Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are an unlikely pair to be the ones responsible for Charleston’s antebellum wealth and beauty. It’s even odder, given South Carolina’s current reputation for fundamentalism, that the actions of the two contributed to the growing body of experience that led people to accept Charles Darwin’s 1859 suggestion that natural selection was the operative cause of evolution.
After the war, Maham needed seed rice for his Pineville area plantation. He died four years later. In the years since he had been so deeply in debt, he must have had some success, because the next year, his younger daughter, Mary’s husband, George Haig died and left the slaves he’d acquired from Maham to his wife for her life.
In 1800, Joshua John Ward was born at Brook Green plantation to Maham’s niece, Elizabeth Cook, and John Ward. Thirty-seven years later, his overseer, James C. Thompson, noticed part of a rice head that was larger than any other Ward had seen.
Ward saved the seed, and planted it the next year on the margins of an old field where it was nearly destroyed by standing water and rats. The following year, he and Thompson planted the seed they’d been able to salvage in a large tub in Thompson’s yard, only to have a slave leave the gate open and a hog eat most of the crop. They transplanted the survivors, and most of the rice was sterile.
In 1840, they took what had survived the hog and rot, and planted half an acre. The next year, Ward planted 21 acres at Brook Green, which his factor sold above the market price. In 1842, Ward tried 400 acres, and the following year planted nothing but the new large grain.
In 1844, Ward made Carolina Gold available commercially. From then until the civil war, the Brook Green rice "commanded the highest price of any rice on the world market in Paris and London."
Ward claimed his 1838 seed was descended from that planted by his great-uncle in 1785.
Sometime in the early 1800's, either 1802 or 1810 or 1811, John Champneys found a new rose growing on his plantation which appeared to be a cross between a white musk, cultivated in Europe since the Crusades, and Parson’s Pink, which had been introduced to England from China in 1759.
Philippe Noisette, a son of the head gardener to the future Louis XVIII, had moved to Charleston in 1795 with his Haitian wife after the revolution there. He experimented with the rose, now called Champneys’ Pink Cluster, and in 1814 sent either seeds or plants to his brother who had a nursery in Paris. Either Philippe or Louis Claude crossed the plant with another rose; the hybrid was introduced in Europe as Blush Noisette in 1819.
Meantime, plant stock of some kind was sent to William Price, Jr., who had the best known American nursery on Long Island, and traded plants with his English suppliers. Two years before Champneys died, the Loddiges Nursery outside London offered a new rose, Champigny, in 1818.
Noisettes were the first roses to introduce the recessive gene for reblooming isolated by the Chinese into a fragrant European species. A number of new varieties appeared in France in the 1820's and 1830's. By the 1840's, they were crossed with tea roses, which led in 1867 to La France, the first hybrid tea released by Jean-Baptiste André Guillot the younger.
At the time, Louis Claude Noisette and other French growers were becoming aware of the mechanics of plant reproduction. When Rudolph Jacob Camerarius had argued in 1694 that plants had sexual organs, and pollen was the male agent of fertilization, most ignored him.
In 1729 a 22-year-old Carl Linnaeus expanded his ides to suggest a method of classifying plants in Introduction to the Floral Nuptials. He continued his work to make reproduction the basis for his description of the natural world and external characteristics, the morphology, the criteria naturalists would use to distinguish species.
The most important work for breeders appeared in 1793, when Christian Konrad Sprengel described his practical experiments with pollination. Still, more than a generation passed before the first controlled rose hybrid was introduced by Beauregard in Angiers in 1839. Safrano, a grandparent of La France, combined a yellow China with a Bourbon, itself a spontaneous hybrid of Parson’s Pink and a damask found on La Réunion in 1823 by Edouard Perichon.
At the time Maham acquired his gold husked seed and Champneys bought his pink shrub rose, observation and selection were the only methods available to farmers to improve their crops. In 1843, Ward’s relative through his mother’s sister, Robert Allston complained that poor rice came from the "commingling of the grain" which happened when different varieties were planted in adjacent fields, and planters were "careless" in selecting their seed stock.
The year before Ward introduced Carolina Gold, Allston described the types of rice then growing in the state. His classification criteria were morphological: seed husk color, size, shape, and awns, also called beards.
The most important variety, which he attributed to Maham, had a gold shell. This coexisted with white rice, which had a creamy hull; guinea rice, which he said looked like guinea corn, a form of African sorghum or millet, and proud rice, a red grain with a white husk and awn like gold seed.
Allston contrasted these with attempts to improve the quality of the crop, either through introducing new seed or careful selection. His example of the first was a bearded variety brought from the East Indies the year before. As an illustration of "improvement" through "a long-continued, careful selection of the seed," he mentioned the long grain rice about to be introduced by Ward.
At the time Carolina Gold and Safrano were introduced in 1844 and 1839, Darwin was back in England from his five year voyage on the Beagle and working out an explanation for the endemic species he’d seen in the Galapagos islands.
It’s his name we associate with the revolution in plant breeding, even though he drew on the work of men like Sprengel. Similarly, while J. J. Ward and Louis Claude Noisette received the credit and profits for developing new plant varieties, they needed the experience of Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys, and the support of men like Robert Allston and Philipe Nosette.
Innovation can only come from a combination of shared interests and special individuals.
Notes: Mary Charlotte Cook, Ward’s maternal aunt, married Benjamin Allston Sr. Allston’s uncle was William Allston, the father of Robert Francis Withers Allston.
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.
