There are none more bitter than those who see their peers or relatives do better than they, especially when those successes are rooted in something they cannot or will not do. In South Carolina, the spirit of innovation and trained observation were not universal and the willingness to work was discouraged.
The constant possibility of failure in the face of uncontrollable conditions makes people superstitious. When repetition doesn’t lead to success, the answer is often symbolic repetition. Agricultural peoples are among the most susceptible when their crops are subject to the vagaries of weather and plagues. When religion and reason preclude superstitious rituals, other more secular outlets are found to assert control over fate.
Growing rice was always risky. When the crop failed there was no income but prices were high for those who managed to harvest something. When the crop flourished, prices fell from surpluses and no one made much profit. The good years, when both the crop and price were good, were rare.
People who first succeed because they could think innovatively are sometimes able to adapt to changes more quickly than those who struggled to succeed or who always copy others and face failure by repetition with minor variations hoping to correct what they had done wrong.
None knew better than Nathaniel Heyward the need to keep changing. He had always preferred newly imported slaves. When Congress banned the importation of new slaves beginning the first of January, 1808, he and others had to confront the changed supply and cost of labor.
Peter Colclanis shows that rice planters did, indeed, adapt by improving per capita yields. The number of slaves in the low country dropped .5% between 1820 and 1830, but the production per individual increased from 241.85 pounds in 1820 to 377.53 in 1830.
When new slaves with usable skills were no longer available, planters turned to technology. Robert Allston found patents for hulling rice appeared sporadically from 1809 and increased in the 1820's, while new applications for threshers began in 1828 and culminated in a workable machine in 1830.
Unfortunately, Colclanis also shows that prices fell after the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Exports from Charleston in 1818 had been worth 11 million dollars but fell to 8 million in 1819, and stayed between 7 and 8 million for most of the decade. They only rose to 11 million again in 1825, then hit that value again in the 1830's before falling to the 7-8 million range in the 1840's.
South Carolina responded to the labor and market crises by forbidding the manumission of slaves in 1820. Although the enforcement of the law varied, the population of freedmen in the low country dropped .9% in the 1820's. While there’s no clear evidence the General Assembly granted freedom to Philip Noisette’s wife and children when he died in 1835, they seem to have been left alone.
Similarly, when Plowden Weston, a merchant who had immigrated in 1757, died in 1827 he requested two of his slaves, Lydia and Anthony, be treated as freemen. The later was a millwright, who had improved the yield of a threshing machine by 1,000 bushels a day. Although his freedom wasn’t acknowledged by the state, Weston’s executors followed his wishes and let Anthony control his time.
Even so, the suspicion of freedmen grew after 1820 and culminated in the trial of Denmark Vesey in 1822. James Hamilton was intendant of Charleston when John Prioleau and John Lyde Wilson reported rumors of a slave insurrection. Hamilton appointed two judges and five jurors, including Nathaniel Heyward and William Drayton, to investigate.
After 34 men had been hung, the governor, who owned three of the executed, argued the deliberations violated the law. The attorney general, Robert Young Hayne, disagreed. Wilson, Hayne, Drayton and Hamilton all exploited their enhanced reputations for political gain, culminating in the nullification crisis of 1832.
In a small society like the Carolina low country, it was inevitable the planters would become more related with each generation. What’s interesting is that, unlike the ones who ordered mills from Jonathan Lucas who had led lives that showed they could adapt to changing circumstances, the ones who supported Hamilton were the children of the siblings who had not pioneered introducing technology into the rice fields.
Of the grandchildren of William Allston and Esther LaBruce, one, William Alston ordered a mill from Lucas, and two married men who worked with Lucas, John Bowman and Andrew Johnston. The daughters of their other son married Wilson and Hayne and did not order mills.
