James Hamilton’s life, as he saw it, and as it’s largely retold, had three acts: years as a successful politician associated with nullification, years as an important businessman and agent for the Republic of Texas to European bankers, and impoverished years caused by investments soured by a bad national economy.
Robert Tinkler believes many were hesitant to look for a deeper pattern, because his personal narrative "reminded his fellow planters that their world of wealth and honor rested precariously on the vagaries of an international commodities market they could little influence."
However, there were those at the time that looked for more consistency and personal responsibility. William Behan’s description of a man intent on fraud from before his marriage to Elizabeth Heyward is probably not as malicious as the private opinions of his creditors.
Those who supported nullification in the 1840's and 1850's could only see Hamilton’s willingness to compromise on slavery to get his Texas claims repaid as "the last cry of a child against being put to bed in the dark." A man who might benefit from his support for Texas, Sam Houston, believed the man "was destitute of all sincerity."
Tinkler himself was more interested in Hamilton’s political importance, and provided little evidence in his biography from the details of the various law suits and his associates that would shed light on his character. In the absence of such hard facts, it’s too easy to pick and choose evidence to support any personal prejudice.
Historians with a scientific bias have tried to use theoretical constructs to provide some objective way to interpret an incomplete factual record. In the 1960's, some historians were trying to use different ideas drawn from psychology to describe the link between people like James Hamilton and their political cultures.
In 1961, David McClelland suggested there were three basic things that motivated people to act: the desire for achievement, for power, or for social acceptance, and that individuals and cultures were some mix of the three.
As old as those ideas may be, they spring to mind when one looks at the life of a man who spent his childhood and youth in boarding houses and private schools where proprietors were probably more interested in flattering him to maintain their income, than socializing him as they would their own sons. Oliver Hazard Perry remembered that at John Frazer’s Latin school "the local boys took their turns at cleaning the classroom each week," but "the comparatively rich - or self-consciously aristocratic - southern students often paid others to perform their chores."
Hamilton spent much of his later youth living with men, rather than with families, where comfort, if not success, depended on pleasing others. After time in the army, he went to Washington, DC., where he lived in boardinghouses or messes with other congressmen. He did spend time with his wife in South Carolina, but, Tinkler says, he always became bored if isolated too long from the society of Charleston or Washington and displayed what one his sons remembers as a "peculiarly mercurial temperament subject to fits of elation and gloom."
One rather suspects that he had no strong political opinions, but absorbed those of others, like John Lyde Wilson and John Cordes Prioleau, and lacked the instinct for power of a man like John Calhoun, who knew how to temper actions. After South Carolinians backed away from the more extreme implications of the nullification crisis in 1832, one of his friends, William Preston, said Hamilton’s problem "was an over anxiety to exhibit himself strikingly to the public eye."
Once he lost an opportunity to return to Washington and recognized he had no serious interest in running plantations, I would guess Hamilton took up one scheme after another because some friend of his supported it. He became involved in Texas after Joel Poinsett invested in land there and after Bernard Elliott Bee joined the government of the republic. Poinsett was a neighbor who supported him after nullification. Bee had worked for him when he was a governor and claimed to be a brother-in-law, apparently through the Prioleaus.
Hamilton supported Nicholas Biddle’s national bank before nullification, and believed he stayed close to the man without realizing men seeking power use people seeking affirmation. No doubt, he believed he had absorbed enough watching the man to successfully exploit the cotton market without any experience of men who make their living in speculation.
Similarly, he thought he could grow rice in South Carolina, cotton in Alabama, and sugar in Texas, if he left others run his plantations, especially if the subordinates were his own sons. Only one, Daniel Heyward Hamilton, became an independent planter, and he ruined his political fortunes when he refused to support nullification in 1852.
Hamilton’s willingness to exploit the trusts of his wife, Elizabeth Heyward, and the widowed Mary Martha McRa probably has deeper roots, and may come from the way his father treated his mother’s lands and the way his step-grandfather exploited the lands of his mother’s mother.
Notes:
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004.
McClelland, David. The Achieving Society, 1961.
Perry, Oliver Hazard. Quoted by Tinker from a biography by Alexander Slidell Mackenzie; the Perrys ran the boardinghouse where the Hamiltons stayed in Newport.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004; "last cry" quotation from Charleston Mercury, 5 June 1838; Houston quotation from 9 December 1842 letter; quotation from Preston in 15 October 1833 letter.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
South Carolina - James Hamilton’s Life
James Hamilton, Jr., whether deliberately or unwittingly, became the center of the Denmark Vesey controversy. On the one side were people from old South Carolina families like John Cordes Prioleau and John Lyde Wilson who supported secret tribunals, but allowed Hamilton to take credit. On the other were men like William Johnson, Jr. and Thomas Bennett who feared some conspiracy might exist, but believed the rule of law should prevail.