Camerarius, Rudolph Jacob. Epistolae de Sexa Plantarum, 1694.
Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. "Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold," The Rice Paper, November 2009; the "highest price" quotation.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species, 1859.
Hurst, C. C. "Notes on the Origin and Evolution of Our Garden Roses," 1941, reprinted in Graham Stuart Thomas, The Old Shrub Roses, 1955.
Lineaus, Carl. Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, 1730.
_____. Systema Naturae, first edition 1735.
Spengle, Christian Konrad. Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen, 1793.
Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
South Carolina - Hazekiah Maham’s War
For nearly ten years, war dominated Hazekiah Maham’s life. His easy years of promotion, and one assumes, comradery and competence peaked in April, 1781, when he built a log tower to give rebel soldiers the height necessary to fire at the otherwise impregnable Fort Watson. While others credit Thomas Taylor with devising the first temporary structure from fence rails at Fort Granby in February, Maham was the one who adapted the idea and improved the construction with logs, so that it became a tactic used the end of May at Augusta.
Four months later, in July, the nature of Maham’s war changed when Thomas Sumter led an attack on the British near Charleston. At the first skirmish at Biggin’s Church on July 16, one of Peter Horry’s troops betrayed their position with a gun that failed to fire and they retreated. A slave told the British where they went, and they were ambushed in camp.
The next day, the British attacked at Quinby Bridge near the Cooper River. Maham’s troops charged to take the howitzer. In the fierce, close combat Maham’s horse was killed. The rebels fell back to Thomas Shubrick’s plantation. Many in Francis Marion’s Brigade of Partisans were killed or wounded when Sumter failed to send artillery to support them. Of the 555 involved 30 were killed and 30 wounded. The dead were buried near where they fell.
In September, the Continental army, commanded by Nathaniel Greene, engaged the British at Eutaw Springs, to stop them from going north to join Charles Cornwallis in Virginia. Technically, Greene lost in the deadliest battle in the south, but not before neutralizing the British troops. Maham’s commander, William Henderson was wounded.
The Swamp Fox’s unit was so badly depleted he was ordered to raise two new regiments, one led by Maham, the other by Peter Horry. The two men had been feuding, and Maham refused to work with Horry.
One reason for the conflict may have been the tensions that arise when an aristocratic society is confronted by the realities of prolonged war where military talent is more widely distributed among the lower orders, and men no longer tolerate incompetent commanders. Thomas Taylor had publically refused to obey an order from the Gamecock, Thomas Sumter, after Shubrick’s plantation.
At some time, Maham was staying with friends when he woke in the night, thinking he was being attacked, grabbed his sword and began slashing clothes that hung by the window. His wife’s wealthy relatives rather thought it a funny anecdote to tell about a man who had married into their family, but modern readers will recognize a common post-combat reaction made worse by an environment where the enemy had eyes everywhere.
After Cornwallis surrendered in November, Maham’s men were attacked in January at Vidau’s Bridge and in February at Durant’s plantation and Tydiman’s plantation. In each case, the British commanders knew the numbers of men Marion commanded. In February they not only knew Marion and Maham were attending the General Assembly at Jacksonborough and that Maham and Horry were feuding, but that the man Maham left in charge had left camp.
Four were killed and 14 wounded in January; 14 were killed and 9 wounded in February. The last battle left the units of both Horry and Maham so ravaged, the governor, John Rutledge, ordered the two merged. When Marion, made Maham commander, ostensibly because he had been a colonel longer, Horry resigned in protest.
When Horry returned to the plantation he’d inherited from his father near Winyah Bay, he found his neighbor’s slaves had run away, leaving sweet potatoes and cotton they’d been growing for themselves. He asked to harvest the crops to support his own slaves.
In March, Maham returned home to see a doctor about a lingering fever. A runaway slave informed the loyalists. James Robins, a captain at Tydiman’s Plantation, appeared to force him to sign papers he wouldn’t fight any longer, and left him on parole. Greene ordered him to stay home and accept his situation.
Frederick Porcher remembers that when Maham returned the area "was full of disaster to the agriculturist." The primary crop had been indigo, which was no longer supported by British subsidies, and the Santee swamp was too prone to floods for other crops. To make matters worse, the state was refusing to pay Marion’s men, and the credit breakdown that sparked riots in Charles Town spread to the hinterland.
Maham’s wife Mary died in January, 1784. By September he was so deeply in debt, the sheriff was serving him papers. When his deputy appeared, Maham drew his sword and forced the man to eat the papers. Marion appeared to smooth over the situation, but his family says Maham continued to be "more and more irritable."
He died in 1789, only 50 years old.
Hazekiah Maham’s War:
1776
Mar Elected captain in Isaac Huger’s 1st Regiment of Riflemen
1779
Sep 24-Oct 19 Stono Ferry, captain of grenadier company under Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Nov 8 Major in the SC 1st Regiment, resign 11/8
nd Major under Daniel Horry in SC Light Dragoons, cousin of Peter Horry
1780
Feb 18-22 Stono Ferry, major with Daniel Horry’s SC State Dragoons
Mar 6-7 Ferguson’s Plantation, major, SC State Calvary
May 12 Charleston surrender
Aug Lieutenant colonel under Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox
1781
Apr 15-23 Fort Watson, major SC State Calvary under Francis Marion
Jul 16 Biggin’s Church, Lieutenant Colonel under Thomas Sumter, SC Continentals
Jul 17 Quinby Bridge and Shubrick’s Plantation, lieutenant colonel, Maham’s Light Dragoons, under Thomas Sumter, SC Continentals
Aug 31 Parker’s Ferry under Francis Marion, SC Continentals and Militia
Sep 8 Eutaw Springs, lieutenant colonel under William Henderson, SC State Troops and Militia
Nov 10 Charles Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown
Nov Colonel and commander of SC 3rd Regiment of State Dragoon under Francis Marion
Nov 18 Fair Lawn under Francis Marion
1782
Jan 3 Vidau’s Bridge, Maham’s Light Dragoons under John Caraway Smith, SC State Troops
Feb 24 Durant’s Plantation, Strawberry Ferry, Maham’s Light Dragoons under John Caraway Smith
Feb 25 Tydiman’s Plantation, Mahan’s Dragoons under John Caraway Smith
Mar Captured by British at home, paroled
Oct 16 Monck’s Corner
nd Chase down thieves who steal his relatives prize horse
Notes:
Gordon, John W. South Carolina and the American Revolution, 2003.