Among the Mottes, only Jacob’s wife, Rebecca Brewton raised daughters who were willing to invest in untried technology. Jacob’s sisters married more conventionally: Sarah was the
grandmother of Hamilton’s uncle, Thomas Lynch; Hannah was Hamilton’s grandmother, and Sarah was the mother of Hamilton’s law partner, William Drayton. Sarah’s daughter, Hannah, married Heyward’s brother William, and their daughter married the younger Drayton; they may be the ones who ridiculed Heyward when he was a young man visiting Charleston.
When faced with the problem of a more expensive labor supply, some, like Weston, responded creatively by finding ways to use their workers more effectively, and others, like Hamilton, attacked those who criticized slavery in any way. Still others, like Nathaniel Heyward, tried both.
The governor, Thomas Bennett, was not the only political opponent to have his slaves investigated. One of the banished men, Charles Drayton, was the property of William’s second cousin, John Drayton. The former governor was the son of William Henry Drayton who had rebelled against his William Bull grandfather during the revolution, while William’s father had followed the Bulls to England after the fall of Charleston.
Two slaves belonging to Jonathan Lucas’ son, Bram Lucas and Richard Lucas, were held before they were acquitted. The younger Jonathan Lucas left the country later that year, and began building mills for England, thereby hastening the loss of Carolina rice’s hegemony in world markets, a loss already foreshadowed by the lower prices.
Notes: See postings on James Hamilton and Denmark Vesey from 10 January 2010 through 7 March 2010.
Allston, William and Esther La Bruce
++ Esther marry Archibald Johnston
Andrew Johnston marry Sarah Eliot McKewn
++ Elizabeth marry Thomas Lynch
Sabina marry John Bowman
++ Joseph marry Charlotte Rothmahler
William marry Mary Brewton Motte
++ William marry Mary Young
Charlotte marry John Lyde Wilson
Rebecca marry Robert Young Hayne
Motte, Jacob and Elizabeth Martin
++ Sarah marry Thomas Shubrick
Elizabeth Shubrick marry Thomas Lynch Jr
++ Hannah marry Thomas Lynch
Elizabeth Lynch marry James Hamilton
James Hamilton marry Elizabeth Heyward
++ Jacob marry Rebecca Brewton
++ Mary marry William Drayton
William Drayton marry Maria Miles Heyward
Drayton, Thomas
++ Thomas - Elizabeth Bull
William - Mary Motte
William - Maria Miles Heyward (above)
++ John Drayton - Charlotte Bull
William Henry
John, the governor
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.
Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, 1989, rice production statistics.
Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 1999, list slaves arrested during the investigation and their owners.
Larry Koger. "Black Masters: The Misunderstood Slaveowners," Southern Quarterly 43:52–73:2006, on Plowden Weston.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
South Carolina - Spirt of Innovation
Once an innovation is accepted, an aura of inevitability develops around it, so one can’t imagine things having been any other way.
However, the atmosphere of innovation among South Carolina rice planters could not have been predicted: it was the fragile result of immigrants bringing in new ideas from Philadelphia and Edinburgh, and from people’s individual experiences during the war. There was nothing to say it would be perpetuated.
Ulrich B. Phillips describes Nathaniel Heyward as a man who was "was venturesome in large things, conservative in small." He had built a pounding mill, but was slow to convert it to steam. He was slower to use mechanical threshers because he wanted to keep his slaves busy in winter. And, it was his strong preference that those slaves be freshly imported from Africa.
Similarly, John Bowman was willing to gamble on an unknown millwright in 1787, but the next year actively campaigned against ratification of the constitution, even though his wife’s brother, Thomas Lynch, had signed the Declaration of Independence.
The mixture of conservative and progressive impulses, found in most of us, was perhaps more extreme in Charleston where the social ideal of the elite was still defined by the landed gentry in southwestern England who had supported the royalists in their civil war and not by the merchant entrepreneurs of London who backed parliament.
Indeed, Phillips, a post-Reconstruction southern historian believes investments in land and slaves were the "large things" and interest in labor-saving, productivity enhancing technology the "small." He believes Heyward remained active in running his many plantations, and that the "assistance rendered by his sons kept the scattered establishments in an efficient routine."
