I began by wondering how Englishmen not known for any proclivity for hard work or innovation could have made their fortunes growing exotic plants like sugar cane and rice. I ended with no simple answer, but a combination of the usual factors: necessity, unusual individuals looking to solve critical problems, unique situations.
Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are probably as representative as any of the middling classes in South Carolina, and their fates are as symptomatic. Unlike men like Henry Laurens and John Joshua Ward, who have come to represent an idealized south of slave traders and rice planters, they have simply faded away.
In 1916, James Wood Johnson, of Johnson and Johnson, bought Mepkin, the plantation that had once been owned by Laurens, the slave trader who had criticized Champneys’ business practices. Unlike lowland planters who wanted land that was productive and the right size to be worked by a single slave crew, Johnson bought adjacent plantations to leave his daughter, Helen Rutgers, 10,000 contiguous acres in 1932. She sold to Henry Luce, and his wife Clare Booth Luce in 1936.
The playwright hired landscape architects to covert the once productive land into acres of gardens. They gave a large portion of the estate to the Trappist Order's Gethsemani Abbey in 1949. The grounds were opened to tourists in 2007.
The land where Ward once selected Carolina Gold from his great-uncle Maham’s rice has similarly been agglomerated with Plowden Weston’s Laurel Hill and other plantations once owned by the Allstons into Brookgreen Gardens by Archer Milton Huntington and his wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington, to display her sculpture. Today, visitors can examine their sculpture collection in a natural setting.
In contrast, the area where Maham lived, including the homes of Francis Marion and the Palmers, was flooded in 1941 by the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project to create Lake Moultrie and provide power to local rural residents. Maham’s land survived but is owned by someone who "is not interested in the history of this area, and as a result is allowing the cemetery and monument [erected by Ward] to be destroyed by overgrowth of briars, brush, and trees."
Champneys’ two plantations similarly disappeared as Charleston expanded; neither is mentioned in the South Carolina list of plantations. In 1995, people in Ravenel planted blueberries at the end of Rose Drive, off Champneys Drive, and in 2003 opened Champneys Blueberries to let the public bring their children to pick where the noisette rose was born.
On Postell Drive, the next road off the Savannah Highway, people built McMansions in Champneys Gardens in the 1990's. In the best Charleston tradition, a $425,000 "exquisite Mediterranean style home" featuring "old English brick," marble foyer and gourmet kitchen is awaiting foreclosure.
If Champneys’ plantations have been transformed into a brand name, so too has Ward’s rice. In 1999 Merle Shepard began crossing Carolina Gold with other varieties to introduce modern disease resistence, greater yields and better wind resistence. With help from Gurdev Khush and Anna McClug, he took the most promising hybrid with an indica basmati and put it through the rigorous selection process now used to establish hybrid purity. The USDA released Charleston Gold for "restaurants using historically authentic ingredients," a market created by Richard Schultz and Glen Roberts.
The desire to recover the past that was stimulated by the Bicentennial also affected rose growers, who were interested in saving older varieties. Noisettes had nearly disappeared because they couldn’t withstand the climate of much of this country. In the late 1970's, Léonie Bell and Doug Seidel began searching for Champneys Pink Cluster, based on herbarium samples preserved in Bermuda. Eventually, Carl Cato and Peggy Cornett discovered surviving bushes in Virginia. Bell sent cuttings from Cato’s find to Joseph Schraven’s Pickering Nursuries in Ontario, to propagate for public sale.
The reason Champneys’ rose could be restored and Maham’s rice needed to be recreated is partly the result of nature, and partly changing values. A woody perennial like a rose can be cloned by cuttings so that the original is reproduced over and over. Seeds for an annual like rice must be planted every year. No matter how careful the grower, variation will persist in hybrids that haven’t been stabilized and a special variety will disappear when it’s not grown and no viable seed survives.
A perennial can come to represent the enduring values of a society like the gentility and beauty of Charleston promoted by the Luces and Huntingtons. An annual, by necessity, is dependent on the perpetuation of those cultural values, year by year, generation after generation, by planters and slaves toiling in the mosquito infested swampy low country. The one can survive abandonment to be rediscovered as a relic; the other cannot endure without effort except in memory.
Notes: Information of plantations from South Carolina Plantations website, maintained by SCIWAY.com, LLC.
Showing posts with label Historiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Historiography. Show all posts
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Sunday, July 11, 2010
South Carolina - Variants on a Tale
Alexander Salley, who became state archivist for South Carolina, reprinted eight versions of Fayrer Hall’s origin tale. Each has been retold by others. Still others have tried to combine them into a single tale, emphasizing different elements. The history of the history has moved from some attempts to explain a confusing situation, the varieties of rice found in South Carolina, to syntheses that compounded the confusion.
The first person Salley mentioned was James Glen, governor between 1743 and 1756, who reprinted Hall’s version in 1761. He emphasized chance and the irrelevance of the proprietors when he added (motif 3, see notes) "it was not done with any previous Prospect of Gain, but owing to a lucky accident, and a private experiment." The (4) gift motif was expanded when he added it was done "for the benefit of Mankind."
In 1766, when conflicts between the crown and the colony were escalating after the Sugar Act of 1764, Gentleman’s Magazine of London published an account by Peter Collinson, a friend of Charles Dubois, which contained many of the same motifs as Hall.
The (1) individual responsible for introducing the rice was the treasurer of the East India company, and the recipient was (5) Thomas Marsh, a Carolina merchant, after they (3) happened to meet in a coffee house. Dubois (4) gave Marsh (6) a "money bag" of (2) East India rice.
Since the quantity was so small, (9) more rice was brought by a Portuguese slave trader who (4) gave, but actually bartered, some of the ship’s provisions for fresh produce. The (3) unexpected rice (8) made men more sure rice could be a viable commodity.
However, (9) the planters still didn’t have enough, and, in 1713, the colony paid bounties to captains who brought rice. One shipment came (2) "from the Streights, probably Egypt" or Milan. Another bounty was paid for rice that came with a slave ship from (2) Madagascar.
Salley found no record of the bounties, and believed the London writer was thinking of the gratuity paid to John Thurber. What Salley didn’t mention was that the Portuguese and Madagascar ships were probably smugglers who provided cheap goods to Charles Town the way the pirates had. He did mention rice itself was smuggled to Portugal in 1708, and sold for fish that then was sent to London.
Collinson and Du Bois were both avid gardeners, active in exploring the natural resources of the colonies. Collinson imported plants collected by John Bertram, while Du Bois helped sponsor Mark Catesby trip to Charles Town in 1722. He also grew plants sent to him by his family from India.
In 1772, as rebellion against royal authority was brewing in France, a contributor to Guillaume Thomas Raynal’s history of European trade with the two Indies emphasized that the introduction was (3) "purely fortuitous," the result of a ship returning from the (2) East Indies that (3) "happened to be cast away" and (6) "some bags" were (4) "taken from the ship." Even so, "a trial was made of sowing them, which (8) succeeded beyond expectations"
During the war, in 1779, a tory minister living in exile in London, Alexander Hewatt replaced the adventurer, Henry Woodward, with an idealized royal governor, Thomas Smith, who arrived in the colony in his mid-30's in 1684. When his wife died, he married Sabina de Vignon, the widow of Signeur D’Arssens who had connections to William and Mary and the proprietors. When Sabina died in 1689, Smith petitioned the proprietors for rights to Van Arssens’ estates.
At the time the proprietors were having problems asserting their authority over the colony, and in 1693 transferred Van Arssen’s land to Smith and appointed him governor. Before he died in 1694, he tried to suppress the pirates who competed with the East India Company. I found nothing on-line about his life between the time he was born in Devon in 1648 and he appeared in the colony.
According to Hewatt, soon after Smith became governor, (3) a "fortunate accident happened" when (1) a brigantine from (2) Madagascar (3) touched on Sullivan Island outside the Charles Town harbor. Smith met with the captain who (4) "made him a present of a (6) bag of seed rice." Smith (7) divided the rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."
Hewatt then mentioned (9) DuBois to explain (11) "the distinction of red and white rice."
The location of the accident and the identity of the planters have been elaborated. Sullivan’s Island was the location of the fort William Moultrie built that repulsed the first British attack on Charleston in 1776, while Hewatt was close to the last royal governor of the colony, William Bull, and probably heard family stories from descendants of Smith. Stephen Bull was William’s son, and his son, William’s grandson, also Stephen Bull, married Elizabeth Woodward. Salley couldn’t identify Joseph, who was not descended from Henry.
In 1798, after years of battle and intrigue to secure the French revolution, Raynal reissued his history and the current contributor said "opinions differ" on the introduction of rice, and he no longer thought it mattered if it came with a shipwreck, was sent by England, or brought by slaves, because what mattered was South Carolina was ideally suited to grow rice.
In 1802, another governor, John Drayton, published his version, which now gave "good government" a role. He said the first shipment of 1699 was an unprofitable variety, and it was only in 1696 that a larger, whiter variety was introduced The last is a trait associated with the rice of Hezekiah Maham, and Drayton may have been contrasting the rice that existed after the revolution, with that from before.
Drayton’s second introduction came when the (1) captain of a brigantine from (2) Madagascar (4) "presented" a (6) bag to the (5) governor (7) "who divided it between several gentlemen." He adds, Mr. DuBois (9) "sent another parcel" which explains "the distinction which now prevails, between white and gold rice."
In 1809, Henry Laurens’ son-in-law, David Ramsey deliberately introduced new elements. He suggested Thomas Smith "had been at Madagascar before he settled in Carolina" and that he was "an old acquaintance" of the captain of a (1) vessel from (2) Madagascar which (3) "being in distress, came to anchor near Sullivan’s Island." The (1) ship’s cook (4) "presented" Smith with (6) "a small bag of rice."
This time it’s Smith himself who (8) proved that rice could grow "luxuriantly." He (7) distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends" Salley said Ramsey went so far as to alter Edward Crisp’s 1704 map of Charles Town to mark the spot in Smith’s garden where the rice first grew, apparently unaware that the area could not have supported rice because it only had access to salt water.
Ramsey had been an active patriot during the war, jailed in Saint Augustine by the British. His more colorful version may have been influenced by Parson Weems’ attempts to create a dramatic past for the young republic with his books on George Washington and Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox. The later was published in 1805, based on notes by Peter Horry, but had been repudiated by Horry.
