Assembling Slave Communities on the Waccamaw

Topic: Early Versions - Waccamaw Neck
Land and slaves were treated as items that could be inherited or sold separately.  While the status of slaves as chattel was inherent in the slave trade, its legal basis was established in 1677 when a representative of the Royal African Company [1] sued a Barbados planter for unpaid debts.

The planter, Penny, argued slaves were equivalent to villeins in Medieval English law who were tied to land and could not be separated from it.  The court sided with the merchant, Thomas Butts. [2]

Thus, when Benjamin Allston made a will before his death in 1811, he gave his working plantation to his oldest son, Joseph Waties, [3] and Matanzas [4] to his other sons, Robert Francis Withers and William Washington.  His wife, Charlotte Anne, moved there with the two young boys to manage the land, and repay her husband’s debts in 1819. [5]

Separately, Benjamin allocated 18 slaves to particular heirs, and decreed the other 126 should be divided between his heirs, who included his wife, three sons, and three daughters. [6]  This left Joseph with a plantation with insufficient manpower, and forced all but 107 of the Waverly slaves to be moved to new locations.

Waverly’s land originally was part of a grant made by George I to Thomas Hepworth in 1711. [7]  It lay north of the Hobcow Barony claimed by one of the colony’s proprietor’s, John Carteret, [8] and south of the one given to a landgrave, Robert Daniel, the same year. [9]  Like the other land grants it was a reward for services.  Hepworth was a lawyer who had served as clerk to the House of Commons Assembly. [10]

Hepworth’s son sold an undeveloped tract on Wahocca Bluff to Percival Pawley in 1737.  He was the son of the Percival mentioned in the post for 8 January 2023 who bought the land from the owner of Daniel’s claim, Thomas Smith.  He, in turn, sold it to his brother George in 1743. [11]  George was the one developed the Wachoker Plantation. [12]  At that time, most of the slaves were coming from modern Sénégal-Gambia and Sierra Leone. [13]

George and Mary’s son William died in 1776, and the land was divided into two plantations for his daughters.  The one who inherited Washington’s Valley was married to Josias William Allston, [14] the grandson of the Josias Alston who moved to North Carolina. [15]  All that’s known bout about the daughter who received Montpelier is that she married her sister’s brother. [16]

Nothing is known about the condition of the plantations or their slaves after the British ravaged so much during the American Revolution.  William’s son-in-law could have done little to rebuild Montpelier, since the slave trade was closed until 1801.  Then, slaves began coming from Kongo, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast of modern Ghana. [17]

Benjamin Allston bought Montpelier in 1807 and renamed it Waverly. [18]  That was the year the slave trade closed again, and any new slaves either were purchased from neighbors or were offspring of existing slave women.

His other plantation, Matanzas, was on the Peedee river and apparently had been purchased as speculation. [19]  It not only was undeveloped but mortgaged. [20]  His widow hired some of her sons’ slaves out to others. [21]  This exposed them to slaves from other plantations.

When William died in 1823, Robert and Joseph each inherited half his share of Matanzas. [22]  No mention is made of the fate of his slaves.  Some may have been taken back to Waverly by Joseph.

Robert’s mother died in 1824, and he received seven of her slaves. [23]  The disposition of the others is not mentioned.  If any went to her daughters, then they may have rejoined ones moved from Waverly in 1819.

To begin developing Matanzas as a plantation, Robert purchased nine more slaves from his mother’s estate who joined the 33 slaves living on the Peedee land.  Then, in 1828, he bought 34 individuals from the estate of Robert Francis Withers. [24]  This doubled the population of his slave quarters with people who may have had different traditions.  Whether the group adapted or changed the community ethos depended on whether it contained strong or charismatic individuals.

In 1836, Robert sold eight of the Waverly slaves to Joseph’s wife, Mary Allan. [25]  They returned to Matanzas, when she could not pay him.  This probably was related to Joseph’s death in 1837.  He was in debt, and Robert sold fifty-one slaves who left Waverly for other plantations. [26]

The sales of slaves when owners died was not unusual in rice country when men died young.  Benjamin was 43, William was 19, and Joseph 36. [27]

The separation of slaves and land, and the early deaths of plantation owners created a situation that was different from that found in Georgia where Pierce Butler’s slaves were kept on his island plantation for several generations, and created their own Gullah dialect. [28]  Likewise, William Francis Allen found slaves on different plantations on Saint Helena Island during the Civil War each had distinctive ways of speaking. [29]

Along the Waccamaw Neck a more generalized culture could develop.  When Robert started planting on Matanzas, he began with slaves who shared the culture of the slave quarters on Waverly.  When he purchased slaves elsewhere, those men and women were forced to adapt to the existing mores of the Peedee land.

Likewise, when he sold Joseph’s slaves, the Waverly culture was both dispersed with each individual, and altered by mingling on new plantations.  However, those buyers were local men.  Robert made clear, he wasn’t trying to get the highest prices, but was trying to keep “rice” slaves in the area, so people who grew rice did not have to pay higher “cotton” slave prices. [30]  As a consequence, he did most of his trades within his area. [31]

This created an environment where the local patterns of speech became standardized within the region.  Likewise, religious practices would have undergone the same sort of sifting and selection to create something with unique traits along the Waccamaw river.  When slaves returned to Waverly, even for short periods, they brought with them slightly modified variants of the home plantation’s culture.