Horry, Peter. Letter to Colonel Grimké, 10 June 1782, quoted by Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993; probably John Faucheraud Grimké who may have been the nominal owner of the neighbor’s land. Grimké was married to Mary Smith, a descendant of the second landgrave Thomas Smith, who bought the grant of Wiynah Bay in 1711; the Grimkés were centered to the south in Beaufort.
Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.
Lewis, J. D. The American Revolution website.
O’Kelley, Patrick. Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, 4 volumes, 2004-2005.
Porcher, Frederick A. Historical and Social Sketch of Craven County, no date.
Four months later, in July, the nature of Maham’s war changed when Thomas Sumter led an attack on the British near Charleston. At the first skirmish at Biggin’s Church on July 16, one of Peter Horry’s troops betrayed their position with a gun that failed to fire and they retreated. A slave told the British where they went, and they were ambushed in camp.
The next day, the British attacked at Quinby Bridge near the Cooper River. Maham’s troops charged to take the howitzer. In the fierce, close combat Maham’s horse was killed. The rebels fell back to Thomas Shubrick’s plantation. Many in Francis Marion’s Brigade of Partisans were killed or wounded when Sumter failed to send artillery to support them. Of the 555 involved 30 were killed and 30 wounded. The dead were buried near where they fell.
In September, the Continental army, commanded by Nathaniel Greene, engaged the British at Eutaw Springs, to stop them from going north to join Charles Cornwallis in Virginia. Technically, Greene lost in the deadliest battle in the south, but not before neutralizing the British troops. Maham’s commander, William Henderson was wounded.
The Swamp Fox’s unit was so badly depleted he was ordered to raise two new regiments, one led by Maham, the other by Peter Horry. The two men had been feuding, and Maham refused to work with Horry.
One reason for the conflict may have been the tensions that arise when an aristocratic society is confronted by the realities of prolonged war where military talent is more widely distributed among the lower orders, and men no longer tolerate incompetent commanders. Thomas Taylor had publically refused to obey an order from the Gamecock, Thomas Sumter, after Shubrick’s plantation.
At some time, Maham was staying with friends when he woke in the night, thinking he was being attacked, grabbed his sword and began slashing clothes that hung by the window. His wife’s wealthy relatives rather thought it a funny anecdote to tell about a man who had married into their family, but modern readers will recognize a common post-combat reaction made worse by an environment where the enemy had eyes everywhere.
After Cornwallis surrendered in November, Maham’s men were attacked in January at Vidau’s Bridge and in February at Durant’s plantation and Tydiman’s plantation. In each case, the British commanders knew the numbers of men Marion commanded. In February they not only knew Marion and Maham were attending the General Assembly at Jacksonborough and that Maham and Horry were feuding, but that the man Maham left in charge had left camp.
Four were killed and 14 wounded in January; 14 were killed and 9 wounded in February. The last battle left the units of both Horry and Maham so ravaged, the governor, John Rutledge, ordered the two merged. When Marion, made Maham commander, ostensibly because he had been a colonel longer, Horry resigned in protest.
When Horry returned to the plantation he’d inherited from his father near Winyah Bay, he found his neighbor’s slaves had run away, leaving sweet potatoes and cotton they’d been growing for themselves. He asked to harvest the crops to support his own slaves.
In March, Maham returned home to see a doctor about a lingering fever. A runaway slave informed the loyalists. James Robins, a captain at Tydiman’s Plantation, appeared to force him to sign papers he wouldn’t fight any longer, and left him on parole. Greene ordered him to stay home and accept his situation.
Frederick Porcher remembers that when Maham returned the area "was full of disaster to the agriculturist." The primary crop had been indigo, which was no longer supported by British subsidies, and the Santee swamp was too prone to floods for other crops. To make matters worse, the state was refusing to pay Marion’s men, and the credit breakdown that sparked riots in Charles Town spread to the hinterland.
Maham’s wife Mary died in January, 1784. By September he was so deeply in debt, the sheriff was serving him papers. When his deputy appeared, Maham drew his sword and forced the man to eat the papers. Marion appeared to smooth over the situation, but his family says Maham continued to be "more and more irritable."
He died in 1789, only 50 years old.
