Patience Spalding

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
The relationships between the African-American Thorpes mentioned in the post for 16 June 2019 are unknown. [1] Nancy and Ed probably were siblings, but may have been first cousins. Floyd could have been the child, cousin, or nephew of either, or might have been related to an entirely different family on Harris Neck who took the Thorp name.

Nancy told Lydia Parrish her grandmother "came from Africa and was old in 1862." [2] Ed told WPA interviewers in 1937 [3] that his grandmother "come from Africa and her name was Patience Spalding" ("come from Africa and uh name wuz Patience Spalding.") [4]

Ed was described as "eight-three years old," [5] which means he was born around 1854. If Patience came from Thomas Spalding’s Sapelo Island plantation, then it’s possible her son or daughter [6] was sold to one of the Thorpes on Harris Neck after Spalding died in 1851. [7] Patience may have rejoined her kin during the Civil War, possibly in 1862. [8]

When the Lincoln announced his intent to blockade Confederate ports in April 1861, [9] rebel soldiers were sent to Saint Simons [10] and Sapelo islands. [11] After Union forces took Port Royale, South Carolina, in November, residents were told to leave. [12 ]

Thomas Spalding’s daughter-in-law, Mary Bass Spalding, superintended the evacuation of Sapelo. William McFeely thinks she used boats to ferry slaves to the mainland, then marched them to a plantation she’d rented in Baldwin County near the state capital of Milledgeville. [13]

Confederate soldiers were moved from Sapelo to Savannah, and the Union took over. In February 1863, a group of soldiers found "7 superannuated contrabands and one cripple" in "an old hut." [14] McFeely believed Bass Spalding may have left anyone behind who was not able to work and walk 200 miles. [15]

Patience may have been one of the abandoned. She then may have joined others on the island who put together a raft or other crude boat to get to safety on the mainland. From there she must have made her way to Harris Neck.

She was a Muslim who continued her prayer regimen after she joined Ed’s family. He remembered:

"When my gran pray, she kneel down on the floor. She bow her head down three time and she say ‘Ameen, Ameen, Ameen’." ("Wen muy gray pray, she kneel down on duh flo. She bow uh head down three time an she say ‘Ameen, Ameen, Ameen’.") [16]

Ed also told WPA interviewers that his grandmother had told him about "conjuring in Africa" where "there was some what could fly" ("cunjuh in Africa" [17] where "deah wuz some wut could fly.") [18]

The post for 9 June 2019 mentioned the incident near Sapelo Island when some Igbo slaves drowned themselves in 1803. That remained part of the lore of the island. [19] Shad Hall, told WPA interviewers:

"Those folks could fly too. They tell me, there was a lot of them that were brought here and they weren’t much good. The master was fixing to tie them up and then whip them. They say, ‘Master, you ain’t going to lick me,’ and with that they ran down to the river. The overseer he sure thought he would catch them when they got to the river. But, before he could get to them, they rose up in the air and flew away. They flew right back to Africa. I think that happened on Butler’s Island."

"Doze folk could fly too. Dey tell me deah’s a lot ub um wut wuz bring heah an dey ain much good. Duh massuh wuz fizin tuh tie um up tuh whip um. Dey say, ‘Massah, you ain gwine lick me,’ and wid dat dey runs down tuh duh ribbuh. Duh obuhseeuh he sho tought he ketch um when dey git tuh duh ribbuh. But fo he could git tum um, dey riz up in duh eah an fly away. Dey fly right back duh Africa. I tink that happen on Butler Ilun." [20]

Hall was the great-grandson of Bilali Mohamed, the Muslim mentioned in the post for 9 June 2019 who managed the Sapelo Island plantation for Thomas. Scholars, who have studied him, think there is no reason to believe he was the only Muslim on the plantation. [21]

Most Muslims caught in the slave trade were Fulani, like Bilali. They [22] were living in southern Mauritania around the time of Christ, and could have been descended from cattlemen living there in the second and third millennia BC, according to François de Medeiros. [23] When the French attacked their religious leaders on the Sénégal river in the 1720s, the Fulani moved south to Futa Jallon. [24]

Not all Fulani were Muslims, and when the Muslims raided the non-Muslims for slaves, the pagans retaliated. Fulani of every belief were sold to slave traders.

The more serious problem for both groups was their livelihood depended on herds of cattle, which lived on the grasses in the chartreuse Sahel that existed between the ivory desert and the lime-green-savannah on the above map.

Desertification was moving the boundary with the Sahara south, and the cattle were following their food supply. Clive Spinage noted a severe drought between 1738 and 1756 that reached from the Sahel to the Guinea coast was "probably the most severe ever recorded." More droughts occurred in the Sahel between 1770 and 1774. One in 1790 again reached the Guinea coast. After a few wet years, drought returned between 1795 and 1800. [25]

When the Fulani migrated east to find better grasslands, they often were seen by nearby settlements as sources of wealth to be taxed. This, in turn, led to more conflicts, which led to more people being sold to slave traders at the time when men like Thomas were buying slaves after the American Revolution.

Map
"Map of Potential Distribution of Vegetation Macrogroups of Africa." United States Geological Survey, Global Ecosystems website.

End Notes
1. The relationships might be discovered by looking at the manuscript census for Harris Neck for every decade between 1870 and 1920.

2. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 50.

3. The WPA’s Drums and Shadows did not indicate when the interviews were conducted. However, the Federal Writers project began asking about superstitions after John Lomax provided them with a questionnaire in 1937. [26] The federal project ended in 1938. [27] The University of Georgia Press in Athens published the Georgia Writers Project’s Drums and Shadows in 1940. The Savannah project was directed by Mary Granger.

4. Drums. 114.

5. Drums. 114. It isn’t known if this Ed Thorpe is the same Eddie Thorpe quoted by Parrish in the post for 16 June 2019, or another person.

6. Neither Nancy nor Ed indicated if Patience was a maternal or paternal grandparent.

7. Thomas Spalding was discussed in the post for 9 June 2019. He did not like to sell slaves, and, when necessary, did not like to break up families. That inhibition may not have extended to middle-aged adults, especially if they were on nearby plantations and could visit. When he wrote his will in 1848, he had some debts he hoped could be paid by future crops. His biographer did not indicate if he succeeded. [28]

8. Nancy may not have known the date in 1862, but she could easily have figured it out by discovering the dates for national events that occurred at the same time she first remembered Patience.

9. George Alexander Heard. "St. Simons Island During the War Between the States." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 22:249–272:1938. 250.

10. Heard. 251.

11. Ray City, Georgia, Community Library. "Berrien Minute Men on Sapelo Island: Part 6." Ray City History website. 21 October 2017.

12. Heard. 252.

13. William S. McFeely. Sapelo’s People: A Long Walk into Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994. 64. His source was a letter written by the wife of one of Mary Bass Spalding’s sons. Ellen Barrow Spalding wrote: "they had been moved en masse to a rented plantation in Baldwin County, Georgia, near Milledgeville, when they refugeed to that place." [29]

14. Samuel Pellman Boyer. Naval Surgeon, Blockading the South, 1862–1866. Diary edited by Elinor Barnes and James A. Barnes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. 72. Entry for 21 February 1863.

15. McFeely. 66–67. Boyer also found abandoned slaves on Saint Catherine’s Island. He wrote they were "left behind simply because they were not fit for much labor. Rather a rough procedure. Old Smart says his ‘massa’ took all his children and grandchildren along with him except one." [30]

16. Drums. 115. Bilali’s great-granddaughter, Katie Brown, remembered his wife, Phoebe, would say "Ameen, Ameen." [31] Sylviane Diouf said "Ameen is the Muslim equivalent to amen." [32]

17. "Cunjuh" was defined as "magical practice, the casting of spells." [33]
18. Drums. 115.

19. Douglas Chambers traced the knowledge of the Igbo incident on Sapelo Island. [34] Michael Gomez analyzed the tales published in Drums. [35]

20. Drums. 156.

21. Gomez [36] and Diouf have discussed the Muslim communities of Sapelo and Saint Simons islands.

22. "Fulani" is the Hausa term. "Fula" is the Portuguese. "Fulbe" is the currently preferred synonym. [37]

23. B. F. de Medeiros. "The Peoples of the Sudan: Population Movements." 119–139 in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. Edited by M. El Fasi. Paris: UNESCO, 1988.

