Topic: Folk Music Revival
Peter the Great was the first Russian monarch to recognize his empire needed a distinct identity. [1] Marina Ritzarev said, when historians researched the origins of Rus’ leaders, they discovered the early princes were Varangians, and suppressed the facts. In place of Vikings, the people, especially those in the vicinity of Moscow, were accorded the status of progenitors. [2]
These were the folk whose music was used by Mikhail Glinka [3] a few years after Nicholas I implemented his policy of Official Nationality. [4] Collections, like one made by Nikolai Lvov in 1790, [5] were intended to emphasize "kindred, rather than alien characteristics." [6] The music reflected the aesthetics of an audience no more than one generation removed from rural villages. [7]
The nature of the urban population began to change with the introduction of textile manufacturing. Old Believers, who had been banished in 1667 during the reign of Alexis I, [8] were operating cotton, silk, and woolen mills in Moscow in 1832. [9] The Bremen-born Ludwig Knoop opened his first mill in Moscow in 1840. His operations expanded after the United Kingdom lifted its ban on the export of tools used by textile factories in 1842. [10]
Rural society changed when Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861. They still were forced to stay on the land and operate through commune leaders, but they no longer were subject to arbitrary demands by estate owners who took the profits from their initiatives [11] to finance lifestyles that proved the nobles’ loyalty to the tsar by imitating his court. [12]
Even before 1861, Mily Balakirev was changing the definition of national music from that of the peasants to that which made Russia different from Prussia, England, and France. [13] In 1862, the disciple of Glinka went to the Caucasus to collection folk music. [14] One work song from his home province of Nizhny Novgorod became famous in 1902 when it was recorded by Feodor Chaliapin [15] as the "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." [16]
The interest in music from remote areas of the Empire increased in 1884 when the Russian Geographic Society organized a Folk Song Commission. It sent its first collecting expedition to the Archangel area in 1886. [17] Balakirev was on the organization’s board. [18]
Just a few years before, Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated, and his son Alexander III condoned anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland and Ukraine. [19] He demanded everyone speak Russian and convert to the Russian Orthodox church. [20] Anyone who was a little bit liberal became suspect.
Evgenia Lineva and her husband fled to London in 1890, then resettled in New York. The student of Glinka organized Ukrainian and Russian immigrants in a choir that performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 in peasant costumes. They were accompanied by an orchestra and featured male dancers. [21]
Alexander III died in 1894, and his son, Nicholas II, allowed the Linevas to return in 1896. [22] She spent some time with the Musico-Ethnographic Commission that had been organized at the University of Moscow in 1901. [23] Chaliapin took Mitrofan Pyatnitsky to a meeting, and the latter began collecting in his home province of Voronezh. He eventually brought singers from the village to perform for the commission. [24]
World War I ended folk song collecting. Members of Pyatnitsky’s group were drafted, and, after the Revolution, disagreed with one another and dispersed. He formed a new choir with people who had moved to Moscow from "remote villages." [25] This coincided with the formation of "thousands of choruses" by workers’ clubs who sang political words to "old popular tunes and folk songs." [26]
In 1928, Josef Stalin implemented his First Five-Year Plan to industrialize the country. To free individuals to work in factories, he appropriated farm land, destroyed the largest landowners, and settled the rest on collective farms. [27]
The same year, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians was formed to weed out "the anti-proletarian and the counter-revolutionary elements" in contemporary music. [28] In 1930, the All-Russian Choir Conference "voted to liquidate peasant choruses, deeming them ‘alien, harmful, corrupting to the class consciousness of participants and listeners.’" [29] Peasant music programming on radio stopped in 1929, and traditional music was banned in 1930. [30]
Pyatnitsky had died in 1927 and bequeathed his choir to his nephew. [31] The choir survived the general purge because it was too popular. Still, the choir modified its repertoire to fit Soviet requirements after a member of the Proletarian Musicians association [32] joined the group in 1931. [33]
At the end of five years, the Central Committee of the Communist Party abolished the existing artistic organizations, and replaced them with creative unions. [34] The new musicians’ group was dominated by conservatory-trained men who decreed any professional musician must be able to read music notation and be familiar with the classics. [35]
Two years later, in 1934, Maxim Gorky exhorted attendees of the First Congress of Soviet Writers to use folklore motifs to create socialist realism. [36] Choirs again were encouraged, [37] and amateurs were expected "involve themselves in the creation of art, thus demonstrating that each individual was fully self-actualized and active in the work of building the ideal society." [38] Textual content was controlled by bringing the best singers and writers to Moscow for indoctrination. [39]
The Pyatnitsky peasant chorus became the Pyatnitsky Russian Folk or Popular Choir in 1936. [40] Singers were trained to read music, and the improvisational element that Pyatnitsky had encouraged was restricted to a few soloists. [41] An orchestra and dance troop was added in 1938. [42] In seeking to reach the mass audience defined by the Communist Party, it recapitulated Lineova’s evolution in the Unites States in 1893.