Hazekiah Maham’s War:
1776
Mar Elected captain in Isaac Huger’s 1st Regiment of Riflemen
1779
Sep 24-Oct 19 Stono Ferry, captain of grenadier company under Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Nov 8 Major in the SC 1st Regiment, resign 11/8
nd Major under Daniel Horry in SC Light Dragoons, cousin of Peter Horry
1780
Feb 18-22 Stono Ferry, major with Daniel Horry’s SC State Dragoons
Mar 6-7 Ferguson’s Plantation, major, SC State Calvary
May 12 Charleston surrender
Aug Lieutenant colonel under Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox
1781
Apr 15-23 Fort Watson, major SC State Calvary under Francis Marion
Jul 16 Biggin’s Church, Lieutenant Colonel under Thomas Sumter, SC Continentals
Jul 17 Quinby Bridge and Shubrick’s Plantation, lieutenant colonel, Maham’s Light Dragoons, under Thomas Sumter, SC Continentals
Aug 31 Parker’s Ferry under Francis Marion, SC Continentals and Militia
Sep 8 Eutaw Springs, lieutenant colonel under William Henderson, SC State Troops and Militia
Nov 10 Charles Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown
Nov Colonel and commander of SC 3rd Regiment of State Dragoon under Francis Marion
Nov 18 Fair Lawn under Francis Marion
1782
Jan 3 Vidau’s Bridge, Maham’s Light Dragoons under John Caraway Smith, SC State Troops
Feb 24 Durant’s Plantation, Strawberry Ferry, Maham’s Light Dragoons under John Caraway Smith
Feb 25 Tydiman’s Plantation, Mahan’s Dragoons under John Caraway Smith
Mar Captured by British at home, paroled
Oct 16 Monck’s Corner
nd Chase down thieves who steal his relatives prize horse
Notes:
Gordon, John W. South Carolina and the American Revolution, 2003.
Horry, Peter. Letter to Colonel Grimké, 10 June 1782, quoted by Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993; probably John Faucheraud Grimké who may have been the nominal owner of the neighbor’s land. Grimké was married to Mary Smith, a descendant of the second landgrave Thomas Smith, who bought the grant of Wiynah Bay in 1711; the Grimkés were centered to the south in Beaufort.
Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.
Lewis, J. D. The American Revolution website.
O’Kelley, Patrick. Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, 4 volumes, 2004-2005.
Porcher, Frederick A. Historical and Social Sketch of Craven County, no date.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
South Carolina - John Champneys’ War
The American Revolution was not kind to Hezekiah Maham or John Champneys, who were beyond the age of adventure when war was declared in 1776. One was 37, the other 33.
Champneys had a plantation on the banks of the Wando, between the Cooper and the Atlantic on the northeast side of Charles Town where seven to eight acres were devoted to "trees, plants, shrubs and flowers of every kind which can minister to use or ornament" and "nature is improved, but no where violated."
All changed when he refused to sign the oath of loyalty in 1777. He was given one year to sell his land and leave. The next year, when the General Assembly demanded reaffirmation of the oath from neutrals, Champneys recalled the response of the banished supporters of Parliament during the English civil war in Barbados when he published "An account of the sufferings and persecution of John Champneys: a native of Charles-town, South-Carolina; inflicted by order of Congress, for his refusal to take up arms in defence of the arbitrary proceedings carried on by the rulers of said place. Together with his protest, &c."
When the British took Charles Town in 1780, Champneys was among those who returned. The next year, the war time governor, John Rutledge, offered loyalists the opportunity to reclaim their citizenship if they served six months in the militia, but he explicitly excluded men, like Champneys, who had been banished before 1780. That same year, 1781, Champneys married Mary Harvey, the widow of William Wilson.
The fourth General Assembly met in exile in Jacksonborough in January, 1782, after the British had surrendered at Yorktown but before they had vacated Charles Town. Rutledge asked them to name the loyalists who were most noxious to the incipient state. After much wrangling, they were close to issuing a list in February when William Henry Harvey, Mary’s brother, requested the property of their brother Alexander be given to him, as the rightful heir, rather than confiscated.
Two days after Harvey’s petition, the General Assembly rejected any such diversion of loyalist property. Instead, the members agreed to defer sales of real property, but not slaves, until their next session in January 1783 to give loyalists time to appeal. Like the British before them, they wanted to work the slaves to pay their war debts.
When the assembly issued its final list of 238, it included Alexander Harvey, who had signed the official greeting welcoming Henry Clinton to Charleston, and his mother’s first cousin, Joseph Seabrook, who had accepted protection from the British.
In 1783, soon after the British withdrew, the General Assembly established the trial rights for loyalists and scheduled hearings where they could come with their supporters to show they weren’t a menace to the community.
Rebecca Brannon has suggested that many tried to establish they had helped the rebel cause by taking in orphans, secretly helping prisoners, or using their positions to soften the British treatment of their neighbors. One she mentions was Joseph Seabrook, who claimed he had been "prevailed upon by his neighbors to take a Militia Command under the British Government in order to prevent plundering."
Charles Town artisans weren’t happy to see so many well-to-do loyalists petitioning for clemency when the Treaty of Paris, that would take effect September 3, upheld the right of those merchants to collect debts assumed during the occupation when the peace severed the economic ties with Britain that had sustained the pre-war economy.
The city was rocked by riots in July and incorporated as a separate entity, Charleston, with an intendant in August.
On March 26 of the following year, 1784, the General Assembly passed a general amnesty act that removed many from the original Confiscation List and placed them on the list of those to be taxed. Alexander Harvey was not removed, but Seabrook was.
Soon after, Charleston rioted again, and a secret group warned thirteen to leave or die. Twelve were merchants who had just been removed from the Confiscation List. The other was John Champneys.
