enslaved and free Black people. On 19 June, Judges Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker opened proceedings and continued at a brisk pace with only a few interruptions until early August. The speed with which they moved is well illustrated by the schedule for Monday, 15 July; opening with Tom Russell’s testimony and ending with Jack Purcell receiving the death sentence, the tribunal heard the testimony of six accused slaves as well as statements from a number of witnesses. Along with Purcell, Kennedy and Parker sent another three to the gallows and banished two more from the United States. Ten days after sentencing William Garner to death, Kennedy and Parker adjourned, reconvening the tribunal in the autumn when they delivered their narrative of events to its members.61 Only with the publication of The Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes in October did most white Charlestonians first learn the scope and scale of the rebels’ plans in any detail. Compiled and heavily edited by Kennedy and Parker, the volume offered an account of events that its authors wanted the white public to embrace as the authoritative and, as its title indicated, the official account of the summer’s events. During the interrogations, officials imposed a media blackout on the tribunal’s proceedings in an effort to prevent further panic, although a few fragments of information did leak but, as the Hartford Courant noted in mid-­July, the city’s newspapers “have been silent on the subject of the insurrection.” Only when the tribunal passed its first sentence did the press break its silence, and only then did papers print the names of the condemned and the dates of their executions. Providing very little information to their readers, Charleston editors filled their pages with shipping reports, commodity prices, notices of forthcoming auctions of land and slaves, and articles culled from other papers on national and international events. Unable to “give a correct account of the proceedings in Charleston [as] everything has been kept a profound secret,” as Martha Richardson told her nephew, gossip and rumor flourished.62 The absence of news or official communiqués did not stop people from speculating about events, however. Friends and family eager to glean some

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news about events quizzed anyone involved in the trial as well as those who had visited the prisoners. From such conversations, Mary Beach gathered a few details that she shared with her sister; Vesey, she reported, was in “a very hardened state” immediately after his trial, but he had spent his final hours praying and singing Psalms. He had, she continued, announced that “his Spiritual enjoyment never had been as great or greater than that night” and thought that the cause for which he was about to die was “Glorious.” For others, the psychological toll of prison and impending execution appears to have triggered profound depression. Lutheran minister John Bachman found Bacchus Hammet to be “very dejected [and] in deep study” while the mental state of Rolla Bennett “evinced much feeling & penitence even to tears.”63 The hangings produced unexpected moments of horror. On 26 July, wrote John Adger in his autobiography, “the whole city turned out” to watch the guard escort twenty-­two prisoners along Meeting Street to Blake’s Fields where stood “the long gallows.” It was a sight, recalled Adger, who was twelve years old at the time, “calculated to strike terror into the heart of every slave.” The crowd then witnessed a spectacle more gruesome than usual. Perhaps unwilling to be the hangman’s passive victim, Bacchus Hammet inverted the somber ritual of execution, turning it into a moment of grotesque theater. He had ridden from jail in an open cart, “laughing and bidding his acquaintances in the streets ‘goodbye.’ ” With the hood over his head and the rope around his neck, Hammet took control of his own death when he “threw himself forward and as he swung back, he lifted his feet so that his knees might not touch the board” of the gallows. The executioner had no better luck with several other prisoners. Failing to adjust the rope properly so that it would “choke effectually the sufferers to death,” the hangman found himself gazing at hooded slaves twisting in their nooses, gasping “in the agony of . . . strangulation” and screaming “to be dispatched.” A guard responded to the macabre scene unfolding before his eyes, taking out his pistol and firing at the suspended bodies. The gunfire had unintended consequences, however; frightened by the sudden noise, a horse bolted and trampled a white spectator to death and injured several others. After this horrifying spectacle, “a deathlike silence reigned in the city,” with the patrol reporting that its streets were “all quiet.64 In death, the rebels found neither rest nor peace. Thrown into shallow graves by the gallows, the corpses quickly attracted vermin, forcing local residents to complain to the city council about “the alarming nuisance occasioned by the offensive manner in which many of the culprits have been interred.” Mourning the deaths of their friends and family members, several enslaved

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and free Black people, who wore “a bit of crape” on their clothes to commemorate the dead, were arrested and whipped. Not until August did the executions finally end. Enslaved cart driver William Garner, who had fled the city several weeks earlier as the authorities began arresting suspects, was apprehended near Columbia at the beginning of the month. Taken back to Charleston in chains for his trial, the court found Garner guilty and sentenced him to death. On 9 August, he was hanged, the last rebel to die on the gallows.65 Not content with brutally ending the lives of Vesey’s men, white city residents then targeted the AME Church for destruction. Soon after the hangman had completed his work in August, a white mob gathered in Hampstead and tore down the building. Acting on instructions from “the Trustees of the African Church on their Lot in Hampstead,” merchant and slave trader William Caldwell advertised the sale of “lumber which comprised said church,” selling salvaged timber and fixtures. By year’s end, the church no longer existed; its remaining members returned to the Methodist church or became congregants at the Scots Presbyterian church.66 A variety of sources, both sacred and profane, shaped the intellectual and political worlds of Denmark Vesey, Monday Gell, “Gullah” Jack Pritchard, and other free Black and enslaved conspirators. Grounded in the emancipatory language of the Atlantic revolutions and militant Old Testament texts, ideas of liberation circulated in workshops, in taverns, and in the African church, generating a powerful message of subversion and salvation. It gained further power when “Gullah” Jack, drawing on the spiritual world of his homeland, forged a community of rebellion through ceremony and ritual. For the enslaved, however, the only way to effect change was through violence; like the Black Jacobins on Saint-­Domingue, from whom Vesey drew inspiration, he understood that only the ruthless destruction of Charleston and its enslavers would realize this goal.67 The growing constraints on Black life, best illustrated by the struggle over the AME Church and by increasingly restrictive manumission laws and efforts to isolate the state from radical ideas from the outside world, suggest that slaveholders were becoming increasingly uneasy about the institution’s future. Living in a cosmopolitan city with links throughout the Atlantic enabled its small coterie of intellectuals to gain a panoramic perspective on the place of slavery within the republic. To give slavery an ethical gloss, masters and their literary proxies fashioned a discourse of enslavement rooted in the ideal of Christian stewardship. Like Vesey, slaveholders recognized the importance of the language and actions of the “revolutionary generation,” but they drew very

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different conclusions from this era. Although they ultimately embraced “the spirit of ’76” and fought for American independence, they remained reluctant revolutionaries. By the 1790s, however, they had rejected revolution and revolutionary politics in their entirety, a gesture triggered in large part by the violent and radical turn of events in France, the outbreak of massive slave revolts on Saint-­Domingue (1791), and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the French Empire (1794). They turned instead to the politics of reaction, taking up the mantle of counterrevolution and proslavery. By the early nineteenth century, the ethic of Christian stewardship grounded this conservative outlook, leading to the construction of a rhetorical edifice that championed slavery as a positive good and as a viable alternative to free labor. The plot consisted of more than a group of enslaved men angered by endless indignities and humiliations, setting out to kill their owners and their families, and then burning down their houses. In purely intellectual terms, it offered a devastating critique of the philosophical foundations of the south’s social order. The summer’s events not only eroded slaveholders’ cherished belief that their enslaved laborers were loyal, dutiful, and obedient, but it also demonstrated their profound ignorance of their slaves’ inner lives. As Charles Ball concluded after his years of enslavement, “There can never be any affinity of feeling between master and slave.” Robert Smalls, an enslaved Charleston harbor pilot who led the daring capture of the Confederate transport ship The Planter in 1862, concurred; replying to a question put by Freedman’s Inquiry Commission agent a year later as to whether “masters knew anything of the secret life of the colored people,” he answered that “one life they show their masters and another life, they don’t show.” In Vesey’s planned rebellion, that hidden life briefly became public.68

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While we shudder at the scenes which might have been acted, and contemplate its origin and progress in a society, we cannot but hope that our Southern fellow citizens will hereafter be permitted to manage their own concerns in their own way. They have as much humanity and intellect, and more experience on this subject, than the people of the non-­slave holding states can be supposed to have. —City Gazette (Charleston), 9 August 1822

The executions at Blake’s Fields during the summer of 1822 did not end resistance by enslaved Carolinians. They persisted in their struggle against their subordination, dissembling before their owners, subverting their orders, vandalizing property, running away, and engaging in behaviors that undermined and eroded their owners’ authority. Just days after Judges Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker adjourned proceedings for the last time in August, a band of enslaved people attacked the mail coach that ran between Charleston and Savannah. Several weeks later, Martha Richardson learned about the arrest and trial of several enslaved people “for attempting to poison their Master”; at the year’s end, Governor Thomas Bennett ordered the militia to capture a group of “armed fugitive slaves” who had been “destroying cattle, breaking into and robbing dwellings, and threatening the lives of faithful domestics” on John’s Island. Three years later, on Christmas Eve, arsonists set the first of several fires, leading to their arrest and imprisonment. In 1829, Georgetown militiamen jailed enslaved men who appeared intent on destroying the small coastal town; at least six were executed. The year 1822 proved to be the watershed moment in this train of events, and the one that prompted lawmakers

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to impose restrictions on enslaved and free Black people, to inoculate and isolate the state from the broader national and international currents that had inspired Denmark Vesey.1 Black Carolinians assimilated the defiance demonstrated by Vesey and his associates into their oral traditions. Interviewed in 1937 by Stiles Scruggs, a field worker from the Works Project Administration, the seventy-­four-­year-­ old Daniel Goddard recalled how the events of 1822 were “discussed often in my presence, by my parents and friends.” Israel Nesbitt, great-­grandson of Robert Nesbitt, a free Black man who was arrested and later acquitted by Kennedy and Parker, learned “‘bout de Vesey uprisin’” from his father. Not only did Nesbitt provide his interlocuter with biographical details about Vesey, but he also recounted stories about midnight meetings and the “tumult” that accompanied the arrests and hangings. Claiming to be illiterate, he had acquired this information from oral traditions rather than from printed materials. But even as Black Carolinians incorporated Vesey into their own history, Charleston’s community of white newspaper editors, essayists, and lawyers fashioned narratives for public consumption. Forced by the events of the summer, they set out to justify the “peculiar” configuration of the social order and to propose potential solutions to the problem of rebellion and resistance by the enslaved people in their midst.2 In December 1822, a bill for the “Better Regulation and Government of Free Negroes and Persons of Colour,” more commonly known as the Negro Seamen Act, became law. A controversial piece of legislation, it required that Black mariners disembarking “from any other State or foreign port . . . [be] confined  in gaol until said vessel shall clear out or depart from this state.” The law was intended to prevent the circulation of subversive ideas and literature among enslaved and free Black people. Moreover, it stipulated that captains pay for their sailors’ incarceration; anyone who defied the law would be imprisoned or fined, with deck hands “taken as absolute slaves, and sold.” Between their arrival and their embarkation, any mariner of African descent was detained and then put behind bars, housed, as attorney Benjamin Faneuil Hunt sardonically remarked, “in a very airy and healthy part of the city.”3 Two months after the bill’s passage, “masters of American vessels lying in the port of Charleston” voiced their opposition to the law by petitioning the U.S. House of Representatives for help. Objecting to the “considerable expense” that they incurred when the state detained “free negroes, or persons of color, as cooks, stewards or mariners,” the petitioners noted that the law denied them “the services of our colored mariners” when they were locked

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up in the Charleston jail rather than on ship, repairing and maintaining the vessel. But there was a broader legal issue at stake: It was, they noted, “contrary to the constitution of the United States.” Despite the federal government’s efforts to prevent the law’s enforcement, arguing that it threatened interstate commerce as well as diplomatic relations with nations that used Black mariners, local political leaders simply ignored such requests. Instead, they founded the South Carolina Association (SCA), an organization designed to ensure compliance, with a remit to enforce “the Laws which are to govern the coloured class of the population of the state.” Several months after the law’s passage, an incident in Charleston triggered a case that tested its constitutionality and propelled the SCA and its attorneys, along with William Johnson, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and a native of the city, onto the front pages.4 The case centered on Henry Elkison, a free Afro-­Jamaican sailor who disembarked from The Homer in midsummer 1823. A “subject of his Brittanic Majesty” who had shipped out of Liverpool, he was arrested by the SCA, acting on behalf of Francis G. Deliesseline, the sheriff of Charleston District. With British consul Benjamin Moodie unable to free Elkison, who was languishing in jail, the unfortunate mariner applied for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that his imprisonment violated a long-­standing agreement between Britain and the United States that granted citizens of each country free access to their respective ports. The Negro Seamen Act clearly violated Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulated that “all treaties made . . . under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby; anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Elkison’s petition now was set before Justice Johnson, then residing in his home town.5 In the subsequent legal battle, SCA attorneys Isaac Holmes and Benjamin Faneuil Hunt, wholeheartedly embraced a states’ rights position, arguing that the state was sovereign, and claiming that laws designed to prevent insurrections took precedence over any federal treaty. From “the moment he [Elkison] touches the soil of Carolina,” opined Holmes, “he is as much subject to our police regulations, and to all the disabilities of his race, as if he had been born in this city.” The two lawyers also argued that the Negro Seamen Act was no different from the state’s quarantine laws that aimed to prevent the spread of epidemics. Extending this metaphor, Hunt concluded that white Carolinians would “dread the moral pestilence which a free intercourse with foreign negroes will produce.” For these lawyers, as well as journalists

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and other commentators, it was the political and ideological legacy of the French Revolution (and, by implication, the Haitian Revolution)—an event that Hunt and Holmes compared to “a volcano, which vomited from its crater every doctrine which was calculated to overturn all governments, and to unsettle the principles of obedience”—that lay at the heart of the problem.6 Their arguments failed to sway Johnson, who, thanks to his criticism of the conduct of the Vesey trials the previous year, remained a target of public anger. “I have received a Warning,” he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “to quit this city.” He enclosed a draft of his Elkison v. Deliesseline decision and commented on how some people, including Charleston Courier editor Edwin Holland, “now pronounce the Negros the real Jacobins of this country.” In their diatribes against Vesey, essayists had found new uses for the trope of the French Revolution as a period of anarchic and misguided violence. Ignoring the threats to his own safety, the judge issued his opinion in early August 1823. Questioning the legality of preventing “coloured subjects” from Britain from disembarking, Johnson wondered whether mariners from other countries might also be banned from entering the state. “If the colour of skin is to preclude the Lascar [a mariner of South Asian origin] or the Sierra Leone seaman,” he argued, “why not the colour of his eyes or his hair exclude from our ports the inhabitants of other territories.” Under this legislation, he continued, a ship from Massachusetts with “her officers black and her crew composed of Nantucket Indians, known to be the best seamen in our service. . . might all become slaves under this act.” Even after Johnson had delivered his opinion, the authorities continued to arrest and imprison Black sailors as soon as they stepped ashore, with the Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser quoting Charleston Mercury editor Henry Laurens Pinckney, who boasted that “the act  . . . so far from being suspended, since the trial of Elkison, proceeds in operation more rigorously, perhaps, than before.” Between late July and September 1823, more than one hundred and fifty sailors of African descent from all corners of the Atlantic basin sat in the city’s jail.7 The law, Johnson wrote, was “clearly unconstitutional” as it violated the commerce clause of the U. S. Constitution and interfered with the national government’s treaty-­making powers, arguments that both Elkison’s attorney and “the masters of American vessels” had made earlier. No sooner had he made his decision public than Robert Turnbull (the SCA’s recording secretary and an author of the legislation) and Hunt launched a campaign to discredit the judge and his opinion. In articles published in the Charleston Mercury, the two lawyers insisted on the sovereignty of the state, attacked Johnson for

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overstepping his judicial authority by taking the case, and roundly criticized his decision. In response, Johnson defended himself in the Mercury’s columns, stressing how commercial treaties protected Elkison, further reminding his detractors that the law was “altogether irreconcilable with the powers of the general government . . . [and] implies a direct attack upon the sovereignty of the United States.” A vocal opponent of the judge, Hunt had no time for Johnson’s nationalist sentiments; in The Argument of Benj. Faneuil Hunt, in the Case of the Arrest of the Person Claiming to Be a British Seaman, he claimed that he would rather see the Union’s dissolution than have South Carolina surrender its power to the federal government. Despite Johnson’s decision and the ensuing uproar, the state continued to jail Black mariners until legislators modified the law a year later, exempting free Blacks serving on naval vessels from arrest. This episode, notes historian William Freehling, alerted low-­country planters to the need for “adopting strict-­construction principles if the federal government was to be prevented from touching the slavery issue.” Here, the state’s cadre of reactionary radicals sought to invalidate a federal law some years before they set out on their crusade against the “Tariff of Abominations” in 1828, a crusade that triggered the Nullification Crisis and threatened the dissolution of the Union in the process. And it is no coincidence that lowcountry political leaders like Robert Y. Hayne and James Hamilton Jr. featured prominently in both controversies.8 Post Vesey conspiracy, lawmakers set out to regulate the lives of enslaved and free Black Carolinians even further. To limit the movement of slaves and their ability to acquire property, lawmakers acceded to calls to restrict the number of enslaved people “working out and bringing wages to their owners” and imposed stringent controls over hiring practices. One clause in the Negro Seamen Act made it “unlawful for any person . . . to hire any male slave, or slaves, his or their time”; owners who violated this provision risked having their property confiscated and sold. Grand jurors embraced this particular measure, noting that enslaved laborers who worked for hire could no longer “act in concert, and ‘concert is the very life of conspiracy.’ ” But, like every measure to regulate hiring, it proved impossible to enforce. Another statute, likewise unenforceable, sought to curb gossip and rumor; it adjudged any enslaved person who made even a passing remark about insurrection a felon and subject to execution. Other new laws curtailed the few liberties enjoyed by free Black people; in addition to banning any free Black person who traveled outside the state from returning, the annual poll tax was raised

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from $2 to a prohibitively high $50 and required Black taxpayers to obtain a white guardian to vouch for their conduct. The council also taxed free Black tenants and landlords to defray the cost of the city guard, levying a $10 fee on any free Black person who worked in any “Mechanick Trade.”9 Legislators also regulated the domestic slave trade in an effort to inoculate the state from subversive influences from the outside world, curtailing the arrival of enslaved people from politically sensitive areas. They placed prohibitions on importing enslaved laborers “from any port or place in the West Indies, or Mexico, or any part of South America, or from Europe, or from any sister State . . . north of the river Potomac or the city of Washington.” As Henry de Saussure told Joel Poinsett, who was then representing Charleston in the U.S. Congress, “Those who have been engaged in scenes of blood in the West Indies . . . beguile our slaves into rebellion with false hope,” a reference to the uprising of nearly ten thousand enslaved plantation laborers in the British colony of Demerara in August 1823. Charleston officials tried once again to prevent “pamphlets of a very seditious & inflammatory character among the Slaves & persons of color” from entering the state; in early 1830, a white mariner carrying David Walker’s incendiary An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) was arrested. Five years later, crowds gathered at the docks to meet The Columbia, which carried bundles of pamphlets from the American Anti-­Slavery Society in its hold. Rather than meet his legal obligation and distribute The Emancipator and two other tracts—“The Anti-­Slavery Record” and “The Slave’s Friend”—Charleston postmaster Alfred Huger confiscated “the vile and criminal incendiarism of northern fanatics.” The following night, a crowd seized the pamphlets that literally became “inflammatory” when they were used as kindling for a large bonfire onto which an effigy of William Lloyd Garrison was thrown while two thousand onlookers cheered the roaring blaze.10 The legislature also improved local security. Using state funds and revenues from the new taxes levied on free Blacks, the city built an arsenal and guardhouse on Marion Square to house “a Competent Force to Act as a Municipal Guard for the City of Charleston and its Vicinity.” In March 1825, during a tour of the nation, the sixty-­eight-­year-­old Revolutionary War veteran Marquis de Lafayette inspected the men, complimenting their uniforms for being “precisely similar to that worn by the National Guard of Paris at the time of the French Revolution,” reminding them that “the first duties of an armed citizen are, the maintenance of public order and the defence of

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the rights of man.” In 1843, the state put up an imposing new building in the same location. Known as The Citadel, it housed the South Carolina Military Academy, an institution that became a training ground for cadets who later fought in the war against Mexico and served in the Confederacy’s armies.11 Lawmakers were not alone in responding to the crisis of the summer of 1822. The uprising prompted lowcountry residents to organize vigilante groups to supplement the ineffective patrol system. The Edisto Island Auxiliary and the Black Swamp Association petitioned to be incorporated as a volunteer militia. Living among thousands of enslaved plantation laborers, planters well knew the potential for rebellion. Peppering their petitions with references to “the midnight incendiary . . . the assassin with his schemes of horror,” along with standard attacks against the abolitionists’ “misguided philanthropy,” lowcountry slave owners expressed their growing animus toward northern reformers. Established in July 1823 to tackle “the laxity which prevails generally in the police of the State and City, as regards our BLACK POPULATION—an evil which threatens the most serious results to the peace and prosperity of South Carolina”—and to ensure “a vigorous, prompt, and certain execution of the laws and ordinances, regulating persons of colour,” the SCA was the most prominent of these organizations. In addition to providing increased security to prevent a recurrence of “the awful spectacles of last summer,” its quarterly meetings, annual dinners, and informal gatherings provided a congenial setting where a counterrevolutionary and reactionary political culture might flourish.12 The Assembly also received petitions from slave owners demanding compensation for their enslaved property that had been either exiled or executed. Rather than reimburse individual owners for the current market value for each enslaved person, the state paid each petitioner a flat fee of $122.44 for the loss. Not only did Comptroller General Benjamin Elmore deny owners the real value of their property, but he proved rather dilatory in cutting the checks; nearly a year elapsed between the executions and the disbursements. Other bills also came due. For “services and faithful conduct,” free Black William Penceel pocketed $1,000—he used $700 to buy an enslaved woman named Sukey and her two children, who were possibly related to Penceel— while Isaac Scott collected $500. Both received an exemption from the new tax on free Blacks. For providing information to the authorities, George Wilson and Peter Desverney gained their freedom along with an annuity of $50, with the latter receiving an engraved silver pitcher. The state also had to pay

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the militia and reimburse the city for housing, feeding, and providing prisoners with rudimentary medical care. Along with money paid for compensation, the episode cost the state treasury at least $12,000.13 Writing to friends and family, several white women considered how the conspiracy had affected their own attitudes toward slavery. Discussing “the mournful state of things in our guilty city,” Mary Beach recounted how one female acquaintance thought that she now would be unable “to bear the sight of a Negroe again.” Refusing to “have one about me,” she concluded that she would move to the north. Governor Bennett’s niece, Anna Johnson harbored similar thoughts; she told her cousin that if she had the opportunity to leave, she would “not stay in this city another day.” Paralyzed by fear and anxiety, she further noted, “When I think what I have escaped & what yet I might suffer my blood curdles.” No doubt aware that several of her uncle’s slaves had been arrested, she concluded that her “feelings have been so lacerated of late” that she was barely able to “think [or] speak.”14 In their letters to friends and family members, correspondents processed public accounts of the plot and considered the character of enslaved people and slavery more generally. Using the metaphor of family—a common device in a society in which the ethic of paternalism and Christian stewardship held sway among a white population keen to obscure slavery’s brutal essence— Beach wondered how “these people[,] growing up like children as is the case of many of the condemned could be brought to such a fiend[-­]like temper that they would imbrue their hands in the blood of their Masters & their little sons, who could never have shed theirs.” Grappling with the issue, Beach deployed another common trope; it was, she wrote, a combination of the French Revolution’s legacy along with the “lust of dominion or want of revenge” that had inspired the crisis that she had just experienced. John Potter blamed subversive influences from the outside, reserving his harshest criticism for abolitionists; he informed Langdon Cheves who, as the president of the Second Bank of the United States, had moved to Philadelphia—home to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society—that “much of the poison that flows in this way comes from your city!!”15 Besides private commentaries, ministers, lawmakers, and newspapermen published their opinions for public consumption, which often revealed more about their own prejudices than about the plot itself. Considering the broader implications of the summer’s events, several mounted spirited defenses of slavery, which, when taken together, constituted important contributions to the growing corpus of proslavery works. In addition to treatises

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in which authors had drawn on a range of disciplines, including history and sociology, to present a defense of the institution, other essays simply trafficked in ad hominem attacks rather than develop an argument. Hamilton believed “a malignant hatred of whites, and [an] inordinate lust of power and booty” explained the rebels’ motives, while Judges Kennedy and Parker suggested that “depravity” along with the absence of “settled principles, and . . . the virtues of civilized life” had led to the conspiracy.16 Some essayists focused on the free Black community as a source of danger. In late 1822, a petition from a group calling itself the “Citizens of Charleston” addressed “the evils to be apprehended” from free Blacks who, they argued, constituted a “third class . . . enjoying more privileges than slaves, and yet possessing few of the rights of the master.” Caught in the no-­man’s-­ land between bondage and freedom, free Black people fully recognized that they had “sufficient of liberty to appreciate the blessings of freedom; and are sufficiently shackled to be sensible they enjoy comparatively few of those blessings.” Acknowledging the constraints and limits on free Black life, the petitioners argued that they “must be discontented with their situation and will embrace the first favorable opportunity of attaining the privileges enjoyed by the whites.” Wrongly claiming that the free Black community was growing faster than the white population, the “Citizens” believed that the plotters had been “driven to despair to obtain by force what cannot be effected in any other way.” In fact, both white and free Black populations were experiencing imperceptible growth; between 1820 and 1830, the white population in Charleston County grew from 19,376 to 20,804 while the free Black population rose from 3,615 to 3,632. At the state level, the picture was no different, with the white population increasing from 237,440 to 257,863 and the number of free Black people from 6,826 to 7,921. Thus, the petitioners’ statistical argument that demanded the expulsion of free Blacks from the state “never again to return” because their population would “in a few more years be more numerous than the whites” had no merit.17 Their other arguments, however, were more credible. They claimed that the mere presence of free Blacks led to “a spirit of discontent” among enslaved people. Watching free Black people “working where they please . . . and expending their money how they please” and recognizing their “superior condition,” the enslaved person, who perhaps had free Black friends or family members, soon became “dissatisfied with his state . . . [and] pants after liberty!” Unable to gain freedom “by purchase or faithful services” after lawmakers closed “the door against emancipation,” slaves had no alternative but

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“to combine with others and endeavor to incite an insurrection.” To break “the identity of interest between the slave and the free person of color” and to “extinguish at once every gleam of hope which the slaves may indulge of ever being free,” the petitioners demanded the expulsion “from our territory of every free person of color.” Their removal would create openings and opportunities for white workers, who could fill jobs formerly occupied by free Blacks, and possibly attract new immigrants from northwestern Europe.18 Thomas Pinckney, a plantation owner and son of Charles Pinckney, offered his suggestions to prevent the recurrence of conspiracy. Commenting on the roles assigned to “draymen, porters, fishermen, hucksters, butchers, barbers, &c.” in the plot, he demanded the expulsion of “those blacks, who now occupy these employments”; like the “Citizens of Charleston,” he suggested their replacement by white workers, who would improve their economic opportunities and put cash in their pockets. Pinckney also proposed “the sale, hire, or other disposal out of town, of the coloured people.” A supporter of the American Colonization Society, Pinckney never precisely stated what he meant by “disposal out of town,” but he perhaps saw transportation to Liberia as a potential solution. However, his call to expel the free Black population as well as significant numbers of enslaved people—a recommendation that would have turned Charleston into a city inhabited almost exclusively by white people, who would lose the goods and services provided by slave labor—gained little traction.19 Not everyone advanced such radical solutions, like the wholesale removal of several thousand people. In A Series of Numbers Addressed to the Public on the Subject of Slavery and Free Blacks, Henry de Saussure strenuously argued for upholding the status quo. Any project to reform or reorganize slavery would leave city dwellers without their enslaved domestic workers, craftsmen, and manual laborers; planters without field hands; and mill owners in England and New England without cotton. Breaking the commercial links between “the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom,” as Senator Charles Sumner labeled plantation and factory owners in a speech to abolitionists in 1848, would spell disaster. Furthermore, de Saussure argued that emancipation was completely impractical. Compensating owners for the loss of their property would not only be an immense burden on taxpayers and the treasury, but it would also trigger economic chaos, forcing planters to operate in a labor market driven not by slavery but by freed people who would demand contracts and wages. Rehearsing an argument that gained currency during the era of Reconstruction, he also claimed that Black freedom would lead to

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political anarchy. Freed men, he claimed, were intellectually incapable of fulfilling their civic obligations as citizens of the republic. “Are the blacks now prepared,” he asked rhetorically, “or could their descendants be prepared for the enjoyment of liberty or political rights? The answer founded on experience must be in the negative.” Closing with the usual diatribe against abolitionists who, he declared, failed to understand the institution’s benign character or the disorder that emancipation would bring, he concluded that slaves “must of necessity remain in their present condition, improved by humane regulation and wise provisions, adapted to their state.”20 Reworking an essay initially written in response to the Missouri Compromise crisis two years earlier, Edwin Holland, editor of the Charleston Courier, published the most popular and polemical piece. In A Refutation of the Calumnies Circulated Against Southern States and Western States, Holland opened with a salvo against Northerners who were “totally ignorant of the actual state and character of our Negro Population.” He then turned on free Black people, characterizing them as “an idle, lazy, insolent set of vagabonds, who live by theft or gambling or other means equally vicious” before disparaging the intellectual abilities of free Black and enslaved people, arguing that their “general inferiority . . . forever baffle all prospects of successful rebellion.” Embracing the growing consensus among his fellow scribblers, he noted that the free Blacks’ “comparative degree of freedom” had led enslaved people to consider their status, which resulted in “a black flood of long-­retained spleen.” Perhaps mindful of the part that multiracial people, such as William Penceel, had played in exposing the plot, Holland exempted “free mulattoes” from his vitriol, claiming that such people would ally themselves with the white community rather than with enslaved or free Black people during a crisis.21 For white southerners, Holland had hit his target with unerring accuracy. Enraged by frequent attacks in northern newspapers and “calumniated in pamphlets and orations” by abolitionists, slaveholders saw the Courier’s editor as a powerful advocate, a man who defended their honor and emphasized the benevolent and humane characteristics of their social order. Using the language of “scientific” racism, he dismissed Black Charlestonians as intellectually inferior, incapable of organizing a rebellion. But he also sought to place Vesey’s insurrectionary plans in a wider historical context. Moving beyond his attacks on “the wicked designs of our barbarous and inhuman enemies” and “whining, canting [and] sickly” abolitionists, Holland provided a brief overview on the origins of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of slavery during the colonial period, claiming that it “was not an institution of our voluntary

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adoption—and ought not, in justice, therefore, be attributed to us” but rather to the British. Reviewing the history of failed rebellions and unsuccessful plots in South Carolina, he concluded that “blood may flow in torrents for an hour, but defeat in such an insane project must be the inevitable result.” Although one hesitates to label his interpretation as “Whig,” Holland embraced the language of progress and improvement that other proslavery commentators frequently deployed. “Our slaves,” he wrote, “are in every respect infinitely better provided with food and clothing, and all the other comforts of life than the laboring poor of any country in the world—and share . . . a greater proportion of happiness than falls to the lot of millions of our own color.”22 Holland concluded his pamphlet by reprinting a commentary from Charleston lawyer Benjamin Elliott that had earlier appeared in the City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser. Called “To Our Northern Brethren,” Elliott’s essay covered well-­trodden ground, accusing the rebels of “falsifying the Bible” and turning their followers into “fiends” ready to “annihilate us and our abodes.” But it was the composure and sangfroid with which white Charlestonians met the crisis that avoided a bloodbath; rather than “yield to their passions and commit indiscriminate massacre,” he wrote, they coolly empaneled a tribunal distinguished by its members’ “integrity, respectability, and intelligence.” The trials, Elliott argued, were models of “American jurisprudence,” and the court’s verdicts merited “the gratitude not only of their immediate citizens, but of their fellow citizens throughout the Union.” Holland then offered some closing remarks in which he reminded his readers about the terror unleashed by French revolutionaries: “Our NEGROES,” he wrote, “are truely the Jacobins of the country; that they are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become the DESTROYERS of our race.”23 But Holland undermined his arguments by contradicting himself. He claimed that enslaved people exhibited a “general inferiority in the gifts of nature” yet simultaneously were capable of planning dangerous insurrections that threatened to tear down the social order. His use of the word “Jacobin” demonstrates the powerful imaginative grip that the French Revolution still had in the collective memory of white Southerners. Even though three decades had elapsed since the Revolution broke out in Paris, it still evoked the specters of chaos and violence, and, when linked to the uprisings on Saint-­ Domingue, it brought the terrors of enslaved people burning plantations, killing their enslavers, and demanding and gaining their freedom to mind. But “Jacobin” as shorthand for the French Revolution had a complex and

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contradictory genealogy. Many Americans regarded the Revolution’s opening stages—when its leaders wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and established the National Assembly in 1789—as a vindication of the ideals of their own revolution. But, as the Revolution lurched in an increasingly violent and unstable direction, particularly when Europe descended into war in 1792, and the guillotine’s blade began to fall daily when the Terror took hold in late 1793, some Americans became concerned about its radical and destructive trajectory. By equating “our NEGROES” with “Jacobins,” Holland explicitly linked revolutionary violence on Saint-­Domingue to Vesey’s unfulfilled ambitions against Charleston. But the term also acknowledged that they were insurgents possessed of powerful ideas, drawing strength from the emancipatory actions and language of the Atlantic revolutions. Nor was Holland alone in connecting the two. Others, including Edisto Island planter and essayist Whitemarsh Seabrook, acknowledged the relationship between Vesey and Saint-­Domingue. Addressing the Agricultural Society of Saint John’s Colleton, Seabrook observed that his white neighbors believed that “God, in his righteous judgement, will raise up a Toussaint or a Spartacus, or an African Tecumseh to demand by what authority we hold them in subjection.”24 While Holland and other commentators reflected secular concerns, white ministers examined the summer’s events in terms of their faith and pastoral obligations. Baptist leader Richard Furman publicly called for “a Day of Humiliation and Thanksgiving” to allow white Charlestonians to thank “the Heavenly Majesty” whose “Divine Providence” had saved them from “the horrors of the intended Insurrection [and] the ravages of a dreadful Hurricane” that hit the lowcountry in late September. In private, however, Furman was far more outspoken, telling Governor Bennett that only “God’s superintending power” had saved the city from “the execution of a ferocious Diabolical Design . . . by Domestic barbarians.” Arguing that “the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures,” Furman believed that only dedicated work by missionaries, who would require that enslaved men and women make their “acquaintance with that Holy Book,” would bring “internal and domestic peace to the state.” Furman also denounced the institutional independence of Black churchgoers; only when they were once again under the firm hand of a white minister would their “vices and transgressions” end. Episcopal minister and local historian Frederick Dalcho agreed, and echoed the opinion of his colleague, the recently deceased Bishop Theodore Dehon, who had earlier denigrated the credentials of Morris Brown and other African Methodist Episcopal ministers. To impose order on the

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slave community, Dalcho called for a strict program of religious training to exorcise the “ignorance, superstition [and] fanaticism” that had excited “the malignant passions of their deluded hearers”; instead, ministers should offer enslaved people “the fruit of the gospel” in order to foster a climate of peaceful coexistence between slave and master.25 Like Dalcho, most ministers believed that inculcating “obedience, submission and subjection” among the enslaved required pastoral labor. That none of the three hundred Black members under his instruction at Saint Michael’s Church had fallen under Vesey’s spell was a source of considerable pride and self-­congratulation, with Dalcho boasting that their “orderly conduct” should be “attributed to the excellent foundation which was laid for their moral and religious instruction.” The real sin, sermonized another minister, lay “in not spreading the Gospel . . . among our own heathen, the mass of which were as destitute of it as if they were in the ‘heart of Africa.’ ” Preachers also argued that masters must shoulder some of the burden and provide a basic religious education to their slaves as well as treat them in a humane and benevolent manner. Only when slaveholders fully embraced the ethic of Christian stewardship and began acting on its prescriptions would their enslaved laborers become, as imagined by Botsford in Sambo and Toney, “faithful and honest,” thus freeing their masters from the specter of rebellion.26 But organizing relations between enslavers and the enslaved around the concept of Christian stewardship required careful thought; many white people believed that it was no easy task to strike the right balance between leniency and coercion. At the Circular Church in September 1822, Presbyterian minister Benjamin Palmer observed that “indulgent and even affectionate” owners had too often let their slaves “forget their station and their duty,” leaving them with “an aspiring disposition” that only brought unhappiness. Echoing writers who exhibited concern about overly benevolent owners, he warned that enslaved people frequently met their owners’ “good natured weakness” with “ingratitude.” Even though the minister reminded his congregation that Saint Paul’s Letter to the Colossians enjoined slaveholders to “give unto your servants that which is just and equal,” he urged them to avoid overindulgence; it was an “ill-­judged kindness” that could “subvert the very relations themselves.” He also addressed civic leaders, demanding that they devote themselves to “tracing out the source and drying up the streams of moral corruption in the midst of us.” Specifically, he recommended the creation of “a committee of vigilance,” its members charged with effecting “a great change for the better in the moral complexion of this . . . community.”

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In practical terms, this meant shutting “dram shops,” which he regarded as “a pestilence that walks in darkness . . . licensed manufactories of sin and misery,” and strictly enforcing measures that outlawed adultery, blasphemy, and breaking the Sabbath.27 These publications served several purposes. The lowcountry’s small cadre of intellectuals—a “sacred circle,” to borrow historian Drew Gilpin Faust’s phrase, of writers, minsters, lawyers, newspaper editors, teachers, and political commentators—had revived the standard tropes of proslavery discourse and brought new authors and perspectives into circulation. In Notes on the Origin and Necessity of Slavery (1826), Charleston essayist and lawyer Edward Brown confidently argued that “slavery has ever been the step ladder by which civilized countries passed from barbarism to civilization.” Drawing on ancient history, current anthropological theory, and scripture, he wove the genre’s main threads together. But essays, pamphlets, and similar writings also enabled civic leaders to present their analyses of the episode. At one level, these texts became literary pulpits from which their authors might expound on the benefits of slavery as well as publicize their loathing of abolitionists. By writing for a popular white audience, these writers sought to fix the meaning of the summer’s events in the public mind. Using the power of the printed word as well as the commercial networks that enabled books, essays, and pamphlets to circulate widely, their publications became the “official” or “authorized” version of Vesey’s planned insurrection, a reassertion of their authority and dominance over a social order that had momentarily faced an existential challenge.28 The contrasts between the published version of the tribunal’s proceedings and the verbatim transcript further highlight how the authorities sought to regain control over events. Although Kennedy and Parker claimed that “the evidence is in most cases preserved, as it was originally taken, without even changing the phraseology,” the judges did not hesitate to censor testimony, rearrange the chronology of the trials, and collapse multiple statements made by a single witness or defendant into brief synopses. But the most striking difference, however, was their omission of Harry Haig’s testimony in which he spoke about “Gullah” Jack Pritchard’s plans to poison the water supply. In the published version, Kennedy and Parker tantalized readers by introducing Haig’s statement before inserting asterisks in place of the inflammatory text. The passage reads: “He [Jack] said he would have some arms made at the blacksmith’s—Jack was going to give me ******** I refused to do this”; in the verbatim transcript, the witness stated, “Jack was going to give me a bottle with poison to put in my Master’s pump.” Had they included this material in their

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account, they perhaps thought that they might be planting dangerous ideas in the minds of future rebels; alternatively, they possibly believed that such a provocative passage would incite an already nervous white citizenry to engage in gratuitous acts of revenge that would further destabilize the social order.29 The Official Report’s publication provided Kennedy and Parker with the chance to narrate the plot in ways that they were not able to do in the verbatim record. With its introductory remarks and a narrative of the summer’s events, along with short accounts of the interrogations and ­appendices containing information on the accused and the outcome of their trials, this slim volume became the definitive record. But even as commentators lauded slavery, promoted the benevolence of southern masters, and hurled insults at meddling northerners, they revealed contradictions in their ideological armor. Essayists simultaneously championed slavery as a benign and humane institution, yet they diffidently recognized its vulnerability to attack by enslaved ­people determined to undermine and subvert it. In 1841, the eighteen-­year-­ old Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked a friend traveling to South Carolina to locate the book for his library; when the friend requested to see his host’s copy, he was told that, after being “carefully kept for years under lock and key,” it had been burned “lest it should reach the dangerous eyes of the slaves.” Others apparently followed suit, turning a book designed for a mass audience into “the rarest of American historical documents.” Although Higginson failed to acquire a copy, he became a prominent figure in the abolitionist community and was later directly involved in the destruction of slavery in South Carolina when he commanded the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of former slaves who conducted operations against the Confederacy in the lowcountry during the Civil War.30

Coda In the decades between 1822 and the American Civil War, the state entered a long period of slow decline. In demographic terms, it slid steadily down the nation’s population table; in seventh place in 1790, South Carolina had fallen to eighteenth by the outbreak of the conflict. Between 1830 and 1860, the white population rose from 257,863 to 291,388, while the number of slaves increased from 315,401 to 402,406. In contrast, Mississippi’s enslaved population soared from 65,659 to 436,631 over the same period, while its white population grew from 70,443 to 353,899. Charleston’s fortunes also

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deteriorated; ranked the nation’s sixth-­largest city in 1830, it had dropped to number twenty-­two by 1860 (it beat out New Haven, Connecticut, by just twelve hundred people). Charleston’s population had barely risen—from 30,289 to 40,522—over the three decades. Other metrics tell a similar story. Between 1850 and 1860, the aggregate value of real estate and personal property for white South Carolinians rose by 90 percent; in Mississippi, it grew by 165 percent, with only five other states, including Maine and Vermont, ranking below South Carolina in this category.31 The steady migration of planters and enslaved laborers to the southwest provides another measure of South Carolina’s stagnation. In 1827, the Agricultural Society of Saint John’s Colleton gathered to hear Whitemarsh Seabrook enumerate the challenges faced by low-­country planters. Not only had the quality and quantity of Sea Island cotton steadily declined, but the land on which enslaved laborers cultivated it had, he noted, become “annually more exhausted,” with planters having failed to take the steps necessary to ensure its “resuscitation.” He lamented that “profits continually diminish,” and he damned “the ravages of the caterpillar” that regularly damaged the crop. Planters in the middle and upcountry faced similar difficulties, with one describing the cotton belt as “the cussedest poor country God ever created.” Faced with the daunting prospect of working increasingly impoverished and unproductive fields and drawn by the promise of fertile soils and fresh, uncultivated lands in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond, large numbers of white, native-­born South Carolinians packed up and headed west, with more than a quarter of a million leaving between 1820 and 1860, the year in which the census recorded that 193,389 had “removed to other states.” The “young and old are preparing to emigrate,” noted the Camden Gazette, “and the inquiry is not whether you are going, but when you are going.” By 1860, there were about 45,000 white South Carolinians living in Alabama, while another 26,000 had taken up residence in Mississippi. Whether reading articles that championed “the great and growing emporium of the Mississippi Valley” or that boasted that “the Alabama territory holds out the most brilliant promise” or chatting to immigration agents from Texas, many families believed that their future lay in the southwest. Not only were white people leaving South Carolina in droves, but very few migrants from overseas or the other states were arriving to replace them. Between 1850 and 1860, the number of foreign-­born arrivals totaled 1,478 (with the foreign-­born population growing from 8,508 to 9,986). Only Florida, North Carolina, and Vermont counted fewer new residents in this period. By the eve of the Civil War, for each newcomer to the

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state, approximately fourteen white South Carolinians had departed to live elsewhere.32 But census figures tell only part of the story. For white South Carolinians in the early 1830s, the Nullification Crisis provided the backdrop for debates about the state’s future. In the writings and speeches of Hugh Swinton Legaré, a native South Carolinian who had a long career as a politician and a diplomat, as well as in belles lettres (he was a founder and the editor of the Southern Review), we can hear foreboding and unease. In Legaré’s opinion, the deep political divisions between the unionists and supporters of nullification, which he thought “an ill-­omened and disastrous project,” had put the state on the wrong path. “We are (I am quite sure), the last of the race of South Carolina,” he told SCA attorney Isaac Holmes, presciently noting that “I see nothing before us but decay and downfall.” In July 1831, he adopted an equally pessimistic tone in his address to the Union and States Rights Party in Charleston, telling the audience that “decay and desolation . . . are invading many parts of the lower country,” expressing his concern about “the comparative unproductiveness of slave labor” and the steady contraction in the prices of agricultural commodities. The westward exodus only deepened his uneasiness; writing to Alfred Huger, Legaré despaired that migration had led to “the whole country about the Wateree and Congaree . . . breaking up and moving off en masse to the West,” with farmers leaving behind fields that were returning to nature, along with “deserted settlements . . . [and] dilapidated buildings.” Furthermore, “decay” was “universal” across the state; not only were families and their enslaved laborers abandoning the rural lowcountry, but farmers from “the back and middle country” were deserting their properties. With everyone on the move, the day was rapidly approaching when vast swaths of the state would, he feared, “be abandoned like a steppe in Mongolia or Tartary!”33 The passage of the Slavery Abolition Act by Parliament, which dismantled slavery in the British Empire, only compounded Legaré’s hunch that South Carolina might be on the wrong side of history, particularly as it became law at the height of the Nullification Crisis. Passed in 1833, twenty-­six years after Parliament had ended British participation in the Atlantic slave trade, it did not emancipate enslaved people overnight; it inaugurated an apprenticeship scheme for freed people—an arrangement that proved as exploitative as slavery itself—that ended in 1838. Four years later, Parliament passed the Slavery Compensation Act, which allocated £20 million to recompense slaveholders for the loss of their property, although no money was set aside to assist former slaves with the transition to freedom. Moreover, the campaign to

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abolish slavery in the empire had taken place against a backdrop of violence and unrest in the British Caribbean. In August 1823, more than ten thousand enslaved sugar workers in Demerara rebelled; eight years later, about thirty thousand slaves on Jamaica participated in the Christmas Rebellion, or the Baptist War. Now, with the exception of Cuba and a number of other islands, the long and violent career of slavery in the Caribbean, once the crucible of the New World plantation complex, had entered its twilight years.34 Although Legaré invoked the history of ancient Greece to claim that slavery was “an essential element of civilized society” and further claimed that “different races of men had been created” for specific roles, with enslaved people ordained to provide “the community with . . . manual labor and the useful arts,” he believed that public concern over the “slave question” in Europe should “awaken the solicitude of Southern man.” Writing to Holmes, Legaré noted how abolition in the British Caribbean, along with the destruction of slavery on Saint-­Domingue, had left “at the mouth of the Mississippi, a black population of 2,000,000 free from all restraint and ready for any mischief.” Two years earlier, in 1831, Nat Turner and his followers in Southampton County, a rural backwater in southern Virginia, had rebelled, killing more than fifty white people before local militia crushed the uprising, an event that triggered a wave of violent retribution across the upper South in which more than a hundred Black people died. And, although, as historian Steven Hahn has noted, enslaved people during the antebellum period “largely ceased to imagine direct rebellions against their owners”; the dread of a large-­scale uprising and the fear of another Saint-­Domingue in their backyard remained a profound psychological force, shaping white perceptions and reactions. Even small children recognized the Haitian Revolution’s impact; Mary Chesnut, wife of U.S. Senator James Chesnut, recalled how her mother Mary Boykin had “in her youth the St. Domingo stories . . . indelibly printed on her mind,” leaving her “afraid of negroes.” Regarded as a potent and existential danger, the terrifying prospect that another Toussaint Louverture might appear had become embedded in the minds of white South Carolinians; when they contemplated the emancipatory currents swirling around the Atlantic basin, the abolition movement’s growing momentum, and the fiery liberationist rhetoric of Black radicals like David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet, the world became even more frightening and dangerous, a place that was, as Legaré told Holmes, “full of alarm and anxiety.”35 During these years, enslaved people inhabited a world that oscillated between the predictable rhythms of the agricultural seasons and the

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profound dislocations caused by sudden, unanticipated change. Death, debts, bankruptcy, or some other crisis could shatter the familiar pattern of daily life at a moment’s notice, bring the auctioneer to the doorstep, and rip apart the bonds of family and friendship overnight. The experiences of the sixteen-­ year-­old William Craft, who would stage a dramatic and successful escape from Georgia to freedom with his wife Ellen in 1840, encapsulate the trauma of sale and separation. In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), William recalled when Mr. Craft, his first owner, had “at separate times” sold his parents, who “were getting old, and would soon become valueless in the market.” Bought by “different persons,” they were “dragged off never to behold each other again.” Now essentially orphaned, William and his siblings were auctioned off when Craft, after losing money in an unsuccessful effort to speculate in cotton, sold them to settle his debts. A planter who “lived at some distance in the country” purchased his sister, while Ira Taylor, a “cashier of the bank to which we were mortgaged” took William. Unable to bid farewell to his sister by “the harsh auctioneer,” William, his “brain on fire,” craved “for power to avenge our wrongs.” Repeated countless times in countless auction rooms across the South, such scenes emblematized (both for enslaved people and abolitionists), in direct and public contradiction to the rhetoric of benevolence and stewardship championed by slaveholders, the inhumanity that sat at the center of the institution. And nowhere was this better illustrated than at Ten Broeck Race Course outside Savannah in March 1857 when Pierce Mease Butler (a descendant of Pierce Butler, who had established the family’s low-­ country plantation dynasty in the late eighteenth century, the ex-­husband of English actress Fanny Kemble, and a compulsive gambler) sold more than four hundred enslaved people who had worked on his coastal Georgia plantations. The men, women, and children, who were housed in the track’s stables and outbuildings during the two-­day sale, were being auctioned to pay off the enormous debts that Butler had accumulated after he lost the family fortune at the card table, in the stock market, and by reckless spending. Realizing over $300,000, the sale, wrote New York Tribune journalist Mortimer Thomson, who infiltrated the auction in the guise of a prospective buyer, had arbitrarily thrown large numbers of people and “happy little communities . . . to the four winds.” And while husbands and wives might be destined for “the pine woods of North Carolina, their brothers and sisters [might] be scattered through the cotton fields of Alabama and the rice swamps of Louisiana.”36 Even though their lives were subject to sudden and unpredictable disruption and upheaval, enslaved people continued to invest in the intricate

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networks of sociability and community, with family and faith retaining a central place. For enslaved people caught up in the whirlwind and trauma of removal, the songs, stories, food ways, collective memories, pharmacological knowledge, beliefs, and aesthetics constituted their lives that they sought to protect from the masters and overseers who supervised the forced marches to Alabama, the Mississippi Valley, or Texas. Just as enslaved people in eighteenth-­century South Carolina had used the shards and remnants of the cultural and communal systems that had survived the Middle Passage to maneuver within the constraints of the plantation complex’s carceral order, so too did the antebellum era’s “migration generation” struggle to reproduce and resurrect similar arrangements to act as a counterweight to the social isolation of their new environments in western plantation lands.37 The enslaved people who remained behind mourned the losses that migration had inflicted on their lives and communities. But they might learn how family and friends were faring in the aftermath of their transportation through the informal and haphazard but extensive network through which news flowed between slave communities across the south. For example, such a network provided William Craft with the news that his sister had ended up in Mississippi. The system also provided slaves with a glimpse of the day’s major issues. Enslaved steamboat workers who worked on the lower Mississippi and lived in a dense informational world, could easily gather news and information—from overhearing a conversation, by glancing at discarded newspapers, or in chatting with a fellow deckhand—and then pass it along to friends and other workers at riverside towns and landings from which it might travel inland to more isolated settlements.38 For several leading South Carolina families, the Mississippi Delta was an attractive destination. In the mid-­1840s, Wade Hampton II and his two sons—Wade Hampton III and Christopher—purchased around 3,000 acres in Issaquena and Washington Counties on the river’s eastern banks. Between 1850 and 1860, the two counties experienced astounding growth; their enslaved population rose from 11,941 to 21,711. Of these slaves, nearly 900 worked on Hampton family plantations. In the same period, the white population grew only modestly from 912 to 1,799. In Issaquena, there were more than 40 plantations between 500 and 1,000 acres and 17 with more than 1,000 acres. Of Issaquena’s 115 slaveholders, 17 owned between 100 and 199 enslaved people (the county’s slave population stood at 7,244) in 1860. Enslaved laborers, furthermore, were cultivating huge amounts of cotton; again, using Issaquena County as an example, production exploded from