24. Futa Jallon was discussed in post for 13 January 2019. A map showing its location was published on 24 March 2019.

25. Clive Spinage. African Ecology: Benchmarks and Historical Perspectives. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2012. 159–161; quotation, 159.

26. Diane Trap. "Slave Narratives." Georgia Encyclopedia website. 12 September 2007; last updated 2 August 2018.

27. Wikipedia. "Slave Narrative Collection."

28. E. Merton Coulter. Thomas Spalding of Sapelo. University: Louisiana State University Press,1940. 299–300.

29. Ella Barrow Spalding. Letter to Charles Spalding Wylly. August 1914. Reprinted in The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley. Edited by Robert K. Humphries. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1991. 239.

30. Boyer. 205–206, entry for 23 November 1863.
31. Drums. 150.

32. Sylviane A. Diouf. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 2013 edition. 88.

33. Drums. 229.

34. Douglas B. Chambers. "Ebo Landing: History, Myth, and Memory." Nebula.Wsimg website. 2015.

35. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 117–120.

36. Michael A. Gomez. "Africans, Culture, and Islam in the Low Country." 103–130 in African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry. Edited by Philip D. Morgan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.

37. Wikipedia. "Fula People."

Floyd Thorp - Come by Here

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Robert Winslow Gordon collected a version of "Come by Here" from Floyd Thorp, [1] with no notes on when or where he recorded it. Stephen Winick assumed it was made near Darien, Georgia in 1926 or 1927. [2]

Thorp is one of those common names that in and of themselves are meaningless. The base word is a place name. Thus, Oglethorpe is "composed of the Old Norse elements ‘odd’, point of a weapon, and ‘ketill’, sacrificial cauldron, with ‘thorp’, village, settlement, farm." [3] People of the name migrated to all parts of what would become the United States. The last name of Rosetta Tharpe, who was discussed in the post for 23 December 2017, was a variant.

McIntosh County, whose county seat was Darien, posted the titles of court cases heard between 1875 and 1925. One file box in the archives mentioned state actions against ten Thorpes, including Floyd, Alonzo, Eddie, and Nancy. [4]

Nancy Thorpe was the most important of these. Lydia Parrish said she and Alonzo " joined the Spiritual Singers Society of Coastal Georgia" after a bridge was built connecting Saint Simons Island with the mainland in 1924. [5] From that we know one branch of African-American Thorpes were singers.

Lorenzo Dow Turner interviewed her when he was doing field work on the Gullah language on Harris Neck. [6] The swampy peninsula laid between two creeks that emptied into the South Newport River that marked the boundary between McIntosh and Liberty Counties. [7] It’s located just above the "rt" in Newport in the map below.

If one assumes Nancy’s family took the surname of their owner and stayed in the general area after Emancipation, then she or her ancestors were owned by Charles Joseph Washington Thorpe or his son, Charles Courtney Thorpe. Neither were large slave owners. At most they possessed 22 individuals.

Charles Thorpe was born in Charleston, [8] and moved to Sunbury in what is now Liberty County, Georgia, after the American Revolution. He married Anne Jurdine there in 1789. [9] Charles J. W. was born in 1792. [10] By then, Charles was involved in building the road to Harris Neck. [11]

Harris Neck lands first had been granted by the Oglethorpe trustees to Daniel Demetre in 1750. [12] Representatives of George II granted him and William Harris more land. [13] Their properties were consolidated when Demetre married Harris’s widow. Edward Baker claimed adjacent land on the peninsula in 1773. [14]

Antebellum land transfer records were destroyed in courthouse fires, so no one knows quite how those grants were willed, subdivided or sold before Reconstruction. Much of Thorpe’s land had been claimed by Baker. [15] His neighbor, Jonathan Thomas, owned much of the Demetre-Harris lands. [16] He had married Mary Jane Baker. [17]

Charles apparently was established before the slave trade was banned in 1808 by the United States. [18] After that, he and his descendants had only three ways to increase their labor supply: smugglers, neighbors, or purchases from traders from places like Virginia.

After Charles died, Thomas advertised for a run away slave owned by Thorpe. Armstrong was described as a twenty-five-year-old mulatto in 1822. [19] Edward Thomas, who was born in 1840, remembered his family rarely bought or sold slaves, and he only remembered one mulatto. [20] It may be Jonathan sold those particular slaves, and one of the Thorpes may have been one of the beneficiaries.

The only other relevant thing known about Charles J. W. was his trusteeship of the South Newport Baptist Church in 1841. [21]

The Baptist first arrived in Sunbury after Charles left. Charles Odingsell Screven was the great-great-grandson of the first Calvinist Baptist in Charleston. [22] His only converts in the early years were Negroes, and the church remained predominantly African American. Screven, and his successors, preached in local plantation praise houses, [23] probably including ones on Harris Neck.

How much either Thrope encouraged religion is unknown. However, during Reconstruction one Thorpe young woman was literate enough to teach in a Freemen’s Bureau school in Darien in 1868 and 1869, and was working to establish an African-American school on Harris Neck. [24] The First African Baptist Church was built on Harris Neck a decade or so later. [25]

Eddie Thorpe told Parrish "slaves, when allowed to go to a praise-house that was out of bounds, were given passes with their promise to return before sun-up." He also told her on New Year’s Eve, the watch night began with prayers, songs, and a sermon. At midnight, individuals took turns thanking the Lord and asking for his continued blessings. "The shouting then begin, and continued until dawn." [26]

Map
Liberty County Historical Society. Its website has been abandoned and no information is available about the old map.

Table
1825. Sullivan. 213.

1850. Jack F. Cox. The 1850 Census of Georgia Slave Owners. Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1999. 308

1860. Sullivan. 790.
1862. Sullivan. 275.

End Notes
1. Like Wylie discussed in the post for 2 June 2019, it is not clear if Thorp had changed the spelling of his name or if Gordon transcribed what he had heard without knowing the local nomenclature. I am not standardizing, but using the spellings ascribed to each individual.

2. Stephen Winick. "The World’s First ‘Kumbaya’ Moment: New Evidence about an Old Song." Folklife Center News 34(3–4): 3–10:2010.

3. "Last name: Oglethorpe." Surname Database website.

4. "Unbound Civil and Criminal Case Files of the Superior Court of McIntosh County." Record Group 198, Box 20. The other Thorpes listed in the sequence were Albert, Annie, Charles E., Josiah S. L., Luther, and W. L. One suspects these may have been tax liens.

5. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. xxiii.

6. Lorenzo Dow Turner. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 edition. 292.

7. Wikipedia. "Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge" and "South Newport River." These places were shown on the map published on 3 February 2019.

8. "Charles Thorpe." Geni website. 8 November 2014.
9. "Ann Jurdine." My Heritage website.

10. Carolyn Jane Crown. "Charles Joseph Washington Thorpe." Geni website. 23 May 2016.

11. Buddy Sullivan. Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater. Darien, Georgia: McIntosh County Board of Commissioners, 1990. 236.

12. Sullivan. 39.
13. Sullivan. 40.
14. Sullivan. 229.
15. Sullivan. 229.
16. "The Story of Harris Neck." United States Fish and Wildlife Service website.
17. PHH. "John Abbott Thomas." Geni website. 15 November 2011.

18. The United States ban was different from the British one that effected the trade in Africa; this ban impacted the purchaser.

19. Advertisement placed by Jonathan Thomas. 14 May 1822. Quoted by Emma Rountree. "Runaway Slave Ads, Savannah Republican, 1819 – 1823." Davenport House Museum website. 2014. Thomas may have been the executor for Thorpe’s estate.