There are no on-line reports of activities by Champneys that would have made him a continuing target. The most likely reason is that his wharf made him the creditor of many. We know he had a mortgage on fifteen stores and land owned by Richardson, Wyatt, and Richardson on the wharf. When the heirs sued one another in 1791, the judge, Henry William De Saussure, discovered Champneys had overbilled the partners, and owed them money.
Champneys apparently moved to Saint Augustine, where, in 1785, he sold his property to Francis Philip Fatio, a Swiss national, with the understanding he could buy it back after the confiscation deadline. The same year, his wife petitioned again on behalf of her brother, who she said was now in England being treated for insanity, and requested safe passage for John to return to request a trial. Neither was accepted.
The Wando plantation was advertized for sale in 1786.
Champneys remained in exile, and his wife petitioned again in 1787 for his safe return to settle his affairs and remove her and their family to England. This time, the General Assembly accepted the petition but did not act until 1789 when it finally lifted his banishment, but didn’t return his wharf.
Sometime, he bought his new plantation on the south side of the city where William Williamson had established "one of the most elaborate early gardens" with six acres of water and ten acres of "pleasure grounds." Williamson had died in 1785, leaving his estate to his half sisters, one of whom, Elizabeth Grimké, was married to John Rutledge.
Why the 44-year-old Champneys was finally accepted is not clear. He may finally have found a sufficiently influential sponsor, the General Assembly may have found it no longer could refuse after it had accepted worse men like Henry Laurens’ brother-in-law, Elias Ball, or it may have realized the war crisis had dissipated when the worst offenders had left and several years passed without rioting.
Mary filed one final petition in 1790. Back when her brother was leaving, she had bought a slave nurse from him at an inflated price, and now needed to regularize the woman’s position. She claimed the mulatto had been afraid at the time of the man who wanted to purchase her and she had had to outbid him.
While the Champneys had been fighting to return to Charleston, new men had been moving there who introduced the spirit of voluntary organizations we associate with the young republic. Andrew Michaux, a botanist sent by the French, started a nursery on Goose Creek and helped organize the Agricultural Society of South Carolina in 1785. Physicians trained in Edinburgh and Philadelphia founded the Medical Society of South Carolina in 1789, while others built the Orphan House in 1790.
When Champneys returned, his name appears among these new men, not among the established planter elite. He was a commissioner of the Orphan House from 1792 and 1796. As treasurer of the agricultural society in 1797, he had trouble collecting dues, and Thomas Pickney sent him a pamphlet about new ways of cultivating rice when he was president in 1810.
The year he died, 1820, the 77-year-old man was listed as a subscriber to the history of the Episcopal church being written by Frederick Dalcho, a Mason who joined the medical society in 1801, and helped organize the botanical garden in 1805.
Champneys’ life was defined by his plantations, the one on the Wando when he was an active entrepreneur, the one to the southwest when he as a civic leader, and the time between, spent in the wilderness of north Florida.
What we know of those plantations, at least the latter, however, has been defined by his enemies. The man who attributed the gardens to Williamson was David Ramsey who had been jailed in Saint Augustine by the British and later married Laurens’ daughter Martha.
Notes:
Brannon, Rebecca Nathan. Reconciling the Revolution: Resolving Conflict and Rebuilding Community in the Wake of Civil War in South Carolina, 1775-1780, 2007; includes references to William Henry Harvey, Alexander Harvey and Joseph Seabrook.
Cothran, James R. Gardens of Historic Charleston, 1995; includes Ramsay’s description of Champneys’ second plantation.
Dalcho, Frederick. An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South-Carolina, 1820.
De Saussure, Henry William. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Chancery of the State of South-Carolina: From the Revolution to [June, 1817], 1817.
Richardson, Barnard. Will described on genealogy website by Amanda Herbert, 21 February 2001.
Rogers, George C. Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, 1980 second edition; provides information on oath and Champney return.
Trinkley, Michael and Debi Hacker. "A Context for the Study of Low Country Gardens" in Tranquil Hill Plantation: The Most Charming Inland Place, 2007; includes advertisement for Champneys’ first plantation, with description of garden.
Champneys had a plantation on the banks of the Wando, between the Cooper and the Atlantic on the northeast side of Charles Town where seven to eight acres were devoted to "trees, plants, shrubs and flowers of every kind which can minister to use or ornament" and "nature is improved, but no where violated."
All changed when he refused to sign the oath of loyalty in 1777. He was given one year to sell his land and leave. The next year, when the General Assembly demanded reaffirmation of the oath from neutrals, Champneys recalled the response of the banished supporters of Parliament during the English civil war in Barbados when he published "An account of the sufferings and persecution of John Champneys: a native of Charles-town, South-Carolina; inflicted by order of Congress, for his refusal to take up arms in defence of the arbitrary proceedings carried on by the rulers of said place. Together with his protest, &c."
When the British took Charles Town in 1780, Champneys was among those who returned. The next year, the war time governor, John Rutledge, offered loyalists the opportunity to reclaim their citizenship if they served six months in the militia, but he explicitly excluded men, like Champneys, who had been banished before 1780. That same year, 1781, Champneys married Mary Harvey, the widow of William Wilson.
The fourth General Assembly met in exile in Jacksonborough in January, 1782, after the British had surrendered at Yorktown but before they had vacated Charles Town. Rutledge asked them to name the loyalists who were most noxious to the incipient state. After much wrangling, they were close to issuing a list in February when William Henry Harvey, Mary’s brother, requested the property of their brother Alexander be given to him, as the rightful heir, rather than confiscated.