Hamilton later played the same role in the nullification crisis of the 1832 when he was governor. Then, John Calhoun was more adept at positioning himself politically, and while he lost any hope of becoming president, still served in the United States Senate until he died from tuberculosis in 1850.
In both cases Hamilton held positions which were largely symbolic. Power in South Carolina is held by the General Assembly, and in Charleston by the city council. One wonders what kind of man was willing to countenance the execution of potentially innocent men and threaten the political stability of the United States for political celebrity.
Robert Tinkler says Hamilton’s parents preferred life in Newport, Rhode Island, to that on a humid, disease infested lowland rice plantation. For many years of his childhood, he stayed north to attend school while his father returned to South Carolina.
However, by the time he was a teenager, the family wealth was evaporating. His parents had guaranteed loans for his mother’s stepfather, William Mountrie, who died in debt in 1805. His father was from Pennsylvania, and had no aptitude for managing a rice plantation. When he married, his wife’s lands were worth $250,000; they later were valued at $6,000.
Young Hamilton was forced to sign away any rights to his inheritance when he turned 21 in 1807. His father finally declared bankruptcy in 1811 and moved in with his daughter, Hannah Prioleau. James Junior found himself in exactly the same position his father had been, a young man without means living in an aristocratic society.
He first studied law and served as secretary to the 1810 governor, Henry Middleton, the son and grandson of friends of his father. Tinkler says he found politics more to his likely than the routine of law. Then like his father, he enlisted in the War of 1812 and married a young heiress he met in 1813.
Like him, Elizabeth Heyward was raised in lowland Carolina society, but was no longer part of it. When her wealthy father died, his family took over managing the estate until his widow married a New Yorker who sued the family to protect the girl’s rights and those of her mother. While she owned Callawassie Island in the Colleton River on the south coast of the state, she’d lost any connection with the Heywards and probably any protection by the dowagers.
Apparently, her stepfather, Nicholas Cruger, didn’t trust James Hamilton, or was naturally suspicious. He demanded a prenuptial agreement to place Callawassie Island in trust. William Behan says Hamilton refused. Instead, he sold her land and slaves and put the money in a postnuptial trust in 1919. Behan believes he wanted to speculate in banks and other investments.
For the next two years he served in the state House of Representatives, then became intendant of Charleston in 1822. While he was pursuing Denmark Vesey in June of 1822, he accepted the congressional seat of William Lowdes, who’d been forced to resign in May by tuberculosis.
In the years he served in the national House of Representatives as a Jacksonian, Behan says he was manipulating the funds in the trust in contravention to the postnuptial agreement. He bought back Callawassie Island from Cruger, who had been ruined by the Panic of 1819, and bought two other rice plantations and slaves in his name alone.
One term into Jackson’s administration, he left Washington to become South Carolina governor, just as the tariffs of 1826 and 1832 were an issue. A previous governor, John Lyde Wilson, and Hamilton’s brother-in-law Samuel Prioleau, who was the first cousin of John Cordes Prioleau, had first bruited the possibility of nullification in the mid-1820's.
The state divided into two parties, the one led by Hamilton unified in its demands for nullification, the other more diverse in its responses. Politicians were pressured to take sides, and even John Calhoun, then the vice president, was forced to support nullification or lose political support in the state.
Hamilton called the Nullification Convention of 1832 which formally refused to obey the law. When Andrew Jackson passed a bill that gave him the right to use the military to enforce United States laws, Hamilton called another session of the convention to repeal its 1832 acts and nullify the Force Act. South Carolinians claimed surprise at the president’s actions and the failure of other southern states to support their actions.
Hamilton remained in the state senate and turned to business, first with the Bank of Charleston and then as a cotton broker with his oldest son, James. By 1836, Behan says, he had title to 16 plantations in four states, all mortgaged, and was buying land script in Texas for the South Carolina Land Company. His investors included large planters like Wade Hampton and politicians like Robert Young Hayne.
The Panic of 1937 destroyed his Texas plans and left him financially vulnerable. The panic had been caused by problems with the Bank of England that led to the failure of three banks that handled southern cotton. Nicholas Biddle successfully manipulated cotton prices the next year, by buying cheap cotton and holding if off the market until prices rose.
After Biddle died, Hamilton thought he could do the same thing, only his son James died from yellow fever in 1839 before he could sell at a profit. The next year he changed the terms of his trustee relationship for Mary Martha McRa, through an agreement with her son, and started depositing her dividends from the Bank of Charleston into an account with a Charleston cotton factor.
In 1842 Hamilton owed over $700,000. His wife, with his consent, sued him for violating the terms of the 1819 trust. The judge stopped any claims against her money until the suit was settled, which took four years. Aggravating matters, in 1842 Sam Houston took over the government of Texas, and cancelled any financial agreements the republic had made with Hamilton.