20. Edward J. Thomas. Memoirs of a Southerner. Savannah: 1923. Quoted by Sullivan. 244.

21. Sullivan. 237.

22. William Chandler Lanier Jr. "Charles Odingsell Screven." Geni website. 27 February 2018.

Ryan Matthew McRae. "Brig. Gen. James B. Screven." Geni website. 26 November 2017.
"James Screven." Geni website. 18 November 2014.
"Samuel Screven." Geni website19 July 2017.
Lawrence Wall. "Rev. William Screven." Geni website. 12 March 2017.

23. S. G. Hillyer. Reminiscences of Georgia Baptists. Atlanta: Foote and Davies Company, 1902.

24. Sullivan. 790. She only was identified as Miss Thorpe.

25. "The Story of Harris Neck" had 1882. Friends of the Savannah Coastal Wildlife Refuges had 1879. ("Harris Neck Timelime." Coastal Refuges website.)

26. Parrish. 56.

Thomas Spalding

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
The origins of Alexander William Wylley’s labor force are unknown. [1] He may have been given some slaves by his father when he married in 1830 or may have inherited a few when Alexander Campbell Wylly died in 1834. [2] Any of those slaves probably were purchased after the family arrived on Sapelo Island. He had owned 17 bondsmen in the Bahamas in 1784, [3] but one would guess he sold them with his lands to raise money to return to the United States with his growing family.

The more probable source was Wylley’s father-in-law. Thomas Spalding may have provided some as a dowry or wedding gift. It is unlikely Wylley knew much about growing rice when he married. He was born in 1801, just before his father began his wanderings from lease to lease. He would have been around eleven-years-old when his father finally acquired land on Saint Simons Island. One suspects he apprenticed himself to Spalding, who had made up for his childhood in exile by studying modern agricultural tracts, and then passing the information on to others. [4]

By the time Wylley married Elizabeth Spalding, her father had expanded his land holdings to include rice lands on Cambers Island, sugar lands near Darien, and cattle ranges on Black Island. [5] If he knew Wylley owned rice lands, the slaves may have come from Cambers Island.

Spalding eventually turned management of Cambers Island and the sugar works over to his son, Charles Harris Spalding, who would have been 22 in 1830. [6] In 1850, Charles owned 204 slaves, while his father had 293, and his other brother, the whose son would inherit the Sapelo plantation, [7] had 87. [8] After Thomas died in 1851, Randolph claimed 252. [9]

Little has been written about Cambers Island, especially since Charles sold it in 1855. [10] Much more is known about the general slave population on Saint Simons Island. Charles Lyell stayed with James Hamilton Couper in the late 1840s. He admitted he wasn’t there to study social conditions, but botanical and geological ones, and thus his observations may not have been as accurate as his scientific ones. [11] With that caveat, he wrote:

"The slave trade ceased in 1796, and but few negroes were afterward smuggled into Georgia from foreign countries, except indirectly for a short time through Florida before its annexation; yet one fourth of the population of this lower country is said to have come direct from Africa." [12]

He also observed a correlation between the size of the enslaved population on a given plantation and the ability of the slaves to speak English and adopt western ways of thinking. In what might have been an allusion to Gullah, he wrote:

"So long as they herd together in large gangs, and rarely come into contact with any whites save their owner and overseer, they can profit little by their imitative faculty, and can not even make much progress in mastering the English language." [13]

Spalding’s detached treatment of his slaves followed, in part, from his distaste for slavery as an institution. He thought the best way to manage people was to treat them like serfs who were granted autonomy in return for completing work that was assigned to them. [14] Watson Jennison thought they "practiced their religion without interference." [15]

Despite his views of slavery, Spalding was a businessman. His loyalist father had lost many of his assets during the American revolution. [16] His father-in-law began purchasing Sapelo Island in 1802 [17] to grow cotton from seed he had obtained from his loyalist brother-in-law who had moved to the Bahamas. [18]

Spalding inherited his contract when Richard Leake died in 1802, and financed his purchase of the land with the sales of his own father’s plantation on Saint Simons. [19] By then, he had received some cotton seed from his father’s former business partner, Roger Kelsall. [20]

Next, like the South Carolina swamp planters who bought slaves from rice growing areas in Africa, [21] he looked for laborers already familiar with his proposed crop. Ray Crook thought Spalding used contacts with loyalists in the Bahamas to buy a driver [22] and possibly other slaves from the Bahamian estate of John Bell who had grown cotton. [23]

In 1803, [24] Spalding and Couper’s father tried to smuggle some Igbo from Savannah. [25] When they neared land, the captives took over the ship, walked into Dunbar Creek, and drowned themselves. [26]

The locus of the African slave trade had changed since South Carolina rice growers were importing captives before the American Revolution. As mentioned in the post for 10 March 2019, most of the captives, who arrived in Charleston between the time South Carolina reopened the slave trade in 1803 and 1808 when it was closed by the United States, were from Kongo, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast of modern Ghana.

The Igbo lived east of the Niger river in what is now southern Nigeria. Spalding’s Bahamian driver, Bilali Mohamed, was a Fulani from Futa Jallon. [27] Sylviane Diouf thought he, most likely, was exported through a port in Guinea. [28]

The slaves on Spalding’s Sapelo Island plantation probably were a mix of Fulani, Igbo, and whoever else was available in the period. It was possible he acquired some or all the slaves already on the Cambers plantation when he purchased the land. Demographically, they may have been more like the groups on South Carolina rice plantations.

End Notes
1. Details on census reports of his slave holdings appeared in the post for 2 June 2019.

2. GlennGyn website published a list of Alexander Campbell Wylly’s slaves taken from the Glenn County, Georgia, probate court records for 30 June 1834. He owned 38 when he died. Based on the number of slaves owned by A. C. sisters in 1850, it seems likely that Wylly’s estate went to support his wife and children living at home, and not to his son. His sisters were mentioned in the post for 2 June 2019.

3. Sandra Riley and Thelma B. Peters. Homeward Bound. Miami: Island Research, 2000 edition. 250, note 32.

4. Buddy Sullivan. "Thomas Spalding (1774-1851)." New Georgia Encyclopedia website. 14 May 2003; last updated 21 February 2018.

5. Buddy Sullivan. "Ecology as History in the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve." Sapelo Island NERR Occasional Papers, 2008. 12.

6. "Spalding Family Papers." Georgia Historical Society website.

7. William S. McFeely. Sapelo’s People: A Long Walk into Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994. 182, note 5.

8. Jack F. Cox. The 1850 Census of Georgia Slave Owners. Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1999. 288.

9. Tom Blake. "McIntosh County, Georgia: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." RootsWeb website. May 2001.

10. Buddy Sullivan. Footnotes to The Darien Journal of John Girardeau Legare, Ricegrower. Edited by Sullivan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. 125.

11. Charles Lyell. A Second Visit to the United States. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:257.

12. Lyell. 1:267. Spain ceded Florida to the United States in the 1821 Adams-Onis Treaty. [29]

13. Lyell. 1:269.

14. E. Merton Coulter. Thomas Spalding of Sapelo. University: Louisiana State University Press,1940. 85. "It was Spalding’s hope that the slaves might progress through serfdom to a measure of liberty and independence. They should be attached to the land and not sold away from it."

15. Watson W. Jennison. Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 2012. 175. His sources were not available in the on-line version.

16. Spalding’s family history was discussed in the post for 2 June 2019.
17. Sullivan, Spalding.

18. Thos. Spalding. "Observations on the Introduction of Long Staple Cotton in Georgia." The Southern Agriculturist and Register of Rural Affairs 5:189–190:April 1832. 189. Leake was married to Jane Martin. Her brother was John Martin.

19. Coulter. 39–40.

20. Thomas Spalding, Observations. James Spalding had immigrated to Charleston in 1760, then entered the Indian trade in Georgia with Kelsall. During the war, he sold his trading interest in Florida to William Panton and Thomas Forbes, who moved to the Bahamas after the Treaty of Paris returned the land to Spain in 1783. [30]

21. For more of the importation of slaves from rice-growing parts of the Africa, see the post for 13 January 2019.

22. Ray Crook. "Bilali—The Old Man of Sapelo Island: Between Africa and Georgia." Wadabagei 10:40–57:Spring 2007. 51–52. He mentioned Robert McKay of Meins and McKay, and Edward Swarbeck.