Salley’s last reference was to a genealogist, Guy Mannering Fessenden, who discovered John Thurber was buried in Warren, Rhode Island, and noted he had brought the rice (2) from India between 1694 and 1607.
David Shields of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation has since found another variant provided by John Legare in 1823. He told the South Carolina Agricultural Society (2) "the late Col. Henry Laurens " (3) "imported" a (6) "small quantity of what is called the Gold-seed Rice, soon after the revolutionary war" which was (8) found to be so far superior to the white-hulled Rice before cultivated."
Shields notd there was no evidence Laurens grew rice at Mepkin between the time he returned to Carolina after the war in 1784 and he died in 1892. Legard probably thought him as a better godfather than Maham, the way Hewatt thought the titled Thomas Smith was a more appropriate agent for change than the adventuring Henry Woodward.
Many recent writers have read some, or all of the accounts mentioned by Salley, and created their own syntheses, usually within a contemporary framework. For instance, Richard Shulze, who is growing heirloom Carolina Gold rice at his Turnbridge Plantation, has elaborated the accident:
"A Liverpool-bound brigantine sailing from (2) Madagascar was (3) badly damaged by a storm and blown off course; it set into the port of Charles Towne for repairs."
and the nature of the gift
"Dr. Henry Woodward apparently (4) befriended the captain"
From there, the modern skeptic questions the traditional facts, noting "the ship, which was of American origin, was probably not trading legally as the British law at that time forbade trade outside of the colonies and the British Isles."
He repeats Ramsay’s idea filtered through Salley that "Woodward proceeded to grow this in his garden in the city" before suggesting it was more likely he planted the seed at "the more suitable property on the Abbapoola Creek."
He then notes not enough time passed between the summer of 1685 when the ship entered port and Woodward’s trip to the frontier where he died for him to (8) "produce a very good crop, which he then (9) distributed to his friends." He concludes "he probably never had the opportunity to fully appreciate (10) the new industry that he was so instrumental in spawning."
As for Josehua John Ward’s belief that Maham’s rice came from Madagascar, it may have. There were some relations with the island where André Michaux, who had left Charleston in 1796, died collecting plants in 1802. However, it’s more likely, Maham was simply saying his rice came from the black market and the origin is deliberately unknown.
Notes:
Motifs found in origin tales that explain the introduction of rice to South Carolina
1. Someone, usually unnamed
2. From Madagascar
3. Through some accident, usually a shipwreck
4. Gave, usually as a sign of gratitude
5. To Woodward, or some other prominent person
6. A peck or some other small amount of rice
7. Which was distributed free to the other planters
8. Who proved rice could grow in the colony
9. A second introduction
10. Is responsible for the spread of the crop
11. And the visible variations in the rice
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919.
Schulze, Richard. Carolina Gold Rice: the Ebb and Flow History of a Lowcountry Cash Crop, 2005.
Shields, David S. "Who first planted Carolina Gold?," The Rice Paper April 2008
The first person Salley mentioned was James Glen, governor between 1743 and 1756, who reprinted Hall’s version in 1761. He emphasized chance and the irrelevance of the proprietors when he added (motif 3, see notes) "it was not done with any previous Prospect of Gain, but owing to a lucky accident, and a private experiment." The (4) gift motif was expanded when he added it was done "for the benefit of Mankind."
In 1766, when conflicts between the crown and the colony were escalating after the Sugar Act of 1764, Gentleman’s Magazine of London published an account by Peter Collinson, a friend of Charles Dubois, which contained many of the same motifs as Hall.
The (1) individual responsible for introducing the rice was the treasurer of the East India company, and the recipient was (5) Thomas Marsh, a Carolina merchant, after they (3) happened to meet in a coffee house. Dubois (4) gave Marsh (6) a "money bag" of (2) East India rice.
Since the quantity was so small, (9) more rice was brought by a Portuguese slave trader who (4) gave, but actually bartered, some of the ship’s provisions for fresh produce. The (3) unexpected rice (8) made men more sure rice could be a viable commodity.
However, (9) the planters still didn’t have enough, and, in 1713, the colony paid bounties to captains who brought rice. One shipment came (2) "from the Streights, probably Egypt" or Milan. Another bounty was paid for rice that came with a slave ship from (2) Madagascar.
Salley found no record of the bounties, and believed the London writer was thinking of the gratuity paid to John Thurber. What Salley didn’t mention was that the Portuguese and Madagascar ships were probably smugglers who provided cheap goods to Charles Town the way the pirates had. He did mention rice itself was smuggled to Portugal in 1708, and sold for fish that then was sent to London.
Collinson and Du Bois were both avid gardeners, active in exploring the natural resources of the colonies. Collinson imported plants collected by John Bertram, while Du Bois helped sponsor Mark Catesby trip to Charles Town in 1722. He also grew plants sent to him by his family from India.
In 1772, as rebellion against royal authority was brewing in France, a contributor to Guillaume Thomas Raynal’s history of European trade with the two Indies emphasized that the introduction was (3) "purely fortuitous," the result of a ship returning from the (2) East Indies that (3) "happened to be cast away" and (6) "some bags" were (4) "taken from the ship." Even so, "a trial was made of sowing them, which (8) succeeded beyond expectations"
During the war, in 1779, a tory minister living in exile in London, Alexander Hewatt replaced the adventurer, Henry Woodward, with an idealized royal governor, Thomas Smith, who arrived in the colony in his mid-30's in 1684. When his wife died, he married Sabina de Vignon, the widow of Signeur D’Arssens who had connections to William and Mary and the proprietors. When Sabina died in 1689, Smith petitioned the proprietors for rights to Van Arssens’ estates.
At the time the proprietors were having problems asserting their authority over the colony, and in 1693 transferred Van Arssen’s land to Smith and appointed him governor. Before he died in 1694, he tried to suppress the pirates who competed with the East India Company. I found nothing on-line about his life between the time he was born in Devon in 1648 and he appeared in the colony.
According to Hewatt, soon after Smith became governor, (3) a "fortunate accident happened" when (1) a brigantine from (2) Madagascar (3) touched on Sullivan Island outside the Charles Town harbor. Smith met with the captain who (4) "made him a present of a (6) bag of seed rice." Smith (7) divided the rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."
Hewatt then mentioned (9) DuBois to explain (11) "the distinction of red and white rice."
The location of the accident and the identity of the planters have been elaborated. Sullivan’s Island was the location of the fort William Moultrie built that repulsed the first British attack on Charleston in 1776, while Hewatt was close to the last royal governor of the colony, William Bull, and probably heard family stories from descendants of Smith. Stephen Bull was William’s son, and his son, William’s grandson, also Stephen Bull, married Elizabeth Woodward. Salley couldn’t identify Joseph, who was not descended from Henry.
In 1798, after years of battle and intrigue to secure the French revolution, Raynal reissued his history and the current contributor said "opinions differ" on the introduction of rice, and he no longer thought it mattered if it came with a shipwreck, was sent by England, or brought by slaves, because what mattered was South Carolina was ideally suited to grow rice.
In 1802, another governor, John Drayton, published his version, which now gave "good government" a role. He said the first shipment of 1699 was an unprofitable variety, and it was only in 1696 that a larger, whiter variety was introduced The last is a trait associated with the rice of Hezekiah Maham, and Drayton may have been contrasting the rice that existed after the revolution, with that from before.
Drayton’s second introduction came when the (1) captain of a brigantine from (2) Madagascar (4) "presented" a (6) bag to the (5) governor (7) "who divided it between several gentlemen." He adds, Mr. DuBois (9) "sent another parcel" which explains "the distinction which now prevails, between white and gold rice."
In 1809, Henry Laurens’ son-in-law, David Ramsey deliberately introduced new elements. He suggested Thomas Smith "had been at Madagascar before he settled in Carolina" and that he was "an old acquaintance" of the captain of a (1) vessel from (2) Madagascar which (3) "being in distress, came to anchor near Sullivan’s Island." The (1) ship’s cook (4) "presented" Smith with (6) "a small bag of rice."
This time it’s Smith himself who (8) proved that rice could grow "luxuriantly." He (7) distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends" Salley said Ramsey went so far as to alter Edward Crisp’s 1704 map of Charles Town to mark the spot in Smith’s garden where the rice first grew, apparently unaware that the area could not have supported rice because it only had access to salt water.
Ramsey had been an active patriot during the war, jailed in Saint Augustine by the British. His more colorful version may have been influenced by Parson Weems’ attempts to create a dramatic past for the young republic with his books on George Washington and Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox. The later was published in 1805, based on notes by Peter Horry, but had been repudiated by Horry.
Salley’s last reference was to a genealogist, Guy Mannering Fessenden, who discovered John Thurber was buried in Warren, Rhode Island, and noted he had brought the rice (2) from India between 1694 and 1607.
David Shields of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation has since found another variant provided by John Legare in 1823. He told the South Carolina Agricultural Society (2) "the late Col. Henry Laurens " (3) "imported" a (6) "small quantity of what is called the Gold-seed Rice, soon after the revolutionary war" which was (8) found to be so far superior to the white-hulled Rice before cultivated."
Shields notd there was no evidence Laurens grew rice at Mepkin between the time he returned to Carolina after the war in 1784 and he died in 1892. Legard probably thought him as a better godfather than Maham, the way Hewatt thought the titled Thomas Smith was a more appropriate agent for change than the adventuring Henry Woodward.
Many recent writers have read some, or all of the accounts mentioned by Salley, and created their own syntheses, usually within a contemporary framework. For instance, Richard Shulze, who is growing heirloom Carolina Gold rice at his Turnbridge Plantation, has elaborated the accident:
"A Liverpool-bound brigantine sailing from (2) Madagascar was (3) badly damaged by a storm and blown off course; it set into the port of Charles Towne for repairs."
and the nature of the gift
"Dr. Henry Woodward apparently (4) befriended the captain"
From there, the modern skeptic questions the traditional facts, noting "the ship, which was of American origin, was probably not trading legally as the British law at that time forbade trade outside of the colonies and the British Isles."