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3.46 million pounds in 1850 to 16.46 million pounds 10 years later. No cotton planter in South Carolina could ever hope to match such astounding levels of production; in Richland County, where the Hampton family first established their plantation dynasty in the late eighteenth century, production gradually declined over the same period, dropping from 4.5 million pounds in 1850 to 3.9 million pounds in 1860.39 Determining the number of enslaved Carolinians moved against their will to the southwestern frontier is harder to assess, but the “second Middle Passage” saw tens of thousands forcibly relocated from the Eastern Seaboard to the southwest. Analyzing sales in South Carolina from 1820 to 1860, historian Steven Deyle estimates that more than a quarter of a million enslaved people went under the auctioneer’s hammer, but this figure does not account for enslaved men and women who migrated with their owners. With planters either selling or transporting slaves to the southwestern frontier, enslaved people now had to endure an African American “trail of tears.” Between 1820 and 1860, about a quarter of the lowcountry’s slaves left the state; for example, Charleston County, which included the city and its rural hinterlands, lost about a third of its enslaved population. The cotton-­producing counties in mid-­state present a different picture; not until the 1850s did mid-­state planters move significant numbers of enslaved laborers. From 1850 to 1860, the slave population of Richland County dropped from 12,978 to 10,577, with large numbers going west. Not only did migration uproot established networks of enslaved family and community members, but it also forced enslaved people to suffer yet more trauma and violence as traders and masters marched them to Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond.40 Traveling deep into the southwest in 1834, geologist George Featherstonhaugh stumbled across traders transporting “a coffle” of three hundred enslaved laborers to the Mississippi River town of Natchez, where they were to be shipped to Louisiana. Having “bivouacked the preceding night in chains in the woods,” they were awakened, ordered into two files and then “manacled and chained to each other,” shuffling slowly down the road followed by wagons in which their captors traveled. Twenty-­five years later, Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed a similar caravan of misery during his journey across eastern Texas. On one occasion, he passed an emigrant train of wagons and about twenty “able field hands,” who, “mud-­incrusted, wrapped in old blankets, or gunny bags, suffering from the cold, plod on, aimless, hopeless, thoughtless” toward their destination. After trudging for weeks on end along rutted trails and bad roads and enduring the dangers of dilapidated riverboats, enslaved

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people then had to confront the realities of the frontier; in the Mississippi Delta, they encountered a forbidding and inhospitable wilderness of forests, swamps, reptiles, and wild animals. Even though guidebook author Robert Baird noted that “no country on earth is covered with a greater variety of useful trees, shrubs, and vines,” it was enslaved laborers who had to hack their way through the dense jungle of vegetation to carve out a landscape suitable for the cultivation of cotton. Just as slaves in the eighteenth-­century lowcountry had shifted hundreds of tons of earth and cleared acres of forest to create rice fields and irrigation ditches using muscle power and basic tools, legions of enslaved laborers in the Delta took axes, machetes, and fire to slash and burn their way through swamp gum, cypress, and hickory, battling back clouds of mosquitoes and evading “rattle, copper head and moccasin snakes,” which, Baird dryly noted, “are very venomous.” But the canebrakes and the stands of trees located in remote corners of the plantation also provided sites for enslaved people to establish temporary maroon camps and sacred groves where they could set about rebuilding culture and community.41 But migration had other significant consequences. In 1854, Richland County’s grand jurors recognized that “the removal of slaves from the more northern of the Slave States” to the Mississippi Valley and beyond had generated labor shortages; between 1850 and 1860, the county’s enslaved population fell from 12,978 to 11,005. The South Carolina Agricultural Society acknowledged the broader implications of the steady procession of slaves and their owners west. Its leaders noted how migration had left the state without its “most energetic and useful citizens,” as these people were now providing “the bone and sinew” of leadership elsewhere. With “slaves, the true wealth of the state . . . decreasing in number,” the cost of purchasing enslaved labor had risen accordingly, leaving planters who stayed behind discovering their bank accounts “strained for the last cent to supply their places” as they endeavored to acquire slaves. Furthermore, the movement west of “stocks of hogs, horses, mules, and cattle” had left farms and plantations with fewer animals, thus reducing their value and productivity. For government officials in Columbia, migration and the steady decline in population spelled financial trouble; the exodus of labor and capital deprived the treasury of tax revenues, leaving the state struggling to meet financial obligations.42 But perhaps the most significant consequence of migration was the campaign to reopen the Atlantic slave trade; its closure in 1808 had led to the dramatic expansion of the domestic slave trade, which rapidly became a major source of income for many white southerners and, for some, the origin

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of considerable fortunes. In 1853, Charleston newspaper editor Leonidas Spratt called for its resumption in the pages of the Southern Standard and the Charleston Mercury, triggering a crusade that fire-­eating radicals, such as Robert Barnwell Rhett and Maxcy Gregg, enthusiastically supported. Three years later, Governor James Adams joined their cause when, in an address to the General Assembly, he argued that if the state still wished to remain a major cotton producer, it needed “cheap labor . . . [which] can be obtained in but one way—by reopening the African slave trade.” Although the effort ultimately failed, the speeches delivered, the reports produced, and the articles published exposed the intellectual contours of the “ruling race’s” opinions on the eve of secession; the writings also reveal how the common themes of proslavery discourse had remained essentially unchanged since the essays and polemics that appeared in the wake of the Vesey crisis three decades earlier.43 Although newspapers filled their columns assessing the pros and cons of reopening the slave trade, it would be the General Assembly, whose members were divided over the merits of the resumption of the slave trade, that would ultimately decide the question. But the debate did not solely concern the trade’s prospects; it was also about the state’s future within the Union and it offered assemblymen yet another opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to slavery and to attack abolitionists and their northern political allies. In 1857, a committee of six members from the state’s House of Representatives (four from the lowcountry, one from the midlands, and one from the upcountry), and chaired by Edward Bryan, who represented Saint John’s Colleton, reported that “South Carolina does need a further importation of slaves from Africa.” To support its conclusion, the committee trotted out the old and, by now, rather threadbare arguments about slavery’s merits; the institution, it argued, “is an essential element in our domestic and social systems . . . [and] is unalterably interwoven with our destiny.” Bryan also invoked the Almighty, claiming “that God designs African slavery to be an American institution, an unavoidable and unalterable element of American civilization.” Using economics, statistics, and census data, the committee claimed to have proven “utterly beyond dispute” that the demand for enslaved laborers was “far greater than can be supplied by the natural increase of our negroes,” concluding that “no time should be lost in taking the necessary steps” for resuming the trade.44 But the report’s academic scaffolding could not obscure its real objective. The reopening of the Atlantic slave trade would pay significant political dividends. Increasing the pool of enslaved Africans available for purchase would

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drive down prices, thus enabling “a more general ownership of slaves among our white population.” Citing the 1850 census, the report’s author noted that only 25,600 out of 53,000 white families in South Carolina currently held slaves, arguing that extending ownership “is desirable throughout the South.” With low prices, today’s non-­slaveholding yeoman farmer had the opportunity to become tomorrow’s planter, and thus would have a greater stake in “the welfare of the State” and would remember the politicians who advocated for the program come Election Day. The addition of thousands of enslaved Africans to the labor force would, the committee contended, ensure the future health of plantation agriculture not just in South Carolina but across the South. Moreover, adding new arrivals to census and tax rolls would result in more representatives in Congress and bring in much-­needed revenue. One had to look only at declining productivity in the British Caribbean, the report claimed, to realize the incompatibility of free labor and staple agriculture, which had forced British politicians to draw “the simultaneous conclusions that West India emancipation was a disgraceful failure and Southern civilization a magnificent success.”45 Opposing Bryan and his desire to reopen the trade was a committee chaired by James Johnston Pettigrew, the representative for Saint Philip’s and Saint Michael’s in Charleston. Noting that there was “a vast distinction between upholding Slavery and upholding the Slave Trade,” his report endorsed the former, opposed the latter, and concluded that a massive influx of enslaved people from Africa would destabilize slavery as it was now organized. Importing “half a million raw Africans . . . a mass of barbarians— vicious, unruly, discontent,” who, “never having learned to regard their master as their friend,” would undermine and erode “the bond of affection, which attaches the master to the slave . . . and the solidarity existing between himself and his owner.” Disrupting the harmonious and benevolent plantation order that had evolved over the years, Pettigrew, scrambling his prose, foresaw a “new night” descending, where “thefts, murders, and plantation riots would be the order of the day.” Importing more enslaved Africans would not immediately solve the problem at hand. Pettigrew argued that enslaved ­people born in the southern states “have been educated to labor . . . their bodies and minds are attuned to it.” In contrast, Africans were not; he claimed that they were “neither physically nor mentally capable” of hard work, concluding that “idleness and sensual inactivity” constituted their “normal condition.” Furthermore, the habits of “idle, slovenly, insubordinate barbarians” would contaminate “our educated, civilized negroes.” Thus, enslaved people

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from Africa would not only debase the labor of native-­born slaves, but their presence would not automatically lead to an increase in productivity. The committee concluded that the “introduction of barbarians from Africa” would be “injurious to the best interests . . . of South Carolina.” The arguments made by Pettigrew’s committee ultimately won the day; in elections held in 1857 and 1858, two prominent supporters for upholding the ban on the slave trade—James Henry Hammond and James Chesnut—won seats to the U.S. Senate, while the lobby demanding its reopening lost momentum. And, even though the subject fleetingly reared its head during the drafting of the constitution of the Confederate States of America in March 1861, the new nation, which was dedicated to protect “the institution of negro slavery,” chose to ban “the importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country.”46 In the three decades bracketed by the Nullification Crisis and the outbreak of the Civil War, the ruling class in South Carolina came to adopt the politics of radical reaction wholeheartedly, embracing, in the words of historian Manisha Sinha, “the counterrevolution of slavery.” The embrace of states’ rights and the unyielding defense of slavery on the printed page, in public statements, at the podium in the U.S. Senate, and elsewhere in the corridors of power suggest a determination by its political leaders to forestall and frustrate any intrusions into their society. Failing to come to terms with the state’s slow economic and demographic decline, they turned instead to the politics of radical conservatism and nostalgia. So, it is perhaps unsurprising that when the Charleston Mercury announced the dissolution of “the union subsisting between South Carolina and other states,” in December 1860, it clothed the event in the rhetoric of the past, leaning on the American Revolution as a vital reference point, casting the national government as an analog to the British Parliament; back in 1776 and now in 1860, their actions “compelled the people of the Southern states to meet the very despotism their fathers threw off in the Revolution of 1776.” Rather than speak optimistically about the potentialities of a bold and expansive future independent of the United States, the rulers of the new slaveholder’s republic unswervingly anchored their ambitions and aspirations to a past built on slavery.47

EPILOGUE

Four years after Brigadier General Pierre Beauregard ordered the artillery batteries that ringed Charleston Harbor to open fire on Fort Sumter in the early morning of 12 April 1861, an impressive array of Union staff officers along with congressmen, judges, and cabinet members gathered on bleachers erected on its parade ground. Several leading abolitionists, including publisher and essayist Joshua Leavitt; William Lloyd Garrison, the founder of The Liberator; theoretician of Black nationalism and author of Blake: or, The Huts of America, Martin Delany, who served with the 104th Regiment of the United States Colored Infantry during the war; and Robert Smalls, the enslaved harbor pilot who had captured the Confederate steamer The Planter in 1862 and later saw action with the Union Navy, were also in attendance. They had assembled to hear a speech by Henry Ward Beecher, the nation’s most distinguished minister and a prominent social reformer, and to witness General Robert Anderson raise the same tattered Stars and Stripes that he had rescued four years earlier from the fort that was now little more than “shattered heaps of shapeless stone.” After a few remarks, Anderson “seized the halyards” and, as soon as the flag “caught the breeze,” the crowd began singing “The Star-­Spangled Banner” while Union warships in the harbor fired a salute.1 Following this powerfully symbolic moment, Beecher stepped forward and, standing under a hastily erected “temple of liberty . . . entwined with bunting and wreaths of flowers,” began speaking. During his lengthy address—at one point, he requested the band “to play an air” so that he could catch his breath—he celebrated the restoration of a country dedicated to the idea that “universal liberty is indispensable to republican government,” noting that the flag raised by Anderson again flew “over a nation neither enslaved nor enslaving.” However, he tempered his remarks with an attack on the “giddy traitors” and “arrogant conspirators” who had led the charge for secession and war. In Beecher’s eyes, it was “an aristocracy as intense, proud and inflexible as ever existed . . . [a] political tape-­worm, that produced nothing, but lay coiled in the body,” that was responsible for four years of unrelenting carnage

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during which an “ocean of blood” had been shed, leaving the South “desolated.” Confederate leaders had, he observed, “cut the land in two . . . [and] set up a sterner, statelier empire where slaves should work [so] that gentlemen might live at ease.” Closing his speech by praising President Abraham Lincoln’s “patience and fortitude” during the last “four bloody years,” he sat down to “great applause” while the choir sang “the doxology of ‘Old Hundred’ [Psalm 100].” Several hours later and five hundred miles to the north in Washington, D.C., actor and disgruntled Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth walked into Ford’s Theater armed with a Deringer pistol to assassinate the man who had endured “the unparalleled burdens and sufferings” of civil war as commander in chief; had drafted and signed the Emancipation Proclamation; and had pledged his government, its soldiers, and its sailors to crush “the armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States.”2 Standing aboard The Oceanus as it steamed to Fort Sumter across Charleston Harbor, now filled with Union transports and gunboats along with the hulks of sunken Confederate blockade runners, the minister perhaps reflected on the city’s long and eventful history. The “polished, cultured, exceedingly capable, and wholly unprincipled class” excoriated by Beecher as the people responsible for the conflict could trace its roots back to the colonial era’s “gentry generation” a group of immensely wealthy men, such as Henry Laurens and Peter Manigault, who had accumulated considerable fortunes from their participation in the slave trade as well as from the labor of enslaved Africans on the rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain, and who came to dominate regional politics and society. By the American Revolution, Charleston had become a thriving port and commercial hub as well as a center for cultural and political life. Possessing an elegance and charisma that the state capital of Columbia sorely lacked, Charleston retained its place as a leading intellectual center for white Carolinians during the antebellum era. Its cadre of educated professionals—lawyers, ministers, teachers, and journalists—as well as its more commercially minded residents embraced a radical conservatism, a position that they celebrated in essays and editorials that championed slavery while simultaneously assailing the modernizing and centralizing tendencies of the national government. Furthermore, in print, in speeches, or in conversation, they never passed up an opportunity to attack abolitionists who, resolved to dismantle the institution that lay at the very heart of southern society, had dedicated their lives to speaking out against the enslavers’ “most horrid crimes” and “appalling barbarity.”3

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For the lowcountry elite, the perpetuation of slavery along with the maintenance of its own power was a fundamental article of faith. By 1781, after a war during which free and enslaved Carolinians had played significant roles, the gentry generation had finally gained independence from Britain, whose policies had threatened the political liberties as well as the livelihoods of plantation masters and slaveholders. From the late eighteenth century to the outbreak of the Civil War, they, along with the rapidly growing numbers of slaveholders and plantation owners in the midland and upcountry counties— the locus of the state’s cotton production—embraced a politics of conservatism and counterrevolution, becoming radical reactionaries and mounting a ferocious defense of slavery in print, from the pulpit, and in the political arena. Moreover, the state’s delegation to the U.S. Congress during this era included several nationally known and influential politicians: John C. Calhoun, who, in a long career that began with his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1810 and only ended with his death forty years later when he was a senator, had served as secretary of war, as secretary of state, and as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson; James Henry Hammond, an outspoken defender of slavery and states’ rights, had sat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1830s and later in the U.S. Senate. The state’s less well-­ known political figures included Preston Brooks (the U.S. representative from Edgefield in the upcountry), who beat Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death in May 1854; James Chesnut, Jr., a U.S. senator and Beauregard’s aide during the attack on Fort Sumter; belletrist and diplomat Hugh Legaré; South Carolina Association lawyer Isaac Holmes; and James Hamilton Jr., Charleston’s mayor during the crisis of 1822 and, a decade later, an enthusiastic supporter of nullification. Neither these politicians nor the constituents that they represented had any intention whatsoever of considering any law that would consign slavery to the dustbin of history; they were not going to be agents of their own demise and preside over the dissolution of their “peculiar institution.”4 When Beecher spoke about the individual states constituting “inseparable parts of national government,” he took aim at South Carolina’s distinctive political culture. As the debate over the Tariff of Abominations of 1828 grew increasingly rancorous in the early 1830s, the state’s political leadership mobilized around the idea of abrogating federal law. Nullification not only ignited a bitter division in South Carolina between its supporters and unionists but also triggered a crisis when Calhoun resigned as Jackson’s vice president in late 1832. A member of an influential family from Abbeville in the Upper Savannah Valley, Calhoun soon emerged as the intellectual

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godfather of southern radicalism, with The South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828) and The Fort Hill Address: On the Relations of the States and the Federal Government (1831) becoming ideological touchstones for the “counterrevolutionary generation,” foundational texts for any southern politician who advocated the doctrine of states’ rights. Despite the defeat of Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers, they and their colleagues went on to fight a number of strenuous and bruising battles in the U.S. Congress, in speeches, and in the press over the extent and exercise of federal power, the sovereignty of the state, and the extension of slavery into the territories in the west and southwest. Furthermore, Calhoun had fully assimilated the language of proslavery, telling his fellow senators in February 1837 how “under the fostering care” of slaveholders, the lives of the enslaved had been transformed. No longer did slaves live in “a low, degraded and savage condition” but now had “attained a condition so civilized and improved” that it contributed directly “to the general happiness of the race,” leading Calhoun to conclude that the relationship between the enslaved and their enslavers was “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good,” providing a “solid and durable foundation” for a stable and orderly society. In the eyes of Beecher, it was only the apocalypse of the civil war that had purged such “deadly doctrines” and drawn “the poison of secession” from the body politic.5 For Charleston’s thirteen thousand enslaved people, freedom became a reality on 18 February 1865 when its mayor, Charles Macbeth, surrendered to Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig who set up his headquarters in Miles Brewton’s house, which had been occupied by Sir Henry Clinton after his army captured the city eighty-­five years earlier. The first Union soldiers to enter Charleston were the men of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 21st Regiment, United States Colored Infantry, who marched through neighborhoods devastated by bombardments from gunboats stationed offshore and from batteries on Morris Island, which Union forces had captured in July 1863. Amid the chaos a few days before the surrender, an immense explosion had flattened the city’s railroad depot and adjacent buildings when a large cache of gunpowder and other munitions blew up. “The flames,” reported Oscar Sawyer, a journalist embedded with the United States Colored Troops during the campaign, “like a fabled monster, strode on, licking up everything inflammable and enveloping its victims in its fiery and deadly embrace.” A moment’s carelessness by Confederate soldiers—the explosion occurred when a fire, started to destroy two thousand bales of cotton, got out of control and rapidly spread to ammunition crates, which ignited and

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turned the depot into “a whirling mass of ruins, in a tremendous volume of flame and smoke”—had inflicted the scale of damage that Denmark Vesey and his men had planned to exact on the city four decades earlier.6 With Union soldiers occupying Charleston, its Black inhabitants poured into the streets to greet and embrace their liberators. “They seized the hands of the officers and men,” reported Sawyer, “and wept with an excess of exultation and delight. . . . It took all our men by surprise.” A few weeks later, with buildings still smoldering, federal troops along with more than four thousand newly freed laborers, artisans, and tradesmen formally celebrated their emancipation and the end of the conflict. With African American soldiers from the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry at the head of a column that stretched for more than two miles and took, reported the New York Tribune, “one hour and twenty minutes to pass any point,” they marched through town, holding aloft banners that announced “Slavery is Dead,” “We Know No Master but Ourselves,” and “Our Past the Block, Our Future the School.” Looking on, some of the newly freed men and women perhaps recalled other noteworthy moments in the city’s history in the last few decades: the executions of Denmark Vesey and his fellow rebels in 1822; the street brawls between unionists and the supporters of nullification in the early autumn of 1832; Calhoun’s lavish public funeral and burial in Saint Philip’s graveyard in 1850, which provided his eulogists, including James Henry Hammond, with a golden opportunity to champion states’ rights, attack the “despotic power” of the federal government, and excoriate the abolitionists’ “violent crusade against the South” with their speeches “full of the vilest abuse and slander”; the contentious and divisive Democratic Convention of April 1860; the huge demonstrations on Meeting Street the following November when speaker after speaker demanded secession after Lincoln’s election victory; and the shelling of Fort Sumter four months later. Others may have recollected stories passed down from grandparents about the American Revolution; they may have dimly recalled the departure of thousands of enslaved people during the city’s evacuation in 1782 or the enthusiastic crowds that greeted Citizen Edmond Genêt’s arrival, as well as the collective anxiety that spread through the white community when enslaved refugees along with their owners, fleeing from the rebellions on Saint-­Domingue, arrived in the early 1790s.7 Whatever their recollections, the freed people who marched by “solitary chimneys, crushed houses, and shattered pillars” had spent their lives working at a variety of skilled and unskilled jobs on the city’s wharves, streets, and building sites, and in its workshops, boatyards, stables, houses, and

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hotels. Not only had enslaved laborers provided the white population with goods and services essential for its welfare, but they had, in many cases, also earned money for their masters. Moreover, depending on the circumstances of their assigned jobs, some urban slaves were able to build lives that exhibited some degree of autonomy. At the same time, they lived and worked in a city that had a distinctive cosmopolitan character; although New Orleans had cemented its position as the South’s leading commercial city by the 1830s, Charleston remained inextricably entwined with the Atlantic world. Just as urban slaves in the 1760s and 1770s witnessed the struggle between colonists and crown, the enslaved community in antebellum Charleston were likewise familiar with the major issues that dominated the national agenda; many doubtless overheard their enslavers angrily denounce meddling abolitionists or had eavesdropped on conversations about the string of political crises in the 1850s that precipitated the union’s dissolution; others picked up news in taverns, on the waterfront from sailors and visitors from the north, or sought out newspapers or surreptitiously obtained abolitionist literature.8 In intellectual terms, the Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century in North America, in France, and on Saint-­Domingue were decisive inflection points. From the Stamp Act protests of late 1765 onward, the language of liberty became a powerful tool in the hands of the enslaved. Drawing very different conclusions from this discourse than their masters, who construed it in far narrower terms, enslaved people sought to translate the radical egalitarian ideas of revolutionary rhetoric into a reality. And these powerful ideas, now in the public sphere, would remain there; the bell could not be unrung. Even though the exigencies of the Revolutionary War made it difficult for the enslaved to take full advantage of the chaos that prevailed when British and American armies campaigned across the region, thousands, particularly in the lowcountry, did gain their freedom, leaving when the British evacuated Charles Town in late 1782. But for tens of thousands of other enslaved people, however, the struggle that secured the independence of their white masters from the “slavery” of British rule also ensured that their own bound status would remain unchanged.9 Many soldiers in the 21st Regiment, United States Colored Infantry, who marched through Charleston in March 1865 had spent their lives in the rural lowcountry, first as enslaved plantation laborers and, more recently, as new recruits in the Union Army. In some cases, their families had lived in the region for generations, creating deep and lasting ties to the land on which they labored. In November 1861, an invasion fleet with twelve thousand Union

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troops steamed into Port Royal Sound; they quickly overwhelmed its defenders, who abandoned Port Royal, Saint Helena, and Hilton Head entirely. The hasty departure of planters as well as Confederate soldiers triggered the abrupt collapse of slavery and plantation agriculture on the islands; enslaved people headed for Union lines and freedom while their former enslavers fled to the mainland. “We were driven from our home in St. Helena Island,” recalled Thomas Chaplin, who fought with the Saint Helena Mounted Volunteer Riflemen during the attack, and was the owner of Tombee Plantation on which thirty enslaved laborers raised Sea Island cotton, “never to return to it.” The following year, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson arrived in Beaufort, the major settlement on Port Royal Island. At Camp Saxton, named after General Rufus Saxton, the officer appointed to administer the freed people on the Sea Islands, the abolitionist colonel drilled the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment mustered from the ranks of recently liberated slaves. On New Year’s Day 1863, at John Joyner Smith’s Old Fort plantation on Saint Helena Island, the two white officers along with “detachments from other colored regiments . . . missionaries, and pastors from local churches,” and about three thousand freed people from the surrounding countryside, all wearing “their holiday attire,” marked “the birth-­day of liberty in the South.” Assembled under a “beautiful grove of live oaks . . . men, women and children of every complexion,” they listened to regimental bands, cheered long and loud when Saxton read the “Proclamation of Emancipation” and told them “to carry this good news to your brethren still in slavery,” applauded “the brilliant and beautiful sight” of Black soldiers drilling, and then settled down to enjoy “an Old Southern Barbecue” that featured “twelve roasted oxen and numerous barrels of molasses and water.”10 Higginson also led his men into combat. On one mission along the Saint Mary’s River on the Georgia/Florida border, they skirmished with a small Confederate unit, captured “some thirty sheep, forty bushels of rice, some other provisions, tools, oars, and a little lumber” and distributed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation. “We seldom found men who could read it,” he recalled, “but they all seemed to feel more secure when they held it in their hands.” In early July 1863, he led a nighttime raid up the Edisto; moving upriver on a steamer, his men attacked a battery at Willtown Bluff (near the church where Fenwick Golightly had alerted worshippers about the Stono rebels more than a century earlier). After a brief exchange that silenced the Confederates’ guns, Higginson watched the rice fields beside the river “come alive with human heads, and along each narrow path came a straggling file of

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men and women, all on a run for the river-­side,” laden with their few meager possessions, and carrying their children. By the next morning, with “the refugees aboard the steamer,” the expedition began its return journey; when the Enoch Dean docked in Beaufort, its decks were piled high with their bedding and bundles, “with black heads emerging and black forms reclining . . . [some] were chatting eagerly among themselves, singing, praying and soliloquizing on joys to come.” Not only had Higginson brought the fight against slavery from the drawing rooms and assembly halls of his native Boston to the lowcountry, but he now commanded men who were directly engaged with the destruction of slavery, and with the liberation of their enslaved brothers and sisters.11 In the eyes of white southerners, the commanding officer of the First South Carolina Volunteers embodied the very worst characteristics of Yankee culture and society. A social reformer, a militant abolitionist, and a Unitarian minister—Higginson was also a staunch supporter of the temperance movement as well as an advocate for women’s and workers’ rights, and later introduced the world to the poetry of Emily Dickinson—he was in the vanguard of white northern radicals who, along with fellow travelers like John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips, sought to end slavery. His passionate advocacy for the dispossessed, combined with his willingness to leap into action, made him an even more dangerous figure. In May 1854, as a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, he participated in the failed attempt to free fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Having successfully reached Massachusetts after fleeing from his owner in Virginia the previous year, Burns was subsequently captured by a bounty hunter on a Boston street and placed in custody in the city’s federal courthouse while he awaited extradition back to the South. In the struggle to free Burns, Higginson received his own red badge of courage and commitment—a deep gash on his face from the blade of a guard’s sword. Two years later, he took part in the New England Emigrant Aid Society’s campaign to recruit and supply antislavery settlers heading for Kansas; in fall 1856, he led a party to the territory, then to a battleground between abolitionists and proslavery forces, arriving in time to witness the fraudulent election in October. Reflecting on his adventures in Kansas, Higginson concluded that the conflict between “Border Ruffians” and antislavery activists in the territory presaged “a struggle which will convulse a continent before it is ended.” He later joined the Secret Six, a clandestine group that included Unitarian minister and reformer Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, an influential abolitionist and former presidential candidate for the Liberty Party, and Samuel Gridley

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Howe, an abolitionist who had earlier fought in the Greek War for Independence. These activists raised funds for Brown’s unsuccessful raid against Harpers Ferry in late 1859. Higginson also took up his pen in the fight against slavery, writing a series of articles on Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in the summer of 1861.12 The countryside through which the soldiers of the First South Carolina Volunteers marched had changed little from the days when charter members of the plantation generation had worked in its fields. The hydraulic landscape of ditches, trunks, ponds, and fields excavated and constructed by their enslaved ancestors more than a century earlier had dominated their lives. On the eve of the war, rice remained the region’s leading crop, with enslaved laborers reaping nearly nineteen million pounds in 1859; they also harvested more than seven million pounds of Sea Island cotton. Its population remained overwhelmingly Black and enslaved: In 1860, for example, 81 percent of Beaufort County’s forty thousand inhabitants were slaves. The task system, which had determined productive relations between enslaved laborers and their owners from the inaugural days of the plantation order, still determined the slaves’ daily lives. For planters, the watchwords were “discipline, stability, order and continuity,” which had characterized rural life on the coastal littoral since the early eighteenth century, with the last profound moment of deep change taking place when plantation agriculture supplanted ranching and forestry, turning the frontier into a rice kingdom where the number of enslaved people outstripped the number of white people.13 It would be foolish, however, to conclude that the rural lowcountry constituted “a land that time forgot.” Over the years, the technology of rice cultivation had grown more sophisticated, with the greater application of hydraulic power to propel water through irrigation channels being one important innovation. The ethnic composition of the region’s enslaved population had also undergone changes. With the closure of the Atlantic trade in 1808, the constant infusion of people, customs, and traditions direct from the littoral of Atlantic Africa, which had been decisive in the formation of eighteenth-­century slave culture and community, came to an end. The generation of enslaved people born after 1808 instead experienced their formative years not as free men and women in Atlantic Africa but as bound laborers on lowcountry plantations. In addition, efforts to bring evangelical religion to plantation slaves—a missionary effort advocated by ministers such as Edmund Botsford—also had a dramatic impact on the lives of the enslaved, encouraging the growth of syncretic religious practices that combined the

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languages and forms of Baptist and Methodist churches with the sacred practices and idioms of Atlantic Africa.14 At Pudden Swamp, a cotton plantation owned by John Frierson near Mayesville in Sumter County in the center of the state (in 1860, of the ­county’s 23,859 inhabitants, 16,682 were enslaved), slavery ended in a far less dramatic fashion than in Charleston or on the Sea Islands. Even though General William Sherman’s soldiers were no more than a few dozen miles away, there were no parades, barbeques, or rousing speeches to mark the institution’s demise here. In a memoir written decades later, former slave Irving Lowery recalled “the beautiful spring day” in early 1865 when Frierson ushered his enslaved laborers into the plantation yard and, from his porch, addressed them. “I must now tell you,” he said, “that you are all no longer my slaves. All the colored people who have been held in the South as slaves are now free. Your freedom is one of the results of the war.” Keen to advertise his credentials as a benevolent master one last time, Frierson congratulated himself on his treatment of elderly slaves: “When they became so old and feeble that they could not work,” he noted, “I have kindly fed, clothed, and cared for them.” Warming to his theme, he observed “that I have not been cruel to any of you. I have not abused you . . . [and] I have owned no blood hounds,” further commenting that he had never separated “a mother and her child; a husband and his wife.” Only when he caught enslaved men and women leaving the plantation without a pass had he resorted to the whip, claiming that “it was not my fault”; instead, he blamed disobedient slaves for forcing him to dispense punishment. In closing, he spoke about the plantation’s future; ex-­slaves would sign a contract wherein “it was agreed that all the slaves should remain on the plantation until . . . January 1866, when the crop would be divided.” When the new year came, however, Lowery noted, most freed people “went out and made contracts with other landlords.” No matter how humane an owner Frierson believed himself to be, his former slaves thought otherwise. They soon took advantage of their newfound freedom to make “their homes elsewhere.” By late 1866, the men and women who had once constituted Pudden Swamp’s enslaved workforce were, wrote Lowery, “all scattered . . . never to come together again until the judgment.”15 On learning about their emancipation, the fifteen-­year-­old Lowery and the rest of the enslaved workforce, which numbered “perhaps forty or fifty,” responded with little outward emotion. “Their rejoicing was,” he recalled, “a subdued rejoicing,” believing that any “outward demonstration of joy . . . would be unwise.” They listened quietly to their former owner and future

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employer speak before they filed onto the porch to sign their contracts; they then “returned to their work.” Although their “joy was unspeakable” and no words could express their feelings, Lowery made no mention of any celebration in the slave quarters, perhaps because, as he noted, even though they “were glad of the new order of things,” they “scarcely knew what it all meant.” Several hours earlier, they had tramped into the plantation yard and stood before their master as enslaved men and women, legally defined as the property of John Frierson and subject to his will; an hour or so later, they headed back to their cabins as free people, no longer the chattel of another human being and anticipating a future in which slavery no longer existed. Over the next weeks and months on farms and plantations across the south, enslaved laborers participated in similar events as slaveholders, often unable to conceal their anger and annoyance, had to acknowledge that the defeat and unconditional surrender of the Confederacy had led to the destruction of slavery and the annihilation of their social order. No longer were they the owners of other people.16 The paternalistic ethic embraced by Frierson and his neighbors had its origins in the eighteenth-­century backcountry where the evangelical church and the household provided the institutional foundations on which its social order rested. With the rise of commercial cotton cultivation at the end of the century, the evangelical church regained influence and authority. Not only were its ministers instrumental in the spiritual transformation of upcountry communities, but several clergymen became influential spokesmen for the “counterrevolutionary generation,” commenting on matters ideological as well as theological, blending the language of scripture together with the language of proslavery to create a powerful message about the institution’s humanity and the benevolence of slaveholders, a vernacular form of proslavery discourse that soon entered the collective consciousness of white Carolinians, who absorbed its message that was delivered from pulpits and politicians, and in pamphlets and papers. The writings of clerics like Baptist leader Richard Furman and Edmund Botsford, the author of Sambo and Toney, were integral to the broader discussion on how best to manage and control enslaved people and the benefits that accrued to masters when obedient and docile slaves quietly and dutifully followed orders, accepted evangelical teachings, and willingly acknowledged their place in the hierarchy.17 Pudden Swamp and other plantations in the interior constituted the engine of the South Carolina economy in the antebellum era. The invention and adoption of the cotton gin in 1793, the durability and adaptability of

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short-­staple cotton along with the rapidly rising demand for the fiber from textile mills in New England and the British Isles contributed to its rapid expansion across the south. As the geographic reach of cotton moved west from South Carolina and Georgia and across the fertile lowlands of Alabama and the other states on the Gulf of Mexico as well as up the Mississippi Valley from New Orleans to Memphis, its economic power also increased; in turn, the influence and power wielded by the region’s planters and political leaders grew dramatically. Compared to rice, a crop that required significant investments in capital and labor to create an environment suitable for its cultivation, short-­staple cotton was everyman’s crop; even the humblest yeoman farmer or smallholder raised an acre or so for the marketplace, an option that was unavailable to inhabitants of the rice lowcountry. But cotton did not dominate trade and commerce only in the southern states. It was, as historian Sven Beckert has noted, “the core ingredient of the world’s most important manufacturing industry . . . [and] catapulted the United States onto center stage of the world economy.” On the eve of the Civil War, cotton accounted for 60 percent of the country’s export business. It was essential to the overall economic health of the United States; in sharp contrast, rice had neither the same commercial hold over the national economy nor the same psychological grip on the imagination of white southerners. While many fundamentally disagreed with much of what James Henry Hammond said, few could challenge the accuracy of his observation, made during a speech in the U.S. Senate in March 1858, that “Cotton is King.”18 From the arrival of English colonists and enslaved laborers from Barbados in 1670 to the outbreak of the Civil War, slavery as a lived experience of traditions, customs, and practices, as well as an institutionalized set of laws and ideologies, had evolved from a loosely structured method of organizing and disciplining servile workers into a complex institution that infiltrated every aspect of the social order. Its structure proved flexible enough to function effectively in three different settings. In each place, the physical environment shaped how masters configured the relations of production and how enslaved people contested these arrangements. The organization of work according to gender and skill, the degree of supervision and discipline, the labor process, and the population density and ethnic origins of the enslaved workforce all contributed to the overall character of these relationships. These arrangements, moreover, fostered the rise of cultures of both work and resistance in each locale. Even though an enslaved person remained a slave whatever the setting—the lowcountry plantation, the urban workshop, the

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farm in the interior—the daily experience of enslavement differed, in some cases quite significantly, with each environment. The local ecology of slavery also shaped practices of resistance and rebellion. In the eighty-­three years between the uprising along the Stono River and Denmark Vesey’s planned insurrection against Charleston, the locus of collective slave resistance had moved from the countryside to the city. Rural slaves still sought to subvert and undermine their enslavement when and wherever possible; rather than resist through collective violence, however, they channeled their discontent by fashioning, writes folklorist Roger Abrahams, “alternative perspectives toward work, time, and status.” In the rural lowcountry, this found expression through independent production on provision grounds, hunting, fishing, and engaging in very modest levels of consumption and commerce. It also entailed deep engagement with family, community, and keeping the memory of distant homelands alive through faith practices, language, cooking, and other cultural formations. And like their counterparts on upcountry cotton plantations, who adopted similar strategies, enslaved people on the coastal littoral adapted and shaped the modes of evangelical religion in the early nineteenth century for their own cultural and social purposes.19 In the countryside, the culture of resistance manifested itself in subtle and oblique ways. The practices and traditions that constituted the “hidden transcript” remained underground; they did not crack through the earth’s crust in a moment of seismic violence as happened on Saint-­Domingue in the early 1790s. In Charleston, with its connections to the wider world and its cosmopolitan sensibilities, the language of liberty moved like lightning. Moreover, the various ways by which masters configured work combined with the organization of the city itself—workshops with tools that easily doubled as weapons, arsenals stocked with muskets and powder, and enslaved people easily moving around the city, for example—made urban slavery far more volatile. In 1822, had not the authorities learned about Vesey’s plans shortly before the insurrection was scheduled to begin, then white Charlestonians would have discovered firsthand how vulnerable they were to attack. Just as the rebellion along the Stono River in 1739 proved to be a significant moment in the transition from a “society with slaves” to a “slave society,” so was 1822 another signal moment in the history of slavery in South Carolina. On this occasion, the cultural legacies of Africa and the concept of liberation, embedded not just in biblical texts but also in the emancipationist language of the Atlantic revolutions, hybridized into a powerful ideology of subversion and salvation among a band of enslaved artisans and laborers.20

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But it was not rebellious slaves acting in concert that caused the fall of the house of slavery; it was rebellious slaveholders who initiated the conflict that led to its ultimate destruction and to the emancipation of four million enslaved people. When the South’s “ruling race” established the Confederate States of America—a new nation with its ideological foundations resting on, as its vice president Alexander Stephens informed an audience in Savannah’s Athenaeum in late March 1861, “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition”—it asserted a principle that flew in the face of nearly two hundred years of historical struggle. From 1670 on, the activities, initiatives, and enterprise of generations of enslaved South Carolinians had testified to the vacuity and hollowness of Stephens’s “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” by creating a culture that enabled them to fashion their own philosophy, politics, morality, and aesthetic. Twenty-­two days after he announced that the establishment of a slaveholders’ republic constituted “one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of the world,” Beauregard ordered his gunners to open fire on Fort Sumter, a decision that triggered four years of bloodshed, ultimately resulting in the comprehensive destruction of both slavery and the Confederate States of America.21 Now, with slavery abolished and the Confederacy in ashes, Black Carolinians as well as freed men and women across the South looked toward a future in which the auction block would no longer break up and divide families and communities; where they would “know no master, but ourselves”; and where they might acquire land, education, and the rights denied during their enslavement. But even as Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau Oliver O. Howard informed the Committee of Freedmen on Edisto Island (ex-­slaves Henry Bram, Ishmael Moultrie, and Yates Sampson) who had alerted the general to their former owners’ determined efforts to repossess plantations abandoned during the war, which prevented freed people “from getting land enough to lay our Fathers bones upon,” that the “whipping post . . . is abolished forever,” a new set of conflicts between planters and freed people over labor, rights, and the very meaning of freedom itself began to take shape. Speaking to an audience in Washington, D.C., in July 1875, Frederick Douglass provocatively asked: “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?” In the decade before and in the years following Douglass’s comments, Black men and women in South Carolina and elsewhere in the South quickly learned that peace had not abolished “the whipping post”; rather, the whipping post reemerged in

Epilogue

405

countless different sinister guises, recrudescing in the form of the white robes and burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan; the noose and the grotesque spectacle of the lynch mob; the shackles and prison stripes of the chain gang; the firehoses and tear gas of police departments in the Jim Crow South, and its segregated railroad and trolley cars, water fountains, lunch counters, and neighborhoods. But, as people of African descent had done during two centuries of their enslavement, they drew on past traditions and practices of resistance, reshaping them to meet the demands of the new struggle to realize their hopes, aspirations, and ambitions.22

NOTES

Introduction Note to epigraph: Thomas Nairne, A Letter from South Carolina, Giving an Account of the Soil, Air, Product . . . of that Province (London, 1710), 6‒8; (from the French, “champain” means open, level countryside). 1. Samuel Dyssli to Mother, Brother and Friends in Switzerland, 3 December 1737, in R. W. Kelsey, “Swiss Settlers in South Carolina,” SCMH 23 (July 1922), 90; Russell R. Menard, “Slave Demography in the Lowcountry, 1670‒1740: From Frontier Society to Plantation Regime,” SCMH 96 (October 1995), 205; SCG, 3 March 1737; Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670‒1920 (New York, 1989), 64; Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957: A Statistical Abstract Supplement (Washington, D.C., 1960), 1192. From its founding in 1670 until 1783, the settlement bounded by the Ashley and Cooper Rivers was known as Charles Town; after the Revolutionary War, its name was changed to Charleston. 2.  Fernand Braudel, “History and Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago, 1980), 25‒54; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015). For general histories on South Carolina, see Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S.C., 1998); Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (New York, 1983); Walter J. Fraser Jr., Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia, S.C., 1989); Robert Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729‒1765 (Kingsport, Tenn., 1940). The literature on antebellum politics in the state is extensive; see James M. Banner Jr., “The Problem of South Carolina,” in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (New York, 1974), 60‒93; James Haw, “‘The Problem of South Carolina’ Reexamined: A Review Essay,” SCMH 107 (January 2006), 9‒25; Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); William Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina (New York, 1965); Lacy K. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800‒1860 (New York, 1988). 3.  On relations between colonists and Native Americans, see William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln, Neb., 2008); Larry E. Ivers, This Torrent of Indians: War on the Southern Frontier, 1715‒1728 (Columbia, S.C., 2016); Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680‒1730 (Lincoln, Neb., 2008); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670‒1717 (New Haven, Conn., 2002); Charles Hudson and Carmen Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521‒1704 (Athens, Ga., 1994); Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville, Tenn., 1976); Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood and M. Thomas Hatley, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, Neb., 2006); James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (New York, 1991); John Stuart Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-­Cherokee Frontier, 1756‒63 (Baton Rouge, La., 2001); David La Vere, The Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies (Chapel Hill,

408

Notes to Pages 3–6

N.C., 2013); Daniel J. Tortora, Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756‒1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2015); Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution (New York, 1995). On the Revolutionary War in the South, see John S. Pancake, This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780‒1782 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2003); David K. Wilson, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775‒1780 (Columbia, S.C., 2005); John W. Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution: A Battlefield History (Columbia, S.C., 2003). 4.  SCG, 22 February 1773; on backcountry violence, see Robert M. Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760‒1808 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990). 5.  See Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-­Century British Atlantic World (Charlottesville, Va., 2010); Martha A. Zierden and Elizabeth J. Reitz, Charleston: An Archeological Life in a Coastal Community (Gainesville, Fla., 2016); Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-­Shute, and Randy Sparks, eds., Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society (Columbia, S.C., 2001); L. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662‒1729 (New York, 2004); William S. Powell, The Proprietors of Carolina (Raleigh, N.C., 1963). 6. Charles F. Kovacik and John J. Winberry, South Carolina: The Making of a Landscape (Columbia, S.C., 1987); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 63‒94, 131‒166; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730‒1815 (Chapel Hill,, N.C., 1993); S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Daniel Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Urbana, Ill., 1991); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740‒1790 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998). 7.  Ira Berlin, “Time, Space and the Evolution of Afro-­American Society on British Mainland North America,” AHR 85 (February 1980), 44‒78; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-­American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York, 2010). On the late eighteenth-­century Atlantic revolutions, see David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context (New York, 2010); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in an Age of Revolution, 1770‒1823 (New York, 1999); Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2008); Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750‒1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1996); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (London, 2013); Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776‒1848 (London, 2011). On westward migration and the “second middle passage,” see Damian A. Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (New York, 2015); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2018). 8.  David Ramsay, The History of the Revolution in South Carolina, from a British Province to an Independent State, 2 vols. (Trenton, N.J., 1785); Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York, 2014); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1995); Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (London, 1991). 9. Wood, Black Majority; Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise; Daniel Littlefield, Rice and Slaves (Urbana, Ill., 1991); Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. See also local histories, including Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers, The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: Volume 1, 1514‒1861 (Columbia, S.C., 1996); George C. Rogers, The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia,

Notes to Pages 6–9

409

S.C., 1970); Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Columbia, S.C., 1980); Olwell, “‘Loose, Idle and Disorderly’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-­Century Charleston Marketplace,” in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington, Ind., 1996); Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-­Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1984), 185‒222; Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York, 2007), 143‒171; J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Gregory E. O’Malley, “Slavery’s Converging Ground: Charleston’s Slave Trade as the Black Heart of the Lowcountry,” WMQ 74 (April 2017), 271‒302. 10.  The so-­called new Atlantic history has likewise reframed the analysis of European migration and colonization in the early modern era. See Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1988); Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four Folkways in America (New York, 1989); A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore, 1993); David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607‒1785 (Athens, Ga., 1994); Robert Ramsey, Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747‒1762 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673‒1800 (New York, 1997); Eric Hinderaker and Peter Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Baltimore, 2003); Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-­States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” AHR 104 (June 1999), 814‒841; Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Edda L. Fields-­Black, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Bloomington., Ind., 2008); Wood, Black Majority, 35‒62; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400‒1800 (New York, 1998); Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250‒1820 (New York, 2012); Linda M. Heywood and John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundations of the Americas, 1585‒1660 (New York, 2007); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007); Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-­Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia, 2016); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the New World Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York, 1998); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1986); Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, La., 1988); Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, 2010); Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery; Freehling, Prelude to Civil War. 11.  Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York, 2002); Sean M. Kelley, The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016); David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, Conn., 2010); Rediker, The Slave Ship; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; Thornton, Africa and Africans; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans; O’Malley, “Slavery’s Converging Ground”; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York, 2000); James Walvin, The Trader, the Owner, the Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery (London, 2007). On the Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database, see www​.slavevoyages​.org. 12. Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 9; Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670‒1837 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999); Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009). 13.  On the backcountry, see Brown, South Carolina Regulators; Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-­Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C.,

410

Notes to Pages 9–14

2002); Klein, Unification of a Slave State; Peter N. Moore, World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in Backcountry South Carolina, 1750‒1805 (Columbia, S.C., 2007); Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism. 14.  James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn., 1985); Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, N.C., 1999). More specifically, on slave culture in South Carolina, see Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, Ill., 1984); Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-­Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1989); Wood, Black Majority; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. 15.  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 112; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1978); Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997). 16.  Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia, S.C., 2005); Jack Shuler, Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights (Oxford, Miss., 2009); Peter Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Revolt of 1739 (New York, 2012); Sally Haddon, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). On rebellion and revolution in the Caribbean basin, see, for example, Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, 2014); Laurent DuBois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1963); Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990); David Barry Gaspar and David Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, Ind., 1997); James Alexander Dun, Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (Philadelphia, 2016); White, Encountering Revolution. 17. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xiii; Edward Pearson, Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999); Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wisc., 1999); see also Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978); Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and the British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Bernard Powers, Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822‒1885 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1994).

Chapter 1 1.  Joseph West to Lord Ashley, 10 August 1669, in Langdon Cheves, ed., “The Shaftesbury Papers and other Records Relating to Carolina and the First Settlement on Ashley River prior to the Year 1670,” in Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society (Charleston, S.C., 1897; repr. ed., Columbia, S.C., 2010), 5:133 (hereafter Cheves, ed., Collections); “A list of All Such Masters, free passengers and servants,” in Cheves, ed., Collections, 5:134. See also Paul Quattlebaum, The Land Called Chicora: The Carolinas Under Spanish Rule with French Intrusions, 1520‒1670 (Gainesville, Fla., 1956), 78‒94; William S. Powell, The Proprietors of Carolina (Raleigh, N.C., 1963); Robert Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1983), 47‒75; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 35‒46; M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663‒1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), 3‒19. 2.  On the Carolina’s passengers, crew, and cargo, see “A List of All Such Masters” and “A List of All the Seamen,” in Cheves, ed., Collections, 5:134‒152; Powell, Proprietors of Carolina, 33‒38;

Notes to Pages 14–17

411

Victoria Proctor, “South Carolina Ships’ Lists,” www​.sciway3​.net​/proctor​/ships​/v1​/carolina1669​ .html; Agnes Leland Baldwin, First Settlers of South Carolina, 1670‒1680 (Columbia, S.C., 1969). 3.  Robert Southwell to Lord Ashley, 31 August 1669, in Cheves, ed., Collections, 5:152‒153; Henry Brayne to Lord Ashley, 7 August 1669, in Cheves, ed., Collections, 5:137. 4. Joseph West to Lord Ashley, 10 September 1669, in Cheves, ed., Collections, 5:154; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the West Indies, 1624‒1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972); Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry: The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670‒1770 (Charleston, S.C., 2006), 19‒33. 5.  Great Newes from Barbados, or, A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes Against the English (London, 1676), 6‒7; Joseph West to Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, November 1669, in Cheves, ed., Collections, 5:157; Richard Waterhouse, “England, the Caribbean, and the Settlement of Carolina,” Journal of American Studies 9 (December 1975), 259‒281; Kinloch Bull Jr., “Barbadian Settlers in Early Carolina,” SCMH 96 (October 1995), 329‒339; Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2010), 54‒107, 189‒258; Hilary McD. Beckles, The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s “Barbarity Time” in Barbados, 1636‒1876 (Kingston, Jamaica, 2016); Dunn, Sugar and Slaves. 6.  Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1673), 43; for a brief biographical sketch of Ligon’s career, see Karen Kupperman, ed., A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (Indianapolis, 2011), 1‒37; Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480‒1630 (New York,1984), 280‒303; Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia, 2014), 168‒202. 7.  John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, “The Sugar Industry in the Seventeenth Century: A New Perspective on the Barbadian ‘Sugar Revolution,’ ” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450‒1680 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 293; Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville, Va., 2014); Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the West Indies, 1623‒1775 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1974; repr. ed., 1994); Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 87; Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York, 1990), 82‒83; Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2015). 8.  Gary Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-­Barbadian Politics, 1627‒1700 (New York, 1984); Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627‒1660 (New York, 2003); Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640‒1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1491‒1800 (New York, 1997), 185‒258; Andrea Stuart, Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire (New York, 2013), 5‒125. 9.  Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000); Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560‒1800 (Baltimore, 1998); Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (New York, 2009); Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars, 1640‒1660 (London, 2009); Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640‒1661 (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); John Donoghue, Fire Under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago, 2013).

412

Notes to Pages 18–20

10.  Lord Ashley to Sir John Yeamans, 15 December 1617, in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 5:361; Lord Francis Willoughby to King Charles II, 12 May 1666, in “America and West Indies: May 1666,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London, 1880), 380‒384.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol5​ /pp380​-384; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 108. 11.  Thomas Walduck, “T. Walduck’s Letters from Barbados, 1710,” JBMHS 15 (November 1947), 27; Henry Colt, “The Voyage of Sir Henry Colt, Knight, to the Islands of the Antilles,” in Vincent T. Harlow, ed., Colonizing Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana,1628‒1667 (London, 1925), 65‒66; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 51; Nicholas Foster, “A Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island of Barbados (1650),” in J. Edward Hutson, ed., The English Civil War in Barbados, 1650‒1655 (St. Michael, Barbados, 2001) 3; Ligon, True and Exact History, 86; “Extracts from Henry Whistler’s Journal of the West India Expedition [1654‒1655],” in C. H. Firth, ed., The Narrative of General Venables, with an Appendix of Papers Relating to the Expedition to the West Indies and the Conquest of Jamaica, 1654‒1655 (London, 1900), 145‒146; Willoughby to Charles II, 12 May 1666, in “America and West Indies: May 1666,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 380‒384;  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​ -indies​/vol5​/pp380​-384; Curtin, Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 82‒83; Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire, 35; Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (New York, 2011), 30; Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens, Ga., 2012), 109‒134. 12.  John Winthrop to Henry Winthrop, 30 January 1628, in Allyn B. Forbes et al., eds., Winthrop Papers, 6 vols. (Boston, 1929‒1992), 2:67; John Winthrop’s, Experiencia in Forbes et al., eds., Winthrop Papers, 1:413; Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty in New England (Princeton, N.J., 1962), 12; Francis Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York, 2003), 125‒129; Hilary McD. Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-­State (New York, 1990), 14. On the tobacco levy, see “The Privy Council to Farmers, and Officers of Customs,” 6 January 1631, in “America and West Indies: January 1631,” in CSP: Volume 1, 1574‒1660, ed. Sainsbury, 124‒125. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol1​/pp124​-125; Peter Hay to James and Archibald Hay, 13 April 1638, cited in Gary Puckrein, Little England, 54; F. C. Innes, “The Pre-­Sugar Era of European Settlement in Barbados,” Journal of Caribbean History 1 (November 1970), 1‒22. 13.  Sir Henry Colt, “Voyage of Sir Henry Colt,” in Harlow, ed., Colonizing Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 69; J. H. Bennett, “Peter Hay: Proprietary Agent in Barbados, 1636‒1641,” Jamaican Historical Review 5 (1965), 16; Bennett, “The English Caribbees in the Period of the Civil War, 1642‒46,” WMQ 24 (July 1967), 360; Daniel Fletcher, cited in Puckrein, Little England, 53‒54. 14.  Whistler, “Extracts,” 146; Colt, “Voyage of Sir Henry Colt,” in Harlow, ed., Colonizing Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 93; Bennett, “Peter Hay,” 416; Foster, “A Briefe Relation,” in Hutson, ed., The English Civil War in Barbados, 3. 15. Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627‒1715 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1989), 15‒17, 26‒27; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985). 16. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550‒1835 (New York, 1985), 178.

