South Carolina - William Gilmore Simms

The 1850's repeated the crises of the 1820's and 30's, but in a compressed time span and with more deadly consequences.

The post-Revolutionary generation in South Carolina faced the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that limited slavery in the west, the Denmark Vesey trial of 1822, and James Hamilton’s nullification threat of 1832.

The next generation had the Compromise of 1850 that included the Fugitive Slave Act and led to talk of nullification. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 left the question of slavery in the territories to the settlers, and led to guerilla war in Kansas.

In this atmosphere, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin and William Gilmore Simms serialized The Sword and the Distaff in the Southern Literary Gazette in 1852 . The one criticizes the inhumanity of slavery; the other anticipates the need for guerilla warfare and recalls the aftermath of the American revolution in South Carolina when, Simms said, "peace is only a name for civil war."

Simms’ intent, based on his title, had been to use a character based on Hezekiah Maham to describe the difficulties of reestablishing plantations after the war. However, as a writer, he was better at describing action than romance. The middle section that describes his hero’s courtship of a wealthy widow drags, while the opening description of highway robbery would excite the imagination of any adolescent boy. When the work was issued as a book, he renamed it Woodcraft.

Like any work of popular fiction of the time, the reader’s interest lay in events that crowded each installment. The characters were recognizable stereotypes. There was the hard-hearted widow who’d played both sides in the war; the Scots merchant villain who’d fenced stolen slaves; his agent, a double dealing squatter; an upright Christian youth who marries after the war but is willing to fight when called upon; the hero’s faithful slaves who hid in the swamp from the British and willingly returned to the fields under the orders of a man not much better than Simon Legree; and the innocent daughter of the squatter who marries the nice, but naive son of the widow.

Maham is changed into Porgy, an insouciant scion who has mortgaged his property "which had been transmitted to him through three or more careful generations" to support a life of alcoholic leisure. When the sheriff finally forecloses on the property, Porgy makes the deputy eat the paperwork. He’s saved through the intervention of Charles Coatesworth Pickney and the squatter’s deathbed confession.

While Porgy is recognizable as a type all too common in South Carolina at the time, he bears almost no resemblance to Maham. All the virtues of the latter have disappeared, and his negative traits exaggerated.

In reality, Maham was a self-made man who worked as an overseer before gaining his own land, not an indulged son like James Hamilton who was criticized in 1850 for supporting the congressional compromise because it might redeem some of his Texas debts and save him from ruin.

When Maham returned to his land he found new seed rice. Porgy’s plantation is taken over by Millhouse, a underling sergeant eager to reestablish traditional ways. He tells him "You was always a-thinking to do something better than other people, and you wouldn’t let nater [nature] alone."

At a time when tidal cultivation was being introduced by the more innovative planters, Millhouse adds "Now I’m a-thinking that the true way is to put the ground in order, and at the right time plant the seed, and then jest lie by, and look on, and see what the warm sun and rain’s guine to do for it."

He concludes his anti-innovation critique with "It ain’t reasonable to think that a man kin find new wisdom about everything"
During the war, Maham had perfected a tower for siege warfare.

The war had dwindled to the final evacuation by the British in Simms’ novel, and most of his allusions are to Francis Marion’s units in general. Maham’s bravery at Quinby Bridge is transferred to the incident of banditry that opens the novel when an outlaw shoots his horse. The incident when Maham started from sleep and believed he was under attack is turned into a joke on Millhouse who attacks a ghost.

The only specific recollections of military encounters are ones that advance Simms’ view of war as a series of harassments bordering on torture. One of Porgy’s slaves, Pomp, recalls a scrimmage with Fraser at Parker’s Ferry where the "cappin mounted a British officer," then ‘cut him clean through his skull to his chin." Porgy himself remembers "old Echars, the Dutchman, whom we dressed in tar and feathers at Moncks’ Corner, for stealing cattle."

According to Patrick O’Kelley, Marion left Maham in charge of unmounted men at Parker’s Ferry while he took other troops to attack. While the British were retreating, unmounted men surrounded Thomas Fraser’s troop of South Carolina loyalists and opened fire at 40 yards. After the battle, Marion returned with his prisoners to where he’d left Maham.

Monck’s Corner is more obscure, mentioned by only one man who wrote Maham "took upwards of eighty prisoners" in October of 1782, months after Maham had been paroled and two months before the defeated British evacuated Charles Town.

In Woodcraft, Porgy is a middle-aged bachelor who’s spent his life in the salons of Charleston, but has to no idea how to court a woman. Maham had been married twice and fathered two daughters. His wife died after he’d returned home from battle, but before he confronted the sheriff’s deputy.

Maham only appears in histories as an actor in events, not as a person important enough to have a portrait painted and passed through generations or one who appears in diaries and journals of society life. His physical appearance and habits are unknown.

Simms makes Porgy so fat he can’t dismount his horse, and worries his trousers will split in company. He’s a heavy drinker who surrounds himself with the detritis of war, the one-armed Millhouse, and the most degenerate forms of the Enlightenment’s arts and sciences, the fraudulent Doctor Oakenburg and George Dennison, "poet of the partisans."

What we know of Hezekiah Maham comes from histories by Frederick Porcher and Joseph Johnson, both born after Mahan died. Parson Weems’ account of Francis Marion’s war effort was based on notes by Maham’s rival, Peter Horry, and never mentions Maham; Marion is given credit for the tower.