Two days after Harvey’s petition, the General Assembly rejected any such diversion of loyalist property. Instead, the members agreed to defer sales of real property, but not slaves, until their next session in January 1783 to give loyalists time to appeal. Like the British before them, they wanted to work the slaves to pay their war debts.
When the assembly issued its final list of 238, it included Alexander Harvey, who had signed the official greeting welcoming Henry Clinton to Charleston, and his mother’s first cousin, Joseph Seabrook, who had accepted protection from the British.
In 1783, soon after the British withdrew, the General Assembly established the trial rights for loyalists and scheduled hearings where they could come with their supporters to show they weren’t a menace to the community.
Rebecca Brannon has suggested that many tried to establish they had helped the rebel cause by taking in orphans, secretly helping prisoners, or using their positions to soften the British treatment of their neighbors. One she mentions was Joseph Seabrook, who claimed he had been "prevailed upon by his neighbors to take a Militia Command under the British Government in order to prevent plundering."
Charles Town artisans weren’t happy to see so many well-to-do loyalists petitioning for clemency when the Treaty of Paris, that would take effect September 3, upheld the right of those merchants to collect debts assumed during the occupation when the peace severed the economic ties with Britain that had sustained the pre-war economy.
The city was rocked by riots in July and incorporated as a separate entity, Charleston, with an intendant in August.
On March 26 of the following year, 1784, the General Assembly passed a general amnesty act that removed many from the original Confiscation List and placed them on the list of those to be taxed. Alexander Harvey was not removed, but Seabrook was.
Soon after, Charleston rioted again, and a secret group warned thirteen to leave or die. Twelve were merchants who had just been removed from the Confiscation List. The other was John Champneys.
There are no on-line reports of activities by Champneys that would have made him a continuing target. The most likely reason is that his wharf made him the creditor of many. We know he had a mortgage on fifteen stores and land owned by Richardson, Wyatt, and Richardson on the wharf. When the heirs sued one another in 1791, the judge, Henry William De Saussure, discovered Champneys had overbilled the partners, and owed them money.
Champneys apparently moved to Saint Augustine, where, in 1785, he sold his property to Francis Philip Fatio, a Swiss national, with the understanding he could buy it back after the confiscation deadline. The same year, his wife petitioned again on behalf of her brother, who she said was now in England being treated for insanity, and requested safe passage for John to return to request a trial. Neither was accepted.
The Wando plantation was advertized for sale in 1786.
Champneys remained in exile, and his wife petitioned again in 1787 for his safe return to settle his affairs and remove her and their family to England. This time, the General Assembly accepted the petition but did not act until 1789 when it finally lifted his banishment, but didn’t return his wharf.
Sometime, he bought his new plantation on the south side of the city where William Williamson had established "one of the most elaborate early gardens" with six acres of water and ten acres of "pleasure grounds." Williamson had died in 1785, leaving his estate to his half sisters, one of whom, Elizabeth Grimké, was married to John Rutledge.
Why the 44-year-old Champneys was finally accepted is not clear. He may finally have found a sufficiently influential sponsor, the General Assembly may have found it no longer could refuse after it had accepted worse men like Henry Laurens’ brother-in-law, Elias Ball, or it may have realized the war crisis had dissipated when the worst offenders had left and several years passed without rioting.
Mary filed one final petition in 1790. Back when her brother was leaving, she had bought a slave nurse from him at an inflated price, and now needed to regularize the woman’s position. She claimed the mulatto had been afraid at the time of the man who wanted to purchase her and she had had to outbid him.
While the Champneys had been fighting to return to Charleston, new men had been moving there who introduced the spirit of voluntary organizations we associate with the young republic. Andrew Michaux, a botanist sent by the French, started a nursery on Goose Creek and helped organize the Agricultural Society of South Carolina in 1785. Physicians trained in Edinburgh and Philadelphia founded the Medical Society of South Carolina in 1789, while others built the Orphan House in 1790.
When Champneys returned, his name appears among these new men, not among the established planter elite. He was a commissioner of the Orphan House from 1792 and 1796. As treasurer of the agricultural society in 1797, he had trouble collecting dues, and Thomas Pickney sent him a pamphlet about new ways of cultivating rice when he was president in 1810.
The year he died, 1820, the 77-year-old man was listed as a subscriber to the history of the Episcopal church being written by Frederick Dalcho, a Mason who joined the medical society in 1801, and helped organize the botanical garden in 1805.
Champneys’ life was defined by his plantations, the one on the Wando when he was an active entrepreneur, the one to the southwest when he as a civic leader, and the time between, spent in the wilderness of north Florida.
What we know of those plantations, at least the latter, however, has been defined by his enemies. The man who attributed the gardens to Williamson was David Ramsey who had been jailed in Saint Augustine by the British and later married Laurens’ daughter Martha.
Notes:
Brannon, Rebecca Nathan. Reconciling the Revolution: Resolving Conflict and Rebuilding Community in the Wake of Civil War in South Carolina, 1775-1780, 2007; includes references to William Henry Harvey, Alexander Harvey and Joseph Seabrook.
Cothran, James R. Gardens of Historic Charleston, 1995; includes Ramsay’s description of Champneys’ second plantation.
Dalcho, Frederick. An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South-Carolina, 1820.
De Saussure, Henry William. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Chancery of the State of South-Carolina: From the Revolution to [June, 1817], 1817.
Richardson, Barnard. Will described on genealogy website by Amanda Herbert, 21 February 2001.
Rogers, George C. Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, 1980 second edition; provides information on oath and Champney return.