In 1846 Hamilton and his wife moved to a cotton plantation in Alabama, and two years later he declared bankruptcy in the state of Georgia. In 1850, the McRa estate sued him for diverting funds from her estate, and discovered he had promised the proceeds from his claim against Texas to at least six different creditors.
He took over management of his daughter’s plantation in Bluffton on the Savannah River in 1849, when her husband made clear he preferred to spend his time in Newport. They moved there in 1855, after he was forced to sell his Texas sugar plantation. He died in a steamboat accident two years later still trying to get reimbursed for his claims against the state, while his wife died in exile in Savannah during the Civil War.
His sons, who bought the Texas plantation, finally gave up in 1868. In 1911, Texas leased the plantation from Nellie League for a prison farm and bought what had become known as Burnin’ Hell outright in 1918.
Notes: Samuel Prioleau and Providence Hext were the parents of John Cordes’ father Samuel and Samuel’s father Philip according to Rob Salzman’s e-familytree website.
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004, on Elizabeth Matthews Heyward.
Lucko, Paul M. "Retrieve Plantation," Handbook of Texas Online.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004.
Hamilton later played the same role in the nullification crisis of the 1832 when he was governor. Then, John Calhoun was more adept at positioning himself politically, and while he lost any hope of becoming president, still served in the United States Senate until he died from tuberculosis in 1850.
In both cases Hamilton held positions which were largely symbolic. Power in South Carolina is held by the General Assembly, and in Charleston by the city council. One wonders what kind of man was willing to countenance the execution of potentially innocent men and threaten the political stability of the United States for political celebrity.
Robert Tinkler says Hamilton’s parents preferred life in Newport, Rhode Island, to that on a humid, disease infested lowland rice plantation. For many years of his childhood, he stayed north to attend school while his father returned to South Carolina.
However, by the time he was a teenager, the family wealth was evaporating. His parents had guaranteed loans for his mother’s stepfather, William Mountrie, who died in debt in 1805. His father was from Pennsylvania, and had no aptitude for managing a rice plantation. When he married, his wife’s lands were worth $250,000; they later were valued at $6,000.
Young Hamilton was forced to sign away any rights to his inheritance when he turned 21 in 1807. His father finally declared bankruptcy in 1811 and moved in with his daughter, Hannah Prioleau. James Junior found himself in exactly the same position his father had been, a young man without means living in an aristocratic society.
He first studied law and served as secretary to the 1810 governor, Henry Middleton, the son and grandson of friends of his father. Tinkler says he found politics more to his likely than the routine of law. Then like his father, he enlisted in the War of 1812 and married a young heiress he met in 1813.
Like him, Elizabeth Heyward was raised in lowland Carolina society, but was no longer part of it. When her wealthy father died, his family took over managing the estate until his widow married a New Yorker who sued the family to protect the girl’s rights and those of her mother. While she owned Callawassie Island in the Colleton River on the south coast of the state, she’d lost any connection with the Heywards and probably any protection by the dowagers.
Apparently, her stepfather, Nicholas Cruger, didn’t trust James Hamilton, or was naturally suspicious. He demanded a prenuptial agreement to place Callawassie Island in trust. William Behan says Hamilton refused. Instead, he sold her land and slaves and put the money in a postnuptial trust in 1919. Behan believes he wanted to speculate in banks and other investments.
For the next two years he served in the state House of Representatives, then became intendant of Charleston in 1822. While he was pursuing Denmark Vesey in June of 1822, he accepted the congressional seat of William Lowdes, who’d been forced to resign in May by tuberculosis.
In the years he served in the national House of Representatives as a Jacksonian, Behan says he was manipulating the funds in the trust in contravention to the postnuptial agreement. He bought back Callawassie Island from Cruger, who had been ruined by the Panic of 1819, and bought two other rice plantations and slaves in his name alone.
One term into Jackson’s administration, he left Washington to become South Carolina governor, just as the tariffs of 1826 and 1832 were an issue. A previous governor, John Lyde Wilson, and Hamilton’s brother-in-law Samuel Prioleau, who was the first cousin of John Cordes Prioleau, had first bruited the possibility of nullification in the mid-1820's.
The state divided into two parties, the one led by Hamilton unified in its demands for nullification, the other more diverse in its responses. Politicians were pressured to take sides, and even John Calhoun, then the vice president, was forced to support nullification or lose political support in the state.
Hamilton called the Nullification Convention of 1832 which formally refused to obey the law. When Andrew Jackson passed a bill that gave him the right to use the military to enforce United States laws, Hamilton called another session of the convention to repeal its 1832 acts and nullify the Force Act. South Carolinians claimed surprise at the president’s actions and the failure of other southern states to support their actions.
