Vidal, Burr, Bachmann

Gore Vidal’s Burr is a very bad book.

Michele Bachmann read it her senior year in college; she graduated in 1978. I was a bit older, working on my dissertation, when I bought a copy in 1973, soon after it came out in paperback.

She says his snotty treatment of the founding fathers was what offended her. I don’t remember exactly what irritated me, except it made me so angry I wanted to throw the book across the room. At the time, my generalization was that it represented a failure of imagination.

I’ve since continued to read his essays, including the most recent that could use a stronger editorial presence. However, I never read another of his serious works of fiction. Myra Breckinridge might be an important novel, but I’ll never know why.

I eventually did relent a little to read the three mysteries he published earlier as Edgar Box. They were readable, but not compelling enough to make me wish he’d continued writing them. As I recall, the failure of imagination in them was limited to the sex scenes. Following the hard-boiled detective tradition, Vidal felt it necessary to have his hero, Peter Sargeant, become involved with woman. However, he could only say, after he got them together, “and then they did it,” sounding much like an adolescent boy describing the wonders of something he didn’t yet know but needs to pretend he did.

Bachmann says her feelings about the book turned her from being a Democrat to a Republican. I don’t believe she’s ever said why she associated Burr with the Democrats, if it was the politics of Vidal which are snobbishly critical of both parties, or if the person who recommend the book to her was a Democrat.

In my case, I turned on the editorial establishment that had promoted the book as “wicked entertainment of a very high order,” a “tour de force,” a “novel of Stendhalian proportions,” to quote only blurbs from the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

I’ve rarely ever read another review of a novel since, and then only of books or authors I had never heard of, usually from foreign countries. I suspect I’ve missed a good read or two, but I’m know I missed a great deal of boredom from being trapped on the same page with whatever the claque was promoting at the moment.

Pneumonia

The Affordable Health Care for America Act won’t kill the elderly, as some allege, but misrepresentations about the law and medicine in general absolutely do kill.

Recently a friend of my boss died from pneumonia. He was an uninsured alcoholic who had been sober for 15 years, ate well and spent time in the gym. He delayed going to his doctor until his temperature was rising quickly, then refused to go to the hospital. He apparently believed the antibiotics and his strong body were enough.

In the night his fever increased. His landlady saw him out in the snow, she thinks, trying to bring down his body temperature. She found him dead the following morning. As near as anyone knows, when he lay down he fell asleep and his lungs continued to fill until he couldn’t breathe.

The week before, the mother of a friend died from pneumonia in a nursing home after her father had refused treatment for her. It was bacterial in origin, possibly caused by a piece of food that had become stuck. The woman suffered from dementia and either didn’t notice the irritation or couldn’t explain it. She died less than a day after my friend heard she was sick.

Bacterial pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics. Patients with the viral form usually survive when they’re given intravenous fluids and monitored during the crisis.

As near as the daughter and my boss know, both people weren’t treated because men believed they couldn’t afford the treatment. The eighty-five-year-old woman was covered by Medicare. An emergency room would have had to treat the fifty-something man, regardless of his income or insurance status.

I don’t know if the man was uninsured because, as my boss believes, he was one of the many who have the money, but believe they’re too healthy to need insurance, or if he’d tried in the past and been refused. Perhaps being a recovering alcoholic, for Alcoholics Anonymous says you are never an ex-drinker, is itself a disqualifying pre-existing condition. The new law, with its demand for universal coverage, phases out such hurdles to medical treatment, though it can do nothing about the bitterness created by rejection.

False perceptions arise from the health care debate that emphasizes the high cost of treatment and the plight of the uninsured. We’re constantly told emergency rooms are overwhelmed as a result. The subtexts are that treatment might have become substandard and that people who use them are parasites. We certainly are told the costs are greater.

What people don’t hear is that there are new alternatives to emergency rooms, the urgent care centers. If the man had gone to one, instead of waiting to see his doctor, he would have been diagnosed faster and they probably would have begun treating him immediately because they had the necessary resources on site.

