Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
John Lomax’s father was living in Holmes County between the Black and Yazoo rivers on the eastern edge of the Mississippi delta before the Civil War. [1] It had not been developed by cotton planters because it had a different soil type than they knew was good for the plant. The part of Alabama where Tartt lived, the green on the map below, had rich dark soils created when the area had been a sea shore during the Cretaceous era of dinosaurs. [2]
In 1860, the bulge in the blue area of Mississippi on the map was 90% undeveloped with large areas of swamp. After the war freedmen and poor whites cleared land and sold the wood to timber companies to earn money to buy land. [3] Charles Reagon Wilson observed:
"Freedmen from across the South saw in the post-Civil War Delta a frontier of opportunity, a relatively undeveloped region without the long settled social arrangements of the eastern South and with land that could be richly productive if cleared. Blacks hoped for land ownership during Reconstruction and asserted their political rights in the Delta." [4]
James Avery Lomax left Mississippi for Texas to escape the chaos of Reconstruction in 1869. "The ruling classes possessing all the culture and intelligence were financially ruined, and the State was in the hands of unscrupulous ‘carpet baggers’ and ignorant negroes. I did not wish my family raised in contact with the negroes, either as slaves or as ‘freed-men’." [5]
As mentioned in the post for 27 January 2019, John published the first important collection of cowboy songs in 1910. He sketched out a much more ambitious folklore project to the Library of Congress than simply collecting more western songs from people like Nancy Humble Griffin. He wanted to expand the material he’d published in American Ballads and Folk Songs in 1934. [6]
However, like Lydia Parrish, he discovered, it was far easier to want to collect songs from strangers than it was to do so. [7] He found Ruby Pickens Tartt through her contributions to the Federal Writers Project, which he was advising in 1937. [8]
In 1939, his son, Alan Lomax
"hosted the American School of the Air, a CBS radio program that featured traditional material—sometimes live singers and sometimes their recordings—paired with the radio orchestra’s folksong interpretations. During these broadcasts, Lomax invited listeners to write in with suggestions. Some did, and as part of a fall 1940 folksong collecting trip for the Library of Congress, John and Ruby Lomax followed up several of the contacts generated by Alan’s radio series." [9]
One person who sent material was Irene Williams. She was living in Oxford, Mississippi, but may have been raised in the Delta on a plantation in Sunflower County. Her brother-in-law had land near Rome and her brother’s farm was farther north near Drew. Like Dick Reeves, [10] she had put together a musical program for appearances at local women’s clubs. [11]
She was at Robert Williams’ plantation, when the Lomax arrived unannounced in October, 1940. He followed her and recorded some songs by field hands at her brother’s place, [12] including "Oh Lordy, won’t You come by here?" The Library of Congress catalog only listed the singers’ names, Velma Mosley, Wash Dawson, and Albert Williams.
While Griffin was well-known in her part of Texas, these three were obscure with commonplace names. Their parents could have moved to Sunflower County from anywhere in the South. One can only deduce details about them from their recordings. Lomax recorded Williams and Myrtle Lee singing "Bird in the Cage." [13] The metaphor was used in a number of folk and popular songs. [14]
Dawson also performed "Keep yo’ hand on the throttle." [15] The identifying line was borrowed from "Life Is like a Mountain Railroad" that had been recorded by the Pace Jubilee Singers in 1929 and released in 1932. [16] They already had recorded a version of "Lawdy Won’t You Come By Here" in Chicago in 1927. [17]
It may be Dawson learned both songs from recordings. B.B. King was born in another part of Sunflower County in 1925. Before his mother died in the late 1930s, he visited a great-aunt who had a "crank-up Victrola" [18] in her "sharecropper’s cabin." [19] He remembered "she’d go into town and find records." [20]
Thus, someone in the area where Dawson working in the 1930s sold African-American records. King remembered Mima had shellac 78s made by Blind Lemon Jefferson, [21] Lonnie Johnson, [22] Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Mamie Smith. [23] In addition to the blues and early jazz artists, she also had gospel music performances, including one by J. M. Reverend Gates. [24]
The only other thing known about Dawson is his "Throttle" was recorded in 1950 by Brother Rodney in Philadelphia. [25] That, in turn, was adapted by Ira Tucker for the Dixie Hummingbird’s "Christian’s Automobile" in 1957. [26] How Rodney learned Dawson’s song is unknown [27], but there’s little mystery in how the Hummingbirds learned Rodney’s song. They were living in Philadelphia in the 1950s. [28]
Availability
Velma Mosley, Wash Dawson, and Albert Williams. "Oh Lordy Won’t You Come By Here." Collected by John Lomax and Ruby Terrill Lomax, Drew, Mississippi. October 1940. Archives of American Folk Song.
Graphics
US Department of Agriculture. Natural Resources Conservation Service. "Vertisols Map." NRCS website.
End Notes
1. "Recollections of J. A. Lomax, as Dictated to W. F. Graves." 142-146 in Joseph Lomax. "Genealogical and Historical Sketches of the Lomax Family." Grand Rapids, Michigan: The Rookus Printing House, 1894. 143.
2. Craig McClain. "How Presidential Elections Are Impacted by a 100 Million Year Old Coastline." Deep Sea News. 27 June 2012. Cited by Wikipedia, "Black Belt (U.S. Region)."
3. John C. Willis. Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Cited by Wikipedia, "History of Mississippi."
4. Charles Reagan Wilson. "Mississippi Delta. Southern Spaces website. 4 April 2004.
5. James Avery Lomax. 144.
6. John Avery Lomax and Alan Lomax. American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934.
7. For more of Parrish, see the post for 2 October 2018.
8. Ruby Pickens Tartt was discussed in the post for 23 January 2019.
9. Stephen Wade. The Beautiful Music All Around Us. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 78. Ruby was John’s wife.
10. Reeves was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019.
11. Wade. 78.
12. Wade. 78.
13. Myrtle Lee and Albert Williams. "Bird in the Cage." Collected by John Lomax and Ruby Terrill Lomax, Drew, Mississippi. October 1940. Archives of American Folk Song.
14. "Lyr req: Bird in a cage." Mudcat Café. Thread started 3 November 2006.
15. W. D. Dawson. "Keep yo’ hand on the throttle." Collected by John Lomax and Ruby Terrill Lomax, Drew, Mississippi. October 1940. Archives of American Folk Song.
16. Pace Jubilee Singers. "Life Is like a Mountain Railroad." Victor 23350. 1932. The tune was written by Charles Davis Tillman in 1892 to a poem by M. E. Abbey.
17. Pace Jubilee Singers. "Lawdy Won’t You Come By Here." Brunswick 7009. 1927.
18. B.B. King. Blues All Around Me. With David Ritz. New York: Avon Books, 1996. 21. King was discussed in the post for 13 April 2018.
19. King. 22.
20. King. 22.
21. King. 22.
22. King. 23.
23. King. 24.
24. King. 24.
25. Brother Rodney. "Keep Your Hand On The Throttle." Gotham 645. 1950.
26. Dixie Hummingbirds. "Christian’s Automobile." Peacock 1780. 1957.
27. Opal Louis Nations. "Part 2 – Liner Notes to Devil Can’t Harm A Praying Man – Texas Gospel, Vols. 3-5)." He mentioned the three recordings, but had no information on Dawson.
28. Jerry Zolten. Great God A’Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds. Oxford University Press. No page numbers on copy available on-line.
“Kumbaya” evolved from the African-American religious song “Come by Here.” After that fruitful overlap of cultures, both songs continued to be sung. This website describes versions of each, usually by alternating discussions organized by topic.
To find a particular post use the search feature just below on the right or click on the name in the list that follows. If you know the date, click on the date at the bottom right.
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Sunday, January 27, 2019
John Lomax in Texas - Lord, Won’t You Come by Here
Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
John Lomax’s family background was a poor man’s version of Ruby Pickens Tartt’s. His great-grandfather migrated from Yorkshire to the North Carolina piedmont in the 1740s. [1] His grandfather moved to western South Carolina where he prospered on squatted land until the legal owner appeared. The family then struggled, with the children hired out to neighbors. [2]
In 1846, John’s father, James Avery Lomax, moved to Mississippi where he worked for his younger brother Tillman. [3] On the eve of the Civil War, Tillman owned sixteen slaves [4] and James mentioned two. [5] During the war, James was called up with others in their forties, but sent home to make shoes for the army at his tannery. [6] Tillman was drafted, denied the promotion he wanted, and turned to thieving. [7]
James remigrated to the edge of civilized land in Texas in 1869. [8] John left the Texas farm in 1887 for Granbury College, and began teaching in 1888. After that, he alternated between going to progressively better educational institutions and teaching in successively more prestigious schools. [9]
He finally studied folklore at Harvard under George Kittredge, mentioned in the post for 23 January 2019. Lomax had begun learning cowboy and Black folk songs from a hired hand, Nat Blythe, in 1876. [10] In 1910, he published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. [11] Two years later he was elected president of the American Folklore Society. [12]
Lomax lost his position at the University of Texas in 1917 during a political purge by the governor, and turned to finance. Lomax was working for the Republic Bank of Dallas when the economy crashed in 1929. He apparently lost that job in the early 1930s, and headed to New York to find a publisher to subsidize a proposed collection of American folk music. From there he went to the Library of Congress where Robert Winslow Gordon had established the Archives of American Folk Song. [13]
Like Tartt, Lomax revisited people he already knew or knew of. He collected a version of "Lord, won’t You come by here" from Nancy Humble Griffin, who then was living upstream from his childhood home in Meridian, Texas. She had been raised on a cattle ranch in Austin County, and Lomax was primarily interested in her western songs when he went to her home in 1941. [14]
Griffin’s source is unknown. African Americans had arrived in Austin County in three waves. The first settlers brought slaves with them from Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. Blacks were 47% of the population in 1860. [15]
The early white settlers were supplemented by German-speaking immigrants beginning in 1838. Many had too little capital to become purchase slaves. [16] Griffin’s immigrant ancestor, Jacob Humble, had left Austria for North Carolina before 1760. Her grandfather moved from there to Louisiana, where her father was born in 1833. [17] Somewhere in Louisiana, her family became connected to that of James Bowie, [18] who died at the Alamo in 1836. Her parents left for Texas soon after she was born in 1855. [19]
During the Civil War, planters from the Deep South moved their slaves beyond the reach of federal law in Texas. [20] Charles Christopher Jackson said the African-American population increased by 47%. More arrived during Reconstruction for opportunities to work small cotton farms. By 1870, they remained 40% of the population. [21]
Griffin’s obituary only mentioned her husband, but did not indicate how they met or where they lived. He was from Gonzalez County, Texas, and may have been the Oliver Smith Griffin from Washington County, Alabama. [22]
It’s possible her father moved the family to the area south of the city of Austin since it was near the Chisholm Trail and cattle roamed the range. It also had a large German-speaking population, and African Americans composed a third of the population in 1880. [23]
Segregation was still the rule. The most likely way a white woman could have heard "Come by Here" would have been at an open camp meeting or Baptist event. She had been baptized as a teenager. Her obituary only noted she
"knew scores of ‘pure’ ballads, and loved to sing them. Nothing, she thought, could take the place of mothers singing to and with their children. ‘Many’s the time,’ she said, ‘it’s kept mine from frettin’ and me from punishin’ them just ’cause I was tired’." [24]
By the time Lomax met her, Griffin was blind and living in Hasse, where her son ran the store and post office. She died there in 1947. [25]
Availability
Nancy Humble Griffin. "Lord, Won’t You Come by Here." Collected by John Lomax in Hasse, Texas, October 1941. Archives of American Folk Song.
End Notes
1. Joseph Lomax. "Genealogical and Historical Sketches of the Lomax Family." Grand Rapids, Michigan: The Rookus Printing House, 1894. 64.
2. "Recollections of J. A. Lomax, as Dictated to W. F. Graves." 142–146 in Joseph Lomax. 142.
3. James Avery Lomax. 143.
4. Jarret Ruminski. The Limits of Loyalty. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Chapter 4.
5. James Avery Lomax. 143.
6. James Avery Lomax. 143.
7. Ruminski
8. James Avery Lomax. 144.
9. Wikipedia. "John Lomax."
10. Wikipedia, Lomax.
11. John A. Lomax. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910.
12. Wikipedia, Lomax.
13. Wikipedia, Lomax. It’s not clear if the bank name given by Wikipedia was correct, since it said his employer’s bank failed and the Republic Bank survived the banking crisis of 1933. Gordon is discussed in the post for 3 February 2019.
14. Mrs. Y. W. Holmes. "Ballads for Library of Congress." The Comanche [Texas] Chief, 31 October 1941. Reprinted 28 October 1971:11.
15. Charles Christopher Jackson. "Austin County." Handbook of Texas Online. 9 June 2010; last updated 17 February 2016.
16. Jackson.
17. Ken West. "Humble, Jacob," "Humble, Henry Sr.," and "Humble, Henry Jr." Geocities website. 26 March 2000.
18. The family legend may have come from her father’s full name, Gilbert Thomas Buie Humble. [26] His mother, Jane Davis, was the daughter of John Davis and Mary Bateman. [27] Bowie’s sister Sarah married William Davis. [28] Nothing is known about William; he is not listed as John’s child, and he and Sarah left no known children. I also found nothing about the children of John’s brother. Bowie also had a Black half-brother, James, who was freed. He had sons. [29]
19. Shirley Smith. Quoted by Texansmyheart. "Gilbert Thomas Humble, Sr." Find a Grave. 27 April 2012.
20. James Hamilton was mentioned in the post for 20 January 2019. He had moved his slaves before the war to escape liens by his creditors.
21. Jackson.
22. James Haire. "Griffin." The Haire & Hines Family & Relations. Tribal Pages website. 11 September 2011. Last updated 11 June 2012.
23. Dorcas Huff Baumgartner and Genevieve B. Vollentine. "Gonzalez County." Handbook of Texas Online. 15 June 2010; last updated 3 February 2016.
24. Nancy Humble Griffin. 1947 obituary. Ancestry website. Uploaded by Linda Mathis, 23 April 1999.
25. Griffin, obituary.
26. Ken West. "Manning, Malinda." Geocities website. 26 March 2000. She was Gilbert’s wife and Nancy’s mother.
27. Chris Chance. "John Davis Jr (1760 - 1810)." Wikitree. 9 January 2015. Last updated, 20 June 2016. On Jane, John, and drilldowns on John’s brothers and uncles.
28. Arthur Bowie. "Sarah Bowie" and "William Davis." Book of Bowie website.
29. "James Bowie, (Free Man of Color)." Gini website. 4 January 2015.