William Dusinberre has quite a different view of Heyward, that humiliated by his first entry into Charleston society, he spoiled his sons and that only one, Charles, had any interest in business.
He notes that Nathaniel’s father had been an innovator when he moved to Beaufort, but that he gave his older sons a classical education. The eldest Thomas, son of his first wife Mary Miles, signed the Declaration of Independence and was sent to Saint Augustine by the British in 1780.
The older son of Heyward’s second marriage to Jane Elizabeth Gignilliat, James, had the same European education but married an actress, Susan Cole, and died soon after. She remarried, and Nathaniel spent years discrediting her and salvaging the rice lands he’d developed.
Thomas’s son Daniel was more like his uncle James. He married a French speaking tailor, Ann Sarah Trezevant, and soon died. When she remarried, Nathaniel took over the rice lands and fought her rights in court, a battle that continued when her daughter Elizabeth married James Hamilton.
A similar pattern is found in the family of Bowman’s in-laws. His wife’s father, Thomas Lynch, was the son of Thomas Lynch, who pioneered rice on the Santee, and was raised to be a gentleman. Like Heyward, Lynch read law in England, toured the continent, and later became involved in colonial politics.
His sister Elizabeth married James Hamilton and spent more time in Newport, where she raised her son James, than Charleston. By the time the younger James married Heyward’s niece’s daughter, Elizabeth, neither had spent much time on a rice plantation and saw their patrimony as an asset to be sold not managed.
The inland rice pioneers like Daniel Heyward and Thomas Lynch raised oldest sons who were drawn into the great political fight with Great Britain, but had no interest in the source of their wealth. Daniel’s younger son, Nathaniel, pioneered tidal cultivation, but he too didn’t perpetuate his interest in his children, and saw the results of innovation and hard work frittered away by actresses and tailors.
The planters who were the first to adopt the innovations of others were a bit more successful. Walter Edgar says that in 1850, a dozen men each harvested more than 100,000 pounds of rice in Georgetown County, and they included the grandson of Plowden Weston, the grandson of Mary Izard Middleton and the stepson of Rebecca Brewton Motte’s daughter Mary.
However, the wealthy planters were better known for the way they lived their lives rather than the way they financed them. Plowden Charles Jennet Weston was a judge described as a "gentleman of most excellent education and rare ability" who published a history of the state. John Izard Middleton was Secretary of the American legation to Russia in the 1820's, before become active in the nullification crises of 1832. William Algernon Alston married his cousin Mary, the sister of the painter Washington Allston. Like any large planter, he served in the South Carolina house and owned more than one house in Charleston.
Still, according to George Rogers, those descendants who were still growing rice in Georgetown County in the 1850's, never fully relied on their overseers and never completely left the area during the growing season. They were more likely to escape malaria at inland resorts like that near Hezekiah Maham’s Pineville than go north as the Hamiltons had done. The time they spent in Charleston was the winter.
The spirit of innovation lasted two generations at most, those leading the revolution and their parents. It was difficult, though not impossible, for a family to maintain the spirit of specialized knowledge and a work ethic into the third generation in a culture of luxury.
Notes: The other signers of the Declaration of Independence were Arthur Middleton, husband of Mary Izard, and Edward Rutledge, a land speculator.
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004, on Elizabeth Matthews Heyward.
Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina, 1998; he doesn’t name all 12 men; his source was George Rogers
Miller Kerby A. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815, 2003, on Bowman.
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime, 1918.
Rogers, George. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970, reprinted by Georgetown County Historical Society.
Smith, Henry A. M. "The Baronies of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, April 1913; unattributed description of Weston.
However, the atmosphere of innovation among South Carolina rice planters could not have been predicted: it was the fragile result of immigrants bringing in new ideas from Philadelphia and Edinburgh, and from people’s individual experiences during the war. There was nothing to say it would be perpetuated.