Notes to Pages 21–26

413

17.  Foster, “A Briefe Relation,” in Hutson, ed., The English Civil War in Barbados, 4; Ligon, True and Exact History, 85; Jerome S. Handler, ed., “Father Antoine Beit’s Visit to Barbados in 1654,” JBMHS 32 (May 1967), 67; Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624‒1690 (New York, 1972), 81: Puckrein, Little England, 57. 18. Menard, Sweet Negotiations; Mintz, Sweetness and Power. 19.  Philip D. Morgan, “Task and Gang Systems: The Organization of Labor on New World Plantations,” in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 203; Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, “Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 1‒48. 20. Ligon, True and Exact History, 44. 21.  Bryan Edwards, A History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London, 1798), 206; Ligon, True and Exact History, 102; Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations; or, A True Account of Their Extreme and Grievous Sufferings by the Heavy Impositions upon Sugar and Other Hardships Relating More Particularly to the Island of Barbados (London, 1689), 16; Peter Thompson, “Henry Drax’s Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-­Century Barbadian Sugar Plantation,” WMQ 66 (July 2009), 578; Frederick C. Knight, Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-­American World (New York, 2010); Menard, Sweet Negotiations. 22.  James Drax, quoted in Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, 78; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 68: Hilary McD. Beckles, Black Rebellion in Barbados: The Struggle Against Slavery, 1627‒1838 (Bridgetown, 1987), 11. 23.  Susan Scott Parish, “Richard Ligon and the Atlantic Science of Commonwealths,” WMQ 67 (April 2010), 209–211; Ligon, True and Exact History, 108; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 84‒116. 24. Ligon, True and Exact History, 22; Whistler, “Extracts,” 144; “Some Observations on the Island of Barbadoes, 1667” in “America and West Indies: December 1667,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 520‒534.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​ /america​-west​-indies​/vol5​/pp520​-534; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, 420‒442; Handler, ed., “Beit’s Visit to Barbados in 1654,” 67. 25. Ligon, True and Exact History, 44; Handler, ed., “Beit’s Visit to Barbados,” 62. 26.  Sir Dalby Thomas, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West Indies (London, 1690), cited in J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 1492‒1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 243; Jack P. Greene, “Changing Identity in the British West Indies in the Early Modern Era: Barbados as a Case Study,” in Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 31‒33; John H. Elliott, “Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500‒1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1987); Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 58‒87. 27.  “An Act for the Good Governing of Servants, and Ordering of the Rights Between Masters and Servants” (27 September 1661), in Acts of the Assembly Passed by the Island of Barbadoes from 1648 to 1718 (London, 1721), 20‒27; see also Sarah Barber, The Disputatious Caribbean: The West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 2014), 136, 173; Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2018). 28.  John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America: Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and State of the British Colonies . . . in America (London, 1741), 2:127;

414

Notes to Pages 26–31

Jerome Handler and Lon Shelby, eds., “A Seventeenth Century Commentary on Labor and Military Problems in Barbados,” JBMHS 34 (March 1973), 119‒120; Ligon, True and Exact History, 28‒29; “Some Observations on the Island of Barbadoes,” in “America and West Indies: December 1667,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 520-­534. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​ .uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol5​/pp520​-534. 29. Ligon, True and Exact History, 13, 43; Whistler, “Extracts,” 146; Beckles, White Servitude; Puckrein, Little England, 32; Handler, “Beit’s Visit to Barbados,” 66. 30.  “An Act for Punishing Offences, Committed on the Sabbath-­Day (4 June 1652),” in [Acts and Statutes] of Barbados (London, 1652), 79; see also “An Act to Refrain the Wandering of Servants and Negroes (4 June 1652) in [Acts and Statutes] of Barbados, 81‒83; “An Act for Preventing the Selling of Brandy and Rum in Tippling Houses Near the Broad Paths and Highways Within This Island (29 April 1668)” in William Rawlin, The Laws of Barbados, Collected in One Volume (London, 1699), 71‒72; Handler, “Beit’s Visit to Barbados,” 68; Wayne Curtis, And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails (New York, 2006), 30; Thomas Verney, “Thomas Verney’s Account of Barbados, Addressed to His Father,” 10 February 1638, in John Bruce, ed., Letters and Papers of the Verney Family Down to the End of the Year 1639 (London, 1853), 195. 31.  Thomas Fuller, cited in Thomas Southwell, ed., Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists’ Society (Norwich, 1884), 3:617; David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603‒1660 (New York, 1985), 22‒23; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-­Headed Hydra; Christopher G. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500‒1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1984); Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580‒1680 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1982). Ashley owned the plantation along with Gerard Hawtayne. 32.  Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, 108; Richard Vines to John Winthrop, 19 July 1647, in Forbes et. al., eds., Winthrop Papers, 1:172; Beckles White Servitude, 111; Ligon, True and Exact History, 46; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-­Headed Hydra, 126; Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586‒1660 (Berkeley, Calif., 1980); Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (London, 2002); Jonathan Healey, “The Political Culture of the English Commons, c. 1550‒1650,” Agricultural History Review 60 (2012), 266‒287. 33.  Henry Marten, England’s Troublers Troubled, in Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640‒1649 (London, 1976), 379; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-­Headed Hydra, 140; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York, 1975), 217‒218, 254; John Rees, The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640‒1650 (London, 2016); Hilary McD. Beckles, “Rebels and Reactionaries: The Political Responses of White Labourers to Planter-­Class Hegemony in Seventeenth-­Century Barbados,” Journal of Caribbean History 15 (December 1981), 1‒19; Nigel Smith, “Exporting Enthusiasm: John Perrot and the Quaker Epic,” in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday, eds., Literature and the English Civil War (New York, 1990), 248‒263; Larry Gragg, The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class (Columbia, Mo., 2009). 34.  “An Act Concerning the Conveyance of Estates” (27 September 1661) in Rawlin, The Laws of Barbados, 33; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-­Headed Hydra, 123; Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644‒1713,” WMQ 47 (October 1990), 503‒522; Handler, “Beit’s Visit to Barbados,” 67. 35.  Francis Sampson to John Sampson, 6 June 1666, in “America and West Indies: June 1666,” in  CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 384‒392.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​

Notes to Pages 31–34

415

.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol5​/pp384​-392; Lord Willoughby to the King, 16 September 1667, in “America and West Indies: September 1667,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 494‒502.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​ /america​ -west​ -indies​ /vol5​ /pp494​ -502; Hilary McD. Beckles, “Rebels and Reactionaries, 9; Beckles, White Servitude, 101; Kirsten Block and Jenny Shaw, “Subjects Without Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean,” Past and Present 201 (February 2011), 33; Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans and the Construction of Difference (Athens, Ga., 2013); Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Dublin, 2013). 36.  “An Act for the Good Governing of Servants,” in Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Barbadoes, 28; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 7; N. A. T. Hall, “Maritime Maroons: Grand Marronage from the Danish West Indies,” in Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene Shepard, eds., Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader (New York, 1991), 387‒400; Michael Craton, “The Black Caribs of Saint Vincent,” in Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville, Fla., 1996), 71‒85. 37. Ligon, True and Exact History, 111‒116; Richard Blome, A Description of the Island of Jamaica; With the Other Iles and Territories in America (London, 1672), 94; Gragg, Quaker Community on Barbados, 32‒33; Richard S. Dunn, “The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,” WMQ 26 (January 1969), 5; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990). 38.  Handler, “Beit’s Visit to Barbados,” 67; Beckles, White Servitude. 39.  Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 70; Henry Winthrop to John Winthrop, 15 October 1627, in Forbes et al., Winthrop Papers, 1:361; McCusker and Menard, “The Sugar Industry in the Seventeenth Century,” 293; see also James Walvin, Atlas of Slavery (Harlow, 2006), 93; David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, Conn., 2010), 210; Jerome J. Handler, “The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” JBMHS 33 (May 1970), 111‒136; Andrew Downes and Hilary McD. Beckles, “The Economics of the Transition to the Black Labor System in Barbados, 1630‒1670,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Fall 1987), 225‒247; Patricia A. Molen, “Population and Social Patterns in Barbados in the Early Eighteenth Century,” WMQ 28 (April 1971), 287‒300. 40.  Guinea Company to James Pope, 9 December 1651, in Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1935), 1:131; Governor Atkins to Lords’ Committee of Trade and Plantations, 11 August 1675, cited in Beckles, White Servitude, 125; Hilary Beckles and Andrew Downes, “An Economic Consideration of the Origins of Black Slavery in the British West Indies, 1624–1645,” Social and Economic Studies 34 (June 1985), 1–25; Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisc., 1969), 55; Thomas Walduck, “T. Walduck’s Letters from Barbados, 1710,” JBMHS 15 (November 1947), 49; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 87; Beckles, Black Rebellion, 18. 41.  Roger Coke, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1670), 12‒13; Beckles, White Servitude, 123; Ligon, True and Exact History, 44; Robert Southwell to Ashley, 31 August 1666, in Cheves, ed., Collections, 5:152. 42.  “Some Observations on the island of Barbadoes (December 1667)” in “America and West Indies: December 1667,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 520‒534. BHO, www​ .british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol5​/pp520​-534; Governor Russell to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 23 March 1695, in “America and West Indies:

416

Notes to Pages 34–38

March 1695,” in CSP: Volume 14, 1693‒1696, ed. J. W. Fortescue (London, 1903), 434‒452. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol14​/pp434​-452; “An Act to prevent the prejudice may happen to this Island, by loose and Vagrant persons in and about the same (21 December 1652) in [Acts and Statutes] of the Island of Barbados (London, 1652), 130‒131; “An Act for the setling the Trained Bands within this Island (21 December 1652)” in [Acts and Statutes] of the Island of Barbados, 117‒125; “An Act to prevent the Prejudice that may happen to this Island by Loose and Vagrant Persons” in Acts of the Assembly, Passed in the Island of Barbadoes, from 1648 to 1718 (London, 1721), 70; Beckles, “Rebels and Reactionaries,” 10; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, 215; Hilary M. Beckles, “Class Formation in a Slave Society: The Rise of a Black Labour Elite and the Development of a White Lumpen Proletariat in 17th Century Barbados,” JBMHS, 37 (1983), 20‒34; Hilary M. Beckles, “Land Distribution and Class Formation in Barbados, 1630‒1700: The Rise of a Wage Proletariat,” JBMHS 36 (1980), 141. 43.  Walter C. Rucker, Gold Coast Diaspora: Identity, Culture and Power (Bloomington, Ind., 2015); David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570‒1640 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016). 44.  Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A History (New York, 2007); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000); David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade; www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/database. 45.  “An Act for the Governing of Negroes” in Acts of the Assembly, 137; Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance; Jerome S. Handler, “Custom and Law: The Status of Enslaved Africans in Seventeenth-­Century Barbados,” Slavery and Abolition 37 (January 2016), 233‒255. 46.  “An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” in Acts of the Assembly, 137; “Petition from the Gentlemen of Barbados,” 8 October 1680, in “America and West Indies: October 1680,” in CSP: Volume 10, 1677‒1680, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury and J. W. Fortescue (London, 1896), 608‒623. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol10​/pp608​-623; Ligon, True and Exact History, 50; Menard, Sweet Negotiations; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004), 137‒169. 47.  Jerome S. Handler and Frederick W. Lange, Plantation Slavery in Barbados: An Archeological and Historical Investigation (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 22; www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​ /database. 48.  Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston, 1996), 29, 44‒49; Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (New York, 2007), 75‒95. 49.  Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (London, 1989), 72; “An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” in Acts of the Assembly, 142; Alexander Gunkel and Jerome S. Handler, eds. and trans., “A Swiss Medical Doctor’s Description of Barbados: The Account of Felix Christian Spoeri,” JBMHS 33 (May 1969), 7; see also http://​jeromehandler​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/Spoeri​-69​.pdf; Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 100‒122; Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, Pa., 2004). 50. Ligon, True and Exact History, 31, 43‒44: Handler, “Beit’s Visit to Barbados,” 66. 51.  Sir Peter Colleton to the Council for Trade, 28 May 1673, in “America and West Indies: May 1673,” in CSP: Volume 7, 1669‒1674, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London, 1889), 487‒499. BHO,

Notes to Pages 38–45

417

www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol7​/pp487​-499; Ligon, True and Exact History, 48; “An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” in Acts of the Assembly, 137; Whistler, “Extracts,” 146; www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/database. 52. Ligon, True and Exact History, 49‒50, 81; Gunkel and Handler, “A Swiss Medical Doctor’s Description,” 7. 53. Ligon, True and Exact History, 53; Jerome S. Handler, “Slave Revolts and Conspiracies in Seventeenth-­Century Barbados,” New West Indian Guide 56 (1982), 5‒42; Jason T. Sharples, “Discovering Slave Conspiracies: New Fears of Rebellion and Old Paradigms of Plotting in Seventeenth-­Century Barbados,” AHR 120 (June 2015), 811‒843. 54.  Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations; or, A True Account of their Extreme and Grievous Sufferings by the Heavy Impositions upon Sugar (London, 1689), 17‒18; Ligon, True and Exact History, 93. 55.  “An Act for the Prevention of Firing of Sugar Canes,” in Rawlin, The Laws of Barbados, 57‒58; Littleton, Groans of the Plantations, 17; Ligon, True and Exact History, 53; Hilary Beckles, “From Land to Sea: Runaway Barbados Slaves and Servants, 1630‒1700,” Slavery and Abolition, 6 (December 1985), 82; Craton, Testing the Chains. 56.  On sugar production, see Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550‒1835 (New York, 1985), 98‒132; Ligon, True and Exact History, 88‒92. 57. Ligon, True and Exact History, 53‒54. 58. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 256; Ligon, True and Exact History, 29, 46; Walduck, “T. Walduck’s Letters from Barbados, 1710,” 81. 59. Ligon, True and Exact History, 98, 105; Blome, Description of Jamaica, 78; Craton, Testing the Chains, 108; Beauchamp Plantagenet, A Description of the Province of New Albion (London, 1648), 5. 60.  “Copy of Instruccons for Mr. West About Our Plantation,” in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 125; Lord Ashley to Sir John Yeamans, 15 December 1671, “America and West Indies: December 1671, 1‒15,” in CSP: Volume 7, 1669‒1674, ed. Sainsbury, 282‒296. BHO, www​.british​ -history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol7​/pp282​-296; Thomas D. Wilson, The Ashley Cooper Plan: The Founding of Carolina and the Origins of Southern Political Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016). 61.  K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), 252; Wilson, The Ashley Cooper Plan, 1‒30. 62.  John Spurr, “Shaftesbury and the Seventeenth Century,” in John Spurr, ed., Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621‒1683 (Farnham, Surrey, 2011), 8; Richard Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625‒1642 (Cambridge, 2013). 63. Haley, First Earl of Shaftesbury; Peter Gaunt, The English Civil Wars: A Military History (New York, 2014); Trevor Royle, The British Civil Wars: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638‒1660 (New York, 2004); Michael Braddick, God’s Fire, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008). 64. Haley, First Earl of Shaftesbury; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550‒1653 (Princeton, N.J., 2003). 65. John Evelyn, cited in Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Wars of the British, 1603‒1776 (London, 2001), 253; Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660‒1685 (New York, 2006). 66. Haley, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 228; Thomas Leng, “Shaftesbury’s Aristocratic Empire,” in Spurr, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 101‒127.

418

Notes to Pages 45–47

67. Puckrein, Little England; Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution; Donoghue, Fire Under the Ashes. 68.  L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662‒1729 (New York, 2004); Wilson, The Ashley Cooper Plan. 69. Puckrein, Little England, 60‒61; Ligon, True and Exact History, 22, 85, 96; James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, “A declaration by James Earl of Carlile, Lord of the Caribee Islands . . . [for] the good and welfare of the inhabitants of the island of Barbadoes, and of all other people under his government (London, 1648), n.p., https://​quod​.lib​.umich​.edu​/e​/eebo​/A80375​.0001​.001​/1:​1​?rgn​ =​div1​;view​=​toc. 70.  Richard S. Dunn, “The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina,” SCMH 72 (April 1971), 81‒93; John J. Navin, The Grim Years: Settling South Carolina, 1670‒1720 (Columbia, S.C., 2019), 16‒44; Henry S. Holmes, “Robert Gibbes, Governor of South Carolina, and Some of His Descendants,” SCMH 12 (April 1911), 78‒105; Jack P. Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” SCMH 88 (October 1987), 192‒210. 71. Ligon, True and Exact History, 86; “Some Observations on the Island of Barbadoes, 1667” in “America and West Indies: December 1667,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 520‒534.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​ /vol5​/pp520​-534; Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins to Lords of Trade and Plantations, 26 March 1680, in “America and West Indies: March 1680,” in CSP: Volume 10, 1677‒1680, eds. Sainsbury and Fortescue, 492‒507. BHO, http://​www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​ /america​-west​-indies​/vol10​/pp492​-507; Jerome Handler and Lon Shelby, eds., “A Seventeenth Century Commentary on Labor and Military Problems in Barbados,” JBMHS 34 (March 1973), 118‒119; William Green, “Supply Versus Demand in the Barbadian Sugar Revolution,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Winter 1987), 403‒418; Alfred D. Chandler, “The Expansion of Barbados,” JBMHS 13 (May‒June 1946), 110. 72.  Alexander Gunkel and Jerome Handler, eds. and trans., “A German Indentured Servant in Barbados in 1652: The Account of Heinrich Von Uchteritz,” JBMHS 33 (May 1970), 93; The President and Council of Barbados to Secretary, 10 July 1661, in “America and West Indies: July 1661,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 42‒50. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​ -state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol5​/pp42​-50; Littleton, Groans of the Plantations, 13‒14; Puckrein, Little England, 63. 73.  Richard Vines to John Winthrop in Forbes et al., eds., Winthrop Papers, 5:171‒172; “Memorandum of Lord Willoughby,” April 1672, in “America and West Indies: April 1672,” in  CSP: Volume 7, 1669‒1674, ed. Sainsbury, 344‒354.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​ -state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol7​/pp344​-354; The President and Council of Barbadoes, 10 July 1661, in “America and West Indies: July 1661,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 42‒50.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​ -indies​/vol5​/pp42​-50; “Petition of the Representatives of Barbadoes to the King,” 6 December 1671, in “America and West Indies: December 1671, 1‒15,” in CSP: Volume 7, 1669‒1674, ed. Sainsbury, 282‒296.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​ -indies​/vol7​/pp282​-296; “Representation of the Council and Assembly of Barbadoes, July 1696,” in “America and West Indies: July 1696, 21‒31,” in CSP: Volume 15, 1696‒1697, ed. J. W. Fortescue (London, 1904), 41‒63. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​ -west​-indies​/vol15​/pp41​-63; Governor Francis Willoughby to Sir Henry Bennet, 18 February 1664, in “America and West Indies: February 1664,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 184‒191.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol5​

Notes to Pages 47–49

419

/pp184​-191; Littleton, Groans of the Plantations, 14; Nicholas Blake to the King, 28 February 1669, “Addenda: February 1669,” in CSP: Volume 17, 1699 and Addenda 1621‒1698, ed. Cecil Headlam (London, 1908), 589‒594.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​ /america​-west​-indies​/vol17​/pp589​-594. 74.  Lords Proprietors of Carolina to Thomas Modyford and Peter Colleton, 9 September 1663, in William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, 10 vols. (Raleigh, N.C., 1886), 1:57; Documenting the American South, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007, http://​docsouth​.unc​.edu​/csr​/index​.html​/document​/csr01​-0061; George Monck, Duke of Albemarle to Thomas Modyford and Peter Colleton, 30 August 1663, in Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, 1:46‒47; Documenting the American South, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007, http://​docsouth​.unc​ .edu​/csr​/index​.html​/document​/csr01​-0061; The Lords Proprietors of Carolina to Sir William Berkeley, 8 September 1663, in “America and West Indies: September 1663,” in CSP: Volume 5, 1661‒1668, ed. Sainsbury, 158‒164.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​ /america​-west​-indies​/vol5​/pp158​-164; Albemarle to Willoughby, 31 August 1663, in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 14‒15; “Instructions to Sir John Yeamans” in William J. Rivers, A Sketch of the History of South Carolina to the Close of the Proprietary Government by the Revolution of 1719 (Charleston, S.C., 1856), 338; “A Declaration and Proposealls to All ye will Plant in Carolina, August 21, 1663,” in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 13; Eric W. Nye, Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency, accessed 22 November 2022, https://​www​.uwyo​ .edu​/numimage​/currency​.htm. 75. Powell, Proprietors of Carolina; Francis Shepard, London: A History (New York, 1998), 183‒190; Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603‒1714 (New York, 1996), 213‒215, 236‒239; Rebecca Rideal, 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire (London, 2016); Robert Bremner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J., 2003). 76.  William Hilton, A Relation of Discovery Recently Made on the Coast of Florida (London, 1664); “Report by Anthony Long, William Hilton and Peter Fabian concerning their voyage from Barbados to the Cape Fear River, September 29, 1663 to February 6, 1664,” in William Saunders, ed.,  The Colonial Records of North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C., 1886), 1:67‒71; Documenting the American South. University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007, http://​ docsouth​.unc​.edu​/csr​/index​.html​/document​/csr01​-0061; see also “Report by Robert Sandford concerning his voyage from Cape Fear to Port Royal, Jamaica, from June to July 1666,” in Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, 1:118‒139; Documenting the American South, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007, http://​docsouth​.unc​.edu​/csr​ /index​.html​/document​/csr01​-0061; Roper, Conceiving Carolina, 15; Powell, Proprietors of Carolina, 48‒49. The proprietors were John Berkeley, the Baron Berkeley of Stratton; Sir William Berkeley; Sir John Colleton; Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury; William Craven, the Earl of Craven; Sir George Carteret; Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon; and George Monck, the Duke of Albemarle; Eric W. Nye, Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency, accessed 5 November 2022, https://​www​.uwyo​.edu​/numimage​/currency​.htm 77. Haley, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 243; “Preamble to the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” in Thomas Cooper and David McCord, eds., The Statutes of South Carolina, 10 vols. (Columbia, 1836‒1841), 1:53; Ashley to Maurice Mathews, 20 June 1672, in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 399; J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Commonwealth of Oceana; and, A System of Politics (Cambridge, 1992), ix; see also Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian

420

Notes to Pages 49–53

Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Glenn Burgess, British Political Thought, 1500‒1660: The Politics of the Post-­Reformation (New York, 2009); Rachel Hammersley, James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 2019); J. R. Milton, “Locke’s Life and Times,” in Vere Chappell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge, 1994); Roger Woolhouse, John Locke: A Biography (Cambridge, 2007). 78.  “Fundamental Constitutions,” in Cooper and McCord, eds., Statutes of South Carolina, 1:55; Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama, Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom (Cambridge, 2019), 245‒261; John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. Mark Goldie (Indianapolis, 2010). 79.  “Fundamental Constitutions,” in Cooper and McCord, eds., Statutes of South Carolina, 1:55; “Proposealls of Several Gentlemen of Barbados (12 August 1663),” in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 5:10; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 70; Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” AHR, 122 (October 2017), 1038‒1078; William Uzgalis, “John Locke, Racism, Slavery, and Indian Lands,” in Naomi Zack, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race (New York, 2019), 21‒30. 80.  “Coppy of Instruccons for Mr. West About Our Plantation,” in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 5:125‒126; Stephen Bull to Ashley, 21 March 1671, in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 5:284; Instructions to Commissioners for Government and Council, 27 July 1669, in William J. Rivers, A Sketch of the History of South Carolina: To the Close of the Proprietary Government (Charleston, S.C., 1856), 347–348; William Hilton, A Relation of a Discovery Lately Made on the Coast of Florida in the Ship Adventure (London, 1664). 81.  Stephen Bull to Ashley, 21 March 1671, in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 5:284; Wilson, The Ashley Cooper Plan; “Instructions to Commissioners for Government and Council, 27 July 1669,” in Rivers, Sketch of the History of South Carolina, 348‒349: Navin, The Grim Years; S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 13‒53; Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville, Tenn., 1976); Robbie Etheridge and Charles Hudson, eds., The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540‒1760 (Oxford, Miss., 2008).

Chapter 2 Note to epigraph: Joseph Dalton to Lord Ashley, 9 September 1670, in Langdon Cheves, ed., “The Shaftesbury Papers and Other Records Relating to Carolina and the First Settlement,” in Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society: Volume 5 (Charleston, S.C., 1897), 182 (hereafter Cheves, ed., Shaftesbury Papers). 1.  “Mr. Carteret’s Relation,” in Cheves, ed., Shaftesbury Papers, 5:165‒167; Thomas Ashe, “Carolina, or A Description of the Present State of That Country, [1682],” in Alexander S. Salley, ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650‒1708 (New York, 1911), 156; Gene Waddell, “Ignorance and Deceit in Renaming Charleston’s Rivers; Some Observations About the Reliability of Historical Sources,” SCMH 89 (January 1988), 40‒50; see also Henry Savage, River of the Carolinas: The Santee (New York, 1956), 50; James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge, La., 1997), 8‒11; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 25‒36. 2.  Dalton to Ashley, 9 September 1670, in Cheves, ed., Shaftesbury Papers, 5:182; Henry Woodward to Sir John Yeamans, 10 September 1670, in Cheves, ed., Shaftesbury Papers, 5:187; Stephen Bull to Lord Ashley, 12 September 1670, in Cheves, ed., Shaftesbury Papers, 5:195; Joseph West to Lord Ashley, September 1670, in Cheves, ed., Shaftesbury Papers, 5:203; Governor Sayle

Notes to Pages 53–56

421

to Lord Ashley, 10 September 1670, in Cheves, ed., Shaftesbury Papers, 5:185. Founded by the Spanish in 1565, San Agustin remained in their hands until 1763 when, after the Seven Years’ War, it came under British control, who renamed the settlement Saint Augustine, making the capital of British East Florida. 3.  Stephen Bull to Lord Ashley, 12 September 1670, in Cheves, ed., “Shaftesbury Papers,” 193. 4.  Governor and Council of Carolina to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 17 September 1709, in “America and West Indies: September 1709,” in  CSP: Volume 24, 1708‒1709, ed. Cecil Headlam (London, 1922), 457‒476.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​ /colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol24​/pp457​-476; see also Peter Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670‒1920 (New York, 1989), 64; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 131‒167; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 59, 61, 84; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607‒1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 172; Russell R. Menard, “The Africanization of the Low Country Labor Force,” in Winthrop D. Jordan and Sheila L. Skemp, eds., Race and Family in the Colonial South (Jackson, Miss., 1987), 81‒108. 5.  www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/database. 6.  www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/database. See Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, La., 1981); Littlefield, “‘Abundance of Negroes of That Nation’: The Significance of African Ethnicity in Colonial South Carolina,” in David R. Chesnutt and Clyde N. Wilson, eds., The Meaning of South Carolina History: Essays in Honor of George C. Rogers, Jr. (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 19‒38; W. Robert Higgins, “Charleston: Terminus and Entrepot of the Colonial Slave Trade,” in Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg, eds., The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); W.  Robert Higgins, “The Geographical Origins of Negro Slaves in Colonial South Carolina,” South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (Winter 1971), 34‒47; David Richardson, “The British Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina,” Slavery and Abolition 12 (December 1991), 125‒172. The information on slave imports into South Carolina is both incomplete and somewhat contradictory. Material on 1717 and 1718 slave imports is drawn from Shipping Returns, CO5/508, PRO, and “An Account of the Number of Ships and Vessels entered and of Negroes Imported from the Year 1706 to 1739 at Charles Town,” Gentleman’s Magazine 25 (1755), 344; Peter H. Wood, “‘It Was a Negro Taught Them’: A New Look at African Labor in South Carolina,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 9 (1974), 160‒169; Judith A. Carney, “From Hands to Tutors: African Expertise in the South Carolina Rice Economy,” AH 67 (Summer 1993), 1‒30. On the Loango trade, see David Richardson, “Slave Exports from West Africa and West-­Central Africa, 1700‒1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution,” Journal of African History 30 (1989), 19‒20; Phyllis M. Martin, The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 1576‒1870: The Effects of the Changing Commercial Relations on the Vili Kingdom of Loango (Oxford, 1972), 73‒92; Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (Madison, Wisc., 1988), 549‒551; Entries of Negroes, 29 September 1738 to 29 September 1739, Records of the Public Treasurer, SCDAH; see also Shipping Returns, CO5/511, TNA; K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (New York, 1970), 231; Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1988); Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 64‒65 7.  Ira Berlin, Many Thousand Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 12.

422

Notes to Pages 57–59

8.  Samuel Dyssli to Family, 3 December 1737, in R. W. Kelsey, “Swiss Settlers in South Carolina,” SCMH 23 (July 1922), 90; Wood, Black Majority, 129‒166. 9.  Governor and Council of Carolina to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 17 September 1709, in “America and West Indies: September 1709,” in CSP: Volume 24, 1708‒1709, ed. Headlam, 457‒476.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​ /vol24​/pp457​-476; Lords Proprietors of Carolina to the Governor and Council of Ashley River, 7 March 1681, in CSP: Volume 11, 1681‒1685, ed. J. W. Fortescue (London, 1898), 16. BHO, www​ .british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol11​/pp15​-25; Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001), 228‒229; Joel W. Martin, “Southeastern Indians and the English Trade in Skins and Slaves,” in Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521‒1704 (Athens, Ga., 1994), 304‒324; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 141‒145; Crane, Southern Frontier, 1670‒1732, 19‒20; Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670‒1717 (New Haven, Conn., 2002). 10.  Henry Woodward, “A Faithful Relation of My Westoe Voiage,” in Salley, ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, 133; Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685‒1790,” in Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, Neb., 2006), 57‒133; Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–1730 (Lincoln, Neb., 2008); Eric E. Bowne, The Westo Indians: Slave Traders in the Early Colonial South (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2005). 11.  David J. Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America, 100‒101. 12.  Royal Officials (Francisco de Florencia and Juan de Pueyo) to the King, 13 August 1706, in Mark F. Boyd, “Further Considerations of the Apalachee Missions,” The Americas 9 (April 1953), 477; John H. Hann, “Summary Guide to the Spanish Florida Missions and Visitas, with Churches in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” The Americas, 46 (April 1990), 417‒513; D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 1: Atlantic America, 1492‒1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 172‒191; Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America, 142‒145. 13.  Governor Nathaniel Johnson and Council of Trade and Plantations, 17 September 1709, in “America and West Indies: September 1709,” in CSP: Volume 24, 1708‒1709, ed. Headlam, 457‒476.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​ /vol24​/pp457​-476; Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 259‒287; David La Vere, The Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013). 14.  John Barnwell to Governor, 4 February 1711, in Joseph Barnwell, ed., “The Tuscarora Expedition: Letters of Colonel John Barnwell,” SCMH 9 (January 1908), 30; Major Christopher Gale, including a Memorial concerning attack by Native Americans, 2 November 1711, in William Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, 10 vols. (Raleigh, N.C., 1886), 1:825‒829. Documenting the American South. University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007, http://​docsouth​.unc​.edu​/csr​/index​.html​/document​/csr01​-0061; Elizabeth A. Fenn and Joe A. Mobley, The Way We Lived in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 50‒57; Milton Ready, The Tar Heel State: A History of North Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 2005), 33; Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 239; Peter Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region,” in Waselkov et al., eds., Powhatan’s Mantle, 54; Johnson to Board of Trade in H. Roy Merrens, ed., The Colonial South

Notes to Pages 59–63

423

Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697–1774 (Columbia, S.C., 1977), 34; La Vere, Tuscarora War; Robbie Etheridge and Charles Hudson, eds., The Transformation of the Southern Indians, 1540‒1760 (Jackson, Miss., 2002). 15.  John Barnwell to Governor, 4 February 1711, in Barnwell, ed., “Tuscarora Expedition, 34; Barnwell to Governor, 20 April 1712, in Barnwell, ed., “Tuscarora Expedition,” 52; Colonel James Moore to President Pollock, 23 December 1712, in Joseph W. Barnwell, ed., “The Second Tuscarora Expedition,” SCMH 10 (January 1909), 38; Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 259‒281; La Vere, Tuscarora War, 96‒112. 16. Ready, Tar Heel State, 36; Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 315‒345; La Vere, Tuscarora War, 96–112; John Barnwell, “Journal of John Barnwell,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 5 (April 1898), 391‒402. 17.  Francis Le Jau to Secretary, 20 February 1712, in Frank J. Klingberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706‒1717, (Berkeley, Calif., 1956), 109, 153; William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln, Neb., 2008); Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 331. 18.  William Tredwell Bull to Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 10 August 1715, in Edgar Legaré Pennington, “The South Carolina Indian War of 1715, as Seen by the Clergymen,” SCMH 32 (October 1931), 254; David Crawley to William Byrd, 30 July 1715, in “America and West Indies: July 1715, 16‒31,” in  CSP: Volume 28, 1714‒1715, ed. Headlam, 235‒253;  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol28​/pp235​-253; Axtell, The Indians’ New South, 51. 19.  Wood, “Changing Population of the Colonial South,” in Waselkov et al., eds., Powhatan’s Mantle, 45; David McCord and Thomas Cooper, eds., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1836‒1841), 3:91; “An exact account of ye number and strength of all the Indian nations . . . subject to the Governmt. Of South Carolina,” in “America and West Indies: January 1720, 1‒15,” in CSP: Volume 31, 1719‒1720, ed. Headlam, 293‒311. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol31​/pp293​-311; Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers Jr., The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: Volume 1, 1514‒1861 (Columbia, S.C., 1996), 82‒83, 95‒110; Crane, Southern Frontier, 162‒186; J. Leitch Wright Jr., The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (New York, 1981), 121‒125; Denise I. Bossy, “Negotiation Slavery and Empire: Yamasee Indians in the Early Southeast,” in Joseph P. Ward, ed., European Empires in the American South: Colonial and Environmental Encounters (Jackson, Miss., 2017), 57‒86. 20.  Le Jau to Secretary, 10 May 1715, in Klingberg, ed., Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 153, 158; Governor Craven to Lord Townshend, 23 May 1715, in “America and West Indies: July 1715, 1‒15,” in CSP: Volume 28, 1714‒1715, ed. Headlam, 215‒235. BHO, www​.british​-history​ .ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol28​/pp215​-235; General Assembly of South Carolina to the King (1715), in “America and West Indies: Miscellaneous, 1715,” in CSP: Volume 28, 1714‒1715, ed. Headlam, 360‒361. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​ /colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol28​/pp360​-361; Charles Rodd to Employer, “America and West Indies: May 1715, 1‒15,” in  CSP: Volume 28, 1714‒1715, ed. Headlam, 161‒182.  BHO, www​ .british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol28​/pp161​-182. 21. Lieutenant-­Governor Alexander Spotswood to Secretary Stanhope, 27 May 1715, in “America and West Indies: July 1715, 1‒15,” in  CSP: Volume 28, 1714‒1715, ed. Headlam, 215‒235.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol28​

424

Notes to Pages 63–67

/pp215​-235; Le Jau to Secretary, 21 May 1715, in Klingberg, ed., Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 159‒160. 22.  William Tredwell Bull to SPG, 10 August 1715, in Pennington, “The South Carolina Indian War,” 253, 260; Crane, Southern Frontier, 170‒171; W. Stitt Robinson, The Southern Colonial Frontier, 1607‒1763 (Albuquerque, 1979), 112‒113; Larry E. Ivers, This Torrent of Indians: War on the Southern Frontier, 1715‒1728 (Columbia, S.C., 2016). 23.  Assembly to Agents, 15 March 1716, in Records of the General Assembly, cited in Crane, Southern Frontier, 182; see also M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663‒1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), 113‒115. 24.  Reverend Claude de Richebourg to SPG, 6 May 1715, in Pennington, “The South Carolina Indian War of 1715,” 263; Benjamin Dennis, 2 September 1715, in Pennington, “The South Carolina Indian War of 1715,” 269; Benjamin Quarles, “The Colonial Militia and Negro Manpower,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (March 1959), 649; “An Act for Enlisting such Trusty Slaves as Shall Be Thought Serviceable to this Province in Time of Alarms (4 November 1704), in McCord and Cooper, eds., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 7:349; Charles Craven to Charles Townshend, 23 May 1715, in Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, 2:177‒179. Documenting the American South. University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007, http://​docsouth​.unc​.edu​/csr​/index​.html​/document​/csr01​-0061. 25. Klingberg, Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 159; Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, 1998), 103; Carson I. A. Ritchie, Frontier Parish: An Account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Anglican Church in America (Rutherford, N.J., 1976), 92. 26. President Middleton to the Duke of Newcastle, 13 June 1728, “America and West Indies: June 1728, 11‒20,” in CSP: Volume 36, 1728‒1729, ed. Cecil Headlam and Arthur Percival Newton (London, 1937), 129‒143.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​ /america​-west​-indies​/vol36​/pp129​-143; Governor Johnson to Council of Trade and Plantations, 12 January 1720, in “America and West Indies: January 1720, 1‒15,” in CSP: Volume 31, 1719‒1720, ed. Headlam, 293‒311.  BHO, http://​www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​ /colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol31​/pp293​-311; Chapman J. Milling, Red Carolinians (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1940), 90; Rowland et al., History of Beaufort County, 99. 27.  President Middleton to the Duke of Newcastle, 13 June 1728, in “America and West Indies: June 1728, 11-­20,” in CSP: Volume 36, 1728‒1729, ed. Headlam and Newton, 129‒143. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol36​/pp129​ -143; Ivers, Torrent of Indians, 174‒187. 28. President Middleton to the Duke of Newcastle, 13 June 1728, in “America and West Indies: June 1728, 11‒20,” in  CSP: Volume 36, 1728‒1729, ed. Headlam and Newton, 129‒143.  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol36​ /pp129​-143; Colonel Alexander Parris to Wargent Nicholson, 27 March 1728, in Journal of the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly, 23 March 1728, cited in Crane, Southern Frontier, 250; Rowland et al., History of Beaufort County, 107. 29.  President Middleton to the Duke of Newcastle, 13 June 1728, in “America and West Indies: June 1728, 11‒20,” in  CSP: Volume 36, 1728‒1729, ed. Headlam and Newton, 129‒143. BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol36​/pp129​-143. 30.  Alexander Moore, “Daniel Axtell’s Account Book and the Economy of Early South Carolina,” SCMH 95 (October 1994), 280‒301; “Hyrne Family Letters, 1701‒10,” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 18; see also Albert J. Schmidt, “Applying Old World Habits to the

Notes to Pages 67–70

425

New: Life in South Carolina at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 25 (November 1961), 51‒59; Albert J. Schmidt, “Hyrne Family Letters,” SCMH 63 (July 1962), 150‒157. 31. Edward Hyrne to Burrell Massingberd, 19 January 1701, in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 18. 32. Ashe, Carolina, or A Description of the Present State of That Country, 149; Thomas Nairne, Letter from South Carolina, 13; R[obert] F[erguson], The Present State of Carolina, with Advice to Settlers (London, 1682), 15; Mr. Osborne to Secretary, 28 May 1715, in Florence Gambrill Geiger, “St. Bartholomew’s Parish as Seen by Its Rectors, 1713‒1761,” SCMH 50 (October 1949), 174‒175. 33.  John S. Otto, “Livestock Raising in Early South Carolina, 1670‒1700: Prelude to the Rice Plantation Economy,” AH 61 (Fall 1987), 19; Wood, Black Majority, 31; Records of the Register and Secretary, 1675‒1696, cited in Aaron M. Shatzman, Servants into Planters: The Origin of an American Image: Land Acquisition and Status Mobility in Seventeenth-­Century South Carolina (New York, 1989), 46, 113; John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh Talmadge Lefler (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), 34. See also Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Letters from John Steward to William Dunlop,” SCMH 32 (January 1931), 22; Gary S. Dunbar, “Colonial Carolina Cow Pens,” AH 3 (July 1961), 125‒131; Ashe, Carolina; or A Description of the Present State of That Country, 149. 34.  Samuel Wilson, An Account of the Province of Carolina (1682), in Salley, ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, 171; A New Voyage to Georgia by a Young Gentleman (London, 1737), 31; Nairne, Letter from South Carolina, 13; George Milligen-­Johnston, A Short Description of the Province of South Carolina (London, 1763), in Bartholomew Rivers Carroll, ed., Historical Collections of South Carolina: Embracing Many Rare and Valuable Pamphlets, 2 vols. (New York, 1836), 2:482. See also Terry G. Jordan, Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching (Lincoln, Neb., 1981), 25‒31; John S. Otto, “The Origins of Cattle Ranching in Colonial South Carolina, 1670‒1715,” SCMH 87 (April 1986), 117‒121; John S. Otto and Nain E. Anderson, “The Origins of Southern Cattle Grazing: A Problem in West Indian History,” Journal of Caribbean History 21 (1987), 138‒153; Mart A. Stewart, “‘Whether Wast, Deodand, or Stray’: Cattle, Culture and the Environment in Early Georgia,” AH 65 (Summer 1991), 1‒28; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York, 2004). 35.  Thomas Newe to Father, 17 May 1682, in “Letters of Thomas Newe, 1682,” in Salley, ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, 181‒182; see also R[obert] F[erguson], The Present State of Carolina, 9; Otto, “Livestock-­Raising in Early South Carolina,” 13‒24; Converse D. Clowse, Economic Beginnings in Colonial South Carolina, 1670‒1710 (Columbia, S.C., 1971), 82‒83; [John Norris], Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor in a Dialogue Between James Freeman, a Carolina Planter, and Simon Question, a West Country Farmer, (London 1712), in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 43; Maurice Mathews, “A Contemporary View of Carolina in 1680,” SCMH 55 (July 1954), 156; The Proprietors to the Governor and Council at Ashley River, 18 May 1674, in Cheves, ed., Collections (Charleston, S.C., 1897), 5:437. 36.  Elizabeth Hyrne to Burrell Massingberd, n.d., in Schmidt, “Applying Old World Habits to the New,” 57; Otto, “Livestock Raising in Early South Carolina,” 17; George Fenwick Jones, “John Martin Boltzius’ Trip to Charleston, October 1742,” SCMH 82 (April 1981), 107; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 53. 37.  SCG, 20 April 1752; Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729‒1765 (Kingsport, Tenn., 1940), 12.

426

Notes to Pages 71–74

38.  SCG, 15 July 1768; William De Brahm, Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America, ed. Louis DeVorsey Jr. (Columbia, S.C., 1971), 95; New Voyage to Georgia, 38. The word “cowpen” possibly originated with settlers from southwest England where “cow pine” referred to “an enclosed place where cattle are fed.” Otto, “Origins of Cattle Ranching,” 15; Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor, 93. 39.  New Voyage to Georgia, 33; Otto, “Livestock Raising in Early South Carolina.” 40.  Francis Le Jau to Secretary, 15 September 1708, in Frank Klingberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706‒1717 (Berkeley, Calif., 1956), 42; De Brahm, Report of the General Survey, 95‒96. 41.  Jean Barbot, Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678‒1712, ed. P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, 2 vols. (London, 1992), 1:101‒103; Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York, 1987), 183; see also Boubacar Barry, “Senegambia from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century: Evolution of the Wolof, Sereer and ‘Tukuloor,’ ” in B. A. Ogot, ed., The General History of Africa: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 262‒299; Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 1968), 1243‒1248. 42. Ashe, Carolina; Or a Description of the Present State of That Country, in Carroll, ed., Historical Collections, 2:63; Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500‒1800 (New York, 1990), 121‒129; Lawson, New Voyage to Carolina, 104; Elizabeth Hyrne to brother, 19 January 1701, in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 22; Francis Yonge, A View of the Trade of South Carolina (London, 1722), in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 69. 43. Norris, Profitable Advice, in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 33; Governor Robert Johnson to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 12 January 1720, in “America and West Indies: January 1720, 1-­15,” in CSP: Volume 31, 1719‒1720, ed. Headlam, 293‒311; BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol31​/pp293​-311; Converse D. Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 1717‒1767: Statistics for the Port’s Naval Lists (Washington, D.C., 1981), 65‒68; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, Economy of British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985). 44. Edward Hyrne to Burrell Massingberd, 19 January 1701, in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 18‒19; see also Albert J. Schmidt, “Hyrne Family Letters,” SCMH 63 (July 1962), 150‒157; Albert J. Schmidt, “Applying Old World Habits to the New,” 51‒59; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 7. 45.  Elizabeth Hyrne to Burrell Massingberd, 13 March 1704, in Schmidt, “Hyrne Family Letters,” SCMH 63 (July 1962), 153; Pauline M. Loven, “Hyrne Family Letters, 1699‒1725,” SCMH 102 (January 2001), 35; SCG, 19 February 1737; G. Melvin Herndon, “Naval Stores in Colonial Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 52 (December 1968), 426‒433; G. Melvin Herndon, “Timber Products of Colonial Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 57 (Spring 1973), 56‒63; Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 65; Thomas Cox and Robert Maxwell, This Well-­Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (Lincoln, Neb., 1985); Silver, New Face on the Countryside, 121‒130. 46.  Moore, “Axtell’s Account Book,” 280‒301; on the chemistry of pine-­tar production, see Theodore P. Kaye, “Pine Tar: History and Uses,” at www​.maritime​.org​/conf​/conf​-kaye​-tar​ .htm; Nairne, Letter from South Carolina, 11; Colonel Spotswood to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 4 March 1728, “America and West Indies: March 1728 , 1-­15,” in CSP: Volume 36,

Notes to Pages 74–78

427

1728‒1729, ed. Headlam and Newton, 46‒58, BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​ /colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol36​/pp46​-58. 47.  Axtell’s sparse entries in his account book reveal nothing about his relationship with the enslaved laborers who worked under him at Newington and elsewhere. Hyrnes’s letters, in which their slaves remain anonymous, also remain silent on the subject. See Moore, “Axtell’s Account Book,” 287‒289; Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Letter from Edmund White to Joseph Morton,” SCMH 30 (January 1929), 3‒4. 48.  Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 79; see also Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650‒1800 (Washington, D.C., 1992); Margaret Creel, “A Peculiar People:” Slave Religion and Community-­Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1988); Joseph Holloway, “The Origins of African-­American Culture,” in Joseph Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 1‒18; Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-­ American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1984), 101‒160; Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York, 1971); Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-­ American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976; repr. ed., Boston, 1992). 49.  James Glen, “Description of South Carolina,” in Carroll, ed., Historical Collections 2:201; Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 81; Judith A. Carney and Richard N. Rosmoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley, Calif., 2009); S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Matthew Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean (Baltimore, 2014); Wood, Black Majority, 35‒62. 50. Barbot, Barbot on Guinea, 2:512; Log of the slaver-­ship Sandown, journal kept by Samuel Gamble, slave merchant [1793‒1794], Log/M/21, Caird Library and Archives, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; Voyage ID# 83502, www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​ /database; Edda L. Fields-­Black, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Bloomington, Ind., 2008), 50; Thomas Winterbottom, Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, (London, 1803), 22, 145; John Matthews, A Voyage to the River Sierra-­Leone (London, 1788), 55‒56. In his 1620 account, Richard Jobson described men working in the fields for a very limited time, helping with tillage and harvest, see Jobson, The Golden Trade, or A Discovery of the River Gambra (London, 1623; repr. ed., Teignmouth, 1904), 49; Carney, Black Rice, 107‒108; Michel Adanson, A Voyage to Senegal, the Isle of Goree, and the River Gambia (London, 1759), 166. 51. Winterbottom, Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, 145; Carney, Black Rice, 49‒55; Matthews, Voyage to the River Sierra-­Leone, 172. 52. Matthews, Voyage to the River Sierra-­Leone, 147‒148. 53.  J. G. Dunlop, ed., “Letters from John Stewart to William Dunlop,” SCMH 32 (April 1931), 85‒86; Dunlop, ed., “Letters from John Stewart to William Dunlop,” SCMH (January 1931), 16; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise; Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993); Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. 54. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise. 55.  Moore, “Axtell’s Account Book,” 299; Carney, Black Rice, 84. 56.  De Brahm, Report of the General Survey, 94; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 92‒126; Matthews, Voyage to the River Sierra-­Leone, 54.

428

Notes to Pages 79–83

57.  Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (London, 1771), 13; see also James Glen, A Description of South Carolina, in Chapman L. Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions (Columbia, S.C., 1951), 118‒121; De Brahm, Report of the General Survey, 94; Carney, Black Rice, 91; Matthews, Voyage to the River Sierra-­Leone, 10, 36‒38. 58. Nairne, Letter from South Carolina, 59; Johann Martin Bolzius, “Reliable Answers to Some Submitted Questions Concerning the Land Carolina,” WMQ 4 (April 1957), 258; see also Klaus G. Loewald et al., eds., “Johann Martin Bolzius Answers a Questionnaire on Carolina and Georgia: Part Two,” WMQ 15 (April 1958), 228‒252; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; Thomas Porcher Plantation Diary in the Stoney Porcher Papers, SHC; “Observations on the Culture of Rice,” William Butler Papers, SHC; List of Negroes, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Papers, DUL; Glen, “Description of South Carolina,” in Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina, 41. 59.  Dyssli to Family in Kelsey, ed., “Swiss Settlers,” 90. 60. Governor Fitzwilliam to Duke of Newcastle, 11 March 1735, in CSP: Volume 41, 1734‒1735, (London, 1953), 386‒402. BHO, british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​ /america​-west​-indies​/vol41​/pp386​-402; Governor William Matthew to Council of Trade and Plantations, 17 January 1737, in “America and West Indies: January 1737,” in CSP: Volume 43, 1737, ed. K. G. Davies (London, 1963), 1‒21; BHO, british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​ -west​-indies​/vol43​/pp1​-21; Pennsylvania Gazette, 13 February 1734; “Extract of the Reverend Mr. Boltzius’ Journal (1733‒1744) in Trevor Reese, ed., Our First Visit to America: Early Reports from the Colony of Georgia, 1732‒1740 (Savannah, Ga., 1974), 56; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), 193; SCG, 11 May 1734, 18 May 1734, 11 December 1736, 5 February 1737, 23 April 1737. 61.  Rodney M. Baine, “Oglethorpe’s Forty Irish Convicts,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 78 (Summer 1994), 326‒338; Aaron Spencer Fogelman, Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-­ Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013); Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra, 194‒197. 62.  “Extract of a Letter from South Carolina, August 20, 1730” in Pennsylvania Gazette, 6 November 1730; Entry for 7 February 1739 in William Stephens, A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia, 1737‒1740, in Allen D. Candler, The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: The Journal of William Stephens, 18 vols. (Atlanta, 1904; repr. ed., New York, 1970), 4:275‒276; Entry for 18 February 1739 in Journal of William Stephens, 4:283‒284; Creel, “A Peculiar People,” 114; Walter J. Fraser Jr., Charleston! Charleston!: The History of a Southern City (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 53. 63.  SCG, 11 December 1736, 11 March 1737, 23 April 1737; Pennsylvania Gazette, 25 November 1736; David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-­Slave Relations on Antigua (Baltimore, 1985). 64.  William Rivers, A Sketch of the Early History of South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1856), 105, 376; Governor Johnson to Board of Trade, 29 April 1720, in William Rivers, A Chapter in the Early History of South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1874), 97; J. G. Dunlop, ed., “William Dunlop’s Mission to St. Augustine in 1688,” SCMH 34 (January 1933), 4‒5. 65.  “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina” in Candler, ed. The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: Original Papers, Correspondence, Trustees, General Oglethorpe and Others, 1737‒1740, Part 2 (Atlanta, 1913), 22:232‒233; Kathleen Deagan, Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community (New York, 1983); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, Ill., 1999); Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” AHR 95 (February 1990), 9‒30.