John Lomax’s family background was a poor man’s version of Ruby Pickens Tartt’s. His great-grandfather migrated from Yorkshire to the North Carolina piedmont in the 1740s. [1] His grandfather moved to western South Carolina where he prospered on squatted land until the legal owner appeared. The family then struggled, with the children hired out to neighbors. [2]
In 1846, John’s father, James Avery Lomax, moved to Mississippi where he worked for his younger brother Tillman. [3] On the eve of the Civil War, Tillman owned sixteen slaves [4] and James mentioned two. [5] During the war, James was called up with others in their forties, but sent home to make shoes for the army at his tannery. [6] Tillman was drafted, denied the promotion he wanted, and turned to thieving. [7]
James remigrated to the edge of civilized land in Texas in 1869. [8] John left the Texas farm in 1887 for Granbury College, and began teaching in 1888. After that, he alternated between going to progressively better educational institutions and teaching in successively more prestigious schools. [9]
He finally studied folklore at Harvard under George Kittredge, mentioned in the post for 23 January 2019. Lomax had begun learning cowboy and Black folk songs from a hired hand, Nat Blythe, in 1876. [10] In 1910, he published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. [11] Two years later he was elected president of the American Folklore Society. [12]
Lomax lost his position at the University of Texas in 1917 during a political purge by the governor, and turned to finance. Lomax was working for the Republic Bank of Dallas when the economy crashed in 1929. He apparently lost that job in the early 1930s, and headed to New York to find a publisher to subsidize a proposed collection of American folk music. From there he went to the Library of Congress where Robert Winslow Gordon had established the Archives of American Folk Song. [13]
Like Tartt, Lomax revisited people he already knew or knew of. He collected a version of "Lord, won’t You come by here" from Nancy Humble Griffin, who then was living upstream from his childhood home in Meridian, Texas. She had been raised on a cattle ranch in Austin County, and Lomax was primarily interested in her western songs when he went to her home in 1941. [14]
Griffin’s source is unknown. African Americans had arrived in Austin County in three waves. The first settlers brought slaves with them from Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. Blacks were 47% of the population in 1860. [15]
The early white settlers were supplemented by German-speaking immigrants beginning in 1838. Many had too little capital to become purchase slaves. [16] Griffin’s immigrant ancestor, Jacob Humble, had left Austria for North Carolina before 1760. Her grandfather moved from there to Louisiana, where her father was born in 1833. [17] Somewhere in Louisiana, her family became connected to that of James Bowie, [18] who died at the Alamo in 1836. Her parents left for Texas soon after she was born in 1855. [19]
During the Civil War, planters from the Deep South moved their slaves beyond the reach of federal law in Texas. [20] Charles Christopher Jackson said the African-American population increased by 47%. More arrived during Reconstruction for opportunities to work small cotton farms. By 1870, they remained 40% of the population. [21]
Griffin’s obituary only mentioned her husband, but did not indicate how they met or where they lived. He was from Gonzalez County, Texas, and may have been the Oliver Smith Griffin from Washington County, Alabama. [22]
It’s possible her father moved the family to the area south of the city of Austin since it was near the Chisholm Trail and cattle roamed the range. It also had a large German-speaking population, and African Americans composed a third of the population in 1880. [23]
Segregation was still the rule. The most likely way a white woman could have heard "Come by Here" would have been at an open camp meeting or Baptist event. She had been baptized as a teenager. Her obituary only noted she
"knew scores of ‘pure’ ballads, and loved to sing them. Nothing, she thought, could take the place of mothers singing to and with their children. ‘Many’s the time,’ she said, ‘it’s kept mine from frettin’ and me from punishin’ them just ’cause I was tired’." [24]
By the time Lomax met her, Griffin was blind and living in Hasse, where her son ran the store and post office. She died there in 1947. [25]
Availability
Nancy Humble Griffin. "Lord, Won’t You Come by Here." Collected by John Lomax in Hasse, Texas, October 1941. Archives of American Folk Song.
End Notes
1. Joseph Lomax. "Genealogical and Historical Sketches of the Lomax Family." Grand Rapids, Michigan: The Rookus Printing House, 1894. 64.
2. "Recollections of J. A. Lomax, as Dictated to W. F. Graves." 142–146 in Joseph Lomax. 142.
3. James Avery Lomax. 143.
4. Jarret Ruminski. The Limits of Loyalty. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Chapter 4.
5. James Avery Lomax. 143.
6. James Avery Lomax. 143.
7. Ruminski
8. James Avery Lomax. 144.
9. Wikipedia. "John Lomax."
10. Wikipedia, Lomax.
11. John A. Lomax. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910.
12. Wikipedia, Lomax.
13. Wikipedia, Lomax. It’s not clear if the bank name given by Wikipedia was correct, since it said his employer’s bank failed and the Republic Bank survived the banking crisis of 1933. Gordon is discussed in the post for 3 February 2019.
14. Mrs. Y. W. Holmes. "Ballads for Library of Congress." The Comanche [Texas] Chief, 31 October 1941. Reprinted 28 October 1971:11.
15. Charles Christopher Jackson. "Austin County." Handbook of Texas Online. 9 June 2010; last updated 17 February 2016.
16. Jackson.
17. Ken West. "Humble, Jacob," "Humble, Henry Sr.," and "Humble, Henry Jr." Geocities website. 26 March 2000.
18. The family legend may have come from her father’s full name, Gilbert Thomas Buie Humble. [26] His mother, Jane Davis, was the daughter of John Davis and Mary Bateman. [27] Bowie’s sister Sarah married William Davis. [28] Nothing is known about William; he is not listed as John’s child, and he and Sarah left no known children. I also found nothing about the children of John’s brother. Bowie also had a Black half-brother, James, who was freed. He had sons. [29]
19. Shirley Smith. Quoted by Texansmyheart. "Gilbert Thomas Humble, Sr." Find a Grave. 27 April 2012.
20. James Hamilton was mentioned in the post for 20 January 2019. He had moved his slaves before the war to escape liens by his creditors.
21. Jackson.
22. James Haire. "Griffin." The Haire & Hines Family & Relations. Tribal Pages website. 11 September 2011. Last updated 11 June 2012.
23. Dorcas Huff Baumgartner and Genevieve B. Vollentine. "Gonzalez County." Handbook of Texas Online. 15 June 2010; last updated 3 February 2016.
24. Nancy Humble Griffin. 1947 obituary. Ancestry website. Uploaded by Linda Mathis, 23 April 1999.
25. Griffin, obituary.
26. Ken West. "Manning, Malinda." Geocities website. 26 March 2000. She was Gilbert’s wife and Nancy’s mother.
27. Chris Chance. "John Davis Jr (1760 - 1810)." Wikitree. 9 January 2015. Last updated, 20 June 2016. On Jane, John, and drilldowns on John’s brothers and uncles.
28. Arthur Bowie. "Sarah Bowie" and "William Davis." Book of Bowie website.
29. "James Bowie, (Free Man of Color)." Gini website. 4 January 2015.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Ruby Pickens Tartt - Lord, Won’t You Come by Here
Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
Ruby Pickens Tartt collected a version of "Lord, Won’t You Come by Here" in Sumter County, Alabama, in 1936 or 1937. [1] She was a participant collector like the members of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. Her mother’s family was one of the first settlers in the county and Tartt maintained that pioneer social position in Livingston, Alabama, even after she applied for relief from the WPA when her husband couldn’t work in the Depression.
Her mother’s immigrant ancestor, Walter Chiles, moved to Jamestown around 1636 [2] with his adult son, also named Walter. The son was listed as a "cloth worker" in Bristol. [3] Their descendants stayed in Virginia until Tartt’s great-grandfather, Hiram Chiles, moved to Alabama when the Choctaw were removed. [4]
Sumter County’s social structure may have been fluid in the early years, when settlers were growing general crops to feed themselves. However, it probably had stratified by 1840 when cotton was the primary commercial crop and settlers who’d claimed the best land for that crop were likely to be the wealthiest.
The census that year indicated Hiram Chiles owned eight male and three female slaves. This was at the time when the county had 22,000 Blacks and 8,000 whites, or 2.75 Blacks for every white. [5] Sumter then was one of the wealthiest and most densely populated counties in the state. Chiles also was not listed as one of the county’s major slave owners in 1860. [6]
His daughter, Mary Champ Chiles, married Jordan Short before the Civil War. He died in 1861, and she opened a private school. Later she taught at the Livingston Female Academy. Her daughter, Fannie West Short, and her husband moved in with her in 1874. [7] William King Pickens apparently rented his land, rather than selling it or supervising sharecroppers. [8]
Tartt was born in 1880 and developed a "terrible temper" that was more than her mother could handle. She spent time with her grandmother who taught her to draw and paint. After attendeding the local girls’ school, [9] she went to Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. [10] Then, in 1901, Tartt moved to New York to study art with William Merritt Chase. [11]
She returned to Livingston where she married William Pratt Tartt. [12] His father, Thomas Morrison Tartt, had worked for his uncle’s commission house in Mobile. After the Civil War, he moved to Livingston where he became a merchant. [13] His namesake son, Ruby’s brother-in-law, was president of the local bank, McMillan and Company. [14] No one has been specific about her husband’s education or employment. [15]
During the 1920s, the Tartts were sufficiently well off to send their daughter Fannie to the University of Alabama where she pledged Kappa Delta. [16] She was responsible for Carl Carmer staying with her parents when a college drama group was visiting Livingston in 1926. [17]
The English instructor had earned a masters degree from Harvard in 1915, [18] where George Kittredge had taken over the folklore work of Francis James Child. [19] According to Howell Raines, Carmer used his students as guides, who took him to events like fiddlers’ contests and sacred harp sings. [20] At the time he met Tartt, he said he was collecting notes for an article, but she recommended he write a book. [21]
He left Tuscaloosa amidst a romantic scandal involving a student in 1927. During the Depression he lost his job as an editor in New York, and began work on his Alabama book. He returned to Livingston to stay with Tartt and her husband. [22]
By then, the Tartts’ situation had deteriorated. Her father had died in 1923. [23] No one has commented on the condition of his estate or how it was divided, but Ruby had an older brother. In 1931, her mother was living with them in Tuscaloosa when she died. [24] The family house was sold and the Tartts rented a bungalow when they returned to Livingston. [25] It was there Carmer stayed.
Stars Fell on Alabama was published in 1934. [26] Anyone interested in the state’s folklore might have recognized one of his central characters, Mary Louise, was based on Ruby. [27] One who did was Julia Peterkin, who wrote about the Gullah culture in South Carolina. [28]
The Tartts were in straitened circumstances when she was assigned to a sewing project by the WPA in 1935. [29] She was the only white, and thus, the defacto leader. She suggested she and her coworkers sing while they worked. [30]
The project quickly found something more suitable for a lady of the community. She was appointed chair of the Federal Writer’s Project for the county, and told to submit eight spirituals within a week. [31] John Lomax was advising the Writer’s Project on folklore at the time. [32] He was so impressed with her collection, he and his wife stopped to visit her in 1937. [33] His subsequent visits reinforced her appreciation of African-American music and spurred her to locate singers for him.
Her work for the Federal Writers Project became part of its collection of slave narratives. Historians have been wary about using the narratives as primary sources, [34] because people who were at least ten-years-old when war was declared were at least 77 when the collection project began. They had potential problems of both being too young to remember and so old their memories were unreliable.
The ones who survived were often house slaves who had better treatment when they were children. They also were more likely to be the ones who maintained contact with whites. Since the collectors were white, and usually from the local community, all the nuances of race relations in the South affected what Blacks were willing to reveal.
Tartt’s narratives were considered superior to most, not only because of "her respect for the actual words spoken, but also to the candor of the interviewees–a measure of the mutual trust enjoyed between herself and these subjects." [35]
After the Writers’ Project ended in 1938, the Tartts had to rent rooms in their house. [36] Their situation improved in 1940 when Tart was hired as a librarian by Sumter County. [37] She joined the county’s board of registrars in 1952. In 1961, Justice Department attorneys concluded she uniformly helped whites to register to vote, but was selective in which Blacks she assisted. [38]
The juxtaposition of reviews of her work for the Writers’ Project and the elections board underscores the complexity of race relations in a state where Carmer watched a lynching while he was visiting the Tartts. [39] Her rapport with singers and her appreciation of their music was inherited from her father in the Jim Crow South. She remembered:
"In the horse and buggy days, I spent many Sunday afternoons with him sitting out near one of their country churches and listening to them sing. When he particularly liked a song he would make a generous contribution to the preacher and it was repeated as many times as he liked. I’ve kept this up through the years." [40]
His encouragement of older music occurred at a time when a radical form of Holiness and new types of music were spreading among poor whites and Blacks. After the Panic of 1893, they became entwined with Populist political movements. I wonder if the same suspicion of African-American churches that underlay the treatment of Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822 [41] wasn’t behind Pickens’ monitoring music in the local churches.
Tartt retired from the county library in 1964, [42] and her husband died in July of that year. [43] She was living in a nursing home when she passed away in 1974. [44]
End Notes
1. Tartt was working for the WPA collecting slave narratives. Tina Naremore Jones provided her start date in "Ruby Pickens Tartt," Encyclopedia of Alabama website, March 21, 2007, last updated September 16, 2010. Olivia and Jack Solomon determined her end date. ("Preface," "Honey in the Rock," Macon: Mercer University Press, 1991, ix).
2. Josh Varnado, Heath Vogel, and Mari Burk. "Walter Chiles (1572 - abt. 1651)." Wikitree website. 3 July 2011. Last updated 15 December 2015. He was the son of John Childe.
3. Mary Elizabeth Stewart, Jennifer Perez, and Mari Burk. "Walter Chiles I (abt. 1608 - 1653)." Wikitree website. 9 February 2911. Last updated 11 November 2015. Son of Walter.
4. Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 3.
5. Joseph F. Stegall. Extract from " 1840 Federal Census Sumter County, Alabama." Edited and formatted by Maggie Stewart. US Gen Archives website. 2 June 2001.
6. Tom Blake. "Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." Ancestry website. October 2001.
7. Brown and Owens. 5. The Livingston Female Academy became The University of West Alabama.
8. Brown and Owens. 9.
9. Brown and Owens. 5.
10. Brown and Owens. 7.
11. Brown and Owens. 9.
12. Brown and Owens. 9.
13. T. A. Deland and A. Davis Smith. "Thomas Morrison Tartt." In From Northern Alabama, Historical and Biographical. Birmingham: Smith and Deland, 1888. 233. Mary Hoit Abbe brought this to my attention. "Thomas Morrison Tartt Biography." AI Gen Web website.
14. Thomas William Herringshaw. "Thomas Morrison Tartt." In Herringshaw’s American Blue-book of Biography: Prominent Americans of 1912. Chicago: American Publishers Association, 1913. 585.
15. Stephen Wade though Tartt had lost his job as postmaster. (The Beautiful Music All Around Us. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 165.) Alan Brown said he worked at the family bank. (Alan Brown. Sumter County. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2015. 63.) Brown and Owens only quoted her statement: "I discovered overnight that not only had we no jobs and no money, but we were in debt." (Brown and Owens. 12.)
16. Obituary for Fannie Pickens Tartt Inglis. The Florida-Times Union [Jacksonville, Florida]. 3 May 1999. Comments made at the Greek Rank website on Kappa Delta at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, KD traditionally was seen as "top tier" at the school.
17. Brown and Owens. 11.
18. "Carl Carmer." Alabama Literary Map website.
19. Wikipedia. "George Lyman Kittredge." I didn’t find anyone who discussed Carmer’s time at Harvard.
20. Howell Raines. "Introduction: The "Strange Country." xi-xxii in Stars Fell on Alabama. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000 edition. xiv-xv.
21. Brown and Owens. 11.
22. Raines. xv.
23. "William King Pickens - 1846-1923." Find a Grave website. 29 April 2008.
24. "Prominent Livingston Woman Dies at 82." Included on "Fannie Short Pickens." Find a Grave. 29 April 2008. 1931 Obituary of Pickens uploaded by John Smolarek.
25. Brown and Owens. 12.
26. Carl Carmer. Stars Fell on Alabama. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934.
27. Brown and Owens. 11. Tartt agreed she was the source for the character. (Raines. xix).
28. Brown and Owens. 12.
29. Wade. 165-166.
30. Brown and Owens. 13.
31. Tartt’s reaction to this demand was described in the post for 21 August 2017.
32. Brown and Owens. 16.
33. John Lomax is discussed in the post for 27 January 2019.
34. Alan Brown and David Taylor. Gabr’l Blow Sof’. Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997. The introduction included comments on the reservations of historians, i-v. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips rejected them out-of-hand. Eugene Genovese revolutionize the historiography of slavery when he used them in his Roll, Jordan Roll. New York: Pantheon Press, 1974.
35. Wade. 166.
36. Brown and Owens. 24. She described them as "disagreeable renters, with their life-saving, soul-destroying checks" in a letter to Lomax. (page 25).
37. Brown and Owens. 53.
38. J. Harold Flannery and Carl Gabel. Memorandum. "R. P. Tartt and Registration Statistics." 20 July 1962. Cited by Brian K. Landsberg. "Sumter County, Alabama and the Origins of the Voting Rights Act." Alabama Law Review 54:877-958:2003. 909.
39. Raines. xv.
40. Wade. 165.
41. Vesey was mentioned in the post for 20 January 2019. William Seymour and the rise of pentecostalism was discussed in the post for 7 December 2017.
42. Brown and Owens. 53.
43. Fran. "William Pratt Tartt." Find a Grave website. 21 July 2009.
44. Brown and Owens. 55.
Ruby Pickens Tartt collected a version of "Lord, Won’t You Come by Here" in Sumter County, Alabama, in 1936 or 1937. [1] She was a participant collector like the members of the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. Her mother’s family was one of the first settlers in the county and Tartt maintained that pioneer social position in Livingston, Alabama, even after she applied for relief from the WPA when her husband couldn’t work in the Depression.
Her mother’s immigrant ancestor, Walter Chiles, moved to Jamestown around 1636 [2] with his adult son, also named Walter. The son was listed as a "cloth worker" in Bristol. [3] Their descendants stayed in Virginia until Tartt’s great-grandfather, Hiram Chiles, moved to Alabama when the Choctaw were removed. [4]
Sumter County’s social structure may have been fluid in the early years, when settlers were growing general crops to feed themselves. However, it probably had stratified by 1840 when cotton was the primary commercial crop and settlers who’d claimed the best land for that crop were likely to be the wealthiest.
