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.
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