Ulrich B. Phillips describes Nathaniel Heyward as a man who was "was venturesome in large things, conservative in small." He had built a pounding mill, but was slow to convert it to steam. He was slower to use mechanical threshers because he wanted to keep his slaves busy in winter. And, it was his strong preference that those slaves be freshly imported from Africa.
Similarly, John Bowman was willing to gamble on an unknown millwright in 1787, but the next year actively campaigned against ratification of the constitution, even though his wife’s brother, Thomas Lynch, had signed the Declaration of Independence.
The mixture of conservative and progressive impulses, found in most of us, was perhaps more extreme in Charleston where the social ideal of the elite was still defined by the landed gentry in southwestern England who had supported the royalists in their civil war and not by the merchant entrepreneurs of London who backed parliament.
Indeed, Phillips, a post-Reconstruction southern historian believes investments in land and slaves were the "large things" and interest in labor-saving, productivity enhancing technology the "small." He believes Heyward remained active in running his many plantations, and that the "assistance rendered by his sons kept the scattered establishments in an efficient routine."
William Dusinberre has quite a different view of Heyward, that humiliated by his first entry into Charleston society, he spoiled his sons and that only one, Charles, had any interest in business.
He notes that Nathaniel’s father had been an innovator when he moved to Beaufort, but that he gave his older sons a classical education. The eldest Thomas, son of his first wife Mary Miles, signed the Declaration of Independence and was sent to Saint Augustine by the British in 1780.
The older son of Heyward’s second marriage to Jane Elizabeth Gignilliat, James, had the same European education but married an actress, Susan Cole, and died soon after. She remarried, and Nathaniel spent years discrediting her and salvaging the rice lands he’d developed.
Thomas’s son Daniel was more like his uncle James. He married a French speaking tailor, Ann Sarah Trezevant, and soon died. When she remarried, Nathaniel took over the rice lands and fought her rights in court, a battle that continued when her daughter Elizabeth married James Hamilton.
A similar pattern is found in the family of Bowman’s in-laws. His wife’s father, Thomas Lynch, was the son of Thomas Lynch, who pioneered rice on the Santee, and was raised to be a gentleman. Like Heyward, Lynch read law in England, toured the continent, and later became involved in colonial politics.
His sister Elizabeth married James Hamilton and spent more time in Newport, where she raised her son James, than Charleston. By the time the younger James married Heyward’s niece’s daughter, Elizabeth, neither had spent much time on a rice plantation and saw their patrimony as an asset to be sold not managed.
The inland rice pioneers like Daniel Heyward and Thomas Lynch raised oldest sons who were drawn into the great political fight with Great Britain, but had no interest in the source of their wealth. Daniel’s younger son, Nathaniel, pioneered tidal cultivation, but he too didn’t perpetuate his interest in his children, and saw the results of innovation and hard work frittered away by actresses and tailors.
The planters who were the first to adopt the innovations of others were a bit more successful. Walter Edgar says that in 1850, a dozen men each harvested more than 100,000 pounds of rice in Georgetown County, and they included the grandson of Plowden Weston, the grandson of Mary Izard Middleton and the stepson of Rebecca Brewton Motte’s daughter Mary.
However, the wealthy planters were better known for the way they lived their lives rather than the way they financed them. Plowden Charles Jennet Weston was a judge described as a "gentleman of most excellent education and rare ability" who published a history of the state. John Izard Middleton was Secretary of the American legation to Russia in the 1820's, before become active in the nullification crises of 1832. William Algernon Alston married his cousin Mary, the sister of the painter Washington Allston. Like any large planter, he served in the South Carolina house and owned more than one house in Charleston.
Still, according to George Rogers, those descendants who were still growing rice in Georgetown County in the 1850's, never fully relied on their overseers and never completely left the area during the growing season. They were more likely to escape malaria at inland resorts like that near Hezekiah Maham’s Pineville than go north as the Hamiltons had done. The time they spent in Charleston was the winter.
The spirit of innovation lasted two generations at most, those leading the revolution and their parents. It was difficult, though not impossible, for a family to maintain the spirit of specialized knowledge and a work ethic into the third generation in a culture of luxury.