When people hear about the cost of treating the elderly who will never recover all their capacities, they don’t hear there’s a difference between treating a disease like cancer, which may kill anyway, and treating a temporary infection.

The ignorance about the dangers of out of control infections also comes from the same media sources, the ones who deny climate change and evolution. In making their arguments, they treat scientists and science with contempt. That attitude, in turn, reinforces people’s natural fear of disease and distrust of doctors who can’t treat the common cold. It makes some people less likely to listen to the medical programs that do appear on television that try to educate about diseases like pneumonia.

The media would deny its responsibility, in the same way it denied there was any relationship between its words and the actions of Jared Loughner who shot Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson on July 8. They would say they are not responsible for the individual actions of a one-time drunk or a man tired of a marriage. They would say individual actions are just that, individual, and not part of a social pattern.

They might also suggest the solution was eliminating malpractice laws. Regulations and contracts may have dictated what an institution or physician could have done in these situations.
However, I do wonder what ethics can condone a nursing home that doesn’t begin treating a treatable infection immediately or a doctor who doesn’t call the ambulance or send a nurse with a man obviously in need of treatment. I wonder what is their moral obligation to seriously inform people of their choices when they can see the people there are talking to are laboring under serious misunderstandings of medical situations.

Ideas, diffused through an atmosphere of misrepresentations and paranoia that feeds of people’s instinctive fears of the unknown or uncontrollable, indeed can kill as swiftly as the infections they abet.

Fire and Ice

Here in the Española valley of northern New Mexico, we’ve now experienced serious displacements cause by fire and ice. Our reactions to each were very different.

More than a decade ago, when the Cerro Grande forest fire threatened Los Alamos, and the employment of people in the valley, people came together. The evacuated either moved to shelters or in with friends. The people responsible, the US Forest Service, held daily news conferences on the progress of putting out the fire. The individual tragedies, the lost homes, were part of a greater story, the threat to a national laboratory that contained radioactive materials.

The loss of natural gas for five or six days when morning temperatures hovered around zero isolated people. No matter how drafty the houses, people had to stay in them. There were no public areas to visit, no restaurants selling warm meals: they were all closed to conserve electricity and few employees would have come to work if they’d tried to open.

One man in Española couldn’t visit his wife in the hospital. His house varied between 30 and 35 degrees. He was trapped by the need to stay home to protect what he could from the threat of broken pipes, so his wife would have a place to return to. We all were trapped by our plumbing, and even the rich discovered they weren’t immune from poor architectural design.

The people responsible, New Mexico Gas Company, cancelled press conferences. The local media, headquartered a hundred miles to the south in Albuquerque, didn’t begin to cover the story until after the Super Bowl, and then only after people in Taos, angry the gas promised for Sunday hadn’t materialized, had begun to rebel and created something to be televised. Pictures of frozen water simply weren’t as compelling to the national media as those of a raging fire.

The greater story had no overriding national interest - the national laboratory has a different source for its natural gas. It was simply one of the compounded consequence of individual attempts to stay warm, a variation of what we now call irrational exuberance.

When cold hit Texas the week before the Super Bowl, furnaces worked longer. The utilities responded to the stress in places like Dallas by instituting rolling brown outs in the more remote areas, especially the western part of the state that produced the natural gas shipped into New Mexico.

When outside temperatures fell way below zero, as low as -18 by the Santa Fe airport on February 3rd, furnaces worked harder, and the natural gas company responded by cutting off service to more remote areas to keep urban centers warm.

Everyone felt they were the victim of someone else, and most responded by denying the reality of the problem. Instead of keeping one part of a house habitable and keeping the rest just warm enough to stop pipes from breaking, people insisted on keeping their entire houses the usual temperature and continuing their usual lives. They were upset they couldn’t have their daily hot showers.

While some people responded to the calls for conservation, my boss’s mother told me she didn’t turn down her heat because she didn’t want to get sick. Her son told me he had turned up his heat because the house had began to cool between furnace cycles.