The census that year indicated Hiram Chiles owned eight male and three female slaves. This was at the time when the county had 22,000 Blacks and 8,000 whites, or 2.75 Blacks for every white. [5] Sumter then was one of the wealthiest and most densely populated counties in the state. Chiles also was not listed as one of the county’s major slave owners in 1860. [6]
His daughter, Mary Champ Chiles, married Jordan Short before the Civil War. He died in 1861, and she opened a private school. Later she taught at the Livingston Female Academy. Her daughter, Fannie West Short, and her husband moved in with her in 1874. [7] William King Pickens apparently rented his land, rather than selling it or supervising sharecroppers. [8]
Tartt was born in 1880 and developed a "terrible temper" that was more than her mother could handle. She spent time with her grandmother who taught her to draw and paint. After attendeding the local girls’ school, [9] she went to Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. [10] Then, in 1901, Tartt moved to New York to study art with William Merritt Chase. [11]
She returned to Livingston where she married William Pratt Tartt. [12] His father, Thomas Morrison Tartt, had worked for his uncle’s commission house in Mobile. After the Civil War, he moved to Livingston where he became a merchant. [13] His namesake son, Ruby’s brother-in-law, was president of the local bank, McMillan and Company. [14] No one has been specific about her husband’s education or employment. [15]
During the 1920s, the Tartts were sufficiently well off to send their daughter Fannie to the University of Alabama where she pledged Kappa Delta. [16] She was responsible for Carl Carmer staying with her parents when a college drama group was visiting Livingston in 1926. [17]
The English instructor had earned a masters degree from Harvard in 1915, [18] where George Kittredge had taken over the folklore work of Francis James Child. [19] According to Howell Raines, Carmer used his students as guides, who took him to events like fiddlers’ contests and sacred harp sings. [20] At the time he met Tartt, he said he was collecting notes for an article, but she recommended he write a book. [21]
He left Tuscaloosa amidst a romantic scandal involving a student in 1927. During the Depression he lost his job as an editor in New York, and began work on his Alabama book. He returned to Livingston to stay with Tartt and her husband. [22]
By then, the Tartts’ situation had deteriorated. Her father had died in 1923. [23] No one has commented on the condition of his estate or how it was divided, but Ruby had an older brother. In 1931, her mother was living with them in Tuscaloosa when she died. [24] The family house was sold and the Tartts rented a bungalow when they returned to Livingston. [25] It was there Carmer stayed.
Stars Fell on Alabama was published in 1934. [26] Anyone interested in the state’s folklore might have recognized one of his central characters, Mary Louise, was based on Ruby. [27] One who did was Julia Peterkin, who wrote about the Gullah culture in South Carolina. [28]
The Tartts were in straitened circumstances when she was assigned to a sewing project by the WPA in 1935. [29] She was the only white, and thus, the defacto leader. She suggested she and her coworkers sing while they worked. [30]
The project quickly found something more suitable for a lady of the community. She was appointed chair of the Federal Writer’s Project for the county, and told to submit eight spirituals within a week. [31] John Lomax was advising the Writer’s Project on folklore at the time. [32] He was so impressed with her collection, he and his wife stopped to visit her in 1937. [33] His subsequent visits reinforced her appreciation of African-American music and spurred her to locate singers for him.
Her work for the Federal Writers Project became part of its collection of slave narratives. Historians have been wary about using the narratives as primary sources, [34] because people who were at least ten-years-old when war was declared were at least 77 when the collection project began. They had potential problems of both being too young to remember and so old their memories were unreliable.
The ones who survived were often house slaves who had better treatment when they were children. They also were more likely to be the ones who maintained contact with whites. Since the collectors were white, and usually from the local community, all the nuances of race relations in the South affected what Blacks were willing to reveal.
Tartt’s narratives were considered superior to most, not only because of "her respect for the actual words spoken, but also to the candor of the interviewees–a measure of the mutual trust enjoyed between herself and these subjects." [35]
After the Writers’ Project ended in 1938, the Tartts had to rent rooms in their house. [36] Their situation improved in 1940 when Tart was hired as a librarian by Sumter County. [37] She joined the county’s board of registrars in 1952. In 1961, Justice Department attorneys concluded she uniformly helped whites to register to vote, but was selective in which Blacks she assisted. [38]
The juxtaposition of reviews of her work for the Writers’ Project and the elections board underscores the complexity of race relations in a state where Carmer watched a lynching while he was visiting the Tartts. [39] Her rapport with singers and her appreciation of their music was inherited from her father in the Jim Crow South. She remembered:
"In the horse and buggy days, I spent many Sunday afternoons with him sitting out near one of their country churches and listening to them sing. When he particularly liked a song he would make a generous contribution to the preacher and it was repeated as many times as he liked. I’ve kept this up through the years." [40]
His encouragement of older music occurred at a time when a radical form of Holiness and new types of music were spreading among poor whites and Blacks. After the Panic of 1893, they became entwined with Populist political movements. I wonder if the same suspicion of African-American churches that underlay the treatment of Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822 [41] wasn’t behind Pickens’ monitoring music in the local churches.
Tartt retired from the county library in 1964, [42] and her husband died in July of that year. [43] She was living in a nursing home when she passed away in 1974. [44]
End Notes
1. Tartt was working for the WPA collecting slave narratives. Tina Naremore Jones provided her start date in "Ruby Pickens Tartt," Encyclopedia of Alabama website, March 21, 2007, last updated September 16, 2010. Olivia and Jack Solomon determined her end date. ("Preface," "Honey in the Rock," Macon: Mercer University Press, 1991, ix).
2. Josh Varnado, Heath Vogel, and Mari Burk. "Walter Chiles (1572 - abt. 1651)." Wikitree website. 3 July 2011. Last updated 15 December 2015. He was the son of John Childe.
3. Mary Elizabeth Stewart, Jennifer Perez, and Mari Burk. "Walter Chiles I (abt. 1608 - 1653)." Wikitree website. 9 February 2911. Last updated 11 November 2015. Son of Walter.
4. Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 3.
5. Joseph F. Stegall. Extract from " 1840 Federal Census Sumter County, Alabama." Edited and formatted by Maggie Stewart. US Gen Archives website. 2 June 2001.
6. Tom Blake. "Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." Ancestry website. October 2001.
7. Brown and Owens. 5. The Livingston Female Academy became The University of West Alabama.
8. Brown and Owens. 9.
9. Brown and Owens. 5.
10. Brown and Owens. 7.
11. Brown and Owens. 9.
12. Brown and Owens. 9.
13. T. A. Deland and A. Davis Smith. "Thomas Morrison Tartt." In From Northern Alabama, Historical and Biographical. Birmingham: Smith and Deland, 1888. 233. Mary Hoit Abbe brought this to my attention. "Thomas Morrison Tartt Biography." AI Gen Web website.
14. Thomas William Herringshaw. "Thomas Morrison Tartt." In Herringshaw’s American Blue-book of Biography: Prominent Americans of 1912. Chicago: American Publishers Association, 1913. 585.
15. Stephen Wade though Tartt had lost his job as postmaster. (The Beautiful Music All Around Us. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 165.) Alan Brown said he worked at the family bank. (Alan Brown. Sumter County. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2015. 63.) Brown and Owens only quoted her statement: "I discovered overnight that not only had we no jobs and no money, but we were in debt." (Brown and Owens. 12.)
16. Obituary for Fannie Pickens Tartt Inglis. The Florida-Times Union [Jacksonville, Florida]. 3 May 1999. Comments made at the Greek Rank website on Kappa Delta at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, KD traditionally was seen as "top tier" at the school.
17. Brown and Owens. 11.
18. "Carl Carmer." Alabama Literary Map website.
19. Wikipedia. "George Lyman Kittredge." I didn’t find anyone who discussed Carmer’s time at Harvard.
20. Howell Raines. "Introduction: The "Strange Country." xi-xxii in Stars Fell on Alabama. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000 edition. xiv-xv.
21. Brown and Owens. 11.
22. Raines. xv.
23. "William King Pickens - 1846-1923." Find a Grave website. 29 April 2008.
24. "Prominent Livingston Woman Dies at 82." Included on "Fannie Short Pickens." Find a Grave. 29 April 2008. 1931 Obituary of Pickens uploaded by John Smolarek.
25. Brown and Owens. 12.
26. Carl Carmer. Stars Fell on Alabama. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934.
27. Brown and Owens. 11. Tartt agreed she was the source for the character. (Raines. xix).
28. Brown and Owens. 12.
29. Wade. 165-166.
30. Brown and Owens. 13.
31. Tartt’s reaction to this demand was described in the post for 21 August 2017.
32. Brown and Owens. 16.
33. John Lomax is discussed in the post for 27 January 2019.
34. Alan Brown and David Taylor. Gabr’l Blow Sof’. Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997. The introduction included comments on the reservations of historians, i-v. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips rejected them out-of-hand. Eugene Genovese revolutionize the historiography of slavery when he used them in his Roll, Jordan Roll. New York: Pantheon Press, 1974.
35. Wade. 166.
36. Brown and Owens. 24. She described them as "disagreeable renters, with their life-saving, soul-destroying checks" in a letter to Lomax. (page 25).
37. Brown and Owens. 53.
38. J. Harold Flannery and Carl Gabel. Memorandum. "R. P. Tartt and Registration Statistics." 20 July 1962. Cited by Brian K. Landsberg. "Sumter County, Alabama and the Origins of the Voting Rights Act." Alabama Law Review 54:877-958:2003. 909.
39. Raines. xv.
40. Wade. 165.
41. Vesey was mentioned in the post for 20 January 2019. William Seymour and the rise of pentecostalism was discussed in the post for 7 December 2017.
42. Brown and Owens. 53.
43. Fran. "William Pratt Tartt." Find a Grave website. 21 July 2009.
44. Brown and Owens. 55.
Sunday, January 20, 2019
Charleston’s Under Side
Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
The authority of plantation owners in antebellum South Carolina was ensconced in law, but memories of the Stono Rebellion, [1] Revolutionary War desertions, [2] and daily acts of passive resistance or malicious obedience made many aware of the fragility of their positions.
The Denmark Vesey incident fed their worst fears. Free Blacks, who were members of an independent African Methodist Episcopal Church, were rumored to be planning a revolt. [3] Suspects were arrested, tortured, and hung in 1822. [4]
After the executions, the master of the slave workhouse asked the state Assembly to be reimbursed for "for the cost of incarcerating each of the arrested men." [5] He was Aeneas Reeves, great-grandfather of Harold Stone Reeves. [6] I don’t know if he was actively involved in the tortures [7] that occurred there, or if his position was a sinecure that involved little more than financial oversight.
Aeneas’ father had served in the Continental Army and moved to Charleston after the war to marry a local widow. [8] He was a silversmith from Philadelphia, [9] whose ancestors had moved from Boston [10] to Long Island [11] to Cumberland County, New Jersey. [12] Aeneas married the daughter of an actor, [13] and sent his son to Europe to study organ. [14]
The Charleston mayor, [15] who exploited Vesey to further his own political ambitions, was also the son of a Revolutionary War soldier who came south. Only James Hamilton’s [16] father married the daughter of the wealthy planter who had pioneered rice cultivation on the Santee River. [17] When he married the widowed Elizabeth Lynch, her lands were worth $250,000. Under his management their value fell to $6,000. [18]
Young Hamilton was forced to sign away his inheritance when he turned 21 in 1807. [19] Like his father, he enlisted in the War of 1812 [20] and married a rich heiress in 1813. [21] However, Elizabeth Heyward’s father had married the daughter of a Huguenot tailor. [22] After he died, Thomas Heyward did everything he could to prevent his son’s wife and daughter from inheriting plantations near Beaufort. [23]
Elizabeth’s stepfather, [24] who wanted to exploit her property himself, [25] demanded Hamilton sign a prenuptial agreement to place Callawassie Island in trust. William Behan said Hamilton refused. [26] The year he was elected to the state House of Representatives, [27] Hamilton sold her land and slaves and put the money in a postnuptial trust in 1819. [28]
In 1824, while running for a seat in the U. S. House, Hamilton bought two plantations and their slaves from her stepfather, who had been ruined by the Panic of 1819 [29]. In contravention to the postnuptial agreement, he placed them in his name rather than that of the trust so he could mortgage them. [30]
One term into Andrew Jackson’s administration, he left Washington to become South Carolina governor, just as the tariffs of 1826 and 1832 were an issue. Hamilton called the Nullification Convention of 1832 that formally refused to obey the law. [31]
Hamilton was not raised on a plantation, but in Newport, Rhode Island, [32] where the economy was fueled by slave ships. [33] During the six years he was in Congress, he lived in boardinghouses [34] where he heard how Northerners made, or claimed to make, their money. His plantations were run by overseers. [35]
He left the governorship in 1832 and turned to business, first with the Bank of Charleston [36] and then as a cotton broker. [37] By 1836, Behan said, he had title to sixteen plantations in four states, all mortgaged. [38] Hamilton also was buying land script in Texas for the South Carolina Land Company. [39]
The Panic of 1837 destroyed his Texas plans and left him financially vulnerable. In 1842 Hamilton owed over $700,000. [40] His wife, with his consent, sued him for violating the terms of the 1819 trust. [41] Aggravating matters, Sam Houston took over the government of Texas in 1842, and cancelled any and all financial agreements the republic had made with Hamilton. [42]
In 1843 Hamilton and his wife escaped to a cotton plantation in Alabama. The 6,000-acres were actually a business partnership that owned the 300 slaves. [43] During the drought of 1845, he took some of those slaves to his Texas plantation, which was a partnership with Abner Jackson. [44]
The first attempts at processing sugar failed. [45] Hamilton sold more land, [46] and moved 130 slaves to Retrieve near the Gulf coast beyond reach of his creditors in the States. Six banks had liens on them. [47]
His financial condition worsened, and some of his partners were forced to sell their shares in his Texas plantation in 1855. [48] He still was trying to recover when he died in a ship wreck on his way to Galveston in November during the Panic of 1857 that had begun in August. [49]
The slaves remained in Teas where they were managed by Jackson. [50] His stepson was Abner Stroebel. He remembered he could recognize Hamilton’s "slaves by their politeness and courtly manners." [51] Each move by Hamilton, from Beaufort to Alabama to Texas, had moved Gullah culture farther west.
End Notes
1. The Stono Rebellion was mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018.
2. The desertions were discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.
3. Sterling Stuckey and Margaret Washington Creel analyzed the religious and cultural backgrounds of Vesey and his followers.
Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 47-58.
Washington. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 150-158.
4. Wikipedia. "Denmark Vesey."
5. Michael P. Johnson. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001. Online copy had no page numbers.
6. The work house was better known as the Sugar House. Damon L. Fordham described the tortures in "The Sugar House – A Slave Torture Chamber in Charleston." The Charleston [South Carolina] Chronicle web page. 29 November 2017.
7. Reeves membership in the Charleston Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019. He was the son of John Bounetheau Reeves, who was a Charleston banker before and after the Civil War. [52] John’s sister, Charlotte Sophia Reeves, [53] married a German businessman, Charles Otto Witte. [54] Their daughter Beatrice married into the Ravenel family and became a writer. She also was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019.
8. Introduction, probably by Dick Reeves’ father, John B. Reeves. Extracts from the Letter-Books of Lieutenant Enos Reeves, Pennsylvania Line. Philadelphia: 1989. Originally published by Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1896 and 1891.
9. Carl Mark Williams. Silversmiths of New Jersey, 1700-1825. Philadelphia: G. S. MacManus Co., 1949. Extract posted on "Enos Reeves" by Jonathan Reeves. The Reeves Project website. 15 August 2018.
10. Debra Nelson Pomykal (Darrough). "Thomas Reeves." Geni website. 23 May 2018. He was the immigrant ancestor.
11. Caryn Beth Burroughs. "John Reeves." Geni website. 7 July 2017. He was Thomas’ son and Enos’ great-great-grandfather.
12. "Abraham Reeves." Geni website. 23 March 2016. He was Enos’ grandfather.