23. Crook. 48.
24. Wikipedia. "Igbo Landing."

25. Douglas B. Chambers. "Ebo Landing: History, Myth, and Memory." Nebula.Wsimg website. 2015.

26. Timothy B. Powell. "Ebos Landing." Georgia Encyclopedia website. 15 June 2004, last updated 11 March 2016 by Chris Dobbs.

27. Crook. 41. Futa Jallon was discussed in the post for 13 January 2019.

28. Sylviane A. Diouf. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 2013 edition. 116. She thought the only likely ship to land in the Bahamas before 1790 was the Peggy, which "sailed from Assini in Ivory Coast and Nunez in Guinea." The Rio Nuñez flowed from the Futa Jallon.

29. Wikipedia. "History of Florida."
30. "Forbes Bluff." Florida Online website.

Alexander William Wylley

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
H. Wylie recorded a version of "Come by Here" for Robert Winslow Gordon in Georgia. Steven Winick believed it was done in the last part of April in 1926 near Darien. [1]

I found nothing more about him on the internet, not even a hint of a first name. [2] His surname may have come from Alexander William Wylley, who owned 102 slaves in McIntosh County in 1850, or from his mother, Margaret Wylly, who owned 52 in Glynn County. [3]

In the next census, taken on the eve of the Civil War, A. W. [4] was growing rice with 46 slaves on The Forest plantation some twenty miles north of Darien, [5] while his sisters Matilda and Harriet owned 34 bondsmen on Saint Simons Island. [6] Darien was in McIntosh County, while Saint Simons was to the south in Glynn. These locations were marked on the map posted 3 February 2019.

Tom Blake found seven African-American Wyllys in the 1870 census. All were born in the United States, but none were born or living in Glynn County. [7] He only was looking at names within counties. These suggests one or two families took their surnames from A. W. rather than from other members of his family living in McIntosh County.

Wylley’s grandfather, Alexander Wylly, was born in Colerain, Derry, [8] and migrated to Savannah in 1750. [9] He became a merchant and grew rice and indigo on 600 acres he purchased from the British government. [10]

Alexander was associated with the conservative faction in the legislature. After the Revolutionary War began, he moved to Tybee Island in 1776 where his home was attacked, his goods seized, and he was temporarily arrested. Destitute, he moved to the British territory of East Florida. [11]

His sons returned to Florida from England, where they had been in college, and joined the loyalist military band [12] commanded by Thomas Brown. In 1778, the British took Savannah. Alexander returned from Florida, and was hired as a clerk by the royal governor. [13]

After the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the army planned a retreat that included taking the loyalists and their slaves with them. Some went immediately to Florida, only to have that territory given back to the Spanish in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The same treaty ceded the Bahamas to England and families began relocating there. [14]

Alexander was allowed to return to Savannah, but his sons were not forgiven. [15] A. W.’s Uncle William went to New Brunswick before moving to the Bahamas, where he joined Brown in lobbying for more power for the loyalists in the government. [16]

A. W.’s father remained relatively anonymous. Alexander Campbell Wylly was granted land on Caicos, but there was no sign he used the grant, [17] even though he was appointed Justice of the Peace there in 1791. [18] Instead, he served as speaker of the colonial house for much of the time between 1798 and 1802. [19]

He married Margaret Armstrong, the daughter of another loyalist. [20] William Armstrong died in 1790, and, some time after, his widow, Anne, left the islands with many of her children. [21] A. C. moved to Spanish-controlled Saint Augustine in 1802. [22]

Next, A. C. took his wife and seven children to Jekyll Island in 1803. [23] Thomas Spalding’s father-in-law, Richard Leake, had traded the island to Christophe Poulain DuBignon for his share of Sapelo Island. DuBignon was escaping the consequences of the French Revolution. [24]

In 1810, A. C. left Jekyll for Saint Simons, where he leased a house. In 1812, he was able to buy The Village Plantation. [25] His wife’s family stayed on the Saint Clair plantation. [26] It’s not known how accepted the unrepentant loyalists were on Saint Simons, especially during the War of 1812 when the British menaced the island. [27] Their youngest son, John, was killed by a neighbor in a dispute over a boundary in 1838. [28]

Spalding’s father was a loyalist merchant banished to Florida who had been allowed to return after the war. [29] Thomas sold his father’s land of Saint Simons to finance his purchase of Sapelo Island. [30] His daughter, Elizabeth, married A. W. in 1830 and moved to a plantation on the other side of Sapelo Sound on the Sapelo River. [31]

End Notes
1. Stephen Winick. "The World’s First ‘Kumbaya’ Moment: New Evidence about an Old Song." Folklife Center News 34(3–4): 3–10:2010. 6.

2. It is not known if Wylie spelled his name this way, or if Gordon transcribed what he heard without knowing the local nomenclature. I am not standardizing, but using the spellings ascribed to each individual. Since it is an unusual name, I’m also assuming any of the variants found in the Darien area refer to the same group.

3. Jack F. Cox. The 1850 Census of Georgia Slave Owners. Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1999. 346.

4. I am using initials for convenience. Alexander William Wylley’s (A. W.) grandfather was Alexander Wylly, his father was Alexander Campbell Wylly (A. C.), and this brother was William Wylly. There’s no indication this was how they were known.

5. Buddy Sullivan. Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater. Darien, Georgia: McIntosh County Board of Commissioners, 1990. 789. He said the plantation was 1.5 miles east of Eulonia.

6. Tom Blake, "Glynn County, Georgia: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census." RootsWeb website. February, 2002.

7. Blake.
8. "Alexander Wylly (1731 - 1781)." Ancestry website.
9. Charlene Kozy. "Casualties of War." Times of the Islands website. Fall 2018.

10. Works Projects Administration, Savannah Unit. Georgia Writer’s Project. "Colerain Plantation. Part II." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 25:39–66:1941. 39.

11. Sandra Riley and Thelma B. Peters. Homeward Bound. Miami: Island Research, 2000 edition. 124–125.

12. William Wylly. "Evidence de bene Esse, on the Claim of Capt. Alex’r Campbell Wylly, late of Georgia." 20 November 1788. Ontario. Bureau of the Archives. Report 49. 294.

13. Lorenzo Sabine. Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1864. 599.

14. Riley. Chapter 11.
15. William Wylly.

16. Paul Daniel Shirley. "Migration, Freedom and Enslavement in the Revolutionary Atlantic: The Bahamas, 1783–c. 1800." PhD dissertation. University College of London, October 2011. Riley said he went to Nova Scotia [page 274]

17. Kozy, Casualties. Times of the Islands website. Fall 2010.

19. Wikipedia. "List of Speakers of the House of Assembly of the Bahamas. Wylly served from 30 October 1798 to 16 November 1800, and from 6 October 1801 to 15 March 1802.

20. James E. Bagwell. Rice Gold: James Hamilton Couper and Plantation Life on the Georgia Coast. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2000. 16.

21. Riley. 270.
22. Kozy, King’s Men.

23. June Hall McCash. Jekyll Island’s Early Years. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. 99.

24. Martha L. Keber. "DuBignon Family." New Georgia Encyclopedia website. 10 February 2003; last updated by 30 October 2014.

25. "The Plantation Era and Christ Church, Frederica, St. Simons Island, Georgia." Oatland Plantation website. March 2007. 10–11.

26. Oatland. 10.

27. Based on conversations with James Hamilton Couper, Charles Lyell wrote: "During the last war, when Admiral Cockburn was off this coast with his fleet, he made an offer of freedom to all the slaves belonging to the father of my present host, and a safe convoy to Canada." (A Second Visit to the United States. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:266.)

28. Oatland. 11.

29. According to Sabine, James Spalding was attained, and his property confiscated in 1778. [2:579]

30. Buddy Sullivan. "Thomas Spalding (1774-1851)." New Georgia Encyclopedia website. 14 May 2003; last updated 21 February 2018.

31. Sullivan, Early Days. 216.

Sea Island Cotton

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Two kinds of cotton were produced in the United States before the Civil War. Long staple grew in the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia. Short staple was better adapted to drier upland areas of the lower South.