The economy began to define the seriousness of the disaster, not nature. When the gas went out the day before a normal payday, some people in Taos bought 20 space heaters each, while one of our employees in Española didn’t have enough spare cash left to buy one while they were in stock.

The people in the gas company operations center had no awareness of the difficulty of bringing the gas back in rural areas where poverty dominates; they were only concerned with protecting the physical plant from a complete breakdown. The governor, Susana Martinez, had only been in office for a few weeks and had no staff to respond.

It’s too simple to dismiss her feeble response as that of a Tea Partier who doesn’t believe in government. When things become extreme, human responses tend to overrule ideology. During the Cerro Grande fire, a libertarian, Gary Johnson, was governor. One interview I remember was one in which he lamented his powerless to do anything about a raging wild fire - picking up a shovel and tossing some dirt simply wasn’t enough.

But things were different. It wasn’t just the differences between fire and ice, spring and deep winter. There was also a difference in our expectations.

In the intervening decade, many had become more and more isolated in media created bubbles that mediated their responses to reality. An unexpected disaster that challenged the security of that bubble was more than a discomfort, it was a threat to a whole set of cultural values, and they responded, as people often do with severe threats, with denial, with an attempt to maintain normality.

The media, who created the bubble, especially those who broadcast the more demagogic commentators, were enamored of the power of social media in Egypt. Some began to show people how to turn on their own meters after the utility company had turned them off before relighting each appliance that was safe. Meantime, other stations were showing the number of substandard furnaces the technicians couldn’t legitimately relight.

The genuine risk of an explosion or fire wasn’t part of a world that operated like a Hollywood script where real poverty doesn’t exist. My next door neighbor’s gas had no pressure. He’s a middle class engineer, but I was still thankful he was at work when the gas company arrived and wasn’t the one to troubleshoot the problem. The federal regulation on orderly relighting after a mass outage suddenly made sense, even if it didn’t fit the current political world view.

Since the gas has been restored and morning temperatures are above zero, people with money and enough education to understand the physics of heat and cold, aren’t talking about what to do to prevent another disaster. They know they can’t do anything about Texas or out-of-state utilities. They’re wondering how to protect themselves, how many space heaters to buy, if a generator is necessary, what to do to protect the pipes.

More than likely, they also live in houses and have mortgages, which means they have insurance which will pay for some of the damages and repairs.

Those living in trailers are worse off. If they have insurance, it’s probably so low the payments won’t begin to cover the damages. If they bought something used or live in an old house, there’s probably no insurance. In the next disaster, they will be dismissed as constant victims by those living in the bubble because they didn’t have the minimum assets to respond.

Between fire and ice, the sense of helplessness is different. In both cases, we were the victim of human decisions, in one case a single individual who OK’d the controlled the burn, in the other the compounded consequence of individuals responding to unprecedented cold. Only in the second was the failure of the response also seen as the deliberate failure of humans with no possibility of redemption because we now have a governor who doesn’t believe anything can or should be done and has spent her time since the heat returned placing blame on everyone else.

Notes:
Albuquerque Journal. "Frozen Out," 4 February 2011, on the purchase of space heaters in Taos.

Associated Press. "Fear of System Failure Forced Brutal Choices," 7 February 2011, on the gas company operations center.

KRQE. "Relights Start Slowly in Espanola," 7 February 11, station website, on the man in Española with the sick wife.

Third World New Mexico

Paranoia flourishes where government and institutions fail.

We are living through the coldest period anyone remembers, and our heat supply was cut off on Thursday morning, soon after temperatures reached -12 here. We won’t be up until after the Super Bowl in Dallas.

The gas company has done a particularly poor job of communicating, at least through its emergency website. It blames the lowered power supply in Texas which has lowered pressure in the gas lines. The websites of the local TV stations are no better; they simply redirect you the utility company site.

There’s some news somewhere. One hears particular areas like Taos are down because of equipment or line failures. We suspect the priorities of Texas suppliers eager to leave a good impression on the wealthy visitors and provide extra power to the media crews converging in Dallas Sunday.