Notes to Pages 84–87

429

66.  J. H. Easterby and Ruth S. Green, eds., The Colonial Records of South Carolina: The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1736‒1739 (Columbia, S.C.,1951), 596, cited in Wood, Black Majority, 306; Statements Made in the Introduction to the Report of General Oglethorpe’s Expedition to St. Augustine (1741) in Carroll, ed., Historical Collections, 2:357; Allen D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: Original Papers, Correspondence, Trustees, General Oglethorpe and Others, 1735‒1737 (Atlanta, Ga., 1910), 21:225; Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: Stephens’ Journal, 1737‒1740 (Atlanta, Ga., 1906), 4:248; Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687‒1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62 (January 1984), 296‒313. 67.  Information about escaped slaves was collected from the South Carolina Gazette from February 1732 to September 1739. Of those escaped slaves, 253 were classified by name, sex, age, place of birth, residence, owner, skin color, language abilities, destination, skill, mode of transportation, method of escape, and number in the party; Wood, Black Majority, 239‒270. 68.  For example, see SCG, 23 February 1738, 23 July 1737, 11 May 1734, 25 March 1732, 29 April 1732, 22 June 1738, 5 May 1739; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 68, 152, 213. 69. See Wood, Black Majority, 239‒270; Philip D. Morgan, “Colonial South Carolina Runaways: Their Significance for Slave Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 6 (December 1985), 57; Daniel Meaders, “South Carolina Fugitives as Viewed Through Local Colonial Newspapers, 1732‒1801,” JNH (April 1975), 288‒319; Daniel Meaders, “Local Colonial Newspapers with an Emphasis on Runaway Notices, 1732‒1801,” JNH 60 (Fall 1975), 292. 70.  Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-­Century Virginia (New York, 1972); John Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” AHR 96 (October 1991), 1101‒1113; Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730‒1830 (Madison, Wisc., 1996); see, for example, SCG, 24 September 1737, 12 January 1738, 11 January 1739. 71.  17 January 1739 in J. H. Easterby, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1736‒1739 (Columbia, S.C., 1951), 591; “Report of the Committee on the Case of the Negroes’ Desertion to St. Augustine,” 2 April 1739, in “Report of the Committee,” 680‒681; James Oglethorpe to Duke of Newcastle, 23 February 1739, in “America and West Indies: February 1739, 16‒28,” in  CSP: Volume 45, 1739, ed. K. G. Davies (London, 1994), 37‒50;  BHO, www​ .british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol45​/pp37​-50; “Journal of William Stephens,” 29 July 1739, in Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: Stephens’ Journal, 1737‒1740, 4:378; 18 September 1739 in Stephens’ Journal, 412‒413; Report of the Committee Appointed by the General Assembly of South Carolina in 1740 on the St. Augustine Expedition Under General Oglethorpe (Charleston, S.C., 1887), 18‒19; “Statements Made in the Introduction to the Report on General Oglethorpe’s Expedition to St. Augustine,” in Carroll, ed., Historical Collections, 2:358‒359; Wood, Black Majority, 239. 72.  Lieutenant-­Governor Thomas Broughton to Duke of Newcastle, 6 February 1737, in “America and West Indies: February 1737, 1‒15,” in CSP: Volume 43, 1737, ed. K. G. Davies (London, 1963), 21‒40; BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​ -west​-indies​/vol43​/pp21​-40; Leonard Cocke to Commodore Dent, 3 November 1736, in “America and West Indies: November 1736, 21‒30,” in CSP: Volume 42, 1735‒1736 (London, 1953), 335‒354; BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol42​ /pp335​-354; Samuel Everleigh to Thomas Causton, 18 March 1737 in “America and West Indies: March 1737, 16‒25,” in CSP: Volume 43, 1737, 74‒93; BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​ -papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol43​/pp74​-93; Henry Weltden to James Oglethorpe,

430

Notes to Pages 87–90

17  January 1737, in “America and West Indies: February 1737, 16‒28,” in  CSP: Volume 43, 1737, 40‒59;  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​ /vol43​/pp40​-59; see also John Jay TePaske, The Governorship of Spanish Florida, 1700‒1763 (Durham, N.C., 1964), 139‒140; Larry E. Ivers, British Drums Along the Southern Frontier: The Military Colonization of Georgia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1974), 90‒150; Aileen Moore Topping, “‘A Free Facetious Gentleman’: Jean Savy, Double Agent?” Florida Historical Quarterly 56 (January 1978), 261‒279; Philip Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1998), 82‒84; SCG, 5 February 1737, 26 March 1737. 73.  William Bull to Duke of Newcastle, 5 October 1739 in “America and West Indies: October 1739,” in CSP: Volume 45, 1739, ed. K. G. Davies (London, 1994), 192‒215; BHO, www​.british​ -history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol45​/pp192​-215; Lieutenant-­ Governor William Bull to Board of Trade, 5 October 1739, Original Correspondence, Board of Trade, CO5/367, TNA; James Oglethorpe to Harman Verelst, 9 October 1739, in “America and West Indies: October 1739,” in CSP: Volume 45, 1739, 192‒215; BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​ /cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol45​/pp192​-215; “Extract of a Letter from South Carolina, dated October 2,” Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, Volume 10 (London, 1740), 127‒129; South Carolina Assembly, Report of the Committee Appointed by the General Assembly of South Carolina in 1740 on the Saint Augustine Expedition Under General Oglethorpe (Charleston, 1887), 17; Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose,” 19; John J. TePaske, “The Fugitive Slave: Intercolonial Rivalry and Spanish Slave Policy,” in Samuel Proctor, ed., Eighteenth-­ Century Florida and Its Borderlands (Gainesville, 1975), 1‒12; Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1689–1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62 (January 1984), 296–313. 74.  “An Act for prohibiting and preventing the exportation of Corn . . . from this Province,” (October 1737), in Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 3: Containing the Acts from 1716, Exclusive, to 1752, Inclusive (Columbia, S.C., 1838), 485; U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957, Series Z 262‒266: Rice Exported from Producing Areas: 1698 to 1772 (Washington, D.C., 1960), 768; Candler, ed., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: Stephens’ Journal, 1737‒1740, 4:153, 208; SCG, 29 June 1738. 75.  “An Act for the Better Preventing the Spreading of the Infection of the Small Pox in Charleston” (18 September 1738) in Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 3:513; SCG, 15 April 1738, 4 May 1738, 11 May 1738, 1 June 1738, 29 June 1738, 5 October 1738. 76.  William Stephens to Harman Verelst, 10 September 1739 in “America and West Indies: September 1739,” in CSP: Volume 45, 1739, 174‒191; BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​ -papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol45​/pp174​-191; Thomas Broughton to the Duke of Newcastle, 6 February 1737, in “America and West Indies: February 1737, 1‒15,” in CSP: Volume  43, 1737, 21‒40;  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​ -indies​/vol43​/pp21​-40; “An Act for the better security of the Inhabitants of this Province against the insurrections and other wicked attempts of the Negroes and other Slaves” (11 April 1739) in Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 3:525; Pennsylvania Gazette, 16 August 1739; SCG, 18 August 1739; Pennsylvania Gazette, 16 August 1739.

Chapter 3 Note to epigraph: Alexander Hewatt, An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia [London, 1779], in Bartholomew Rivers Carroll, ed., Historical Collections of South Carolina, Volume 1 (New York, 1836), 333.

Notes to Pages 91–96

431

1.  William Bull to the Duke of Newcastle, 5 October 1739, in “America and West Indies: October 1739,” in CSP: Volume 45, 1739, ed. K. G. Davies (London, 1994), 45:192‒215; BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol45​/pp192​-215; James Oglethorpe to Harman Verelst, 9 October 1739, in “America and West Indies: October 1739,” in CSP: Volume 45, 1739,  45: 192-­215; William Bull to Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, 5 October 1739, in CSP: Volume 45, 1739, 45: 192–215; “An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” in Allen D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, Volume 22, Part 2: Original Papers, Correspondence, General Oglethorpe, and Others, 1737‒1740 (Atlanta, Ga., 1913), 232‒236; see also Peter Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Rebellion of 1739 (New York, 2010); Mark Smith., ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia, S.C., 2005); Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 308‒330; Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander S. Moore, and George C. Rogers, The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: Volume 1, 1514‒1861 (Columbia, S.C., 1996), 114, 117. 2.  Kinloch Bull Jr., The Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston: Lieutenant Governor William Bull II and His Family (Columbia, S.C., 1991); W. Stitt Robinson, James Glen: From Scottish Provost to Royal Governor of South Carolina (Westport, Conn., 1996). 3.  James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 1‒17; Emilia Viotto da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York, 1994), xiv; Allen D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: Stephens’ Journal, 1737‒1740 (Atlanta, 1906), 4:423. 4.  Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 64‒76, 142‒176; Philip D. Morgan, “Task and Gang Labor: The Organization of Work on New World Plantations,” in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 189‒220; Klaus G. Loewald, Beverly Starika, and Paul S. Taylor, eds., “Johann Martin Bolzius Answers a Questionnaire on Carolina and Georgia,” WMQ 14 (April 1957), 218‒222. 5.  www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/database​#tables; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585‒1660 (New York, 2007); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (New York, 2007). 6.  John William Gerard De Brahm, Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America, ed. Louis DeVorsey (Columbia, S.C., 1971), 94; Hewatt, “Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia,” 1:142; Edward A. Pearson, “Rebelling as Men,” in Smith, ed., Stono, 87‒112; SCG, 16 March 1738. 7.  “Account of the Negroe Insurrection,” in Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, Volume 22, Part 2: Original Papers, Correspondence, General Oglethorpe, and Others, 1737‒1740, 233; “A Ranger’s Report of Travels with General Oglethorpe, 1739‒1742,” in Newton Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (New York, 1916), 222; “An Act for making and keeping in repair the road . . . on the East Side of the Pon Pon River” (11 March 1738), in Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 3: Containing the Acts from 1716, Exclusive, to 1752, Inclusive (Columbia, S.C., 1838), 486; SCG, 16 March 1738; Edward A. Pearson, “‘A Countryside Full of Flames’: A Reconsideration of the Stono Rebellion and Slave Rebelliousness in Early Eighteenth Century South Carolina,” Slavery and Abolition 17 (August 1996), 22‒50. 8.  “Account of the Negroe Insurrection,” in Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 22:233; John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976), 46; “A Ranger’s Report,” in

432

Notes to Pages 96–101

Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies, 222; “Extract of a Letter from South Carolina, October 2,” Gentleman’s Magazine 10 (March 1740), 128; Boston Weekly-­News Letter, 27 September 1739‒4 October 1739. 9.  Thomas Phillips, A Journal of the Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, Anno 1693 and 1694 (London, 1746), 220; John Matthews, A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone (London, 1788), 154; Bruce Mouser, “Rebellion, Marronage and Jihad: Strategies of Resistance to Slavery Along the Sierra Leone Coast, c. 1783‒1796,” Journal of African History 48 (2007), 27‒44; Robin Law, “‘My Head Belongs to the King’: On the Political and Ritual Significance of Decapitation in Pre-­Colonial Dahomey,” Journal of African History 30 (1989), 399‒415; John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” AHR 96 (October 1991), 1101‒1113. 10.  SCG, 6 April 1734, 12 April 1739, 19 April 1739. 11.  “Account of the Negroe Insurrection,” in Candler, The Colonial Records of Georgia, 22:234; James Oglethorpe to Harman Verelst, 9 October 1739, in “America and West Indies: October 1739,” in  CSP: Volume 45, 1739, 192‒215;  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​ -papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol45​/pp192​-215. 12.  “Account of the Negroe Insurrection,” in Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of Georgia, 22:232‒236; Commons Journal, South Carolina Assembly, 29 November 1739, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, September 12, 1739‒March 26, 1741, ed. J. H. Easterby (Columbia, S.C., 1952), 64‒65. 13.  Commons Journal, South Carolina Assembly, 29 November 1739, in Easterby, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, September 12, 1739‒March 26, 1741, 64‒65. 14.  “Account of the Negroe Insurrection,” in Candler, ed., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia 22:234. 15.  “Account of the Negroe Insurrection,” in Candler, ed., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 22:234‒235; “Extract of a Letter from South Carolina, October 2,” Gentleman’s Magazine 10 (March 1740), 128. 16.  South Carolina Assembly, “Report of the Committee to Enquire into the Causes and Disappointment of the Late Expedition to Saint Augustine [July 1741],” in Easterby, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1741‒1742, 83; “A Ranger’s Report,” in Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies, 223. 17.  “A Ranger’s Report,” in Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies, 223; “Account of the Negroe Insurrection,” in Candler, ed., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 22:235‒236. 18.  “Account of the Negroe Insurrection,” in Candler, ed., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 22:235; “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in This Province (10 May 1740),” in David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina: Acts Relating to Charleston, Courts, Slaves, and Rivers, Volume 7 (Charleston, S.C., 1840), 416; “A Ranger’s Report,” in Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies, 223. 19.  William Stephens Journal, 11 June 1740, in Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia: Stephens’ Journal, 1737‒1740, 592; 21 November 1739, in Easterby, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1739‒1741, 37. 20.  Report of the Committee on the St. Augustine Expedition Under General Oglethorpe in 1740, in Collections of the Historical Society of South Carolina, Volume 4 (Charleston, S.C., 1887), 18. See also David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 182; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994), 169‒170; M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), 210‒212; Robinson, James Glen, 23.

Notes to Pages 102–107

433

21.  “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes in This Province (10 May 1740),” in McCord, ed., Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 7:97‒417. 22.  Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 1: Containing Acts, Records and Documents of a Constitutional Character (Columbia, S.C., 1836), 55; “Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes,” in McCord, ed., Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 7:404, 413; Bolzius, “Reliable Answers to Some Submitted Questions Concerning the Land Carolina,” WMQ 14 (April 1957), 234; see Loewald et al., eds., “Bolzius Answers a Questionnaire,” 218‒222. 23.  SCG, 27 August 1772. 24.  SCG, 27 August 1772; on prerevolutionary Charles Town, see Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York, 2007), 143‒171; William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (New York, 2010); J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Richard Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty: A Study of the Artisans, 1763‒1789 (Columbia, S.C., 1959); Walter J. Fraser Jr., Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 98‒138. 25.  Henry Laurens to Joseph Brown, 28 October 1765, in George C. Rogers Jr. and David Chesnutt, eds., PHL: Volume 5, September 1, 1765‒July 32, 1768 (Columbia, S.C., 1976), 29‒32; John Pringle to William Tilghman, 30 July 1774, Preston Davie Papers, SHC; SCG, 8 November 1742, 20 January 1772, 4 February 1772, 15 November 1774, 20 June 1775, 27 August 1772. 26.  T. P. Harrison, ed., “Journal of a Voyage to Charlestown in South Carolina by Pelatiah Webster in 1765,” Publications of the Southern History Association 2 (January 1898), 4; SCG, 27 August 1772, 17 September 1772; Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1984), 187‒232; www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/database. 27.  SCG, 17 September 1772. 28.  SCG, 17 September 1772. 29. Wood, Black Majority, 144‒148; Peter Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670‒1920 (New York, 1989), 64. 30.  Henry A. M. Smith, “Charleston: The Original Plan and the Earliest Settlers,” SCMH 9 (January 1908), 14‒15; Fraser, Charleston! Charleston!, 8; John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh Talmadge Lefler (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), 8‒9; Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-­Century British Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2015); Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 6, 120; Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, “Staple Crops and Urban Development in the Eighteenth-­Century South,” Perspectives in American History 10 (1976), 18; “Charleston at the End of the Colonial Era,” in H. Roy Merrens, ed., The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Descriptions, 1697‒1774 (Columbia, S.C., 1977), 281; Adam Gordon, “Journal of Lord Adam Gordon,” in Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies, 398; John Bennett, ed., “Charleston in 1774 as Described by an English Traveller,” SCMH, 47 (July 1946), 179; Hewatt, Historical Account, 2:289; B. A. Uhlendorf, ed., The Siege of Charleston: Diaries and Letters of Hessian Officers (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1938). 31.  Walter L. Robbins, ed., “John Tobler’s Description of South Carolina (1753),” SCMH 71 (July 1970), 144; Matthew Mulcahy, “The ‘Great Fire’ of 1740 and the Politics of Disaster Relief in Colonial Charleston,” SCMH 99 (April 1998), 138; Kenneth Scott, “Sufferers in the Charleston Fire of 1740,” SCMH 64 (October 1963), 203‒211; Fraser, Charleston! Charleston!, 83‒85; Suzanne Kresbach, “The Great Charlestown Smallpox Epidemic of 1760,” SCMH, 97 (January 1996), 30‒37; SCG, 27 November 1740, 14 August 1755, 26 November 1764, 13 October 1766.

434

Notes to Pages 107–114

Major fires occurred in 1698, 1699, 1700, and 1740; hurricanes hit the city in 1690, 1700, 1713, 1728, and 1752. 32.  SCG, 19 September 1752; Jonathan Mercantini, “The Great Carolina Hurricane of 1752,” SCMH 103 (October 2002), 355; Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the Greater British Caribbean, 1624‒1783 (Baltimore, 2008), 133‒138, 144‒145. 33.  “Johann Bolzius’ Trip to Charleston, October 1742,” SCMH 82 (April 1981), 99; Robbins, ed, “Tobler’s Description of South Carolina (1753),” 144; SCG, 20 November 1740. 34.  T. P. Harrison, ed., “Journal of a Voyage to Charlestown in South Carolina by Pelatiah Webster in 1765,” Publications of the Southern Historical Association 2 (January 1898), 134; Klaus G. Loewald et al., eds., “Reliable Answers to Some Submitted Questions Concerning the Land Carolina,” WMQ 14 (April 1957), 242; Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (New York, 1950), 15‒16; Yates Snowden, Notes on Labor Organizations in South Carolina, 1742‒1861 (Columbia, S.C., 1914), 7. 35.  James Glen, “An Attempt Towards an Estimate of the Value of South Carolina (1751),” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 179. 36.  On enslaved boat builders, see Petition of Andrew Ruck, Shipwright, 21 January 1744, in J. H. Easterby, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, September 14, 1742‒­January 27, 1744, 541; Bridenbaugh, Colonial Craftsman, 140. 37.  “Rates Ascertained for the Carriage of All Goods and Commodities,” SCG, 24 June 1732, 29 May 1755, 12 February 1756, 6 October 1759, 8 August 1771, 18 October 1773; Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Harlen Greene, Harry S. Hutchins, and Brian E. Hutchins, Slave Badges and the Slave Hire-­ System in Charleston, South Carolina, 1783‒1865 (Jefferson, N.C., 2004). 38.  SCG, 15 May 1755, 17 June 1732; Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Greene et al., Slave Badges. 39.  SCG, 23 June 1770; on Lancaster, see SCG, 8 January 1741, 24 October 1741; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 4 February 1772. 40.  SCG, 28 September 1738, 1 January 1741, 8 January 1741, 24 October 1741. 41.  “Petition of Sundry Inhabitants of Charles Town, 5 February 1747,” in J. H. Easterby, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1746‒1747, 154‒155; SCG, 15 October 1763, 28 September 1734, 18 December 1740, 22 October 1763, 25 January 1770; Snowdon, Labor Organizations in South Carolina, 5‒6. 42.  Patrick Joyce, “The Historical Meanings of Work: An Introduction,” in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings of Work (New York, 1989); SCG, 4 May 1772. 43.  “Remonstrance of the Governor of the Council and Assembly of South Carolina to the King, 23 July 1734,” in “America and West Indies: July 1734, 21‒30,” in  CSP: Volume 41, 1734‒1735, 250, 164‒180;  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​ -west​-indies​/vol41​/pp164​-180; SCG, 9 July 1750, 24 September 1772. 44.  SCG, 26 June 1749, 1 January 1756, 5 August 1766, 27 December 1767, 2 May 1768, 12 January 1769, 27 May 1769, 17 January 1771; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 8 August 1769. 45.  SCG, 5 December 1769; Henry Laurens to James Laurens, 2 July 1775, in Philip Hamer, George Rogers, and David Chesnutt, eds., PHL: Volume 10: December 12, 1774‒January 4, 1776 (Columbia, S.C., 1985), 203; Morgan, “Black Life,” 1:202; Martin, Divided Mastery, 24‒25; Greene et al., Slave Badges, 21‒22. 46.  SCG, 25 June 1750, 6 August 1750.

Notes to Pages 115–120

435

47.  “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves (29 March 1735),” in David McCord, ed., Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 7:396; Grand Jury Presentations, May 1774, Court of General Sessions Journal, 1769‒1776, SCDAH; SCG, 5 November 1744, 23 October 1753, 5 November 1753, 23 May 1773. 48.  SCG, 24 September 1772; Robert Olwell, “‘Loose, Idle and Disorderly Women’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-­Century Charleston Marketplace,” in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington, Ind., 1996); Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus, Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Athens, Ga., 2015). 49.  “Petition of Sundry Inhabitants of Charleston,” 5 February 1747, in J. H. Easterby, ed., The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, September 10, 1746‒June 13, 1747, 154‒155; SCG, 15 April 1771, 27 April 1771, 17 October 1774, 15 November 1774. 50.  Mark DeWolfe, ed., “The Journal of Josiah Quincy, Jr.,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 49 (1915‒1916), 455. See also Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York, eds., Portrait of a Patriot, Volume Three: The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior: The Southern Journal (Charlottesville, 2014); SCG, 1 May 1756, 17 May 1774, 31 May 1774. 51.  Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602), ed. Albert van Danzig and Adam Jones (Oxford, 1987), 63‒65. 52.  On Stead, see SCG, 26 May 1759; Manumission Deed, 15 January 1762, Miscellaneous Records, vol. LL, 495‒496, SCDAH; on Sarah, Manumission Deed, 17 December 1774, Miscellaneous Records, vol. RR, 239, SCDAH. 53. Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740‒1790 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Joyce C. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730‒1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993); Wood, Black Majority. 54.  John Bartram, “Diary of a Journey Through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, July 1, 1765 to April 10, 1766,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 33 (December 1942), 1:13, 22; De Brahm, Report of the General Survey. 55.  Henry Laurens to Henry Bright, 9 September 1762, in Philip M. Hamer and George C. Rogers, eds., PHL, Volume 3: January 1, 1759‒August 31, 1763 (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 118; Henry Laurens to Alexander Gray, 13 October 1767, in George C. Rogers and David R. Chesnutt, eds., PHL, Volume 5: September 1, 1765‒July 31, 1768 (Columbia, S.C., 1976), 361; Josiah Smith to George Austin, 17 June 1771, in Josiah Smith Letter Book, SHC; SCG, 6 June 1771; SCG, 12 January 1760, 26 January 1760, 13 February 1762; Dennis B. Blanton, Michael Chenoweth, and Cary J. Mock, “The Great Flood of 1771: An Explanation of Natural Causes and Social Effects,” in Lesley-­Ann Dupigny-­Giroux and Cary J. Mock, eds, Historical Climate Variability and Impacts in North America (New York, 2009), 3‒23; Horace F. Rudisill, ed., The Diaries of Evan Pugh, 1762‒1801 (Florence, S.C., 1993). 56.  Henry Laurens to Devonshier, Reeve, and Lloyd, 22 May 1755, and 31 July 1755, in Philip M. Hamer and George C. Rogers Jr., eds., PHL, Volume 1: September 11, 1746‒­October 31, 1755, (Columbia, S.C., 1968), 252, 304; Henry Laurens to Gidney Clarke, 26 June 1756, Hamer et al., eds., PHL, Volume 2: November 1, 1755‒December 31, 1758 (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 230‒231; Henry Laurens to Richard Oswald, 17 May 1756, in Hamer et al., eds., PHL, 2:186; on Bunce

436

Notes to Pages 120–129

Island (sometimes referred to as Bance Island), see Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440‒1870 (New York, 1997), 342‒343; Daniel Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, La., 1981); James Glen, “A Description of South Carolina (1761),” in Chapman J. Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions (Columbia, S.C., 1951), 14. 57.  Loewald et al., eds., “Bolzius Answers a Questionnaire,” 256‒259; Philip D. Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700 to 1880,” WMQ 39 (1982), 566; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. An acre is 4,840 square yards (or roughly the size of an American football field). 58.  Bartram, “Diary of a Journey Through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1:13‒14; Johann Martin Bolzius, “Reliable Answer to Some Submitted Questions Concerning the Land Carolina,” WMQ 14 (April 1957), 256. 59.  George Fenwick Jones, ed., “John Martin Boltzius’ Trip to Charleston, October 1742,” SCMH 82 (April 1981), 104; Peter Gordon, The Journal of Peter Gordon, 1732‒1735, ed. E. Merton Coulter (Athens, Ga., 1963). 60.  Philip Morgan, “Task and Gang Systems: The Organization of Labor on New World Plantations,” in Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America, 190‒191: Loewald et al., eds., “Bolzius Answers a Questionnaire,” 259. 61.  John Budd, cited in Eugene L. Schwab, ed., Travels in the Old South, 2 vols. (Lexington, Ky., 1973), 1:8. 62. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise. 63.  E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-­Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (December 1967), 56‒97; E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford, 1940), 101‒102; Robert Norris, Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee, King of Dahomey (London, 1789), 142‒143. 64.  Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone (London, 1803), 1:52‒53. 65.  John William Gerard De Brahm, Report of the General Survey, 94. 66. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. 67.  Thomas Coffin Plantation Book, 1813, Thomas Coffin Papers, SCHS; Josiah Smith to George Austin, 22 July 1773, 22 July 1774, 25 February 1772, Josiah Smith Letter Book, SHC. 68.  Contract of John Courturier, John Colhoun Papers, SCL; G. Melvin Herndon, “A Young Scotsman’s Visit to South Carolina, 1770‒1772,” SCMH 85 (July 1984), 189. 69.  Josiah Smith to George Austin, 31 January 1775 and 30 July 1772, in Josiah Smith Letter Book, SHC. 70.  Peter Manigault to Ralph Izard, 10 February 1770; James Postell to Peter Manigault, 2 February 1770; Peter Manigault to Sir [James Postell], 4 February 1770, in Maurice A. Crouse, ed., “The Letterbook of Peter Manigault, 1763‒1773,” SCMH 70 (July 1969), 181‒183. 71.  De Brahm, Report of the General Survey. 72.  “Governor William Bull’s Representation of the Colony, 1770,” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 254‒269.

Chapter 4 Note to epigraph: Richard J. Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953), 119.

Notes to Pages 129–135

437

1.  Robert Witherspoon, “Memoir of Robert Witherspoon,” in Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David D. Doyle, eds., Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America (New York, 2003), 135‒143; see also “The Memoir of John Anderson,” in the Anderson-­Thornwell Papers, SHC. See also Rachel Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760‒1818 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990); Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); W. Stitt Robinson, The Southern Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque, N.M., 1979); Verner Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670‒1732 (Durham, N.C., 1928); Robert Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729‒1765 (Kingsport, Tenn., 1940); Richard Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenberg County, Virginia, 1746‒1832 (Philadelphia, 1984). 2.  Witherspoon, “Memoirs of Robert Witherspoon,” in Miller et al., eds., Irish Immigrants, 139; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1985), 131‒168; David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607‒1785 (Athens, Ga., 1994); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots-­ Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689‒1764 (Princeton, N.J., 2001); R. J. Dickson, Ulster Immigration to Colonial America, 1718‒1775 (Belfast, 1966). 3.  Witherspoon, “Memoir of Robert Witherspoon,” in Miller et al., eds., Irish Immigrants, 140; Allen Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000). 4.  SCG, 1 September 1739; Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, 56. 5.  Witherspoon, “Memoirs of Robert Witherspoon,” in Miller et al., eds., Irish Immigrants, 140‒141; SCG, 1 September 1739, Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, 56. 6.  Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 17‒28. 7.  “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves in This Province (May 1740),” in David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 7: Containing the Acts Relating to Charleston, Courts, Slaves, and Rivers (Columbia, S.C., 1840), 397. 8.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 119‒120; Brown, South Carolina Regulators; Klein, Unification of a Slave State. On banditry more generally, see Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York, 1969); James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, N.C., 1999). 9.  Petition of the Inhabitants on the Pee Dee River Above Lynches Creek, 17 March 1762, Journal of the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly, 1751‒1753, 111 CO5/466, TNAUK; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 13‒38; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 47‒78; Rachel Klein, “Ordering the Backcountry: The South Carolina Regulation,” WMQ 38 (October 1981), 661‒680; Klein, “Frontier Planters and the American Revolution: The South Carolina Backcountry,” in Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds., An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry in the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1985), 37‒69. 10.  John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh Talmadge Lefler (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), 34; William K. Boyd, ed., Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina by William Byrd (1728) (Raleigh, N.C., 1929), 300; James Adair, The History of the American Indians, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2005), 246; “Governor William Bull’s Representation of the Colony,” 30 November 1770, in H. Roy Merrens, ed., The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697‒1774 (Columbia, 1977), 268; Peter Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region,” in Peter

438

Notes to Pages 135–140

Wood et al., eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: The Southeastern Indians in the Colonial Era (Lincoln, Neb., 1989), 65; Robin Beck, Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South (New York, 2013), 137‒180; Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, 15, 29; James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), 1‒7; Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500‒1800 (New York, 1990); Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville, Tenn., 1976). 11.  SCG, 18 May 1745; Governor James Glen to the Committee on Indian Affairs, 1751, in William L. McDowell, ed., Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, May 21, 1750‒August 7, 1754 (Columbia, S.C., 1958; repr. ed., 1992), 52; David H. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740‒1762 (Norman, Okla., 1962), 14‒15; Daniel J. Tortora, Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756‒1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2015); John Richard Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier: A Study of Indian Relations, Trade, and Land Problems in the Southern Wilderness, 1754‒1775 (New York, 1966). 12. Proceedings of the Council Concerning Indian Affairs, 7 July 1753, in William L. McDowell., ed., Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, 1754‒1765 (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 453. 13.  Robert Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1983), 266. 14.  George Milligen-­Johnston, “A Short Description of the Province of South Carolina, (1770),” in Chapman J. Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions (Columbia, S.C., 1951), 196; John Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-­Cherokee Frontier, 1756‒1763 (Baton Rouge, La., 2001); Hatley, Dividing Path, 119‒140; SCG, 22 September 1759, 9 February 1760, 23 February 1760, 6 August 1761. 15.  Milligen-­Johnston, “A Short Description,” in Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina, 197; M. Thomas Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokee and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution (New York, 1995), 119‒140; Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754‒1766 (New York, 2000), 61; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 6. 16. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 3, 14; Anderson, Crucible of War, 466‒467; SCG, 10 June 1760; Milligen-­Johnston, “A Short Account,” in Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina, 198. 17. Christopher French, “A Soldier’s Story: Captain Christopher French, 1761,” http://​ trailofthetrail​.blogspot​.com​/2011​/05​/soldiers​-story​-capt​-christopher​-french​.html (diary entries for 10 June, 14 June, 26 June 1761); Hatley, Dividing Paths, 138‒140; Henry Laurens to John Ettwein, 11 July 1761, in Hamer et al., eds., PHL: January 1, 1759 to August 31, 1763 (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 3:73‒76. 18.  SCG, 30 January 1762; Philolethes, 2 March 1763, in Hamer et al., eds., PHL, 3:286. 19.  Council of Trade and Plantations to the Duke of Newcastle, 10 June 1730, in “America and West Indies: June 1730,” 281, 1‒15, in CSP: Volume 37, 1730, ed. Cecil Headlam and Arthur Percival Newton (London, 1937), 130‒147;  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​ /colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol37​/pp130​-147; Petition of Joseph Murray, 2 February 1749, in “Petitioning for Land, 1748/9,” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 167. 20.  Council of Trade and Plantations to the Duke of Newcastle, 10 June 1730, in “America and West Indies: June 1730,” 281, 1‒15, in  CSP: Volume 37, 1730, ed. Headlam and Newton, 130‒147;  BHO, www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-state​-papers​/colonial​/america​-west​-indies​/vol37​ /pp130​-147; Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986); Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of Revolution (New York, 1988); Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, 19; Weir, Colonial South Carolina;

Notes to Pages 140–147

439

M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663‒1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989). 21.  “Proposed Instructions Regarding Swiss in South Carolina, 21 Ocotber 1730,” in Leonard Woods Larabee, ed., Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors, 2 vols. (New York, 1935), 2:613‒614. 22. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 608; Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, 37; SCG, 16 November 1734. 23. Petition of Loduwick Ryen, 2 February 1749, in “Petitioning for Land, 1748/9,” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 170‒171; Walter L. Robbins, ed., “John Tobler’s Description of South Carolina (1753),” SCMH 71 (July 1970), 159; Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, 54‒55; SCG, 7 January 1745; Hans Jacob Riemensperger, “A Translation of the Brochure by Hans Jacob Riemensperger to Attract Migration to Saxe Gotha Township, South Carolina, in 1740,” at http://​sites​.rootsweb​.com​/​~scorange​/history​/brochure​.htm; George Fenwick Jones, The Georgia Dutch: From the Rhine and Danube to the Savannah, 1733‒1783 (Athens, Ga., 1992), 78‒79; A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore, 1993), 210‒211. 24.  Petition of Jacob Pennington, 2 February 1749, in “Petitioning for Land, 1748/9,” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 170‒171; SCG, 1 November 1760. 25.  Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, 1755, in A. D. Chidsey, “William Parsons: Easton’s First Citizen,” Pennsylvania History 7 (April 1940), 97. The names of several backcountry South Carolina counties, such as Chester, Lancaster, and York, reflect the Pennsylvanian origins of early settlers. See Allen Tullos, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), 11. 26.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 6‒7, 23; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 19‒21; Weir, Colonial South Carolina, 209; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 182. See also Lieutenant-­ Governor William Bull to the Earl of Hillsborough, 30 November 1770, Secretary of State Correspondence, CO5/394, TNAUK. 27.  Witherspoon, “Memoir of Robert Witherspoon,” in Miller et al., eds., Irish Immigrants, 139; SCG, 26 March 1737, 4 September 1736, 19 March 1737. 28. Allen Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 29; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 21‒22; Richard Maxwell Brown, “Backcountry Rebellions and the Homestead Ethic in America, 1740‒1779,” in Don Fehrenbacher and Richard Maxwell Brown, eds., Tradition, Conflict and Modernization: Perspectives on the American Revolution (New York, 1987), 73‒99; Peter N. Moore, World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in Backcountry South Carolina, 1750‒1805 (Columbia, S.C., 2007); Charles S. Davis, ed., “The Journal of William Moultrie While a Commissioner on the North and South Carolina Boundary Survey, 1772,” JSH 8 (November 1942), 549‒555; see also Journal of William Moultrie, Commissioner of the North and South Carolina Boundary Survey, 1772, in William Moultrie Papers, SCL. 29.  Hector St. Jean Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-­ Century America (London, 1782; repr. ed., New York, 1904), 26‒27, 54. 30.  Witherspoon, “Memoir of Robert Witherspoon,” in Miller et al., eds., Irish Immigrants, 141; Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, 83. 31.  SCG, 7 July 1766, 14 November 1768, 2 April 1771. 32.  Inventory of Thomas Wilson, 27 June 1774, Probate Records of South Carolina, Inventories, 1771‒1776, 395; Inventory of James Forsythe, 4 January 1775, Probate Records of South

440

Notes to Pages 147–152

Carolina, Inventories, 1771‒1776, 493, SCDAH; Brent Holcomb, comp., Probate Records of South Carolina, Volume 1: Index to Inventories, 1746‒1785 (Easley, S.C., 1977); T. H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (May 1988), 73‒104; T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America,” Journal of British Studies 25 (October 1986), 467‒499; SCG, 5 December 1771; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 19. 33.  SCG, 11 July 1774; Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 6; Joseph A. Ernst and H. Roy Merrens, “‘Camden’s Turrets Pierce the Skies!’: The Urban Process in the Southern Colonies During the Eighteenth Century,” WMQ 30 (October 1973), 549‒574; Thomas J. Kirkland and Robert M. Kennedy, Historic Camden: Colonial and Revolutionary, Part One: Colonial and Revolutionary (Columbia, S.C., 1905); Walter Edgar and N. Louise Bailey, eds., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives: Volume 2: The Commons House of Assembly, 1692‒1775 (Columbia, S.C., 1977); David Colin Crass, Bruce R. Penner, and Tammy R. Forehand, “Gentility and Material Culture on the Carolina Frontier,” Historical Archeology 33 (Fall 1999), 14‒31; Kenneth E. Lewis, “Frontier Change, Institution Building, and the Archeological Record in the South Carolina Backcountry,” Southeastern Archeology 28 (Winter 2009), 184‒201. Camden was originally part of Fredericksburg Township and was known as Pine Tree Hill until 1768 when it was renamed Camden in honor of Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, who argued for colonial rights. 34.  Petition for compensation, Robert Fisher, Loyalist Claims, SCDAH; South Carolina Gazette and American Gazette, 21 October 1774. 35.  Petition for compensation, Robert Fisher, Loyalist Claims, SCDAH. 36.  Petition for compensation, Robert Fisher, Loyalist Claims, SCDAH. 37. Petition for compensation, George Plattt, 20 November 1783, Loyalist Claims, AO12/46, 95‒97, American Loyalist Claims, Series I, TNAUK. 38. Maurice Crouse, ed., “The Letterbook of Peter Manigault,” SCMH 70 (September 1969), 191; Henry Laurens to Richard Oswald, 15 February 1763, in Hamer et al., eds., PHL, 3:2, 60; George Lloyd Johnson, The Frontier in South Carolina (Westport, Conn., 1997), 79; G. Terry Sharer, “The Indigo Bonanza in South Carolina, 1740‒1790,” Technology and Culture, 12 (July 1971), 454. 39.  SCG, 30 March 1765, 5 December 1769; Johnson, Frontier in South Carolina, 82; Davis, ed., “The Journal of William Moultrie,” 552; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 20; “Last Will and Testament of Jacob Pennington, 7 December 1762,” www​.geni​.com​/people​/Jacob​-Pennington​ /6000000002033882161. 40.  SCG, 27 October 1767, 8 March 1768; South Carolina and American General Gazette, 17 July 1767; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 22 December 1767, 8 March 1768. 41.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 121. 42.  Witherspoon, “Memoir of Robert Witherspoon,” in Miller et al., eds., Irish Immigrants, 140. 43.  Lloyd Johnson, “The Welsh in the Carolinas in the Eighteenth Century,” North American Journal of Welsh Studies 4 (Winter 2004), 12‒19; Glen Pearson, ed., “An Abstract of the Records of the Welsh Neck Baptist Church, Society Hill, South Carolina,” at http://​sciway3​.net​/proctor​ /marlboro​/church​/Welsh​_Neck​_Baptist2​.html; Glen Pearson, ed., “The Church Minutes for Cashaway Neck Church of Christ, 1757‒1772,” at http://​sciway3​.net​/proctor​/marlboro​/church​ /Cashaway​_Baptist​.html; Baptist Church, Darlington County, Cashaway Records, 1756‒1778, typescript, SCL; Records of the Welsh Tract, Pencader Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware, 1701 to 1828 (Wilmington, Del., 1904), 8.

Notes to Pages 153–160

441

44.  Charles D. Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Edmund Botsford (Charleston, S.C., 1832), 27‒38; Leah Townsend, South Carolina Baptists, 1670‒1805 (Florence, S.C., 1935). 45.  Church Covenant, 20 June 1767, the Church of Christ in Cashaway Neck (article 15), in Pearson, ed., “The Church Minutes for Cashaway Neck Church of Christ,” at sciway3​.net​ /proctor​/marlboro​/church​/Cashaway​_Baptist​.html; 12 September 1759, Constitution of the Church of Christ in Cashaway (article 8) in Pearson, ed., “Church Minutes for Cashaway Neck Church of Christ.” 46.  25 December 1759, Confession of Joshua Edwards in Pearson, ed., “Church Minutes for Cashaway Neck Church of Christ”; 26 April 1760, 22 November 1760, Case of Richard Ponder in Pearson, ed., “Church Minutes for Cashaway Neck Church of Christ,” l. 47.  William Owens v. Benjamin James, 19 May 1770, June 1770, 16 February 1771, 21 April 1771, in Pearson ed., “Church Minutes for Cashaway Neck Church of Christ.” 48.  Covenant of the Welsh Neck Baptist Church, 2 August 1760, cited in Townsend, South Carolina Baptists, 1670‒1805 (Florence, S.C., 1935; repr. ed., Baltimore, 2003), 287; see also Pearson, ed., “An Abstract of the Records of the Welsh Neck Baptist Church,” in http://​sciway3​ .net​/proctor​/marlboro​/church​/Welsh​_Neck​_Baptist2​.html. 49.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 17, 30, 46; Witherspoon, “Memoir of Robert Witherspoon,” in Miller et al., eds., Irish Immigrants; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 41‒43. 50. Johnson, Frontier in South Carolina, 139‒141; Meriwether, Expansion of South Carolina, 97; Stephen A. Marini, The Cashaway Psalmody: Transatlantic Religion and Music in Colonial Carolina (Champaign, Ill., 2020); F. M. Buffett, “Fordyce, John,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume 3, University of Toronto/Université Laval, www​.biographi​.ca​/en​/bio​/fordyce​ _john​_3E​.html. 51.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 6‒7, 101‒102, 157. 52.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 13‒14. 53.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 101. 54.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 119; Ernst and Merrens, “Camden’s Turrets Pierce the Skies!,” 549‒574; Kenneth E. Lewis, The Carolina Backcountry Venture: Tradition, Capital, and Circumstance in the Development of Camden and the Wateree Valley, 1740‒1810 (Columbia, S.C., 2017). 55.  “Petition of the Inhabitants on the Pee Dee River, about the mouth of Lynche’s Creek, 16 March 1752,” in Terry W. Lipscomb and R. Nicholas Olsberg, eds., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, November 14, 1751‒October 7, 1752 (Columbia, S.C., 1977), 457; Alexander Gregg, History of the Old Cheraws . . . from About A.D. 1730 to 1810 (New York, 1867), 131. 56.  Baikia Harvey to Thomas Baikie, 30 December 1775, in Barbara DeWolfe, ed., Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America During the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1997), 211‒212; Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 157‒158, 226. 57.  David Ramsay, History of South Carolina from Its First Settlement in 1670 to the Year 1808 (Newberry, S.,C., 1858), 120; Robbins, ed., “Tobler’s Description of South Carolina (1753),” 159; Presentments of the Grand Jury, Camden District, 5 November 1773, in SCG, 28 December 1773. 58.  SCG, 28 December 1774; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 55‒56; Robbins, “Tobler’s Description of South Carolina (1753),” 159; Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 231. 59. Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 57; Brown, South Carolina Regulators; SCG, 25 August 1766; “Confession and Declaration of Burns,” in SCG, 22 February 1768; Belfast News Letter, 7 November 1766.

442

Notes to Pages 160–169

60.  SCG, 4 August 1767; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 58‒59; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 29. 61.  South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 28 July 1767; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 36. 62. Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 37; Belfast News Letter, 9 October 1767; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 4 August 1767. 63. Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 32. 64.  South Carolina and American General Gazette, 12 December 1766; SCG, 2 February 1768; Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 15, 118‒121. 65.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 27, 214; Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York, 1975). See also Brown, South Carolina Regulators; Klein, Unification of a Slave State. The term “Regulator” seems to make its first appearance in the colony’s newspapers in November 1767 when the South Carolina and American General Gazette reported on Governor Charles Montagu’s speech before the Assembly on November 6. 66. Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 56‒57. 67. Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 50; SCG, 13 June 1768; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 27 October 1767, 3 May 1768. 68.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 17‒18, 29. 69. Charles Woodmason, “The Remonstrance Presented to the Commons House of Assembly by the Upper Inhabitants,” in Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 41‒43. 70.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 279; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 96‒111; “An Act for Establishing Courts, Building Gaols, and Appointing Sheriffs and Other Officers, for the More Convenient Administration of Justice in This Province,” 12 April 1768, in McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 7, 197‒205. 71.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 281. 72.  SCG, 2 September 1768; Charles Woodmason, “Memorandum on the Regulators,” Sermon Book number 4, 15, cited in Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 50; Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 234‒235. 73. Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 54‒58; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 69; Henry Laurens to William Drayton, 15 February 1783, in David R. Chesnutt and C. James Taylor, eds., PHL, Volume 16: September 1, 1782 to December 17, 1792, 144‒147; on Gibson, see Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550‒1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 172‒173; Daniel J. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America (New York, 2011), 13‒27; http://​freeafricanamericans​.com​/Gibson​_Gowen​.htm. 74.  SCG, 15 August 1768; Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 54‒58; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 69. 75.  SCG, 5 August 1768, 15 August 1768, 19 August 1768; Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 57‒60; Paul Bartow, “‘Shameful Neglect and Inattention to the Public Good’: Elections in Colonial South Carolina,” SCMH 199 (July 2018), 152. 76. Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 83‒95; SCG, 13 May 1768, 13 June 1768. 77. Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 91, 93. 78. Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 91‒94; SCG, 28 March 1769, 6 April 1769; South Carolina and American General Gazette, 3 April 1769. 79.  “An Act for Establishing Courts, Building Gaols, and Appointing Sheriffs and Other Officers, for the More Convenient Administration of Justice in This Province,” 12 April 1768, in

Notes to Pages 169–173

443

McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 7, 197‒205; see also Brown, South Carolina Regulators, 96‒111. 80.  William Bartram, “Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773‒1774: A Report of Dr. John Fothergill,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 33, pt. 2 (November 1943), 139; William Bull to Lords Commissioners of Plantations, 10 September 1768, CO5/391 (folio 61), TNAUK.

Chapter 5 Note to epigraph: Henry Laurens to Ross and Mill, 24 December 1768, in Philip Hamer, George Rogers Jr., and David Chesnutt, eds., PHL, Volume 6: August 1, 1768‒July 31, 1769 (Columbia, S.C., 1968), 240; SCG, 8 January 1737; Benjamin West to Samuel West, 25 February 1778, in James S. Schoff, ed., Life in the South, 1778‒1779: The Letters of Benjamin West (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963), 25; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), 3‒4. 1.  Josiah Quincy to Mrs. Quincy, 1 March 1773, in Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy Jun. (Boston, 1825), 74, 95; SCG, 1 March 1773; Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., “The Journal of Josiah Quincy, Junior, 1773,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 49 (October 1915‒June 1916), 441, 454. See also Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York, eds., Portrait of a Patriot, Volume Three: The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior: The Southern Journal (Charlottesville, 2014); Robert A. McCaughey, Josiah Quincy, 1772‒1864: The Last Federalist (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 9‒10; Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the British Atlantic World (Charlottesville, Va., 2010); Jennifer L. Goloboy, Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-­Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era (Athens, Ga., 2016); Walter J. Fraser Jr., Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 98‒139; Richard Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty: A Study of the Artisans, 1763‒1789 (Columbia, S.C., 1959); Jonathan Mercantini, Who Should Rule at Home? The Evolution of South Carolina Political Culture, 1748‒1776 (Columbia, S.C., 2007); William P. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (New York, 2010); Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York, 2007), esp. 143‒171. 2.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 442, 462; Nicholas M. Butler, Votaries of Apollo; The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766‒1820 (Columbia, S.C., 2007). 3.  David Ramsay, History of South Carolina, from Its First Settlement in 1670 to the Year 1808, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C., 1809), 2:202; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 453. On the Allston family, see Walter B. Edgar and N. Louise Bailey, eds., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives: The Commons House of Assembly, 1692‒1775, 4 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1977), 2:35. 4.  George Milligen-­Johnston, “A Short Description of the Province of South Carolina,” in Chapman J. Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions (Columbia, S.C., 1951), 119; Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 1:123; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 454; Henry Laurens to Ross and Mill, 24 December 1768, in Hamer et al., eds., PHL, 6:240; Peter Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670‒1920 (New York, 1989); Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689‒1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963); Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry: The Making of a Planter and Merchant Class in South Carolina, 1670‒1770 (New York, 1989).

444

Notes to Pages 173–176

5.  James Glen, “Glen’s Answers to the Lords of Trade (1749),” in Plowden Charles Weston, ed., Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina (London, 1856), 85; Frederick Bowes, The Culture of Early Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1942), 9; J. Thomas Savage and Robert Leath, “Buying British: Merchants, Taste, and Charleston Consumerism,” in Maurie McInnes, ed., In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 55; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, and Cities (New York, 1992). 6.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York, 1966), 605; Bushman, Refinement of America, xix; Rhys Isaac, “On Explanation, Text, and the Terrifying Power in Ethnographic History,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6 (Spring 1993), 228; Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (New York, 1992); Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, Conn., 2009); Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), 51‒75, 239‒256. 7.  John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston, 1989), 31; John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York, 1993); Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va., 1994); Barbara G. Carson, Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in Federal Washington (Washington, D.C., 1990); T. H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (May 1988), 75; Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690‒1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (October 1986), 467‒499. 8.  E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974), 389. See also Thompson, “Eighteenth-­Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class,” Social History 3 (May 1978), 150; Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991), 16‒96; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959); Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (New York, 1982), 3‒14. 9.  Henry Laurens to Alexander Hamilton, 19 April 1785, in Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1962), 3:605‒608; Robert Olwell, “‘A Reckoning of Accounts’: Patriarchy, Market Relations, and Control on Henry Laurens’s Lowcountry Plantations, 1762‒1785,” in Larry Hudson, ed., Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South (Rochester, N.Y., 1994), 33‒52; Philip D. Morgan, “Three Planters and Their Slaves: Perspectives on Slavery in Virginia, South Carolina, and Jamaica, 1750‒1790,” in Winthrop D. Jordan and Sheila K. Skemp, eds., Race and Family in the Colonial South (Jackson, Miss., 1987), 37‒80; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 319‒366. 10. Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 115. 11.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 467; Hart, Building Charleston, 130‒155; S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). See also Breen, “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling Among the Gentry of Virginia,” WMQ 24 (April 1977), 239‒257; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740‒1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982); Randy J. Sparks, “Gentlemen’s Sport: Horse Racing in Antebellum Charleston,” SCMH 93 (January 1993), 15‒30. 12.  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: A History of Manners (Oxford, 1939); see also Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), 219.