Both were members of the Malvaceae that emerged in the Eocene in South America and Australia. [1] Mallow pollens appeared in Africa during the Oligocene. [2] About 12.5 million years ago, the cotton genus, [3] Gossypium, emerged in Africa, and one lineage floated across the Pacific to western Mexico by 10 million years ago. [4] The Miocene climate was cold in those centuries and sea levels had dropped. Seeds of one modern cotton species were still viable after three years in sea water according to a team led by Jonathan Wendel. [5]

Seeds from Africa took another ocean voyage one to two million years ago [6] during the Ice Age when sea levels again were low. This time, the lineage that had developed long seed hairs [7] in Africa or Asia landed in the New World where it mated with local plants to produce progeny with double the number of chromosomes. [8]

Today four species share the long threads, all derived from a single genetic change: Indian cotton (arboreum), which was domesticated by 2300 bc in the Indus valley; Levant (herbaceum); Mexican (hirsutum), which was being cultivated in the Tehuacan valley around 3000 bc, and Caribbean (barbadense), [9] which was being used for fishing nets on the Peruvian coast about 3500 bc. [10] The last moved from there to the Caribbean [11] where it was being farmed for export to Hispañola by the Arawak when Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. [12]

Cotton seeds were covered by hairs that probably developed to deter predators. When they dried after the seed pod opened, they maintained their round shape. The seed parent of the American tetraploids developed additional long hairs that dried into flat, twisting ribbons that attached to one another. That made them spinnable, [13] although the James Hargreaves jenny of 1764 didn’t produce a strong enough thread for existing looms. Richard Arkwright’s water frame of 1771 was the one that created stronger yarns. [14]

Colonists began experimenting with cotton as a commercial crop to support England’s mills before the American Revolution. Its introduction into South Carolina and Georgia went through three phases: establishing the crop could grow, proving it could make a profit, and adapting to the demands of the new market.

Beaufort, South Carolina, historians noted several people had been given credit for being the first to plant the long-staple Caribbean cotton. Andrew Turnball and his overseer, John Earle, grew some kind of cotton, possibly Arabian since they migrated from the Mediterranean to the newly British possession of East Florida in 1763. Andrew’s son Nicholas then grew what became Sea Island cotton near the Savannah river in Georgia in 1787. [15]

Francis Levant moved from Italy to East Florida, then to Georgia where he shipped 10,000 pounds of cotton from Savannah to London in 1791. [16] Two years later James King was exporting cotton from Georgia that had been ginned by a roller mill. His father-in-law, Kinsey Burden had experimented with cotton upriver from Savannah in 1777. [17]

Sea Island cotton was introduced elsewhere by outsiders who were aware of economic developments in England, or who had no emotional commitment to rice. William Elliott introduced it to Hilton Head Island in 1790. [18] His great-grandfather had settled in Albemarle county, North Carolina, then moved to Charleston [19] where he married into the Barnwell family. [20] His grandfather made the move to Beaufort, [21] where the Barnwells became "to sea island cotton what the Heywards were to rice." [22]

Ezekiel Donnell suggested 1791 was the first year English mills began to rely on sea island cotton. Three-fourths of the supply came from South Carolina, and the rest from Georgia. In earlier years "Great Britain obtained her supplies of cotton from the West Indies, South America, and the countries around the eastern parts of the Mediterranean." [23]

The next year prices more than doubled when wars with Napoléon began to impact shipping across the Atlantic. [24] Others started planting cotton rather than rice. Ebenezer Coffin introduced long-staple cotton on Saint Helena island. [25] His immigrant ancestor, Tristram, moved to Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1642 [26] just as the English Civil War was beginning. The family became merchants who remained loyal during the American Revolution. [27] After the war, Ebenezer married a woman who may have had kinship ties with people in Charleston. [28] He began clearing land for Coffin Point in 1800, and had a working plantation in 1803. [29]

Instead of a cotton gin, they used a roller mill invented by Joseph Eve. The Philadelphia-born Loyalist began buying land in the Bahamas in 1788, and moved there in 1795. He improved the local roller mill to remove black-seeds from long-staple cotton by converting it to wind, cattle, or water power. David Moody said his customers included Pierce Butler and John Couper on Saint Simons island off the coast of Georgia. He sold his island plantation and moved to Charleston to manufacture gins in 1800. When his factory burned in 1805, he moved inland to the fall line at Augusta, Georgia. [30]

End Notes
1. Jonathan F. Wendel, Curt L. Brubaker, and Tosak Seelanan. "The Origin and Evolution of Gossypium. 1–18 in Physiology of Cotton. Edited by James McD. Stewart, Derrick M. Oosterhuis, James J. Heitholt, and Jackson R. Mauney. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2010. 2.

2. Wendel. 2.
3. Wendel. 3.
4. Wendel. 10.
5. Wendel. 11.
6. Wendel. 12.
7. Wendel. 13.
8. Wendel. 12.
9. Wendel. 13.
10. Wendel. 16.
11. Wendel. 17.

12. William F. Keegan and Corinne L. Hofman. The Caribbean before Columbus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. No page numbers in on-line edition. Arawak were discussed with MC-6 site on Middle Caicos island.

13. Wendel. 13.

14. "Sir Richard Arkwright." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 20 July 1998; last updated 19 December 2018. He was mentioned in the post 19 May 2019.

"Sir Richard Arkwright (1732 - 1792)." British Broadcasting Company website.

Wikipedia. "Richard Arkwright."

15. 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. 277–278. E. J. Donnell reported Alexander Bissell was the first to export sea island cotton from Saint Simons Island in 1788. [31]

16. Donnell said Frank Leavet originally lived in Jamaica where he lived "in a distressed situation." Patrick Walsh recommended he move to Georgia and sent him "a large quantity of various seeds of Jamaica." He planted the ones he recognized, and emptied the bag containing Pernambuco cotton seeds on a dung heap when he needed the bag itself. It was thus he learned it would grow in 1789. [32]

17. Rowland. 278.

18. Rowland, 280, and E. J. Donnell. Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton. New York: James Sutton and Company, 1872. 10.

19. Phoebe R. Leverling. "Thomas Elliott." Genealogy website. On Elliott’s great-grandfather.

20. John Barnwell migrated to South Carolina in 1701 where he served as a military leader against the the Tuscarora and the Spanish in Florida. [33]

21. "Mary Elliott (Gibbes)." Gini website. 1 December 2016. On Elliott’s great-grandmother.
22. Rowland. 280.
23. Donnell. 51.

24. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta reported the price paid per pound in 1740 as 9 pence. It jumped to 23 pence in 1792–1793, fell to 14 pence in 1802–1803, rose to 20 pence in the War of 1812, then returned to 9 pence per pound in 1822–1824. [34]

25. Rowland. 281.

26. W. S. Appleton. Gatherings toward a Genealogy of the Coffin Family. Boston: David Clapp and Son, 1896. 3.

Wikipedia. "Haverhill, Massachusetts."

27. James H. Stark. The Loyalists of Massachusetts. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1910. 234.

28. Ebenzer’s cousin, John Coffin, served with Cornwallis in Charleston. [35] John married Ann Mathews from Saint Johns Island. [36] Ebenezer subsequently married Mary Mathews in Boston. [37] She may have been a cousin to Ann. [38]

29. Rowland. 281.

30. David L. Moody. "Dr. Joseph Eve." Ancestry website. His primary source was Lydia Austin Parrish. "Records of Some Southern Loyalists." Manuscript in Harvard Library’s Houghton Library.

31. Donnell. 44.
32. Donnell. 48.
33. Wikipedia. "John Barnwell (Colonist)."

34. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta. "Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600-1850." Global Economic History Network conference, Utrecht, 23–25 June 2005. 38.

35. Stark. 236.
36. Stark. 237.
37. Appleton. 45.

38. Sally Pamelia Dobson. "Benjamin Matthews." Geni website. Last updated 20 January 2017. On father of Mary Coffin, son of Benjamin.

"Benjamin Mathewes." Geni website. Last updated 14 November 2014. On father of Benjamin, son of Anthony.