Trinkley, Michael and Debi Hacker. "A Context for the Study of Low Country Gardens" in Tranquil Hill Plantation: The Most Charming Inland Place, 2007; includes advertisement for Champneys’ first plantation, with description of garden.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
South Carolina - The Revolutionary Generation
V. O. Key suggested South Carolina politics in the 1940's depended more on people’s relations with their neighbors and kinfolk, than it did with class, region, or ideology. In civil wars, like the American revolution, predicting people’s behavior is impossible without knowing more about their lives than statisticians like to recognize.
Hezekiah Maham was a small planter who represented upcountry Saint Stephen’s parish in the first Provincial Congress in 1775. John Champneys was a merchant who was on the Charles Town committee formed to prepare a militia later that year.
When war threatened in 1776, Maham was elected captain in Isaac Huger’s regiment. When war became reality, Champneys refused to swear an oath of loyalty in 1777 and was banished.
The two men who ended on opposite sides of the war were self-made men who became planters by their early thirties. They differed in that the one grew up in a rural area where he could only succeed if he ingratiated himself with his neighbors, while the other worked in an urban, commercial environment that necessarily made men antagonists.
Hezekiah Maham was born in 1739 in the borderlands between the French Santee (Saint James) and the English Santee (Saint Stephen). The area became more French as Huguenots moved up river. As another generation followed the Santee’s tributaries west into Saint John’s parish, however, more names were Anglicized. His name also appears as Mayham while Pamor became Palmer.
Nothing is known about his father, Nicholas. The name Maham itself is lost in obscurity. One genealogist found it in County Clare, the same area where the Guerins stopped on their way from France to the New World, but he may have confused it with Mahon. We know Hezekiah’s one sister, Elizabeth, married John Cook and another, Ann, married Huguenot John Cahusac. Hezekiah’s first wife was Ann Guerin, who died within two years of their 1758 marriage.
Joseph Johnson says Maham worked for a while as an overseer for Mrs. Sinkler "of St Johns Parish, grand mother of Jas Sinkler, the DuBoses and Glovers." This would make her Elizabeth Mouzon, first wife of the Huguenot Peter, and the plantation was probably Lifeland Sinkler’s brother James was granted land at Belvedere, St. John’s, in 1770 and established a retreat from the threat of malaria at Pineville in 1793.
By 1771 Maham was well enough established to be granted land in the area that became Pineville, and marry Mary Palmer, daughter of Catherine Farrell and Thomas Palmer. Thomas was the nephew of the more famous brothers, John and Thomas of Gravel Hill in the Fair Forest swamp, whose sister, Catherine, was the last wife of Peter Sinkler.
Unlike the planter Maham, whose early life is now found primarily in the genealogies and plantation records of descendants of the ancien régime, the merchant Champneys appears only in legal records. I’ve found nothing between his birth in 1743 and his marriage in 1763 to Anne Livingston.
There was a John Champneys who was a free holder in Charleston in 1737, and one who served as the province’s deputy secretary. They could have been the same man, but neither is likely to have been the father of our John who was 7 when the latter died in 1750 at age 77.
There was another John Champneys born in 1743 to John Champneys and Sarah Saunders in Saint Andrews Parish, but his descendants claim he married Amarinthia Lowndes.
Our Champneys went into business with his wife’s father George as Livingston and Champneys in 1763. When the older man died in 1769, his sons were storekeepers in Indian territory, and one can assume his business was related to deerskins or other aspects of that trade.
The younger man was more ambitious and, in 1767, requested a certificate to ship indigo to Bristol under the British bounties that had existed since 1749. A year later we know he was buying rice from planters for resale to Charles Town merchants.
Henry Laurens wrote William Cowles in London in May of 1768 to explain the reason he hadn’t fulfilled his contract for 600 barrels of rice was that Champneys had tried to send him damaged goods. He noted that the man had "try’d more than one trick in delivering rice."
Later that year, Champneys struck out on his own and Livingston soon denounced him for harming his business. By then, the younger man had invested his profits into commercial real estate and owned the wharf where the older man did business.
In 1773, the overseer at his plantation, Johannes Jacob Zimmerle, was killed when he tried to capture a run-away slave. The land was on the Wando river, which empties into Charleston’s harbor between the Cooper and the ocean. The slave may have been the runaway Champneys advertised as "Banaba, of a yellowish complexion, looks like an Ebo negro."
For reasons not made clear, he asked the General Assembly to pay for damages to his plantation in 1775. They ruled his request was inflated, and he owned them more for other obligations than they owed him. It was that body’s whose oath he rejected as illegitimate two years later.
We don’t know if he was the duplicitous businessman seen by Laurens, the elder Livingston and the assembly, or if any man who tried to become a factor had to start with the worst suppliers, the ones no one else would handle, until he built a reputation that would attract better ones.
We do know that after Livingston died, his son William moved to Saint Helena, the area at the mouth of the rivers draining into the Atlantic south of Charleston, where he bought indigo to send to Champneys. When he died in 1791, William was "regretted by a numerous and valuable acquaintance" in that area.
Notes:
E. P. O. "Hans/Johannes Jacob Zimmerle (John Simerly) of SC," genealogy.com, 31 Aug 2004.
Gueri, Pat. "Some Historical Notes on the Guerin Surname in Co. Clare," clarelibrary website.
House of Names website. "Maham Coat of Arms and Name History."
Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.
Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.
Laurens, Henry. Letter to William Cowles and Company, 9 May 1768, in The Papers of Henry Laurens: September 1, 1765-July 31, 1768, 1976, edited by George C. Rogers, Jr, David R. Chesnutt, and Peggy J. Clark; includes the information on George Livingston.
