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.
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