"Anthony Mathewes." Ancestry website. On father of Benjamin and grandfather of Ann.

Cotton Markets

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Economic engines are industries that stimulate self-perpetuating demand and the growth of other industries. Sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean required slaves, who needed to be fed during transit from Africa. Thus, rice became a necessity. That in turn led to a demand for slaves in South Carolina.

Similarly, the rise of large cities like London presupposed the development of food surpluses, building materials, and clothing for inhabitants who couldn’t provide themselves with necessities by their own labor. Textiles have been a driver of economic growth since the Middle Ages when Flemish weavers in Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres needed yarn, and English landowners raised sheep to produce wool for export. [1]

Bubonic plague decimated populations of Europe. It entered England in 1348 and killed 40 to 60% of the population. [2] The disease spread to Lancashire in September of the next year, where it spared the wealthy, the old and ailing, but took the "youthful and healthy." [3]

Edward III invited survivors from Hainult in Flanders to migrate, [4] probably after the French-speaking county became the domain of Bavaria after his wife’s sister’s husband died and her property was inherited by his sons. [5] They were settled throughout the country, including in Manchester [6] and Preston in Lancashire.

Preston was located on the River Ribble where it opened into an estuary of the Irish sea. It then was developing into a port. [7] Manchester was situated near water falls on the Mercey river that could be harnessed for water power. [8] It already was a center for woolen manufacture. [9] The influx of Flemish weavers solidified its status, while Preston became a center of the textile trade by the 1550s. [10]

The industry remained local and relatively primitive. When Spain attacked Antwerp in 1585, during the Counter-Reformation, Elizabeth I let Protestant refugees settle in England. Some went to Manchester. Their settlement was hedged by "restrictions and burdens on foreigners setting up business as masters in England, in the trades then carried on in this country, whilst foreigners commencing a new art would be exempt from those restrictions." Edward Baines believed this meant they introduced cotton spinning and weaving. [11]

Cotton was not then competitive. That began when the East India Company began importing printed cotton fabrics from India into England in 1631. [12] Soon after, Armenian merchants arrived in France in 1640 with the secrets of calico printing. [13] Baines noted cotton manufacturing was mentioned in Manchester for the first time the next year, but in a way that suggested the industry was well established. The raw materials came from Cyprus and Smyrna through London. [14]

Industrial activity, no doubt, was depressed during the religious wars that commenced in England in 1640. Manchester supported Parliament and the Puritans [15] while Preston sided with Charles I and the Roman Catholics. [16]

When Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the East India Company gave him calicos to stimulate demand among the upper classes. [17] Unlike woollens, whose yarns were dyed and woven into plaid patterns like tartans, calicos had designs printed on them in bright colors. Some local printing began in 1676. [18]

The trading company was so successful, woollen interests, including the aristocrats who raised sheep, began complaining to Parliament. France had banned the import, manufacture, or use of calico in 1686. [19] They wanted the same protection. England banned finished cloth in 1700, but it still allowed the import of undyed cotton. [20]

The acts did not have the desired effect, because Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and Huguenot weavers began fleeing the country. Giorgio Riello noted Holland and Switzerland were the primary beneficiaries. [21] Baines found evidence one had settled in London by 1690. [22]

Following riots directed toward Huguenot weavers in London in 1719, [23] Parliament enacted more restrictions on calico in 1721. It exempted raw cotton, muslin worn by the wealthy, and blue calico worn by the poor. [24] The result was smuggling by the East India Company and others. [25]

Riello thought the reason calicos became a threat to the European textile industry was the dyes that created the brilliant patterns were unknown, and were produced by unfamiliar techniques. [26] The English finally found an inexpensive way to process indigo to create blue in 1734. [27] The Swiss mastered madder to produce red in 1768. [28] Francis Drake pioneered using copper plates to transfer designs in Dublin in 1754. [29]

France repealed its calico laws in 1759 to the benefit of Swiss craftsmen. [30] England waited until 1774. [31] By that time, Robert Peel had established a calico printing works in Preston, [32] and James Hargreaves had patented the spinning jenny that made cotton thread more quickly. [33]

The cost of cotton production was finally low enough to be competitive with India, [34] and the British laws were repealed in 1774. [35] The textile industry in Lancashire began to drive the economy. By 1785, 80,000 people were working in its mills. [36]

Lancashire imported its food and lumber from Ireland. [37] Its labor didn’t just come from the countryside, but from Scotland. During the period of protection, Scots land owners had started evicting their tenants in 1762 to convert their land to sheep pasture. [38] This increased the number of workers in Preston, which had remained both Roman Catholic and Jacobite. [39]

The parents of Thomas Hilton’s wife, [40] Jane Lachlison, moved there from Scotland [41] in the early 1800s. [42] One of her sisters, Lydia, married Thomas Arkwright. [43] His ties to the Richard Arkwright who introduced the centralized mill into cotton thread production in 1771 [44] were remote at best. The family had been in the area for generations. Richard’s father had at least 13 children by several wives, and his great-grandfather may have had three sons, each of whom had sons. [45]

The Hiltons and Lachlison began moving to the United States in the 1830s. Before them, Samuel Slater had migrated to New England in 1789. He’d been apprenticed to one of Arkwright’s partners, and understood both the machinery and the manufacturing process. Moses Brown hired him to build a mill in 1793 in Rhode Island. [46] That was the same year Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin. [47]

The gears of the industrial engines meshed. The textile mills demanded more raw materials. The Southern plantations that responded by growing cotton used slave labor. That, in turn, increased the demand for rice.

End Notes
1. Encyclopædia Britannica. "Ghent." Last updated 12 January 2015.
2. Wikipedia. "Black Death in England."

3. R. Sharpe France. "A History of Plague in Lancashire." Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Transactions 90:1–175:1938. 21.

4. Edward Baines. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835. 90.

5. This is supposition. Writers only say the middle 1300s. Edward married Philippe de Hainaut in 1328. [48] Her father died in 1337, [49] and her brother died in 1345. Her older sister Margaret inherited the title, which meant it went to her husband Louis IV of Bavaria. He died in 1347, and she resigned in favor of her son. When he double-crossed her, she reasserted her rights to Hainault. In the ensuing battles, Edward supported her in 1351 and changed sides in 1354. [50] One would guess he issued his invitation sometime in the 1350s.

6. Baines. 90.
7. Wikipedia. "Preston, Lancashire."
8. Wikipedia. "Manchester."
9. Baines. 90.
10. Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Preston." May 04, 1999; Last Updated: Dec 20, 2018.
11. Baines. 84

12. E. J. Donnell. Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton. New York: James Sutton and Company, 1872. 7.

13. Maddy. "Calico and Its Origins." Historic Alleys website. 6 February 2010.

14. Baines. 100–101. His source was Lewes Roberts. The Treasure of Traffic. London: E. P. for Nicholas Bourne, 1641.

15. Wikipedia, Manchester.
16. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Preston.

17. Beverly Lemire. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660-

1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 15. Cited by Peter Fisher. "The Calico Acts: Why Britain Turned its Back on Cotton." History thesis. University of Puget Sound, 2012. 3.

18. Baines. 258. Giorgio Riello mentioned 1677 in a table on page 32. "The Rise of Calico Printing in Europe and the Influence of Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." London School of Economics website.

19. "Printed Textiles from the 18th Century." Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes, Mulhouse, website.

20. Wikipedia. "Calico Acts" and "Textile Manufacture during the Industrial Revolution."
21. Riello.
22. Baines. 259.
23. Fisher. 12.
24. Fisher. 16.

25. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta. "Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600-1850." Global Economic History Network conference, Utrecht, 23–25 June 2005. 7. Their source was P. J. Thomas. Mercantilism and the East India Trade, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1926.

26. Riello.

27. Riello. 35. This demand lead to the indigo production in South Carolina, mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019.

28. Riello. 39.
29. Riello. 42.
30. Riello. 20.
31. Wikipedia, Calico Acts.
32. Baines. 262–263.
33. Wikipedia. "Spinning Jenny."
34. Broadberry.
35. Wikipedia, Calico Acts.
36. Donnell. 37.
37. Baines. 87.
38. Wikipedia. "Highland Clearances."
39. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Preston.