We look at the pattern and see outages in remote areas around Albuquerque, nothing in Santa Fe County, and then here. The pueblos, whose lines come from here, went down three hours later than we did. The utility website indicated they had separate, probably more demanding, agreements with the company.

When I walked into the post office I was asked why did I think we were singled out.

Of course I had a ready answer. We won’t squawk like the wealthy in Santa Fe. I didn’t say the obvious, because this area is poor, Hispanic, and has a long tradition of crony politics where regulations are non-existent or not respected because they were written to help family and friends.

I know some lines are good and gas exists. Every time they do a test my furnace turns on, sometimes in the middle of the night. I’m at the end of a line, several miles from the city.

A couple years ago, the local utility spun off the natural gas business to New Mexico Gas, and both suddenly used Denver addresses for their bill payments. When companies are no longer local, they don’t respond to local interests. When companies are owned by investors, they tend to out source maintenance, rather than maintain their own crews.

The thing that makes us all angry is the utility company has decided it needs to bring in crews of relighters to go house to house to turn on our appliances for us. They’ve recruited people from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Colorado. We wonder about the quality of tradesmen who aren’t employed in those states fixing local problems caused by the cold.

As the postman said, give me my gas and I’ll handle the relighting.

The utility and the governor actually have responded to that particular distrust. They now list the utilities who are providing the technicians. Elsewhere, the police are accompanying the crews who have to test everything for safety before they put meters back in service.

In this area, they’re using the National Guard. I don’t know if that’s because there aren’t enough police, or if they’re no different than the rest of us, staying home keeping an eye on the water pipes, or if they’re so distrusted someone else needs to be used. The costs of a dysfunctional police force are hidden and high.

No one’s saying yet why we lost our gas service, or why we’re the last ones to have it restored. All we know is we will endure four days without heat when morning temperatures are between 4 and 10 degrees, and the areas that vote Republican are getting service before those that traditionally vote for Democrats.

Some, of course, don’t have problems. They live in areas where they still use propane. We only got gas here about 10 years ago. At least some of my neighbors still have wood stoves, although I’ve seen little smoke coming from their chimneys. Perhaps they exhausted their wood supplies in January.

I’m lucky. I have some decent space heaters and can keep the bedroom at about 68. The rest of the house is drafty and in the low 40's at night. I keep water tricking through the hot and cold water pipes in the farthest bathroom and don’t flush the toilet in the night. Even so, it got down to 39 inside last night and the fittings on the toilet are leaking.

The biggest problem is the lack of hot water. I’ve abandoned dishes for paper plates, and now dip my cooking utensils in the large pot I keep boiling when I’m in the kitchen. I can’t go to work again until I can take a shower.

A man I work with lives in a trailer with four children. He can’t afford a space heater, if any are still available after the cold at New Year’s. Friday his wife took two kids to the emergency room because they were already sick.

There won’t be any questions asked in the state capital. The governor not only supports the Tea Party philosophy, but is widely seen to be a daughter of the Texas gas and oil interests. There’s more likely to be investigations of poor construction techniques: many multi-million dollar homes in Las Campanas have broken water pipes despite having heat. Bottled water was sold out in my Santa Fe grocery Friday afternoon.

South Carolina - Roses and Rice Redux

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.

South Carolina - Entrepreneurial Spirit

Capitalism, by definition, exists when people can make money from their efforts, and therefore assumes a monetary economy. The right for inventors to "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" was included in the constitution.

That expectation has been resisted by those who are expected to pay. Back in Barbados, one complaint against James Drax was that, when he had found a way to process his sugar cane, he hadn’t shared his knowledge with his neighbors, who were his competitors in the market.

One suspects one reason the slaves of Jonathan Lucas were investigated in the Denmark Vesey scare of 1823 is that Lucas not only had built mills, but opened a mill where he charged planters to process their rice. In 1810, his father’s first customer, John Bowman, still owed them $1,500.