He repeats Ramsay’s idea filtered through Salley that "Woodward proceeded to grow this in his garden in the city" before suggesting it was more likely he planted the seed at "the more suitable property on the Abbapoola Creek."
He then notes not enough time passed between the summer of 1685 when the ship entered port and Woodward’s trip to the frontier where he died for him to (8) "produce a very good crop, which he then (9) distributed to his friends." He concludes "he probably never had the opportunity to fully appreciate (10) the new industry that he was so instrumental in spawning."
As for Josehua John Ward’s belief that Maham’s rice came from Madagascar, it may have. There were some relations with the island where André Michaux, who had left Charleston in 1796, died collecting plants in 1802. However, it’s more likely, Maham was simply saying his rice came from the black market and the origin is deliberately unknown.
Notes:
Motifs found in origin tales that explain the introduction of rice to South Carolina
1. Someone, usually unnamed
2. From Madagascar
3. Through some accident, usually a shipwreck
4. Gave, usually as a sign of gratitude
5. To Woodward, or some other prominent person
6. A peck or some other small amount of rice
7. Which was distributed free to the other planters
8. Who proved rice could grow in the colony
9. A second introduction
10. Is responsible for the spread of the crop
11. And the visible variations in the rice
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919.
Schulze, Richard. Carolina Gold Rice: the Ebb and Flow History of a Lowcountry Cash Crop, 2005.
Shields, David S. "Who first planted Carolina Gold?," The Rice Paper April 2008
Sunday, July 04, 2010
South Carolina - Rice’s Origin Tale
Rice was introduced at least three times into South Carolina: first in the early years of the colony, again after the revolution when planters needed to replace their lost seed grain, and then again when Joshua John Ward made his improved selection available.
The first occurred before there were many written records and has become the subject of folk history; the second is remembered in family tradition, and the third, a commercial transaction, was recorded for all to know by the participants.
Alexander Salley found the only public record of what became the folk tradition was a 1715 entry in the journal of the House of Commons noting the body had agreed to pay a gratuity of one hundred pounds to John Thurber for "bringing the first Madagascar Rice into this province."
He found the first narrative explanation appeared sixteen years later in a pamphlet he attributed to Fayrer Hall, who had served in expeditions against pirates in 1718. Hall wrote the introduction of rice
"was owing to the following Accident. A Brigantine from the Island Madagascar happened to put in there; they had a little Seed Rice left, not exceeding a Peck or Quarter of a bushel, which the Captain offered and gave to a Gentlemen of the Name of Woodward. From Part of this he had a very good Crop, but was ignorant for some Years how to clean it. It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection, that it is thought it exceeds any other in Value. The Writer of this hath seen the Captain in Carolina, where he received a handsome gratuity from the Gentlemen of that Country."
The basic motifs of the folk narrative, told in several variants, are that:
1. Someone, usually unnamed
2. From Madagascar
3. Through some accident, usually a shipwreck
4. Gave, usually as a sign of gratitude
5. To Woodward, or some other prominent person
6. A peck or some other small amount of rice
7. Which was distributed free to the other planters
8. Who proved rice could grow in the colony
In the first retelling, the identity of Thurber was reduced to a sea captain, who was now the one from Madagascar.
Between the time Charles II granted the land to eight proprietors in 1663 and Thurber’s petition, Madagascar was not controlled by any western power. Attempts by the British had ended in 1649, while the French were massacred in 1673.
The only westerners who visited the island after that were pirates, who exploited the slave trade after they’d been driven from the Caribbean. The British finally removed them from the island about the time Thurber made his petition. By then, the Sakalava had consolidated power, and the French had established their base on the nearby island of Bourbon, now La Réunion.
Hall used the word "accident" to suggest the introduction was a chance, not deliberate act. From the first the proprietors wanted to develop a colony and listed rice as one of the crops that was both suitable to the climate and congruent with the throne’s desire to establish a completely self-sufficient mercantile economy. 1n 1672, William Jeffereys sent a barrel of rice "for the prop. acct of the Lords Proprs of Carolina" which was received by the governor.
Many of the early settlers never accepted the legitimacy of the proprietors and had thrown off their power in 1720. The use of the word "accident," like the hidden reference to pirates, may have been an attempt to suggest the proprietors had nothing to do with the introduction of rice as a crop and, by extension, the success of the colony.
The double reference to rice as a gift may have been another attempt to contrast proper behavior with that of the proprietors. The third governor of the colony, John Yeamans, shipped his surplus food to Barbados where he could make a profit rather than sell it to the settlers he’d brought with him who didn’t have enough to eat.
Woodward is assumed to have been Henry Woodward, who died sometime between 1685 and 1690. He had come to the area on the exploratory voyage of 1666 and stayed with the Cusabo on Port Royale sound. He was captured by the Spanish the next year. He escaped when Robert Searle raided Saint Augustine in 1668, and stayed with the pirates until shipwrecked on Nevis in 1669.
He returned to the area with the expedition that founded Charles Town in 1670, and explored the interior. His friendly relations with the Westbo opened trade with the Indians in 1674, an arrangement rejected by later settlers who precipitated a war that exterminated the tribe and replaced them with the Shawnee.
Disgraced, he went to London in 1682 to seek rehabilitation and returned as the official Indian agent for the proprietors with rights to a 20% commission on trade. He was in trouble again in 1685 for supporting the Yamasee and Scots settlers at Stuart Town against the proprietors.
His ambiguous loyalties to pirates, proprietors, rebellious settlers and native Americans made him a figure suspect to all. He’s the element in Hall’s narrative that became the least stable.
The quantity of rice usually struck the narrator as too small to explain the spread or variations in the crop, and so a second introduction was often mentioned, much like the story of Seth resolves problems of ancestry introduced by the fight between Cain and Abel. Hall suggested that
"Mr. Du Bois, Treasurer of the East-India Company, did send to that Country a small Bag of Seed-Rice some short Time after, from whence it is reasonable enough to suppose might come these two Sorts of that Commodity, one called Red Rice in Contradistinction to the White."
This addendum introduces the remaining motifs in the origin tale:
9. A second introduction
10. Is responsible for the spread of the crop
11. And the visible variations in the rice
Notes:
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998, on Yeamans.
Hall, Fayrer. The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom, 1731, quoted by Salley.
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina, no 6, 1919.
The first occurred before there were many written records and has become the subject of folk history; the second is remembered in family tradition, and the third, a commercial transaction, was recorded for all to know by the participants.
Alexander Salley found the only public record of what became the folk tradition was a 1715 entry in the journal of the House of Commons noting the body had agreed to pay a gratuity of one hundred pounds to John Thurber for "bringing the first Madagascar Rice into this province."
He found the first narrative explanation appeared sixteen years later in a pamphlet he attributed to Fayrer Hall, who had served in expeditions against pirates in 1718. Hall wrote the introduction of rice
"was owing to the following Accident. A Brigantine from the Island Madagascar happened to put in there; they had a little Seed Rice left, not exceeding a Peck or Quarter of a bushel, which the Captain offered and gave to a Gentlemen of the Name of Woodward. From Part of this he had a very good Crop, but was ignorant for some Years how to clean it. It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection, that it is thought it exceeds any other in Value. The Writer of this hath seen the Captain in Carolina, where he received a handsome gratuity from the Gentlemen of that Country."
The basic motifs of the folk narrative, told in several variants, are that:
1. Someone, usually unnamed
2. From Madagascar
3. Through some accident, usually a shipwreck
4. Gave, usually as a sign of gratitude
5. To Woodward, or some other prominent person
6. A peck or some other small amount of rice
7. Which was distributed free to the other planters
8. Who proved rice could grow in the colony
In the first retelling, the identity of Thurber was reduced to a sea captain, who was now the one from Madagascar.
Between the time Charles II granted the land to eight proprietors in 1663 and Thurber’s petition, Madagascar was not controlled by any western power. Attempts by the British had ended in 1649, while the French were massacred in 1673.
The only westerners who visited the island after that were pirates, who exploited the slave trade after they’d been driven from the Caribbean. The British finally removed them from the island about the time Thurber made his petition. By then, the Sakalava had consolidated power, and the French had established their base on the nearby island of Bourbon, now La Réunion.
Hall used the word "accident" to suggest the introduction was a chance, not deliberate act. From the first the proprietors wanted to develop a colony and listed rice as one of the crops that was both suitable to the climate and congruent with the throne’s desire to establish a completely self-sufficient mercantile economy. 1n 1672, William Jeffereys sent a barrel of rice "for the prop. acct of the Lords Proprs of Carolina" which was received by the governor.
Many of the early settlers never accepted the legitimacy of the proprietors and had thrown off their power in 1720. The use of the word "accident," like the hidden reference to pirates, may have been an attempt to suggest the proprietors had nothing to do with the introduction of rice as a crop and, by extension, the success of the colony.
The double reference to rice as a gift may have been another attempt to contrast proper behavior with that of the proprietors. The third governor of the colony, John Yeamans, shipped his surplus food to Barbados where he could make a profit rather than sell it to the settlers he’d brought with him who didn’t have enough to eat.
Woodward is assumed to have been Henry Woodward, who died sometime between 1685 and 1690. He had come to the area on the exploratory voyage of 1666 and stayed with the Cusabo on Port Royale sound. He was captured by the Spanish the next year. He escaped when Robert Searle raided Saint Augustine in 1668, and stayed with the pirates until shipwrecked on Nevis in 1669.
He returned to the area with the expedition that founded Charles Town in 1670, and explored the interior. His friendly relations with the Westbo opened trade with the Indians in 1674, an arrangement rejected by later settlers who precipitated a war that exterminated the tribe and replaced them with the Shawnee.
Disgraced, he went to London in 1682 to seek rehabilitation and returned as the official Indian agent for the proprietors with rights to a 20% commission on trade. He was in trouble again in 1685 for supporting the Yamasee and Scots settlers at Stuart Town against the proprietors.
His ambiguous loyalties to pirates, proprietors, rebellious settlers and native Americans made him a figure suspect to all. He’s the element in Hall’s narrative that became the least stable.