Notes: The other signers of the Declaration of Independence were Arthur Middleton, husband of Mary Izard, and Edward Rutledge, a land speculator.
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004, on Elizabeth Matthews Heyward.
Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina, 1998; he doesn’t name all 12 men; his source was George Rogers
Miller Kerby A. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815, 2003, on Bowman.
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime, 1918.
Rogers, George. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970, reprinted by Georgetown County Historical Society.
Smith, Henry A. M. "The Baronies of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, April 1913; unattributed description of Weston.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
South Carolina - Mill Acceptance
Joyce Chaplin argues Jonathan Lucas gets too much credit as the inventor of the pounding mill, that other men had preceded him as other men had preceded Nathaniel Heyward in using tidal cultivation and others had introduced rice besides Henry Woodward.
She’s correct that whenever there are important inventions or scientific discoveries, there usually are many who recognize the problem and are working towards a solution. Robert Allston mentions Robert Nesbit who returned from a trip to Scotland to introduce a wind-operated threshing mill 1811 and a drill plow to simplify planting in 1812.
However, an idea must be accepted before it’s a successful innovation. Heyward was important because others followed his specific example. Nesbit was not because his neighbors abandoned his tools after he died in 1821, because they required workers have more skills than they could expect.
James Jonathan Lucas listed the people who ordered mills from his grandfather, so we know the path of diffusion for his innovation. No doubt he only mentions the most noted customers, but then those are the ones most likely to have influenced others.
Between John Bowman and Andrew Johnston he names Mrs. Thomas Middleton, Peter Horry, William Alston, Plowden Weston and Mrs. Arthur Middleton. The most important lines of communication weren’t between the Middleton brothers, but between the daughters of Rebecca Brewton and the grandchildren of William Allston.
Rebecca’s grandfather, Miles Brewton, had followed Jonathan Bryan into Georgia. She married Jacob Motte and became famous during the revolution when she helped Francis Marion burn her Congaree plantation house that the British had taken as a headquarters.
Rebecca was wealthy apart from her marriage: she inherited her brother Miles’ property when he died at sea. Laura Edwards suggests she defied convention when she settled plantations, no doubt those from Miles, on her daughters alone, and did not give her sons-in-law ownership. Her daughter Frances married Thomas Middleton, while Mary married William Alston.
Among the Middletons, both Frances Motte and Mary Izard were widows refusing to remarry at the time they ordered mills for the estates they managed. Like Frances’ mother, Mary Izard inherited property from her brother John, which is the land she developed on the Combahee with Lucas. Also like Rebecca Motte, she was left to her own devices during the war when her husband Arthur was a prisoner at Saint Augustine, and in this time, apparently, was reduced to begging from friends to feed her children.
The linkages and lines of influence may have been stronger between Rebecca and Mary, because Mary’s cousin, also Mary Izard, was the daughter of her father Walter’s brother Joseph who married Rebecca’s brother Miles.
William Allston and Esther LaBruce’s daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Lynch. Their daughter married John Bowman. Elizabeth’s sister Esther married Archibald Johnston, whose son was Andrew, while her brother Joseph’s son William married Mary Brewton Motte.
The path of diffusion then went from Elizabeth Allston Lynch’s daughter Sabina Bowman to her cousin by marriage, Frances Motte Middleton, and her cousin William Alston, married to Frances’ sister Mary. From there patronage passed to Frances’ cousin-in-law, Mary Izard Middleton.
The others, Peter Horry and Plowden Weston had plantations in the same area. Indeed, Weston’s Laurel Hill bordered land inherited by William and Esther Allston’s son John. John’s son William married Rachel Moore; when he died, she and her new husband sold the land she controlled. Her son, Washington Allston, sold Springfield to his cousin Benjamin Allston, while she sold Brook Green to Robert and Francis Withers who sold it to Joshua Ward, the husband of Benjamin Allston’s wife’s sister.