It could well be the widowed survivor of war did become the man described by Simms. His great-nephew, Joshua John Ward, however, heard through the family, he had been much more.

Unfortunately, his virtues were held in contempt by the generation going into the civil war, who only praised the most atrocious actions as necessary in war and condemned anyone else as decadent as Porgy.

Notes:
Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.

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.

Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.

Attacks on the Rational

Sometimes I think the defense of slavery has been as pernicious as slavery itself, if for no other reason than it discourages logical thinking.

Charleston in the years after the revolution included plantation owners willing to experiment with new technology. By the time of the nullification crisis around 1830 innovators still existed, but they weren’t respected for their efforts. Slaves, not machines, were the only answer for economic challenges.

Scientific thinking posits the sanctity of facts, and assumes scientists will change their theories when those theories no longer can explain observed reality. Thomas Kuhn showed men don’t always live up to that ideal, that when they’re confronted with anomalies they propose more and more absurd solutions to sustain their basic beliefs. However, he also showed that over time, the value of experience does alter theory, the underlying value holds.

One cannot support scientific thinking if one is so wedded to a practice like slavery that no contrary facts can be admitted. Once facts cannot be recognized, then they must be explained away, turned into something that supports the overarching theory. Bending reality becomes acceptable.

Today, we have people who deny the observed realities of climate change because the proposed explanation threatens some part of their world view. For some, it’s the idea that nature isn’t as rigid as suggested by Genesis. For others, it’s the concept of human responsibility and the consequences for accountability for one’s actions that’s troubling. And, of course, there are those who see an economic threat.

The result is an attack on science itself.

Recently, Mary Beard reviewed a book by Donald Kagan which she saw as attacking Thucydides for praising the behavior of Pericles in the Peloponnesian war which Kagan thinks is like that of those who wouldn’t put more resources into winning the war in Viet Nam. Since Kagan believes those actions led to unnecessary defeat, so Pericles must be redefined as leading his country to disaster.

The result is an attack on the academy itself which tries to sift evidence to develop explanations. When certain conclusions are forbidden, reality must be subverted.

Since the protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination against Blacks and abortion in the late 1960's, we have seen a growing number of people who cannot accept the validity of criticism of any kind. If schools needed to change to fit social ideals, then education must be rejected. And so, a generation developed who rejected the very tools they needed to survive in the changing economy.

Now the economy is in crisis and those who’ve been left behind are the most vehement in protesting any policy that might prevent further or repeated problems, simply because the people who propose those solutions are associated with other ideas that are unacceptable. The basic thinking seems to be, if you have the wrong idea about abortion, then you can’t be trusted with the money supply.

The final result has been an attack on the constitution itself, which distributes power among groups in the population. Since those left behind cannot change, then the constitution must be reinterpreted. The tools that come to hand are those developed by men in the south who defended slavery - nullification and the primacy of minority rights.

Elections are no longer legitimate if the wrong man wins.

Notes:
Beard, Mary. "Which Thucydides Can You Trust?," The New York Review of Books, 30 September 2010, on Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.

Food Stamps - Part 4

The biggest requirements for living on $39 a month for food are resourcefulness and a willingness to think in non-traditional ways.

My boss’s former tenant’s first thought was the familiar pinto beans. Mine was lentils and rice. I’ve seen people in the local store filling their cart when eggs were on sale for $.68 a dozen and discussed the problems of keeping peanut butter from spoiling with an older woman.

To do well, one has to go beyond what one knows, without the benefit of the internet or books or even friends.

I don’t like pinto beans, but, if forced to eat them, I would probably spend time trying to find out how to make them taste better, not with fancy spices, but by figuring out the best ratio of water to beans. I would do this because I know it took me some time to learn to cook rice, and I remember both what I did and that I succeeded.

However, I would need a clock or timer, which might be a luxury.

One would have to be willing to look at items on sale or at low prices and consider them. That was what brought my attention to the citrus punch, a pile of cartons in the aisle with an advertised special low price. When I looked at the ingredients, I realized it wasn’t the best, but might work in a tight situation.

I remember how horrified people were years ago when they heard the elderly sometimes ate dog food. I went to the pet aisle to see if the seniors might have been right. The cheapest can of dog food is $.69 and lists more nutrients than the Spam substitute that costs $2.00, the potted meat that costs $.59 and the Vienna sausages that also cost $.59.

Likewise cat food isn’t a bad choice, if you mask the smell, taste and texture. Three small cans with tuna flavoring cost a dollar and list more nutrients than a can of tuna that costs $.89. After all it has to keep an animal alive, while the tuna is only considered part of a human’s diet.

Resourcefulness isn’t the monopoly of any social class. When I asked friends how they would solve this dietary puzzle, they essentially dismissed it out of hand as impossible. They wouldn’t even speculate.

I was too polite to ask them how they think they would have survived rationing in World War II or the destruction of Sarajevo, events that touched the middle classes as much as the poor. Modern life may have removed most of us from the threat of famine that existed before modern agriculture, but natural disasters and wars always threaten to return us to that fragile world where 800 calories of dried food is a luxury.

Our renter is more resourceful than they because she’s already spending her time scouring second hand sources within walking distance. They would have to overcome their cultural pride first, then learn where to shop.

Food stamps may not signify any freedom to live without constantly thinking about one’s stomach, but they may engender more freedom to think creatively about survival. I suspect many, however, would prefer the freedom to have an extra serving without thinking about the end of the month.

Freedom from want is not the same as freedom from wanting.