40. Hilton was mentioned in the post for 3 February 2019. Nothing was clearly known about Hilton. The Ancestry website entry for "Thomas Hilton" reported he as "born in England, Scotland on 17 Nov 1797, parents unknown."

41. "Jane Lachlison." Ancestry website. It said she was "born in Scotland on 6 Jun 1802."

42. Her brother was born in England in 1814 according to Grave History. "James Lachlison." Find a Grave website. 26 October 2014.

43. jrpv. "Lydia Lacklison Arkwright." Find a Grave website. 12 April 2012.
44. Wikipedia. "Sir Richard Arkwright (1732 - 1792)."

45. Tricia Booth. "People: Richard Arkwright’s Family." Her Belper Derbyshire Historical and Geological Records website.

46. Wikipedia. "Samuel Slater."
47. Wikipedia. "Eli Whitney."
48. Wikipedia. "Philippa of Hainault."
49. Wikipedia. "William I, Count of Hainaut."
50. Wikipedia. "Margaret II, Countess of Hainaut."

Charleston Society for the Preservation of Spirituals

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
The Charleston Society for the Preservation of Spirituals did not indicate where it collected its version of "Come by Here." For most of the other songs, it provided the name of an island, river, town, parish, or plantation. They were spread from the Santee River north of Charleston to Beaufort.

To know something about the performers then requires learning more about the Gullah-speaking slaves in coastal South Carolina than appeared in earlier posts. [1]

Lorenzo Dow Turner documented the presence of some 4,000 African words in Gullah in the early 1930s. His primary South Carolina sources were individuals living on Edisto Island, Saint Helena Island near Beaufort, and Johns and Wadmalaw islands near Charleston. He also talked to people from two other locations mentioned by the Charleston Society, Bluffton and James Island. [2]

P. E. H. Hair found 30% of the general terms Turner collected were used by the Yorùbá of modern Nigeria; 25% were from Sierra Leone, home of the Mende, and 20% were Kongo. More important, 65% of the words retained in ritual and narrative materials, like stories, songs, and prayers, were Mende. The Vai of neighboring, modern Liberia contributed 21%. [3]

This mirrors Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s analysis of shipping manifests in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. [4] From 1801 to 1807, most of the captives who arrived in Charleston were from Kongo, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast of modern Ghana. Between 1750 and 1775, when 43% of South Carolina and Georgia’s total slave population was imported, [5] the largest number came from modern Sénégal-Gambia and Sierra Leone. The Gold Coast and Kongo were a distant third and fourth. [6]

These groups came from different parts of the continent, and had cultures that began developing at different times. The earliest evidence for humanoid evolution has been found in Ethiopia by archaeologists. Lucy’s remains were discovered in 1974 by Donald Johansen in the Afar section of the Great Rift Valley. [7]

Geneticists attempted to define what happened next by looking at genomes that could be distinguished by particular clusters of mutations called haplogroups. Those based on variations associated with the paternal Y chromosome located the center of diversity in Cameroon, the silver star on the map below. [8]

Scientists assigned letters in chronological order, so that the A group was the earliest. The current location of individuals carrying that genome was only a relic of the past. New groups tended to displace earlier ones that then survived in remote areas. The large A area along the southeastern Atlantic coast coincided with the Kalahari Desert.

After the migration out of Africa during the Ice Age that led to the development of the C and D groups, the next major mutation emerged with the E group in Ethiopia. It eventually filled the continent.

Linguists’ attempts at reconstructing the development of African languages created a more nuanced interpretation of the movement of the E group. As shown in the map below, the A haplogroup appeared as the light-yellow population of Khoi-San speakers.

The primary language family of group E in sub-Saharan African was the Niger-Congo that spanned the area below the Sénégal river east along the Niger to the drainage of the Congo. [9] Kay Williamson argued that, "on the basis of the principle of least moves," the original homeland was the confluence on the Benue and Niger rivers at Lokoja in central Nigeria. From there its speakers spread west, east, and south subdividing as they migrated. [10]

As succeeding groups moved west they either absorbed the earlier populations or forced them to relocate. Thus, three major Niger-Congo subfamilies appear in the map for western Africa.

To the west of the Volta subgroups, the rose-colored Mandé was a separate, coherent clade.

Gerrit Dimmendaal and Anne Storch suggested "The internal diversification within Greenberg’s West Atlantic (or Atlantic in current terminology) indeed was so huge that some scholars would argue that it is primarily an areal grouping representing a number of independent, early descendants of Niger-Congo." [11]

David Sapir found enough commonalities within the Atlantic group to propose two sub-groups an early Southern Mel, and a later Northern Mel. [12] Gola was part of the earlier group that was expanding "about 2500 years ago" in what is now Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. [13]

The migration south by the Bantu (tan on the map) came after the moves west. One characteristic of linguistic and genetic evolution was greater diversity in earlier areas than later zones, simply because not enough time had passed for variation to develop in the younger regions.

Graphics
1. U. S. Geological Survey, National Atlas. "Average Rainfall for South Carolina." Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Thegreatdr on 18 March 2008. The dark area near the coast where tidal rice was grown is the darker green.

Total of spirituals collected along the Santee River includes Santee River.

Charleston includes Back River, Charleston, Cooper River, Grayton Hall, Goose Creek, James Island, Red Top.

Edisto Island includes Christ Church Parish, Edisto Island, and Saint Andrews Parish.

Beaufort includes Ashepoo River Plantation, Beaufort, Bluffton, and Tomotley Plantation.

Berkeley County includes Pinopolis and Upper St Johns Parish.

Hampton County includes McPhersonville and Pocotaligo.

No location mentioned: 6
Two locations mentioned: 6

2. Section of Irish. "World Map of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups - Dominant Haplogroups in Pre-Colonial Populations with Possible Migrations Routes." Wikimedia Commons. 6 July 2018.

3. Ulamm. "Niger-Congo Languages." Wikimedia Commons. 28 October 2007.

End Notes
1. The Charleston Society and the development of rice plantations in South Carolina were discussed in a series posted between 6 January 2019 and 20 January 2019. Gullah was described in the post for 6 January 2019.

2. Lorenzo Dow Turner. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 edition. Gullah vocabulary, chapter 3; list of informants, 291-292. He also collected from people living along the Georgia coast and on its islands.

3. P. E. H. Hair. "Sierra Leone Items in the Gullah Dialect of American English." Sierra Leone Language Review 4:79-84:1965.

4. David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

5. 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 (2007): 1329–1358, table 1. The other 57% was spread over one hundred thirty years.

6. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. "Figure 4.1. Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages to South Carolina (1701-1807)." 94 in Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

7. Wikipedia. "Lucy (Australopithecus)."
8. Wikipedia. "Haplogroup."

9. John T. Bendor-Samuel. "Niger-Congo languages." Encyclopædia Britannica website. 26 July 1999; last updated 21 November 2017.

10. Kay Williamson’s work evolved in a number of papers including "Towards reconstructing Proto-Niger-Congo." 49-70 in Proceedings of the 2nd World Congress of African Linguistics, Leipzig 1997. Edited by H. E. Wolff and O. Gensler. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2000.

11. Gerrit J. Dimmendaal and Anne Storch. "Niger-Congo: A Brief State of the Art." Oxford Handbooks Online. February 2016. Joseph H. Greenberg created the first accepted taxonomy in The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1963.

12. J. D. Sapir. "West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages, Their Noun Class Systems and Consonant Alteration." Current Trends in Linguistics 7:45-112:1971. Discussed by B. W. Andah. "The Peoples of Upper Guinea (between the Ivory Coast and the Casamance)." 530-558 in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. Edited by M. El Fasi. Paris: UNESCO, 1988. 539.

13. Andah. 552.

Robert Winslow Gordon

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
Robert Winslow Gordon collected four songs with "come by here" south of Savannah near the mouth of the Altamaha river in 1926. He then was living in Darien, and did most of collecting within an hour’s drive. [1] Darien was the county seat of McIntosh County, shown in red in the map.