Notes to Pages 177–182

445

13.  F. Yonge, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the People of South Carolina in the Year 1719, in Bartholomew Rivers Carroll, ed., Historical Collections of South Carolina, Volume 2 (London, 1726), 167; Mr. Johnston to Lord Bishop of Sarum, 20 September 1708, in Frank J. Klingberg, ed., Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston, 1707‒1716 (Berkeley, Calif., 1946), 22; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 12‒32, 97‒105; Robert Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1983), 97, 101; M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663‒1763 (Chapel Hill, 1966); Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 102. 14. Edgar, South Carolina, 109‒130; Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-­Century America (Philadelphia, 2004); Greene, Quest for Power; Stephen Saunders Webb, “The Strange Career of Francis Nicholson,” WMQ 3rd Ser., 22 (October 1966), 513‒548. 15.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 454; Edgar, South Carolina, 122‒123; M. Eugene Sirmans, “The South Carolina Royal Council, 1720‒1763,” WMQ 3 (July 1961), 373‒392. 16. Edgar, South Carolina, 123. 17.  Peter Manigault to Charles Alexander, [Spring 1768], in Robert Weir, “‘The Harmony We Were Famous For’: An Interpretation of Pre-­Revolutionary South Carolina Politics,” WMQ 26 (October 1969), 482; Peter Manigault to Daniel Blake, 25 September 1762 in Weir, “The Harmony We Were Famous For,” 496; SCG, 25 September 1762; Henry Laurens to Richard Oswald, 10 October 1764, in George C. Rogers, David R. Chesnutt, eds., PHL, 4:467; Governor James Glen, cited in Peter Whiteley, Lord North: The Prime Minister Who Lost America (London, 1996), 134; W. Roy Smith, South Carolina as a Royal Province, 1719‒1776 (1903; repr. ed., Freeport, N.Y., 197), 82. 18.  Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (Baton Rouge, La., 1952), 68‒69; Jerome Nadelhaft, The Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina (Orono, Maine, 1981), 11; Richard Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty: A Study of the Artisans, 1763‒1789 (Columbia, S.C., 1959), 18; Hart, Building Charleston, 62; Petition of John Rose, Loyalist Claims, Volume 53, SCDAH. 19.  Leila Sellers, Charleston Business on the Eve of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1934; repr. ed., New York, 1970), 25‒48; Robert Pringle to Richard Thompson, 2 September 1738, in Walter B. Edgar, ed., The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, 2 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1972), 1:29‒30. 20.  “Joseph Wragg,” in Edgar and Bailey, eds., Biographical Directory 2:27; SCG, 16 June 1733; W. Robert Higgins, “Charles Town Merchants and Factors Dealing in the External Negro Trade, 1735‒1775,” SCMH, 65 (October 1964), 206; Kay Wright Lewis, A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World (Athens, Ga., 2017), 42. 21.  William Logan, “William Logan’s Journal of a Journey to Georgia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 36 (1912), 163; James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748‒1811 (Columbia, S.C., 2001). 22. Henry Laurens to Edward Trafford, 20 January 1749, in Hamer et al., eds., PHL, 1:202‒203; Henry Laurens to John Knight, 20 January 1749, in Hamer et al., eds., PHL, 1:205; Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619‒1807 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016); Sean M. Kelley, The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2019); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.,

446

Notes to Pages 182–186

2007); Michael Woods, “The Culture of Credit in Colonial Charleston,” SCMH 99 (October 1998), 358‒380; Huw David, “James Crokatt’s ‘Exceeding Good Counting House’: Ascendancy and Influence in the Transatlantic Carolina Trade,” SCMH 111 (July/October 2010), 151‒174. 23. Weir, Colonial South Carolina, 218; Henry Laurens to Charles Gwynn, 12 June 1755, in Philip Hamer and George C. Rogers Jr., eds, PHL, Volume 1: September 11, 1746‒October 31, 1755 (Columbia, S.C., 1968), 263; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440‒1870 (New York, 1997), 269; see also Edelson, Plantation Enterprise; Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­ Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735‒1785 (New York, 1995), 67, 139. 24.  “Henry Laurens,” in Edgar and Bailey, eds., Biographical Directory, 391. 25.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 454; Henry Laurens to John Coming Ball, 7 January 1763, in Hamer et al., eds. PHL, 3:207. 26.  DeWolfe, ed., Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America During the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1997), 194‒195; “Joseph Wragg,” in Edgar and Bailey, eds., Biographical Directory, 2:27; Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York, 1998). 27.  An Essay in Currency, Written in August 1732 (Charles Town, 1734), 5; SCG, 13 August 1750; Bowes, Culture of Early Charleston, 119; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New York, 1938), 450‒451. 28.  John Archdale, A New Description of That Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina (London, 1707), in B. R. Carroll, ed., Historical Collections of South Carolina, 2 vols. (New York, 1836), 2:113; “Original Rules and Members of the Charleston Library Society,” SCMH, 23 (October 1922), 163‒170; Joseph Ewan, “The Growth of Learned and Scientific Societies in the Southeastern United States to 1860,” in Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn C. Brown, eds., The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War (Baltimore, 1976), 208‒218; Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730‒1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), 49; Raven, London Booksellers; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585‒1763, 3 vols. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1978); Davis, A Colonial Southern Bookshelf: Reading in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, Ga., 1979); George Milligen-­Johnston, A Short Description of the Province of South Carolina, in Chapman J. Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina, 149. 29.  William Bull, in H. Roy Merrens, ed., The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Descriptions, 1697‒1774 (Columbia, S.C., 1976), 264; Bowes, Culture of Early Charleston, 63, 75‒91; Joseph I. Waring, ed., “Correspondence Between Alexander Garden, M.D., and the Royal Society of Arts,” SCMH 63 (January 1964), 16; SCG, 4 May 1765. 30.  SCG, 1 March 1773; An American, American Husbandry, Volume 1 (London, 1775), 429; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558‒1640 (Oxford, 1965), 38‒40; Lawrence Stone and Jeanne Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540‒1880 (New York, 1984). 31.  Robert M. Weir, “‘The Harmony We Were Famous For,” 479‒480; “Dr Milligen-­ Johnston’s ‘Additions’ to His Pamphlet,” in Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina, 109; Edgar, South Carolina, 203; Russell R. Menard, “Slavery, Economic Growth, and Revolutionary Ideology in the South Carolina Lowcountry,” in Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker, Russell R. Menard, and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763‒1790 (Charlottesville, Va., 1988), 244‒274; Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980), 171. In descending

Notes to Pages 186–193

447

order, the region’s remaining nine wealthiest men were Elijah Postell (St. George, Dorchester), Alexander Peronneau (Charles Town), John Ainslie (Charles Town), John Catell (St. Andrews), Benjamin Williamson (St. Paul’s), Richard Capers (Christ Church), Dr. Archibald McNeill (St. George’s), and Christopher Jenkins (St. John’s, Colleton); Bernhard Alexander Uhlendorf, ed., The Siege of Charleston, with an Account of the Province of South Carolina; Diaries and Letters of Hessian Officers from the von Jungkenn Papers in the William L. Clements Library (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1938), 327; Alexander Cumine to Alexander Oglivie, 17 June 1763, in DeWolfe, ed., Discoveries of America, 194; Hart, Building Charleston. 32.  Thomas Nairne, A Letter from South Carolina (London, 1710), 43; M. Eugene Sirmans, “The Colony at Mid-­Century,” in Ernest M. Lander Jr. and Robert K. Ackerman, eds., Perspectives in South Carolina History: The First Three Hundred Years (Columbia, S.C., 1973), 57‒58; James Glen, “An Attempt Towards an Estimate of the Value of South Carolina,” Glen to Board of Trade, 24 June 1761, in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 180; John Norris, Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor (London, 1712) in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 51. 33.  Klingberg, ed., Carolina Chronicle, 22; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 454. 34.  SCG, 22 March 1734. 35.  SCG, 1 March 1773; Luigi Castiglioni, Viaggio: Travels in the United States of America, 1785‒1787, trans. and ed. Antonio Pace (Syracuse, N.Y., 1983), 164; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 455. 36.  On Sommers, see John Bivins Jr., “Charleston’s Rococo Interiors, 1765‒1775,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 12 (November 1986). 37.  “Humphrey Sommers,” in Edgar and Bailey, eds., Biographical Directory, 2:649. 38.  SCG, 23 May 1744; Angela D. Mack and J. Thomas Savage, “‘Reflections of Refinement’: Portraits of Charlestonians at Home and Abroad,” in McInnis, ed., In Pursuit of Refinement, 26‒27; Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty, 13; Maurice Crouse, ed., “The Letterbook of Peter Manigault,” SCMH 70 (April 1969), 93‒95; Peter Manigault to His Mother, 15 April 1751, in Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Peter Manigault’s Letters,” SCMH 31 (October 1930), 277‒278. 39.  Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (New York, 2016), 313‒316. The portrait currently hangs in the East Gallery of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 40. Bushman, Refinement of America, 73; Alexander Cumine to Mary Oglivie, April 1, 1763, in DeWolfe, ed., Discoveries of America, 190; Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, or the Memoirs of Elkanah Watson (New York, 1856), 45; Gail Gibson, “Costume and Fashion in Charleston, 1769‒1782,” SCMH 82 (July 1981). 41.  Gibson, “Costume and Fashion in Charleston,” 230. 42.  SCG, 22 June 1769, 5 October 1769, 17 October 1774, 31 October 1774; Gibson, “Costume and Fashion in Charleston,” 245. 43.  SCG, 1 April 1732, 11 October 1746; Mack and Savage, “Reflections of Refinement,” 24; see also Bowes, Culture of Early Charleston, 34‒53; Sophia Hume, An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South Carolina (Bristol, 1750), n.p. 44.  SCG, 3 September 1744, 31 December 1744, 10 November 1746, 17 November 1746, 15 December 1746, 20 June 1761, 21 December 1769; Bowes, Culture of Early Charleston, 44; William Bull, “Governor William Bull’s Representation of the Colony, 1770,” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 264. 45.  SCG, 3, 10, 17 September 1744, 2 January 1775; Cynthia A. Kerner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700‒1835 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 54‒68; Joanna Bowen

448

Notes to Pages 193–198

Gillespie, The Life and Times of Martha Laurens Ramsay, 1759‒1811 (Columbia, S.C., 2001); Hume, An Exhortation, n.p.; Henry Laurens to Martha Laurens, 18 August 1771, in George C. Rogers Jr. et al., eds., PHL, 7:556; Henry Laurens to Martha Laurens, 18 May 1774, in George C. Rogers Jr. et al., eds., PHL, 9:458; David Ramsay, Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay (Philadelphia, 1811), 63‒64. 46.  Eliza Pinckney to Mrs. R. Evance, 16 July 1759, in Elise Pinckney ed., The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 121, 181; Eliza Pinckney, “To Improve in Every Virtue,” in Nancy Woloch, ed., Early American Women: A Documentary History, 1600‒1900 (Belmont, Calif., 1992), 49‒50; Mary Beth Norton, “‘What an Alarming Crisis Is This’: Southern Women and the American Revolution,” in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 203‒234. 47.  SCG, 2 May 1771, 19 December 1774; David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill N.C., 1997), 145‒158. 48.  Bull, “Representation of the Colony,” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 263; Gordon, “Journal of an Officer Who Traveled in America and the West Indies in 1764 and 1765,” in Newton D. Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (New York, 1916), 397. 49.  Marvin R. Zanhiser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: Founding Father, 9‒21; Harriot H. Ravenel, Eliza Pinckney (New York, 1986), 134‒166; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Life of General Thomas Pinckney (Boston, 1895), 23; SCG, 21 December 1769; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 446; Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, 103. 50. Bowes, Culture of Early Charleston, 52; Huw David, Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and Britain’s Atlantic Commerce, 1730‒1790 (Columbia, S.C., 2018). 51.  Peter Manigault to Mrs. Manigault, 26 June 1750, in “Six Letters of Peter Manigault,” SCMH 15 (July 1914), 114; Peter Manigault to Mrs. Manigault, 8 December 1753, in Mabel L. Weber, ed., “Peter Manigault’s Letters (Continued),” SCMH 32 (October 1931), 271; Peter Manigault to Francis Huger, 5 June 1770, in Maurice A. Crouse, ed., “The Letterbook of Peter Manigault, 1763‒1773 (Continued),” SCMH 70 (July 1969), 186; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585‒1763 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1978). 52.  South Carolina and American General Gazette, 20 November 1769; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 21 February 1774, in George C. Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 9:299; SCG, 1 April 1732, 21 December 1769; Peter Manigault to Mrs. Manigault (Mother), 26 June 1750, in Peter Manigault, “Six Letters of Peter Manigault,” SCMH 15 (July 1914), 114; Bowes, Culture of Early Charleston, 44; Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 125; Thomas Heyward, Junior to Father [Daniel Hayward], 11 February 1767, The Old Northwest Genealogical Quarterly 7 (October 1904), 259‒260. 53.  See M. Allison Carll, “An Assessment of English Furniture Imports into Charleston, 1760‒1800,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 11 (November 1985), 1‒20; Gordon, “Journal of an Officer,” in Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies, 398; James Glen, “Governor James Glen’s Valuation,” in Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 180. 54.  SCG, 6 August 1741; Bushman, “Shopping and Advertising in Colonial America,” in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 233‒251; Hart, Building Charleston; Eliza Lucas to Mrs. Bodincott, 1740, cited in Savage and Leath, “Buying British,” in McInnes, ed., In Pursuit of Refinement, 55; John Drayton, A View of South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1802), 217. 55.  SCG, 19 June 1749, 14 February 1761; Eliza Pinckney to Father, 11 November 1742 in Pinckney ed., Letterbook of Eliza Pinckney, 57.

Notes to Pages 199–205

449

56.  Mabel L. Webber, “Extracts from the Journal of Ann Manigault, 1754‒1781,” SCMH 18 (October 1919), 256; Peter Manigault to Ann Manigault, 8 December 1753, in Webber, ed., “Peter Manigault’s Letters,” 271; Peter Manigault to Miles Brewton, 25 July 1768, in Maurice Crouse, ed., “The Letterbook of Peter Manigault,” SCMH 70 (July 1969), 177; T. P. Harrison, ed., Journal of a Voyage to Charlestown in So. Carolina by Pelatiah Webster (Charleston, 1898), 7. 57. Bushman, Refinement of America, xiv. 58.  Moses Lopez to Aaron Lopez, 3 May 1764, in Thomas J. Tobias, ed., “Charles Town in 1764,” SCMH 67 (April 1966), 67; Gideon Johnston to Secretary, 16 November 1711, in Klingberg, ed., Carolina Chronicle, 99; Walter L. Robbins, ed., “John Tobler’s Description of South Carolina (1753),” SCMH 71 (July 1970), 144‒145; Kenneth Scott, “Sufferers in the Charleston Fire of 1740,” SCMH 64 (October 1963), 203‒211; Samuel G. Stoney, ed., “The Great Fire of 1778 Seen Through Contemporary Letters,” SCMH 64 (January 1963), 23‒27; Hart, Building Charleston; Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-­Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1984), 188; R. C. Nash, “Urbanization in the Colonial South: Charleston, South Carolina, as a Case Study,” Journal of Urban History 19 (November 1992), 3‒29; Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the Greater British Caribbean, 1624‒1783 (Baltimore, 2006). 59.  Edward to John Rutledge, 30 July 1769, in Josiah Adams, Laws of Success and Failure in Life: An Address (Charleston, S.C., 1833); SCG, 25 February 1766, 4 March 1766, 25 October 1773, 28 February 1774, 10 May 1774; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 4 March 1766; James Haw, John and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina (Athens, Ga., 1997), 10. 60.  Webber, ed., “Extracts from the Journal of Anne Manigault, 1754‒1781,” 12‒13; SCG, 26 January 1768, 5 October 1773, 7 March 1774; Henig Cohen, “Shakespeare in Charleston on the Eve of the Revolution,” Shakespeare Quarterly 3 (July 1953), 328; Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebian Culture,” 389. 61.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 451, 467; Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, 110‒111; Sparks, “Gentlemen’s Sport,” 15‒30. 62.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 444‒445; Uhlendorf, ed., Siege of Charleston, 327. 63.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 445‒446. 64.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 446‒447, 451; Crouse, ed., “The Letterbook of Peter Manigault,” 93; “A Dissertation on Gout,” SCG 25 January 1772. 65.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 445‒446; Harriet P. Simons and Albert Simons, “The William Burrows House of Charleston,” Winterthur Portfolio 3 (1967), 172‒204; Carll, “An Assessment of English Furniture Imports,” 1‒20; John Bivens Jr., “The Charleston Rococo Interiors, 1765‒1775: The ‘Sommers’ Carver,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 12 (November 1986), 1‒129; Barbara G. Carson, Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in Federal Washington (Washington, D.C., 1990); Merrens, ed., Colonial South Carolina Scene, 277. 66.  Pennsylvania Gazette, 15 November 1750; SCG, 10 June 1733, 15 August 1743; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 447; Bushman, Refinement of America, 83‒84; SCG, 15 August 1743. 67.  N.A., The Chearful Companion: Or a Songster’s Pocket Book (London, 1769), 340; Charleston City Gazette, 17 July 1793; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 448. 68.  Eliza Wikinson to Miss Porcher, 6 March 1783, in George Armstrong Wauchope, The Writers of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1910), 408‒409; Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters, 144‒145. 69.  Charleston Evening Gazette, 20 October 1785.

450

Notes to Pages 205–212

70.  Charleston Evening Gazette, 20 October 1785; Bushman, Refinement of America, 61‒100. 71.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 450; Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters, 175‒208. 72.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 455; Alexander Garden to John Ellis, 19 November 1764, in James E. Smith, ed., A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus, and Other Naturalists, Volume 1, (London, 1821), 520; Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 173. 73.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 455. 74.  SCG, 3 May 1735, 26 January 1765, 14 March 1768; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 467. 75. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 2:217; George Fenwick Jones, ed., “John Martin Boltzius’ Trip to Charleston, October 1742,” SCMH 82 (April 1981), 94; Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit; SCG, 14 May 1737; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy.” 76.  Johann Martin Bolzius, “Reliable Answers to Some Submitted Questions Concerning the Land Carolina,” WMQ 14 (April 1957), 243; Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 455, 454; Alexander Garden to John Ellis, 19 November 1764, in Smith, ed., A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus, 1:520; Hume, An Exhortation, 51; SCG, 30 April 1737 (the original had appeared several months earlier in the Pennsylvania Gazette, courtesy of Poor Richard); Robbins, ed., “John Tobler’s Description of South Carolina,” 144; Jones, ed., “Boltzius’ Trip to Charleston,” 101; Eliza Pinckney to Miss H., n.d., in Pinckney, ed., Letterbook, 48. 77.  Alexander Garden to the Society, 20 April 1755, in Joseph I. Waring, ed., “Correspondence Between Alexander Garden, M.D., and the Royal Society of Arts,” SCMH 64 (January 1963), 17, 19; Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise. 78.  Howe, ed., “Journal of Josiah Quincy,” 454; Christopher Gadsden, “To the Inhabitants of the Province of South Carolina, About to Assemble on the 6th of July,” in Peter Force, ed., American Archives, Fourth Series: A Documentary History of the English Colonies in North America, Volume 1 (Washington, D.C., 1837), 511.

Chapter 6 1.  South Carolina and American General Gazette, 6 June 1766; SCG, 9 June 1766; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Part 1 (London, 1789), 1:268; Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-­Made Man (New York, 2005), 106‒107; Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952); Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765‒1776 (New York, 1972); Maier, “The Charleston Mob and the Evolution of Popular Politics in Revolutionary South Carolina, 1765‒1784,” Perspectives in American History 4 (1970), 171‒196; Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-­Americans, circa 1600‒1780,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 157‒219; Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York, 2007), 143‒171; Walter J. Fraser Jr., Patriots, Pistols, Petticoats: “Poor Sinful Charles Town” During the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C., 1993). 2. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 1:268‒270; Carretta, Equiano, the African, 106‒107. 3.  Gary Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770‒1823 (New York, 1975).

Notes to Pages 213–217

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4. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, Part 2, 2:18‒21; Carretta, Equiano, the African; Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York, 2005); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (New York, 2011); James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven, Conn., 2011), 104‒106, 174‒175. 5.  Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-­American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 51‒96; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York, 2006); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776‒1848 (New York, 1988); Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York, 2009), 91‒145. 6.  Robert M. Weir, “‘A Most Important Epocha’: The Coming of the Revolution in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 3; Daniel McDonough, Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens: The Parallel Lives of Two American Patriots (Selinsgrove, Pa., 2000); Jerome Nadelhaft, The Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina (Orono, Maine, 1982); M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663‒1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966); Jonathan Mercantini, Who Shall Rule at Home? The Evolution of South Carolina Political Culture, 1748‒1776 (Columbia, S.C., 2007). 7.  See Davis, The Problem of Slavery; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. 8.  SCG, 31 October 1765; Pennsylvania Gazette, 2 January 1766; Charles Woodmason “Chief Justice Charles Shinner: Memorandum,” in Richard Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953), 293; Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 49; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763‒1834 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), 45; Lieutenant-­Governor William Bull cited in Richard Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty: A Study of the Artisans, 1763‒1789 (Columbia, S.C., 1959), 36‒37; Pennsylvania Gazette, 2 January 1766; Christopher Gadsden to Charles Garth, 2 December 1765, in R. W. Gibbes, ed., Documentary History of the American Revolution, 3 vols. (New York, 1855), 1:8. 9. SCG, 31 October 1765. 10.  Hooker, ed., Woodmason Journal, 295; Henry Laurens to Joseph Brown, 28 October 1765 in George C. Rogers Jr., and David R. Chesnutt eds, PHL, Volume 5, September 1, 1765-­July 31, 1768 (Columbia, S.C., 1976), 29; Henry Laurens to James Grant, 1 November 1765, Rogers et. al., PHL, 5: 38; Henry Laurens to William Fisher, 27 February 1766, in Rogers et al., PHL, 5:77. 11.  SCG, 31 October 1765; Henry Laurens to Joseph Brown, 28 October 1765, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:32. 12.  Henry Laurens to William Fisher, 27 February 1766, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:76; Kinloch Bull Jr., The Oligarchs of Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston: Lieutenant Governor William Bull and His Family (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 123; Lieutenant-­Governor William Bull to Conway, 6 February 1766, CO5/390, TNA; William Bull to Board of Trade, 17 December 1765, CO5/390, TNA; Hooker, ed., Carolina Backcountry, 86; Maurice A. Crouse, “Cautious Rebellion: South Carolina’s Opposition to the Stamp Act,” SCHM 73 (April 1972), 62; Richard Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty; Marcus Rediker, “‘A Motley Crew of Rebels’: Sailors, Slaves and the Coming of the American Revolution,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 155‒157; Ray Raphael, Founders: The People Who Brought You a

452

Notes to Pages 217–221

Nation (New York, 2009), 39‒44; Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York, 2005), 60‒65. 13.  Joseph Johnson, Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South (Charleston, S.C., 1851), 28‒29; T. P Harrison, ed., “Journal of a Voyage to Charlestown in South Carolina by Pelatiah Webster in 1765,” Publications of the Southern Historical Association 2 (April 1898), 140; “The Declaratory Act, March 18, 1766,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation, 1763‒1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution (New York, 1975), 85; E. Stanly Godbold and Robert H. Woody, Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution (Knoxville, Tenn., 1983); Richard Walsh, The Writings of Christopher Gadsden (Columbia, S.C., 1966); SCG, 6 May 1766. 14.  SCG, 2 June 1766, 17 June 1766; Henry Laurens to William Mayne, 21 August 1766, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:169; Laurens to John Smith, 30 August 1766, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:175; Laurens to John Lewis Gervais, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:130; Laurens to William Fisher, 27 February 1766, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:78. 15.  John Pringle to William Tilghman, 30 July 1774, Preston Davie Papers, SHC; Henry Laurens to George Grenville, 24 February 1769, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:386‒387; Resolutions of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, 29 November 1765, in SCG, 17 December 1765; Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., “The Journal of Josiah Quincy, Jr., 1773,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 49 (October 1915‒June 1916), 426‒481. 16.  Henry Laurens to John Lewis Gervais, 29 January 1766, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:53; Bull, Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston, 118; Entry for 2 December 1765, in Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Extracts for the Diary of Ann Manigault, 1754‒1781,” SCMH 18 (July 1919), 209; SCG, 2 June 1766, 25 October 1773, 31 October 1773; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 15 November 1774; “The First Remonstrance from South Carolina Against the Stamp Act,” in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History of the American Revolution, 1:1–6. 17.  Virginia Gazette, 7 March 1766; Newport Mercury, 10 February 1766; William Bull to Board of Trade, 17 December 1765, CO5/378, TNA; Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, 37, part 1 (28 October 1765‒28 May 1767), 34‒36, cited in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:54; Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, cited in Peter Wood, “‘Liberty Is Sweet’: African-­American Freedom Struggles in the Years Before White Independence,” in Alfred F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (De Kalb, Ill., 1993), 177; Peter H. Wood, “‘Impatient of Oppression’: Black Freedom Struggles on the Eve of White Independence,” Southern Exposure 12 (November‒December 1984), 10‒16; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740‒1790 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998). 18.  slavevoyages​.org. 19.  Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 14 January 1766, cited in Wood, “‘Liberty Is Sweet,’ ” 178; Henry Laurens to John Lewis Gervais, 29 January 1766, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:53; Bull to Board of Trade, 17 December 1765, CO5/378, TNA; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 6 May 1766; Bull, Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston, 122; Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of American Maroons (New York, 2016), 33‒38. 20.  Henry Laurens to John Lewis Gervais, 29 January 1766, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:53‒54. 21.  SCG, 29 February 1768 (John Dickinson’s, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies appeared in the Gazette from early January until early March 1768); William Tennant, An Address, Occasioned by the Late Invasion of the Liberties of

Notes to Pages 221–225

453

the American Colonies (Philadelphia, 1774), 6; Christopher Gadsden to Samuel Adams, 5 June 1774, in Walsh, ed., Writings of Christopher Gadsden, 95; Henry Laurens to Lachlan McIntosh, 15 October 1768, in Chesnutt, ed., PHL, 6:127; Governor Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 2 July 1775, in K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution: Colonial Office Series, 21 vols. (Dublin, 1972‒1981), 10:21 [hereafter DAR]. 22.  James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London, 1993), 14‒15; Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 472‒479; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 100; Christopher L. Brown, “Empire Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” WMQ 56 (April 1999), 273‒306; James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 3 volumes (London, 1924), 2:431, cited in Louis Taylor Merrill, “The English Campaign for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” JNH 30 (October 1945), 382; Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (London, 1995), 90‒132. 23.  Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolition (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 96‒101; Jerome Nadelhaft, “The Somerset Case: Myth, Reality, and Repercussions,” JNH 51 (July 1966), 193‒195; James Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield and Slavery,” Journal of British Studies 27 (January 1988), 45‒68; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 100; Benjamin Franklin to Anthony Benezet, 22 August 1772, in William B. Wilcox, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 19: January 1 through December 31, 1772 (New Haven, Conn., 1976), 269; Franklin to Benezet, 10 February 1773, in Wilcox, ed., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 20: January 1 through December 31, 1773 (New Haven, Conn., 1976), 40; Pennsylvania Gazette, 13 January 1773; SCG, 10 August 1772, 15 September 1772. 24.  Pennsylvania Gazette, 13 January 1773; Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea (Philadelphia, 1771); Edward Long, Candid Reflections upon the Judgment Lately Awarded by the Court of King’s Bench, in Westminster-­Hall, on What Is Commonly Called the Negroe-­Cause (London, 1772), iii‒iv; Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia, 2009), 139‒153; John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (Dublin, 1775), 16, 18; Brown, “Empire Without Slaves,” 276. 25.  New York Journal, 30 April 1772; Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, 2 volumes (London, 1828), 1:124; Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (New Haven, Conn., 2010), 46‒54. 26. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (New York, 1972), 161‒197; John Sainsbury, “The Pro-­Americans of London, 1769 to 1782,” WMQ 35 (July 1978), 430; William Lee to Ralph Izard, 4 March 1775, in Anne Izard Deas, ed., Correspondence of Ralph Izard of South Carolina from 1774‒1804, Volume 1 (New York, 1844), 1:53; Henry Cruger to Ralph Izard, 21 March 1775, in Deas, Correspondence of Ralph Izard of South Carolina, 57. 27.  South Carolina Gazette, and Country Journal, 3 July 1770. 28. Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty, 31‒34; on the Gadsden election controversy, see Carl  J. Vipperman, The Rise of Rawlins Lowndes, 1721‒1800 (Columbia, S.C., 1978), 96‒103; Robert Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1983), 274; Godbold and Woody, Gadsden and the American Revolution; Richard Walsh, ed., Writings of Christopher Gadsden, 40; Christopher Gadsden to Charles Garth, 2 December 1765, in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History of the American Revolution, 1:8; see also John Pringle to William Tilghman, 30 July 1774, Preston Davie Papers, SHC. 29.  Hooker, ed., Carolina Backcountry, 295; Henry Laurens to James Grant, 31 January 1766, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:60; Lieutenant Governor William Bull to Secretary of State Conway, 6 February 1766, cited in Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American

454

Notes to Pages 225–230

Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 230‒231; Maier, “The Charleston Mob,” 176; Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty, 39. 30.  SCG, 10 July 1770; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 4 October 1768. 31.  E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (February 1971), 76‒136. 32.  SCG, 7 September 1767, 25 May 1769; Henry Laurens to James Grant, 12 August 1767 in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:277; see also Henry Laurens, “A Representation of Facts Relative to the Conduct of Daniel Moore, Esq (Charles Town, 1767), in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 5:393‒464; Henry Laurens to James Grant, 22 January 1769, in George C. Rogers Jr., and David R. Chesnutt, eds., PHL, 6:255; Henry Laurens to James Grant, 22 January 1769, in Rogers et al., PHL, 6:255; Henry Laurens to Thomas Loughton Smith, 8 August 1769, in George C. Rogers, Jr., and David R. Chesnutt, eds., PHL, 7:117; Henry Laurens, Extracts from the Proceedings of the High Court of Vice-­Admiralty (Charles Town, S.C., 1769), in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 6:295‒383; Egerton Leigh, The Man Unmasked: Or the World Undeceived (Charles Town, S.C., 1769), in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 6:457‒458; Robert M. Calhoon and Robert M. Weir, “The Scandalous History of Sir Egerton Leigh,” in Robert M. Weir, “The Last of the American Freemen”: Studies in the Political Culture of the Colonial and Revolutionary South (Macon, Ga., 1986), 33‒62; Greene, “The Political Authorship of Sir Egerton Leigh,” SCMH 75 (July 1974), 143‒152; Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689‒1776 (New York, 1963), 409‒410; Mercantini, Who Should Rule at Home? The Evolution of South Carolina Political Culture, 1748‒1776 (Columbia, S.C., 2007), 232‒240. 33.  Arthur Lee, Answer to the Considerations on Certain Political Transactions of the Province of South Carolina (London, 1774), 103‒104; Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 259‒260; George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (New York, 1962); Weir, Colonial South Carolina, 312; Greene, “Bridge to Revolution: The Wilkes Fund Controversy in South Carolina, 1769‒1775,” JSH 29 (February 1963), 19‒52; Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,” WMQ 20 (July 1963), 373. 34. Bull, Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston, 145; SCG, 24 August 1767, 15 September 1772, 3 November 1772; Pennsylvania Gazette, 25 November 1772; Weir, Colonial South Carolina, 308; Alan D. Watson, “The Beaufort Removal and the Revolutionary Impulse in South Carolina,” SCMH 84 (July 1983), 121‒135. 35.  William Bull to the Earl of Hillsborough, 18 October 1768, cited in W. Roy Smith, South Carolina as a Royal Province, 1719‒1776 (New York, 1903), 362; SCG, 24 August 1769. 36. Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty, 60‒61; George C. Rogers, Jr., “The Charleston Tea Party: The Significance of December 3, 1773,” SCMH 75 (July 1974), 153‒168; SCG, 21 November 1774, 23 November 1773, 12 December 1774. 37. Nadelhaft, Disorders of War, 23‒26. 38.  Alexander Innes to Dartmouth, 3 June 1775, in B. D. Barger, “Charles Town Loyalism in 1775: The Secret Reports of Alexander Innes,” SCMH 63 (July 1962), 128; William H. Drayton to William Drayton, 4 July 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:36; Keith T. Krawczynski, William Henry Drayton: South Carolina Revolutionary Patriot (Baton Rouge, La., 2001). 39.  Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 22 April 1775, in David R. Chesnutt and C. James Taylor, eds., PHL, Volume 10: December 12, 1774‒January 4, 1776 (Columbia, S.C., 1985), 104; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 14 July 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:219; William

Notes to Pages 230–234

455

Henry Drayton to William Drayton, 4 July 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:37; Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty, 74‒76. 40.  Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 18 February 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:72; SCG, 27 February 1775, 6 March 1775; Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 April 1775. 41.  General Committee to Delegates for South Carolina at Philadelphia, 8 May 1775, in Rogers et al., eds., PHL, 10:113‒114; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 15 May 1775, in Rogers et  al., eds., PHL, 10:118‒119; Peter Timothy to William Henry Drayton, 22 August 1775, in Joseph W. Barnwell, ed., “The Correspondence of Hon. Arthur Middleton,” SCMH, 27 (July 1926), 131; Alexander Innes to Earl of Dartmouth, 16 May 1775, in Barger, “Charles Town Loyalism in 1775,” 127; SCG, 13 June 1775. 42.  Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina in the Revolution, 1775‒1780 (New York, 1901), 6; SCG, 20 June 1775, 14 July 1775; Circular letter to the inhabitants of South Carolina [as printed in the Cape Fear Mercury], June 30, 1775; Documenting the American South, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007, http://​docsouth​.unc​.edu​ /csr​/index​.html​/document​/csr01​-0061. 43.  Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 23 July 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:55; Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 31 August 1775, in Davies, ed. DAR, 11:93; Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 19 September 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:116; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 13 June 1775; J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 2009); William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (New York, 2010); Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty, 71. 44.  Josiah Smith to George Appleby, 16 June 1775, Josiah Smith Letter Book, SHC; Grand Jury Presentments, February 1771, Charles Town District, Journal of the Court of General Sessions, SCDAH; John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C., 1821), 1:231. 45.  James Habersham to Robert Keen, 11 May 1775, in The Letters of James Habersham, Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, Volume 4 (Savannah, Ga., 1901), 244; Harris, Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah, 84‒87; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 2 July 1775 in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:204; Tim Lockley, “David Margrett: A Black Missionary in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” Journal of American Studies 46 (August 2012), 729‒745. 46.  Thomas Hutchinson to Council of Safety, 5 July 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:207‒208; Council of Safety to St. Bartholomew Committee, 18 July 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:231. 47.  “1775. Septr. 24. Sunday.,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December  28, 2016, http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Adams​/01​-02​-02​-0005​-0003​-0013. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 2, 1771– 1781, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 181–183.]; George Milligen, “Narrative by George Milligen of His Experiences in South Carolina,” in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:110 (after his departure from the colony, he became Milligen-­Johnston; see Chapman J. Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions [Columbia, S.C., 1951], xvii‒xxii); Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 31 August 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:95; Josiah Smith to George Austin, 14 June 1775, Josiah Smith Letterbook, SHC; Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South (Columbia, S.C., 2013).

456

Notes to Pages 234–238

48.  Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 31 August 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:95‒98; Milligen, “Narrative,” in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:109‒114; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 18 June 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:184‒185; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 20 August 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:319‒321; Harris, Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah; Ryan, World of Thomas Jeremiah. 49.  William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 31 August 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:95‒97; William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 31 August 1775, CO5/396, TNA; William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 19 August 1775, CO5/396, CO5/410, TNA; Harris, Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah; Ryan, World of Thomas Jeremiah. 50.  Milligen, “Narrative . . . of His Experiences in South Carolina,” in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:111; Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 31 August 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:95‒96; Harris, Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah; Ryan, World of Thomas Jeremiah. 51.  Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 31 August 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:95; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 20 August 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:321‒322; Alexander Innes to Earl of Dartmouth, 3 June 1773, in Barger, ed., “Charles Town Loyalism in 1775,” 131; Milligen, “Narrative . . . of His Experiences in South Carolina,” 11:111; Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina, xvii‒xxii. 52.  Governor Patrick Tonyn to Earl of Dartmouth, 1 July 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:30; William H. Drayton to William Drayton, 4 July 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:36; SCG, 7 July 1775, 7 September 1775. 53.  John Stuart to Earl of Dartmouth, 21 July 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:53; Josiah Smith to George Appleby, 16 June 1775, Josiah Smith Letter Book, SHC; “The Deposition of Dr. William Pasteur: In Regard to the Removal of Powder from the Williamsburg Magazine,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 13 (July 1905), 49; John Alden, “John Stuart Accuses William Bull,” WMQ 2 (July 1945), 320; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999); Edward J. Cashin, William Bartram and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (Columbia, S.C., 2000). 54.  Edward Rutledge to Ralph Izard, 8 December 1775, in Deas, ed., Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard of South Carolina, 165; “Dunmore’s Proclamation,” in Robert L. Scribner, ed., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence (Charlottesville, Va., 1976), 1:334; George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, 26 December 1775, in Philander D. Chase, ed., The Papers of George Washington. Revolutionary War Series, Volume, 2, 16 September 1775‒31 December 1775 (Charlottesville, Va., 1987), 610‒611; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 112‒113; Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 162‒163; James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World: The Extraordinary Life of a Royal Governor in Revolutionary America (Charlottesville, Va., 2013), 94‒130; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 102‒103. 55.  Governor James Wright to Earl of Dartmouth, 25 May 1775, in K. G. Davies, ed., DAR, 9:144; Ralph Izard to Friend, 27 October 1775, in Deas, ed., Correspondence of Ralph Izard, 135; Sir William Lyttelton in David Murdoch, ed., Rebellion in America: A Contemporary British Viewpoint, 1765‒1783 (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1979), 334. 56.  Diary of John Adams, “24 September 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016, http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Adams​/01​-02​-02​-0005​ -0003. [Original source:  The Adams Papers, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, Volume 2, 1771–1781, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 172–188.]; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 23 June 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:188;

Notes to Pages 238–243

457

Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 31 August 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:95; Alden, “John Stuart Accuses William Bull,” 320. 57.  Alexander Innes to Lord William Campbell, 10 June 1775, in Barger, ed., “Charles Town Loyalism in 1775,” 132; “Narrative of George Milligen of His Experiences in South Carolina, 15 September 1775” in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:112‒113; Arthur Middleton to William Henry Drayton, 12 August 1775, in Barnwell, ed., “Correspondence of Hon. Arthur Middleton,” 126. 58.  “The Constitution of South Carolina, of 26 March, 1776” in Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume First: Containing Acts, Records, and Documents of a Constitutional Character (Columbia, S.C., 1836), 1:128‒134; Nadelhaft, Disorders of War, 27‒34; Weir, “A Most Important Epocha,” 70‒71; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 227; Governor Lord William Campbell to Earl of Dartmouth, 19 and 20 July 1775, in Davies, ed. DAR, 10:35; William H. Drayton to William Drayton, 4 July 1775, in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:36; Keith Krawczynski, William Henry Drayton: South Carolina Revolutionary Patriot (Baton Rouge, 2001), 196‒221. 59.  Jeffrey A. Smith, “Impartiality and Revolutionary Ideology: Editorial Policies of the South Carolina Gazette, 1732‒1775,” JSH 49 (November 1983), 511‒526; Gordon Wood, ed., The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate (New York, 2015); Michael Dobson, “Fairly Brave New World: Shakespeare, the American Colonies and American Revolution,” Renaissance Drama 23 (1992), 189‒207; Frances Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage (New York, 2006), 9‒32; Hennig Cohen, The South Carolina Gazette, 1732‒1775 (Columbia, S.C., 1953); Fredric M. Litto, “Addison’s Cato in the Colonies,” WMQ 23 (July 1966), 431‒449; James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748‒1811 (Columbia, S.C., 2002). 60.  Jack N. Rakove, Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (New York, 1998), 22, 31; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 230‒245; J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660‒1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-­American World (New York, 1994); Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992); T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York, 2010). 61.  Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 14 August 1776, in David R. Chesnutt and C. James Taylor, eds., PHL, Volume 11: January 6, 1776‒December 12, 1777 (Columbia, S.C., 1988), 224; Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (London, 1776), 89. 62. Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 14 August 1776, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 11:224‒225; Gregory D. Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C., 2000), 66‒67. 63. John Laurens to Henry Laurens, 26 October 1776, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 11:276‒277; Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution. 64.  “Extract from a Letter from South Carolina,” in Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 5 October 1775; Ryan, World of Thomas Jeremiah, 199; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 22 January 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:40; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 15 May 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:118; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 30 July 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:258; “Dunmore’s Proclamation,” in Scribner, ed., Revolutionary Virginia, 1:334; Josiah Smith to James Poyas, 18 May 1775, Josiah Smith Letterbook, SHC. 65. Holton, Forced Founders; Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772‒1832 (New York, 2013), 13‒54; Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 221‒271.

458

Notes to Pages 244–248

66.  Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago, 2013); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961; repr. ed., 1996); Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in the Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J., 1992).

Chapter 7 1.  Henry Laurens to Henry Laurens Jr., 26 May 1775, in David R. Chesnutt, C. James Taylor et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, Volume 10: December 12, 1774‒January 4, 1776, 16 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1968‒2003), 142. 2.  South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 18 July 1775; William Tennent, “A Fragment of a Journal Kept by the Rev. William Tennent,” in R. W. Gibbes, ed., Documentary History of the American Revolution . . . Chiefly in South Carolina, 1764‒1776, 3 vols. (New York, 1855), 1:231; William Henry Drayton to Council of Safety, 21 August 1775 in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 1:150; Council of Safety to South Carolina Delegates in Congress, 18 September 1775, in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 1:398; William Henry Drayton to Council of Safety, 21 August 1775, in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 1:344‒345; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), 85; Gary D. Olson, “Loyalists and the American Revolution: Thomas Brown and the South Carolina Backcountry, 1775‒1776,” SCMH 68 (October 1967), 217. 3.  Tennent, “Fragment of a Journal,” in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 1:228‒229; Tennent to Council of Safety in Savannah, 10 September 1775, in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 1:169; Drayton and Tennent to Council of Safety, 24 August 1775, in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 157; Tennent to Drayton, 18 August 1775, in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 1:147; Christopher Gould, “The South Carolina and Continental Associations: Prelude to Revolution,” SCMH 87 (January 1986), 30‒48. 4.  Council of Safety to South Carolina Delegates in Congress, 18 September 1775, in David R. Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:400; John Adams, 24 September 1775, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 2:180‒183; www​ .masshist​.org​/publications​/adams​-papers​/index​.php​/view​/ADMS​-01​-02​-02​-0005​-0003​-0013. 5.  Richard Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953), 121; William Henry Drayton and William Tennent to Council of Safety, 7 August 1775, in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 1:131; Alexander Cameron, “Intelligence from Alexander Cameron,” 8 November 1775, in K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770‒1783, 21 vols. (Shannon, 1972‒1981), 11:176; Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution (Clemson, S.C., 2010). 6.  Council of Safety to Richard Pearis, 24 October 1775, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 10:502; Cameron, “Intelligence from Alexander Cameron,” in Davies, ed., DAR, 11:176; South Carolina and American General Gazette, 8 December 1775; Jeffrey W. Dennis, Patriots and Indians: Shaping Identity in Eighteenth-­Century South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 2017). 7.  Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York, 1995), 182‒212; Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the American Revolutionary South, 1775‒1782 (Columbia, S.C., 2008), 109; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution (New York, 1995); John W. Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution: A Battlefield History (Columbia, S.C., 2003), 53.

Notes to Pages 249–253

459

8.  Lord George Germain to Major-­General Henry Clinton, 6 December 1775, Davies. ed., DAR, 11:204; Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 14 August 1776, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 11:225; Henry Laurens to Martha Laurens, 17 August 1776, in Chesnutt et al., eds., PHL, 11:253. 9. Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution, 41‒54; Dan L. Morrill, Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution (Baltimore, 1993), 15‒27; Pennsylvania Gazette, 11 September 1776. 10.  Pierce Butler to Arthur Middleton, 21 March 1776, in Arthur Middleton, “Correspondence of Hon. Arthur Middleton,” SCMH 27 (July 1926), 139—140; Thomas Pinckney to Harriott, 5 June 1776, in Jack L. Cross, ed., “Letters of Thomas Pinckney, 1775‒1780,” SCMH 58 (April 1957), 67; Malcolm Bell Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens, Ga., 1987), 31‒41. 11.  Lord Cornwallis to Lord George Germain, 19 September 1780, in Walter Clark, ed., The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Volume 15: 1780‒1781 (Goldsboro, N.C., 1898), 281; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People At War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 241; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King. 12.  Henry Laurens to Richard Caswell, 26 September 1778, in Chesnutt et al. eds., PHL, 14:362; Sir Henry Clinton to Lord George Germain, 14 May 1779, in William B. Wilcox, ed., The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775‒1782, with an Appendix of Original Documents (New Haven, Conn., 1954), 120‒122, 405; Captain Robert Fanshaw to Vice-­Admiral Viscount Howe, 13 February 1778, in Davies, ed., DAR, 15:46; Sir James Wright to Sir Henry Clinton, 3 February 1780, in Davies, ed., DAR, 18:46; Lord George Germain to Sir Henry Clinton, 8 March 1778, in Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of Seventy-­Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants (New York, 1958), 1075; John S. Pancake, “This Destructive War”: The British Campaign in the Carolinas (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1985), 5‒19; James Simpson to Sir Henry Clinton, 28 August 1779, in Alan Brown, ed., “James Simpson’s Report on the Carolina Loyalists, 1779‒1780,” JSH 21 (November 1955), 517; John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for Independence (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), 200. 13.  Banastre Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, in the Southern Provinces of North America (London, 1787), 4; John Shy, “British Strategy for Pacifying the Southern Colonies, 1778‒1781,” in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 155‒173; Clyde R. Ferguson, “Carolina and Georgia Patriot and Loyalist Militia in Action, 1778‒1783,” in Crow and Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, 174‒202; Ira D. Gruber, “Britain’s Southern Strategy,” in W. Robert Higgins, ed., The Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict, and Leadership (Durham, N.C., 1979), 205‒238; Dennis M. Conrad, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775‒1780 (Columbia, S.C., 2005); David K. Wilson, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775‒1780 (Columbia, S.C., 2005); Paul Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats: A Study in British Revolutionary Policy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964); Russell F. Weighley, The Partisan War: The South Carolina Campaign of 1780‒1782 (Columbia, S.C., 1970); Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2014). 14. Lieutenant-­Colonel Moses Kirkland to His Majesty’s Commissioners, 21 October 1778,” cited in Randall Miller, “A Backcountry Loyalist Plan to Retake Georgia and the Carolinas, 1778,” SCMH 75 (October 1974), 213; John E. Ferling, “Joseph Galloway’s Military Advice: A Loyalist’s View of the Revolution,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98 (April

460

Notes to Pages 253–257

1974), 174; Martha Condray Seary, “1779: The First Year of the British Occupation of Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 67 (Summer 1983), 171; Joseph Galloway to Earl of Dartmouth, 23 January 1778, cited in Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961; repr. ed., 1996), 112; Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 July 1780. 15.  John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (New York, 2007), 323‒324; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 124‒173. 16.  Campbell to Lord Carlisle, 18 January 1779, in Colin Campbell, ed., Journal of an Expedition Against the Rebels of Georgia (Augusta, Ga., 1981), 143; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 324‒325, 386; Kenneth Coleman, “Georgia in the American Revolution,” in Kenneth Coleman, ed., A History of Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1991), 81. 17.  John Deas to John Rutherford, 15 September 1779, in D. E. Huger Smith, “Nisbett of Dean and Dean Hall,” SCMH 24 (April 1923), 21; Benjamin Lincoln to General William Moultrie, 10 May 1779, in Commager and Morris, eds., Spirit of Seventy‒Six, 2:1089; Josiah Smith to Reverend John Rodgers, 10 October 1779, Josiah Smith Letterbook, SHC; Pennsylvania Packet, 16 July 1778; Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution, 58‒64; Morrill, Southern Campaigns, 41‒52. 18.  New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, 19 July 1779; Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 190. 19.  Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (New York, 2011), 87‒90; Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775‒82 (New York, 2001); Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730‒1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), 235; Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 89‒90; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 113; Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 113‒114; New York Gazette, 21 July 1779. 20.  John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint Domingue (New York, 2006), 206‒210; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 388‒390. 21. Lieutenant-­Colonel Archibald Campbell to Sir Henry Clinton, 4 March 1779, in Davies, ed., DAR, 17:75; Oliver Hart to Joseph Hart, 16 February 1779, Oliver Hart Papers, South Caroliniana Library; Memorial of William Bull, Loyalist Claims; Pancake, This Destructive War, 30‒35; General Orders, 23 September 1779, Benjamin Lincoln Papers, DUL; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to Mrs. Pinckney, 9 October 1779, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Papers, DUL; Sir William Lyttelton, House of Commons, 26 October 1775, in Peter Force, ed., American Archives, Fourth Series: A Documentary History of the English Colonies in North America, Volume 6 (Washington, D.C., 1843); see also David Murdoch, ed., Rebellion in America: A Contemporary Viewpoint, 1765‒1783 (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1979), 334. 22.  Sir Henry Clinton to Lord George Germain, 14 May 1779, in Wilcox, ed., The American Rebellion, 104; Pancake, This Destructive War, 15; Carl P. Borick, A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780 (Columbia, S.C., 2003); David B. Mattern, Benjamin Lincoln and the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C., 1998); John Buchanan, The Road to Charleston: Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 2019); Conrad, The Southern Strategy; Wilson, The Southern Strategy; Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats; Weighley, The Partisan War: The South Carolina Campaign of 1780‒1782 (Columbia, S.C., 1970); Henry Clinton and William Bulger, “Sir Henry Clinton’s ‘Journal of the Siege of Charleston, 1780,’ ” SCMH 66 (July 1965), 147‒174.