The quantity of rice usually struck the narrator as too small to explain the spread or variations in the crop, and so a second introduction was often mentioned, much like the story of Seth resolves problems of ancestry introduced by the fight between Cain and Abel. Hall suggested that
"Mr. Du Bois, Treasurer of the East-India Company, did send to that Country a small Bag of Seed-Rice some short Time after, from whence it is reasonable enough to suppose might come these two Sorts of that Commodity, one called Red Rice in Contradistinction to the White."
This addendum introduces the remaining motifs in the origin tale:
9. A second introduction
10. Is responsible for the spread of the crop
11. And the visible variations in the rice
Notes:
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998, on Yeamans.
Hall, Fayrer. The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom, 1731, quoted by Salley.
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina, no 6, 1919.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
South Carolina - Doubt
Historians are attracted to comparative history because it provides the more scientifically minded a way to look at their subject from an outsider’s point of view. The hope is that comparisons will reveal the universals of the human condition and show the points of uniqueness that our cultural blinders prevent us from seeing.
When one looks at the investigations in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 into a possible slave insurrection, the ones in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 into acts of witchcraft, and the ones described by Carlo Ginzburg in Friuli.between 1575 and 1644 one sees a similar pattern: progression from doubt to belief.
When churchmen in Friuli interviewed the first man with special powers, there was such a disjunct between the questions and answers that they dropped the case because "he told other tall tales which I did not believe, and so I did not question him further." It was only when another individual, one more knowledgeable about witchcraft, became probing that the Holy Inquisition believed it had uncovered witchcraft.
Similarly in Charleston, when James Hamilton, Jr., first interviewed Peter Poyas and Mingo Harth, their treatment of the questions with disbelief led him to think the possibility of a plot only lies. It was only when a second man, John Lyde Wilson, reported similar comments from a second slave that the Charleston city council acted.
In both cases, events moved from doubt to certainty, and once that change in attitude had occurred, there were never more questions about the existence of either the witches or the slave conspiracy.
In Salem, there appears to have been little initial doubt about the truthfulness of the early accusers: they weren’t peasants or slaves, but the daughter and niece of a respected churchman, Samuel Parris, and their accusations came after physical fits observed by several witnesses. The magistrates took protestations of innocence as proof of guilt, and meted milder sentences to those who confessed. It took the refusal of Giles Corey to go to trial to shake their confidence that they were dealing with real acts of witchcraft.
Historians have taken the final judgements to be the true ones, to question the events in Salem, but not in Charleston or Friuli. And so, we wonder what were the social, economic and psychological factors that precipitated Salem, but accept the reality of a slave mutiny and so don’t ask why Charleston in 1822, why not 1812 or 1832.
The acceptance of doubt took different forms in Charleston and Salem. The second was still a Puritan society, even if it had moderated its beliefs since 1620. People still believed in predestination, that God decided before individuals were born if they were saved, and nothing individuals could do would change their state of grace. At best, they could look for evidence of proof, as the magistrates had looked for evidence of witchcraft. However, they could never absolutely know if they were saved.
Jacobus Arminius disagreed with Puritan theology and argued God had granted man free will with which to accept or reject God. It was individuals’ decision that determined if they were saved, and if they made that decision there was no doubt about their state of grace. His beliefs informed the great Methodist revival that swept the country in the 1740's, and would influence the revivals that were to come in the next decade in the south.
Roman Catholics and Episcopalian Charlestonians, of course, would never have considered the question. They were saved by virtue of following the practices of the church. Doubt was not a concept, only certainty.
And so, the event that occurred in an environment where people lived with doubt, is treated with doubt today, and the ones that occurred where people saw doubt as proof of their failure to believe are the ones that are accepted as fact today. It may be no coincidence that the historian who felt the need to use comparative history to escape the bubble of culture, Frank Tannenbaum, was investigating the institution of slavery.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti. 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen, 1947.
When one looks at the investigations in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 into a possible slave insurrection, the ones in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 into acts of witchcraft, and the ones described by Carlo Ginzburg in Friuli.between 1575 and 1644 one sees a similar pattern: progression from doubt to belief.
When churchmen in Friuli interviewed the first man with special powers, there was such a disjunct between the questions and answers that they dropped the case because "he told other tall tales which I did not believe, and so I did not question him further." It was only when another individual, one more knowledgeable about witchcraft, became probing that the Holy Inquisition believed it had uncovered witchcraft.
Similarly in Charleston, when James Hamilton, Jr., first interviewed Peter Poyas and Mingo Harth, their treatment of the questions with disbelief led him to think the possibility of a plot only lies. It was only when a second man, John Lyde Wilson, reported similar comments from a second slave that the Charleston city council acted.
In both cases, events moved from doubt to certainty, and once that change in attitude had occurred, there were never more questions about the existence of either the witches or the slave conspiracy.
In Salem, there appears to have been little initial doubt about the truthfulness of the early accusers: they weren’t peasants or slaves, but the daughter and niece of a respected churchman, Samuel Parris, and their accusations came after physical fits observed by several witnesses. The magistrates took protestations of innocence as proof of guilt, and meted milder sentences to those who confessed. It took the refusal of Giles Corey to go to trial to shake their confidence that they were dealing with real acts of witchcraft.
Historians have taken the final judgements to be the true ones, to question the events in Salem, but not in Charleston or Friuli. And so, we wonder what were the social, economic and psychological factors that precipitated Salem, but accept the reality of a slave mutiny and so don’t ask why Charleston in 1822, why not 1812 or 1832.
The acceptance of doubt took different forms in Charleston and Salem. The second was still a Puritan society, even if it had moderated its beliefs since 1620. People still believed in predestination, that God decided before individuals were born if they were saved, and nothing individuals could do would change their state of grace. At best, they could look for evidence of proof, as the magistrates had looked for evidence of witchcraft. However, they could never absolutely know if they were saved.
Jacobus Arminius disagreed with Puritan theology and argued God had granted man free will with which to accept or reject God. It was individuals’ decision that determined if they were saved, and if they made that decision there was no doubt about their state of grace. His beliefs informed the great Methodist revival that swept the country in the 1740's, and would influence the revivals that were to come in the next decade in the south.
Roman Catholics and Episcopalian Charlestonians, of course, would never have considered the question. They were saved by virtue of following the practices of the church. Doubt was not a concept, only certainty.
And so, the event that occurred in an environment where people lived with doubt, is treated with doubt today, and the ones that occurred where people saw doubt as proof of their failure to believe are the ones that are accepted as fact today. It may be no coincidence that the historian who felt the need to use comparative history to escape the bubble of culture, Frank Tannenbaum, was investigating the institution of slavery.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti. 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen, 1947.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
South Carolina - Evidence
In his review of books about the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston in 1822, Michael Johnson was critical of scholars who failed their craft by relying on secondary, rather than primary, sources.
Scholars are dependent on the work of others. Each individual does original work in some area, but is expected to lecture and write on subjects beyond that research specialty. He or she has no choice but to trust the work of others that’s been vetted by peer review. To read some work lacks due diligence is as distressing as hearing bank auditors don’t question account entries.
Johnson notes the five man special tribunal appointed to investigate a potential slave uprising issued an Official Report in 1822 which is used by most historians. He notes there are also two
manuscript versions of its interviews that look "similar, suggesting that they were written by the same clerk. The unambiguously legible and perfectly horizontal handwriting stretching line after line indicates that neither manuscript represents rough notes scribbled hurriedly during court sessions. Both must have been written later, at least one of them presumably based on notes that no longer survive. Neither document, then, preserves the court transcript as we think of such things today: verbatim records of what witnesses said."
Internal evidence of the kind every historian is supposed to be trained to evaluate suggests that one "is the earliest extant record of the court proceedings," and the other a later copy. Johnson examined the three documents to detect differences between them to argue that the Official Report created a narrative that was not supported by its own work.
As I read his critique, I thought about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They bear some similarities with both the investigation in Charleston and the work of the Holy Inquisition in Friuli described by Carlo Ginzburg. All three sets of interrogators used torture or its threat to elicit cooperation. The hysteria in Salem stopped when Giles Corey chose to be crushed to death rather than stand trial.
Second, all follow the pattern of early diversity in reports that’s replaced by uniformity as witnesses learn what their questioners expect to hear. Indeed, Mary Beth Norton observed that 14-year-old Abigail Hobbs, one of the first to confess in Salem, described the witches the way she would the Wampanoag and Abenaki who were menacing the area. Later witnesses gave ritualized descriptions of pinching, pricking, choking fits and signing books.
The thing that’s different is the cultural response to the events. It’s this response that has hindered the work of historians, and made some what Johnson calls "unwitting co-conspirators."
People in Massachusetts were shocked by Corey’s death, and since have treated the trials as an embarrassment, but a very public one. If one wants to learn more, the University of Virginia has a web site where it’s publishing transcriptions of every document related to the trial. One does not need to take Norton’s word for what Hobbs said. One can read it for oneself.
In contrast, Charleston believed at the time, and still believes, that its secret methods saved it from a catastrophe. As Johnson notes, others who want to believe slaves were not passive victims have made Vesey into the heroic reverse of the Charleston ogre, "a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying."
In the age of the internet, when amateurs everywhere can verify the accuracy of scholarship by discovering obscure original documents, some university or research center needs to make all the Charleston documents available and leave it to the public domain to evaluate what was once secret evidence. Some no doubt will still conclude the plot was very real, while others will still see proof that slaves weren’t passive. The rest of us can ponder the environment that created the need for the secret tribunal in the place, and consider the best ways to meet threats that are sensed but not overt.
Notes: All quotes from Johnson.
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare, 2002, reviewed by Jill Lepore in The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002.
Scholars are dependent on the work of others. Each individual does original work in some area, but is expected to lecture and write on subjects beyond that research specialty. He or she has no choice but to trust the work of others that’s been vetted by peer review. To read some work lacks due diligence is as distressing as hearing bank auditors don’t question account entries.
Johnson notes the five man special tribunal appointed to investigate a potential slave uprising issued an Official Report in 1822 which is used by most historians. He notes there are also two
manuscript versions of its interviews that look "similar, suggesting that they were written by the same clerk. The unambiguously legible and perfectly horizontal handwriting stretching line after line indicates that neither manuscript represents rough notes scribbled hurriedly during court sessions. Both must have been written later, at least one of them presumably based on notes that no longer survive. Neither document, then, preserves the court transcript as we think of such things today: verbatim records of what witnesses said."