He had begun his folk-music studies at Harvard with George Kittredge. [2] Gordon took a job at Berkeley in 1917, where he collected shanties from local seamen. During his 1925 sabbatical leave, he sought folk songs in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1926, he rejoined his wife in Darien. [3]

Deborah Kodish said Gordon became friendly with a deaconess in a Darien African-American church, who introduced him to other singers. He established more credibility when he treated a rattlesnake bite for the uncle of a woman who worked for his wife. [4]

I suspect he also was able to interview other people who had worked for his wife’s family. His father-in-law, Robert Porter Paul, had been secretary-treasurer for the Hilton and Dodge Lumber Company [5] that one time had been "the largest timber firm on the U. S. east coast." [6] When a Hilton girl married a prominent politician, wedding guests stayed at Paul’s house. [7] It probably was one of many times the family hired local African-Americans to supplement its household staff.

Thomas Hilton’s mother’s brother was the first to arrive in the United States as a machinery salesman in the 1830s. [8] Robert Lachlison probably was from Preston, a major textile town in Lancashire. While his son was born in Charleston in 1837, [9] he settled in Philadelphia where he and his brother James had a machine shop. [10] Later they all moved to Savannah.

Thomas Hilton migrated to Darien in 1855, [11] after a long strike in Preston. [12] His parents followed. His father, also Thomas, built a sawmill on Cat Head Creek. [13]

After the Civil War, Hilton built a new mill with his father and brother. In the early years, farmers up the Altamaha cut trees, lashed them into rafts, and floated them down to Darien where the Hiltons bought them. [14]

Meantime, the president of the Macon and Brunswick Railroad suggested a northern lumberman buy 300,000 acres of woodland on tributaries of the Altamaha. William Dodge built two mills to ship wood to the coast. It also floated logs to Darien where they were moved to his mill on Saint Simons Island. [15] Dodge died in 1883, [16] and his son Norman merged with Hilton in 1889. [17]

The racial composition of the labor force rarely was mentioned by historians. Small land owners disputed the titles purchased by Dodge’s Georgia Land and Lumber, [18] which made it hard to recruit them as workers. Dodge sent sawyers from his closed mill in Pennsylvania, and, by 1889, was using convict labor. [19] The company also recruited African-Americans from North Carolina for its turpentine works. [20]

Animosities never subsided in the area, and broke into a race riot in Eastman in 1882. It occurred during an African-American camp meeting that attracted 3,000. [21] I found nothing on the internet to identify the sponsors. Many came by excursion trains that may have been provided by the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad. It had purchased the Macon and Brunswick the previous year [22] and was working to increase its revenues. [23]

The coastal population was overwhelmingly African American, and so were the men who worked in the mills. Buddy Sullivan said in 1870 "blacks held 67 of the 76 jobs in the labor positions at sawmills around Darien and Duboy Island" where Hilton had operations. [24]

Similarly, writers for Coastal Illustrated found, on Saint Simons Island in 1900, "the majority of African Americans were farmers, farm laborers, or day-laborers. Prince Williams was an engineer at the sawmill while forty others listed their occupations as laborers at the sawmill." [25]

Thomas’s son Joseph remembered in 1951, after the sawmills had closed, that "these old mills in good locations, particularly Lower Bluff and St. Simons, had crews, many of whom, both white and colored, had never worked anywhere else—just grown up there. Most of them owned their own homes." [26]

The day laborers mentioned by Coastal Illustrated probably included the men who worked on the wharves. Lydia Parrish was told:

"Ships from everywhere came for the sawed lumber. Julia once told me she had seen as many as thirty-five vessels lined up at The Mills in the days when the Hilton-Dodge Lumber Company was at the peak of its production. [. . .] as many as twenty-five Negroes would ‘roll ballast’–which means, as can be imagined, that the stones with which the windjammers came loaded were landed at temporary dock, and rolled in wheelbarrows to waste land." [27]

Joseph recalled:

"The boss stevedores were men of brawn and skill. The stevedore ‘hands’ as all laborers about loading jobs, booms and saw mills were called, were all colored, carefully picked and trained, many being wonderful physical specimens.

"Each gang of stevedore hands had a leader who sang a line of a chantey song, the others coming in on the short chorus, then with a ‘Ho’ all heaved together on the big stick in perfect time. This same system of singing when the combined efforts of a gang was needed to move heavy timbers, was used in loading coastwise vessels, and I never heard of a boss stevedore interrupting it." [28]

Parrish gathered information on stowing lumber, and asked men to sing some of the songs they had used. [29]

Joseph remembered the stevedores "lived in different places, some in or near Darien, others at a settlement beyond The Ridge, known as ‘Connigan Bridge’ and a settlement on the northern end of Sapelo Island, called ‘Sapelo High Point’." [30]

The good lumber was nearly gone in 1900. [31] Hilton and Dodge absorbed its rivals, [32] while cutting back production. [33] Skilled loggers and sawmill workers probably began moving to other states that were hiring. The company closed in 1916.

Joseph said he worked for others and that, at one mill upriver from Savannah, "most of the top jobs at this place were filled by men from our old mills on the coast." [34] By 1920, only two men on Saint Simons worked in a sawmill. [35]

Graphics
David Benbennick. "Map of Georgia highlighting McIntosh County." Wikimedia Commons. 12 February 2006.

End Notes
1. Deborah G. Kodish. "Introduction." Folk-Songs of America: The Robert Winslow Gordon Collection 1922-1932. Washington: Library of Congress, 1978.

2. Wikipedia. "George Lyman Kittredge." He was mentioned in the posts for 23 January 2019 and 27 January 2019.

3. Kodish.
4. Kodish.

5. Robert P. Paul, Secretary and Treasurer. Letter to Corp of Engineers, 18 November 1886. In Annual Report of the Chief of Engineers, United States Army, to the Secretary of War, for the Year 1887. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887. Part 2. 1202–1203. Paul died in 1914.

6. Buddy Sullivan. Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater. Darien, Georgia: McIntosh County Board of Commissioners, 1990. 441.

7. The Atlanta Constitution. January 3, 1892. 15.

8. Thomas Hilton. "High Water on the Bar." Savannah: 1951. 51–66 in Buddy Sullivan. High Water on the Bar. Darien: The Darien News, 2009. 51.

9. "Lachlison, James." Georgia Historical Society website.

10. William Harden. "Capt. James Lachlison Foster." 2:987–988 in A History of Savannah and South Georgia. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1913. 2:987.

11. "Hilton Family Papers." Georgia Historical Society website.
12. Wikipedia. "Preston, Lancashire."
13. Hilton. 52.
14. Sullivan, Early Days. 349–350, 444.

15. Wilber W. Caldwell. The Courthouse and the Depot. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001. 250.

16. Caldwell. 251.
17. Harden. "Joseph Hilton," 2:715–716. 2:716.
18. Scott Thompson. "The Dodge Lands." Pieces of Our Past website. 25 July 2009.

19. Mark V. Wetherington. The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 130.

20. Wetherington. 119.

21. Lucian Lamar Knight. Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials, and Legends. Atlanta: Byrd Printing Company, 1913. 706.

22. Wikipedia. "Macon and Brunswick Railroad."
23. Caldwell said activities by the East Tennessee set off a "new wave of lumbering" (251).
24. Sullivan, Early Days. 333.
25. "Forgotten Past." Coastal Illustrated. 25 January 2012. 12.
26. Hilton. 62.

27. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 200–201. Her source was Julia Armstrong.

28. Hilton. 58.

29. Parrish. On stowing lumber, 202; "Call Me Hangin’ Johnny" used to load lumber, 203; "Pay Me My Money Down," 208; "Raggedy Leevy" used to block lumber, 212; "Anniebelle" to load lumber, 222.

30. Hilton. 58. The Ridge was higher land above Darien. Thomas moved his family there to avoid diseases bred in the rice field (Hilton, 54). The Pauls also lived there [7].

31. Sullivan, Early Days. 351.
32. Harden. "Joseph Hilton," 2:716-717. 2:717
33. Sullivan, Early Days. 542, 561.
34. Hilton. 64.
35. Coastal Illustrated.

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.