Hamilton remained in the state senate and turned to business, first with the Bank of Charleston and then as a cotton broker with his oldest son, James. By 1836, Behan says, he had title to 16 plantations in four states, all mortgaged, and was buying land script in Texas for the South Carolina Land Company. His investors included large planters like Wade Hampton and politicians like Robert Young Hayne.
The Panic of 1937 destroyed his Texas plans and left him financially vulnerable. The panic had been caused by problems with the Bank of England that led to the failure of three banks that handled southern cotton. Nicholas Biddle successfully manipulated cotton prices the next year, by buying cheap cotton and holding if off the market until prices rose.
After Biddle died, Hamilton thought he could do the same thing, only his son James died from yellow fever in 1839 before he could sell at a profit. The next year he changed the terms of his trustee relationship for Mary Martha McRa, through an agreement with her son, and started depositing her dividends from the Bank of Charleston into an account with a Charleston cotton factor.
In 1842 Hamilton owed over $700,000. His wife, with his consent, sued him for violating the terms of the 1819 trust. The judge stopped any claims against her money until the suit was settled, which took four years. Aggravating matters, in 1842 Sam Houston took over the government of Texas, and cancelled any financial agreements the republic had made with Hamilton.
In 1846 Hamilton and his wife moved to a cotton plantation in Alabama, and two years later he declared bankruptcy in the state of Georgia. In 1850, the McRa estate sued him for diverting funds from her estate, and discovered he had promised the proceeds from his claim against Texas to at least six different creditors.
He took over management of his daughter’s plantation in Bluffton on the Savannah River in 1849, when her husband made clear he preferred to spend his time in Newport. They moved there in 1855, after he was forced to sell his Texas sugar plantation. He died in a steamboat accident two years later still trying to get reimbursed for his claims against the state, while his wife died in exile in Savannah during the Civil War.
His sons, who bought the Texas plantation, finally gave up in 1868. In 1911, Texas leased the plantation from Nellie League for a prison farm and bought what had become known as Burnin’ Hell outright in 1918.
Notes: Samuel Prioleau and Providence Hext were the parents of John Cordes’ father Samuel and Samuel’s father Philip according to Rob Salzman’s e-familytree website.
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004, on Elizabeth Matthews Heyward.
Lucko, Paul M. "Retrieve Plantation," Handbook of Texas Online.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
South Carolina - 1822 Social Structure
The execution of Denmark Vesey brought four men into conflict: Thomas Bennett and William Johnson, Jr. on one side, James Hamilton, Jr. and John Lyde Wilson on the other.
I became curious about the ways these four men represented Charleston society in 1822, and so checked the genealogies put on line by their many descendants.
The first thing that became clear is that the city’s society in 1822 was still fluid and open, not a closed phalanx of old families and their retainers. Not one had a paternal ancestor in this country farther back than four generations.
Bennett’s great-grandfather Thomas appeared in the public record the first time in 1727 when his son was baptized in Christ Church Parish. Hamilton’s grandfather William had migrated from Belfast to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by 1733 when he married Jean McIlvaine of County Antrim. The only record of Johnson’s great-grandfather is that his name was Michael Jansen in 1715 and Wilson’s father appeared in the records of up-country Cheraw, when he moved there from Maryland in 1760.
The second trait the four men share is that any connections they had with older South Carolina families and Barbados were through their mothers or their wives.
Wilson’s first wife, Charlotte Alston, has the oldest family tree. Her father came from a family of rice planters descended from John Allston, who had arrived sometime between 1685 and 1694. Her mother, Mary Ashe, was related to John Porter, who was expelled from the Virginia House of Burgess in 1663 as a Quaker; Alexander Lillington, who moved to North Carolina from Barbados around 1669, and James Moore, who managed land on Goose Creek for the Yeamans family and married Margaret Berringer. Berringer’s mother’s second husband was John Yeamans, who had left Barbados in 1665 to head the early settlement at Cape Fear in 1665.
Charlotte’s brother married a daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia. When Charlotte died, Wilson married Rebecca Eden, a woman whose fortune have been saved by Burr.
The father of Hamilton’s mother, Elizabeth Lynch, had married into the same Alston family as Wilson, before marrying her mother, Hannah Motte. When his father married her, Lynch was the widow of John Harleston. His grandfather John had migrated from Dublin in 1690 and served as an attorney to the Colletons while his first wife’s grandfather, Gideon Faucheraud, had settled on Goose Creek, the symbolic center of old South Carolina, in 1707.
Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth Heyward, came from a family of rice planters whose immigrant ancestor, Daniel, left England around 1672. His sister Hannah was married to John Cordes Prioleau’s cousin, Samuel Prioleau, Jr. When she died, Prioleau married her sister Elizabeth.
Bennett’s grandfather had married Margaret Swinton, whose father Hugh had plantation lands on the Cooper River. Hugh’s wife, Judith Simmons, was born of Huguenot parents who settled Middleburg Plantation in Berkeley County.