Internal evidence of the kind every historian is supposed to be trained to evaluate suggests that one "is the earliest extant record of the court proceedings," and the other a later copy. Johnson examined the three documents to detect differences between them to argue that the Official Report created a narrative that was not supported by its own work.
As I read his critique, I thought about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They bear some similarities with both the investigation in Charleston and the work of the Holy Inquisition in Friuli described by Carlo Ginzburg. All three sets of interrogators used torture or its threat to elicit cooperation. The hysteria in Salem stopped when Giles Corey chose to be crushed to death rather than stand trial.
Second, all follow the pattern of early diversity in reports that’s replaced by uniformity as witnesses learn what their questioners expect to hear. Indeed, Mary Beth Norton observed that 14-year-old Abigail Hobbs, one of the first to confess in Salem, described the witches the way she would the Wampanoag and Abenaki who were menacing the area. Later witnesses gave ritualized descriptions of pinching, pricking, choking fits and signing books.
The thing that’s different is the cultural response to the events. It’s this response that has hindered the work of historians, and made some what Johnson calls "unwitting co-conspirators."
People in Massachusetts were shocked by Corey’s death, and since have treated the trials as an embarrassment, but a very public one. If one wants to learn more, the University of Virginia has a web site where it’s publishing transcriptions of every document related to the trial. One does not need to take Norton’s word for what Hobbs said. One can read it for oneself.
In contrast, Charleston believed at the time, and still believes, that its secret methods saved it from a catastrophe. As Johnson notes, others who want to believe slaves were not passive victims have made Vesey into the heroic reverse of the Charleston ogre, "a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying."
In the age of the internet, when amateurs everywhere can verify the accuracy of scholarship by discovering obscure original documents, some university or research center needs to make all the Charleston documents available and leave it to the public domain to evaluate what was once secret evidence. Some no doubt will still conclude the plot was very real, while others will still see proof that slaves weren’t passive. The rest of us can ponder the environment that created the need for the secret tribunal in the place, and consider the best ways to meet threats that are sensed but not overt.
Notes: All quotes from Johnson.
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare, 2002, reviewed by Jill Lepore in The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
South Carolina - Interrogation
Michael Johnson began his study of Denmark Vesey when The William and Mary Quarterly asked him to review three books. As he read them he came to believe "almost all historians have failed to exercise due caution in reading the testimony of witnesses recorded by the conspiracy court" that took its evidence from "intimidated witnesses."
His concerns about the handling of information obtained by torture are contentious, not simply because of their political implications. Historians are taught to respect their sources, and not to substitute their interpretations for reality. For a scholar to claim the text cannot be trusted undermines the foundation of good craftsmanship.
Carlo Ginzburg explored the problem of identifying facts in coerced confessions when he reviewed the transcripts of interviews made by the Holy Inquisition with peasants from Friuli.between 1575 and 1644.
Ginzburg believes that in the area where "German, Italian and Slav customs met," the peasants were practicing pagan fertility rites there were beyond the experience of their interviewers. In the first interrogations, both the questions and the answers were widely variable. However, once the examiners begin to systematically ask questions that assumed they were practicing traditional witchcraft, the answers they heard eventually came to match their expectations.
More surprising, in time a new set of beliefs derived from the interrogations spread through the region. The peasants came to believe they, in fact, were witches. The Inquisition not only had heard what it expected, but had brought it into existence.
Johnson knows that many of the witnesses interviewed by the special tribunal in Charleston in 1822 were incarcerated in the workhouse where they expected to be beaten. Even so, the first slaves they interviewed seemed to be genuinely baffled by the questions. After the first men were hung on July 2, witnesses not only had reason to fear for their lives and but also had some idea, derived from rumors, what the court wanted to hear.
Johnson’s hampered from making the doing the same kind of analysis as Ginzburg, because the manuscript transcriptions of the interviews only recorded the answers, not the questions. He can only deduce what must have been asked, and suggests the five men concentrated on verifying the timing of the planned insurrection, identifying the leaders, examining the plans to use guns, and exploring their hopes to involve slaves from rural plantations.
He also found two political events concerned the judges: the Missouri compromise and events in Haiti. He noted the judges consistently confused references by slaves to discussions in the state assembly in 1821 about allowing slave owners some freedom to grant manumission with the compromise of 1820 which placed limits on slave holding in the Louisiana Territory. Wherever the manuscript recorded the word "legislature," the published report substituted "Congress."
Slaves had revolted in Saint Domingue in the 1790's and achieved some independence in 1804. The Spanish area controlled by the Dominicans rebelled in 1821, and the Haitian president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, had invaded in February of 1822. Johnson found a lengthy article on conditions on the island in the Charleston Courier from April.
He deduces from the answers the slaves gave that they were asked specific questions about any possible links between their planned insurrection and Boyer. One slave, Robert Harth, noted Peter Poyas had "some knowledge of an army from St. Domingo" and another, Monday Gell said Vesey, who was born on the island, had "brought a letter to me which was directed to President Boyer."
Johnson quotes another article by Ginzburg where he says "’texts have leaks’ that can reveal insights unintended by their creators." As Johnson makes clear, the work of the special tribunal could not establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that there were or were not slaves planning a revolt, and if those men, if they existed, were the ones it executed. It could, however, reveal a great deal about the fears that haunted slave holders in Charleston who lived among people they owned, but only partly understood.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
His concerns about the handling of information obtained by torture are contentious, not simply because of their political implications. Historians are taught to respect their sources, and not to substitute their interpretations for reality. For a scholar to claim the text cannot be trusted undermines the foundation of good craftsmanship.
Carlo Ginzburg explored the problem of identifying facts in coerced confessions when he reviewed the transcripts of interviews made by the Holy Inquisition with peasants from Friuli.between 1575 and 1644.
Ginzburg believes that in the area where "German, Italian and Slav customs met," the peasants were practicing pagan fertility rites there were beyond the experience of their interviewers. In the first interrogations, both the questions and the answers were widely variable. However, once the examiners begin to systematically ask questions that assumed they were practicing traditional witchcraft, the answers they heard eventually came to match their expectations.
More surprising, in time a new set of beliefs derived from the interrogations spread through the region. The peasants came to believe they, in fact, were witches. The Inquisition not only had heard what it expected, but had brought it into existence.
Johnson knows that many of the witnesses interviewed by the special tribunal in Charleston in 1822 were incarcerated in the workhouse where they expected to be beaten. Even so, the first slaves they interviewed seemed to be genuinely baffled by the questions. After the first men were hung on July 2, witnesses not only had reason to fear for their lives and but also had some idea, derived from rumors, what the court wanted to hear.
Johnson’s hampered from making the doing the same kind of analysis as Ginzburg, because the manuscript transcriptions of the interviews only recorded the answers, not the questions. He can only deduce what must have been asked, and suggests the five men concentrated on verifying the timing of the planned insurrection, identifying the leaders, examining the plans to use guns, and exploring their hopes to involve slaves from rural plantations.
He also found two political events concerned the judges: the Missouri compromise and events in Haiti. He noted the judges consistently confused references by slaves to discussions in the state assembly in 1821 about allowing slave owners some freedom to grant manumission with the compromise of 1820 which placed limits on slave holding in the Louisiana Territory. Wherever the manuscript recorded the word "legislature," the published report substituted "Congress."
Slaves had revolted in Saint Domingue in the 1790's and achieved some independence in 1804. The Spanish area controlled by the Dominicans rebelled in 1821, and the Haitian president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, had invaded in February of 1822. Johnson found a lengthy article on conditions on the island in the Charleston Courier from April.
He deduces from the answers the slaves gave that they were asked specific questions about any possible links between their planned insurrection and Boyer. One slave, Robert Harth, noted Peter Poyas had "some knowledge of an army from St. Domingo" and another, Monday Gell said Vesey, who was born on the island, had "brought a letter to me which was directed to President Boyer."
Johnson quotes another article by Ginzburg where he says "’texts have leaks’ that can reveal insights unintended by their creators." As Johnson makes clear, the work of the special tribunal could not establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that there were or were not slaves planning a revolt, and if those men, if they existed, were the ones it executed. It could, however, reveal a great deal about the fears that haunted slave holders in Charleston who lived among people they owned, but only partly understood.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
South Carolina - James Hamilton’s Character
James Hamilton’s life, as he saw it, and as it’s largely retold, had three acts: years as a successful politician associated with nullification, years as an important businessman and agent for the Republic of Texas to European bankers, and impoverished years caused by investments soured by a bad national economy.
Robert Tinkler believes many were hesitant to look for a deeper pattern, because his personal narrative "reminded his fellow planters that their world of wealth and honor rested precariously on the vagaries of an international commodities market they could little influence."
However, there were those at the time that looked for more consistency and personal responsibility. William Behan’s description of a man intent on fraud from before his marriage to Elizabeth Heyward is probably not as malicious as the private opinions of his creditors.
Those who supported nullification in the 1840's and 1850's could only see Hamilton’s willingness to compromise on slavery to get his Texas claims repaid as "the last cry of a child against being put to bed in the dark." A man who might benefit from his support for Texas, Sam Houston, believed the man "was destitute of all sincerity."
Tinkler himself was more interested in Hamilton’s political importance, and provided little evidence in his biography from the details of the various law suits and his associates that would shed light on his character. In the absence of such hard facts, it’s too easy to pick and choose evidence to support any personal prejudice.
Historians with a scientific bias have tried to use theoretical constructs to provide some objective way to interpret an incomplete factual record. In the 1960's, some historians were trying to use different ideas drawn from psychology to describe the link between people like James Hamilton and their political cultures.
In 1961, David McClelland suggested there were three basic things that motivated people to act: the desire for achievement, for power, or for social acceptance, and that individuals and cultures were some mix of the three.
As old as those ideas may be, they spring to mind when one looks at the life of a man who spent his childhood and youth in boarding houses and private schools where proprietors were probably more interested in flattering him to maintain their income, than socializing him as they would their own sons. Oliver Hazard Perry remembered that at John Frazer’s Latin school "the local boys took their turns at cleaning the classroom each week," but "the comparatively rich - or self-consciously aristocratic - southern students often paid others to perform their chores."