To keep himself identifiable in a family that reused names in each generation, the William who ordered the mill from Lucas changed his last name to Alston, while his uncles continued to use two L’s.
It’s rare to be able to trace diffusion so clearly. However, the Lucases’ mills might not have spread if the person who ordered one after Andrew Johnston hadn’t been Henry Laurens. The Allstons and Mottes proved the invention worked; Laurens gave it credibility with a larger market.
Notes: Mills built by Jonathon Lucas. List from James Jonathan Lucas, letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
1787 John Bowman, Peach Island, married to Sabina Lynch, granddaughter of William Allston
Wife Sabina Lynch
Her mother Elizabeth Allston
Her grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Frances Motte Middleton, Washo plantation
Daughter of Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Peter Horry, Winyah Bay
Wife’s sister married to Daniel Heyward
Horry uncle of Nathaniel Heyward
* William Alston, Fairfield on Waccamaw
Son of Joseph Allston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
Married to Mary Brewton Motte
Her parents Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Plowden Weston, Laurel Hill on Waccamaw
Neighbor of William Allston’s widow Rachel Moore
His father John Allston
His grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Mary Izard Middleton, Hobonny on Combahee
Daughter of Walter Izard
Niece of Joseph Izard, father of Mary Izard who married Miles Brewton
Cousin-in-law of Rebecca Brewton through her brother Miles
1791-1792 Andrew Johnston, Millbrook
Son of Esther Allston and Archibald Johnston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
1793 Henry Laurens, Mepkin
Many think it was Washington Allston’s older stepbrother Benjamin who was the one who bought Springfield, not the cousin Benjamin. The brother Benjamin was supposed to have inherited Brook Green. The resolution of William Allston’s estate was apparently messy, and no one provides any strong evidence to support the claim for either Benjamin.
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, on Nesbit.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993.
Edwards Laura F. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South, 2009.
Lane, G. Winston Jr. “Economic Power among Eighteenth-Century Women of the Carolina Lowcountry: Four Generations of Middleton Women, 1678-1800,” in Jack P. Greene, Randy J. Sparks, and Rosemary Brana-Shute, Money, Trade and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society, 2000, on Frances Motte and Mary Izard.
She’s correct that whenever there are important inventions or scientific discoveries, there usually are many who recognize the problem and are working towards a solution. Robert Allston mentions Robert Nesbit who returned from a trip to Scotland to introduce a wind-operated threshing mill 1811 and a drill plow to simplify planting in 1812.
However, an idea must be accepted before it’s a successful innovation. Heyward was important because others followed his specific example. Nesbit was not because his neighbors abandoned his tools after he died in 1821, because they required workers have more skills than they could expect.
James Jonathan Lucas listed the people who ordered mills from his grandfather, so we know the path of diffusion for his innovation. No doubt he only mentions the most noted customers, but then those are the ones most likely to have influenced others.
Between John Bowman and Andrew Johnston he names Mrs. Thomas Middleton, Peter Horry, William Alston, Plowden Weston and Mrs. Arthur Middleton. The most important lines of communication weren’t between the Middleton brothers, but between the daughters of Rebecca Brewton and the grandchildren of William Allston.
Rebecca’s grandfather, Miles Brewton, had followed Jonathan Bryan into Georgia. She married Jacob Motte and became famous during the revolution when she helped Francis Marion burn her Congaree plantation house that the British had taken as a headquarters.
Rebecca was wealthy apart from her marriage: she inherited her brother Miles’ property when he died at sea. Laura Edwards suggests she defied convention when she settled plantations, no doubt those from Miles, on her daughters alone, and did not give her sons-in-law ownership. Her daughter Frances married Thomas Middleton, while Mary married William Alston.
Among the Middletons, both Frances Motte and Mary Izard were widows refusing to remarry at the time they ordered mills for the estates they managed. Like Frances’ mother, Mary Izard inherited property from her brother John, which is the land she developed on the Combahee with Lucas. Also like Rebecca Motte, she was left to her own devices during the war when her husband Arthur was a prisoner at Saint Augustine, and in this time, apparently, was reduced to begging from friends to feed her children.