Johnson’s mother traced her ancestry back to Thomas Amory who left Somerset for Barbados in 1653 and then moved to Goose Creek in 1699.
The third feature of Charleston society in the 1820's was the importance of the American Revolution in providing men with sufficient status to marry women from established families.
James Hamilton’s father was the fifth son, apprenticed to study medicine in Philadelphia when war was declared. He volunteered, and appeared in Charleston soon after Elizabeth’s Lynch’s husband was killed in action.
Lynch’s mother, Hannah Motte, later married William Moultrie, who had defeated the British at Sullivan’s Island in 1776. Johnson’s father William was imprisoned by the British when they took Charleston in 1780, while Bennett’s first wife, Mary Lightbourn Stone, was the daughter of a privateer, Benjamin Stone.
In many ways, the city’s social structure in 1822 was like that described by Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind. There were the old families like those of Ashley Wilkes and Charlotte Alston who preferred to marry among themselves, but were pragmatic enough to barter their daughters’ status for plantations. There were children of immigrants, like Scarlet O’Hara and Elizabeth Lynch, who wanted to marry into those families. And, with the war, there were men on the make, like Rhett Butler and James Hamilton, Sr., who suddenly had access to salons where they would have been shunned before.
I became curious about the ways these four men represented Charleston society in 1822, and so checked the genealogies put on line by their many descendants.
The first thing that became clear is that the city’s society in 1822 was still fluid and open, not a closed phalanx of old families and their retainers. Not one had a paternal ancestor in this country farther back than four generations.
Bennett’s great-grandfather Thomas appeared in the public record the first time in 1727 when his son was baptized in Christ Church Parish. Hamilton’s grandfather William had migrated from Belfast to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by 1733 when he married Jean McIlvaine of County Antrim. The only record of Johnson’s great-grandfather is that his name was Michael Jansen in 1715 and Wilson’s father appeared in the records of up-country Cheraw, when he moved there from Maryland in 1760.
The second trait the four men share is that any connections they had with older South Carolina families and Barbados were through their mothers or their wives.
Wilson’s first wife, Charlotte Alston, has the oldest family tree. Her father came from a family of rice planters descended from John Allston, who had arrived sometime between 1685 and 1694. Her mother, Mary Ashe, was related to John Porter, who was expelled from the Virginia House of Burgess in 1663 as a Quaker; Alexander Lillington, who moved to North Carolina from Barbados around 1669, and James Moore, who managed land on Goose Creek for the Yeamans family and married Margaret Berringer. Berringer’s mother’s second husband was John Yeamans, who had left Barbados in 1665 to head the early settlement at Cape Fear in 1665.
Charlotte’s brother married a daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia. When Charlotte died, Wilson married Rebecca Eden, a woman whose fortune have been saved by Burr.
The father of Hamilton’s mother, Elizabeth Lynch, had married into the same Alston family as Wilson, before marrying her mother, Hannah Motte. When his father married her, Lynch was the widow of John Harleston. His grandfather John had migrated from Dublin in 1690 and served as an attorney to the Colletons while his first wife’s grandfather, Gideon Faucheraud, had settled on Goose Creek, the symbolic center of old South Carolina, in 1707.
Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth Heyward, came from a family of rice planters whose immigrant ancestor, Daniel, left England around 1672. His sister Hannah was married to John Cordes Prioleau’s cousin, Samuel Prioleau, Jr. When she died, Prioleau married her sister Elizabeth.
Bennett’s grandfather had married Margaret Swinton, whose father Hugh had plantation lands on the Cooper River. Hugh’s wife, Judith Simmons, was born of Huguenot parents who settled Middleburg Plantation in Berkeley County.
Johnson’s mother traced her ancestry back to Thomas Amory who left Somerset for Barbados in 1653 and then moved to Goose Creek in 1699.
The third feature of Charleston society in the 1820's was the importance of the American Revolution in providing men with sufficient status to marry women from established families.
James Hamilton’s father was the fifth son, apprenticed to study medicine in Philadelphia when war was declared. He volunteered, and appeared in Charleston soon after Elizabeth’s Lynch’s husband was killed in action.
Lynch’s mother, Hannah Motte, later married William Moultrie, who had defeated the British at Sullivan’s Island in 1776. Johnson’s father William was imprisoned by the British when they took Charleston in 1780, while Bennett’s first wife, Mary Lightbourn Stone, was the daughter of a privateer, Benjamin Stone.