Hamilton spent much of his later youth living with men, rather than with families, where comfort, if not success, depended on pleasing others. After time in the army, he went to Washington, DC., where he lived in boardinghouses or messes with other congressmen. He did spend time with his wife in South Carolina, but, Tinkler says, he always became bored if isolated too long from the society of Charleston or Washington and displayed what one his sons remembers as a "peculiarly mercurial temperament subject to fits of elation and gloom."
One rather suspects that he had no strong political opinions, but absorbed those of others, like John Lyde Wilson and John Cordes Prioleau, and lacked the instinct for power of a man like John Calhoun, who knew how to temper actions. After South Carolinians backed away from the more extreme implications of the nullification crisis in 1832, one of his friends, William Preston, said Hamilton’s problem "was an over anxiety to exhibit himself strikingly to the public eye."
Once he lost an opportunity to return to Washington and recognized he had no serious interest in running plantations, I would guess Hamilton took up one scheme after another because some friend of his supported it. He became involved in Texas after Joel Poinsett invested in land there and after Bernard Elliott Bee joined the government of the republic. Poinsett was a neighbor who supported him after nullification. Bee had worked for him when he was a governor and claimed to be a brother-in-law, apparently through the Prioleaus.
Hamilton supported Nicholas Biddle’s national bank before nullification, and believed he stayed close to the man without realizing men seeking power use people seeking affirmation. No doubt, he believed he had absorbed enough watching the man to successfully exploit the cotton market without any experience of men who make their living in speculation.
Similarly, he thought he could grow rice in South Carolina, cotton in Alabama, and sugar in Texas, if he left others run his plantations, especially if the subordinates were his own sons. Only one, Daniel Heyward Hamilton, became an independent planter, and he ruined his political fortunes when he refused to support nullification in 1852.
Hamilton’s willingness to exploit the trusts of his wife, Elizabeth Heyward, and the widowed Mary Martha McRa probably has deeper roots, and may come from the way his father treated his mother’s lands and the way his step-grandfather exploited the lands of his mother’s mother.
Notes:
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004.
McClelland, David. The Achieving Society, 1961.
Perry, Oliver Hazard. Quoted by Tinker from a biography by Alexander Slidell Mackenzie; the Perrys ran the boardinghouse where the Hamiltons stayed in Newport.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004; "last cry" quotation from Charleston Mercury, 5 June 1838; Houston quotation from 9 December 1842 letter; quotation from Preston in 15 October 1833 letter.
Robert Tinkler believes many were hesitant to look for a deeper pattern, because his personal narrative "reminded his fellow planters that their world of wealth and honor rested precariously on the vagaries of an international commodities market they could little influence."
However, there were those at the time that looked for more consistency and personal responsibility. William Behan’s description of a man intent on fraud from before his marriage to Elizabeth Heyward is probably not as malicious as the private opinions of his creditors.
Those who supported nullification in the 1840's and 1850's could only see Hamilton’s willingness to compromise on slavery to get his Texas claims repaid as "the last cry of a child against being put to bed in the dark." A man who might benefit from his support for Texas, Sam Houston, believed the man "was destitute of all sincerity."
Tinkler himself was more interested in Hamilton’s political importance, and provided little evidence in his biography from the details of the various law suits and his associates that would shed light on his character. In the absence of such hard facts, it’s too easy to pick and choose evidence to support any personal prejudice.
Historians with a scientific bias have tried to use theoretical constructs to provide some objective way to interpret an incomplete factual record. In the 1960's, some historians were trying to use different ideas drawn from psychology to describe the link between people like James Hamilton and their political cultures.
In 1961, David McClelland suggested there were three basic things that motivated people to act: the desire for achievement, for power, or for social acceptance, and that individuals and cultures were some mix of the three.
As old as those ideas may be, they spring to mind when one looks at the life of a man who spent his childhood and youth in boarding houses and private schools where proprietors were probably more interested in flattering him to maintain their income, than socializing him as they would their own sons. Oliver Hazard Perry remembered that at John Frazer’s Latin school "the local boys took their turns at cleaning the classroom each week," but "the comparatively rich - or self-consciously aristocratic - southern students often paid others to perform their chores."
Hamilton spent much of his later youth living with men, rather than with families, where comfort, if not success, depended on pleasing others. After time in the army, he went to Washington, DC., where he lived in boardinghouses or messes with other congressmen. He did spend time with his wife in South Carolina, but, Tinkler says, he always became bored if isolated too long from the society of Charleston or Washington and displayed what one his sons remembers as a "peculiarly mercurial temperament subject to fits of elation and gloom."
One rather suspects that he had no strong political opinions, but absorbed those of others, like John Lyde Wilson and John Cordes Prioleau, and lacked the instinct for power of a man like John Calhoun, who knew how to temper actions. After South Carolinians backed away from the more extreme implications of the nullification crisis in 1832, one of his friends, William Preston, said Hamilton’s problem "was an over anxiety to exhibit himself strikingly to the public eye."
Once he lost an opportunity to return to Washington and recognized he had no serious interest in running plantations, I would guess Hamilton took up one scheme after another because some friend of his supported it. He became involved in Texas after Joel Poinsett invested in land there and after Bernard Elliott Bee joined the government of the republic. Poinsett was a neighbor who supported him after nullification. Bee had worked for him when he was a governor and claimed to be a brother-in-law, apparently through the Prioleaus.
Hamilton supported Nicholas Biddle’s national bank before nullification, and believed he stayed close to the man without realizing men seeking power use people seeking affirmation. No doubt, he believed he had absorbed enough watching the man to successfully exploit the cotton market without any experience of men who make their living in speculation.
Similarly, he thought he could grow rice in South Carolina, cotton in Alabama, and sugar in Texas, if he left others run his plantations, especially if the subordinates were his own sons. Only one, Daniel Heyward Hamilton, became an independent planter, and he ruined his political fortunes when he refused to support nullification in 1852.
Hamilton’s willingness to exploit the trusts of his wife, Elizabeth Heyward, and the widowed Mary Martha McRa probably has deeper roots, and may come from the way his father treated his mother’s lands and the way his step-grandfather exploited the lands of his mother’s mother.
Notes:
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004.
McClelland, David. The Achieving Society, 1961.
Perry, Oliver Hazard. Quoted by Tinker from a biography by Alexander Slidell Mackenzie; the Perrys ran the boardinghouse where the Hamiltons stayed in Newport.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004; "last cry" quotation from Charleston Mercury, 5 June 1838; Houston quotation from 9 December 1842 letter; quotation from Preston in 15 October 1833 letter.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
South Carolina - Nation State
I didn’t realize until this past year how fragile is the very idea of a nation state. I sat through all those hours of undergraduate history classes dutifully remembering names and events in the Thirty Years War and the Hundred Years War and the Louis of France without much comprehension.
It turns out, this wasn’t all my fault. Steven Pincus believes it was the consequence of an English politician, Thomas Macaulay, who wanted people to think their past had been a bland, inevitable progression from the Magna Carta to the Hanovers who ruled when he was alive.
However, Bernard Bailyn, in his review of Pincus’ new book, argues the second overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688 was the consequence of competing views of a nation state, one dominated by a single man who inherited his position, and one dominated by a merchant elite. While men who favored a state argued about the form, he suggests there were still a great number who simply rejected the very idea of centralized power.
Except for New England, organized by merchants and dominated by Puritan congregations, many of the men who migrated to the colonies still held the medieval view of landed property owners as sovereign. Richard Dunn suggests none of the Caribbean colonies accepted the legitimacy of their proprietors, the Stuarts or Cromwell, and worked through their assemblies to defy any authority. Within the Macaulay tradition, most of these disputes have come to be described as instances of modern Englishmen demanding representation instead of medieval barons refusing to submit.
The proprietors themselves tended to see themselves as medieval barons in the tradition of the Bishop of Durham, Anthony Bek, who was granted extraordinary powers in exchange for protecting England on the Scots border in the late thirteenth century. The Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, demanded the vulnerable Charles I delegate similar powers to raise maintain an army, shire the land, and collect taxes, duties and quit rents in Barbados in 1627 that had been granted to William Alexander in Nova Scotia in 1621.
When Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the most active partner among the South Carolina proprietors, drew up the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669 he assumed he had the same powers as Durham to organize the colony. The colonists simply refused to ratify it, and continued to reject every revision. Unlike the colonists who came with William Bradford to Plymouth, they didn’t propose an alternative constitution. They simply rejected any contract for government.
After Ashley-Cooper died in 1683, the Carolina colonists abandoned any pretense of accepting central authority. The large areas of settlement argued with each other, and people within the settlements quarreled among themselves. In 1719, the colonists simply took power from the proprietors and asked to become a royal colony, not for the benefits of order, but to ensure they were legally free of any existing rules or obligations.
Today, we call countries like Afghanistan run by territorial barons cum war lords failed states, when, in fact, like many of the Caribbean and Carolina planters they never entered into the world of nations. It was a fragile concept when James II was trying to implement it, and it remains so today.
Notes:
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Macaulay, Thomas. History of England, 1848-1855.
Pincus, Steven. 1688: The First Modern Revolution, 2009, reviewed by Bernard Bailyn in The New York Review of Books, 29 November 2009.
It turns out, this wasn’t all my fault. Steven Pincus believes it was the consequence of an English politician, Thomas Macaulay, who wanted people to think their past had been a bland, inevitable progression from the Magna Carta to the Hanovers who ruled when he was alive.
However, Bernard Bailyn, in his review of Pincus’ new book, argues the second overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688 was the consequence of competing views of a nation state, one dominated by a single man who inherited his position, and one dominated by a merchant elite. While men who favored a state argued about the form, he suggests there were still a great number who simply rejected the very idea of centralized power.
Except for New England, organized by merchants and dominated by Puritan congregations, many of the men who migrated to the colonies still held the medieval view of landed property owners as sovereign. Richard Dunn suggests none of the Caribbean colonies accepted the legitimacy of their proprietors, the Stuarts or Cromwell, and worked through their assemblies to defy any authority. Within the Macaulay tradition, most of these disputes have come to be described as instances of modern Englishmen demanding representation instead of medieval barons refusing to submit.