The linkages and lines of influence may have been stronger between Rebecca and Mary, because Mary’s cousin, also Mary Izard, was the daughter of her father Walter’s brother Joseph who married Rebecca’s brother Miles.
William Allston and Esther LaBruce’s daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Lynch. Their daughter married John Bowman. Elizabeth’s sister Esther married Archibald Johnston, whose son was Andrew, while her brother Joseph’s son William married Mary Brewton Motte.
The path of diffusion then went from Elizabeth Allston Lynch’s daughter Sabina Bowman to her cousin by marriage, Frances Motte Middleton, and her cousin William Alston, married to Frances’ sister Mary. From there patronage passed to Frances’ cousin-in-law, Mary Izard Middleton.
The others, Peter Horry and Plowden Weston had plantations in the same area. Indeed, Weston’s Laurel Hill bordered land inherited by William and Esther Allston’s son John. John’s son William married Rachel Moore; when he died, she and her new husband sold the land she controlled. Her son, Washington Allston, sold Springfield to his cousin Benjamin Allston, while she sold Brook Green to Robert and Francis Withers who sold it to Joshua Ward, the husband of Benjamin Allston’s wife’s sister.
To keep himself identifiable in a family that reused names in each generation, the William who ordered the mill from Lucas changed his last name to Alston, while his uncles continued to use two L’s.
It’s rare to be able to trace diffusion so clearly. However, the Lucases’ mills might not have spread if the person who ordered one after Andrew Johnston hadn’t been Henry Laurens. The Allstons and Mottes proved the invention worked; Laurens gave it credibility with a larger market.
Notes: Mills built by Jonathon Lucas. List from James Jonathan Lucas, letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
1787 John Bowman, Peach Island, married to Sabina Lynch, granddaughter of William Allston
Wife Sabina Lynch
Her mother Elizabeth Allston
Her grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Frances Motte Middleton, Washo plantation
Daughter of Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Peter Horry, Winyah Bay
Wife’s sister married to Daniel Heyward
Horry uncle of Nathaniel Heyward
* William Alston, Fairfield on Waccamaw
Son of Joseph Allston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
Married to Mary Brewton Motte
Her parents Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Plowden Weston, Laurel Hill on Waccamaw
Neighbor of William Allston’s widow Rachel Moore
His father John Allston
His grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Mary Izard Middleton, Hobonny on Combahee
Daughter of Walter Izard
Niece of Joseph Izard, father of Mary Izard who married Miles Brewton
Cousin-in-law of Rebecca Brewton through her brother Miles
1791-1792 Andrew Johnston, Millbrook
Son of Esther Allston and Archibald Johnston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
1793 Henry Laurens, Mepkin
Many think it was Washington Allston’s older stepbrother Benjamin who was the one who bought Springfield, not the cousin Benjamin. The brother Benjamin was supposed to have inherited Brook Green. The resolution of William Allston’s estate was apparently messy, and no one provides any strong evidence to support the claim for either Benjamin.
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, on Nesbit.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993.
Edwards Laura F. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South, 2009.
Lane, G. Winston Jr. “Economic Power among Eighteenth-Century Women of the Carolina Lowcountry: Four Generations of Middleton Women, 1678-1800,” in Jack P. Greene, Randy J. Sparks, and Rosemary Brana-Shute, Money, Trade and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society, 2000, on Frances Motte and Mary Izard.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
South Carolina - Mill Invention
The widespread adaption of tidal rice cultivation precipitated a crisis in the old order: more rice was produced than slaves, using African derived mortar and pestles, could process. No one was willing to buy surplus slaves to handle the harvest work load, and some, who increased the work hours, realized their slaves were getting injured from the resulting fatigue and they were losing more than a quarter of their premium crop to poor handling.