13. Aeneas Reeves married Elizabeth Sully, daughter of Matthew Sully and Elizabeth Robertson. [55] Matthew was the son of Matthew Sully and Sarah Chester. The elder Matthew was an English actor who took his family to Charleston in 1792, where the younger also appeared on the stage. Thomas Sully and Lawrence Sully were his brothers, and Elizabeth’s uncles. Both were painters. [56]
14. Obituary for Aeneas Reeves. [Charleston, South Carolina] News and Courier. 11 August 1863. Posted by Saratoga. "Matthew Sully Reeves." Find a Grave website. 18 August 2008.
15. Technically, Charleston did not have a mayor. The function was filled by an intendant.
16. This wasn’t the Hamilton mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018. James Hamilton was a common Scots name and the one discussed earlier moved from Scotland to Philadelphia to Saint Simons Island, Georgia. The mayor’s grandfather, William Hamilton, had migrated as a young adolescent from Belfast to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by 1733. [57]
17. James Hamilton’s father, also James Hamilton, married the daughter of Thomas Lynch.
18. Robert Tinkler. James Hamilton of South Carolina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2004. 25.
19. Tinkler. 26. Hamilton’s father’s financial problems partly were caused by signing notes for his wife’s step-father. [58] His wife’s widowed mother, Hannah Motte, had married William Moultrie, another Revolutionary War soldier [59] with no ability to run a plantation. The impoverishment of Hannah may be one reason her sister-in-law, Rebecca Brewton Motte, had ensured his daughter’s plantation could only be inherited through the female line. How this affected Josephine Pinckney was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019.
20. Tinkler. 30.
21. Tinkler. 31.
22. Thomas Heyward’s son Daniel married Ann Sarah Trezevant. [60] He was the stepbrother of the Nathaniel Heyward who was discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.
23. Tinkler. 31.
24. The conflict with Heyward began when the widowed Trezevant married Nicholas Cruger, Jr. [61]
25. William A Behan. Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina. New York: iUniverse, 2004. 39.
26. Behan. 40.
27. Tinkler. 34.
28. Behan. 41.
29. Tinkler. 58.
30. Behan. 42.
31. Wikipedia. "James Hamilton Jr."
32. Tinkler. 21, 24-5. Newport was one of the places absentee planters went to escape the diseased-filled summers of the South Carolina coast. His mother also wintered there and sent him to a Northern boarding school.
33. Tinkler. 21-22.
34. Tinkler. 52-53.
35. Tinkler. 89.
36. Tinkler. 150-2.
37. Tinkler. 153.
38. Behan. 42.
39. Tinkler. 176.
40. Behan. 40.
41. Tinkler. 212-213.
42. Charles W. Brown. "Hamilton, James." Handbook of Texas Online. 15 June 2010.
43. Tinkler. 214.
44. Tinkler. 217.
45. Tinkler. 218.
46. Tinkler. 231.
47. Tinkler. 231-232.
48. Tinkler. 249.
49. Tinkler. 262-264.
50. Tinkler. 249.
51. Abner J. Strobel. The Old Plantations and Their Owners of Brazoria County, Texas. Houston: The Union National Bank, 1926. Reprinted in A History of Brazoria County. Edited by T. L. Smith, Junior. 1958. 46.
52. Harold Stone Reeves. Interviewed by Joan Ball for the South Carolina Historical Society, 24 March 1971.
53. Saratoga. "Charlotte Sophia Reeves Witte." Find a Grave website. 29 September 2009.
54. James Calvin Hemphill. "Charles Otto Witte." 1:436-440 in Men of Mark in South Carolina. Washington, DC: Men of Mark Publishing Company, 1907.
55. Saratoga, Matthew Sully Reeves.
56. Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. "Sully, Matthew." 14:338-339 in Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1600-1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
57. Harriet E. Wallace. Some Hamiltons and Wallaces of Lancaster Co., PA, Jefferson Co., OH, and South Carolina. Urbana: H. E. Wallace, 1986.
58. Tinkler. 25.
59. Tinkler. 17.
60. Tinkler. 30.
61. Tinkler. 31.
The authority of plantation owners in antebellum South Carolina was ensconced in law, but memories of the Stono Rebellion, [1] Revolutionary War desertions, [2] and daily acts of passive resistance or malicious obedience made many aware of the fragility of their positions.
The Denmark Vesey incident fed their worst fears. Free Blacks, who were members of an independent African Methodist Episcopal Church, were rumored to be planning a revolt. [3] Suspects were arrested, tortured, and hung in 1822. [4]
After the executions, the master of the slave workhouse asked the state Assembly to be reimbursed for "for the cost of incarcerating each of the arrested men." [5] He was Aeneas Reeves, great-grandfather of Harold Stone Reeves. [6] I don’t know if he was actively involved in the tortures [7] that occurred there, or if his position was a sinecure that involved little more than financial oversight.
Aeneas’ father had served in the Continental Army and moved to Charleston after the war to marry a local widow. [8] He was a silversmith from Philadelphia, [9] whose ancestors had moved from Boston [10] to Long Island [11] to Cumberland County, New Jersey. [12] Aeneas married the daughter of an actor, [13] and sent his son to Europe to study organ. [14]
The Charleston mayor, [15] who exploited Vesey to further his own political ambitions, was also the son of a Revolutionary War soldier who came south. Only James Hamilton’s [16] father married the daughter of the wealthy planter who had pioneered rice cultivation on the Santee River. [17] When he married the widowed Elizabeth Lynch, her lands were worth $250,000. Under his management their value fell to $6,000. [18]
Young Hamilton was forced to sign away his inheritance when he turned 21 in 1807. [19] Like his father, he enlisted in the War of 1812 [20] and married a rich heiress in 1813. [21] However, Elizabeth Heyward’s father had married the daughter of a Huguenot tailor. [22] After he died, Thomas Heyward did everything he could to prevent his son’s wife and daughter from inheriting plantations near Beaufort. [23]
Elizabeth’s stepfather, [24] who wanted to exploit her property himself, [25] demanded Hamilton sign a prenuptial agreement to place Callawassie Island in trust. William Behan said Hamilton refused. [26] The year he was elected to the state House of Representatives, [27] Hamilton sold her land and slaves and put the money in a postnuptial trust in 1819. [28]
In 1824, while running for a seat in the U. S. House, Hamilton bought two plantations and their slaves from her stepfather, who had been ruined by the Panic of 1819 [29]. In contravention to the postnuptial agreement, he placed them in his name rather than that of the trust so he could mortgage them. [30]
One term into Andrew Jackson’s administration, he left Washington to become South Carolina governor, just as the tariffs of 1826 and 1832 were an issue. Hamilton called the Nullification Convention of 1832 that formally refused to obey the law. [31]
Hamilton was not raised on a plantation, but in Newport, Rhode Island, [32] where the economy was fueled by slave ships. [33] During the six years he was in Congress, he lived in boardinghouses [34] where he heard how Northerners made, or claimed to make, their money. His plantations were run by overseers. [35]
He left the governorship in 1832 and turned to business, first with the Bank of Charleston [36] and then as a cotton broker. [37] By 1836, Behan said, he had title to sixteen plantations in four states, all mortgaged. [38] Hamilton also was buying land script in Texas for the South Carolina Land Company. [39]
The Panic of 1837 destroyed his Texas plans and left him financially vulnerable. In 1842 Hamilton owed over $700,000. [40] His wife, with his consent, sued him for violating the terms of the 1819 trust. [41] Aggravating matters, Sam Houston took over the government of Texas in 1842, and cancelled any and all financial agreements the republic had made with Hamilton. [42]
In 1843 Hamilton and his wife escaped to a cotton plantation in Alabama. The 6,000-acres were actually a business partnership that owned the 300 slaves. [43] During the drought of 1845, he took some of those slaves to his Texas plantation, which was a partnership with Abner Jackson. [44]
The first attempts at processing sugar failed. [45] Hamilton sold more land, [46] and moved 130 slaves to Retrieve near the Gulf coast beyond reach of his creditors in the States. Six banks had liens on them. [47]
His financial condition worsened, and some of his partners were forced to sell their shares in his Texas plantation in 1855. [48] He still was trying to recover when he died in a ship wreck on his way to Galveston in November during the Panic of 1857 that had begun in August. [49]
The slaves remained in Teas where they were managed by Jackson. [50] His stepson was Abner Stroebel. He remembered he could recognize Hamilton’s "slaves by their politeness and courtly manners." [51] Each move by Hamilton, from Beaufort to Alabama to Texas, had moved Gullah culture farther west.
End Notes
1. The Stono Rebellion was mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018.
2. The desertions were discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.
3. Sterling Stuckey and Margaret Washington Creel analyzed the religious and cultural backgrounds of Vesey and his followers.
Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 47-58.
Washington. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 150-158.
4. Wikipedia. "Denmark Vesey."
5. Michael P. Johnson. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001. Online copy had no page numbers.
6. The work house was better known as the Sugar House. Damon L. Fordham described the tortures in "The Sugar House – A Slave Torture Chamber in Charleston." The Charleston [South Carolina] Chronicle web page. 29 November 2017.
7. Reeves membership in the Charleston Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019. He was the son of John Bounetheau Reeves, who was a Charleston banker before and after the Civil War. [52] John’s sister, Charlotte Sophia Reeves, [53] married a German businessman, Charles Otto Witte. [54] Their daughter Beatrice married into the Ravenel family and became a writer. She also was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019.
8. Introduction, probably by Dick Reeves’ father, John B. Reeves. Extracts from the Letter-Books of Lieutenant Enos Reeves, Pennsylvania Line. Philadelphia: 1989. Originally published by Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1896 and 1891.
9. Carl Mark Williams. Silversmiths of New Jersey, 1700-1825. Philadelphia: G. S. MacManus Co., 1949. Extract posted on "Enos Reeves" by Jonathan Reeves. The Reeves Project website. 15 August 2018.
10. Debra Nelson Pomykal (Darrough). "Thomas Reeves." Geni website. 23 May 2018. He was the immigrant ancestor.
11. Caryn Beth Burroughs. "John Reeves." Geni website. 7 July 2017. He was Thomas’ son and Enos’ great-great-grandfather.
12. "Abraham Reeves." Geni website. 23 March 2016. He was Enos’ grandfather.
13. Aeneas Reeves married Elizabeth Sully, daughter of Matthew Sully and Elizabeth Robertson. [55] Matthew was the son of Matthew Sully and Sarah Chester. The elder Matthew was an English actor who took his family to Charleston in 1792, where the younger also appeared on the stage. Thomas Sully and Lawrence Sully were his brothers, and Elizabeth’s uncles. Both were painters. [56]
14. Obituary for Aeneas Reeves. [Charleston, South Carolina] News and Courier. 11 August 1863. Posted by Saratoga. "Matthew Sully Reeves." Find a Grave website. 18 August 2008.
15. Technically, Charleston did not have a mayor. The function was filled by an intendant.
16. This wasn’t the Hamilton mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018. James Hamilton was a common Scots name and the one discussed earlier moved from Scotland to Philadelphia to Saint Simons Island, Georgia. The mayor’s grandfather, William Hamilton, had migrated as a young adolescent from Belfast to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by 1733. [57]
17. James Hamilton’s father, also James Hamilton, married the daughter of Thomas Lynch.
18. Robert Tinkler. James Hamilton of South Carolina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2004. 25.
19. Tinkler. 26. Hamilton’s father’s financial problems partly were caused by signing notes for his wife’s step-father. [58] His wife’s widowed mother, Hannah Motte, had married William Moultrie, another Revolutionary War soldier [59] with no ability to run a plantation. The impoverishment of Hannah may be one reason her sister-in-law, Rebecca Brewton Motte, had ensured his daughter’s plantation could only be inherited through the female line. How this affected Josephine Pinckney was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019.
20. Tinkler. 30.
21. Tinkler. 31.
22. Thomas Heyward’s son Daniel married Ann Sarah Trezevant. [60] He was the stepbrother of the Nathaniel Heyward who was discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.
23. Tinkler. 31.
24. The conflict with Heyward began when the widowed Trezevant married Nicholas Cruger, Jr. [61]
25. William A Behan. Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina. New York: iUniverse, 2004. 39.
26. Behan. 40.
27. Tinkler. 34.
28. Behan. 41.
29. Tinkler. 58.
30. Behan. 42.
31. Wikipedia. "James Hamilton Jr."
32. Tinkler. 21, 24-5. Newport was one of the places absentee planters went to escape the diseased-filled summers of the South Carolina coast. His mother also wintered there and sent him to a Northern boarding school.
33. Tinkler. 21-22.
34. Tinkler. 52-53.
35. Tinkler. 89.
36. Tinkler. 150-2.
37. Tinkler. 153.
38. Behan. 42.
39. Tinkler. 176.
40. Behan. 40.
41. Tinkler. 212-213.
42. Charles W. Brown. "Hamilton, James." Handbook of Texas Online. 15 June 2010.
43. Tinkler. 214.
44. Tinkler. 217.
45. Tinkler. 218.
46. Tinkler. 231.
47. Tinkler. 231-232.
48. Tinkler. 249.
49. Tinkler. 262-264.
50. Tinkler. 249.
51. Abner J. Strobel. The Old Plantations and Their Owners of Brazoria County, Texas. Houston: The Union National Bank, 1926. Reprinted in A History of Brazoria County. Edited by T. L. Smith, Junior. 1958. 46.
52. Harold Stone Reeves. Interviewed by Joan Ball for the South Carolina Historical Society, 24 March 1971.
53. Saratoga. "Charlotte Sophia Reeves Witte." Find a Grave website. 29 September 2009.
54. James Calvin Hemphill. "Charles Otto Witte." 1:436-440 in Men of Mark in South Carolina. Washington, DC: Men of Mark Publishing Company, 1907.
55. Saratoga, Matthew Sully Reeves.
56. Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. "Sully, Matthew." 14:338-339 in Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1600-1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
57. Harriet E. Wallace. Some Hamiltons and Wallaces of Lancaster Co., PA, Jefferson Co., OH, and South Carolina. Urbana: H. E. Wallace, 1986.
58. Tinkler. 25.
59. Tinkler. 17.
60. Tinkler. 30.
61. Tinkler. 31.
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
South Carolina - Irrigated Rice
Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
The American Revolution slowed the slave trade. English ships could not supply planters, and Michael Gomez suggested the traders were forced into the Bight of Biafra were the Guinea current was more treacherous. [1] David Eltis’ team reported a total 14,174 captives imported between 1776 and 1800, compared to 61,476 during the previous twenty-five years. [2]
The British, who occupied Charleston in 1780, encouraged bondsmen to defect to them. Some were sent to Nova Scotia where Moja Makani was revitalizing African-American traditions in 2015. [3] Others were conscripted into the Caribbean military unit mentioned in the post for 29 April 2018. Philip Morgan estimated a quarter of the slaves disappeared from Georgia and South Carolina. [4]
When Southerners began rebuilding after the Revolution they used different methods to grow rice. The swamp lands had developed freshets that destroyed crops. DuBose Heyward’s great-grandfather attributed the change to clearing the land. He remembered twenty years before the American Revolution:
"The upper country being then but partially cleared and cultivated, the greater part of its surface was covered with leaves, the limbs and trunks of decaying trees, and various other impediments to the quick discharge of the rains which fall upon it, into the creeks and ravines leading into the river; consequently much of the water was absorbed by the earth or evaporated before it could be received into its channels, and even when there so many obstacles yet awaited its progress, that heavy contributions were still levied upon it. The river, too, had time to extend along its course the first influx of water before that from more remote tributary sources would reach it. Owing to these and other causes, the Santee was comparatively exempt from those freshets which have since blighted the prosperity of what was once a second Egypt." [5]
Near Beaufort, Nathaniel Heyward realized, in 1787, his swamp land was "too far inland to adequately drain away the excess" water. [6] He was the younger son of Daniel Heyward by his second wife, [7] and thus had inherited less desirable plantation land. Since his older brothers weren’t interested in managing their estates, he volunteered. His experiments on their land with using the tides for irrigation produced a bigger rice crop with less labor. [8]
William Dusinberre said Heyward’s primary contribution was determining when and how to let water flood the land. Others figured out how to build the embankments and canals, borrowing from the Dutch. Still others improved the sluice gates, sometimes adapting African techniques, and introduced European pumps. [9] Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for a Santee river plantation in 1787. [10]
The adoption of flood irrigation narrowed the amount of available land to a thirty mile strip along the coast, and limited the planters to those with capital to invest in irrigation ditches and machinery. Josephine Pinckney’s great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Motte, sold her inland plantations to buy land in 1784 on the Santee River suitable for flood irrigation. [11]
The change favored those men like Nathaniel Heyward and Motte’s son-in-law, Thomas Pinckney, who were willing to apprentice themselves to their plantations. Men, like Pierce Butler, mentioned in the post for 4 October 2018, became dependent on the skills of their overseers.