The proprietors themselves tended to see themselves as medieval barons in the tradition of the Bishop of Durham, Anthony Bek, who was granted extraordinary powers in exchange for protecting England on the Scots border in the late thirteenth century. The Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, demanded the vulnerable Charles I delegate similar powers to raise maintain an army, shire the land, and collect taxes, duties and quit rents in Barbados in 1627 that had been granted to William Alexander in Nova Scotia in 1621.
When Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the most active partner among the South Carolina proprietors, drew up the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669 he assumed he had the same powers as Durham to organize the colony. The colonists simply refused to ratify it, and continued to reject every revision. Unlike the colonists who came with William Bradford to Plymouth, they didn’t propose an alternative constitution. They simply rejected any contract for government.
After Ashley-Cooper died in 1683, the Carolina colonists abandoned any pretense of accepting central authority. The large areas of settlement argued with each other, and people within the settlements quarreled among themselves. In 1719, the colonists simply took power from the proprietors and asked to become a royal colony, not for the benefits of order, but to ensure they were legally free of any existing rules or obligations.
Today, we call countries like Afghanistan run by territorial barons cum war lords failed states, when, in fact, like many of the Caribbean and Carolina planters they never entered into the world of nations. It was a fragile concept when James II was trying to implement it, and it remains so today.
Notes:
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Macaulay, Thomas. History of England, 1848-1855.
Pincus, Steven. 1688: The First Modern Revolution, 2009, reviewed by Bernard Bailyn in The New York Review of Books, 29 November 2009.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Childhood Memories
Should an historian try to recreate a past era so completely the reader recognizes its very alienness or should he or she focus on those parts of the past that survive into the present and influence its form?
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
South Carolina - Bacon’s Rebellion
Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion is the first use of force in what was to become the United States to thwart the policies of the legally established government.
The governor, William Berkeley, had become somewhat rigid with age and longevity in office. In 1676, the House of Burgess, responding to demands from Bacon, proposed reforms that would limit Berkeley’s power and restore some rights to landless men. Bacon stormed the sitting assembly with 500 armed men and demanded a military commission. His men then attacked local Indians, before returning to burn Jamestown. The rebellion collapsed when Bacon died and England sent Berkeley reinforcements.
The revolt has been ensconced in popular history as the first battle between freedom loving poor folk and the tyranny of an unelected government, even though the dispute lay over the rights of native Americans to land they had cleared and developed, which the government sought to protect. Some even think much of it was motivated by family feuds between Berkeley and his wife’s family, the Culpepers, who were related to Bacon.
The psychology of fear in Virginia was closer to the reaction of New Englanders to attacks by Indians encouraged by England’s enemies in the French and Indian Wars, which coincided with the Salem witch hysteria in 1692, than it was with the reactions of men allied with the losing side in the English civil war who supported Humphry Walrond in Barbados in 1650 because they felt mistreated.
The difficulties of early frontier life were real. Richard Thompson migrated to Maryland in the 1630's on a ship that had stopped en route at Barbados. In 1637, he returned home to find his wife, children and servants killed. During the English civil war he remarried and moved to the Virginia area between the Potomac and Rappahannock, where he died in 1649 when his children were still toddlers.
In 1662 his son Richard came of age and named Thomas Willoughby his legal guardian. He had been granted land south of the James near Norfolk and married Willoughby’s daughter, Sarah. Willoughby’s grandfather, Thomas, had migrated to Virginia and acquired land through his connections with Percival Willoughby, an investor in the Virginia Company.
The Willoughby family entered the English peerage with Christopher, who was knighted by Henry VIII for military action at Tournai in 1513. His oldest son, William, established the Erseby line, his second son, Christopher, began the Parhams, and his youngest of five boys, Thomas, served as Chief Justice and married an heiress. Their son Robert married Dorothy Willoughby; their grandson, the Percival, married Francis Willoughby of the Eresby branch.
Francis Willoughby of Barbados was descended through the Parhams. Jorge H. Castelli thinks the immigrant Thomas may have been the fifth son of Francis’ great-grandfather Charles.
The Willoughbys not only intermarried, but maintained other face-to-face contacts. Thomas, the husband of Sarah Thompson, was sent to London for his education at the Merchant Taylors School founded by one of the livery companies in London. In 1655, Francis Emperor wrote to the same Thomas Willoughby in Barbados for help in recruiting a Puritan minister.
Emperor had left Barbados in 1650, probably when the royalists, led by Humphrey Walrond, were threatening dissidents, and moved to the Norfolk area which, April Hatfield says, had become a magnet for emigrants from the island. The local economy was tied to export trade, supplying naval stores and dried meat provisions. Settlers from England were more likely to move north of the James where tobacco was grown.
Men like Emperor continued to trade with relatives in Barbados, and provided an example for islanders who needed more land than was available there. In 1652 Thomas Modyford had written to Berkeley about the possibility of sending settlers. In 1662 Francis Willoughby had done the same. Even Guy Molesworth, who’d been forced to leave the island in 1650, was in Jamestown in 1660 as an aide to Berkeley.
Hatfield says about 9% of the population of Virginia’s eastern shore were immigrants from other colonies. The son of Isaac Allerton, a somewhat unscrupulous New England merchant who had originally trained as a tailor, moved to Virginia where he became active in the tobacco trade. The younger Isaac eventually married Thomas Willoughby’s sister Elizabeth and moved to the area above the Rappahannock that had been opened after the Indians were subdued.
When Bacon rebelled, personal experience as much as family ties determined who supported whom. Richard Thompson, the Willoughby in-law who grew up hearing about Indian depredations, supported Bacon and later issued a written apology. Allerton, the Willoughby in-law who grew up hearing about family ties to the leading Pilgrim magistrates, supported Berkeley. Thomas himself was dead and his son, Thomas, was too young to participate.
When you look for concrete links between generations to show the diffusion of attitudes towards government and threats of armed rebellion, it is extremely difficult to do more than establish people knew one another. Everyone knows brothers who never speak, and anyone who’s looked at family genealogies knows the problems that arise when the same name is repeated. Some still aren’t convinced Allerton’s wife wasn’t Elizabeth Thompson, sister of Sarah and Richard, instead of their sister-in-law, Elizabeth Willoughby.
But I suspect somewhere in those dusty records, more likely in those for an indentured servant following Francis Emperor than for a major landowner, lay the lines of influence that possibly tie the uprising in Barbados with later ones in this country through oral history. We can only guess what might have been, not what was.
Notes:
Allerton, Walter Scott. A History of the Allerton Family in the United States: 1585 to 1885, 1900.
Brooke, Francis Taliaferro. "Some Contemporary Accounts of Eminent Charaters," William and Mary Quarterly Historical Magazine, 1908, on Richard Thompson.
Castelli, Jorge H. "Willoughby Family of Parham," Tudorplace website.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kennedy, Mary Seldon. Seldens of Virginia and Allied Families, volume 2, 1911, on Willoughby family.
Lepore, Jill. Review of Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare, The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002., discusses Indian background of Salem witch trials.
Nichol, Margaret Nolan. "The Thompson Family" of Northumberland County, Virginia, Genealogenie website.
The governor, William Berkeley, had become somewhat rigid with age and longevity in office. In 1676, the House of Burgess, responding to demands from Bacon, proposed reforms that would limit Berkeley’s power and restore some rights to landless men. Bacon stormed the sitting assembly with 500 armed men and demanded a military commission. His men then attacked local Indians, before returning to burn Jamestown. The rebellion collapsed when Bacon died and England sent Berkeley reinforcements.
The revolt has been ensconced in popular history as the first battle between freedom loving poor folk and the tyranny of an unelected government, even though the dispute lay over the rights of native Americans to land they had cleared and developed, which the government sought to protect. Some even think much of it was motivated by family feuds between Berkeley and his wife’s family, the Culpepers, who were related to Bacon.
The psychology of fear in Virginia was closer to the reaction of New Englanders to attacks by Indians encouraged by England’s enemies in the French and Indian Wars, which coincided with the Salem witch hysteria in 1692, than it was with the reactions of men allied with the losing side in the English civil war who supported Humphry Walrond in Barbados in 1650 because they felt mistreated.
The difficulties of early frontier life were real. Richard Thompson migrated to Maryland in the 1630's on a ship that had stopped en route at Barbados. In 1637, he returned home to find his wife, children and servants killed. During the English civil war he remarried and moved to the Virginia area between the Potomac and Rappahannock, where he died in 1649 when his children were still toddlers.
In 1662 his son Richard came of age and named Thomas Willoughby his legal guardian. He had been granted land south of the James near Norfolk and married Willoughby’s daughter, Sarah. Willoughby’s grandfather, Thomas, had migrated to Virginia and acquired land through his connections with Percival Willoughby, an investor in the Virginia Company.
The Willoughby family entered the English peerage with Christopher, who was knighted by Henry VIII for military action at Tournai in 1513. His oldest son, William, established the Erseby line, his second son, Christopher, began the Parhams, and his youngest of five boys, Thomas, served as Chief Justice and married an heiress. Their son Robert married Dorothy Willoughby; their grandson, the Percival, married Francis Willoughby of the Eresby branch.
Francis Willoughby of Barbados was descended through the Parhams. Jorge H. Castelli thinks the immigrant Thomas may have been the fifth son of Francis’ great-grandfather Charles.
The Willoughbys not only intermarried, but maintained other face-to-face contacts. Thomas, the husband of Sarah Thompson, was sent to London for his education at the Merchant Taylors School founded by one of the livery companies in London. In 1655, Francis Emperor wrote to the same Thomas Willoughby in Barbados for help in recruiting a Puritan minister.
Emperor had left Barbados in 1650, probably when the royalists, led by Humphrey Walrond, were threatening dissidents, and moved to the Norfolk area which, April Hatfield says, had become a magnet for emigrants from the island. The local economy was tied to export trade, supplying naval stores and dried meat provisions. Settlers from England were more likely to move north of the James where tobacco was grown.
Men like Emperor continued to trade with relatives in Barbados, and provided an example for islanders who needed more land than was available there. In 1652 Thomas Modyford had written to Berkeley about the possibility of sending settlers. In 1662 Francis Willoughby had done the same. Even Guy Molesworth, who’d been forced to leave the island in 1650, was in Jamestown in 1660 as an aide to Berkeley.
