James Hamilton’s reliance on comrades for his success may be one of the South Carolina cultural values inherited from Barbados where early deaths and institutional anarchy forced men to rely on one another.
Alison Games found in the early years of Barbados both planters and liberated indentured servants created "extended networks of friends and endowed these networks with familial significance." She found one important relationship was that of godfather, and that men who had had no opportunity to marry often named their godchildren and the children of friends as heirs.
By the time Hamilton was born, families were very much a part of Charleston life. However, the persistence of diseases like yellow fever perpetuated the concern of men for the children of their friends. Hamilton himself became the guardian of the orphans of his cousin through his maternal grandmother, John Middleton, while one of his rivals in Charleston, Thomas Bennett, adopted Christopher Gustavus Memminger, after his widowed mother died of yellow fever, and raised two orphans from Santa Domingo.
The fear of early death haunted both Barbados and Charleston, but the responses of the two places were different. Richard Dunn found absentee owners rarely prospered in Barbados, and so people who wanted to succeed stayed on their land, despite the dangers. Nineteenth century wealthy families from the Carolina low country fled to places like Newport, leaving their plantations in the hands of underlings. While it kept people alive, such trips did little to prepare men like Hamilton for overseeing their plantations or gangs of slaves.
Games also found that individuals in Barbados, who did not have enough collateral to borrow money from an English or Dutch merchant to start a plantation, entered partnerships with their peers, and might, indeed, be members of more than one partnership. Many large Carolina landowners were perpetually in debt to their factors, and so, if they needed money, had no choice but to ask friends to sign their notes.
Hamilton knew from the bankruptcies of his father, his maternal step-grandfather, William Moultrie, and his step-father-in-law, Nicholas Cruger, the dangers of such agreements, but he and his friends also knew their necessity. It was this willingness to work with friends that enabled him to get so deeply in debt, and forced him to take more desperate measures to raise money to maintain those ties.
Much like Richard Lignon who bought a share of a plantation in Barbados with Thomas Modyford, Hamilton bought a plantation in Alabama with lawyer James Petigru and others through the Oswichee Company and bought land in Texas with Albert Burnley. He and Albert Jackson had owned land in South Carolina before developing the Retrieve plantation in Texas with Henry R. W. Hill, a New Orleans factor.
When Edward Banfield observed a poor south Italian town, he realized many of its problems arose from a distrust of outsiders that led people to only work with those they trusted, and that nothing would change their economic condition so long as those affiliation values reigned. For many reasons, men in Barbados developed a similar reliance on comrades and aversions to institutions that once formed, were perpetuated when men migrated to the Carolinas.
In the beginning, similar conditions between Barbados and frontier Carolina encouraged a transfer of a culture based on social networks. Once in place, the culture perpetuated itself like it did in Italy, and influenced the ability of men like Hamilton, exposed to no other values as youth, to respond to changing possibilities. In the end, he was its victim, as much as Denmark Vesey and everyone who was willing to be charmed by him in the hopes of personal gain.
Notes:
Banfield, Edward C. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958.
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004.
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