In many ways, the city’s social structure in 1822 was like that described by Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind. There were the old families like those of Ashley Wilkes and Charlotte Alston who preferred to marry among themselves, but were pragmatic enough to barter their daughters’ status for plantations. There were children of immigrants, like Scarlet O’Hara and Elizabeth Lynch, who wanted to marry into those families. And, with the war, there were men on the make, like Rhett Butler and James Hamilton, Sr., who suddenly had access to salons where they would have been shunned before.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
South Carolina - Denmark Vesey
The incident that reignited my interest in South Carolina was an article in The Nation by Jon Wiener describing the controversy stirred by Michael Johnson when he suggested Denmark Vesey had, in fact, not been plotting a slave revolt in Charleston in 1822, but had been convicted by false evidence forced from imprisoned slaves fearing for their lives.
Johnson had gone back to the rarely read manuscript transcriptions of testimony and compared them with the published report used by most historians. He suggested the legal discovery of the Vesey conspiracy unfolded occurred in two phases.
On May 22, Peter Desverneys, a slave owned by John Prioleau, told him he’d heard from a slave owned by John Paul, that something was about to happen. The scion of one of the first Huguenot families in Charleston informed his cousin-in-law, the intendent who functioned as mayor, James Hamilton, Jr. Hamilton questioned Paul’s slave William, who gave evidence against two other slaves owned by his master, Mingo Harth and Peter Poyas, and decided he told more lies than truths.
On May 30, George Wilson, a slave owned by John Lyde Wilson, told him there were plans for an insurrection. Apparently the member of traditional Charleston society took what he’d heard within the context of the Desverneys episode and alerted Hamilton who now "mobilized the militia and patrols." Johnson suggests Hamilton’s reaction created the sense of "deep interest and distressing anxiety" among the while residents of Charleston that he then deplored.
After the failure of an insurrection to materialize, a special tribunal began taking evidence in secret to learn the nature of what had been adverted. On July 2, representatives of the court publically executed a freedman, Denmark Vesey, three slaves owned by the governor, Thomas Bennett (Rolla, Ned, and Batteau), Peter Poyas, and another slave, Jesse Blackwood, owned by Thomas Blackwood, head of the Planters and Mechanics Bank.
While the court was in session, Bennett’s brother-in-law, William Johnson, Jr., published an account of an earlier South Carolina slave revolt in the Edgefield County that had turned out to be a hoax. Members of the tribunal thought Johnson was attacking them, and demanded the justice of the Supreme Court retract his insinuations.
Michael Johnson believes the special court then redoubled its efforts to prove the existence of the Vesey conspiracy with more evidence obtained by torture that lead to the execution of another two on July 12, 22 on July 26, four on July 28 and one on August 9. The Johns Hopkins historian believes in this second phase the court became more concerned with defending its honor than with discovering the truth.
Bennett waited until autumn to tell the state legislature that he believed the special tribunal’s secret sessions were "in every sense...an usurpation of authority, and a violation of law" The attorney general, Robert Young Hayne, disagreed and argued only free whites had rights in the judicial system.
Public opinion, much enflamed by the arrests and executions, sent Hayne to the Senate, elected Wilson as the next governor and sent Hamilton to the House of Representatives before electing him governor in 1830. Hayne was replaced by John Calhoun in the next Senate election, and replaced Hamilton as governor in 1832.
Bennett served three terms in the state senate, while Robert Starobin says Johnson was eventually forced to leave the state.
Notes: All quotes from Johnson.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Starobin Robert S. "Terror in South Carolina 1822: An Introduction to Denmark Vesey and the Slave Conspiracy in Charleston," in Starobin, Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822, 1970.
Wiener, Jon. "Denmark Vesey: A New Verdict," The Nation, February 21, 2002.
Johnson had gone back to the rarely read manuscript transcriptions of testimony and compared them with the published report used by most historians. He suggested the legal discovery of the Vesey conspiracy unfolded occurred in two phases.
On May 22, Peter Desverneys, a slave owned by John Prioleau, told him he’d heard from a slave owned by John Paul, that something was about to happen. The scion of one of the first Huguenot families in Charleston informed his cousin-in-law, the intendent who functioned as mayor, James Hamilton, Jr. Hamilton questioned Paul’s slave William, who gave evidence against two other slaves owned by his master, Mingo Harth and Peter Poyas, and decided he told more lies than truths.
On May 30, George Wilson, a slave owned by John Lyde Wilson, told him there were plans for an insurrection. Apparently the member of traditional Charleston society took what he’d heard within the context of the Desverneys episode and alerted Hamilton who now "mobilized the militia and patrols." Johnson suggests Hamilton’s reaction created the sense of "deep interest and distressing anxiety" among the while residents of Charleston that he then deplored.
After the failure of an insurrection to materialize, a special tribunal began taking evidence in secret to learn the nature of what had been adverted. On July 2, representatives of the court publically executed a freedman, Denmark Vesey, three slaves owned by the governor, Thomas Bennett (Rolla, Ned, and Batteau), Peter Poyas, and another slave, Jesse Blackwood, owned by Thomas Blackwood, head of the Planters and Mechanics Bank.