Notes to Pages 258–261

461

23.  Lieutenant-­Colonel Alexander MacDonald to his wife, 10 June 1780, cited in Stephen Conway, The War of American Independence, 1775‒1783 (New York, 1995), 116; Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750‒1804 (New York, 2016), 234; John E. Ferling, Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It (New York, 2015), 260‒261; Henry Clinton, Memorandums &c., &c., Respecting the Unprecedented treatment Which the Army Have Met with Respecting the Plunder Taken After a Siege (London, 1794), 57, 62; Alexander R. Stoesen, “The British Occupation of Charleston, 1780‒1782,” SCMH 63 (April 1962), 71‒82; R. A. Bowler, “Sir Henry Clinton and Army Profiteering: A Neglected Aspect of the Clinton-­Cornwallis Controversy, WMQ 1 (January 1974), 111‒122; Major James Wemyss to Lord Cornwallis, 11 July 1780, cited in George C. Rogers, The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 122‒123. 24.  Walter J. Fraser, Jr., Patriots, Pistols and Petticoats: “Poor Sinful Charles Town” During the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C., 1993), 134; William Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (New York, 1802), 2:252. 25.  Robert Gray, “Robert Gray’s Observations on the War in Carolina,” SCMH 11 (July 1910), 141; C. L. Bragg, Martyr of the American Revolution: The Execution of Isaac Hayne, South Carolinian (Columbia, S.C., 2016), 123‒129; Proclamation of Sir Henry Clinton, 22 May 1780, Early American Imprints, Series 1 #43809; “Observations of the Paroles Exacted by the British in the State of South Carolina,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 July 1780; Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775‒1782 (New Haven, Conn., 1954), 181; John Pebbles Diary, SCL. 26.  Proclamation of Sir Henry Clinton, 3 June 1780, Early American Imprints, Series 1 #16791; Arney R. Childs, “William Hasell Gibbes’ Story of His Life,” SCMH 50 (April 1949), 65; “Alterations of Articles of Capitulation Proposed by Major General Benjamin Lincoln and Answered by Their Excellencies Sir Henry Clinton and Vice-­Admiral Arbuthnot, 9 May 1780,” in Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:91‒92; Sir Henry Clinton to General William Phillips, 25 May 1780, cited in Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The American Adventure (Boston, 1970), 132. 27.  Dr. Robert Brownsfield to William D. James in Commager and Morris, eds., Spirit of Seventy-­Six, 2:1111‒1112; B. Tarleton, “A Return of the Rebels killed, Wounded and Taken at the Affair at Waxhaws, 29 May 1780,” in Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:206; Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution, 86‒88; John Knight, War at Saber Point: Banastre Tarleton and the British Legion (Morrisville, Pa., 2020); Michael Scoggins and Walter Edgar, The Day It Rained Militia: Huck’s Defeat and the Revolution in the South Carolina Backcountry, May‒July 1780 (Charleston, S.C., 2005). 28.  “Observations on the Paroles Exacted by the British in the State of South Carolina,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 July 1780; Scoggins and Edgar, The Day It Rained Militia; Walter B. Edgar, Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (New York, 2001). 29.  Scoggins and Edgar, The Day It Rained Militia; Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution, 96‒111; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 453‒454; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 234; Charles O’Hara to the Duke of Grafton, 6 January 1781, in George C. Rogers, ed., “Letters of Charles O’Hara to the Duke of Grafton,” SCMH 65 (July 1964), 171. 30.  Roger Lamb, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War (Dublin, 1809), 341; Rogers, ed., “Letters of Charles O’Hara,” 177; “Gray’s Observations

462

Notes to Pages 261–265

on the War in Carolina,” SCMH, 141; Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 July 1780; Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 171; Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution, 96‒136; Edgar, Partisans and Redcoats; John Oller, The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution (New York, 2016); Robert D. Bass, Swamp Fox: The Life and Campaigns of General Francis Marion (New York, 1959); Robert D. Bass, Gamecock: The Life and Campaigns of General Thomas Sumter (New York, 1961). 31. Lamb, An Original and Authentic Journal, 302; Cornwallis to Germain, 21 August 1780, in Davies, ed., DAR, 18:150; Mark Urban, Fusiliers: The Saga of a British Redcoat Regiment in the American Revolution (New York, 2007), 200‒217; Gordon, South Carolina in the American Revolution, 92‒95; Ferling, Whirlwind, 262‒266; Lord George Germain to Sir Henry Clinton, 4 July 1780, The Parliamentary Register: History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Lords, Volume 8 (London, 1782), 121‒122. 32.  Cornwallis to Germain, 21 August 1780, in Davies, ed., DAR, 18:50; Cornwallis to Germain, 19 September 1780, in Davies, ed., DAR, 18:170; O’Hara to Grafton, 1 November 1780, in Rogers, ed., “Letters of Charles O’Hara,” SCMH 65 (July 1964), 160; Cornwallis to Clinton, 29 August 1780, in Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, 15:277; Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 108; Cornwallis to Germain, 18 April 1781, in Lieutenant-­General Earl Cornwallis, An Answer to That Part of the Narrative of Lieutenant-­General Sir Henry Clinton Which Relates to the Conduct of Lieutenant-­General Earl Cornwallis During the Campaign in North America in the Year 1781 (London, 1783), 49; “Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, with a Narrative of the Battle of Camden, 3 September 1780,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Jefferson​/01​-03​-02​-0695. [Original source:  The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 3, 18 June 1779 – 30 September 1780, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J., 1951, 593–597.]; Urban, Fusiliers, 200–217; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 563. 33.  On King’s Mountain, see Pancake, This Destructive War, 108‒121; Morrill, Southern Campaigns, 101‒112; Christopher Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes (New York, 1990), 270‒297; Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 159‒160; O’Hara to Grafton, 15 November 1780, in Rogers, ed., “Letters of Charles O’Hara,” 169; Cornwallis to Germain, 18 April 1781, in Davies, ed., DAR, 20:113; Lyman Draper, King’s Mountain and Its Heroes (Cincinnati, Ohio 1881), 169; “Account of Colonel Isaac Shelby of North Carolina,” in Commager and Morris, eds., Spirit of Seventy-­Six, 2:1139‒1142; Major James Wemyss to Cornwallis, 20 September 1780, Cornwallis Papers, PRO30/11/64, TNA. 34.  Nathanael Greene to Catherine Greene, 29 December 1780, in Richard Showman et al., eds., The Papers of General Nathanael Greene (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 7:16; Nathanael Greene to General Robert Howe, 29 December 1780, in Showman et al., eds.,  Papers of Nathanael Greene, 7:17; Nathanael Greene to Colonel Francis Marion, 4 December 1780, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 6:520; Nathanael Greene to Thomas Jefferson, 6 December 1780, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 6:530; Nathanael Greene to Thomas Sumter, 8 January 1781, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 7:74‒75; Robert Gray, “Colonel Robert Gray’s Observations on the War in South Carolina,” SCMH 11 (July 1910), 143; Sir James Wright to Cornwallis, 23 April 1781, in Davies, ed.,  DAR, 20:117;  Nathanael Greene to George Washington, 7 December 1780,” in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 6: 543-­545; Nathanael Greene to Samuel Huntington, 28 December 1780, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 7:9. 35. Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels, 306; O’Hara to the Duke of Grafton, 20 April 1781, in Rogers, ed., “Letters of Charles O’Hara,” 173; Lawrence E. Babits, A Devil of a Whipping: The

Notes to Pages 265–268

463

Battle of Cowpens (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); John Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Court House: The American Revolution in the Carolinas (New York, 1997), 319‒334; Albert Louis Zambone, Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life (Yardley, Pa., 2018); Don Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 135‒155; Michael Stephenson, Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was Fought (New York, 2007), 325‒331. 36.  Lawrence E. Babits and Joshua B. Howard, Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009); Cornwallis to General Sir Henry Clinton, 15 October 1781, in Davies, ed., DAR, 20:243; Cornwallis to Major General William Phillips, 10 April 1781, in Charles Ross, ed., Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, Volume 1, 3 vols. (London, 1859), 88; Cornwallis to Lord George Germain, 17 March 1781, in Ross, ed., Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, 1:523; Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels, 307; Nathanael Greene to Catherine Greene, 18 March 1781, in Showman, et al., eds., The Papers of Nathanael Greene, Volume 7: 26 December 1780‒29 March 1781 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2015), 446‒447; O’Hara to Duke of Grafton, 15 November 1780, in Rogers, ed., “Letters of Charles O’Hara,” SCMH 65 (July 1964), 174; Nathanael Greene to Isaac Huger, 30 January 1781, in Dennis Conrad et al., eds., The Papers of General Nathanael Greene (Columbia, S.C., 1999). For full texts of documents calendared in The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, Volume 7 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 152‒289, see http://​mep​.blackmesatech​.com​/mep/; Pennsylvania Gazette, 14 November 1781. 37.  Nathanael Greene to George Washington, 29 March 1781, in Theodore J. Crackel, ed., The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition: Documents, March 1780‒March 1787, http://​rotunda​.upress​.virginia​.edu​/founders​/GEWN​.html; Lord Rawdon to Lord Cornwallis, 24 May 1781, in Benjamin F. Stevens, The Campaigns in Virginia, 1781: Six Rare Pamphlets on the Clinton-­Cornwallis Controversy (London, 1888), 483; William Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution (New York, 1802), 2:279. 38.  Robert Dunkerly and Irene B. Boland, Eutaw Springs: The Final Battle of the American Revolution’s Final Battle (Columbia, S.C., 2017); William Johnson, Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene, Volume 2, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C., 1822), 240. 39.  Cornwallis to General Sir Henry Clinton, 15 October 1781, in Davies, ed., DAR, 20:243; Cornwallis to Major General William Phillips, 10 April 1781, in Ross, ed., Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, 1:88; Cornwallis to Lord George Germain, 17 March 1781, in Ross, ed., Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, 1:523; Nathanael Greene to Catherine Greene, 18 March 1781, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 7:446‒447; O’Hara to Duke of Grafton, 15 November 1780, in Rogers, ed., “Letters of Charles O’Hara,” SCMH 65 (July 1964), 174; Nathanael Greene to Isaac Huger, 30 January 1781, in Dennis Conrad et al., Papers of General Nathanael Greene (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 7:152‒289. Full texts of documents calendared in The Papers of General Nathanael Greene are on the Web at http://​mep​ .blackmesatech​.com​/mep/; Pennsylvania Gazette, 14 November 1781; Pancake, This Destructive War, 204‒221; Greene to Lafayette, 17 September 1781, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 9:358; Greene to George Washington, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 9:362; Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels, 307; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 519. 40.  Aedanus Burke to Governor Benjamin Guerard, 14 December 1784, in Governor’s Messages, 313, SCDAH; Pennsylvania Gazette, 31 July 1782; Francis Marion to Nathanael Greene, 5 April 1782, Francis Marion Papers, SCL. 41.  “An Act for Disposing of Certain Estates and Banishing Certain Persons,” 26 February 1782, in Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 9 vols. (Columbia, S.C.,

464

Notes to Pages 268–271

1838), 4:519; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011), 68; Lieutenant-­Governor William Bull to Lord George Germain, 25 March 1782, in Davies, ed., DAR, 21:50; David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution in South Carolina, 2 vols. (Trenton, N.J., 1785), 2:233; Johnson, Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene, 2:188. 42.  John Matthews to Arthur Middleton, 25 August 1782, in Joseph Barnwell, ed., “Correspondence of Hon. Arthur Middleton,” SCMH 37 (April 1926), 65, 70; Thomas Pinckney to General Greene, 31 March 1782, in Joseph Barnwell, ed., “Letters to General Greene and Others,” SCMH 16 (October 1915), 142; Pennsylvania Gazette, 12 June 1782; Lieutenant-­Governor William Bull to Lord George Germain, 25 March 1782, in Davies, ed., DAR, 21:50; Harry M. Ward, The War for Independence: The Transformation of American Society (New York, 1999), 76; Gary Sellick, “Black Skin, Red Coats: The Carolina Corps and Nationalism in the Revolutionary British Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 39 (September 2018), 459‒478; Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:279; Gregory D. Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C., 2000). 43.  Nathanael Greene to Congress, 19 December 1792, in Joseph W. Barnwell, “The Evacuation of Charles Town by the British in 1782,” SCMH 11 (January 1910), 9‒10, 20; Alexander R. Stoesen, “The British Occupation of Charleston, 1780‒1781,” SCMH 63 (April 1962), 71‒82; Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 January 1783; Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:361; on the numbers of enslaved people evacuated, see Elias Boudinot to Lewis Pintard, 16 January 1783, in Paul H. Smith and Ronald M. Gephart, eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774‒1789, 26 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1976), 19:589; William Floyd to George Clinton, 16 January 1783 in Smith and Gephart, eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 19:590. 44.  John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 27 September 1782, in John Lewis Gervais Papers, SCL; Secret to Marion, 13 November 1782, in John Bennett, ed., “Marion-­Gadsden Correspondence,” SCMH 41 (April 1940), 55; Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:109; Frey, Water from the Rock; Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African-­Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, 2009); Philip D. Morgan, “Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760‒1810,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 83‒142; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects; The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740‒1790 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); Jeffery Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670‒1837 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999). 45.  Lieutenant-­Governor William Bull to Lord George Germain, 22 March 1781, in Davies, ed., DAR, 20:94; Kinloch Bull, Jr., The Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston: Lieutenant Governor William Bull II and His Family (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 272‒274; Butler to Middleton, 21 March 1776, in Middleton, “Correspondence of Hon. Arthur Middleton,” 141. 46.  Anthony Allaire, “Diary of Lieutenant Anthony Allaire, of Ferguson’s Corps: Memorandum of Occurrences During the Campaign of 1780,” in Draper, King’s Mountain and Its Heroes, 486. 47.  John Rutledge to Gentlemen, 8 December 1780, in Joseph Barnwell, ed., “Letters of John Rutledge,” SCMH 18 (January 1917), 43‒44; General Nathanael Greene to George Washington, 7 December 1780, rotunda​.upress​.virginia​.edu​/founders/; Colonel William Harding to General Nathanael Greene, 7 November 1781, in “Letters to General Greene and Others,” SCMH 16 (July 1915), 107‒108; James Haw, “Every Thing Here Depends Upon Opinion”: Nathanael Greene and Public Support in the Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution,” SCHM

Notes to Pages 271–278

465

109 (July 2008), 212–231; General Nathanael Greene to Benjamin Harrison, 20 January 1781, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 7: 162–163. 48.  John Rutledge to the Delegates of South Carolina, 8 December 1780, in Joseph Barnwell, ed., “Letters of John Rutledge,” 18:44; General Nathanael Greene to an Unidentified Person, 1‒23 January 1781, in Showman, et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 7: 175–176. 49.  John Rutledge to the Delegates of South Carolina, 8 December 1780, in Barnwell, ed., “Letters of John Rutledge,” 18:44; Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:239; Caroline Gilman, ed., Letters of Eliza Wilkinson (New York, 1839), 29‒31, 40‒42. 50.  John Rutledge to the Delegates of South Carolina, 8 December 1780, in Joseph Barnwell, ed., “Letters of John Rutledge,” 18:44; Nathanael Greene to Alexander Hamilton, 10 January 1781, founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Hamilton​/01​-02​-02​-1014; Andrew Pickens to General Nathanael Greene, cited in Rod Andrew Jr., The Life and Times of General Andrew Pickens: Revolutionary War Hero, American Founder (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2017), 126; Gilman, ed., Letters of Eliza Wilkinson, 46. 51. General Orders, 23 September 1779, Benjamin Lincoln Papers, DUL; General Nathanael Greene to Joseph Reed, 9 January 1781, in William B. Reed, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed (Philadelphia, 1847), 344. 52.  Minutes of the Board of Police, 26 February 1782, PRO30/11/110, TNAUK. 53.  Lieutenant-­Governor William Bull to Lord George Germain, 22 March 1781, in Davies, ed., DAR, 20:94; Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:344; Secret Correspondence, 8 November 1782, in John Bennett, ed., “Marion-­Gadsden Correspondence,” SCMH 41 (April 1940), 54; Eugene Fingerhut, “Uses and Abuses of the American Loyalists’ Claims: A Critique of Quantitative Analysis,” WMQ 25 (April 1968), 245‒258; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 88‒91; Sir Guy Carleton to George Washington, 12 May 1783, Founders Online, National Archives, https://​ founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Washington​/99​-01​-02​-11252. 54. Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 89‒90; Alured Clarke to Cornwallis, 10 July 1780, cited in Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 226; Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Clarke to Cornwallis, 10 July 1780, in Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War of Independence (Chicago, 2012), 178. 55. Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 89‒90; Moultrie, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:355‒356. 56. Bull, Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston, 273; William Bull, Loyalist Claims, SCDAH. 57. Bull, Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston, 272‒275; William Bull, Loyalist Claims, SCDAH. 58.  Nathanael Greene to Thomas Sumter, 17 May 1781, in Showman et al., eds., Papers of Nathanael Greene, 8:278; Memorial of Elias Ball, Loyalist Claims, Volume 55, SCDAH; David Ramsay to William Henry Drayton, 1 September 1779, in Robert L. Brunhouse and David Ramsay, “David Ramsay, 1749‒1815: Selections from His Writings,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 55 (August 1965), 65. 59. Josiah Smith Letterbook, SHC; Minutes of the Board of Police, 26 February 1782, PRO30/11/110, TNAUK; Thomas Pinckney to Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 17 May 1779, cited in Mary Beth Norton, “‘What an Alarming Crisis Is This’: Southern Women and the American Revolution,” in Crow and Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, 214. 60. Petition of David Guerard, 10 January 1783, Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776‒1815, SCDAH.

466

Notes to Pages 278–282

61.  John Orde, Loyalist Claims, SCDAH. 62.  Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution (New York, 2006), 107; Boston King, “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-­Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington, Ky., 2004), 353. 63.  Major Barnard Elliott to Council of Safety, 7 December 1775, in “Papers of the Second Council of Safety of the Revolutionary Party of South Carolina, November 1775‒March 1776,” SCMH 3 (October 1902), 195‒196. 64.  Marvin L. Cann, “War in the Backcountry: The Siege of Ninety Six, May 22‒June 19, 1781,” SCMH 72 (January 1971), 4; Cruger to Cornwallis, 27 August 1780, Cornwallis Papers, PRO30/11/63; Lord Rawdon to Cornwallis, 24 May 1781, cited in Pancake, This Destructive War, 200; Alexander A. Lawrence, “General Robert Howe and the British Capture of Savannah in 1778,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 36 (December 1952), 317. Ferdinand de Brahm, “An Engineer Describes the Siege of Charleston, 1780,” in Paul K. Walker, ed., Engineers of Independence: A Documentary History of the Army Engineers in the American Revolution, 1775‒1783 (Washington, D.C., 1981), 275; Minutes of the South Carolina Council of Safety, 16 December 1775 in William Bell Clark, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1968), 3: 133–135. 65.  Timothy Lockley, “‘The King of England’s Soldiers:’ Armed Blacks in Savannah and Its Hinterlands during the Revolutionary War Era, 1778‒1787,” in Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry eds., Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Athens, 2014), 26‒41; Schama, Rough Crossings, 103‒104. 66.  Memorial of Scipio Handley, Loyalist Claims, vol. 53 #1‒2, SCDAH; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Quest for Global Freedom (Boston, 2006), 37‒38, 211‒212; Pancake, This Destructive War, 32‒35. 67.  Thomas Bee to Governor John Matthews, 9 December 1783, in Thomas Bee Papers, SCL; Governor John Matthews to Francis Marion, 6 October 1782, in Gibbes, ed., Documentary History, 3:233; Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York, 1996), 65‒88; René Chartrand, “Black Corps in the British West Indies, 1793‒1815,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 76 (Winter 1998), 249; Sellick, “Black Skin, Red Coats,” 461‒462; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 317‒320. 68.  New York Mercury, 27 August 1782; Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 September 1782; Governor Patrick Tonyn to Earl of Shelburne, 14 November 1782, in Davies, ed., DAR, 21:136; Lord North to Governor Patrick Tonyn, 4 December 1783 in Davies, ed., DAR, 21:251; Governor Patrick Tonyn to Sir Guy Carleton, 11 September 1783, in Davies, ed., DAR, 21:217. See also Schama, Rough Crossings; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom; Carole Watterson Troxler, “Loyalist Refugees and the British Evacuation of East Florida, 1783‒1785,” Florida Historical Quarterly 60 (July 1981), 1‒28; Troxler, “Refuge, Resistance, and Reward: The Southern Loyalists’ Claim on East Florida, JSH 55 (November 1989), 563‒596; Jennifer K. Snyder, “Revolutionary Repercussions: Loyalist Slaves in St Augustine and Beyond,” in Liam Riordan and Jerry Bannister, eds., The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto, 2012), 165‒184; James Waring McCrady and C. L. Bragg, Patriots in Exile: Charleston Rebels in Saint Augustine During the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C., 2020). 69.  Ralph Izard to Arthur Middleton, 30 May 1783, in Smith and Gephart, eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774‒1789, 20:287; Ralph Izard to Alice Izard, 7 October 1782, Ralph Izard Papers, SCL; John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, 27 September 1782, John Lewis

Notes to Pages 282–288

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Gervais Papers, SCL; Governor Patrick Tonyn to Earl of Shelburne, 14 November 1782, in Davies, ed., DAR, 21:136; Lord North to Governor Patrick Tonyn, 4 December 1783, in Davies, ed., DAR, 21:251. 70.  Commission of Forfeited Estates, Sales of Land and Negroes, Records of the Comptroller General, SCDAH; Ralph Izard to Gabriel Manigault, 9 June 1789, Ralph Izard Papers, SCL. 71.  John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776, in The Adams Papers Digital Edition, ed. Sara Martin (Charlottesville, Va., 2008‒2021); William Bull to Lord George Germain, 25 March 1782, in Davies, ed., DAR, 21:51; Lieutenant-­Governor Alexander Leslie to Sir Guy Carleton, 18 October 1783, in B. F. Stevens and H. J. Brown, eds., Report on American Manuscripts in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 4 vols. (London, 1907), 3:175; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 301; Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Mrs. R. E., 25 September 1780, cited in Mary Beth Norton, “‘What an Alarming Crisis Is This,’ ” in Crow and Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, 214; Jerome J. Nadelhaft, The Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina (Orono, Me., 1981), 64; Morgan, “Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760‒1810,” in Berlin and Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 83‒142; Frey, Water from the Rock, 172‒205. 72.  Message of Governor Charles Pinckney to Legislature, 27 November 1787, Governors’ Messages #701, SCDAH; Egerton, Death or Liberty; Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 223‒231. 73. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-­Made Man (New York, 2007), 236‒302; Kevin Belmonte, William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2007); Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery (New York, 2007); Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York, 2006), 156 74.  “Homage of Slavery,” The Liberator, 27 August 1847; Laura Auricchio, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered (New York, 2014), 116‒118; Melvin D. Kennedy, Lafayette and Slavery from His Letters to Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp (Easton, Pa., 1950); Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York, 2010), 485; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in an Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (New York, 2011); Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776‒1848 (New York, 1988); Rafe Blaufarb and Liz Clarke, Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle Against the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 2015); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007), 221.

Chapter 8 Note to epigraphs: Minutes of the Welsh Neck Baptist Church, 1785, SCL; Eli Whitney to Eli Whitney Sr., 11 September 1793, in M. B. Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney Relative to the Invention of the Cotton Gin,” AHR 3 (October 1897), 99. 1. Edmund Botsford to Richard Furman, 15 October 1808, Edmund Botsford Papers, SCBHC; Edmund Botsford to John Rippon, 24 March 1804, South Carolina Letters, Letters from Forgotten Ancestors, www​.tngenweb​.org​/tnletters​/sc​/geor1​.htm; Charles D. Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Edmund Botsford (Charleston, S.C., 1832), 107‒108; Edmund Botsford, Sambo and Toney: A Dialogue Between Two Africans in South Carolina (Georgetown, S.C., 1808); Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009), 155‒161; Michael

468

Notes to Pages 288–294

O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, Volume 1: 1810‒1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 418‒419; Roy Talbert Jr. and Meggan A. Farish, The Antipedo Baptists of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1710‒2010 (Columbia, S.C., 2014). 2.  Winyaw Intelligencer, 29 December 1819; City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 7 January 1820; William Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit (New York, 1869), 140‒144; Wood Furman, A History of the Charleston Association of Baptist Churches in South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1811), 31; John Barrington, ed., Baptists in Early America, Volume 5: Welsh Neck, South Carolina (Macon, Ga., 2018); Eric C. Smith, Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America (New York, 2020); Smith, The Revival Spirituality of Oliver Hart and the Regular Baptists in Eighteenth-­ Century South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 2018); George C. Rogers, The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 182‒183, 192; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, Ill., 1984). 3. Botsford, Sambo and Toney, 3‒4, 7, 8, 11. 4. Botsford, Sambo and Toney, 6, 13, 14, 15. 5. Botsford, Sambo and Toney, 22, 23. 6. Botsford, Sambo and Toney, 42. 7. Botsford, Sambo and Toney, 42, 44‒45. (Paul’s letter to the Colossians, 3:22: “Servants, obey in all things [your] masters according to the flesh; not with eye service, as men pleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God”); Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-­Genovese, Fatal Self-­Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (New York, 2011). 8. Botsford, Sambo and Toney, 24, 40. 9.  Edmund Botsford, “On the Duty of Churches to Their Ministers,” Charleston Baptist Association, Circular Letter of 1802, in Furman, A History of the Charleston Association of Baptist Churches. See also http://​baptisthistoryhomepage​.com​/1802​.cl​.sc​.charleston​.html. 10. Botsford, Sambo and Toney, 3. 11.  Governor John Drayton, 26 November 1800, Senate Journal, SCDAH; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Christine Leigh Heyerman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Rachel Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760‒1808 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992); Lacy K. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 1800‒1860 (New York, 1991). 12.  Keith Krawczynski, ed., “William Drayton’s Journal of a 1784 Tour of the South Carolina Backcountry,” SCMH 97 (July 1966), 190‒197, 202‒205; Julian Dwight Martin, ed., “The Letters of Charles Caleb Cotton, 1798‒1802” SCMH 51 (October 1951), 224; Edward Hooker, “The Diary of Edward Hooker, 1805‒1808,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1896, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1897), 1:884; John Ferdinand Dalziel Smith, A Tour of the United States of America (London, 1784), 198; Peter N. Moore, World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in Backcountry South Carolina, 1750‒1805 (Columbia, S.C., 2007); George L. Johnson Jr., The Frontier in the Colonial South: South Carolina Backcountry, 1736‒1800 (Westport, Conn., 1997). 13.  François André Michaux, “Travels to the West of the Alleghany Mountains, in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, and . . . the Upper Carolinas in the Year 1802,” in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Travels West of the Alleghanies, Volume 3 (Cleveland, Ohio, 1904), 293‒294; John Farquharson to Gabriel Manigault, 24 June 1789, Manigault Family Papers, 1750‒1900, SCL; Charleston Evening Gazette, 10 June 1786; George Washington, “Entry for 25 May 1791,” in Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, Volume 6: January

Notes to Pages 294–297

469

1790‒December 1799 (Charlottesville, Va., 1979) 147; G. Terry Sharrer, “The Indigo Bonanza in South Carolina, 1740‒1790,” Technology and Culture 12 (July 1971), 102; John J. Winberry, “Reputation of Carolina Indigo,” SCMH 80 (July 1979), 242‒250. 14.  Columbian Herald (Charleston), 30 November 1786, 26 October 1786, 19 February 1787; South Carolina Post and Advertiser, 24 October 1786; Charleston Morning Post, 13 December 1786, 6 February 1787, 17 February 1787; State Gazette of South Carolina, 19 March 1787, 18 January 1787. See also Leonard Richards, Shays Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia, 2002); Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York, 2007); Ulrich B. Phillips, “The South Carolina Federalists I,” AHR 14 (April 1909), 537‒538; Mark Kaplanoff, “Making the South Solid: Politics and the Structure of Society in South Carolina, 1790‒1815,” PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1979; Henry Laurens to James Bourdieu, 9 June 1785, in David R. Chesnutt and C. James Taylor, eds., PHL, Volume 16: September 1, 1782‒December 17, 1792 (Columbia, S.C., 2003), 567‒568. 15.  Joseph W. Barnwell, ed., “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785‒1786,” SCMH 13 (October 1912), 193; South Carolina Gazette and General Advertiser, 16 December 1783; Walter J. Fraser Jr., Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 171‒172. 16.  “Extract of a Letter from Charleston, dated May 23, 1785,” Columbian Herald (Charleston), 30 September 1785; Barnwell, ed., “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785‒1786,” 193; Robert A. Becker, ed., “John F. Grimke’s Eyewitness Account of the Camden Court Riot, April 27‒28, 1785,” SCMH 83 (July 1982), 210‒213; Becker, “Salus Populi Suprema Lex: Public Peace and South Carolina Debtor Laws,” SCMH 80 (January 1979), 70; Jerome Nadelhaft, The Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina (Orono, Maine, 1981), 195. 17.  Aedanus Burke to Governor Benjamin Guerard, 14 December 1784, Aedanus Burke Papers, SCL; Michael Stevens, “The Hanging of Matthew Love,” SCMH 88 (January 1987), 55‒58; John C. Meleny, The Public Life of Aedanus Burke: Revolutionary Republican in Post-­ Revolutionary South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 248‒249. 18.  Grand Jury Presentments, Orangeburg District, November 1785; Edgefield District, October 1786, SCDAH; William Bratton to Governor Benjamin Guerard, 13 February 1784, Governors’ Messages, 276, SCDAH; Krawczynski, ed., “Drayton’s Journal,” 197. 19.  “An Act for the Promotion of Industry, and for the Supression of Vagrants and Other Idle and Disorderly Persons,” 28 March 1787, in Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 5: Containing the Acts for 1786 to 1814 (Columbia, S.C., 1839), 41‒44; “An Ordinance Respecting Suits for Recovery of Debts,” 26 March 1784, in Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 4: Containing the Acts from 1752 to 1786 (Columbia, S.C., 1838), 640‒641; “An Act to Establish a Medium of Circulation,” 12 October 1785, in Cooper, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 4:712; “An Act for Regulating Sales Under Executions,” 12 October 1785, in Cooper, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 4:710‒712; “An Ordinance for Repairing and Rebuilding the Court Houses and Gaols in the Several Districts of this State,” 17 March 1783, in Cooper, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 4:564‒565; “Estimate, January 1, 1783, to January 1, 1784,” in Cooper, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 4:538; Luigi Castiglioni, Viaggio: Travels in the United States of America, 1785‒1787, ed. Antonio Pace (Syracuse, N.Y., 1983), 165; Governor Charles Pinckney, 7 February 1791, Governors’ Messages, #532; Grand Jury Presentments, Orangeburg District, 1783, SCDAH. 20. Castiglioni, Viaggio, 166; Petition of Sundry Freeholders and Inhabitants of Ninety-­ Six and Orangeburgh, 16 January 1786; General Assembly Petitions, SCDAH; Petition of the Inhabitants of Tyger River and Union District, 25 March 1805; Robert X. Evans, ed., “Robert

470

Notes to Pages 297–301

Mills’ Letter on South Carolina, 1804,” SCMH 39 (July 1938), 115; Francis Hall, “Traveling in a ‘Democratical Machine’ in South Carolina,” in Thomas D. Clark, ed. South Carolina: The Grand Tour (Columbia, S.C., 1973), 52; Nadelhaft, The Disorders of War, 134‒135. 21.  “An Act to Establish a Company for the Inland Navigation from Santee to Cooper River,” 22 March 1786, in David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 7: Containing Acts Relating to Charleston, Courts, Slaves and Rivers (Columbia, S.C., 1840), 541‒546; South Carolina State Gazette (Charleston), 3 December 1784; Frederick A. Porcher, The History of the Santee Canal (Charleston, S.C., 1903); Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Colonel Senf ’s Account of the Santee Canal,” SCMH 28 (January 1927), 8‒21; Webber, ed, “Colonel Senf ’s Account of the Santee Canal,” SCHM (April 1927), 112‒131; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 16; Senate Journal 1794, SCDAH; John Drayton, A View of South Carolina as Respects Her Natural and Civil Concerns (Charleston, S.C., 1802), 155‒156. [A cotton bale weighed approximately 200 pounds in 1790; by 1832, its weight had risen to 345 pounds. See Isaac Smith Homans, A Cyclopedia of Commerce and Commercial Navigation (New York, 1858), 460.] 22.  City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Charleston, S.C.), 28 May 1801; S. G. Stephens, “The Origins of Sea Island Cotton,” AH 50 (1976); Joyce Chaplin, “Creating a Cotton South in Georgia and South Carolina, 1760‒1815,” JSH 57 (May 1991), 171‒200; James Everett Kibler, Our Father’s Fields: A Southern Story (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 23; Lewis Dupré, Observations on the Culture of Cotton (Georgetown, S.C., 1799); Robert Mills, Statistics of South Carolina, Including a View of Its Natural, Civil, and Military History (Charleston, S.C., 1853), 153; Gene Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power (New York, 2009); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015); Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2003). 23.  Eli Whitney to Eli Whitney Sr., 11 September 1793, in M. B. Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney Relative to the Invention of the Cotton Gin,” AHR 3 (October 1897), 99; Drayton, View of South Carolina, 135. 24.  Eli Whitney to Eli Whitney Sr., 11 September 1793, in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 100; Pierce Butler to Nathaniel Hall, 16 September 1793, Pierce Butler Letterbook, SCL; Dupré, Observations on the Culture of Cotton. 25.  Eli Whitney to Eli Whitney Sr., 11 September 1793, in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 100; Eli Whitney to Eli Whitney Sr., 17 August 1794, in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 101; Eli Whitney to Josiah Stebbins, 15 October 1803, in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” Eli Whitney to Josiah Stebbins, 9 February 1803, in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 124‒125, 127; Eli Whitney to Josiah Stebbins, 9 February 1805 in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 126‒127; Eli Whitney to Josiah Stebbins, 20 December 1801, in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 112; Georgia Gazette, 6 March 1794; Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin. 26.  Phineas Miller to Paul Hamilton, 19 January 1803, in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 117; Hooker, “Diary of Edward Hooker, 1805‒1808,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1896, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1897), 1:859; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 263; Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin, 74‒75; Charles E. Cauthen, ed., Family Letters of the Three Wade Hamptons, 1782‒1901 (Columbia, S.C., 1953). 27.  Charles Caleb Cotton to Father, and Mother, 8 December 1799, in Julian Dwight Martin, ed., “The Letters of Charles Caleb Cotton,” SCMH 52 (January 1951), 18; Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in

Notes to Pages 301–306

471

the Building of a Nation (Boston, 2017); Eli Whitney to Eli Whitney Sr., 11 September 1793, in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 100; Eli Whitney to Josiah Stebbins, 9 February 1805 in Hammond, ed., “Correspondence of Eli Whitney,” 127; Abbeville District, “Petition Asking for the Repeal of the Acts Barring the Importation of Negroes,” 23 September 1802, Legislative Petitions, SCDAH; James McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783‒1810 (Columbia, S.C., 2004), 48. 28.  Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1911), 2:371; John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (New York, 2003), 288‒289; Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York, 2009), 320‒321; Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (New York, 2018); David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2009); Lacy Ford, “Reconfiguring the Old South: “Solving” the Problem of Slavery, 1787‒1838,” JAH 95 (June 2008), 99‒122. 29.  SCG, 6 March 1775. See also Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, Volume 4: The Border Colonies and the Southern Colonies, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1935), 470; www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/database​#results. 30.  Barnwell, ed., “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785‒1786,” 193, 202‒203. See also John R. Alden, The South in the Revolution, 1763‒1789 (Baton Rouge, La., 1957), 370‒371; Patrick S. Brady, “The Slave Trade and Sectionalism in South Carolina, 1787‒1808,” JSH 38 (November 1972), 601‒620. 31.  Brady, “Slave Trade and Sectionalism in South Carolina,” 605; Thomas Cooper and David McCord, eds., The Statutes of South Carolina, 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1836‒1841), 5:38. 32.  Beaufort District, 1790 Census, from Social Explorer Dataset (SE), Census 1790, Digitally transcribed by the Inter-­university Consortium for Political and Social Research; Thomas Pinckney to Legislature, 3 March 1787, Miscellaneous Records, Vol. 2V, 272, SCDAH; Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York, 2014), 187‒208; Timothy James Lockley, ed., Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary History (Columbia, S.C., 2009), 55‒60. 33.  “Debate over the Importation of Negroes, 1785,” in Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, 4:481‒482, 487. 34.  Barnwell, ed., “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785‒1786,” 202; Thomas Bee, “Debate on the Importation of Negroes, September 27, 1785,” in Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, 4:481‒482; David Ramsay, Observations on the Impolicy of Recommending the Importation of Slaves, Respectfully Submitted to the Consideration of the Legislature of South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1791); McMillin, Final Victims, 48. 35.  Barnwell, ed., “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785‒1786,” 203‒204; “Debate on the Importation of Negroes, 1785,” in Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, 4:482; Castiglioni, Viaggio 163‒164. 36.  “Debate on the Importation of Negroes, 1785,” in Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, 4:484; Charleston Courier, 29 December 1803; Petition of Robert Barnwell to the General Assembly, 8 December 1796, Records of the General Assembly, SCDAH; Petition of William James and George James to the General Assembly, 20 November 1802, in Records of the General Assembly, SCDAH. 37. Inhabitants of Abbeville District, “Petition Asking the Repeal of Acts Barring the Importation of Negroes into the State as Detrimental to the Settlement and Development of the Middle and Upper Districts of the State,” 23 October 1802, Item 129, Legislative Petitions (S165015), Records of the South Carolina General Assembly, SCDAH.

472

Notes to Pages 306–311

38.  Petitions of Robert Barnwell to the General Assembly, 8 December 1796; William James and George James to the General Assembly, 20 November 1802, General Assembly Petitions; Governor James Richardson, 25 November 1803, Governor’s Messages, Senate Journal, SCDAH. 39.  Memorial Respecting the Insurrection in St. Domingo, 12 December 1791, General Assembly Petitions, 1775‒1815, SCDAH; Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990), 97, 117; Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York, 2008), 32‒36; Laurent DuBois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-­ Méry, A Topographical and Political Description of the Spanish Part of Saint-­Domingo (Philadelphia, 1798); Nathaniel Cutting to Thomas Jefferson, 29 November 1791, http://​founders​ .archives​.gov​/documents​/Jefferson​/01​-22​-02​-0313; news of the rebellion arrived in South Carolina a few weeks after its outbreak. See also State Gazette of South Carolina, 15 September 1791. 40. Extract from the General Assembly of the French of Santo Domingo; Memorial Respecting the Insurrection in St. Domingo, 12 December 1791, General Assembly Petitions, 1775‒1815, SCDAH; Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-­American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York, 2018); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-­ Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (New York, 2000). 41.  Sylvanus Bourne to Thomas Jefferson, 8 September 1791, Founders Online, National Archives, https://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Jefferson​/01​-22​-02​-0130. [Original source:  The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 22,  6 August 1791 – 31 December 1791, ed. Charles T. Cullen. Princeton N.J., 1986, 133–134.] 42.  H. D. de Saint-­Maurice, “A Journalist’s Account of the Destruction of Cap Français,” in Jeremy Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago, 2007), 193; Bell, Toussaint Louverture, 46; Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, eds., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789‒1804: A Brief History in Documents (New York 2006), 26‒27; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (New York, 2011). 43. Bell, Toussaint Louverture, 49‒53; Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 2010), 155‒188; Léger-­Félicité Sonthonax, “Decree of General Liberty, 29 August 1793,” in Dubois and Garrigus, eds., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 26‒27, 122‒123. 44.  William Moultrie to Legislature, 30 November 1793, Governor’s Message #577, Governors’ Messages, SCDAH; Petition of the Inhabitants of the Town of the Cape and Its Dependencies, (June 1793),” in Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 163‒164; Robert J. Alderson Jr., This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions: French Consul Michel-­Ange-­Bernard Mangourit and International Republicanism in Charleston, 1792‒1794 (Columbia, S.C., 2008), 93‒109. 45.  Marvin R. Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: Founding Father (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), 114; Governor Charles Pinckney to the Colonial Assembly of St. Domingo, September 1791, cited in Thomas Ott, The Haitian Revolution (Knoxville, Tenn., 1973), 53; Thomas Jefferson to Colonel Monroe, 14 July 1793, in Henry A. Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 9 vols. (New York, 1853‒1855), 4:20; Thomas Jefferson to St. George Tucker, 28 August 1797, in Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 4:196. 46.  Thomas Jefferson to John Drayton, 23 December 1793, in Washington, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 4:97‒98; James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The

Notes to Pages 311–313

473

New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 241; Robert Alderson, “Charleston’s Rumored Slave Revolt of 1793,” in David Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 93‒111; New York Journal and Patriotic Register, 11 October 1793, cited in Melvin H. Jackson, Privateers in Charleston: An Account of a French Palatinate in South Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1969), 93; Popkin, You Are All Free, 123, 259; Colonel Vanderhorst to Captain McKelvey, 26 August 1793, South Carolina Militia Book, 1793‒1814, SCHS. 47.  James Monroe to John Cowper, 17 March 1802, in Daniel Preston, Marlena C. DeLong and Heidi C. Stello eds., The Papers of James Monroe: Selected Correspondence and Papers, 1796– 1802: Volume Four (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2012), 4:577; James Monroe to Thomas Mathews, 17 March 1802, in Preston, et al. eds., Papers of James Monroe, 4:579; Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993); James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730‒1810 (New York, 1997); Governor John Drayton to Governor James Monroe, 27 September 1800, General Orders, Executive Letterbooks; Governor John Drayton to South Carolina Senate, 25  November 1800, Governor’s Message #768 in Governors’ Messages, SCDAH; Jack D. L. Holmes, “The Abortive Slave Revolt at Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 1795,” Louisiana History 11 (Autumn 1970), 341‒362. On the “German Coast” Rebellion (the parishes of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Charles) of January 1811 in the lower Mississippi Valley, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-­Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1992), 343‒374; Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York, 2011); Rothman, Slave Country, 107‒113. 48.  Carol Berkin, A Sovereign People: The Crisis of the 1790s and the Birth of America (New York, 2017), 81‒151; George C. Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith (Columbia, S.C., 1962), 256; Richard K. Murdoch, ed., “Correspondence of French Consuls in Charleston, South Carolina, 1793‒1794,” SCMH 74 (January 1973), 1‒79; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789‒1815 (New York, 2009), 174‒208; Alderson, Bright Era of Happy Revolutions. 49.  City Gazette (Charleston), 4 May 1793; Frederick Jackson Turner, ed., “Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, 1791‒1797,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1903, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1904), 2:204, cited in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788‒1800 (New York, 1993), 333; Wood, Empire of Liberty, 186; Murdoch, ed., “Correspondence of French Consuls,” 74 (April 1973), 74‒76; Murdoch, ed., “Correspondence of French Consuls,” 74 (January 1973), 15; John F. Grimké, to “Dear Friend,” 17 March 1794, in John F. Grimké Papers, SCL; David Ramsay to John Eliot, 12 April 1793, in Robert L. Brunhouse, ed., Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 55 (1965), 135. 50.  A South Carolina Federalist [Henry de Saussure], Answer to a Dialogue Between a Federalist and a Republican (Charleston, S.C., 1797), 9, Early American Imprints, Series 1, #36843; J. F. Grimké, Charge, Delivered to the Grand Juries of Beaufort and Orangeburgh Districts, by the Honorable J. F. Grimké, One of the Associate Judges of the State of South-­Carolina, November Term, 1798 (Charleston, S.C., 1798), 6, Early American Imprints, Series 1, #33824; on the XYZ Affair, see Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 549‒579; Wood, Empire of Liberty, 241‒243; Martin, ed. “Letters of Charles Caleb Cotton,” SCMH 51 (October 1950), 217; Pennsylvania Gazette, 13 December 1797. 51.  David Ramsay, Observations on the Impolicy of Recommencing the Importation of Slaves (Charleston, S.C., 1791); Castiglioni, Viaggio, 165.

474

Notes to Pages 314–320

52.  “Rusticus” to Gentlemen, 20 June 1794, Alexander Garden Papers, SCHS. 53.  “Rusticus” to Gentlemen, 20 June 1794, 7 August 1794, Garden Papers, SCHS; “The Abolition of Slavery,” 4 February 1794, in Dubois and Garrigus, ed., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 132; Jackson, Privateers in Charleston, 94. 54.  “Rusticus” to Gentlemen, 7 August 1794, Garden Papers, SCHS 55. Drayton, View of South Carolina, 145‒147; Hooker, “Diary of Edward Hooker,” 879. 56. Drayton, View of South Carolina, 144. 57.  Governor James Richardson to [South Carolina] House of Representatives, 4 November 1803, in Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, 4:500‒501; Thomas Lowndes, “Debate on the Importation of Slaves, February 1804,” in Annals of the Congress of the United States, Eighth Congress, Comprising the Period from October 17, 1803 to March 3, 1805 Inclusive (Washington, D.C., 1852), 922; Drayton, View of South Carolina, 146; Henry de Saussure to Ezekiel Pickens, 10 September 1805, Henry William de Saussure Papers, SCL; David Ramsay, An Oration on the Cession of Louisiana to the United States, Delivered on 12 May 1804 in Saint Michael’s Church, Charleston (Charleston, S.C., 1804), 7. 58.  City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Charleston), 29 January 1808, 9 February 1808; Ebenezer S. Thomas, “Reminiscences of Ebenezer S. Thomas, 1803,” in Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, 4:503; “Negroes Imported into South Carolina, 1804,” in Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, 504; Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” Journal of the Early Republic 73 (July 1973), 287; McMillin, Final Victims; John Chesnutt to Joseph Reed, 14 March 1805, John Chesnutt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Fraser, Charleston! Charleston!, 188; Rothman, Slave Country; Joseph Stanton (Rhode Island), “Debate on the Importation of Slaves, February 1804, Annals of Congress, 8th Congress, 1st Session, p. 1018; McMillin, Final Victims, 48. 59.  Minutes of the Welsh Neck Baptist Church, 1737‒1935, WPA typescript, SCL; Upper Fork of Lynch’s Creek in Minutes of the Charleston Baptist Association for 1794 (Charleston, S.C., 1795); Elmer T. Clark, J. Manning Potts, Jacob S. Payton, eds., The Journals and Letters of Francis Asbury, 3 vols. (Nashville, Tenn., 1958), 1:505; Mary McDonald to Richard Furman, 20 May 1796, Furman Family Papers, SCBHC; Matthew 7:12; Richard Furman, “On the Languishing State of Religion in the Southern States,” Charleston Baptist Association Minutes, Circular Letter, 1799, in Furman, History of the Charleston Association of Baptist Churches, baptisthistoryhomepage​.com​/1799​.cl​.sc​.charleston​.html. 60.  Charleston Baptist Association, A Summary of Church Discipline, Showing the Qualifications and Duties of the Officers of a Gospel Church (Richmond, Va., 1794), n.p.; 1 November 1794, Upper Fork, Lynch’s Creek Church; 4 November 1797, Minutes of the Charleston Baptist Association, n.p. 61. Joshua Evans, 13 March 1797, Joshua Evans Diary in Stephen Beauregard Weeks Papers, SHC; Joshua Evans, A Journal of the Life, Travels, Religious Exercises, and Labours in the Work of the Ministry of Joshua Evans (Philadelphia, 1837), 142, 171, 176; Albert M. Shipp, The History of Methodism in South Carolina (Nashville, Tenn., 1884), 370. 62.  Francis Asbury, The Journal of Francis Asbury, Volume 2 (New York, 1821), 185, 241; Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780‒1845 (Princeton, N.J., 1965); Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, The Doctrines and Disciplines of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America (Philadelphia, 1798), 170. 63.  Doctrines and Disciplines of the Methodist Episcopal Church of 1780, cited in Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, 295; Doctrines and Disciplines of the Methodist Episcopal Church of 1783,

Notes to Pages 320–324

475

cited in Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, 295; Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church of 1796, 298; Asbury, Journal, 2:307. 64.  The Address of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to All Their Brethren and Friends in the United States (Baltimore, 1800), Early American Imprints, Series 1, #37957; Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760‒1800 (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 127; Doctrines and Disciplines of the Methodist Episcopal Church of 1800, in Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, 300. 65.  David Sherman, History of the Revisions of the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1874), 34; Doctrines and Disciplines of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1804), 215; Shipp, Methodism in South Carolina, 329‒330; Andrews, Methodists and Revolutionary America, 127; Charity R. Carney, Ministers and Masters: Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South (Baton Rouge, La., 2011), 15; Governor John Drayton to Senate, 26 November 1800, in Senate Journal, SCDAH; Abel M. Chreitzberg, Early Methodism in the Carolinas (Nashville, Tenn., 1897), 78; John O. Wilson, Sketch of the Methodist Church in Charleston, S.C., 1785‒1887 (Charleston, S.C., 1888). 66.  Jeremiah Norman Diary, June‒December 1799, in Stephen Beauregard Weeks Papers, 1746‒1941, SHC; Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770‒1810 (New York, 1998). 67.  John W. Catron, “Evangelical Networks in the Greater Caribbean and the Origins of the Black Church,” Church History 79 (March 2010), 88‒100; Thomas J. Nettles, “Richard Furman,” in Timothy George and David S. Dockery, eds., Baptist Theologians (Nashville, Tenn., 1990), 140‒164; James A. Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy (Macon, Ga., 1985); Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind; on Furman’s slave purchases, see Miscellaneous Records, vol. 3J, p.275, SCDAH. 68.  William Hammett Diary, SCL; D. A. Reilly, “William Hammett: Missionary and Founder of the Primitive Methodist Connection,” Methodist History 10 (October 1971), 30‒43; John B. Boles, The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Lexington, Ky., 1972), 134‒135; Robert Elder, The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790‒1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016). 69.  “Account of the Remarkable Work in South Carolina in a Letter from Dr. Furman to Dr. Rippon, 11 August 1802,” in John Rippon, ed., The Baptist Annual Register, 1801‒1802 (London, 1803), 1103‒1105; Richard Furman to Edmund Botsford, 12 October 1802, SCBHC; James Jenkins to Francis Asbury, 30 June 1802, in James Jenkins, Experiences, Labours, and Sufferings of the Reverend James Jenkins of the South Carolina Conference (Columbia, S.C., 1842), 117; Asbury, Journal, 3:453; Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, Backwoods Preacher, ed., W. P. Strickland (New York, 1856), 30‒31; Leah Townshend, South Carolina Baptists, 1670‒1805 (Florence, S.C., 1935), 301‒305. See also Boles, The Great Revival; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). 70.  Richard Furman to John Rippon, 11 August 1802, in “Extracts,” Baptist Annual Register, 1103‒1105. 71.  Richard Furman to John Rippon, 11 August 1802, in “Extracts,” Baptist Annual Register, 1103‒1105; Jenkins, Experiences, Labours, and Sufferings, 133. 72.  Richard Furman to John Rippon, 11 August 1802, in “Extracts,” Baptist Annual Register, 1103‒1105; Jenkins, Experiences, Labours, and Sufferings, 133. 73.  Richard Furman to John Rippon, 11 August 1802, in “Extracts,” Baptist Annual Register, 1103‒1105.

476

Notes to Pages 324–331

74. Jenkins, Experiences, Labours, and Sufferings, 117, 150; Richard Furman to Edmund Botsford, 12 October 1802, SCBHC. 75.  David Lilly to Georgia Analytical Repository, 23 August 1802, in David Benedict, History of the Baptist Denomination in America (London, 1813), 706; Townshend, South Carolina Baptists, 244, 310‒305; Boles, The Great Revival, 185; Clark et al., eds., Journals and Letters of Francis Asbury, 3:453. 76.  16 September 1809, Minutes of the Padgett’s Creek (Tyger River) Baptist Church, Union County, WPA typescript, SCL. 77.  Covenant of the Welsh Baptist Church, 1814, Minutes of the Welsh Neck Baptist Church, WPA typescript, SCL; Cashaway Baptist Church Records, SCBHC. 78.  Baptist Church, Kershaw County, 2 September 1815; 3 June 1816; Charleston Baptist Association Minutes, 27 October 1788; Baptist Association of Charleston, A Summary of Church Discipline Shewing the Various Qualifications and Duties of the Officers and Members of a Gospel Church (Richmond, 1794), n.p.; May 1804, Cashaway Baptist Church Records, SCBHC. 79. Drayton, View of South Carolina, 23; Michael Gaffney Diary, 1797‒1853, Michael Gaffney Papers, SHC. 80.  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. David Waldstreicher (New York, 2002), 197; Hector St. Jean Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York, 1904), 27. See also Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York, 2003), 11‒16, 41‒42; Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 199‒200. 81.  Charleston Courier, 1 February 1803; Raymond A. Mohl, ed., “‘The Grand Fabric of Republicanism’: A Scotsman Describes South Carolina, 1810‒1811,” SCMH 71 (July 1970), 180‒181; Hooker, “Diary of Edward Hooker,” 1:900‒901. 82.  Hooker, “Diary of Edward Hooker,” 1:896‒897. 83.  Hooker, “Diary of Edward Hooker,” 1:893. 84.  Hooker, “Diary of Edward Hooker,” 1:898; Archie V. Huff, Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont (Columbia, S.C., 1995), 74‒75. 85.  “The Circular Letter,” Minutes of the Charleston Baptist Association, Held at the High Hills of Santee, from Oct. 31 till Nov. 4, 1812 (Charleston, 1812), 7, Early American Imprints, Series 2 #24735; Charleston Baptist Association, A Summary of Church Discipline, Shewing the Qualifications and Duties, of the Officers and Members, of a Gospel-­Church (Wilmington, Del.,1783), 2, Early American Imprints, Series 1 #17826; Drayton, View of South Carolina, 150.

Chapter 9 1.  Southern Patriot, and Commercial Gazette (Charleston), 5 July 1822; City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston), 15 July 1822; Charleston Mercury, 3 July 1822, 6 July 1822; John Berwick Legaré, An Oration on 4th July, 1822 (Charleston, 1822), 28; Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker, An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes Charged with an Attempt to Raise an Insurrection (Charleston, S.C., 1822), 2, 135; A. V. Huff, “The Eagle and the Vulture: Changing Attitudes Toward Nationalism in Fourth of July Orations Delivered in Charleston, 1778‒1860,” South Atlantic Quarterly 73 (Winter 1974), 10‒22; Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, Mass., 1997); Douglas R. Egerton and Robert Paquette, eds., The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History (Gainesville, Fla., 2017); Lois A. Walker and Susan R. Silverman, eds., A Documented History of Gullah Jack Pritchard and the Denmark Vesey Slave Insurrection of 1822 (Lewiston, N.Y., 2000).

Notes to Pages 332–335

477

2.  James Hamilton, An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection Among a Portion of the Blacks in This City (Charleston, S.C., 1822), 4, 6‒7; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 35; Trial of William Paul, 19 June 1822; Examination of George Wilson, 20 June 1822, in Governors’ Message #1328, 28 November 1822, in Governors’ Messages, Records of the General Assembly, SCDAH (hereafter Trial Record); see also Hasell Wilson Memoirs, Robert Wilson Papers, CLS. 3. Hamilton, Late Intended Insurrection, 10; James Hamilton to William Lowndes, 16 June 1822, James Hamilton Papers, SHC; Charles Graves Militia Book, SCHS; Hasell Wilson Memoirs, Robert Wilson Papers, CLS; Mary Beach to Elizabeth Gilchrist, 5 July 1822, Mary Lamboll Thomas Papers, SCHS; Anna Johnson to Elizabeth Haywood, 24 July 1822, Ernest Haywood Papers, SHC. 4.  Trial of Jesse Blackwood, 27 June 1822, Trial Record. 5. Hamilton, Late Intended Insurrection, 17; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 41. 6. Joseph Brevard, An Alphabetical Digest of the Public Statute Law of South Carolina, 3 vols. (Charleston, S.C., 1814), 3:38; Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 2: Containing the Acts from 1682 to 1716, Inclusive, 10 vols. (Charleston, S.C., 1837), 423; David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 7: Containing the Acts Relating to Charleston, Courts, Slavery, and Rivers (Columbia, S.C., 1840), 389; Thomas Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619‒1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). 7.  William Johnson to Thomas Jefferson, 10 December 1822, Founders Online, National Archives, “To Thomas Jefferson from William Johnson, 10 December 1822,” Founders Online, National Archives, https: founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Jefferson​/98​-01​-02​-3203 [This is an Early Access document from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series]; William Johnson, “Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement,” Charleston Courier, 21 June 1822, 22 June 1822, 29 June 1822; William Johnson, To the Public of Charleston (Charleston, S.C., 1822); Anna Haywood to Elizabeth Haywood, 24 July 1822, Ernest Haywood Papers, SHC. 8.  On the plot itself, see Edward A. Pearson, Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy (Chapel Hill, N.C.,1999), 1‒164 (This chapter draws from that discussion.); Douglas R. Egerton, “He Shall Go Out Free”: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Lanham, Md., 1999); David Robertson, Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It (New York, 1999). On the controversy generated by Pearson, Designs Against Charleston, see Michael Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-­Conspirators,” WMQ 58 (October 2001), 915‒976, and the subsequent series of articles by various historians in “Forum: The Making of a Slave Conspiracy, Part 2,” WMQ 59 (January 2002), 135‒202; Douglas R. Egerton, “Why They Did Not Preach Up This Thing: Denmark Vesey and Revolutionary Theology,” SCMH 100 (October 1999), 298‒318; Walter C. Rucker, “I Will Gather All Nations”: Resistance, Culture, and Pan-­African Collaboration in Denmark Vesey’s South Carolina,” JNH 86 (Spring 2001), 132‒147; William Freehling, “Denmark Vesey’s Antipaternalistic Reality,” in William Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994), 34‒58; Robert Starobin, “Denmark Vesey’s Slave Conspiracy of 1822: A Study in Rebellion and Repression,” in John Bracey, August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., American Slavery: The Question of Resistance (Belmont, Calif., 1971), 142‒157; Richard Wade, “The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,” JSH 30 (May 1964), 143‒161; Robert L. Paquette and Douglas R. Egerton, “Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair,” SCMH 105 (January 2004), 8‒48; James O’Neil Spady, “Power and Confession: On the Credibility of the Earliest Reports of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy,” WMQ 68 (April 2011), 287‒304; Robert L. Paquette, “Jacobins of the Lowcountry: The Vesey Plot on Trial,” WMQ 59 (January 2002), 185‒192.