The post for 13 January 2019 suggested white overseers had become more important before the Revolution, especially in areas with deaths caused by mosquito-born diseases. William Scarborough analyzed the backgrounds of men working on rice, tobacco, sugar, and cotton plantations. He found 92% of the overseers on rice plantations were born in South Carolina. The remaining 8% came from North Carolina or Ireland. [12]
Scarborough found those working on rice lands were "superior in ability and character" to overseers elsewhere. They were more likely to be educated, to be married, and to have accumulated some property, including their own slaves. Fourteen of the 23 he studied were the sons of farmers. [13]
He didn’t comment on nationality or religion, probably because such information did not exist in the historical records he was using. We know from other sources many Scots-Irish migrated to South Carolina, [14] but so had Huguenots and Englishmen. Irish immigrants could have meant Irish, Scots Irish, or Huguenot Irish. Scots-Irish Presbyterians were the ones who stressed education and literacy.
Tidal irrigation didn’t just require plantation owners learn new skills; it changed the nature of the labor force. While people who understood how to cultivate and harvest rice still were needed, men able to maintain the irrigation systems also were required. They did not have to come from the Southern Rivers area. Eltis noted the percentage of slaves imported from Senegambia after 1800 dropped to 31.6%. [15]
One reason for the differing origins was the slave trade was only legal in South Carolina between 1804 and 1808. [16] In the idealism following the Revolution, the state assembly had banned the trade, and plantation owners brought slaves raised or imported by other states.
When a national ban on the Atlantic trade was set to take effect, the legislature opened the trade for a few years. Dusinberre said this led to a short period of very high demand. He noted, "during these years Heyward bought scores, perhaps hundreds of Africans at lower prices than would have prevailed had his supply been confined to slaves imported from Virginia." [17]
More slaves came from the Guinea coast and Angola. They not only were the ones then available to smugglers, but, as mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019, some had an inherited ability to build up immunities to ague, as malaria then was called.
End Notes
1. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 30.
2. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112:1329-1358:Dec 2007. Calculated from figures in Table 1.
3. Moja Makani was discussed in the post for 10 November 2017.
4. Philip D. Morgan."Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810." 83-141 in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution. Edited by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983. Cited by Morgan. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 66.
5. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 37-38. The map with the post for 10 January 2019 shows the location of these places. The Santee River was the one that flowed through the long, narrow reservoir of Lake Marion to Charleston. Lakes Marion and Moultrie flooded the Huguenot lands when the Santee was dammed in the 1940s to generate electric power.
6. William Dusinberre. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 32.
7. DuBose Heyward descended from Daniel Heyward’s first wife. His membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
8. Dusinberre. 32.
9. Dusinberre. 32.
10. James Jonathan Lucas. Letter dated 20 April 1904. Reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
11. "Eldorado Plantation – McClellanville – Charleston County." South Carolina Plantations website. Her will stipulated the plantation pass through the female line. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
12. William Kauffman Scarborough. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984 edition. 57.
13. Scarborough. 56.
14. James G. Leyburn recorded Scots-Irish farmers began settling in upland South Carolina after George II purchased the rights of the proprietors in 1729 [page 219]. Others went to Charleston in response to a 1763 bounty [page 252]. Many who entered the port were indentured servants. The American Revolution stopped immigration. (The Scotch-Irish. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.)
15. Eltis. Table 1.
16. Dusinberre. 33.
17. Dusinberre. 33.
The American Revolution slowed the slave trade. English ships could not supply planters, and Michael Gomez suggested the traders were forced into the Bight of Biafra were the Guinea current was more treacherous. [1] David Eltis’ team reported a total 14,174 captives imported between 1776 and 1800, compared to 61,476 during the previous twenty-five years. [2]
The British, who occupied Charleston in 1780, encouraged bondsmen to defect to them. Some were sent to Nova Scotia where Moja Makani was revitalizing African-American traditions in 2015. [3] Others were conscripted into the Caribbean military unit mentioned in the post for 29 April 2018. Philip Morgan estimated a quarter of the slaves disappeared from Georgia and South Carolina. [4]
When Southerners began rebuilding after the Revolution they used different methods to grow rice. The swamp lands had developed freshets that destroyed crops. DuBose Heyward’s great-grandfather attributed the change to clearing the land. He remembered twenty years before the American Revolution:
"The upper country being then but partially cleared and cultivated, the greater part of its surface was covered with leaves, the limbs and trunks of decaying trees, and various other impediments to the quick discharge of the rains which fall upon it, into the creeks and ravines leading into the river; consequently much of the water was absorbed by the earth or evaporated before it could be received into its channels, and even when there so many obstacles yet awaited its progress, that heavy contributions were still levied upon it. The river, too, had time to extend along its course the first influx of water before that from more remote tributary sources would reach it. Owing to these and other causes, the Santee was comparatively exempt from those freshets which have since blighted the prosperity of what was once a second Egypt." [5]
Near Beaufort, Nathaniel Heyward realized, in 1787, his swamp land was "too far inland to adequately drain away the excess" water. [6] He was the younger son of Daniel Heyward by his second wife, [7] and thus had inherited less desirable plantation land. Since his older brothers weren’t interested in managing their estates, he volunteered. His experiments on their land with using the tides for irrigation produced a bigger rice crop with less labor. [8]
William Dusinberre said Heyward’s primary contribution was determining when and how to let water flood the land. Others figured out how to build the embankments and canals, borrowing from the Dutch. Still others improved the sluice gates, sometimes adapting African techniques, and introduced European pumps. [9] Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for a Santee river plantation in 1787. [10]
The adoption of flood irrigation narrowed the amount of available land to a thirty mile strip along the coast, and limited the planters to those with capital to invest in irrigation ditches and machinery. Josephine Pinckney’s great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Motte, sold her inland plantations to buy land in 1784 on the Santee River suitable for flood irrigation. [11]
The change favored those men like Nathaniel Heyward and Motte’s son-in-law, Thomas Pinckney, who were willing to apprentice themselves to their plantations. Men, like Pierce Butler, mentioned in the post for 4 October 2018, became dependent on the skills of their overseers.
The post for 13 January 2019 suggested white overseers had become more important before the Revolution, especially in areas with deaths caused by mosquito-born diseases. William Scarborough analyzed the backgrounds of men working on rice, tobacco, sugar, and cotton plantations. He found 92% of the overseers on rice plantations were born in South Carolina. The remaining 8% came from North Carolina or Ireland. [12]
Scarborough found those working on rice lands were "superior in ability and character" to overseers elsewhere. They were more likely to be educated, to be married, and to have accumulated some property, including their own slaves. Fourteen of the 23 he studied were the sons of farmers. [13]
He didn’t comment on nationality or religion, probably because such information did not exist in the historical records he was using. We know from other sources many Scots-Irish migrated to South Carolina, [14] but so had Huguenots and Englishmen. Irish immigrants could have meant Irish, Scots Irish, or Huguenot Irish. Scots-Irish Presbyterians were the ones who stressed education and literacy.
Tidal irrigation didn’t just require plantation owners learn new skills; it changed the nature of the labor force. While people who understood how to cultivate and harvest rice still were needed, men able to maintain the irrigation systems also were required. They did not have to come from the Southern Rivers area. Eltis noted the percentage of slaves imported from Senegambia after 1800 dropped to 31.6%. [15]
One reason for the differing origins was the slave trade was only legal in South Carolina between 1804 and 1808. [16] In the idealism following the Revolution, the state assembly had banned the trade, and plantation owners brought slaves raised or imported by other states.
When a national ban on the Atlantic trade was set to take effect, the legislature opened the trade for a few years. Dusinberre said this led to a short period of very high demand. He noted, "during these years Heyward bought scores, perhaps hundreds of Africans at lower prices than would have prevailed had his supply been confined to slaves imported from Virginia." [17]
More slaves came from the Guinea coast and Angola. They not only were the ones then available to smugglers, but, as mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019, some had an inherited ability to build up immunities to ague, as malaria then was called.
End Notes
1. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 30.
2. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112:1329-1358:Dec 2007. Calculated from figures in Table 1.
3. Moja Makani was discussed in the post for 10 November 2017.
4. Philip D. Morgan."Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810." 83-141 in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution. Edited by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983. Cited by Morgan. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 66.
5. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 37-38. The map with the post for 10 January 2019 shows the location of these places. The Santee River was the one that flowed through the long, narrow reservoir of Lake Marion to Charleston. Lakes Marion and Moultrie flooded the Huguenot lands when the Santee was dammed in the 1940s to generate electric power.
6. William Dusinberre. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 32.
7. DuBose Heyward descended from Daniel Heyward’s first wife. His membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
8. Dusinberre. 32.
9. Dusinberre. 32.
10. James Jonathan Lucas. Letter dated 20 April 1904. Reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
11. "Eldorado Plantation – McClellanville – Charleston County." South Carolina Plantations website. Her will stipulated the plantation pass through the female line. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
12. William Kauffman Scarborough. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984 edition. 57.
13. Scarborough. 56.
14. James G. Leyburn recorded Scots-Irish farmers began settling in upland South Carolina after George II purchased the rights of the proprietors in 1729 [page 219]. Others went to Charleston in response to a 1763 bounty [page 252]. Many who entered the port were indentured servants. The American Revolution stopped immigration. (The Scotch-Irish. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.)
15. Eltis. Table 1.
16. Dusinberre. 33.
17. Dusinberre. 33.
Sunday, January 13, 2019
South Carolina - Swamp Rice
Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
Judith Carney argued in Black Rice that slaves were responsible for the successful introduction of rice as a commercial crop in South Carolina. She believed they imported the agrarian complex of ideas, methods, and technology from western Africa. [1] One example was the tall wooden mortar and pestle that resembled a butter churn. [2] She thought it was the innovation in rice threshing alluded to by Edward Randolph in the post for 10 January 2019.
Even with crop production problems solved, marketing imbalances like the one Alexander Salley noted in 1700 plagued the rice trade. [3] The demand for slaves led to more rebellions along the Sénégal and Gambia rivers. Muslims established a theocratic state on the Futa Jallon between the Gambia and Sierra Leone rivers in 1725 that decreed no Muslim could be sold. [4] José Lopez de Moura led a different group that destroyed the slave-trade center on Bunce Island in 1728. [5]
Bourbacar Barry showed the Futa Jallon leaders established a society that depended on non-Muslim slaves kept in special villages where they grew rice to feed the community and for export. The theocrats organized man hunts to supply slaves to trade for the guns they needed to continue the hunts. The warfare led to famines like that observed by Louis Moreau de Chambonneau in 1676.[6] Each famine led to more demand for rice from other suppliers.
Starting in the 1720s, South Carolinas expanded production from the coastal regions into the inland swamps around Charleston. Daniel Heyward introduced rice to Beaufort in 1741 and planters spread along the rivers there. [7] Each territorial expansion generated a demand for slaves to work the new plantations to grow the rice needed for the middle passage to bring new slaves.
At this point, David Eltis and his colleagues claimed that, despite Carney’s arguments, slaves didn’t just come from rice growing areas. Shipping manifests suggested only 21.9% of the slaves arriving in South Carolina and Georgia before 1750 came from the combined ports along the west African coast from the Sénégal to modern-day Liberia. [8]
Their statistics matched the experience of the leading slave trader in the early 1750s. Henry Laurens said "Gambia slaves were the favorites. Gold Coast negroes were highly valued" [9] in Charleston and "Angola slaves brought very good prices" [10] in 1755.
The diversity in demands probably came from the variety in crops. Josephine Pinckney’s great-grandmother, Eliza Lucas, had proven indigo could be processed in South Carolina in 1744. Five years later, Charleston’s agent in London persuaded Parliament to subsidize the crop. [11]
DuBose Heyward’s great-grandfather remembered after the bounty was offered, "one after another" of the Huguenot "planters moved" to Saint Stephen’s Parish "as opportunity offered for the purchase of land" and slaves. [12]
Rice grown inland was irrigated by water impounded in stagnant pools that bred disease carrying mosquitoes. In the twenty-five years before the American Revolution, Walter Edgar found "deserving poor" in Charleston changed from the "elderly and infirm" to "women and small children." One assumes many of their menfolk had died from yellow fever or complications of malaria. [13]
DuBose noted "residents along the swamp suffered severely from agues and fever," the common term for malaria. He said they also "observed with surprise, and it still remains a mystery, that overseers and negroes and others who lived entirely in the swamp enjoyed more health than those who lived on the uplands." [14]
Microbiologists since have found individuals were born with their mothers’ immunities against malaria, then lost them in the first months after birth when infant mortality was high. Resistence took years to redevelop through childhood and adolescence. Thereafter, people who were infected by bites didn’t feel the effects. [15]
White men who lived in wetlands, if they survived, were more likely to have acquired immunities than those who did not. Stuart Edelstein noted some African populations had developed genetic mutations that helped protect the young during the period when natural immunities were weak. Three forms of sickle cells appeared in Africa, one in Sénégal, one in Benin, and one in the Congo. [16]
The slave trade changed in the years between 1751 to 1775, when the percentage of slaves from Senegambia increased to 58.2%. More important, the absolute number of slaves increased dramatically. Eltis showed 4,856 slaves from the western African region before 1750 and 35,774 between then and the American Revolution.
The difficulty with reconciling presentations by Eltis and Carney was his periods were broad and didn’t coincide with critical historic events. The early period would have included the time before 1700 when rice was not a commercial crop. It also merged the years mentioned in the post for 10 January 2019 when the Royal African Company had a monopoly and the years after William took the throne of England in 1688. [17]
Several events in the late 1740s contributed to the changes. Barry said an extended drought along the Sénégal began in 1747 that intensified the war and famine cycle. [18] Perhaps to take advantage of the surplus of slaves, a Scots syndicate bought Bunce Island. [19]
Laurens was sent to England where he apprenticed with Richard Oswald. [20] When the Huguenot returned to Charleston in 1747, he used his inheritance to buy a partnership with a local trader, George Austin. [21] Joseph Opala wrote:
"Oswald’s agents at Bance island dispatched several ships a year to Charlestown, each containing between 250 and 350 slaves and goods such as ivory and camwood (a red dyewood). Laurens advertised the slaves, then sold them at auction to local rice planters for a ten percent commission. He used the substantial earnings from the sale to buy locally produced Carolina rice which he sent to Oswald in London, together with the ivory and camwood, and often in the same ship that brought the slaves from Africa." [22]
Demand for slaves increased again in 1751 when trustees for the colony of Georgia agreed to allow slavery. [23] Rice planters from South Carolina opened new lands below the Savannah River. Betty Wood said, "in the mid-1760s, Georgia began to import slaves directly from Africa—mainly from Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia." [24]
During the Seven Years War fought between 1756 and 1763, the English gained control of the French slave trade at Saint-Louis on the Sénégal and Gorée on the Gambia, and acquired three more Caribbean islands, Dominica, Tobago, and Saint Vincent. [25] Barry suggested the new commander at Saint-Louis employed methods used by the British during what was also called the French and Indian War: Charles O’Hara "supplied arms to Moors, who reduced the entire Senegal valley to a killing field." [26]
Slave owners with the most capital could be more particular about the slaves they purchased, and those growing rice may, indeed, have chosen those offered by Laurens, especially if they were dependent on him for credit. Smaller buyers, including those growing rice or indigo on smaller inland holdings, may have been the ones who purchased the majority of the other slaves. As the map at the bottom shows, these parts of Africa, by chance, were the very areas with the greatest incidence of the sickle cell.
Graphics
Muntuwandi. "Distribution of the sickle cell trait, shown in pink and purple." Wikimedia Commons. 10 May 2007.
End Notes
1. Judith A. Carney. Black Rice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
2. Lydia Parrish showed the similarities in husking techniques in photographs of women "Pounding Corn in West Africa" and "Beating Rice in Darien," Georgia. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Between 48 and 49.
3. For more on Salley, see the post for 10 January 2019.
4. Boubacar Barry. La Sénégambie du xve au xuxe siècle. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988. Translated by Ayi Kwei Armah as Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Section on "Muslim revolutions in the eighteenth century."
5. A. Boahen. "The States and Cultures of the Lower Guiñean Coast." 399-433 in Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Edited by B. A. Ogot. Paris: UNESCO, 1992. 397. Bunce Island was discussed in the post for 10 January 2019.