Webber, Mabel L. Death Notices in "The South Carolina Gazette," 1766-1774, 1954 edition, on William Livingston.
Hezekiah Maham was a small planter who represented upcountry Saint Stephen’s parish in the first Provincial Congress in 1775. John Champneys was a merchant who was on the Charles Town committee formed to prepare a militia later that year.
When war threatened in 1776, Maham was elected captain in Isaac Huger’s regiment. When war became reality, Champneys refused to swear an oath of loyalty in 1777 and was banished.
The two men who ended on opposite sides of the war were self-made men who became planters by their early thirties. They differed in that the one grew up in a rural area where he could only succeed if he ingratiated himself with his neighbors, while the other worked in an urban, commercial environment that necessarily made men antagonists.
Hezekiah Maham was born in 1739 in the borderlands between the French Santee (Saint James) and the English Santee (Saint Stephen). The area became more French as Huguenots moved up river. As another generation followed the Santee’s tributaries west into Saint John’s parish, however, more names were Anglicized. His name also appears as Mayham while Pamor became Palmer.
Nothing is known about his father, Nicholas. The name Maham itself is lost in obscurity. One genealogist found it in County Clare, the same area where the Guerins stopped on their way from France to the New World, but he may have confused it with Mahon. We know Hezekiah’s one sister, Elizabeth, married John Cook and another, Ann, married Huguenot John Cahusac. Hezekiah’s first wife was Ann Guerin, who died within two years of their 1758 marriage.
Joseph Johnson says Maham worked for a while as an overseer for Mrs. Sinkler "of St Johns Parish, grand mother of Jas Sinkler, the DuBoses and Glovers." This would make her Elizabeth Mouzon, first wife of the Huguenot Peter, and the plantation was probably Lifeland Sinkler’s brother James was granted land at Belvedere, St. John’s, in 1770 and established a retreat from the threat of malaria at Pineville in 1793.
By 1771 Maham was well enough established to be granted land in the area that became Pineville, and marry Mary Palmer, daughter of Catherine Farrell and Thomas Palmer. Thomas was the nephew of the more famous brothers, John and Thomas of Gravel Hill in the Fair Forest swamp, whose sister, Catherine, was the last wife of Peter Sinkler.
Unlike the planter Maham, whose early life is now found primarily in the genealogies and plantation records of descendants of the ancien régime, the merchant Champneys appears only in legal records. I’ve found nothing between his birth in 1743 and his marriage in 1763 to Anne Livingston.
There was a John Champneys who was a free holder in Charleston in 1737, and one who served as the province’s deputy secretary. They could have been the same man, but neither is likely to have been the father of our John who was 7 when the latter died in 1750 at age 77.
There was another John Champneys born in 1743 to John Champneys and Sarah Saunders in Saint Andrews Parish, but his descendants claim he married Amarinthia Lowndes.
Our Champneys went into business with his wife’s father George as Livingston and Champneys in 1763. When the older man died in 1769, his sons were storekeepers in Indian territory, and one can assume his business was related to deerskins or other aspects of that trade.
The younger man was more ambitious and, in 1767, requested a certificate to ship indigo to Bristol under the British bounties that had existed since 1749. A year later we know he was buying rice from planters for resale to Charles Town merchants.
Henry Laurens wrote William Cowles in London in May of 1768 to explain the reason he hadn’t fulfilled his contract for 600 barrels of rice was that Champneys had tried to send him damaged goods. He noted that the man had "try’d more than one trick in delivering rice."
Later that year, Champneys struck out on his own and Livingston soon denounced him for harming his business. By then, the younger man had invested his profits into commercial real estate and owned the wharf where the older man did business.
In 1773, the overseer at his plantation, Johannes Jacob Zimmerle, was killed when he tried to capture a run-away slave. The land was on the Wando river, which empties into Charleston’s harbor between the Cooper and the ocean. The slave may have been the runaway Champneys advertised as "Banaba, of a yellowish complexion, looks like an Ebo negro."
For reasons not made clear, he asked the General Assembly to pay for damages to his plantation in 1775. They ruled his request was inflated, and he owned them more for other obligations than they owed him. It was that body’s whose oath he rejected as illegitimate two years later.
We don’t know if he was the duplicitous businessman seen by Laurens, the elder Livingston and the assembly, or if any man who tried to become a factor had to start with the worst suppliers, the ones no one else would handle, until he built a reputation that would attract better ones.
We do know that after Livingston died, his son William moved to Saint Helena, the area at the mouth of the rivers draining into the Atlantic south of Charleston, where he bought indigo to send to Champneys. When he died in 1791, William was "regretted by a numerous and valuable acquaintance" in that area.
Notes:
E. P. O. "Hans/Johannes Jacob Zimmerle (John Simerly) of SC," genealogy.com, 31 Aug 2004.
Gueri, Pat. "Some Historical Notes on the Guerin Surname in Co. Clare," clarelibrary website.
House of Names website. "Maham Coat of Arms and Name History."
Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.
Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.
Laurens, Henry. Letter to William Cowles and Company, 9 May 1768, in The Papers of Henry Laurens: September 1, 1765-July 31, 1768, 1976, edited by George C. Rogers, Jr, David R. Chesnutt, and Peggy J. Clark; includes the information on George Livingston.
Webber, Mabel L. Death Notices in "The South Carolina Gazette," 1766-1774, 1954 edition, on William Livingston.
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