While the court was in session, Bennett’s brother-in-law, William Johnson, Jr., published an account of an earlier South Carolina slave revolt in the Edgefield County that had turned out to be a hoax. Members of the tribunal thought Johnson was attacking them, and demanded the justice of the Supreme Court retract his insinuations.
Michael Johnson believes the special court then redoubled its efforts to prove the existence of the Vesey conspiracy with more evidence obtained by torture that lead to the execution of another two on July 12, 22 on July 26, four on July 28 and one on August 9. The Johns Hopkins historian believes in this second phase the court became more concerned with defending its honor than with discovering the truth.
Bennett waited until autumn to tell the state legislature that he believed the special tribunal’s secret sessions were "in every sense...an usurpation of authority, and a violation of law" The attorney general, Robert Young Hayne, disagreed and argued only free whites had rights in the judicial system.
Public opinion, much enflamed by the arrests and executions, sent Hayne to the Senate, elected Wilson as the next governor and sent Hamilton to the House of Representatives before electing him governor in 1830. Hayne was replaced by John Calhoun in the next Senate election, and replaced Hamilton as governor in 1832.
Bennett served three terms in the state senate, while Robert Starobin says Johnson was eventually forced to leave the state.
Notes: All quotes from Johnson.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Starobin Robert S. "Terror in South Carolina 1822: An Introduction to Denmark Vesey and the Slave Conspiracy in Charleston," in Starobin, Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822, 1970.
Wiener, Jon. "Denmark Vesey: A New Verdict," The Nation, February 21, 2002.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Subsidized Prices
Agriculture and industry have been at odds as long as both have been strong enough to influence politics. In the nineteenth century, Congressmen argued over tariffs because high import tariffs helped industry and hurt agriculture. They argued about internal improvements because canals helped farmers in the north get food across the Appalachians to feed to growing numbers of cotton mill workers on the coast, but southern farmers could get by sending cotton to New England with rivers that drained into the Caribbean and Atlantic.
The ancient conflict took a different turn when Paul Volcker decided the primary cause of inflation was the constant increase in wages which pushed up the cost of goods. By chance the prices of oil and meat increased while he was promoting policies to keep wages down. The government’s answer then was not to improve wages, but to subsidize prices.
That the idea seeped into our political discourse through ranchers is probably not accidental. Since the depression, the government had been trying to ameliorate the boom-bust cycles of agriculture by restricting production, then by subsidizing prices. It was impossible not to extend the idea from one group of raw food producers to another.
Ever since, the only solution to economic problems both political parties would agree to support is subsidized prices. When college tuition got too high for the middle classes, the answer wasn’t to explore why costs were rising, but simply to argue who should benefit from the subsidy (loan) program and how onerous it should be.
Similarly, when health care costs began increasing faster than other commodities, few politicians were willing to upset their corporate contributors by investigating how costs are set. Instead, the argument became limited to how to subsidize the price, for whom and under what conditions. The higher prices rose, the larger the number of people who needed support.
Few recognized the reality that there no longer was any connection between wages and prices, and that prices continued to rise when the cost of labor was falling. Economics courses didn’t change to reflect new experiences about the hesitancy of prices to fall, when increased prices became the measure of our economic well-being. Annual increases in GDP ultimately required increased profits, which increasingly came from high prices for real estate and increased compensation for managers.
The only answer was to find more creative ways to cut the cost of labor, and so congressmen manipulated the tax code to encourage the transfer of work to cheaper countries. The gap between wages and prices increased for workers, but not managers who exploited the changes.
When contractors built more houses than there were available customers, the answer was to manipulate the price of owning a home by changing the rules of mortgages. More recently, congressmen added tax credits as a solution to the wage-price gap. Their primary concern was to stimulate housing by not allowing inflated prices to fall.
When more women had to work to supplement household incomes and the use of older children as babysitters was frowned upon and neighbors or older relatives were unavailable, the question wasn’t why are wages so low that two people must work to produce the same income as one had in the past. Instead, the answer was to manipulate the tax code to subsidize the price of childcare.
When better off families needed servants so couples could each pursue careers that demanded long hours while maintaining their physical presence in the community they found they couldn’t find affordable low-cost labor. Similarly, when those contractors needed increasingly cheaper skilled tradesmen to improve their profits or those meat producers needed inexpensive labor, they found no surplus of cheap, unemployed workers.
They did what people have done in this country since the nineteenth century; they turned to immigrants. The fact that Congress had been passing laws since World War I to restrict that labor pool was simply inconvenient. A variety of government policies and inactions that permitted illegal immigration had the effect of subsidizing the price of labor for the wealthy, contractors, and meat producers.
When many people could no longer afford to buy cars, the question wasn’t why have car prices continued to increase when fewer people work to make them and their wages have been dropping. Instead, car companies began manipulating prices with buyer incentives. When those no longer worked, the government had to step in and further subsidize the price.
