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.
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