6. Chambonneau was quoted in the post for 10 January 2019.
7. Lawrence Sanders Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 178. See the map in the post for 10 January 2019 for these locations in South Carolina.
8. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112:1329-1358:Dec 2007. Table 1.
9. Henry Laurens. Letter to Wragg, 6 September 1755. Quoted by David Duncan Wallace. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915. 76.
10. Laurens, quoted by Wallace without citation. 76.
11. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 146. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
12. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 40. DuBose Heyward’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
13. Edgar. 153.
14. DuBose. 81.
15. Denise L. Doolan, Carlota Dobaño, and J. Kevin Baird. "Acquired Immunity to Malaria." Clinical Microbiology Reviews 22:13-36:2009.
16. Stuart J. Edelstein. The Sickled Cell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. On multiple inventions, 147-148, 150; on effects of sickle cell, 48.
17. William III’s attitude toward free trade was discussed in the post for 10 January 2019. Eltis’ team did stress the important of indigo as a commercial crop.
18. Barry. 110.
19. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 342.
20. Wallace. 15.
21. Wallace. On Lauren’s father’s death, 16; on Austin, 17-18.
22. Joseph A. Opala. "The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection." Website of The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. This was very similar to Thomas. 268.
23. Betty Wood. "Slavery in Colonial Georgia." Georgia Encyclopedia. 19 September 2002; last updated 24 September 2014.
24. Wood.
25. Wikipedia. "Seven Years’ War."
26. Barry. 87. In North America, the French and English armed their native allies. They not only attacked colonists, but each other.
Judith Carney argued in Black Rice that slaves were responsible for the successful introduction of rice as a commercial crop in South Carolina. She believed they imported the agrarian complex of ideas, methods, and technology from western Africa. [1] One example was the tall wooden mortar and pestle that resembled a butter churn. [2] She thought it was the innovation in rice threshing alluded to by Edward Randolph in the post for 10 January 2019.
Even with crop production problems solved, marketing imbalances like the one Alexander Salley noted in 1700 plagued the rice trade. [3] The demand for slaves led to more rebellions along the Sénégal and Gambia rivers. Muslims established a theocratic state on the Futa Jallon between the Gambia and Sierra Leone rivers in 1725 that decreed no Muslim could be sold. [4] José Lopez de Moura led a different group that destroyed the slave-trade center on Bunce Island in 1728. [5]
Bourbacar Barry showed the Futa Jallon leaders established a society that depended on non-Muslim slaves kept in special villages where they grew rice to feed the community and for export. The theocrats organized man hunts to supply slaves to trade for the guns they needed to continue the hunts. The warfare led to famines like that observed by Louis Moreau de Chambonneau in 1676.[6] Each famine led to more demand for rice from other suppliers.
Starting in the 1720s, South Carolinas expanded production from the coastal regions into the inland swamps around Charleston. Daniel Heyward introduced rice to Beaufort in 1741 and planters spread along the rivers there. [7] Each territorial expansion generated a demand for slaves to work the new plantations to grow the rice needed for the middle passage to bring new slaves.
At this point, David Eltis and his colleagues claimed that, despite Carney’s arguments, slaves didn’t just come from rice growing areas. Shipping manifests suggested only 21.9% of the slaves arriving in South Carolina and Georgia before 1750 came from the combined ports along the west African coast from the Sénégal to modern-day Liberia. [8]
Their statistics matched the experience of the leading slave trader in the early 1750s. Henry Laurens said "Gambia slaves were the favorites. Gold Coast negroes were highly valued" [9] in Charleston and "Angola slaves brought very good prices" [10] in 1755.
The diversity in demands probably came from the variety in crops. Josephine Pinckney’s great-grandmother, Eliza Lucas, had proven indigo could be processed in South Carolina in 1744. Five years later, Charleston’s agent in London persuaded Parliament to subsidize the crop. [11]
DuBose Heyward’s great-grandfather remembered after the bounty was offered, "one after another" of the Huguenot "planters moved" to Saint Stephen’s Parish "as opportunity offered for the purchase of land" and slaves. [12]
Rice grown inland was irrigated by water impounded in stagnant pools that bred disease carrying mosquitoes. In the twenty-five years before the American Revolution, Walter Edgar found "deserving poor" in Charleston changed from the "elderly and infirm" to "women and small children." One assumes many of their menfolk had died from yellow fever or complications of malaria. [13]
DuBose noted "residents along the swamp suffered severely from agues and fever," the common term for malaria. He said they also "observed with surprise, and it still remains a mystery, that overseers and negroes and others who lived entirely in the swamp enjoyed more health than those who lived on the uplands." [14]
Microbiologists since have found individuals were born with their mothers’ immunities against malaria, then lost them in the first months after birth when infant mortality was high. Resistence took years to redevelop through childhood and adolescence. Thereafter, people who were infected by bites didn’t feel the effects. [15]
White men who lived in wetlands, if they survived, were more likely to have acquired immunities than those who did not. Stuart Edelstein noted some African populations had developed genetic mutations that helped protect the young during the period when natural immunities were weak. Three forms of sickle cells appeared in Africa, one in Sénégal, one in Benin, and one in the Congo. [16]
The slave trade changed in the years between 1751 to 1775, when the percentage of slaves from Senegambia increased to 58.2%. More important, the absolute number of slaves increased dramatically. Eltis showed 4,856 slaves from the western African region before 1750 and 35,774 between then and the American Revolution.
The difficulty with reconciling presentations by Eltis and Carney was his periods were broad and didn’t coincide with critical historic events. The early period would have included the time before 1700 when rice was not a commercial crop. It also merged the years mentioned in the post for 10 January 2019 when the Royal African Company had a monopoly and the years after William took the throne of England in 1688. [17]
Several events in the late 1740s contributed to the changes. Barry said an extended drought along the Sénégal began in 1747 that intensified the war and famine cycle. [18] Perhaps to take advantage of the surplus of slaves, a Scots syndicate bought Bunce Island. [19]
Laurens was sent to England where he apprenticed with Richard Oswald. [20] When the Huguenot returned to Charleston in 1747, he used his inheritance to buy a partnership with a local trader, George Austin. [21] Joseph Opala wrote:
"Oswald’s agents at Bance island dispatched several ships a year to Charlestown, each containing between 250 and 350 slaves and goods such as ivory and camwood (a red dyewood). Laurens advertised the slaves, then sold them at auction to local rice planters for a ten percent commission. He used the substantial earnings from the sale to buy locally produced Carolina rice which he sent to Oswald in London, together with the ivory and camwood, and often in the same ship that brought the slaves from Africa." [22]
Demand for slaves increased again in 1751 when trustees for the colony of Georgia agreed to allow slavery. [23] Rice planters from South Carolina opened new lands below the Savannah River. Betty Wood said, "in the mid-1760s, Georgia began to import slaves directly from Africa—mainly from Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia." [24]
During the Seven Years War fought between 1756 and 1763, the English gained control of the French slave trade at Saint-Louis on the Sénégal and Gorée on the Gambia, and acquired three more Caribbean islands, Dominica, Tobago, and Saint Vincent. [25] Barry suggested the new commander at Saint-Louis employed methods used by the British during what was also called the French and Indian War: Charles O’Hara "supplied arms to Moors, who reduced the entire Senegal valley to a killing field." [26]
Slave owners with the most capital could be more particular about the slaves they purchased, and those growing rice may, indeed, have chosen those offered by Laurens, especially if they were dependent on him for credit. Smaller buyers, including those growing rice or indigo on smaller inland holdings, may have been the ones who purchased the majority of the other slaves. As the map at the bottom shows, these parts of Africa, by chance, were the very areas with the greatest incidence of the sickle cell.
Graphics
Muntuwandi. "Distribution of the sickle cell trait, shown in pink and purple." Wikimedia Commons. 10 May 2007.
End Notes
1. Judith A. Carney. Black Rice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
2. Lydia Parrish showed the similarities in husking techniques in photographs of women "Pounding Corn in West Africa" and "Beating Rice in Darien," Georgia. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Between 48 and 49.
3. For more on Salley, see the post for 10 January 2019.
4. Boubacar Barry. La Sénégambie du xve au xuxe siècle. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988. Translated by Ayi Kwei Armah as Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Section on "Muslim revolutions in the eighteenth century."
5. A. Boahen. "The States and Cultures of the Lower Guiñean Coast." 399-433 in Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Edited by B. A. Ogot. Paris: UNESCO, 1992. 397. Bunce Island was discussed in the post for 10 January 2019.
6. Chambonneau was quoted in the post for 10 January 2019.
7. Lawrence Sanders Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 178. See the map in the post for 10 January 2019 for these locations in South Carolina.
8. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112:1329-1358:Dec 2007. Table 1.
9. Henry Laurens. Letter to Wragg, 6 September 1755. Quoted by David Duncan Wallace. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915. 76.
10. Laurens, quoted by Wallace without citation. 76.
11. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 146. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
12. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 40. DuBose Heyward’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
13. Edgar. 153.
14. DuBose. 81.
15. Denise L. Doolan, Carlota Dobaño, and J. Kevin Baird. "Acquired Immunity to Malaria." Clinical Microbiology Reviews 22:13-36:2009.
16. Stuart J. Edelstein. The Sickled Cell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. On multiple inventions, 147-148, 150; on effects of sickle cell, 48.
17. William III’s attitude toward free trade was discussed in the post for 10 January 2019. Eltis’ team did stress the important of indigo as a commercial crop.
18. Barry. 110.
19. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 342.
20. Wallace. 15.
21. Wallace. On Lauren’s father’s death, 16; on Austin, 17-18.
22. Joseph A. Opala. "The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection." Website of The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. This was very similar to Thomas. 268.
23. Betty Wood. "Slavery in Colonial Georgia." Georgia Encyclopedia. 19 September 2002; last updated 24 September 2014.
24. Wood.
25. Wikipedia. "Seven Years’ War."
26. Barry. 87. In North America, the French and English armed their native allies. They not only attacked colonists, but each other.
Thursday, January 10, 2019
South Carolina
Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
South Carolina began as a satellite of Barbados. Walter Edgar called it a colony of a colony. [1]
In 1660, Charles II assumed the throne in England and demand for sugar and tobacco soared. It wasn’t simply that the Restoration court was more decadent than the previous Puritan regime had been. Peace returned to England after twenty years of civil war.
Charles had spent much of the war in Europe where advisors to Louis XIV were promoting the mercantile idea a nation state should be self-sufficient with colonies that supplied its needs. France had established a trade station on the Sénégal river in 1659. [2] Soon after his return, Charles rewarded some followers with an English monopoly on West African trade. [3]
The Royal Adventurers in Africa established its headquarters on Bunce Island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone river, [4] where they hoped to obtain gold. [5] Boubacar Barry noted groups in the Southern Rivers region between the Gambia river and Futa Jallon grew rice. [6] Groups along the Sénégal river grew millet and sorghum. [7] Thus, the early English slave ships bought rice from native growers for the Atlantic voyage.
The English company was reorganized in 1663, with John Colleton included as an investor. He had developed a sugar plantation in Barbados during the Puritan Commonwealth, and was rewarded for his loyalty that same year with a share in the Carolina grant. By then, land on the island was so valuable, plantation owners were importing food from England and Ireland. [8]
Englishmen showed little interest in moving to the new colony. Wealth was produced by sugar, and other Caribbean islands were coming under English control. In 1669, the proprietors sent three ships to recruit colonists in England. [9] Among the men who arrived in 1670 was Thomas Heyward, of Eaton, Derby, [10] the immigrant ancestor of DuBose Heyward. [11]
Huguenots began arriving after Louis revoked the edict of Nantes in 1685. They included Isaac DuBose from Normandy [12] and René Ravenel from Brittany. [13] One was the progenitor of DuBose Heyward’s mother; the other was the immigrant ancestor of Beatrice Ravenel’s husbands. [14]
Once a population nucleus was established on the Carolina coast, more were willing to transfer from Barbados. John Yeamans settled near Port Royale where he imported cattle from Virginia in 1671. [15] By 1682, salted pork and beef were the colony’s primary exports to Barbados, Jamaica, and New England. [16]
Henry Woodward established trade with the Westo on the Savannah River in 1674. [17] Soon he and other traders were supplying deerskins to the Caribbean for the leather required for ancillary needs like harnesses, mill belts, and containers.
The increased demand for slaves by the French led to an African rebellion by the Muslim victims led by Nasr al-Din in 1673. An agent for the French company noted in 1676 one non-Muslim leader responded by
"taking captives, pillaging and burning the Toubenan region. He went so far as the very residence of Bourgali, devastating millet farms, cutting down seedlings. So complete was the destruction he caused that people were forced to eat boiled grass, carrion and bits of leather." [18]
This led to the ironic result that more slaves were available than food to feed them, either at the gathering points or on the voyages.
Ships needed rice, and popular legends attributed the introduction of the seed to ship captains coming from Madagascar. [19] In fact, the Carolina proprietors saw the potential demand early when one wrote the governor of Barbados in 1663 that they hoped to grow crops unavailable elsewhere in the English trading zone, including rice. [20] In 1672, the proprietors in London sent a barrel of rice to Charleston. [21]
Demand for rice increased after William III deposed James II in 1688. The Dutchman believed in free trade, and opened the slave trade to all companies that would pay fees to the crown. [22] Plantation owners in South Carolina began experimenting with rice. John Stewart reported it was grown in 22 locations in 1690, [23] when colonists ask the proprietors if they could pay their rents in commodities like rice. [24]
In 1700, the customs collector reported "they have now found the true way of raising and husking rice" and were shipping 300 tons to England and 30 to the Caribbean. The crop was so large it exceeded the availability of ships to transport it. [25]
The establishment of a commercial crop made South Carolina more attractive to immigrants. Josephine Pinckney’s primal ancestor left Bishop Auckland, Durham, in 1691 for Jamaica. Thomas Pinckney decided working as a privateer in whatever war England then was waging with France would be more profitable. [26]
When his ship docked in Charleston, the twenty-three-year-old asked to be allowed to settle. He invested his wages of war in real estate. Marty Matthews said he bought lots in town and a plantation on the Ashley river. [27] He also acquired rice land near Beaufort. [28]
Pinckney returned to Durham in 1694 after his parents died, perhaps to claim his share of the estate. While there he married Mary Cotesworth. He probably did not run the plantations himself. Matthews said he had found something more lucrative than growing rice. He bought a wharf and became a merchant. [29]
Graphics
U. S. Department of Interior. Wikimedia Commons. 27 July 2009. Uploaded by Bjoertvedt as "US map - rivers and lakes."
End Notes
1. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 35.
2. Wikipedia. "Saint-Louis, Senegal."
3. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 198.
4. Thomas. 342. Bunce also was called Bence.
5. Wikipedia. "Royal African Company."
6. Boubacar Barry. La Sénégambie du xve au xuxe siècle. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988. Translated by Ayi Kwei Armah as Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 19.
7. Barry. 10.
8. Richard Dunn. Sugar and Slaves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 paperback edition. 67.
9. Edgar. 41.
10. Barbara Thompson Epps. "daniel heyward." Gini website. 21 August 2015.
11. DuBose Heyward’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
12. "Isaac DuBose, I." Gini website. 23 May 2018.
13. French Wikipedia. "René Ravenel."
14. Beatrice Ravenel’ membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
15. Edgar. 133.
16. Edgar. 134.
17. Edgar. 135.
18. Barry. 109. His source was Charles Becker, who in turn was quoting P. Carson. Materials for West African History in French Archives. London: University of London, 1968. 352. The agent was Louis Moreau de Chambonneau
19. Nason McCormick analyzed motifs in the legends in "South Carolina - Rice’s Origin Tale" and "South Carolina - Variants on a Tale." McCormick’s website. 4 July 2010 and 11 July 2010.
20. A. S. Salley, Jr. The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina. Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina. Bulletin 6. 1919. 3. The proprietor was George Monck, Duke of Albemarle.
21. Salley. 4.
22. Thomas. 204-205.
23. Judith A. Carney. Black Rice. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2001. 83. Her source was Peter Wood. Black Majority. New York: Knopf, 1974. 55.
