Capitalism, by definition, exists when people can make money from their efforts, and therefore assumes a monetary economy. The right for inventors to "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" was included in the constitution.
That expectation has been resisted by those who are expected to pay. Back in Barbados, one complaint against James Drax was that, when he had found a way to process his sugar cane, he hadn’t shared his knowledge with his neighbors, who were his competitors in the market.
One suspects one reason the slaves of Jonathan Lucas were investigated in the Denmark Vesey scare of 1823 is that Lucas not only had built mills, but opened a mill where he charged planters to process their rice. In 1810, his father’s first customer, John Bowman, still owed them $1,500.
Today Eliza Lucas is held as the ideal alternative, a woman who gave away her seed, possibly under the influence of her new husband, Charles Pinckney. Her gifts were probably less charitable than calculated. She had begun experimenting with crops on her grandfather’s plantation on the Wappo, because it was heavily mortgaged and they needed to raise money to save it. She was told she couldn’t get a bounty for her indigo until "you can in some measure supply the British Demand." The best way to reach that threshold was to give "small quantities to a great number of people," not a lot to a few who could influence the price.
The tension between innovators, who expect to profit from their labors, and public benefactors, who give away the fruit of their efforts, has increased from colonial times when men lived under the protection of Lords Proprietors and kings. In the oldest versions of rice’s origin tales described in earlier posts, the word "give" was used to indicate rice was transferred from the possession of one person to another. In the first, published in 1731, Frayer Hall simply said "It was soon dispensed over the Province."
The transformation of "give" to "gift" occurred during the American revolution which began, in part, when New England merchants protested the Mercantilist policies of Britain which hampered their ability to make money. In 1779, a tory, Alexander Hewatt, said the royal governor, Thomas Smith divided his present of rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."
David Ramsay amplified the role of Smith in 1809 when he said Smith first proved the rice would grow, then distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends." Despite his view of what a good governor should do, Ramsay himself petitioned the first session of the House of Representatives for rights to his writings, an effort that stimulated Congress to pass the first patent law in 1790.
The same sort of transformation for indigo occurred in the years leading to the civil war. James Glen didn’t mention Eliza Lucas when he wrote about indigo in South Carolina in 1861. However, a few years earlier William Gilmore Simms had constantly referred to her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in his novel Woodcraft, as a rich benefactor who, one character tells his hero, "must save you from McKewn if possible. He can do so, if anybody can."
Pinckney had just died in 1825 when Simms returned to Charleston from whence his family had fled when his father failed as a merchant. His first attempt to attract the attention of the city’s elite was a poem dedicated to a man who, in a better world, might have saved his family from bankruptcy. Hezekiah Maham, on the other hand, always turned to his favorite commander, Francis Marion, for advice and help.
More recent writers emphasize the charitable motives for the gift. For instance, popular historian Rod Gragg says that Woodward "knowing the huge profits rice produced as an export to England, ... shared his discovery with his fellow colonists."
The same emphasis on giving away one’s labor characterizes some writing about John Champneys and his hybrid rose. Peggy Cornett, director of the Center for Historic Plants at Montecello, simply wanted to connect known facts when she said "Champneys shared rooted cuttings of his seedling with friends, including William Prince, Jr.," from whom he may have purchased the Parson’s Pink rose that contributed to his seedling, and that Champneys "shared another batch from his seedling with his neighbor, a Frenchman, named Philippe Noisette."
A Charleston website that promotes a romantic view of the city for tourists converts the words necessary to indicate the transfer of a plant into a act of cultural magnificence when it says Noisette gave "a local rice farmer" the China rose, and "as was the custom in the South among gardeners at the time, Champneys then presented seedlings of Champneys' pink cluster back to his friend, Philippe Noisette."
Rosarian Peter Harkness took the step from describing a gift to ascribing a motive when he wrote "The farmer was proud to own such a special rose and passed on cuttings to his friends, including Philippe Noisette."
Champneys was many things, but simple rice farmer he was not. Such a characterization is probably the result of a number of factors, not the least creative writing courses that warn would be writers to avoid the passive voice and use action words when possible. When there are no facts, or descriptions are conflicting and vague, they’re told to visualize how people would have acted in the past.
In addition to suggesting how people are taught to write, the eleemosynary versions also suggest a strong distrust of the motives of innovators, entrepreneurs and capitalists. Many prefer the John Rockefeller who gave away dimes and established a foundation to avoid taxes to the man who organized the Standard Oil cartel.
The transformation in our perceptions of innovators occurred in stages. The only first hand accounts we have are those of Eliza Lucas and Joshua John Ward. Both describe deliberate efforts over several years to develop viable plants and persistence in the face of failure, some caused by the malicious actions of others. For the gardener, both also provide insights into the ways of nature and how man has selected traits to improve it.
Their works were not commonly known in the past. Instead, writers like Hall and Cornett were forced to write narratives based on few facts. The older one left the introduction of rice to the impersonal passive voice, while the other tried to imagine human intervention in the spread of noisette roses.
Such neutral accounts were rejected in times of crises, like the revolution and the years before the civil war. Then royalists like Hewatt and federalists like Ramsey and Simms replaced traditional figures like pirates and the Swamp Fox with conservative heroes like Thomas Smith and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. More recently, slaves and a mulatto’s husband have been given the role of critical interveners in history.
Today’s writers, generally ignorant of the background of their sources, simply rewrite them to fit our current values. Gragg and Harkness describe men as unrealistic in their behavior as an earlier generations’s Lord Fauntleroy and Pollyanna. However, their popular audience is less interested in realistic tales of effort and perseverance, than in suggestions of an alternative to modern reality.
The new world colonies were founded to make money, and that’s what Drax and Eliza and Jonathan Lucas and Champneys wanted to do. That others also made fortunes imitating them may follow the logic of capitalism, but was not the primary motive for those who helped introduce sugar, indigo, rice and noisette roses.
Notes:
Campbell, Levin H. The Patent System of the United States So Far as it Relates to the Granting of Patents: A History, 1891.
Cornett, Peggy. "Champneys' Pink Cluster Comes to Monticello," Twinleaf Journal, January 1999.
Discover Charleston. "Secret Gardens: Charleston's Blooming Treasures," DiscoverCharleston website.
Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.
Gragg, Rod. Planters, Pirates, & Patriots: Historical Tales from South Carolina, 2006.
Harkness, Peter. The Rose: an Illustrated History, 2003.
Lucas, William Dollard. "Notes for Jonathon Lucas Sr.: A Lucas Memorandum," posted on-line, on the 1810 debt.
Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919, on Hall, Hewatt and Ramsay.
Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.
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.
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