They fell into what I call the contractor’s conundrum: the more successful a builder, the greater the costs and the fewer the rewards. Henry Ford’s answer had been improved automation, a solution criticized by many but rooted in the history of our industrial revolution.
However, when improved rice yields were overwhelming traditional processes, the idea of improved tooling was new. Oliver Evans patented the gravity-fed flouring mill that simplified grinding wheat in 1790. Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made the mass production of cotton in South Carolina possible, in 1794.
Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for John Bowman in 1787.
His story, as told by his grandson, includes elements of both chance and cultural deliberation. His parents were mill owners in Cumberland County on England’s northwestern boundary with Scotland who trained their son to be a millwright.
During the final year of the revolution, while the Peace of Paris was being negotiated, Lucas, then in his late 20's, emigrated to the New World. The proverbial story holds he was headed for the Caribbean when a storm damaged his ship and landed him in Charleston in 1783.
Two years later, in 1785, a Scots immigrant hired him to build a saw mill on Hog Island. While he was working on the Santee, he and Bowman apparently discussed the problems of preparing rice for market. Two years later, Lucas built an experimental rice mill at Bowman’s Peach Island plantation that imitated the pounding action of the mortar.
By 1793, Plowden Weston was complaining his horse driven mill was so slow he could only process two or three batches a day. By then, Lucas had built a mill powered by the tides at Millbrook for Andrew Johnston, the son of a Scots immigrant, Archibald Johnston.
Jonathan’s son Jonathan married Sarah Lydia Simons in 1799 and soon after built a commercial mill on her Middleburg plantation where local planters could bring their grain to be processed. They also built mills in Charleston, and, in 1817, erected a steam mill in the harbor.
When the senior Lucas died in Charleston in 1822, he had transformed the tidal rice industry. By 1843, Robert Allston observed, "almost every planter of four hundred acres and upward, is provided with a tide-water or steam-pounding mill."
Notes:
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.
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001, describe crisis, broken rice sold at a lower price.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993, quotes Weston.
Lucas, James Jonathan. Letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
They fell into what I call the contractor’s conundrum: the more successful a builder, the greater the costs and the fewer the rewards. Henry Ford’s answer had been improved automation, a solution criticized by many but rooted in the history of our industrial revolution.
However, when improved rice yields were overwhelming traditional processes, the idea of improved tooling was new. Oliver Evans patented the gravity-fed flouring mill that simplified grinding wheat in 1790. Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made the mass production of cotton in South Carolina possible, in 1794.
Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for John Bowman in 1787.
His story, as told by his grandson, includes elements of both chance and cultural deliberation. His parents were mill owners in Cumberland County on England’s northwestern boundary with Scotland who trained their son to be a millwright.
During the final year of the revolution, while the Peace of Paris was being negotiated, Lucas, then in his late 20's, emigrated to the New World. The proverbial story holds he was headed for the Caribbean when a storm damaged his ship and landed him in Charleston in 1783.
Two years later, in 1785, a Scots immigrant hired him to build a saw mill on Hog Island. While he was working on the Santee, he and Bowman apparently discussed the problems of preparing rice for market. Two years later, Lucas built an experimental rice mill at Bowman’s Peach Island plantation that imitated the pounding action of the mortar.
By 1793, Plowden Weston was complaining his horse driven mill was so slow he could only process two or three batches a day. By then, Lucas had built a mill powered by the tides at Millbrook for Andrew Johnston, the son of a Scots immigrant, Archibald Johnston.
Jonathan’s son Jonathan married Sarah Lydia Simons in 1799 and soon after built a commercial mill on her Middleburg plantation where local planters could bring their grain to be processed. They also built mills in Charleston, and, in 1817, erected a steam mill in the harbor.
When the senior Lucas died in Charleston in 1822, he had transformed the tidal rice industry. By 1843, Robert Allston observed, "almost every planter of four hundred acres and upward, is provided with a tide-water or steam-pounding mill."
Notes:
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.
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001, describe crisis, broken rice sold at a lower price.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993, quotes Weston.
Lucas, James Jonathan. Letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
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