478

Notes to Pages 335–338

9.  William Johnson to John Quincy Adams, 3 July 1824, in Documents Printed by Order of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts During the Session of the General Court. A. D. 1845 (Boston, 1845), 51; Donald G. Morgan, Justice William Johnson, the First Dissenter: The Career and Constitutional Philosophy of a Jeffersonian Judge (Columbia, S.C., 1954), 131; William Johnson to Thomas Jefferson, 10 December 1822 in Founders Online, National Archives, https: founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Jefferson​/98​-01​-02​-3203; Morgan, Justice William Johnson, 138; Governor Thomas Bennett, 10 August 1822, Governors’ Messages, #1328, p. 51, SCDAH; Johnson, “Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement,” Charleston Courier, 22 June 1822, 29 June 1822; Johnson, To the Public of Charleston; David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason, eds., John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery: Selections from the Diary (New York, 2017), 112‒113. 10.  James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990), xiii; Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), 245. From Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakesh, I define resistance as “those behaviors and cultural practices by subordinate groups that contest hegemonic social formations [and] that threaten to unravel the strategies of domination.” See Haynes and Prakesh, “The Entanglement of Power and Resistance,” in Haynes and Prakesh, eds., Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in Southeast Asia (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 3. 11.  Emilia Da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York, 1994), xiii‒xiv; Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. 12.  Da Costa, Crowns of Glory, xiv. 13.  Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 138‒139; Martha Richardson to Dr. James Screven, 7 August 1822, Arnold-­Screven Papers, SHC; Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, xiii. 14.  Charles Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston, 35, 39‒40 (Charleston, S.C., 1854); Michael L. Kennedy, “A French Jacobin Club in Charleston, South Carolina, 1792‒1795,” SCMH 91 (January 1990), 4‒21; Eugene P. Link, Democratic-­Republican Societies, 1790‒1800 (New York, 1942); George C. Rogers Jr., Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of Charleston (Columbia, S.C., 1962), 245‒247; Charles D. Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Baltimore, 1897; repr. ed., Gloucester, Mass., 1964), 171‒175. 15.  Charles Pinckney to George Washington, 20 September 1791, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 28 December 2016, http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Washington​ /05​-08​-02​-0379. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, 22 March 1791 – 22 September 1791, ed. Mark A. Mastromarino (Charlottesville, 1999) 8:542–546.]; Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 14 July 1793, in Barbara B. Oberg et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 26, 11 May to 31 August 1793 (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 501; Tim Matthewson, A Pro-­Slavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-­American Relations During the Early Republic (Westport, Conn., 2003), 449‒450; Lacy Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009), 84; Thomas Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789‒1804 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1973), 53; Alfred N. Hunt, The Haitian Revolution on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, La., 1988); Charleston Courier, 28 February 1793; William Read to Jacob Read, 21 July 1795, Jacob Read Papers, William Perkins Library, DUL; Tim Matthewson, “Abraham Bishop, ‘The Rights of Black Men,’ and the American Reaction to the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 67 (Summer 1982), 149; George C. Rogers Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Norman, Okla., 1969; repr. ed., 1980), 110; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, 17 January 1788, House Proceedings, South Carolina House and Senate Journals, 8 January 1788‒29 February 1789, 20, South Carolina Files, Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Notes to Pages 338–340

479

16.  Christopher Fitzsimmons to John Hathaway, 18 July 1799, Christopher Fitzsimmons Letterbook, SCL; George Terry, “South Carolina’s First Negro Seaman Acts, 1793‒1803,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1980), 78‒93; Brevard, Alphabetical Digest of the Public Statute Law, 2:261; U. B. Phillips, “The South Carolina Federalists,” AHR 14 (July 1909), 735; Columbian Herald (Charleston), 17 October 1793; Duke de la Rochefoucault-­ Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America . . . in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (London, 1799), 584. 17.  James W. Hagy and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “The French Refugee Newspapers of Charleston” SCMH 97 (April 1996), 142‒143; Nicholas Herbemont, Pioneering American Wine: Writings of Nicholas Herbemont, Master Viticulturist, ed. David S. Shields (Athens, Ga., 2009), 9; “An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the State of South Carolina, December 19, 1805,” in Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Volume 5 (Columbia, S.C., 1839), 503; Charleston Library Society, A Catalogue of Books (Charleston, S.C., 1811); Petition of Jean Negrin to Senate, General Assembly Petitions, c. 1805, SCDAH; John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (London, 1796). See also Richard Price and Sally Price, eds., Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-­ Century Slave Society (Baltimore, 1992). 18.  Gazette of the United States, and the Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, 8 December 1797; Otsego Herald (Cooperstown, N.Y.), 28 December 1797; Charleston State Gazette, 22 November 1797; Pennsylvania Gazette, 13 December 1797; François-­Alexandre-­Frédéric, duc de La Rochefoucauld-­Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America (London, 1799), 584; South Carolina Weekly Museum, 25 November 1797; “Rusticus” [Alexander Garden] to Gentlemen, 7 August 1794, Alexander Garden Papers, SCHS; Jacob Alison to Jacob Read, 5 December 1797, Jacob Read Papers, DUL; New York Journal and Patriotic Register, 11 October 1793, cited in Melvin H. Jackson, Privateers in Charleston, 1793‒1796: An Account of a French Palatinate in South Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1969), 93; Philip D. Curtin, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man in Saint-­Domingue, 1788‒1791,” Hispanic American Historical Review 30 (May 1950), 157‒175; Robert Alderson, “Charleston’s Rumored Slave Revolt of 1793,” in David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 93‒111; Laurent DuBois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 105. 19.  William Johnson, Nugae Georgicae: An Essay Delivered to the Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina, 14 October 1815 (Charleston, S.C., 1815), 5, 35; Richard Furman, Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States (Charleston, S.C., 1822), 10; James Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy (Macon, Ga., 1985), 274‒286. 20.  Zephaniah Kingsley, A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-­operative System of Society as It Exists in Some Governments and Colonies in America, and in the United States, 3rd ed. (Tallahassee, Fla., 1833), 23; Daniel Schafer, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator (Gainesville, Fla., 2013); Daniel Stowell, ed., Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley (Gainesville, Fla., 2000). 21.  Confession of Jesse in Negro Plot: An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection Among a Portion of the Blacks of the City of Charleston, South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1822), 42; Charleston Courier, 23 August 1822; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 96; Sara Fanning, Caribbean Crossing: African-­Americans and the Haitian Emigration Movement (New York, 2015), 52‒55; Edlie Wong, “In the Shadow of Haiti: The Negro Seamen Act, Counter-­Revolutionary St.

480

Notes to Pages 340–344

Domingue, and Black Emigration,” in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler, eds., The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies (Philadelphia, 2016), 169. 22.  Merton L. Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (Urbana, Ill., 1965), 15; Genius of Universal Emancipation, July 1821; George Bourne, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, with Animadversions upon Dr. Smith’s Philosophy (Philadelphia, 1816), 21; Andrew Murray, “Writings That Have Shaped Our Past: The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, with Animadversions upon Dr. Smith’s Philosophy,” American Presbyterians 66 (Winter 1988), 229‒233; Confession of Jack Purcell, in Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 118; James H. Morehead, “Between Hope and Fear: Presbyterians and the 1818 Statement on Slavery,” Journal of Presbyterian History 96 (Fall/Winter 2018), 48‒61; Rufus King’s speech during the debates over Missouri was reprinted in Niles Register, 4 December 1819. 23.  Trial of Rolla Bennett, Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 62. Joel Poinsett informed President James Monroe on 22 August 1822 that the Missouri Compromise “was considered by this unfortunate and half instructed people as one of emancipation,” cited in Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619‒1865 (Baton Rouge, La., 1990), 135‒136. 24.  Peter Neilson, Recollections of a Six Years’ Residence in the United States of America (Glasgow, 1830), 234; Philip J. Staudenraus, ed., “Letters from South Carolina,” SCMH 58 (October 1957), 213‒214; William Faux, Memorable Days in America: Being a Journal of a Tour of the United States (1823), 69‒70; Faux’s letter to the Charleston Courier, published on 5 June 1819, is reproduced on pages 73 to 75 in his Memorable Days. See also City Gazette, 9 June 1819. Of Huger’s two sons, Daniel was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, while John, a Louisiana sugar planter, survived the war, having fought in Kentucky and Tennessee under General Braxton Bragg. 25.  Jacob Rapelye to Paul Rapelye, 5 August 1822, Napier, Rapelye, and Bennett Papers, SCL; Alexander MacGregor to Paul Rapelye, 16 July 1822, in Napier, Rapelye, and Bennett Papers, SCL; Charleston Courier, 20 September 1824; Arthur Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700‒1861, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1938); Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670‒1920 (New York, 1989), 115; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York, 1966), 361. 26.  Petition of the Society of Master Coopers to the House of Representatives, 3 December 1793; Petition of Sundry Mechanics of Charleston to the General Assembly, 1822, in General Assembly Petitions, SCDAH; Robert Mills, Statistics of South Carolina, Including A View of Its Natural, Civil, and Military History (Charleston, 1826), 427‒428. 27. Hamilton, Late Intended Insurrection, 17; Isidor Paiewonsky, ed., Eyewitness Accounts of Slavery in the Danish West Indies (New York, 1989), 66. See also Neville A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix (Baltimore, 1982); Arnold Highfield, “The Danish Atlantic and the West Indian Slave Trade,” in George Tyson and Arnold Highfield, eds., The Danish West Indies Slave Trade: Virgin Island Perspectives (Saint Croix, 1994), 11‒32; Robertson, Denmark Vesey; Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free. In Homer’s Iliad, Telemachus was the name of Penelope and Odysseus’s son. That Telemaque was later known as “Denmark” may reflect his purchase in a Danish colony or, as Kennedy and Parker suggested, may have resulted through “gradual corruption, among the Negroes” from “Telemaque” to “Denmark” or “Telmak.” See Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 160.

Notes to Pages 344–348

481

28.  Justin Girod-­Chantrans, Voyage d’un Suisse dans Différentes Colonies D’amérique (Neuchatel, 1785), cited in Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990), 28. On Joseph Vesey’s naval career, see William Henry Drayton to Capt. Joseph Vesey, 4 November 1775, in William Bell Clark ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution (Washington D.C., 1966), 2:889; Votes and Resolutions of the [Continental] Navy Board of the Eastern Department, 13 November 1777, in Michael J. Crawford, E. Gordon Bowen-­Hasell, Jr., and Mark L. Hayes eds., Naval Documents of the American Revolution (Washington D.C., 1996), 10:476; Muster Roll of the Continental Navy Sloop Providence, 22 February 1778, in Crawford et al., eds., Naval Documents of the American Revolution (Washington D.C., 2005), 11:403. 29.  Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour 10 (Autumn 1982), 121. See also Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, “The Many-­Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century,” in Colin Howell and Richard J. Twomey, eds., Jack Tar in History: Essays in Maritime History (Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1991), 11‒36; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-­American Maritime World, 1700‒1750 (New York, 1987); Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-­American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York, 2018). 30.  City Gazette, and Daily Advertiser, 10 July 1799; 1 October 1799, 8 October 1799, 9 November 1799, 11 December 1799 (the winning ticket was #1884); Manumission of Telemaque, 31 December 1799, Miscellaneous Records, KKK, 427, SCDAH. 31.  Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974); Michael Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984); Johnson and Roark, “‘A Middle Ground’: Free Mulattoes and the Friendly Moralist Society of Antebellum Charleston,” Southern Studies 21 (Fall 1982), 246‒265; Robert Harris, “Charleston’s Free Afro-­American Elite: The Brown Fellowship Society and Humane Brotherhood,” SCMH 82 (October 1981), 289‒310; Rules and Regulations of the Brown Fellowship Society (Charleston, S.C., 1844); Hamilton, Late Intended Insurrection, 17. 32. Confession of Bacchus Hammet, Benjamin Hammet Papers, DUL; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 40. 33.  African Methodist Episcopal Church [Richard Allen], The Doctrines and Disciplines of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia, 1817), 77, 97‒99, 103, 190, Early American Imprints, Series II, Shaw-­Shoemaker #39949; Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2008), 243‒245; Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, Pa., 1997), 25‒28. 34.  F. A. Mood, Methodism in Charleston: A Narrative of the Chief Events Relating to the Rise and Progress of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston (Nashville, Tenn., 1856), 129‒132; John Saillant, “Before 1822: Anti-­Black Attacks on Charleston Methodist Churches from 1786 to Denmark Vesey’s Execution,” Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life 16 (Winter 2016), at common​-place​.org​/book​/before​-1822; J. Gordon Melton, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African-­American Methodism (New York, 2007), 158; James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995), 35. 35.  Petition to the House of Representatives, 16 October 1820, General Assembly Petitions, SCDAH; Sidney Walter Martin, ed., “Ebenezer Kellogg’s Visit to Charleston, 1817,” SCMH, 49 (January 1948), 11; Daniel Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville,

482

Notes to Pages 348–353

Tenn., 1891), 31‒45; Christopher Gadsden, An Essay on the Life of the Right Reverend Theodore Dehon (Charleston, S.C., 1833), 200; Charleston Patriot, 9‒10 June 1818; Charleston Times, 17  July 1818. See also Albert Raboteau, “Richard Allen and the African Church Movement,” in Leon Litwack and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1988); Edward Smith, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Rise of Black Churches in Eastern American Cities, 1740‒1877 (Washington, D.C., 1988); Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 26‒27, 31‒45; Mood, Methodism in Charleston, 132; Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in the Old South (Atlanta, 1979), 120. 36.  Examination of Frank Ferguson, 27 June 1822, in Trial Record; Pendleton Messenger, 8 December 1820; Floyd Miller, The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787‒1863 (Urbana, Ill., 1975); Marina Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1973), 110; City Gazette, 3 October 1821, 22 April 1822 (brief notice of The Calypso’s arrival). 37.  City Gazette, and Daily Advertiser, 28 October 1790; Charleston Mercury, 23 May 1822; Charleston Evening Gazette, 10 November 1822; Court of General Sessions, Grand Jury Presentments, Charleston District, January Term 1816, in City Gazette, and Daily Advertiser, 22 January 1816; Michael A. Schoeppner, Moral Contagion: Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America (New York, 2019), 18. 38. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 122‒123. See also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 80; Warden of Charleston to House of Representatives, 1816, General Assembly Petitions, SCDAH; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 12; “Gaming and Swindling,” in Brevard, ed., Alphabetical Digest of the Public Statute Law, 1:389; “An Ordinance to Suppress EO Tables (September 1785),” in Timothy Ford, comp., Ordinances of the City Council of Charleston (Charleston, S.C., 1789), 20. 39.  Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1830), 3:141. 40. Hall, Travels in North America, 3:143‒144; Neilson, Recollections of a Six Years’ Residence, 284‒287. 41.  Charleston Courier, 21 August 1807, 1 July 1822; City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, 17 February 1816; Charleston Patriot and Commercial Advertiser, 9 August 1817; Michael D. Thompson, Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port (Columbia, S.C., 2015), 76. 42.  City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, 7 February 1821; Federal Population Census, Charleston District, South Carolina, 1820, SCDAH. 43.  “The Petition of Sundry Inhabitants on Charleston Neck to the House of Representatives,” in City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, 9 November 1822; Mills, Statistics of South Carolina, 396; Brevard, Alphabetical Digest of the Public Statute Law, 3:32‒61; Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America (London, 1824), 134‒135; Charleston Fire Masters Record Book, SHC. 44. Nic Butler, “Squeezing Charleston Neck, from 1783 to the Present,” www​.ccpl​.org​ /charleston​-time​-machine​/squeezing​-charleston​-neck​-1783​-present. 45. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978), 311; Jeremy Schipper, “Misconstruction of the Sacred Page: On Denmark Vesey’s Biblical Interpretations,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 138 (2019), 23‒38; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993), 206‒207; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 11; Trial of William Paul, 19 June 1822, Trial Record.

Notes to Pages 353–358

483

46.  John Hammond Moore, ed., “A Hymn of Freedom‒South Carolina,” JNH (January 1965), 50‒53; John Hammond Moore, ed., “The Abiel Abbott Journals: A Yankee Preacher in Charleston Society, 1818‒1827,” SCMH 68 (April 1967), 51‒73; Neilson, Recollections of a Six Years’ Residence, 258; Charles Joyner, “‘If You Ain’t Got No Education’: Slave Language and Slave Thought in Antebellum Charleston,” in Michael O’Brien and David Moltke-­Hansen, eds., Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986), 255‒278; Eugene D. Genovese, “Black Plantation Preachers in the Slave South,” Southern Studies 2 (Fall/Winter 1991), 204‒229. 47. Kingsley, Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-­operative System of Society, 13; Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701‒1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987), 66‒67; James O’Neil Spady, “Belonging and Alienation: Gullah Jack and Some Maroon Dimensions of the ‘Denmark Vesey Conspiracy,’ ” in Richard Bodek and Joseph Kelly, eds., Maroons and the Marooned: Runaways and Castaways in the Americas (Jackson, Miss., 2020), 30‒54; Schafer, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr.; Daniel L. Schafer, “Shades of Freedom: Anna Kingsley in Senegal, Florida, and Haiti,” Slavery and Abolition 17 (April 1996), 130‒154; Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), 81‒83; Ras Michael Brown, African-­Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (New York, 2012); Hamilton, Late Intended Insurrection, 23‒24; on Paul Pritchard’s property, see Land Records, Charleston County, 1 August 1810, A8:408‒410, MESDA. 48.  Deposition of Mr. Paul Pritchard, 10 July 1822, in Trial Record; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 163; Hamilton, Late Intended Insurrection, 24. 49.  Testimony of Julius Forrest, 8 July 1822, in Trial Record; Testimony of Harry Haig, 17 July 1822, in Trial Record; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 76‒79, 130. For travelers’ accounts of magic and witchcraft in eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century Africa, see, for example, John Mathews, A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone (London, 1788) 130‒133; Henry Meredith, An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa, (London, 1812), 30‒35. In its New World context, see, for example, Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York, 1971), 89‒151; Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-­American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1992), 117; Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-­Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1988), 154‒155; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, Ill., 1984); Elliott Gorn, “Black Magic: Folk Beliefs of the Slave Community,” in Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt, eds., Science and Medicine in the Old South (Baton Rouge, La., 1989), 314. 50.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-­Structure (New York, 1969), 95; Vincent Crapanzano, “Introduction: Case Studies in Spirit Possession,” in Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, eds., Case Studies in Spirit Possession (New York, 1977), 9. 51.  Confession of Y[orrick] Cross, Confession of Bacchus Hammet, and Examination of Joe LaRoche, 20 July 1822, Trial Record. 52.  Testimony of James Mall, 15 July 1822, in Trial Record; Charles Joyner, “If You Ain’t Got No Education,” 265. 53.  Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, “Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 2; Thompson, Working on the Dock of the Bay. 54.  Trial of Naphur Yates, 19 July 1822, in Trial Record; Trial of George Bampfield, 20 July 1822, in Trial Record, Examination of Perault Strohecker, 19 July 1822, in Trial Record, and Examination of Tom Russell, 15 July 1822, in Trial Record; Hamilton, Late Intended Insurrection, 21, 28.

484

Notes to Pages 358–362

55. Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790‒1915 (Urbana, Ill., 1990), 36‒44; Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York, 1970); Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820‒1860 (New York, 1960); Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-­Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History, n.s. 1 (1984), 187‒232; Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; Or, The Life of an American Slave (New York, 1837; repr. ed., Chapel Hill, N.C., 2012), 161‒162; Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783‒1784, ed. Alfred J. Morrison, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1911), 2:201; John Lambert, Travels Through Canada and the United States of America in the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808, 2 vols. (London, 1814), 2:163. 56.  Alphabetical Digest of Ordinances of the City Council of Charleston, 1783‒1818 (Charleston, S.C., 1818), 186; Confession of Bacchus Hammett in Benjamin Hammet Papers, William Perkins Library, DUL; James Henry Hammond, “Progress of Southern Industry,” DeBow’s Review 8 (June 1850), 518. See also Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, (New York, 1855; repr. ed., Urbana, Ill., 1987), 193, 202. 57.  Trials of Batteau Bennett (20 June 1822), Pharo Thompson (16 July 1822), Lot Forrester (17 July 1822), Jerry Cohen (20 July 1822), and George Evans (6 August 1822), Trial Record; Confession of Bacchus Hammet, Confession of John Enslow, in Benjamin Hammet Papers, William Perkins Library, DUL. 58.  Confession of John Enslow, Benjamin Hammet Papers, DUL; Testimony of William Paul, 19 June 1822; Examination of Frank Ferguson, 15 July 1822; Examination of Charles Perry (24 July 1822), Examination of Lydia Perry (24 July 1822), Testimony of Edward Perry (23 July 1822), and Trial of Agrippa Perry (24 July 1822), in Trial Record. On the slave traveling in disguise, see Stephen Elliott to William Elliott, 22 July 1822, Elliott and Gonzales Papers, SHC. 59.  John Potter to Langdon Cheves, 29 June 1822, 15 July 1822, Langdon Cheves Papers, SCHS; Anna Johnson to Elizabeth Haywood, 18 July 1822, Ernest Haywood Papers, SHC; Confession of John Enslow, Examination of Bacchus Hammet, Examination of Joe La Roche, and Trial of Rolla Bennett, 20 June 1822, Trial Record; Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 47. 60.  John Potter to Langdon Cheves, c. July 1822, Langdon Cheves Papers, SCHS; Harry Haig Confession, Committee Reports, 3 December 1822, General Assembly, SCDAH. 61. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 233. 62.  Hartford Courant, 16 July 1822; Douglass’ Monthly, August 1861, 4:510; Martha Richardson to Dr. James Screven, 7 August 1822, Arnold-­Screven Papers, SHC. See also Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 31; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 233. 63.  Mary Beach to Elizabeth Gilchrist, 5 July 1822, Mary Lamboll Thomas Beach Papers, SCHS; Report of John Bachman, c. July 1822, Hammett Papers, DUL. 64.  Anonymous note, Hammett Papers, DUL; [A Colored American], The Late Contemplated Insurrection in Charleston (New York, 1850), 6‒7; Mary Beach to Elizabeth Gilchrist, 27 July 1822, 25 July 1822, Mary Lamboll Thomas Beach Papers, SCHS; Martha Richardson to Dr. James Screven, 6 July 1822, Arnold-­Screven Papers, SHC; Charles Graves Militia Book, 26 July 1822, SCHS. (Chains and padlocks used to shackle the prisoners cost $47, the hoods for the condemned came to $30, while the council paid Thomas McMillan $61 “for erecting a gallows.” Council Minutes, August 1822, CCA.) Samuel Wragg Ferguson, “Memoirs of Samuel Wragg Ferguson [1900],” Samuel Wragg Ferguson Papers, DUL; Anna Johnson to Elizabeth Haywood, 27 July 1822, Ernest Haywood Papers, SHC; John D. Adger, My Life and Times, 1810‒1899 (Richmond, 1899), 52‒53.

Notes to Pages 363–367

485

65.  Council Minutes, 27 August 1822, CCA; Charleston Mercury, 26 July 1822; Thomas Higginson, “Denmark Vesey,” Atlantic Monthly 7 (June 1861), 728‒744. See also Thomas Higginson, Black Rebellion: Scenes from Travelers and Outlaws (Boston, 1889), 101‒162. 66.  City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, 15 August 1822; Petition to the House of Representatives, 16 October 1820, General Assembly Petitions, SCDAH; Sidney Walter Martin, ed., “Ebenezer Kellogg’s Visit to Charleston, 1817,” SCMH 49 (January 1948), 11; Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 31‒45; Christopher Gadsden, An Essay on the Life of the Right Reverend Theodore Dehon (Charleston, S.C., 1833), 200; Charleston Patriot, 9‒10 June 1818; Charleston Times, 17 July 1818. See also Raboteau, “Richard Allen and the African Church Movement”; Edward Smith, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Rise of Black Churches in Eastern American Cities, 1740‒1877 (Washington, D.C., 1988); Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 26‒27, 31‒45; Mood, Methodism in Charleston, 132; Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 120. 67.  Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 64; Examination of Rolla Bennett, 25 June 1822, Trial Record. 68. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 125; Robert Smalls in “American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, 1863,” in John Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, La., 1977), 377.

Chapter 10 1. Martha Richardson to James Screven, 16 September 1822, Arnold-­Screven Papers, SHC, Chapel Hill, N.C.; Thomas Bennett to Senate, 9 December 1822, Governors’ Messages, #1325, Governors’ Messages, SCDAH; Charleston Mercury 13 August 1822; Edward A. Pearson, Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999); Robert S. Starobin, ed., Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (New York, 1970); Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wisc., 1999); Walter J. Fraser, Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia, S.C., 1984), 209; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Crisis Controversy in South Carolina, 1816‒1836 (New York, 1965); George C. Rogers Jr., The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 236‒237. 2.  Daniel Goddard, Works Project Administration interview, in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: South Carolina Narratives, Volume 2, Part 2 (Westport, Conn., 1972), 151; George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: North Carolina and South Carolina Narratives, Supplement, Series 1: Volume 11 (Westport, Conn., 1972), 261‒263. 3.  Philip Hamer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts,” JSH 1 (February 1935), 6; Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 111‒115; “An Act for the Better Regulation and Government of Free Negroes and Persons of Color,” 21 December 1822, in Thomas Cooper and David McCord, comps., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1836‒1841), 7:461; Michael A. Schoeppner, Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America (New York, 2019), 31‒64; Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (New York, 2018). 4.  “Memorial of Sundry Masters of American Vessels Lying in the Port of Charleston, S.C., in the House of Representatives, February 19,” Niles Register, 15 March 1823, 23 August 1823; Annals of Congress, U.S. House of Representatives, 17th Congress, 2nd Session, 1056; Alan January, “The South Carolina Association: An Agency for Race Control in Antebellum Charleston,”

486

Notes to Pages 367–370

SCMH (July 1977), 191‒201; Rules of the South Carolina Association (Charleston, S.C., 1823), n.p., American Pamphlets from N-­YHS, #P5072. 5.  Hamer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts,” 3‒28; Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 111‒115; Edlie Wong, “In the Shadow of Haiti: The Negro Seamen Act, Counter-­Revolutionary Saint Domingue, and Black Emigration,” in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler, eds., The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States (Philadelphia, 2016), 162‒188; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 196; Schoeppner, “Peculiar Quarantines: The Seamen Acts and the Regulating Authority in the Antebellum South,” Law and History Review (August 2013), 559‒586; Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser, 1 September 1823. 6.  Benjamin Faneuil Hunt, The Argument of Benj. Faneuil Hunt, in the Case of the Arrest of the Person Claiming to Be a British Seaman (Charleston, S.C., 1823), cited in Paul Finkelman, ed., Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases (Washington, D.C., 1985), 262. See also Caroliniensis [Isaac Holmes and Robert Turnbull], On the Arrest of a British Seaman in Answer to Judge Johnson’s Opinion (Charleston, S.C., 1823), 45; Donald G. Morgan, Justice William Johnson, the First Dissenter: The Career and Constitutional Philosophy of a Jeffersonian Judge (Columbia, 1954); William Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760‒1818 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977). 7.  Justice William Johnson to Thomas Jefferson, 11 August 1823, http://​founders​.archives​ .gov​/documents​/Jefferson​/98​-01​-02​-3694; [William Johnson], Opinion of the Hon. William Johnson, Delivered 7 August 1823, in the Case of the Arrest of the British Seaman, ex parte, Henry Elkison v. Francis G. Deliesseline, Sheriff of Charleston (Charleston, S.C., 1823), in Paul Finkelman, ed., Free Blacks, Slaves, and Slaveholders in Civil and Criminal Courts: The Pamphlet Literature (New York, 1988) 2 vols., 1:290; Wong, “In the Shadow of Haiti,” 162‒188; Bolster, Black Jacks, 196; Schoeppner, “Peculiar Quarantines,” 559‒586; Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser, 1 October 1823. 8.  Carolinensis [Isaac Holmes and Robert Turnbull], On the Arrest of a British Seaman in Answer to Judge Johnson’s Opinion (Charleston, S.C., 1823; Charleston Mercury, 26 August 1823; Johnson, Opinion of the Hon. William Johnson, 1:299; Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 115; Morgan, Justice William Johnson, 197; Edward Rugemer, The Problem with Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, La., 2008), 82‒84; Wong, Neither Fugitive Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York, 2009), 183‒239; Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009), 285‒287; Schoeppner, Moral Contagion. 9.  “Memorial of the Citizens of Charleston to the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, Charleston 1823,” in U. B. Phillips, ed., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Volume 2: Plantation and Frontier Documents, 2 vols. (Cleveland, Ohio, 1909), 111; Article Six, in “An Act for the Better Regulation and Government of Free Negroes and Persons of Colour; And for Other Purposes,” 20 December 1823, in Cooper and McCord, comps., Statutes at Large 7:462; Charleston Courier, 1 July 1822; The Liberator, 15 August 1835, 22 August 1835, 5 September 1835; Marina Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1973), 67; Carolina Gazette, 19 October 1822. 10.  Charleston Patriot, 10 August 1835; The Liberator, 15 August 1835, 22 August 1835; “An Act the More Effectually to Prohibit Free Negroes and Persons of Color from Entering into This State; And for Other Purposes,” 21 December 1823, in Cooper and McCord, comps., Statutes at Large, 7:464; Henry de Saussure to Joel Poinsett, 6 July 1822, cited in Freehling, Prelude to

Notes to Pages 370–373

487

Civil War, 112; William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, “Walker’s Appeal Comes to Charleston: A Note and a Document,” JNH 59 (July 1974), 288; Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (State College, Pa., 1997), 145‒146; Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 340‒341. 11.  “An Act to Establish a Competent Force . . . for the City of Charleston and Its Vicinity,” in Benjamin Elliot and Martin Strobel, The Militia System of South Carolina, Being a Digest of Acts of Congress Concerning the Militia (Charleston, S.C., 1835), 107; Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1825 and 1825 or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1829), 2:45; Lloyd S. Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); Fraser, Charleston! Charleston!, 205; Oliver J. Bond, The Story of the Citadel (Richmond, 1936); John Thomas, The History of the South Carolina Military Academy (Charleston, S.C., 1898). 12.  Petition of the Black Swamp Association, 9 December 1823; Petition of the Edisto Island Auxiliary Association, 18 November 1823, General Assembly Petitions, SCDAH; Rules of the South Carolina Association (Charleston S.C., 1823), 2, 11; Charleston Mercury, 3 December 1823; Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1981), 336‒337; January, “The South Carolina Association,” 191‒201; Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 112‒113. 13.  Journal C, October 1814‒September 1824, Treasury Records, Ledgers and Journals; Account of the Contingent Expenses Incurred in the Late Insurrection, August and September 1822; Fees and Charges for the Detention of the Late Conspirators; Petition of Dr. John Righton, December 1823, General Assembly Petitions, SCDAH; Charleston Mercury, 25 December 1822; Will of Peter Desverneys, Wills, Charleston County, Vol. 49, Book B, 1856‒1862, p. 866, cited in Wikramanayake, World in Shadow, 10, 139. 14.  Mary Beach to Elizabeth Gilchrist, 5 July 1822, Mary Lamboll Thomas Beach Papers, SCHS; Anna Johnson to Elizabeth Haywood, 27 July 1822, Ernest Haywood Papers, SHC. See also Cynthia M. Kennedy, Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston’s Urban Slave Society (Bloomington, Ind., 2005); Patrick H. Breen, “In Terror of Their Slaves: White Southern Women’s Responses to Slave Insurrections and Scares,” in Winfred B. Moore, Kyle S. Sinisi, and David H. White Jr., Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-­First Century (Columbia, S.C., 2003), 69‒84. 15.  Mary Beach to Elizabeth Gilchrist, 23 July 1822, Mary Lamboll Thomas Beach Papers, SCHS; John Potter to Langdon Cheves, 24 June 1822, Langdon Cheves Papers, SCHS. 16.  James Hamilton, Negro Plot: An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection Among A Portion of the Blacks of the City of Charleston, South Carolina (Charleston, 1822), 29; Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker, An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes Charged With An Attempt To Raise An Insurrection in the State of South Carolina (Charleston, 1822), 137‒138. Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830‒1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1981); Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985), 85‒103; Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701‒1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987); Paul Finkelman, Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (New York, 2003); Jeffrey Robert Young, ed., Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740‒1829: An Anthology (Columbia, S.C., 2006). 17.  “Memorial of the Citizens of Charleston,” in Phillips, ed. Documentary History of American Industrial Society, 2:109; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census for 1820 (Washington, D.C., 1821), www​ .socialexplorer​ .com​ /tables​ /Census1820​ /R12593751; U.S. Bureau of the Census,

488

Notes to Pages 373–379

1830 Census: Fifth Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the U.S. (Washington, D.C., 1832), www​ .socialexplorer​.com​/tables​/Census1830​/R12593752. 18. “Memorial of the Citizens of Charleston,” in Phillips, ed., Documentary History of American Industrial Society, 2:109‒111; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014), 83‒98. 19. Achates [Thomas Pinckney], Reflections Occasioned by the Late Disturbances in Charleston (Charleston, S.C., 1822), 14‒15, 20; Southern Intelligencer, 16 November 1822, cited in Tise, Proslavery, 59. 20.  Henry de Saussure, A Series of Numbers Addressed to the Public on the Subject of Slaves and the Free People of Colour (Columbia, S.C., 1822), 11, 17; Charles Sumner, “Union Among Men of All Parties Against the Slave Power and the Extension of Slavery: A Speech Before a Mass Convention at Worcester, Massachusetts, June 28, 1848,” in George Frisbie Hoar, ed., Charles Sumner: His Complete Works (Boston, 1900), 2:233. 21.  Edwin Holland, A Refutation of the Calumnies Circulated Against Southern and Western States Respecting the Institution of Slavery (Charleston, S.C., 1822); William L. King, The Newspaper Press of Charleston, S.C.: A Chronological and Biographical Approach (Charleston, S.C., 1872), 109. 22. Holland, Refutation of the Calumnies, 11, 13, 61, 68. 23. Holland, Refutation of the Calumnies, 79‒82, 86; Tise, Proslavery, 59; David Moltke-­ Hansen, “The Expansion of Intellectual Life: A Prospectus,” in Michael O’Brien and David Moltke-­ Hansen, eds., Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986), 30; Clyde N. Wilson and Shirley B. Cook, eds., The Papers of John C. Calhoun (Columbia, S.C., 2003), 27:410. 24.  Gouverneur Morris to William Short, 18 September 1790, in Beatrix Cary Davenport ed., A Diary of the French Revolution, 2 vols. (Boston, 1939) 1:171; Whitemarsh Seabrook, A Concise View of the Critical Situation and the Future Prospects of the Slave-­Holding States in Their Relation to Their Coloured Population (Charleston, S.C., 1825), 4; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, La., 1988), 114‒115; Holland, Refutation of the Calumnies, 14, 78, 83‒84, 86; Tise, Proslavery, 59; Moltke-­ Hansen, “The Expansion of Intellectual Life,” 30. 25.  Weekly Raleigh Register, 11 October 1822; Hallowell Gazette (Maine), 16 October 1822 (letter from Charleston on the hurricane, dated 28 September); Richard Furman to Governor Thomas Bennett, September 1822, Richard Furman Correspondence, SCBHC; Richard Furman, Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States (Charleston, S.C., 1822), reprinted in James Rogers, Richard Furman: Life and Legacy (Macon, Ga. 1985), 274‒275, 277, 284; Frederick Dalcho, Practical Considerations Founded on the Scriptures; Relative to the Slave Population of South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1823), 26, 32; Donald Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780‒1845 (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 40‒43. 26.  C. E. Gadsden, An Essay on the Life of the Right Reverend Theodore Dehon (Charleston, S.C., 1833), 205; Dalcho, Practical Considerations, 26; Richard Furman to Governor Thomas Bennett, September 1822, Richard Furman Correspondence, SCBHC; Edmund Botsford, Sambo and Toney: A Dialogue Between Two Africans in South Carolina (Philadelphia, 1816), 42. 27.  Benjamin M. Palmer, Religion Profitable: With a Special Reference to the Case of Servants (Charleston, S.C., 1822), 16; The Letter of Paul to the Colossians, 4:1. 28.  Edward Brown, Notes on the Origin and Necessity of Slavery (Charleston, S.C., 1826), 2; Tise, Proslavery, 65‒66.

Notes to Pages 380–383

489

29.  The relevant pages from Kennedy and Parker’s Official Report are reproduced in Pearson, Designs Against Charleston, 160‒161. 30.  Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 1; Testimony of Harry Haig in Records of the General Assembly, Governors’ Messages #1328, 28 November 1822, SCDAH; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Black Rebellion: Selections from Travelers and Outlaws (Boston, 1889; repr. ed., New York, 1969), 274; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston, 1870); Howard Meyer, The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York, 2000). 31.  U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census: Population of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1864), 448; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Table Two, The True Value of Real Estate and Personal Property According to the Seventh Census (1850) and the Eighth Census (1860); Census: Statistics of the United States,” in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1866), 295, www2​.census​.gov​/library​/publications​/decennial​/1860​/statistics​ /1860d​-12​.pdf​?#; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1790 Census: Return of the Whole Number of Persons Within the Several Districts of the United States (Philadelphia, 1793), 4; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1830 Census: Abstract of the Returns of the Fifth Census (Washington, D.C., 1832), 21‒22. 32.  U.S. Census Bureau, “Table Five: Nativities of the Free Population,” in 1860 Census: Population of the United States: Mississippi (Washington, D.C., 1864), 272; U.S. Census Bureau, “Table Five: Nativities of the Free Population,” in 1860 Census: Population of the United States: Alabama (Washington, D.C., 1864), 10; U.S. Census Bureau, “Table Five: Nativities of the Free Population,” in 1860 Census: Population of the United States: South Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1864), 453; U.S. Census Bureau, “Table Three: Nativities of the White and Free Colored Population,” in 1850 Census: The Seventh Census of the United States: South Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1853), 339; Seabrook, A Report Accompanied with Sundry Letters on the Causes Which Contribute to the Production of Fine Sea Island Cotton (Charleston, S.C., 1827), 6, 16‒19; Southern Patriot (Charleston), 15 January 1847; Winyaw Intelligencer, 6 October 1819; Frederick Law Olmsted, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom of America: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 2 vols. (London, 1861), 1:204; Tommy W. Rogers, “The Great Population Exodus from South Carolina 1850‒1860,” SCMH 68 (January 1967), 14‒21; James D. Miller, South by Southwest: Planter Emigration and Identity in the Slave South (Charlottesville, Va., 2002); Damian E. Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (New York, 2015); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). 33.  Hugh Swinton Legaré to Isaac Holmes, 8 April 1833, in Mary S. Legaré, ed., Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C., 1846), 1:215; Legaré to Alfred Huger, 21 November 1835, in Legaré, ed., Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, 1:221; Legaré, “Speech Delivered Before the Union and States’ Right Party, July 4th. 1831, Charleston, S.C.,” in Legaré, ed., Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, 1:273; Michael O’Brien, A Character of Hugh Legaré (Knoxville, Tenn., 1985); O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, Volume 1 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Moltke-­Hansen, “The Expansion of Intellectual Life,” 3‒46; Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); Freehling, Prelude to Civil War. 34.  Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776‒1848 (New York, 1988), 419‒472; Emilia Viotto da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York, 1994); Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire (New York,

490

Notes to Pages 383–387

2007), 172‒198; James Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776‒1838 (Jackson, Miss., 1986), 123‒182; Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York, 2005). 35.  Hugh Swinton Legaré, “The Constitutional History of Greece,” in Legaré, ed., Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, 1:428; Legaré to Holmes, 8 April 1833, in Legaré, ed., Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, 1:215; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776‒1848 (New York, 1989), 419‒473; Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Princeton, N.J., 1997); C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 211. 36.  William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London, 1860), 10‒13; Q. K. Philander Doesticks [Mortimer Thomson], What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation? Great Auction Sale of Slaves, at Savannah, Georgia, March 2nd and 3rd 1859 (n.p., 1863), 5; Anne C. Bailey, The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History (New York, 2017); Malcolm Bell Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens, Ga., 1987), 311‒340. 37. On “migration generations,” see Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-­American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 159‒244. 38.  Thomas Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 12. 39.  U.S. Census Bureau, “Table One (Mississippi): Population by Counties; Table Eleven (Mississippi) Agriculture, Farms . . . etc.,” in U.S. Census Bureau, 1850 Census: The Seventh Census of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1853), 447, 458, www2​.census​.gov​/library​ /publications​/decennial​/1850​/1850a​/1850a​-34​.pdf ​?#; U.S. Census Bureau, “Table One (South Carolina), Population by Counties, and Table Eleven (South Carolina): Agriculture, Farms . . . etc.,” in U.S. Census Bureau, 1850 Census: The Seventh Census of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1853), 339, 346, www2​.census​.gov​/library​/publications​/decennial​/1850​/1850a​/1850a​-30​ .pdf​?#; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Table One (Mississippi), Population by Age and Sex,” in U.S. Census Bureau, 1860 Census: The Eighth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1864), 269, www2​.census​.gov​/library​/publications​/decennial​/1860​/population​/1860a​-22​.pdf​ ?#; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census: Agriculture of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1864), 85, www​.census​.gov​/library​/publications​/1864​/dec​/1860b​.html; James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York, 1992), 9‒11; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2013). 40.  Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005), 295‒296; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, Wisc., 1989); “The Forced Migration of Enslaved People in the United States, 1810‒1860,” American Panorama, https://​dsl​.richmond​.edu​/panorama​/forcedmigration. 41.  George W. Featherstonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States from Washington . . . to the Frontier of Mexico (New York, 1844), 36; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas, or, A Saddle trip on the Southwestern Frontier (New York, 1857), 56‒57; Robert Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, or, The Emigrant’s and Traveller’s Guide to the West (Philadelphia, 1834), 44; David J. Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720‒1835 (Jackson, Miss., 2004); John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770‒1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1988).

Notes to Pages 387–393

491

42.  Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-­American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 162‒244; Edward Ball, “Slavery’s Trail of Tears,” Smithsonian Magazine November 2015, www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/history​/slavery​-trail​-of​-tears​-180956968/; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 2 vols. (New York, 1862), 2:292 43.  James H. Adams, Message Number One of His Excellency Jas. H. Adams, Governor of South Carolina, to the Senate and House of Representatives, at the Session of 1856, with Accompanying Documents (Columbia, S.C., 1856), 10; Ronald Takaki, “The Movement to Reopen the African Slave Trade in South Carolina,” SCMH 66 (January 1965), 38‒54; Ronald Takaki, A Pro-­ Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York, 1971); Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery, 125‒152; Deyle, Carry Me Back, 78‒82. 44.  Special Committee on Slavery and the Slave Trade, Edward B. Bryan, and Walker, Evans & Co., Report of the Special Committee of the House of Representatives of South Carolina, On So Much of the Message of His Excellency Gov. Jas. H. Adams, as Relates to Slavery and the Slave Trade (Charleston, S.C., 1857), 3‒4, 26, 33, 36. 45.  Special Committee, Slavery and the Slave Trade, 13, 44. 46.  Special Committee on Slavery and the Slave Trade, and James Johnston Pettigrew, Report of the Minority as the Special Committee of Seven to Whom Was Referred So Much of His Late Excellency’s Message No. 1, as Relates to Slavery and the Slave Trade (Columbia, S.C., 1858), 9, 13, 18, 23, 25, 27; Constitution of the Confederate States of America, Article 1, section 9, Article 4, section 3, March 11, 1861 (Montgomery, Ala., 1861). 47.  Charleston Mercury, 20 December, 1860, 25 December 1860; Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery.

Epilogue 1.  New York Times, 18 April 1865. 2.  Henry Ward Beecher, “Address at the Raising of the Union Flag over Fort Sumter, April 14, 1865,” in Henry Ward Beecher, Patriotic Addresses in America and England: From 1850 to 1885 on Slavery, the Civil War and the Development of Civil Liberty in the United States (Boston, 1887), 676‒677, 683, 687‒688, 696; New York Times, 18 April 1865; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 67‒68; Wilbert L. Jenkins, Seizing the New Day: African-­Americans in Post-­Civil War Charleston (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), 38‒39; Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (New York, 1974), 970‒971; Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 2006), 7‒11; Emancipation Proclamation, 1 January 1863, in Rachel Filene Seidman, The Civil War: A History in Documents (New York, 2001), 101–105. 3.  Beecher, “Address at the Raising of the Union Flag,” 685; New York Times, 18 April 1865; New York Herald, 28 February 1865; Michael O’Brien and David Moltke-­Hansen, eds., Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986); Bernard E. Powers, Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822‒1885 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1999): Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston, 1845), 78. 4.  Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume 2: Secessionists Triumphant (New York, 2007); Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861‒1868 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005); William J. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (New York, 1983).

492

Notes to Pages 394–399

5.  Beecher, “Address at the Raising of the Union Flag,” 692; New York Times, 18 April 1865; H. Lee Cheek Jr., ed., John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speeches (Washington, D.C., 2003), 267‒308 (Exposition and Protest), 317‒342 (Fort Hill Address); John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, February 1837,” in Speeches of John Calhoun (New York, 1843), 224‒225; Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery; John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830‒1860 (New York, 1979); Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South (New York, 2012); Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, La., 1985); William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816‒1836 (New York, 1965); Robert Y. Hayne to James H. Hammond, 25 February 1830, in “Letters on the Nullification Movement in South Carolina, 1830‒1834,” AHR 6 (July 1901), 737. 6.  New York Herald, 28 February 1865; Douglas W. Bostick, Charleston Under Siege! The Impregnable City (Charleston, S.C., 2010); W. Scott Poole, South Carolina’s Civil War: A Narrative History (Macon, Ga., 2005). 7.  New York Herald, 28 February 1865; New York Tribune, 4 April 1865; Walter J. Fraser, Jr., Charleston! Charleston!: The History of A Southern City (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 272; Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York, 1992), 93; Powers, Black Charlestonians; Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume 2, 288‒308; Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 253. 8.  New York Times, 17 April 1865; Powers, Black Charlestonians, 36‒72; James Henry Hammond, An Oration on the Life, Character and Services of John C. Calhoun (Delivered 21st November 1850 in Charleston, S.C.) (Charleston, S.C., 1850), 33, 52. 9.  Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J., 1991); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776‒1848 (London, 1988); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (London, 2011); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770‒1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975). 10.  Christian Recorder, 17 January 1863; Cleveland Morning Leader, 12 January 1863; New York Herald, 7 January 1863; Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 1862‒1868 (New York, 1969), 128‒134; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings, ed. R. D. Madison (New York, 1997), 55; Theodore Rosengarten, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter with the Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822‒1890) (New York, 1986), 713; Charlotte Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands,” The Atlantic, May 1864; Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York, 1964); James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 370‒371. 11. Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 55, 129‒130, 133, 138; see also Stephen R. Wise, Lawrence S. Rowland, and Alexander Moore, Rebellion, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 1861‒1893: The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Volume 2 (Columbia, S.C., 2015), 1‒31. 12.  Howard N. Meyer, ed., The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York, 2000), 1‒40; Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Gordon S. Barker, The Imperfect Revolution: Anthony Burns and the Landscape of Race in Antebellum America (Kent, Ohio, 2010), 65‒71; David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2005); Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete Civil

Notes to Pages 399–404

493

War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago, 1999); Thomas Wentworth Higginson, A Ride Through Kanzas (New York, 1856), 24; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Black Rebellion: Five Slave Revolts (New York, 1998). 13.  U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census: Agriculture of the United States, South Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1864), 129; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census: Population of the United States, South Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1864), 452; Peter Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670‒1920 (New York, 1989), 117; Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers, The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, 1514‒1861 (Columbia, S.C. 1996); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, Ill., 1984); Philip Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700 to 1880,” WMQ 39 (October 1982), 563‒599; S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); 1860 census data for Beaufort County from Social Explorer Dataset (SE), Census 1860, digitally transcribed by Inter-­University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Edited and verified by Michael Haines. Compiled, edited, and verified by Social Explorer. 14.  Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People:” Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs (New York, 1989); Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen H. Stokes, ed., Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields: Letters of the Heyward Family, 1862‒1871 (Columbia, S.C., 2010). 15.  I. E. Lowery, Life on the Old Plantation in Ante-­Bellum Days, or A Story Based on Facts by the Reverend I. E. Lowery (1911), in Susanna Ashton, ed., I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives (Columbia, S.C., 2010), 224‒225; John G. Barrett, Sherman’s March Through the Carolinas (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956). 16. Lowery, Life on the Old Plantation, in Ashton, ed., I Belong to South Carolina, 225 [Lowery, 46]; see also Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); Berlin et al., Free at Last. 17.  Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800‒1860 (New York, 1988), 5‒43; Rachel Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760‒1808 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992); Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800‒1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), 219‒256; Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 141‒172. 18.  James Henry Hammond, “Speech on the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution, March 4, 1858,” in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina (New York, 1866), 317; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015); Beckert, “Empire of Cotton,” The Atlantic, 12 December 2014; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2013). 19.  Roger Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-­American Culture in the Plantation South (New York, 1992), xxii; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Joyner, Down by the Riverside. 20.  Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-­American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990). 21.  Alexander Stephens, “The Cornerstone Speech,” in Paul Finkelman, ed., Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents (New York, 2003),

494

Notes to Pages 404–405

90‒91; Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge, La., 1988); Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860–April 1861 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 402‒408. 22.  Committee of Freedmen on Edisto Island, South Carolina, to Freedmen’s Bureau Commissioner, 20‒21 October 1865, in Steven Hahn, Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O’Donovan, John C. Rodrigue, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Land and Labor, 1865, Series 3, Volume 1, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861‒1867 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), 442‒444; General O. O. Howard to Committee of Freedmen on Edisto Island, 22 October 1865 in Hahn, et​.al., eds., Land and Labor, 442-­444. www​.freedmen​.umd​.edu​/Edisto​%20petitions​.htm; Frederick Douglass, “The Color Question,” 5 July 1875, in John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Volume 4, Series 1: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 1864‒80 (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 420; David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York, 2018).