Today Eliza Lucas is held as the ideal alternative, a woman who gave away her seed, possibly under the influence of her new husband, Charles Pinckney. Her gifts were probably less charitable than calculated. She had begun experimenting with crops on her grandfather’s plantation on the Wappo, because it was heavily mortgaged and they needed to raise money to save it. She was told she couldn’t get a bounty for her indigo until "you can in some measure supply the British Demand." The best way to reach that threshold was to give "small quantities to a great number of people," not a lot to a few who could influence the price.

The tension between innovators, who expect to profit from their labors, and public benefactors, who give away the fruit of their efforts, has increased from colonial times when men lived under the protection of Lords Proprietors and kings. In the oldest versions of rice’s origin tales described in earlier posts, the word "give" was used to indicate rice was transferred from the possession of one person to another. In the first, published in 1731, Frayer Hall simply said "It was soon dispensed over the Province."

The transformation of "give" to "gift" occurred during the American revolution which began, in part, when New England merchants protested the Mercantilist policies of Britain which hampered their ability to make money. In 1779, a tory, Alexander Hewatt, said the royal governor, Thomas Smith divided his present of rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."

David Ramsay amplified the role of Smith in 1809 when he said Smith first proved the rice would grow, then distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends." Despite his view of what a good governor should do, Ramsay himself petitioned the first session of the House of Representatives for rights to his writings, an effort that stimulated Congress to pass the first patent law in 1790.

The same sort of transformation for indigo occurred in the years leading to the civil war. James Glen didn’t mention Eliza Lucas when he wrote about indigo in South Carolina in 1861. However, a few years earlier William Gilmore Simms had constantly referred to her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in his novel Woodcraft, as a rich benefactor who, one character tells his hero, "must save you from McKewn if possible. He can do so, if anybody can."

Pinckney had just died in 1825 when Simms returned to Charleston from whence his family had fled when his father failed as a merchant. His first attempt to attract the attention of the city’s elite was a poem dedicated to a man who, in a better world, might have saved his family from bankruptcy. Hezekiah Maham, on the other hand, always turned to his favorite commander, Francis Marion, for advice and help.

More recent writers emphasize the charitable motives for the gift. For instance, popular historian Rod Gragg says that Woodward "knowing the huge profits rice produced as an export to England, ... shared his discovery with his fellow colonists."

The same emphasis on giving away one’s labor characterizes some writing about John Champneys and his hybrid rose. Peggy Cornett, director of the Center for Historic Plants at Montecello, simply wanted to connect known facts when she said "Champneys shared rooted cuttings of his seedling with friends, including William Prince, Jr.," from whom he may have purchased the Parson’s Pink rose that contributed to his seedling, and that Champneys "shared another batch from his seedling with his neighbor, a Frenchman, named Philippe Noisette."

A Charleston website that promotes a romantic view of the city for tourists converts the words necessary to indicate the transfer of a plant into a act of cultural magnificence when it says Noisette gave "a local rice farmer" the China rose, and "as was the custom in the South among gardeners at the time, Champneys then presented seedlings of Champneys' pink cluster back to his friend, Philippe Noisette."

Rosarian Peter Harkness took the step from describing a gift to ascribing a motive when he wrote "The farmer was proud to own such a special rose and passed on cuttings to his friends, including Philippe Noisette."

Champneys was many things, but simple rice farmer he was not. Such a characterization is probably the result of a number of factors, not the least creative writing courses that warn would be writers to avoid the passive voice and use action words when possible. When there are no facts, or descriptions are conflicting and vague, they’re told to visualize how people would have acted in the past.

In addition to suggesting how people are taught to write, the eleemosynary versions also suggest a strong distrust of the motives of innovators, entrepreneurs and capitalists. Many prefer the John Rockefeller who gave away dimes and established a foundation to avoid taxes to the man who organized the Standard Oil cartel.