Hatfield says about 9% of the population of Virginia’s eastern shore were immigrants from other colonies. The son of Isaac Allerton, a somewhat unscrupulous New England merchant who had originally trained as a tailor, moved to Virginia where he became active in the tobacco trade. The younger Isaac eventually married Thomas Willoughby’s sister Elizabeth and moved to the area above the Rappahannock that had been opened after the Indians were subdued.
When Bacon rebelled, personal experience as much as family ties determined who supported whom. Richard Thompson, the Willoughby in-law who grew up hearing about Indian depredations, supported Bacon and later issued a written apology. Allerton, the Willoughby in-law who grew up hearing about family ties to the leading Pilgrim magistrates, supported Berkeley. Thomas himself was dead and his son, Thomas, was too young to participate.
When you look for concrete links between generations to show the diffusion of attitudes towards government and threats of armed rebellion, it is extremely difficult to do more than establish people knew one another. Everyone knows brothers who never speak, and anyone who’s looked at family genealogies knows the problems that arise when the same name is repeated. Some still aren’t convinced Allerton’s wife wasn’t Elizabeth Thompson, sister of Sarah and Richard, instead of their sister-in-law, Elizabeth Willoughby.
But I suspect somewhere in those dusty records, more likely in those for an indentured servant following Francis Emperor than for a major landowner, lay the lines of influence that possibly tie the uprising in Barbados with later ones in this country through oral history. We can only guess what might have been, not what was.
Notes:
Allerton, Walter Scott. A History of the Allerton Family in the United States: 1585 to 1885, 1900.
Brooke, Francis Taliaferro. "Some Contemporary Accounts of Eminent Charaters," William and Mary Quarterly Historical Magazine, 1908, on Richard Thompson.
Castelli, Jorge H. "Willoughby Family of Parham," Tudorplace website.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kennedy, Mary Seldon. Seldens of Virginia and Allied Families, volume 2, 1911, on Willoughby family.
Lepore, Jill. Review of Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare, The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002., discusses Indian background of Salem witch trials.
Nichol, Margaret Nolan. "The Thompson Family" of Northumberland County, Virginia, Genealogenie website.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
South Carolina - Humphrey Walrond
Humphrey Walrond’s rebellion in Barbados occurred more than 350 years ago. Historians can either dismiss the similarities to today’s more extreme conservative activists or argue similar conditions produce similar responses or that there are direct connections from person to person.
In other words, they confront the classic case confronting anthropologists: coincidence, reinvention or diffusion.
In some ways, the psychological case is the easiest to make.
Humphrey Walrond was the oldest son of a junior branch of a family that established itself in Somerset. His grandfather Humphrey had amassed a fortune in Chancery, bought land in the village of Sea, and opened the local grammar school.
When civil war broke out in England, Walrond was 43 with ten children. He showed no particular inclination to serve either side, but later told Parliament he had done what he could to protect his roundhead neighbors from the depredations of the royalists who dominated the countryside.
In 1645 he fell foul of both sides when the nature of the war changed. Parliament had wearied of protracted warfare that depended on local militias, and established the New Model Army as a professional force, an action akin to Lincoln’s when he elevated Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in our civil war. The first forays under Thomas Fairfax were in Walrond’s area.
As Fairfax neared, the royalist hounded Walrond from his home. He fled to the nearest fortified town, Bridgewater, which Fairfax soon made his first example of Parliamentary resolve by laying siege to the castle and lobbing fire bombs that destroyed much of the town.
Walrond was among the fifty gentlemen taken prisoner when the town was defeated, sent to Gatehouse, and stripped of his property. His oldest son, George, lost as arm sometime fighting for the royalists. When his petitions to Parliament were refused, he sold his property and moved to Barbados.
The town’s local historian, James Street, observed the "Col. Walrond, across the Atlantic, was (as we have said) a strangely different character" than he had been in Sea."
He used every method of the roundheads - legislative maneuvers, war, sequestration of estates, purification of all but the most loyal - to destroy representatives of the men he felt had wrongly punished him. He borrowed the oaths of the Stuarts, but was more an inversion of the men he felt had destroyed him than he was a royalist.
His ally in Barbados, Francis Willoughby underwent the same psychological transformation. During the war, he fought for Parliament, but in 1647, after Charles I had been defeated, he supported Parliament in its disputes with the New Model Army. When the army took London, he was jailed for six months, then fled to Holland to support Charles I.
Once Willoughby took control in Barbados from Walrond, he appeased the moderate royalists, who wished to remain isolated from England’s wars. However, when the banished landowners continued to sponsor partisan accounts of Walrond’s activities, Darnell Davis says Willoughby confused the personal with the political and redirected his anger from the Commonwealth toward anyone who disagreed with him.
As the blockade continued, he nursed his grievance, and wrote his wife "since they began so deeply with me, as to take away all at one clap, and without any cause given on my part, I am resolved not to sit down a loser and be content to see thee, my children, and self ruined."
With no sense of the realities of a plantation economy that had always depended on trade for most of its food, he believed they "can neither starve us with cold, nor famish us with hunger" and so told her "If ever they get the Island, it shall cost them more than it is worth before they have it." It was this indifference to ruin that led moderate royalists to abandon his cause.
The two men, both sons who had inherited to follow the lines of their caste, were shocked when their reflexive responses not only weren’t adequate, but judged wrong when circumstances changed in unexpected ways. They reacted a bit like war prisoners today who internalize some of the attributes of their tormenters at the same time they lose any sense of causality in the outside world.
When Charles II was made king in 1660, Willoughby returned to Barbados, with Walrond as his assistant. By the end of the year, Walrond had displaced him and began prosecuting Thomas Modyford for treason, unmindful of the fact the moderate royalist was related to the man who helped engineer the restoration of the Stuarts, George Monck.
Walrond was expelled again in 1662, and a year later charged with trading with Spain in violation of the Navigation Laws his behavior in Barbados had prompted Parliament to introduce. During his previous exile from Barbados, he had offered his services to Spain, which then was putting down rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal. He angered everyone in England, but managed to leave his son George the most necessary inheritance of a royalist, a title, albeit the Spanish Marquis of Vallado, and debt.
Willoughby never returned to civilian life, but died in battle with the Dutch in 1666.
Notes:
Davis, Nicholas Darnell. The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887, quotes Willoughby’s letter.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile, Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
In other words, they confront the classic case confronting anthropologists: coincidence, reinvention or diffusion.
In some ways, the psychological case is the easiest to make.
Humphrey Walrond was the oldest son of a junior branch of a family that established itself in Somerset. His grandfather Humphrey had amassed a fortune in Chancery, bought land in the village of Sea, and opened the local grammar school.
When civil war broke out in England, Walrond was 43 with ten children. He showed no particular inclination to serve either side, but later told Parliament he had done what he could to protect his roundhead neighbors from the depredations of the royalists who dominated the countryside.
In 1645 he fell foul of both sides when the nature of the war changed. Parliament had wearied of protracted warfare that depended on local militias, and established the New Model Army as a professional force, an action akin to Lincoln’s when he elevated Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in our civil war. The first forays under Thomas Fairfax were in Walrond’s area.
As Fairfax neared, the royalist hounded Walrond from his home. He fled to the nearest fortified town, Bridgewater, which Fairfax soon made his first example of Parliamentary resolve by laying siege to the castle and lobbing fire bombs that destroyed much of the town.
Walrond was among the fifty gentlemen taken prisoner when the town was defeated, sent to Gatehouse, and stripped of his property. His oldest son, George, lost as arm sometime fighting for the royalists. When his petitions to Parliament were refused, he sold his property and moved to Barbados.
The town’s local historian, James Street, observed the "Col. Walrond, across the Atlantic, was (as we have said) a strangely different character" than he had been in Sea."
He used every method of the roundheads - legislative maneuvers, war, sequestration of estates, purification of all but the most loyal - to destroy representatives of the men he felt had wrongly punished him. He borrowed the oaths of the Stuarts, but was more an inversion of the men he felt had destroyed him than he was a royalist.
His ally in Barbados, Francis Willoughby underwent the same psychological transformation. During the war, he fought for Parliament, but in 1647, after Charles I had been defeated, he supported Parliament in its disputes with the New Model Army. When the army took London, he was jailed for six months, then fled to Holland to support Charles I.
Once Willoughby took control in Barbados from Walrond, he appeased the moderate royalists, who wished to remain isolated from England’s wars. However, when the banished landowners continued to sponsor partisan accounts of Walrond’s activities, Darnell Davis says Willoughby confused the personal with the political and redirected his anger from the Commonwealth toward anyone who disagreed with him.
As the blockade continued, he nursed his grievance, and wrote his wife "since they began so deeply with me, as to take away all at one clap, and without any cause given on my part, I am resolved not to sit down a loser and be content to see thee, my children, and self ruined."
With no sense of the realities of a plantation economy that had always depended on trade for most of its food, he believed they "can neither starve us with cold, nor famish us with hunger" and so told her "If ever they get the Island, it shall cost them more than it is worth before they have it." It was this indifference to ruin that led moderate royalists to abandon his cause.
The two men, both sons who had inherited to follow the lines of their caste, were shocked when their reflexive responses not only weren’t adequate, but judged wrong when circumstances changed in unexpected ways. They reacted a bit like war prisoners today who internalize some of the attributes of their tormenters at the same time they lose any sense of causality in the outside world.
When Charles II was made king in 1660, Willoughby returned to Barbados, with Walrond as his assistant. By the end of the year, Walrond had displaced him and began prosecuting Thomas Modyford for treason, unmindful of the fact the moderate royalist was related to the man who helped engineer the restoration of the Stuarts, George Monck.
Walrond was expelled again in 1662, and a year later charged with trading with Spain in violation of the Navigation Laws his behavior in Barbados had prompted Parliament to introduce. During his previous exile from Barbados, he had offered his services to Spain, which then was putting down rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal. He angered everyone in England, but managed to leave his son George the most necessary inheritance of a royalist, a title, albeit the Spanish Marquis of Vallado, and debt.
Willoughby never returned to civilian life, but died in battle with the Dutch in 1666.
Notes:
Davis, Nicholas Darnell. The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887, quotes Willoughby’s letter.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile, Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
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