The trend toward homogenization was abetted by overseers, who often spent little time at any one plantation, but moved from one to another, taking their expectations of slave behavior with them.  Harold Easterby found the names of seven men who served at Waverly, [32] and eight at Manzanos. [33]  Some were dismissed for their cruelty; [34] at least one was described as a bad man at another plantation where he worked. [35]

Like many planters, Robert prided himself for not selling any of his slaves, until the Civil War.  However, Easterby noted he did try to sell some to his sister-in-law and later sold four to the miller at Waverly in the 1850s. [36]  Robert overlooked the disruptions he caused by buying slaves from other plantations.

End Notes
1.  The Royal African Company was controlled by Charles I through his brother James.  It had been established as the Royal Adventurers into Africa in 1660, [37] and was reorganized in 1672 as the RAC.  Five of the owners also were proprietors of South Carolina: John Berkeley, George Carteret, John Colleton, Anthony Ashley Cooper, and William Craven. [38]  The company is mentioned in post for 10 January 2019.

2.  Holly Brewer.  “‘Twelve Judges in Scarlet’ The Seventeenth-Century Contest over a Common Law of Slavery for England and its Empire.”  Penn Legal History Consortium, 3 October 2012.  Republished on Social Science Research Network website.  Only last names appeared in legal records.  Brewer was able to identify Butts, but there were several possible Penny planters on Barbados.

3.  J. H. Easterby.  The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston.  Chicago: University of Chicago, 1945.  New edition issued by University of South Carolina of Columbia in 2004.  19.

4.  I am using names used at the time; Matanzas was renamed Chicora Woods in 1853. [39]

5.  Easterby.  19–20.  As mentioned in the post for 6 August 2023, Charlotte Ann Allston was an Allston cousin before she married an Allston.

6.  Easterby.  28.

7.  Susan A. Scheno.  “Ricefields: Our Historical Legacy.”  Ricefields website.  7.  None of the individuals who could have mentioned “Come by Here” to Genevieve Willcox Chandler was associated with Waverly.  I am using it as an example of a Waccamaw Neck plantation because its slave population is well documented.

8.  Henry A. M. Smith.  “The Baronies of South Carolina.  Part X. Hobcow Barony.”  The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 14(2):61-80:April 1913.  62.

9.  Daniel’s purchase and his quick resale to another landgrave, Thomas Smith, are discussed in the post for 8 January 2023.

10.  Walter B. Edgar and N. Louise Bailey.  Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977.  2:313–314.

11.  Scheno.  7.

12.  Robert Walden Coggeshall.  Ancestors and Kin.  Spartanburg, South Carolina: The Reprint Company, 1988.  153.

13.  This information is from the post for 10 March 2019.
14.  Scheno.  8.

15.  Josias Alston was the son of John Allston and grandson of the immigrant John Allston. [40]  He inherited Turkey Hill, which he sold in 1772 to his cousin Joseph Allston, the son of his father’s brother William. [41]  Rowena Nyland said that “the reason Josias sold his inheritance is unknown.  He relocated in the Little River area on the North/South Carolina border on lands which his will suggests he obtained from Joseph Allston.” [42]

16.  Scheno.  8.
17.  This information is from the post for 10 March 2019.
18.  Scheno.  8.
19.  Easterby.  19–20.
20.  Easterby.  20.
21.  Easterby.  19.
22.  Easterby.  28.
23.  Easterby.  28.
24.  Easterby.  28.

25.  Easterby.  29.  She was the sister of Robert M. Allan, a Charleston cotton factor. [43]

26.  Easterby.  29.

27.  Coggeshall.  172–173.  Ages are calculated from birth and death dates and may be off by a year.

28.  Lillian F. Sinclair.  “My Recollections of Darien in the Late Seventies and Eighties.  66–68 in Buddy Sullivan.  High Water on the Bar.  Darien, Georgia: Darien Development Authority, 2009.  67.  “These Butler Negroes were a race apart.  The never, until years after the war, mingled with other Negroes.  They were not allowed to do so by Pierce Butler and, after his death, kept to their tradition.  They had a peculiar lingo which one had to be familiar with before one could understand it.”

29.  William Francis Allen.  “Introduction.”  The Slave Songs of the United States.  Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.  New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867.  xxiv.  “The different plantations have their own peculiarities, and adepts profess to be able to determine by speech of a negro what part of the island he belongs to, or even, in some cases, his plantation.  I can myself vouch for the marked peculiarities of one plantation from which I had scholars, and which are hardly more than a mile distant from another which lacked these peculiarities.”

30.  Easterby.  30.

31.  George C. Rogers.  The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970; reprinted by Georgetown County Historical Society, 2002.  329.

32.  Easterby.  23–26.  Mr. Sessions, John Oliver, Gabriel L. Ellis, George C. Gotea, Benjamin A. Tillman, G. Savage Smith, and Thomas Hemingway.

33.  Easterby.  23–26.  Neighbor, James Hull, Daniel P. Avant, Thomas Sanders, Gabriel L. Ellis, J. A. Hemingway, William B. Millican, and Jessse Belflowers.

34.  Easterby.  24–25.  Avant and Ellis.
35.  Easterby.  25.  Ellis.
36.  Easterby.  29.
37.  Hugh Thomas.  The Slave Trade.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.  198.
38.  Thomas.  201.
39.  Easterby.  19–20.
40.  Coggeshall.  172.

41.  Rowena Nyland.  “Historical Analysis of the Willbrook, Oatland, and Turkey Hill Plantations.”  14–60 in Archaeological and Historical Examinations of Three Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Rice Plantations on the Waccamaw Neck, edited by Michael Trinkley.  Columbia, South Carolina: Chicora Foundation, May 1993.  30–31.

42.  Nyland.  32.
43.  Easterby.  66.