Now people are beginning to ask why there are no jobs in a recession. There is no recognition that when those jobs were sent overseas, the machine tool industry also moved. You can’t restart a factory stripped of its machinery, or restart mothballed equipment when no machinists apprentices were trained to replace the people who understood machinery when they reached retirement age.
The resources are gone, and any government program, analogous to those of Alexander Hamilton, to bring them back will take time and cost money. At the time Hamilton was bitterly opposed by one political party, because he essentially advocated policies that subsidized infant industries with higher prices for imported goods. No one can begin manufacturing anything in this country without the same kinds of subsidies. Any such program would face the same opposition that met Hamilton.
The only political will is for subsidies that maintain the illusion people can afford increasing prices, while complaining about the consequences of those policies on people’s sense of initiative and responsibility. No one is quite willing to admit that perpetual subsidy is no more stable than the life on credit that marked the farmers whose problems the government first tried to solve two or three generations ago.
The ancient conflict took a different turn when Paul Volcker decided the primary cause of inflation was the constant increase in wages which pushed up the cost of goods. By chance the prices of oil and meat increased while he was promoting policies to keep wages down. The government’s answer then was not to improve wages, but to subsidize prices.
That the idea seeped into our political discourse through ranchers is probably not accidental. Since the depression, the government had been trying to ameliorate the boom-bust cycles of agriculture by restricting production, then by subsidizing prices. It was impossible not to extend the idea from one group of raw food producers to another.
Ever since, the only solution to economic problems both political parties would agree to support is subsidized prices. When college tuition got too high for the middle classes, the answer wasn’t to explore why costs were rising, but simply to argue who should benefit from the subsidy (loan) program and how onerous it should be.
Similarly, when health care costs began increasing faster than other commodities, few politicians were willing to upset their corporate contributors by investigating how costs are set. Instead, the argument became limited to how to subsidize the price, for whom and under what conditions. The higher prices rose, the larger the number of people who needed support.
Few recognized the reality that there no longer was any connection between wages and prices, and that prices continued to rise when the cost of labor was falling. Economics courses didn’t change to reflect new experiences about the hesitancy of prices to fall, when increased prices became the measure of our economic well-being. Annual increases in GDP ultimately required increased profits, which increasingly came from high prices for real estate and increased compensation for managers.
The only answer was to find more creative ways to cut the cost of labor, and so congressmen manipulated the tax code to encourage the transfer of work to cheaper countries. The gap between wages and prices increased for workers, but not managers who exploited the changes.
When contractors built more houses than there were available customers, the answer was to manipulate the price of owning a home by changing the rules of mortgages. More recently, congressmen added tax credits as a solution to the wage-price gap. Their primary concern was to stimulate housing by not allowing inflated prices to fall.
When more women had to work to supplement household incomes and the use of older children as babysitters was frowned upon and neighbors or older relatives were unavailable, the question wasn’t why are wages so low that two people must work to produce the same income as one had in the past. Instead, the answer was to manipulate the tax code to subsidize the price of childcare.
When better off families needed servants so couples could each pursue careers that demanded long hours while maintaining their physical presence in the community they found they couldn’t find affordable low-cost labor. Similarly, when those contractors needed increasingly cheaper skilled tradesmen to improve their profits or those meat producers needed inexpensive labor, they found no surplus of cheap, unemployed workers.
They did what people have done in this country since the nineteenth century; they turned to immigrants. The fact that Congress had been passing laws since World War I to restrict that labor pool was simply inconvenient. A variety of government policies and inactions that permitted illegal immigration had the effect of subsidizing the price of labor for the wealthy, contractors, and meat producers.
When many people could no longer afford to buy cars, the question wasn’t why have car prices continued to increase when fewer people work to make them and their wages have been dropping. Instead, car companies began manipulating prices with buyer incentives. When those no longer worked, the government had to step in and further subsidize the price.
Now people are beginning to ask why there are no jobs in a recession. There is no recognition that when those jobs were sent overseas, the machine tool industry also moved. You can’t restart a factory stripped of its machinery, or restart mothballed equipment when no machinists apprentices were trained to replace the people who understood machinery when they reached retirement age.
The resources are gone, and any government program, analogous to those of Alexander Hamilton, to bring them back will take time and cost money. At the time Hamilton was bitterly opposed by one political party, because he essentially advocated policies that subsidized infant industries with higher prices for imported goods. No one can begin manufacturing anything in this country without the same kinds of subsidies. Any such program would face the same opposition that met Hamilton.
The only political will is for subsidies that maintain the illusion people can afford increasing prices, while complaining about the consequences of those policies on people’s sense of initiative and responsibility. No one is quite willing to admit that perpetual subsidy is no more stable than the life on credit that marked the farmers whose problems the government first tried to solve two or three generations ago.
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