INDEX

21st Massachusetts, 12, 394, 396 4th July celebrations, 229, 249, 331 55th Massachusetts (USCT), 12, 394–95 Abbeville County, 300–306, 393 Act for the Settlement of Ireland (1652), 30 Adams, John, 233, 238, 246, 283 Adams, John Quincy, 335, 393 Adams, Samuel, 209, 221 African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), 12, 332–34, 341, 348, 372–77 Africanization, 33, 89, 93, 106, 197 agrarian republicanism, 145, 327, 329 Alabama, 6, 381, 384–86, 402 Albemarle (ship), 13–14, 42 alcohol, 27, 61, 97, 99, 196, 207, 328, 349 Allaire, Anthony (soldier), 270 Allen, Richard, 347 Allston, Joseph (planter), 172, 283 Altamaha River, 65, 226 Amelia Township, 143 American Anti-­Slavery Society, 341 American Colonization Society, 348, 374 Amherst, Jeffrey (soldier), 138 Amis Des Noirs, 285, 314 Amsterdam, 20, 141 Anderson, Robert (soldier), 391 Anglicans, 155–56 Angola, 55–57, 85–88, 92–96, 151, 302 Annapolis, Md., 81 Appalachians, 7, 91, 135, 138 architecture, 199 arson, 10, 250 artillery, 224, 238, 257, 331, 391 artisans, 3, 9, 24, 108, 112, 179, 213–15, 218, 224–26, 228–29, 254, 295, 329, 345 Asbury, Francis, 319, 325 Ashley Hall, 91, 275, 277 Ashley River, 101, 275

assault, 3, 134, 160–61 Assembly (Barbados), 20, 28, 31, 35–36, 38, 40 Atlantic Revolutions, 5–7, 12, 214, 283–85, 292–93, 335, 363, 377, 396, 403 Atlantic World, 5–7, 22, 285, 292, 396 Attakullakulla (Cherokee diplomat), 139, 248 Augusta, Ga., 137, 151, 162, 168, 253–54, 293 Austin, George (planter), 125 Axtell, Daniel (planter), 67–78 Axtell, Rebecca, 67 backcountry, 129–70, 287–330 Balfour, Nisbet (soldier), 258 Ball, Charles, 358, 364 Ball, Elias (planter), 183, 276 balls, 154 Baltic, 72–73 Baltimore, Md., 320 banditry, 9, 134, 151, 157–59 bandits, 134, 151, 157–165, 296 Baptist War, 1831–1832 (Jamaica), 383 Baptists, 143, 152–57, 317–23, 329, 340 Barbadian Adventurers, 14 Barbados, 4, 13–51, 54–56, 78, 122 Barnwell County, 295 Barnwell, John (soldier), 59–64 Bartram, John (naturalist), 118, 121 Bartram, William (naturalist), 169 Baxter, Edward (mariner), 14 Beaufort, S.C., 83, 228, 397–99 Beauregard, Pierre (soldier), 391, 393 Beckles, Hilary (historian), 26 Beecher, Henry Ward, 391–94 beheading, 96–97, 100 Beit, Antoine (priest), 20, 24–26, 32, 37 Belfast, Ireland, 129–30, 179

496 Benezet, Anthony (abolitionist), 212–22 Bennett, Thomas (governor), 365 Berkeley, William (proprietor), 45, 50 Berlin, Ira (historian), 5–6, 8–9, 356 Bermuda, 52, 237 Bethel Association, 324–25 Bible, 147, 315, 318–19, 326, 353, 376, 403 Bight of Biafra (Africa), 33–35, 55, 94, 120, 316 Black Dragoons, 281 Black Majority, 6 Black Mingo Creek, S.C., 146, 164 Black Rice, 6, 75–76 Black River, S.C., 130, 144–47, 164, 295 Black Swamp Association, 371 Blackstock’s Plantation, Battle of, 261 Blake, William (artist), 339, 362, 365 Blake’s Fields, 331 Board of Trade, 177 boatmen, enslaved, 148, 234 boats, 86–87, 109, 146, 298; schooners, 65, 112, 234, 351; canoes, 65, 85, 93, 95, 105 boatyards, 2, 93, 109, 356, 395 Boltzius, Johann (minister), 70, 79–80, 102, 108, 120–21, 208 Bonny (Africa), 1, 55, 316 Boone, Thomas (governor), 224–25 Boonesborough, S.C., 139 borderlands, 7, 53, 57–59, 63–66, 136, 138, 282 Boston, Mass., 171, 180, 185, 215, 224–25, 228 Boston Massacre (1770), 224 Botsford, Edmund (minister), 153–57, 287–91, 317, 325, 378, 399–401 Boundary Street, 351–52 boycotts, 209, 225, 228–30, 285 Boyer, Jean-­Pierre (Haitian leader), 340 Braddock, Edward (soldier), 136 Brandywine, Battle of, 195, 210 Brayne, Henry (mariner), 14 Brazil, 18, 20 Brewton, Miles (planter), 199–201, 258, 394 Bridgetown (Barbados), 27, 34 Bristol (England), 33, 35, 180–81 British Army, 194, 234; in Anglo–Cherokee War, 137–38; Revolutionary War, 250–53, 258–75 British Civil Wars, 14, 16, 43 British East Florida, 281–82, 296

Index British Empire, 195, 210, 223, 243, 382 British Legion, 251, 259–60, 264, 271–72. See also Tarleton, Banastre, 251–52, 255, 261, 264–65, 274 Broad River, S.C., 170, 246, 264, 321, 326 Broughton, Thomas (governor), 86 Brown Fellowship Society, 345 Brown, Morris (minister), 347–48, 353, 377 Buford, Abraham (soldier), 259–60 Bulkeley’s Farm (Charleston), 354 Bull, Stephen, 90–91 Bull, William, 88–91, 97, 100, 128, 135, 167, 192, 198, 221, 216–20, 228, 274, 283 Bull, William Tredwell (minister), 61, 63 Bunce Island (Africa), 55, 120, 150, 180, 241 Bunker Hill, Battle of, 245 Burke, Aedanus (lawyer), 296–97 Burnet, John (minister), 233 Bushman, Richard (historian), 173 Butler, Pierce (planter), 249–50, 255, 299–301, 303 Butler, Pierce Mease (planter), 384 Cabinda (Africa), 1, 55, 88, 94 Cabo Corso (Gulf of Guinea), 116 Calabar (Africa), 1, 33, 35, 55, 120, 316 Calhoun, John C., 2, 329, 393–95. See also South Carolina Exposition and Protest, 394 Calhoun, Joseph, 2, 329, 393–95 Cambridge, University of, 194, 196 Camden (Pine Tree Hill), S.C., 140, 147–48, 150, 158–60, 162, 164–65, 168, 258, 261, 266, 293, 295, 312 Camden, Battle of, 195, 262, 274–76 camp meetings, 317, 323–25 Campbell, Archibald (soldier), 253, 280 Campbell, William (governor), 127, 221, 231–34, 236, 239, 280 cane fields, 15, 17, 19–22, 34–41, 47, 120, 307 Cane Ridge, Ky., 322–23 Cape Fear, N.C., 48, 60 Caribbean, 3,7, 11, 17, 30, 45, 54, 60, 78, 80–85, 181, 285, 292, 307, 311, 337, 344, 385 Carlisle Bay (Barbados), 14, 42 Carney, Judith (cultural geographer), 6, 75–76 Carolina (ship), 13–14, 42 carpenters, 84, 92, 108, 110–12, 179, 279, 282, 288, 345, 350

Index Cartwright, Peter (minister), 322 cash, 69, 97, 110–11, 115, 117, 121, 159, 201, 374 Cashaway Neck, S.C., 153–54, 325–26 Castiglioni, Luigi (author), 188, 297, 305 Castillo San Marcos (San Agustin), 53, 58, 66 Catawba Indians, 57–59, 62, 134, 219–20 Catesby, Mark (naturalist), 79 Catholic, 20, 30, 32, 83 cattle, 20, 45, 53–58, 67–74, 119, 123, 130–31, 144–45, 149–50, 159, 254–55, 269–73, 365, 387; cattle pens, 74, 162, 164 cavalry, 86, 251, 259, 264, 360 census, 54, 62, 326, 381–82, 388–89 charity, 34, 132, 152, 163, 184 Charles Town Fire Company, 216, 225 Charles Town Library Society, 181, 184, 239, 339 Charleston Baptist Association, 291, 329 Charleston Courier, 334, 342, 368, 375 Charleston Mercury, 349, 368–69, 388, 390 Charleston Neck, S.C., 347, 350–52 Charlotte Amalie, 343 Cheraw Hill, S.C., 147–48 Cheraws, S.C., 156, 162–63, 165, 258, 264, 268, 297 Cherokee Indians, 2, 4, 9, 63–64, 133–35, 248; Cherokee War (1760), 133–39, 142, 158, 160–62, 182, 247 Chesapeake Bay, 13, 45, 146, 171, 188, 237, 265–66 Chesnut, Mary, 383 Cheves, Langdon, 372 Chippendale, Thomas, 179, 189 Christ Church Parish, S.C., 114, 178, 207 Christian stewardship, 10, 154, 170, 240, 291–92, 317, 322, 330, 340, 363–64, 372, 378, 384 Christianization, 152, 293, 324–25 church discipline, 154, 159, 166, 291, 325 Church of England, 146, 155, 189 The Citadel, Charleston, 371 Circuit Court Act, 165, 169, 247 Clarkson, Thomas, 284–85 Clinton, Henry (soldier), 248–51, 255–60, 267, 275, 279, 394 clocks, 22, 93, 189 clothing, 282, 318; elite, 190, 197; slave, 104, 121, 273, 351, 376 Coercive Acts, 228–29

497

Coffin, Thomas (planter), 125 Colhoun, John (planter), 125 College of Charleston, 337 Colleton County, S.C., 219–20 Colleton, John, 14, 18, 45 Colleton, Thomas, 14–15 Colt, Henry (soldier), 19 Columbia, S.C., 293, 297, 342, 387, 392 Combahee River, 48, 59, 61–65, 210, 249, 254, 268, 359 Committee of Safety, 233 Commons House of Assembly, 164, 177–78, 209, 227, 238 Comte D’Estaing, 256 Comte de Rochambeau, 267 concerts, 171, 174, 199, 309 Concord, Mass., 230, 245 Confederate States of America (CSA), 12, 390–92, 404 Congaree Valley, S.C., 141, 148, 247, 271–72, 275–76, 293, 300 Congarees, 134, 166 Constitutional Convention, 195, 301–4, 337, 341 consumption, habits of, 16, 25, 73, 124, 132, 146, 148, 173–76, 191, 202 Continental Army, 236, 242, 250–51, 257–58, 262, 272 Continental Association, 230, 245, 302 Continental Congress, 182, 190, 226, 229–30, 236, 239 conversation, 12, 74, 185, 203–7, 224, 238, 313, 321, 332, 349, 362, 392, 396 conversion, 36, 67, 87, 155, 287–89, 318, 322–25 Cooper River, 93, 106, 109, 119, 174, 181, 183, 229, 235, 297–98, 319, 345 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 13, 28, 42–51 Coosawhatchie River, 254 Copley, John Singleton (painter), 190 Cornwallis, Charles (soldier), 250, 259–67, 274–75 cosmopolitanism, 9, 93, 198, 349, 363, 396, 403 cotton, 2, 5, 9, 228; on Barbados, 19–21, 23, 41; cotton gin, 5, 292, 298–99, 300, 316, 401; “cotton revolution,” 2, 4, 9–10, 292, 298–301; Sea Island cotton, 343, 381, 397, 399; short-­staple cotton, 298–301, 342, 402 Council of Safety, 229, 233–35

498

Index

counterrevolutionary generation, 337, 364, 371, 390, 393, 401 Court of Common Pleas, 166 Cowhowee Valley, N.C., 138 cow pens, 54, 68–69, 70–72, 74 Cowpens, Battle of, 264–65 Craft, Ellen, 384–85 Craft, William, 384–85 Craven, Charles (governor), 57, 63–64 Creek Indians, 57–58, 63–64, 136, 181 Creighton, George (free Black), 348 Crevecoeur, Hector St. Jean (writer), 145, 327 Crokatt, James (colonial agent), 181 Cromwell, Oliver, 14, 30, 44, 46 Cuba, 66, 86, 350, 383 cuisine, 37, 121, 202 Cumberland Island, Ga., 66 Cunningham, Patrick, 247–48 Cunningham, William, 267, 296 da Costa, Emilia Viotti (historian), 91, 336 Dalcho, Frederick (minister), 377–78 Danton, Georges, 309 Davis, Caleb (planter), 83 De Brahm, William Gerard (surveyor), 71, 78, 124 de Montiano, Manuel (governor, Spanish Florida), 83 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 173 Deas, John (planter), 254 debt, 19, 47, 61, 68, 145, 160, 196, 294, 296–97, 313 Declaration of Independence, 197, 240, 249, 302 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 285, 311, 377 Declaratory Act, 217, 227 Deep Roots, 6 deer, 57, 61, 130, 136, 145, 159 deforestation, 47 Dehon, Theodore (minister), 348, 377 Delany, Martin (writer), 391 Demerara, rebellion, 366, 370, 383 Democratic-­Republicans, 327, 329 de Saussure, Henry, 316–17, 370, 374 Desverneys, Peter, 332 DeWitt’s Corner, Treaty of, 248 Dickinson, John, 220 Dillon’s Tavern (Charleston, S.C.), 211, 216, 225–26, 239

dinner parties, 171, 175–76, 198, 204 dogs, 31, 41, 155 Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 9. See also “hidden transcript,” 9–12, 28, 81, 92, 335, 403 Dorchester Creek, S.C. 74, 101, 125, 188, 268, 259 Dorset (England), 28, 43–44 Douglass, Frederick, 404 dram shops, 104, 110, 379 Drax, James (planter), 22–25, 41 Drayton, John (governor), 292, 311, 314 Drayton, William Henry, 229, 245 drums, 38, 96, 99, 198, 216, 245 drunkenness, 27, 86, 98, 103, 153–54, 207, 272, 309, 349. See also intoxication, 153–54, 159 dry goods, 115, 131–32, 183 dung, 22–23, 47, 295. See also manure, 22, 53, 67, 69, 78, 150 Dunmore, Proclamation, 214, 237, 242–43 Dunn, Richard (historian), 41 Dutch, 20, 48, 116 Dutch West India Company, 20 Dyssli, Samuel, 1, 56–57 East Bay Street, Charleston, 114, 348 East India Company, 228 Edgefield County, S.C., 296, 300, 393 Edisto Island, S.C., 46, 377, 404 Edisto Island Auxiliary, 371 Edisto River, 90, 99, 189 Edwards, Bryan, 23 Edwards, Joshua (minister), 153 elections, 49, 164, 167, 169, 177, 224–25, 340 Elfe, Thomas (craftworker), 179, 185, 189 elite, lowcountry, 107, 171–210, 242, 283, 312, 393; education of, 43, 192–96, 198, 210 Elkison, Henry (sailor), 367, 368–69; Elkison v. Deliesseline, 367–69 Elmina, 116 emancipation, ideas of, 222, 237–38, 241–43, 274, 285, 292, 308, 320–21, 341–42, 353, 373, 375, 389, 392, 395, 400, 403–4 Emancipation Proclamation, 392, 397 enclosure, 16, 28–30 Enoree River, 142, 324 Equaino, Oluadah, 211–13, 284 Estate Confiscation Act (1782), 267 Eutaw Springs, Battle of, 250, 266

Index Eutaw Springs, S.C., 148, 293 evangelical religion, 10, 133, 155–59, 200, 233, 247, 287–93, 317–26, 330, 352, 399, 401 Exodus, Book of, 353 Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, 340 Faust, Drew Gilpin (historian), 379 Featherstonehaugh, George, 386 Ferguson, Patrick (soldier), 263 First South Carolina Volunteers, 380, 398–99 Fisher, Robert (planter), 148–51 fisherman, 111–12, 280, 374 fishing, 60, 71, 122, 277, 359, 403 Fishing Creek, S.C., 261, 296 flax, 131, 145–46, 228 Fletcher, Daniel (planter), 19 Ford, Timothy (lawyer), 295, 303 Fordyce, John (minister), 155 forests, 8, 18, 53, 58–59, 63, 67, 72, 83, 123, 128, 135, 261–62, 304, 387 Fort Frederica, Ga., 84 Fort Hill Address (John C. Calhoun), 394 Fort Johnson, 215, 230, 238, 248, 279 Fort Motte, 276–77 Fort Prince George, 136–39 Fort Sumter, 12, 391–93, 395 Foucault, Michel, 176 France, 5, 7, 120, 213, 251, 285, 292, 308, 311–14, 337, 339, 364, 396 Franklin, Benjamin, 187–88, 207, 222 Fraser’s Highlanders, 280 Fredericksburg Township, S.C., 143, 160–61, 440 free Blacks, 12, 83, 104, 112, 167, 213, 232, 234, 256, 268, 280, 331–36, 341–43, 345– 48, 351–52, 361, 363, 366, 369, 370–75 Freehling, William (historian), 369 French Empire, 11, 285, 308–9, 311–13, 337, 364 French Revolution, 213, 285, 304, 311–12, 334, 337, 368, 370, 376 French, Christopher (soldier), 138 Frierson, John (planter), 400 frontier generation, 53, 123 Fulsom, Jeremiah (bandit), 159–60 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 43, 48–50 Furman, Richard (minister), 40, 288, 317, 322–25, 339–40, 377

499

Gabriel (Prosser), 311, 399 Gadsden, Christopher, 181–83, 209–11, 214, 217, 221, 224–25, 229–30 Galloway, Joseph, 252–53 gallows, 81, 96, 215, 235, 331, 335, 339, 355, 361–63 Gambia River, 55 gaming, gambling, 27, 111, 116, 166, 206, 208 Garden, Alexander (botanist), 185, 208–9, 313–14 gardens, 50, 172, 315. See also provision grounds, 37–38, 71, 93, 104, 118, 121–22, 127 Garrison, William Lloyd, 370, 391, 398 Gell, Monday, 335, 339–40, 348, 352, 356–57, 363 gender, 6, 79–80, 89, 95, 113, 117, 127, 145, 192–94, 402 Genet, Edmond-­Charles, 310, 337, 395 gentility, 173–74, 176, 186, 193–94, 200, 206 gentry generation, 8, 172, 178, 181, 210, 214, 393 gentry, English, 24, 43 George III, 135, 189, 192, 198, 211, 223, 237–38 Georgetown, S.C., 66, 81, 130, 172, 258, 261, 283, 287–88, 319, 359, 365 Georgia, 66, 84–88, 91, 100, 122, 133, 141, 160, 222–26, 238, 246, 248, 251–56, 275, 281–82, 291, 298, 300, 306, 318, 322, 384, 397, 402 Germain, George, 238, 252 Germantown, Battle of, 195, 210 Gervais, John Lewis (planter), 220, 269 Gibbes family, 46 Gibson, Gideon, 166 gins, cotton, 5, 292, 298–99, 401 Glen, James (governor), 75, 109, 135–36, 173, 178, 186, 197 Gloucestershire (England), 43 Gold Coast, 20, 35, 55, 94, 316 Golightly, Fenwick (planter), 90, 397 Goose Creek, S.C., 61, 126, 168, 281, 359; Goose Creek Men, 176 Goree, 55 gossip, 74, 81, 93, 103, 110, 114, 117 Governor’s Council, 140, 142, 178, 181, 198, 219 Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose), 83

500

Index

Gradual Abolition Act (Pennsylvania), 284 grain, 19, 47, 67, 76–78, 102, 118, 121, 146, 208, 271 Granby, S.C., 148 grand jurors, 102–4, 114–16, 200, 312, 333, 351, 369, 387 Grant, James (soldier), 138 Great Awakening, 165 Great Cane Break, Battle of, 248 Great Smoky Mountains, N.C., 162 Great Wagon Road, 142 Greek language, 192, 399 Greene, Nathanael (soldier), 250, 263–69, 271, 273, 276, 281, 299 Greenville, S.C., 327–28 Grimke, John (judge), 295–97, 312 grog shops, 10, 12, 82, 328, 349. See also taverns, 10, 12, 104, 196, 218, 224, 349–50, 363, 396 Guilford Courthouse, Battle of, 265 Guinea Company, 33 Gulf of Mexico, 2, 292, 402 Gullah, 356 “Gullah” Jack Pritchard, 340, 350, 353–55, 359–60, 363 guns, 31, 41, 53, 61, 158, 180, 219, 230, 234–35, 272, 397 Habersham, James, 233 Hahn, Steven (historian), 383 Haig, Harry, 354–55, 360, 379 Haiti, 285, 292, 340–41; Revolution, 315, 340, 368, 383 Hamilton, James, 332, 354, 369, 393 Hammett, William (minister), 321 Hammond, James Henry, 2, 358, 390, 393, 395, 402 Hampstead, Charleston, 345, 347, 363 Hampton, Wade (planter), 300, 385 Handley, Scipio (free Black), 280 hanging, 96, 235–36, 242, 331, 362, 369 Hanging Rock, S.C., 261, 324 Harrington, James (political theorist), 29, 49 Hart, Oliver (minister), 245, 288 Harvard, 172 Havana, 86–87 Hayes Station, S.C., 267 Hayne, Robert, 332 Hebrides, Scotland, 143 herding, 54, 69–71, 143, 145, 271

herdsmen, 2, 54, 70, 71–72 Hessians, 253 hidden transcript, 9–12, 28, 81, 92, 335, 403 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 380, 397–99 Highlands, Scotland, 32, 138, 143, 253, 280 Hilliard, William (planter), 45 Hillsborough, S.C., 139 Hilton Head, S.C., 298, 397 Hilton, William (mariner), 48 hiring, 110–12, 117, 133, 351, 358, 369 Hobbes, Thomas (political theorist), 29 Hobkirk’s Hill, Battle of, 266 hogs, 68–71, 119, 130–31, 149–50, 271–73, 387 Holetown, Barbados, 27 Holland, Edwin (newspaper editor), 368, 375 homestead ethic, 144–45 horse racing, 201, 207, 296 horses, 3, 60, 69–70, 83, 90, 105, 118, 127, 131, 134, 139, 144, 159–60, 164–65, 169, 199, 201–7, 253, 257, 270–71, 296, 319, 387 household, 76, 83, 97, 107–9, 113, 123, 130–33, 137–40, 143–51, 154–55, 159–62, 169–70, 181, 194, 290–94, 298, 326–27, 329, 344, 401 Howe, Robert (soldier), 253, 280 Huck, Christian (soldier), 260 Hudson Valley, N.Y., 145, 312 Hudson’s Bay Company, 44 Huguenots, 64, 163, 167, 184 hunting, 57–61, 70–71, 100, 122, 136–37, 145, 159, 277, 403 hurricanes, 19, 77, 80, 107, 119, 199, 256 Hutchinson, Thomas (planter), 233 hymns, 287, 290, 323 Hyrne, Edward (planter), 67–69, 72–73 indentured servants, 8, 15–17, 23–26, 28, 31–34, 40, 46, 50–51, 80, 82, 237 indigo, 1, 5–9, 19–21, 41–42, 67, 118, 145–47, 150, 152, 163–64, 170, 180, 230, 278, 294, 392 Inns of Court (London), 194–96 insurrection, slave, 80, 86, 88, 100–101, 219–20, 232–33, 246, 281, 310–12, 331–33 Ireland, 13–14, 17, 30, 129–31 irrigation, 77–78, 85, 118–19, 124, 127, 255, 269, 387, 399

Index Issaquena County, Ms., 300, 385 Izard, Ralph (planter), 126, 192, 223, 231, 282–83 Jacksonborough, S.C., 99 Jamaica, 23, 46–47, 76, 80, 86, 120, 136, 221–22, 281–82, 308, 321, 383 James Island, S.C., 68, 118, 215, 254, 257, 279, 359 Jefferson, Thomas, 307, 310–12, 327, 334–35, 368 Jekyll Island, Ga., 66 Jemmy (Stono rebel), 92, 95–96, 98, 101 Jenkins, James (minister), 322, 324 Jeremiah, Thomas (free Black), 234 Jeremiah, Thomas, execution of, 235–36, 242 Johns Island, S.C., 46 Johnson, Nathaniel (governor), 59 Johnson, Robert (governor), 81, 140 Johnson, William (judge), 333–35, 339, 360, 367–69 Johnston, Gideon (minister), 176, 187, 189, 199 Julius Caesar, 199, 239 Kennedy, Lionel (judge), 331, 333–36, 341, 353, 361, 365, 373, 379, 380 Keowee (Lower Towns), 135–36 Kershaw, Joseph (merchant), 147–48, 150, 160, 163, 245 Kettle Creek, Battle of, 254 Kiawah Island, S.C., 61 Kiawah River, 52 Kikongo, 99, 220 King Charles I (England), 14, 18, 29, 43–44 King Charles II (England), 13–14, 25, 44 King Charles (Spain), 83 King Hancock (Tuscarora chieftain), 59–60 King, Boston, 278 King’s Tree, S.C., 130–32, 144, 152 Kingdom of Kongo, 55, 57, 85, 87, 94, 354, 356 Kings Mountain, Battle of, 263–64, 267 Kingsley, Zephaniah, 339–40, 353–54 Kinsale (Ireland), 13–14, 34 Kirkland, Moses, 162, 168, 246, 252–53 Knockbracken, Ireland, 129–30, 157 Labat, Jean-­Baptiste, 31 labor process, 21–22, 93, 112

501

labor, domestic, 8, 25, 92, 108, 113, 181, 188, 202, 344, 357; skilled, 34, 92, 108–10, 112–13, 133, 335, 343–45, 350, 352, 357, 395; waterfront, 82, 109, 234, 343–45, 349, 356 Lafayette, Marquis de, 285, 370 land grants, 140; land prices, 45; land sales, 119, 130, 144 laundry, 113–14 Laurens, Henry, 119–20, 139, 147–51, 166–67, 173–78, 180–83, 190, 196, 209, 214–26, 235, 241–42, 245, 392 Laurens, John, 240–41, 267–68 Laurens, Martha, 193, 248 law, 16, 25, 30, 36, 43, 61, 87, 128, 158, 163–66, 247, 301 laws, indentured servants, 25–26, 36 laws, slavery, 36, 63–64, 102–3, 116, 213, 303, 316, 333, 338, 376 Lawson, John (traveler), 106, 134–35, 170 Le Cap Francais, 307–11, 338, 344, 360 Le Jau, Francis (missionary), 60, 62–63, 71 Lee, Henry (soldier), 276 Legaré, Hugh Swinton, 382–83, 393 Leger-­Felicite Sonthonax, 308–9 Leigh, Egerton, 183, 209, 226 Lexington Green, Mass., 223, 230, 245 libraries, 147, 181, 184, 239, 339, 380 Ligon, Richard, 15, 21–23, 26, 31, 36–40, 46 Lincoln, Abraham, 12, 393, 395 Lincoln, Benjamin (soldier), 254, 256–57, 267, 270 Lincoln’s Inn, London, 43, 67 Linebaugh, Peter (historian), 29, 80 linen, 116, 131, 145–46, 164, 180, 182, 191, 247 Little Lynches Creek, S.C., 155 Little River Meeting House, S.C., 246 Littleton, Edward (author), 22, 47 Liverpool, England, 35, 180–82, 345, 367 livery stables, 107, 109, 352 livestock, 28, 45, 68–70, 123, 142, 170, 250, 260, 269–71, 278 Lloyd, Caleb (colonial official), 215–16, 255 Loango, 55, 94 Locke, John, 43, 48–50 London, 18–19, 23, 25, 43–44, 173, 180–81, 195–97, 214, 240–41; anti-­slavery activists in, 220–22, 284 London, Great Fire of, 49

502

Index

Londonborough, S.C., 139 Long Canes, 161; massacre at, 137, 139 looting, 160, 250, 265, 270–73, 281 Lord Mansfield, 214, 221–22 Lords Proprietors, 4, 13, 15, 47, 69, 134, 177 lotteries; Santee Canal, funding of, 297; Denmark Vesey winnings, 345, 358 Louisiana Territory, 316–17, 384, 386 Louverture, Toussaint, 308, 314–15, 377, 383 Lower Towns (Cherokee), 135–36, 138 Loyalists, 8, 149, 234, 238 Lutherans, 70, 108, 143, 362 luxury, 24, 146, 173–74, 186, 197, 206–9, 235, 305 Lynch, Thomas (planter), 172 Lynches Creek, S.C., 150, 155–56, 318 Lyttelton, William (governor), 133, 136–38, 237, 257 mahogany, 163, 173, 201–2 Maine, 381 Malembo (Africa), 1, 55 Manigault, Ann, 198, 219 Manigault, Gabriel, 275, 283 Manigault, Peter (planter), 126, 150, 178, 185, 189–90, 192, 195–96, 198, 202, 302 manners, 17, 24–25, 163–64, 172–74, 184–85, 192–94, 200–201, 203 manumission, 64, 275, 363 manure, 22, 53, 67, 69, 150 Marine Anti-­Britannic Society, 295 mariners, 20, 116, 316, 351, 366, 367–69 Marion, Francis (soldier), 260–62, 264, 266, 271, 276–67, 297 Marion Square, Charleston, 370 markets, 92, 115–16, 170, 189, 356; African, 1, 5, 33–35, 37, 55, 94, 116, 120, 151, 353–54 maroons, 80, 254, 277, 280, 282, 304, 387 Marrs Bluff, S.C., 166–67 Martinique, 7, 281 Maryland, 19, 45, 69, 75, 81, 177 Mason-­Dixon Line, 284, 286 Massachusetts, 44, 48, 67, 172, 225, 230, 245, 284, 294, 301 Massingberd, Elizabeth, 67 Matanzas River, 58 Mathews, Maurice (planter), 69, 77 Matthews, John (mariner), 76, 79, 96, 281 Mazyck’s Fields, Charleston, 215–17, 225

McIntosh, Lachlan, 221 mechanics, 352 Memphis, Tenn., 402 Mende, 76 Methodists, 293, 319–20, 321–22, 324, 347, 363, 400 Michel-­Ange-­Bernard de Mangourit, 311 Middleton family, 46, 65, 178, 195, 219, 229 migration generation, 5, 386–87 militia, 16, 30–32, 39, 41, 58–59, 63–64, 66, 81, 86–87, 97, 98–101, 128, 161, 164, 167–68, 211, 218, 220, 232, 234, 237, 243. See also militia, Revolutionary War, 245, 250, 258, 260–61, 262–64, 266, 267–68, 271–72, 276, 307, 310–11, 328–29; militia, Denmark Vesey conspiracy, 332–33, 360, 365, 371–72, 383 Mills, Robert, 298, 343 Mississippi Valley, 2, 6, 45, 135, 141, 292, 300 Missouri Compromise, 334, 341–42, 357, 375 Moderators, 134, 169 Modyford, Thomas (planter), 22, 45, 49 Monck’s Corner, S.C., 298, 350 Monday Club, 202 Monroe, James, 310–11 Montagu, Charles (governor), 168, 172, 217, 227 Montgomery, Archibald (soldier), 138 Montserrat, 212 Moon, Thomas (bandit), 160–61 Moore, James (governor), 58–60 Morgan, Daniel (soldier), 264–65 Morgan, Philip (historian), 84, 122, 356 Moultrie, John (planter), 118 Moultrie, William (governor), 144, 258, 269, 275, 309, 338 Mozambique, 353 Mulberry Grove, Ga., 299 mules, 270–71, 317, 387 music, 193, 200, 205, 216, 239, 305, 335 Nairne, Thomas, 61, 79, 186 National Convention (France), 309 naval stores, 53, 67–68, 72–75, 92, 122–23 needlework, 92, 113, 193 Negrin, Jean Jacques (printer), 338 Negro Act (1740), 101 Negro Seamen Act (1822), 366–67, 369 Neuse River, N.C., 59–60 New Calabar (Africa), 33, 35, 316

Index New England, 46, 58, 63, 157, 225, 284, 299, 374, 398, 402 New Market (racetrack), 200 New Orleans, 309, 311, 349, 396, 402 New Windsor, S.C., 143, 159, 168 New York, 145, 177 New York City, 180, 217, 253, 255, 259, 268, 280, 345, 351 Ninety-­Six, S.C., 137, 147, 150, 159, 162, 165–66, 223, 246–48, 251–52, 258, 264, 268, 280, 293, 296–97, 327 Norris, John (writer), 71, 186 North Briton #45, 223–25 Northwest Ordinance (1787), 284 Notes on the State of Virginia, 327 Nova Scotia, 279, 282 Nullification, 369, 382, 390, 393, 395 Oglethorpe, James (governor/Georgia), 87, 101 O’Hara, Charles (soldier), 260, 262 Ohio Valley, 136 Old Testament, 335, 346, 363 Oolenoy, S.C., 328–29 Orangeburg, S.C., 137, 165, 168, 189, 276, 296–97, 312 orchards, 131, 138–39 Orkney, Scotland, 143, 158 orphans, 225, 346 Oswald, Richard (slave trader), 120, 150, 180, 241 overseers, 26, 32, 89, 94, 102, 109, 111, 119, 125–27, 217, 249–50, 270, 307, 385 Oxford, University of, 43, 194, 196 Palatinate, 59, 130, 141 Pamlico River, N.C., 59 Panic of 1819, 343 Paris, 87, 182, 268, 285, 309, 337 Parker, Peter (naval officer), 248–49 Parker, Thomas (judge), 331–33, 336, 341, 353, 361, 365–66, 373, 379–80 Parliament, 19, 34, 43, 47, 104, 177, 214–17, 221, 223–24, 230 Parole policy, pardons, 258–60 Parris, Alexander (planter), 66 paternalism, 26, 340, 372 Patrick Tonyn (governor), 236, 282 Pee Dee River, 66, 119, 130, 140, 148, 152–53, 157, 162–63, 166–67, 182–83, 261, 263–64, 271, 288, 297, 332, 324–25

503

Pegues, Claudius (planter), 162–63, 168 Pencader Hundred, Del., 162 Penceel, William (free Black), 332, 371, 375 Pennsylvania, 136, 141–43, 338, 342 Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 284, 315, 348 Pernambuco, 20–23 pest house (Sullivans Island), 212 Philadelphia, 180–81, 201, 236, 284, 301, 303, 310, 347–48, 372 Philipsburg Proclamation, 255 Pickens, Andrew (soldier), 248, 254, 260, 267 pigs, 41, 150, 270 Pinckney family, 113, 167, 193–95, 197, 204, 208, 210, 277, 283–84, 298, 301–3, 306–7, 309–10, 337, 368, 374 pitch, 53, 67, 72–74 Plaine du Norde, 306, 339 “plantation generation,” 9, 89, 93, 399 plantation management, 6, 22, 318, 339–40 plays, 193, 199–200, 288 plundering (see looting), 65, 250–51, 265, 267 Pocotaligo, S.C., 62–64, 271 poison, 175, 360–61, 365, 379 Pons Pons Road, S.C., 90, 95, 98, 128 Port Royal Island, S.C., 62, 70, 83, 91, 207, 271, 277–78 Port Royal Sound, S.C., 48, 58, 60, 65–66, 397 Port Royall (ship), 13–14, 42 Portuguese, 20, 87 Powell, John (mariner), 18 Presbyterians, 143, 155–57, 317–18, 320, 323 Prevost, Augustine (soldier), 254, 256, 270, 279 Prince Frederick Parish, S.C., 155, 178 Prince William Parish, S.C., 90 pro-­slavery ideology, 132, 155, 222, 241, 291, 313, 315, 318, 322, 336, 339, 353, 364, 372, 376, 379, 388, 394, 398, 401 Provincial Congress, 183, 195, 229, 230–32, 242, 247 provision grounds, 37–38, 93, 71, 118, 121–22, 127 Purrysburg, S.C., 1, 81 Quakers, 221, 318–19 Queen Anne’s War, 58 Queensborough Township, S.C., 152 Quincy, Josiah, 116, 171–73, 175–79, 191, 193–94, 201–3, 206–9

504

Index

races, horses, 154, 171, 174, 200, 207 Ramsay, David (historian), 159, 207, 276, 305, 312–13, 316 Rangers, patrols, 100 Rawdon, Francis (soldier), 266, 268 Recife, 20 Reconstruction, 374 Rediker, Marcus (historian), 29, 80 refugees, 30, 49, 62, 137, 166, 267–68, 282, 307, 309–10, 312–14, 337–40, 395 Regulators, 3, 134, 162, 164–68, 247 revival meetings, 293, 317, 322–25 Revolution of 1719, 177 “revolutionary generation,” 8, 15, 213–14, 217, 229, 239, 285, 363 Revolutionary War, 245–86 Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 388 Rhine Valley, 59, 131, 141, 143 rice, 1, 5–6, 8–9, 54–56, 61, 66, 75–85, 88–89, 94, 118–27, 172, 208–9, 282, 288, 292, 305, 319 Richardson, James (governor), 306, 315 Richardson, Richard (planter), 169, 248 Richmond, Va., 311 Rose, John (shipwright), 179, 281 Royal African Company (RAC), 33, 49–50, 96 Royal Navy, 86, 234, 249, 256, 266, 280, 350 Rutledge, Edward (planter), 200, 229, 237 Rutledge, John (planter), 178, 195, 200, 217, 229, 271–72, 279, 297, 301 Ryen, Loduwick (farmer), 141–42 Sahara, 57, 72. Saint Augustine, 210, 236–37, 259, 263, 278, 281–82, 311. See also San Agustin, 52–53, 58, 63, 65–66, 81–90, 95, 101 Saint Bartholomew Parish, S.C., 62, 65, 68 Saint Cecilia Society, 172, 191 Saint David’s Parish, 168 Saint-­Domingue, 5, 11, 213, 256, 285, 306–15, 334, 338–40, 344–45, 363–64, 376–77, 383, 395–96, 403 Saint Helena Parish, S.C., 62, 65, 68, 79, 125, 275, 278, 281, 298, 397 Saint James Goose Creek, S.C., 61, 126, 168 Saint James Santee, S.C., 62, 64, 298 Saint John’s Colleton, S.C., 255, 377, 381, 388 Saint Johns River, Fla., 353 Saint Kitts, 46, 80

Saint Lucia, 31, 281 Saint Luke’s Parish, S.C., 68 Saint Mary’s River, 66, 397 Saint Michael’s Church (Charleston), 188, 197, 316, 331, 378, 389 Saint Paul, epistle of, 322 Saint Paul’s Parish, S.C., 31, 91, 95–100, 188–89, 224 Saint Peter Parish (Barbados), 15, 31, 46 Saint Philip’s Church (Charleston), 197 Saint Philip’s Parish, S.C., 181–82, 389, 395 Saint Simons Island, Ga., 58, 84 Saint Stephens Parish, S.C., 125 Saint Thomas, 80, 343–44 Saint Vincent, 31, 281 Salkehatchie River, S.C., 63, 70 Saluda River, S.C., 157, 162, 169, 275, 293, 296–97 Sambo and Toney, 287–91 San Agustin (Saint Augustine), 52–53, 58, 63, 65–66, 81–83, 86–89, 90, 95, 101, 421 Santee Canal, S.C., 350 Santee Indians, 134 Santee River, S.C., 52, 131, 140, 142, 172, 261, 268, 271, 297, 298 Santiago de Cuba, 86 Santo Domingo, 308 Savage’s Old Fields, Ninety-­Six, S.C., 268 Savannah River, 1, 57–59, 61, 63, 70–71, 81, 84, 86, 91, 95, 107, 137, 139, 142 Saxby, George (colonial official), 215–16, 225, 283 Saxe Gotha, S.C., 130, 141–43 Saxton, Rufus (soldier), 397 Sayle, William, 52 schools, 10, 162, 184, 192–96, 301 Scotland, 32, 34, 130, 141–43, 146, 155 Scots Irish, 155 Scott, James C., 9, 335. See also hidden transcript, 10–12, 28, 81, 92, 335, 349, 355, 403 Scottish Highlands, 32, 143 scripture, 10, 12, 153, 317, 376, 379, 401 Seabrook, Whitemarsh (planter), 377, 381 seamstresses, 113, 191 Searle, Daniel (governor, Barbados), 30 Segoon-­Pop Club, 206 Senegal, 33, 76 Senegambia, 35, 54–55, 119, 151 sermons, 152, 157, 224, 288, 317–19, 323, 336 Seven Years’ War, 133, 136, 213, 231

Index Sewee Indians, 52 Sharp, Granville (abolitionist), 195, 213, 221, 284 Shays, Daniel, 294 sheriffs, 165, 295, 367 Sherman, William T. (soldier), 400 shipping agents, 352 Sierra Leone, 7, 35, 54–55, 76–79, 96, 116, 120, 123, 150, 180, 241, 279, 282, 302, 368 Skiagusta, 135–36 skill, 112–13, 117, 357, 402 “slave societies,” 3, 8, 16–17, 41–42, 54–55, 75, 132, 337, 356, 403 Slave Trade Act (UK), 285 slave trade, re-­opening (1803), 313–17; slave trade, debate on re-­opening (1857), 388–390 Slavery Compensation Act (UK), 382 smallpox, 59, 85, 88, 91, 135, 137, 182, 237, 256, 270, 278–79 Smalls, Robert, 364, 391 Smith, Josiah (plantation manager), 125, 200, 232 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), 61, 155, 184, 187 Society of Free Dark Men, 345 Somerset, James, 195, 214, 221–22 Sommers, Humphrey, 188–89, 198 Sons of Liberty, 225 South Carolina Association, 367, 393 South Carolina Exposition and Protest, 394 South Carolina Gazette, 80, 84, 103, 109, 137, 184, 216, 229 Southampton County, Va., 383 Southern Review, 382 southern strategy, Revolutionary War, 251, 254–57 Spanish Florida, 13, 45, 47, 53, 58, 61, 66, 82–91, 101, 141 Spratt, Leonides (newspaper editor), 388 Stamp Act (1765), 3, 104, 34, 183, 211–25, 282, 302, 396 Stephens, Alexander, 404 Stephens, William, 87 Stewart, Alexander (soldier), 266 Stobo, Archibald (minister), 90 Stono Ferry, Battle of, 254, 279 Stono Rebellion, 3, 11, 91–103, 180, 220, 313, 334, 403 Sullivan’s Island, S.C., 212, 280, 338

505

Sullivans Island, Battle of, 211, 240, 248–49, 251 Sumner, Charles, 374, 393 Sumter County, S.C., 292 Sumter, Thomas (soldier), 260–61, 267, 276 surveying, 8, 64, 134, 139–40, 144, 298 Switzerland, 1, 141–43 tar, 53, 67, 72–74, 112 Tarleton, Banastre (soldier), 251–52, 255, 259–61, 264–65, 274 task system, 93–94, 120–24, 127, 133 taverns, 10, 12, 104, 196, 218, 224, 349–50, 363, 396 Tea Act, 228 Telemaque, 344–45, 480; see Vesey, Denmark, 11–12, 331–64, 366–79, 395, 399, 403 Ten Broeck Racecourse, Savannah, Ga., auction at (1857), 384 Tennant, William (minister), 245 Texas, 381, 385–86 textiles, 145–46, 300, 343, 402 theater, 172, 175, 199–200, 225, 239 Theus, Jeremiah (painter), 189 Thompson, E. P. (historian), 226 timber, 53, 67–68, 72–73, 78, 107, 112, 150, 271, 345 Timothy, Peter (newspaper editor), 184, 231 tippling houses, 27, 104, 110 toasts, 172, 198, 204, 207, 211, 216, 222, 225–26, 337 tobacco, 18, 21–23, 36, 41, 52, 122, 124, 145–46, 150, 152, 294 Tobago, 31, 46 Tobler, Johannes, 108, 142, 159 topsoil, erosion of, 31, 46 Tortola, 321 town houses, 8, 92, 108, 179, 305, 349 Townshend, Charles, 228 townships, 139–41, 143 Tradd Street, Charleston, 188 Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, 7 True and Exact History of Barbados (Richard Ligon), 15, 21–23, 26, 31, 36–40, 46 Turner, Nat, 383, 399 Turner, Victor (anthropologist), 355 Tuscarora War, 59–64, 134 U.S. Congress, 302, 313, 327, 329, 341, 370, 389, 393–94 U.S. Supreme Court, 333, 339, 360, 367

506

Index

Ulster, 129, 141, 143, 146 United States Colored Troops (USCT), 391, 394, 396 Upper Pee Dee Valley, S.C., 140, 148, 152–53, 157, 163, 166–67, 263, 288, 318, 322, 326 urban slavery, 90–128, 331–64 vagrancy, 34, 159, 166, 296 Vesey, Denmark, 11–12, 331–64, 366–79, 395, 399, 403 Vesey, Joseph, 343, 345 Virginia Capes, Battle of, 266 Waccamaw River, 66, 172, 271 Wadmalaw Island, S.C., 61, 255 Walduck, Thomas (planter), 18, 33 Walker, David, 370, 383 War of Austrian Succession, 101, 198 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 101 War of Spanish Succession, 58, 72 Washington County, Ms., 300, 385 Washington, George, 136, 195, 210, 237, 252, 267, 294, 311, 337 Wateree River, 141, 147–48, 150, 157, 160, 297, 382 Waxhaws, S.C., 144, 157, 259, 323 Wayne, Anthony (soldier), 268–69 Webster, Pelatiah, 104–5, 108, 198 wells, 109, 112, 358; poisoning of, 360 Welsh Neck, S.C., 151–55, 287–88, 318, 326 Welsh Tract, S.C., 152 Wemyss, James (soldier), 258, 262 Wesley, John, 222, 284 West, Joseph, 13, 29, 50, 53 Westo Indians, 53, 56–58 wharves, 2, 5, 93, 96, 104–9, 170, 181, 206, 216, 218, 298, 343, 345, 356, 395 wheat, 124, 131, 142, 146, 149–50, 170, 293 whisky, 327–28 Whistler, Henry (mariner), 18, 24, 38

Whitefield, George, 200, 232 Whitney, Eli, 287, 298–301 Whydah (Ouidah), 96 Wilberforce, William, 284 Wilkes, John, 147, 209, 222–25, 227–28 Wilkinson, Eliza, 204–5, 272–73 Williamsburg Township, S.C., 130, 143, 146, 237 Williamson’s Plantation, battle of, 270 Wilmington, N.C., 180, 265–66 Wimborne Saint Giles, England, 28 Windward Coast, 37, 116, 120, 302 Winterbottom, Thomas (mariner/physician), 76, 123 Winthrop, Henry, 18 Winthrop, John, 18 Winyah Bay, S.C., 288 Witherspoon family, 129–34, 139, 144–47, 157 wolves, 130, 159 Woodmason, Charles (minister), 129, 146, 151, 155–57, 162, 164–68, 170 Woodward, Henry, 52, 57 Woolman, John, 212 workshops, 2, 5, 12, 48, 93, 214, 218, 224, 349–50, 357, 363, 395, 403 Wragg, Joseph and Samuel (merchants), 180–85, 352 Wraggborough, S.C., 181 Wyly, Samuel (merchant), 160 Yamasee War, 2, 4, 56–66, 91, 99, 138 Yeamans, John, 14, 52, 176 yellow fever, 88, 91, 185 yeoman farmers, 209, 327, 389, 402 Yonge’s Island, S.C., 272 Yorkshire (England), 147, 177 Yorktown, Battle of, 250, 262, 266–67, 281 Zanzibar, 353–54 The Zong, 213

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At last, after far too many years of writing, editing, and cutting and pasting, followed by yet more rewriting, revising, and cutting and pasting, I’ve now arrived at the most enjoyable moment of the entire project, the time when I can publicly thank all those people who have generously and graciously provided invaluable assistance and encouragement, as well as cups of tea along the way. First, I want to acknowledge those who helped me at the outset of the project. At the University of Wisconsin‒Madison, Charles Cohen, my adviser, not only opened my eyes to the world of early American history but also provided much-­needed guidance, editorial advice, and support as I drafted my dissertation. Chuck was just one of many extraordinary and talented teachers that I met during my years in Wisconsin, and I’d like to recognize the contributions of other faculty members to my education, including Paul Boyer, Gerda Lerner, Thomas McCormick, and Michael MacDonald, whose seminars on early modern England and the Annales school had a significant impact on my intellectual development. In the Department of African American Studies, William L. Van Deburg played an important role in the early stages of this project. I spent many happy and productive hours in archives and libraries on both sides of the Atlantic and I want to thank all those who answered my questions, retrieved dozens of boxes, files, and folders, photocopied materials, suggested other collections to peruse, and regularly recommended a good place for lunch. In South Carolina, I want to thank the librarians and archivists at the following institutions: the South Caroliniana Library and the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina, and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, all located in Columbia; in Charleston, the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, the College of Charleston Library, the South Carolina Historical Society and the Charleston Archive at the Charleston County Public Library (formerly the Charleston City Archive); and, in Greenville, the South Carolina Baptist Historical Collection in the James B. Duke Library at Furman

508

Acknowledgments

University. In North Carolina, I want to acknowledge the assistance I received at the Louis Round Wilson Library (the Southern Historical Collection) and the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina‒Chapel Hill; the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University, Durham; the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) in Winston-­Salem; and the Presbyterian Heritage Center of Montreat. I also want to thank the staff at several other repositories: the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Memorial Library on the campus of the University of Wisconsin‒Madison, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts; in Philadelphia, the Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; in Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress and the National Archives. And, at my home institution, I want to offer my sincere thanks to all at Shadek-­Fackenthal Library, particularly its Interlibrary Loan staff for their skill and speed at tracking down all variety of materials. In England, I was fortunate enough to combine fruitful days in the archives—and my thanks go out to the staff at a number of remarkable institutions: the British Library in St. Pancras, the National Archives of the United Kingdom in Kew, the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell; the National Library of the Church of England at Lambeth Palace, Lambeth; the Surrey History Centre in Woking, and the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester —with uproarious evenings spent with friends and family. And so many, many thanks to those wonderful people who, over the years, have so generously provided me with comfortable beds, great meals, and lively evenings in their local: for their wonderful hospitality and good cheer, my sincere thanks go to Tim Hindle and Ellian Hindle, Mark Bond-­Webster and Nancy Bond-­Webster, and Rob Sandow in England and, north of the border in Edinburgh, a tip of the hat to Mark Medcalf. Over the years, I have also benefited considerably from the insights, observations, and questions from commentators, panelists, and audience members at a number of conferences, including those organized by the Southern Historical Association, the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Conference at the College of Charleston. I have also been fortunate enough to present several chapters at seminars run by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia; at the Newberry Library in

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Chicago; and at University College, London. I was also fortunate to spend a couple of productive months at Johns Hopkins University, participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on slavery. The Provost’s Office at Franklin and Marshall College has generously provided funds for these excursions, as well as a subvention to help offset production costs. At the beginning of the project, I also received funds from the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin and from the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (Wisconsin Chapter). Several other people have provided considerable support, advice, and encouragement. Without them, this manuscript would never have seen the light of day and so I want to offer them my hearty thanks and appreciation for their help and guidance over the years. Both Kathleen Brown and Bob Lockhart have been real stalwarts. Not only did Kathy set aside considerable time from her pathbreaking research on abolition and the project of “undoing slavery” to read and comment on the manuscript, improving it immensely with her insights and editorial skills, but she has also taken on the lion’s share of parenting duties, being a wonderful mother to our three children. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, Bob has been a constant source of encouragement. Throughout the long process of submission, readers’ reports, and revisions, he has been an unfailing source of support and a good friend. I also want to thank the production team, including Lily Palladino and Kathy McQueen. I also want to thank the anonymous readers for their thoughtful commentaries. I also want to thank my colleagues at Franklin and Marshall College, particularly Doug Anthony, Van Gosse, the late Matt Hoffman, Ben McRee, Maria Mitchell, Richard Reitan, Abby Schrader, Laura Shelton, and Louise Stevenson, whose dedication to their students and scholarship have made our corner on the third floor of Stager Hall a wonderful place in which to labor and learn. I also want to acknowledge the work done by Ann Wagoner, the department’s academic coordinator, who makes sure that the whole operation runs smoothly, thus making our lives considerably less fraught. In the autumn of 2019, I was fortunate enough to spend a semester in Bath at Advanced Studies in England (ASE) where, in between excursions to Stratford-­on-­Avon, London, the Cotswolds, and Oxford, I spent many productive hours revising the manuscript. I offer my sincere thanks to the wonderful staff and faculty at ASE, including Jonathan Hope, Lucy Marten, and Rob Jones, who made my sojourn in one of the most beautiful cities in the British Isles so memorable.

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I also want to offer sincere thanks to a number of people who, although they did not directly contribute to the completion of the manuscript, nonetheless kept me sane, especially Tom Ryan and Tracey Weis in Lancaster; Danny Gold, E. J. Simpson, Jim Fogarty, who can all be found at Danny’s Guitar Shop in Narberth—the best little guitar shop on the Philadelphia Main Line—playing guitars or cracking terrible jokes; Angus Corbett who has played a huge role in looking after our extended family and is always good for a long conversation about “the cricket” and other subjects concerning Australia. My three children—William, Danny, and Emily—also deserve considerable credit, as well as my deepest and sincerest thanks and love, not only for their support, high spirits, and enthusiasm but also for putting up with my “brief ” visits to local archives during beach vacations in South Carolina. The love, camaraderie, and support of these people, along with the music of the Grateful Dead and the football of Liverpool F.C., amongst other things, have helped sustain and nourish me over the years. Any mistakes or errors are of my own making and are my responsibility.