The transformation in our perceptions of innovators occurred in stages. The only first hand accounts we have are those of Eliza Lucas and Joshua John Ward. Both describe deliberate efforts over several years to develop viable plants and persistence in the face of failure, some caused by the malicious actions of others. For the gardener, both also provide insights into the ways of nature and how man has selected traits to improve it.

Their works were not commonly known in the past. Instead, writers like Hall and Cornett were forced to write narratives based on few facts. The older one left the introduction of rice to the impersonal passive voice, while the other tried to imagine human intervention in the spread of noisette roses.

Such neutral accounts were rejected in times of crises, like the revolution and the years before the civil war. Then royalists like Hewatt and federalists like Ramsey and Simms replaced traditional figures like pirates and the Swamp Fox with conservative heroes like Thomas Smith and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. More recently, slaves and a mulatto’s husband have been given the role of critical interveners in history.

Today’s writers, generally ignorant of the background of their sources, simply rewrite them to fit our current values. Gragg and Harkness describe men as unrealistic in their behavior as an earlier generations’s Lord Fauntleroy and Pollyanna. However, their popular audience is less interested in realistic tales of effort and perseverance, than in suggestions of an alternative to modern reality.

The new world colonies were founded to make money, and that’s what Drax and Eliza and Jonathan Lucas and Champneys wanted to do. That others also made fortunes imitating them may follow the logic of capitalism, but was not the primary motive for those who helped introduce sugar, indigo, rice and noisette roses.

Notes:
Campbell, Levin H. The Patent System of the United States So Far as it Relates to the Granting of Patents: A History, 1891.

Cornett, Peggy. "Champneys' Pink Cluster Comes to Monticello," Twinleaf Journal, January 1999.

Discover Charleston. "Secret Gardens: Charleston's Blooming Treasures," DiscoverCharleston website.

Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.

Gragg, Rod. Planters, Pirates, & Patriots: Historical Tales from South Carolina, 2006.

Harkness, Peter. The Rose: an Illustrated History, 2003.

Lucas, William Dollard. "Notes for Jonathon Lucas Sr.: A Lucas Memorandum," posted on-line, on the 1810 debt.

Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.

Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919, on Hall, Hewatt and Ramsay.

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

Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.

South Carolina - Mercantilism

No one wonders today about the market for sugar cane or tobacco. It may be the knowledge of who were the rice eaters was as obvious to planters at the time, and so wasn’t recorded. Its absence from the historic record now may be less an omission of ignorance than proof the commonplace is often too common to write down.

However, it may also be that in the mercantile economy that dominated South Carolina before the revolution, a producer didn’t need to know anything more than which products were being promoted by the government.

South Carolina was born as a grant to supporters of Charles II who expected to profit from their land with commercial crops. Increasingly, Charles saw the colonies as existing to support his goal of economic independence from countries like Holland whose merchants dominated shipping.

In 1660, he reinstituted the measures adopted by Oliver Cromwell that required all goods coming to England or its colonies be carried by British ships. He added requirements that goods like sugar, tobacco and indigo could only be shipped to England and that exporters pay a tax before exporting them to the continent.

South Carolina’s early years were spent by entrepreneurs trying to find a sellable commodity. Settlers like John Yeamans first raised cattle and hogs for the Caribbean, while Henry Woodward opened trade relations with the natives that led to the export of deerskins. In 1695, the General Assembly ruled quit rents could be paid to the proprietors in desirable products - "Indigo, Cotton, Silke, Rice, Beef or Porke" - an act that favored cattlemen over Indian traders.

In 1705, England under Anne made two changes: it added rice to the list of enumerated goods and started paying a bounty for pitch and tar to develop an alternative source to the Swedes. According to Walter Edgar, local men discovered it was more productive to use already fallen trees that they knew were rich in resin, than chopping down live trees. The navy complained the quality wasn’t the same, and in 1724, changed the law to require green trees. South Carolinians abandoned the effort.

Parliament became more powerful under George II, who acceded in 1727. In 1730 the Navigation Acts were modified to allow colonies to ship rice directly to Portugal without paying the export tax. Rice production increased, but prices were so unpredictable, some planters began looking for an alternative crop.