24. Salley. 4.
25. Salley. 7. The collector was Edward Randolph.
26. Marty D. Matthews. Forgotten Founder: The Life and Times of Charles Pinckney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 1. It was the Nine Years War. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
27. Matthews. 2.
28. John Pinckney. "The Pinckney Family Tree: Thomas Pinckney." John Pinckney website. 15 November 2005.
29. Matthews. 2.
South Carolina began as a satellite of Barbados. Walter Edgar called it a colony of a colony. [1]
In 1660, Charles II assumed the throne in England and demand for sugar and tobacco soared. It wasn’t simply that the Restoration court was more decadent than the previous Puritan regime had been. Peace returned to England after twenty years of civil war.
Charles had spent much of the war in Europe where advisors to Louis XIV were promoting the mercantile idea a nation state should be self-sufficient with colonies that supplied its needs. France had established a trade station on the Sénégal river in 1659. [2] Soon after his return, Charles rewarded some followers with an English monopoly on West African trade. [3]
The Royal Adventurers in Africa established its headquarters on Bunce Island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone river, [4] where they hoped to obtain gold. [5] Boubacar Barry noted groups in the Southern Rivers region between the Gambia river and Futa Jallon grew rice. [6] Groups along the Sénégal river grew millet and sorghum. [7] Thus, the early English slave ships bought rice from native growers for the Atlantic voyage.
The English company was reorganized in 1663, with John Colleton included as an investor. He had developed a sugar plantation in Barbados during the Puritan Commonwealth, and was rewarded for his loyalty that same year with a share in the Carolina grant. By then, land on the island was so valuable, plantation owners were importing food from England and Ireland. [8]
Englishmen showed little interest in moving to the new colony. Wealth was produced by sugar, and other Caribbean islands were coming under English control. In 1669, the proprietors sent three ships to recruit colonists in England. [9] Among the men who arrived in 1670 was Thomas Heyward, of Eaton, Derby, [10] the immigrant ancestor of DuBose Heyward. [11]
Huguenots began arriving after Louis revoked the edict of Nantes in 1685. They included Isaac DuBose from Normandy [12] and René Ravenel from Brittany. [13] One was the progenitor of DuBose Heyward’s mother; the other was the immigrant ancestor of Beatrice Ravenel’s husbands. [14]
Once a population nucleus was established on the Carolina coast, more were willing to transfer from Barbados. John Yeamans settled near Port Royale where he imported cattle from Virginia in 1671. [15] By 1682, salted pork and beef were the colony’s primary exports to Barbados, Jamaica, and New England. [16]
Henry Woodward established trade with the Westo on the Savannah River in 1674. [17] Soon he and other traders were supplying deerskins to the Caribbean for the leather required for ancillary needs like harnesses, mill belts, and containers.
The increased demand for slaves by the French led to an African rebellion by the Muslim victims led by Nasr al-Din in 1673. An agent for the French company noted in 1676 one non-Muslim leader responded by
"taking captives, pillaging and burning the Toubenan region. He went so far as the very residence of Bourgali, devastating millet farms, cutting down seedlings. So complete was the destruction he caused that people were forced to eat boiled grass, carrion and bits of leather." [18]
This led to the ironic result that more slaves were available than food to feed them, either at the gathering points or on the voyages.
Ships needed rice, and popular legends attributed the introduction of the seed to ship captains coming from Madagascar. [19] In fact, the Carolina proprietors saw the potential demand early when one wrote the governor of Barbados in 1663 that they hoped to grow crops unavailable elsewhere in the English trading zone, including rice. [20] In 1672, the proprietors in London sent a barrel of rice to Charleston. [21]
Demand for rice increased after William III deposed James II in 1688. The Dutchman believed in free trade, and opened the slave trade to all companies that would pay fees to the crown. [22] Plantation owners in South Carolina began experimenting with rice. John Stewart reported it was grown in 22 locations in 1690, [23] when colonists ask the proprietors if they could pay their rents in commodities like rice. [24]
In 1700, the customs collector reported "they have now found the true way of raising and husking rice" and were shipping 300 tons to England and 30 to the Caribbean. The crop was so large it exceeded the availability of ships to transport it. [25]
The establishment of a commercial crop made South Carolina more attractive to immigrants. Josephine Pinckney’s primal ancestor left Bishop Auckland, Durham, in 1691 for Jamaica. Thomas Pinckney decided working as a privateer in whatever war England then was waging with France would be more profitable. [26]
When his ship docked in Charleston, the twenty-three-year-old asked to be allowed to settle. He invested his wages of war in real estate. Marty Matthews said he bought lots in town and a plantation on the Ashley river. [27] He also acquired rice land near Beaufort. [28]
Pinckney returned to Durham in 1694 after his parents died, perhaps to claim his share of the estate. While there he married Mary Cotesworth. He probably did not run the plantations himself. Matthews said he had found something more lucrative than growing rice. He bought a wharf and became a merchant. [29]
Graphics
U. S. Department of Interior. Wikimedia Commons. 27 July 2009. Uploaded by Bjoertvedt as "US map - rivers and lakes."
End Notes
1. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 35.
2. Wikipedia. "Saint-Louis, Senegal."
3. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 198.
4. Thomas. 342. Bunce also was called Bence.
5. Wikipedia. "Royal African Company."
6. Boubacar Barry. La Sénégambie du xve au xuxe siècle. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988. Translated by Ayi Kwei Armah as Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 19.
7. Barry. 10.
8. Richard Dunn. Sugar and Slaves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 paperback edition. 67.
9. Edgar. 41.
10. Barbara Thompson Epps. "daniel heyward." Gini website. 21 August 2015.
11. DuBose Heyward’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
12. "Isaac DuBose, I." Gini website. 23 May 2018.
13. French Wikipedia. "René Ravenel."
14. Beatrice Ravenel’ membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
15. Edgar. 133.
16. Edgar. 134.
17. Edgar. 135.
18. Barry. 109. His source was Charles Becker, who in turn was quoting P. Carson. Materials for West African History in French Archives. London: University of London, 1968. 352. The agent was Louis Moreau de Chambonneau
19. Nason McCormick analyzed motifs in the legends in "South Carolina - Rice’s Origin Tale" and "South Carolina - Variants on a Tale." McCormick’s website. 4 July 2010 and 11 July 2010.
20. A. S. Salley, Jr. The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina. Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina. Bulletin 6. 1919. 3. The proprietor was George Monck, Duke of Albemarle.
21. Salley. 4.
22. Thomas. 204-205.
23. Judith A. Carney. Black Rice. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2001. 83. Her source was Peter Wood. Black Majority. New York: Knopf, 1974. 55.
24. Salley. 4.
25. Salley. 7. The collector was Edward Randolph.
26. Marty D. Matthews. Forgotten Founder: The Life and Times of Charles Pinckney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 1. It was the Nine Years War. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
27. Matthews. 2.
28. John Pinckney. "The Pinckney Family Tree: Thomas Pinckney." John Pinckney website. 15 November 2005.
29. Matthews. 2.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Society for the Preservation of Spirituals - Come by Yuh
Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals included "Come by Yuh" in its 1931 collection of songs from The Carolina Low Country. [1]
The Charleston group was organized in 1922 after a successful community sing sponsored by the Poetry Society. Membership was open to both Blacks and whites, but "limited to those plantation bred or plantation broken with good, but not professional, voices." [2] Barbara Bellows said it quickly became the "last bastion of planter aristocracy." [3]
DuBose Heyward was among the founding members. That summer he went to the MacDowell art colony in New Hampshire where he met his future wife, Dorothy Kuhns. [4] He published his first novel, Porgy, in 1925. [5] She converted it into a play in 1927. [6] When it was staged with an African-American cast in New York, the actors added their own "bits." [7]
Another society member, Bernice Ravenel, graduated from what became Radcliffe. While in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she wrote poems influenced by her friend, Amy Lowell. [8] In 1926, she published The Arrow of Lightning [9] after her first husband, Francis Gualdo Ravenel, died and before she married his second cousin, Samuel Prioleau Ravenel. [10]
Josephine Pinckney spent a semester at Radcliffe hoping to have the same kind of experiences as Ravenel. She joined the spiritual society after she returned from Cambridge in the summer of 1922. [11] Her own collection of poems, Sea-drinking Cities, appeared in 1927. [12]
Many, like Heyward, Ravenel, and Pinckney, had spent time in the north where they realized their native speech patterns not only were different, but also were culturally significant. Dick Reeves remembered he was mocked for reflexively using a Gullah [13] word when he arrived at a prep school in Front Royal, Virginia.
"They chided me about my accent and I wondered (tape malfunction) why it was that I talked so differently from the rest of the people. And when I got a chance I studied why Charlestonians speak differently. And it’s on account of our familiarity with the Gullah dialect and our Charleston brogue is influenced by the Gullah dialect." [14]
Gullah is a creole language dating back to slavery that developed when Africans from different communities were thrown together in holding areas in Africa, on ships transporting them to the United States, and in slave quarters. At each stage, they also needed to respond to whites who controlled their communities. Initially, only plantation owners and overseers needed to speak Gullah, but when African-American women were used as nannies, maids, and cooks, the language spread to all whites who had close contact with Blacks.
Society members could see the changes that came with World War I when rural African Americans began moving into cities where "standardized hymn sheets were becoming popular." [15] Pinckney’s cousin, Mary Elliott Hutson, thought the group should go beyond singing to collecting and preserving songs. [16]
Reeves told an interviewer in 1971:
"Many of us recalled the Negroes singing the spirituals. Sometimes we’d go in a member’s kitchen and the cook would sing to us, and at other times we’d go out in the country and learn the spirituals in the churches. And that’s how we learned them. Many individual members of the Society had remembered some of the spirituals sung in their locality by the Negroes on their plantation." [17]
Herbert Ravenel Sass suggested they publish the songs with essays to raise money "for the relief and medical care of the ‘old time negroes’." [18] This was personal to him and many others in Charleston. Rice production had not recovered after the Civil War, and the last crop was grown by Sass’s mother’s second cousin in 1927. [19]
Samuel Freedman said "members of Episcopal, Lutheran and Reform Jewish congregations [. . .] set about visiting Gullah churches in Charleston and the nearby Sea Islands." [20] Those who had grown up hearing and speaking the local Gullah language did the transcriptions. Heyward insisted they be "letter perfect." [21]
Members’ experiences had varied. Hutson may have been the only one who grew up on a working farm. Her father owned a cotton plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina. [22] Her parents retired to Charleston in 1916. [23]
Others, like Sass, only knew their family lands after they had reverted to second-growth woodland that was purchased by wealthy northerners for hunting preserves. E. F. Hutton bought the last rice plantation from Theodore Ravenel and merged it with four others. [24] Sass’ first books were The Way of the Wild [25] and Adventures in Green Places. [26] He was working for Charleston’s News and Courier when he joined the society. [27]
Pinckney’s family had owned five rice plantations on the Santee River before the Civil War. After the war her father negotiated with former slaves at El Dorado to work as share croppers. He gave up growing rice in 1886, a decade before Josephine was born. [28] One of her cousins continued living there until a chimney fire destroyed the house. The freedmen probably stayed near their family burial grounds. She inherited the land in 1915. [29]
When she was growing up, only one African American was constant in the house: the cook, Victoria Rutledge. Bellows said she’d been "born in 1875 probably in the freedman settlements along the Santee River." [30] Later, Lula Pencel Moore joined the household staff, and stayed with Pinckney until Pinckney’s death in 1957. The one sang spirituals, the other modern hymns. [31]
Heyward’s grandparents’ house north of Charleston was burned during the Civil War. After his grandfather died, his grandmother moved the family to Charleston, where Heyward’s mother was raised. His childhood was considerably less comfortable than Pinckney’s, especially after his father was killed in an accident at the rice mill where he was a wage laborer in 1888. [32]
The plantation was just a memory. What Gullah he heard came from his family and growing up in the city. His mother made money telling stories in Gullah, usually to northern visitors. [33]
End Notes
I pieced together the relationships between people and their ancestries from entries on sites like Geni and Find a Grave.
1. "Come by Yuh." The Carolina Low Country. Edited by the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931. 308-309.
2. Barbara L. Bellows. A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 69.
3. Bellows. 69.
4. Felicia Hardison Londré. "Heyward, Dorothy (Hartzell) Kuhns." In American Women Writers. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 2002.
5. DeBose Heyward. Porgy. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925.
6. Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward. Porgy: A Play in Four Acts. Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company. The play became the basis for George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1935.
7. David Schiff. "The Man Who Breathed Life Into ‘Porgy and Bess’." The New York Times. 5 March 2000. His source was Dubose’s preface to the published play.
8. Wikipedia. "Beatrice Ravenel."
9. Bernice Ravenel. The Arrow of Lightning. New York: H. Vinal, 1926.
10. Wikipedia, Beatrice Ravenel.
11. Bellows. 68.
12. Josephine Pinckney. Sea-drinking Cities. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927.
13. Gullah was a creole language that had developed in Carolina and Georgia. The fate of some African-American Gullah speakers was mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017.
14. Harold Stone Reeves. Interviewed by Joan Ball for the South Carolina Historical Society, 24 March 1971. Reeve wasn’t a writer but a story teller like Janie Screven DuBose Heyward. He recorded an album in 1963. Gullah, a Breath of the Carolina Low Country. Charleston: Lenwal Enterprises.
15. Bellows. 68.
16. Bellows. 69.
17. Reeves.
18. Bellows. 140.
19. Federal Writers Project. South Carolina: a Guide to the Palmetto State. Compiled by workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of South Carolina. New York: Bacon and Wieck, 1941. 289. The crop was harvested by Theodore Ravenel.
20. Samuel G. Freedman. "A Black Cultural Tradition and Its Unlikely Keepers." The New York Times. 17 June 2011.
21. Bellows. 69.
22. Anthony Harrigan. "My Family’s America: The Charleston Experience." Modern Age 282-289:1983. Her father was Marion Martin Hutson. Sass was Harrigan’s uncle.
23. Bellows. 69.
24. Charles F. Philips, Jr. "Colleton County Connections: Its People and the Events They Inspired." Colleton Genealogical Society website.
25. Herbert Ravenel Sass. The Way of the Wild. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1925.
26. Herbert Ravenel Sass. Adventures in Green Places. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1926.
27. James Hutchisson. "The Naturalist." Charleston 21:164-171:October 2007.
28. Wikipedia. "Thomas Pinckney (American Civil War)."
29. "Eldorado Plantation - McClellanville - Charleston County." South Carolina Plantations website.
30. Bellows. 25. Rutledge was her married name.
31. Bellows. 122-3.
32. Harlan Greene. "Charleston Childhood: The First Years of Dubose Heyward." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 83:154-167:1982.
33. "Mrs. Heyward To Present Reading." The Gaffney [South Carolina] Ledger. 29 January 1925. 1. Copy posted to Newspapers website by dubose1465 on 26 August 2015.
The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals included "Come by Yuh" in its 1931 collection of songs from The Carolina Low Country. [1]
The Charleston group was organized in 1922 after a successful community sing sponsored by the Poetry Society. Membership was open to both Blacks and whites, but "limited to those plantation bred or plantation broken with good, but not professional, voices." [2] Barbara Bellows said it quickly became the "last bastion of planter aristocracy." [3]
DuBose Heyward was among the founding members. That summer he went to the MacDowell art colony in New Hampshire where he met his future wife, Dorothy Kuhns. [4] He published his first novel, Porgy, in 1925. [5] She converted it into a play in 1927. [6] When it was staged with an African-American cast in New York, the actors added their own "bits." [7]
Another society member, Bernice Ravenel, graduated from what became Radcliffe. While in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she wrote poems influenced by her friend, Amy Lowell. [8] In 1926, she published The Arrow of Lightning [9] after her first husband, Francis Gualdo Ravenel, died and before she married his second cousin, Samuel Prioleau Ravenel. [10]
Josephine Pinckney spent a semester at Radcliffe hoping to have the same kind of experiences as Ravenel. She joined the spiritual society after she returned from Cambridge in the summer of 1922. [11] Her own collection of poems, Sea-drinking Cities, appeared in 1927. [12]
Many, like Heyward, Ravenel, and Pinckney, had spent time in the north where they realized their native speech patterns not only were different, but also were culturally significant. Dick Reeves remembered he was mocked for reflexively using a Gullah [13] word when he arrived at a prep school in Front Royal, Virginia.
"They chided me about my accent and I wondered (tape malfunction) why it was that I talked so differently from the rest of the people. And when I got a chance I studied why Charlestonians speak differently. And it’s on account of our familiarity with the Gullah dialect and our Charleston brogue is influenced by the Gullah dialect." [14]
Gullah is a creole language dating back to slavery that developed when Africans from different communities were thrown together in holding areas in Africa, on ships transporting them to the United States, and in slave quarters. At each stage, they also needed to respond to whites who controlled their communities. Initially, only plantation owners and overseers needed to speak Gullah, but when African-American women were used as nannies, maids, and cooks, the language spread to all whites who had close contact with Blacks.
Society members could see the changes that came with World War I when rural African Americans began moving into cities where "standardized hymn sheets were becoming popular." [15] Pinckney’s cousin, Mary Elliott Hutson, thought the group should go beyond singing to collecting and preserving songs. [16]
Reeves told an interviewer in 1971:
"Many of us recalled the Negroes singing the spirituals. Sometimes we’d go in a member’s kitchen and the cook would sing to us, and at other times we’d go out in the country and learn the spirituals in the churches. And that’s how we learned them. Many individual members of the Society had remembered some of the spirituals sung in their locality by the Negroes on their plantation." [17]
Herbert Ravenel Sass suggested they publish the songs with essays to raise money "for the relief and medical care of the ‘old time negroes’." [18] This was personal to him and many others in Charleston. Rice production had not recovered after the Civil War, and the last crop was grown by Sass’s mother’s second cousin in 1927. [19]
Samuel Freedman said "members of Episcopal, Lutheran and Reform Jewish congregations [. . .] set about visiting Gullah churches in Charleston and the nearby Sea Islands." [20] Those who had grown up hearing and speaking the local Gullah language did the transcriptions. Heyward insisted they be "letter perfect." [21]
Members’ experiences had varied. Hutson may have been the only one who grew up on a working farm. Her father owned a cotton plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina. [22] Her parents retired to Charleston in 1916. [23]
Others, like Sass, only knew their family lands after they had reverted to second-growth woodland that was purchased by wealthy northerners for hunting preserves. E. F. Hutton bought the last rice plantation from Theodore Ravenel and merged it with four others. [24] Sass’ first books were The Way of the Wild [25] and Adventures in Green Places. [26] He was working for Charleston’s News and Courier when he joined the society. [27]
Pinckney’s family had owned five rice plantations on the Santee River before the Civil War. After the war her father negotiated with former slaves at El Dorado to work as share croppers. He gave up growing rice in 1886, a decade before Josephine was born. [28] One of her cousins continued living there until a chimney fire destroyed the house. The freedmen probably stayed near their family burial grounds. She inherited the land in 1915. [29]
When she was growing up, only one African American was constant in the house: the cook, Victoria Rutledge. Bellows said she’d been "born in 1875 probably in the freedman settlements along the Santee River." [30] Later, Lula Pencel Moore joined the household staff, and stayed with Pinckney until Pinckney’s death in 1957. The one sang spirituals, the other modern hymns. [31]
Heyward’s grandparents’ house north of Charleston was burned during the Civil War. After his grandfather died, his grandmother moved the family to Charleston, where Heyward’s mother was raised. His childhood was considerably less comfortable than Pinckney’s, especially after his father was killed in an accident at the rice mill where he was a wage laborer in 1888. [32]
The plantation was just a memory. What Gullah he heard came from his family and growing up in the city. His mother made money telling stories in Gullah, usually to northern visitors. [33]
End Notes
I pieced together the relationships between people and their ancestries from entries on sites like Geni and Find a Grave.
1. "Come by Yuh." The Carolina Low Country. Edited by the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931. 308-309.
2. Barbara L. Bellows. A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 69.
3. Bellows. 69.
4. Felicia Hardison Londré. "Heyward, Dorothy (Hartzell) Kuhns." In American Women Writers. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 2002.
5. DeBose Heyward. Porgy. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925.
6. Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward. Porgy: A Play in Four Acts. Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company. The play became the basis for George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1935.
7. David Schiff. "The Man Who Breathed Life Into ‘Porgy and Bess’." The New York Times. 5 March 2000. His source was Dubose’s preface to the published play.
8. Wikipedia. "Beatrice Ravenel."
9. Bernice Ravenel. The Arrow of Lightning. New York: H. Vinal, 1926.
10. Wikipedia, Beatrice Ravenel.
11. Bellows. 68.
12. Josephine Pinckney. Sea-drinking Cities. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927.
13. Gullah was a creole language that had developed in Carolina and Georgia. The fate of some African-American Gullah speakers was mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017.
14. Harold Stone Reeves. Interviewed by Joan Ball for the South Carolina Historical Society, 24 March 1971. Reeve wasn’t a writer but a story teller like Janie Screven DuBose Heyward. He recorded an album in 1963. Gullah, a Breath of the Carolina Low Country. Charleston: Lenwal Enterprises.
15. Bellows. 68.
16. Bellows. 69.
17. Reeves.
18. Bellows. 140.
19. Federal Writers Project. South Carolina: a Guide to the Palmetto State. Compiled by workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of South Carolina. New York: Bacon and Wieck, 1941. 289. The crop was harvested by Theodore Ravenel.
20. Samuel G. Freedman. "A Black Cultural Tradition and Its Unlikely Keepers." The New York Times. 17 June 2011.
21. Bellows. 69.
22. Anthony Harrigan. "My Family’s America: The Charleston Experience." Modern Age 282-289:1983. Her father was Marion Martin Hutson. Sass was Harrigan’s uncle.
23. Bellows. 69.
24. Charles F. Philips, Jr. "Colleton County Connections: Its People and the Events They Inspired." Colleton Genealogical Society website.
25. Herbert Ravenel Sass. The Way of the Wild. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1925.
26. Herbert Ravenel Sass. Adventures in Green Places. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1926.
27. James Hutchisson. "The Naturalist." Charleston 21:164-171:October 2007.
28. Wikipedia. "Thomas Pinckney (American Civil War)."
29. "Eldorado Plantation - McClellanville - Charleston County." South Carolina Plantations website.
30. Bellows. 25. Rutledge was her married name.
31. Bellows. 122-3.
32. Harlan Greene. "Charleston Childhood: The First Years of Dubose Heyward." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 83:154-167:1982.
33. "Mrs. Heyward To Present Reading." The Gaffney [South Carolina] Ledger. 29 January 1925. 1. Copy posted to Newspapers website by dubose1465 on 26 August 2015.
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
Marikina Christian Integrated School - Kumbaya
Topic: Instrumental Versions - Handbells
The musical instrument closest to handbells is the gamelan. In Java and Bali, members of a village strike hollow bronze vessels of different sizes. Each person in the group is assigned one kettle gong that he or she plays in layered, rhythmic music.
Similarly, one member of the handbell ensemble at Trinity Lutheran in Tinley Park, Illinois, likened her experiences to playing "a team sport. You only have a couple of notes. It’s not like playing in a band where you have to play every note." [1]
Gamelan ensembles developed during the Majapahit Empire [2] that flourished between 1293 and 1500. [3] Soon after, the Javanese established a trading depot on Manila Bay, and the musical idea spread with them. [4]
Luzon island had been involved with trade for centuries with the Chinese. After Muslim traders arrived, the economic web expanded. [5] The bronze vessels used in the southern Philippines for kulintang ensembles were similar to those in Sunda. [6]
Young children in the Manilla suburb of Marikina used handbells in a similar manner with "Kumbaya" in a program for parents in 2013. They rang bells while a recording played that featured a marimba-sounding melody and a stick rhythm that probably also included a synthesizer.
Bells of a given tone and color were given to two children who generally rang together, but there were gaps in the bell playing. The accompaniment compensated for the fact the four-year-olds didn’t yet have a concept of playing a role in a group melody, but introduced them to the experience of communal music without a penalty for failing to ring on cue.
The recording began with just the rhythm. The boys immediately started bending their knees, while the girls rolled their hands over each other as they stepped from side to side.
When they sang one verse of "Kumbaya," the children raised their arms in a circle over their heads while they sang the first "kumbaya." On "Lord" they brought their hands together in a prayer position and lowered them to their chests. On the second "kumbaya" they moved their parallel hands up and down in front of them.
A short interlude followed when the boys moved their shoulders up and down while the girls returned to stepping and rolling their hands. They repeated the "kumbaya" verse and gestures before reaching down for the bells at their feet on the floor of the stage.
The expectations place on these children were very different from the ones levied on members of the Montclair, New Jersey, youth choir. [7] There the natural egocentrism of the young was encouraged when the youngest were given solos. In Marikina, the children, male and female, always acted as a group. Even the differently tuned bells were given to more than one person.
The Protestant school acknowledged their high levels of energy by allowing the children to move about in the opening section. The Presbyterian children were expected to stand still.
Children’s minds and bodies are still developing. Biological changes, like those in basal metabolism rates, are universal. [8] The way they are manifested is governed by cultural norms. This interaction of culture and species is also true of psychological traits like egocentrism, but early socialization makes them appear less uniform across cultural boundaries.
Thus, the African-American Presbyterians emphasized individualism and disciplined behavior, while the Philippine members of Christ’s Beloved Community encouraged group activity that allowed physical movement. Their performance ended with all the children shaking their bells until the accompaniment ended.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: 7 girls, 5 boys
Vocal Director: not visible
Instrumental Accompaniment: recording
Rhythm Accompaniment: recording
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: kumbaya
Vocabulary
Pronoun: none
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: one-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: AA
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: verse-interlude
Singing Style: one syllable to one note, unison
Notes on Performance
Occasion: program for parents
Location: stage
Microphones: none
Clothing: boys and girls were dressed alike in dark slacks and white tee-shirts with the school logo.
Notes on Movement
The children stood in a single line, with boys and girls mixed in no particular order. They shook the bells several times during their interval in the music. The bells faced down and were moved about 45 degrees. They did not wear gloves.
Notes on Audience
It applauded at the end.
Notes on Performers
The Marikina valley was claimed as a hacienda by the Jesuits in 1630. They used local laborers, supplemented by Chinese settlers. It became an industrial center when shoemaking factories were introduced in 1887. Workers flooded the area transforming the Roman Catholic stronghold into a cosmopolitan center. [9]
The Marikina Christian Integrated School is run by Raul Caguin. His brother Ed moved to California in 1985, and was converted in 1988. After he joined the Community Bible Church in Vallejo, he returned to the Philippines as an evangelist. He and Raul organized a local branch of the California Pentecostal church [10] that operates the school. [11]
Availability
YouTube: "Pre-Kinder (Kumbaya sa saliw ng bells)" uploaded by Lorieane Catubag on 21 March 2013.
End Notes
1. Michelle Ketter. Interviewed by Donna Vickroy. "Handbell Choir Rings in Trinity’s Anniversary." Southtown Star [Tinley Park, Illinois]. 18 October 2009. 7. Trinity Lutheran was discussed in the post for 13 December 2018.
2. The Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia. Bulletin for National Museum of Canada April 1961. 2. Cited by Donald A. Lentz. The Gamelan Music of Java and Bali. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 5. Recited by Wikipedia. "Gamelan." Traditionally the groups were all male or all female.
3. Wikipedia. "Majapahit."
4. Wikipedia. "Manila."
5. Wikipedia, Manila.
6. Wikipedia. "Kulintang."
7. Trinity Presbyterian of Montclair, New Jersey was discussed in the last post dated 30 December 2018.
8. The importance of high energy and basal metabolism rates was discussed in the post for 25 July 2018.
9. "The Shoe Capital of the Philippines." Marikina city website.
10. "Redeemer Bible Church."
11. "BCI-CCS City Campus." BCI Marikina website.
The musical instrument closest to handbells is the gamelan. In Java and Bali, members of a village strike hollow bronze vessels of different sizes. Each person in the group is assigned one kettle gong that he or she plays in layered, rhythmic music.
Similarly, one member of the handbell ensemble at Trinity Lutheran in Tinley Park, Illinois, likened her experiences to playing "a team sport. You only have a couple of notes. It’s not like playing in a band where you have to play every note." [1]
Gamelan ensembles developed during the Majapahit Empire [2] that flourished between 1293 and 1500. [3] Soon after, the Javanese established a trading depot on Manila Bay, and the musical idea spread with them. [4]
Luzon island had been involved with trade for centuries with the Chinese. After Muslim traders arrived, the economic web expanded. [5] The bronze vessels used in the southern Philippines for kulintang ensembles were similar to those in Sunda. [6]
Young children in the Manilla suburb of Marikina used handbells in a similar manner with "Kumbaya" in a program for parents in 2013. They rang bells while a recording played that featured a marimba-sounding melody and a stick rhythm that probably also included a synthesizer.
Bells of a given tone and color were given to two children who generally rang together, but there were gaps in the bell playing. The accompaniment compensated for the fact the four-year-olds didn’t yet have a concept of playing a role in a group melody, but introduced them to the experience of communal music without a penalty for failing to ring on cue.
The recording began with just the rhythm. The boys immediately started bending their knees, while the girls rolled their hands over each other as they stepped from side to side.
When they sang one verse of "Kumbaya," the children raised their arms in a circle over their heads while they sang the first "kumbaya." On "Lord" they brought their hands together in a prayer position and lowered them to their chests. On the second "kumbaya" they moved their parallel hands up and down in front of them.
A short interlude followed when the boys moved their shoulders up and down while the girls returned to stepping and rolling their hands. They repeated the "kumbaya" verse and gestures before reaching down for the bells at their feet on the floor of the stage.
The expectations place on these children were very different from the ones levied on members of the Montclair, New Jersey, youth choir. [7] There the natural egocentrism of the young was encouraged when the youngest were given solos. In Marikina, the children, male and female, always acted as a group. Even the differently tuned bells were given to more than one person.
The Protestant school acknowledged their high levels of energy by allowing the children to move about in the opening section. The Presbyterian children were expected to stand still.
Children’s minds and bodies are still developing. Biological changes, like those in basal metabolism rates, are universal. [8] The way they are manifested is governed by cultural norms. This interaction of culture and species is also true of psychological traits like egocentrism, but early socialization makes them appear less uniform across cultural boundaries.
Thus, the African-American Presbyterians emphasized individualism and disciplined behavior, while the Philippine members of Christ’s Beloved Community encouraged group activity that allowed physical movement. Their performance ended with all the children shaking their bells until the accompaniment ended.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: 7 girls, 5 boys
Vocal Director: not visible
Instrumental Accompaniment: recording
Rhythm Accompaniment: recording
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: kumbaya
Vocabulary
Pronoun: none
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: one-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: AA
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: verse-interlude
Singing Style: one syllable to one note, unison
Notes on Performance
Occasion: program for parents
Location: stage
Microphones: none
Clothing: boys and girls were dressed alike in dark slacks and white tee-shirts with the school logo.
Notes on Movement
The children stood in a single line, with boys and girls mixed in no particular order. They shook the bells several times during their interval in the music. The bells faced down and were moved about 45 degrees. They did not wear gloves.
Notes on Audience
It applauded at the end.
Notes on Performers
The Marikina valley was claimed as a hacienda by the Jesuits in 1630. They used local laborers, supplemented by Chinese settlers. It became an industrial center when shoemaking factories were introduced in 1887. Workers flooded the area transforming the Roman Catholic stronghold into a cosmopolitan center. [9]
The Marikina Christian Integrated School is run by Raul Caguin. His brother Ed moved to California in 1985, and was converted in 1988. After he joined the Community Bible Church in Vallejo, he returned to the Philippines as an evangelist. He and Raul organized a local branch of the California Pentecostal church [10] that operates the school. [11]
Availability
YouTube: "Pre-Kinder (Kumbaya sa saliw ng bells)" uploaded by Lorieane Catubag on 21 March 2013.
End Notes
1. Michelle Ketter. Interviewed by Donna Vickroy. "Handbell Choir Rings in Trinity’s Anniversary." Southtown Star [Tinley Park, Illinois]. 18 October 2009. 7. Trinity Lutheran was discussed in the post for 13 December 2018.
2. The Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia. Bulletin for National Museum of Canada April 1961. 2. Cited by Donald A. Lentz. The Gamelan Music of Java and Bali. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 5. Recited by Wikipedia. "Gamelan." Traditionally the groups were all male or all female.
3. Wikipedia. "Majapahit."
4. Wikipedia. "Manila."
5. Wikipedia, Manila.
6. Wikipedia. "Kulintang."
7. Trinity Presbyterian of Montclair, New Jersey was discussed in the last post dated 30 December 2018.
8. The importance of high energy and basal metabolism rates was discussed in the post for 25 July 2018.
9. "The Shoe Capital of the Philippines." Marikina city website.
10. "Redeemer Bible Church."
11. "BCI-CCS City Campus." BCI Marikina website.
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