Eliza Lucas managed her grandfather’s three plantations in the 1730's, after her father George was forced to return to Antigua. She tried growing indigo in 1740, only to see the crop killed by frost before it was dry. She planted seed she saved, but only 100 plants grew in 1741. The following year, she planted her saved seed and more sent by her father; only her seed grew. The crop failed in 1743. She finally produced a good crop in 1744 from her selected seed.

Developing seed that would grow in South Carolina was only part of the challenge. Indigo requires processing to convert its chemicals into dye. Her father sent Nicholas Cromwell from Montserrat who, she believed, sabotaged the lot with lime. He then sent Cromwell’s brother who was no more useful. Her descendant, Harriott Horry Ravenel, says he also sent an "unidentified negro" from some French island.

George Lucas was governor of Antigua, with all the government contacts that implies. As soon as she had a good crop in 1844, she sent samples to London and published the results in the Charleston newspaper. She was told that when she could produce enough to meet British requirements, she could expect a duty to be laid on French indigo "on proper Application to Parliament."

The duty of sixpence a pound was duly offered in 1749, the same year George II adopted white trousers and dark blue jackets for the British naval uniform. Planters adopted the crop, after they realized the work schedules of the rice and indigo complemented each other and they could get more production from their existing slaves.

However, many never learned all the steps required to ferment the dye from the plant. The governor at the time, John Glen, wrote

"I am afraid that the limewater which some use to make the particles subside, contrary as I have been informed to the practice of the French, is prejudicial to it by precipitating different kinds of particles, and consequently incorporating them with the indigo."

According to Jennifer Payne, the best Carolina indigo sold for 5s 9d a pound in 1773, while dye from the French West Indies sold for a minimum of 9s and that from Guatemala fetched 13s 9d a pound.

Once planters and merchants began growing crops that depended on governmental favors, they, like Eliza Lucas, became adept at influencing Parliament. When George III needed to raise money to pay for troops stationed in the colonies, the Sugar Act was passed in 1764 to tax luxuries. Rice was exempt, but not indigo.

When the first Continental Congress met in 1774 to coordinate the colonial response to the Stamp Act, South Carolina’s representatives threatened to leave when men wanted an organized refusal to ship goods to Britain. To maintain unity, the Congress exempted rice from the boycott, but not indigo.

The bounty on indigo ended with the Treaty of Paris, as did the protected Mercantile economy. Planters were thrown into the world of nascent capitalism. The generation after the war responded with innovations in rice production or turned to cotton. The one depended, in part, on institutional buyers, the other on manufacturers.

The decline of Carolina rice after Napoléon might possibly be traced to the very success of South Carolina as a mercantile economy. When the government guaranteed the profitability of certain, strategic products, planters had no reason to learn anything about the destination for their crops. When competition appeared, as it had with tar and indigo, they changed products.

When capitalism’s quest for the cheapest supplier overtook rice planters in the 1830's, most had no idea how to find new markets and many had taken ideological stances that prevented them from adopting methods developed by northerners. They asked the government for support in foreign markets, then, in 1846, asked Congress to impose a tariff on cheaper rice coming from Java.

At the same time, a man in Virginia, Cyrus McCormick, was developing a reaper. In 1848, he left the south for Chicago to be closer to people who would buy his machines. In the 1890's, midwesterners would adapt it for rice in Louisiana.

Notes:
After the bounty was dropped on tar, some in the colony did continue supplying naval stores. For instance, John Pamor, the great uncle of Hezekiah Maham’s second wife, Mary Palmer, made his fortune from turpentine Likewise, some indigo growers produced dye that surpassed the quality of the French West Indies.

Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998; on tar, Sugar Act, Continental Congress.

Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.

Payne, Jennifer. "Rice, Indigo, and Fever in Colonial South Carolina," 1998, available on-line.

Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.

Ravenel, Harriott Horry. Eliza Pinckney, 1896.