End Notes
1. Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014. 3. This article was based on "The Conflict between Nationalistic and Pluralistic Traditions in Russian Musical Narratives." International Society for the Study of European Ideas. Haifa University. August 1998.
2. Ritzarev. 4.
3. Glinka was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
4. Peter the Great was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
5. Ivan Pratsch. Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes. Saint Petersburg: 1790. Prach was the arranger. Lvov’s name was added on later editions.
6. Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 16.
7. Richard Taruskin. "N. A. Lvov and the Folk." 3-24 in Defining Russia Musically. 20. Lvov and Pratsch collected "their material wherever they encountered it, chiefly in St. Petersburg and the city’s immediate vicinity — and not only from the urbanized peasants (servants and laborers) who might have been expected to retain some vestige of rural traditions, but from their own friends and acquaintances."
8. Wikipedia. "Old Believers."
9. Danila Raskov and Vadim Kufenko. "The Role of Old Believers’ Enterprises: Evidence from the Nineteenth Century Moscow Textile Industry." 7 May 2014. Carl von Ossietzky Universtät, Evangelisches Studienwerk website. 14.
10. Wikipedia. "Ludwig Knoop."
11. Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire." 27 January 2017. Moscow’s New Economic School website.
12. Markevich. 19. For instance, Balakirev’s first exposure to music came from performances staged by Alexander Ulybyshev, a local noble who maintained a private orchestra. [43]
13. Composers like Rimsky-Korsikov and Borodin pursued Balakirev’s ideas in their own ways. Balakirev later advised Tchaikovsky. [44]
14. Wikipedia. "Mily Balakirev."
15. Chaliapin was an operatic basso.
16. Wikipedia. "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." Nizhny Novgorod was not in the Caucasus.
17. Barbara Krader. "Folk Music Archive of the Moscow Conservatory, With a Brief History of Russian Field Recording." Indiana University website. 13. Based on I. K. Sviridova. Kabinet narodnoi muzyki. Moscow: Izd-vo Muzyka, 1966.
18. Krader. 13. This was the more conservative Balakirev who returned to public life after a period of isolation and depression [45] that began after Russia was defeated lost in the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1871. [46]
19. Wikipedia. "Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire."
20. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
21. Norman E. Saul. The Life and Times of Charles R. Crane, 1858–1939. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 44–45.
22. Saul. 46.
23. Krader. 14.
24. Elena Prokofieva. "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky - Peasant Choirmaster." The Third Age website. John Freedman brought this to my attention in "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky Bust and Monument, Voronezh." Russian Landmarks website. 25 June 2015.
25. Prokofieva.
26. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
27. Wikipedia. "First Five-year Plan."
28. "RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), Ideological Platform." 1929. Translated by Nicolas Slonimsky. Music since 1900. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). 1052–1055. Reprinted on Michigan State University, Soviet History website. Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov was more hostile to modern forms of music like jazz and compositions by Shostakovich.
29. Susannah Lockwood Smith. "Soviet Arts Policy, Folk Music, and National Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir, 1927-45." Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1997. 66. Cited by Pauline Fairclough. Classics for the Masses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. No page numbers in on-line edition.
30. Smith. 129.
31. Prokofieva. The nephew was Pyotr Mikhailovich Kazmin.
32. Wikipedia. "Vladimir Grigoryevich Zakharov." It said 1932.
33. Wikipedia. "Pyatnitsky Choir." It said 1931, as did Marina Frolova-Walker. Stalin’s Music Prize. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 184.
34. Kiril Tomoff. Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 13. It was the Decree on the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations. [47]
35. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2012. 116.
36. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" 21 September 2000. Semantic Scholar website. 3–4. Gorky’s speech is better than any of its precis. It’s available on the Marxist.org website. Its source was Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. 25–69.
37. Olson. 3.
38. Smith. 160. Cited by Olson. 11.
39. Stites. 72.
40. Smith. 127–128. Cited by Olson. 14. The Russian word was "narodnyi."
41. Smith. 123. Cited by Olson. 14–15. he did not rehearse his peasant chorus. Instead he told them to "sing it, as you sing on your bench and in a round dance." [48]
42. Frolova-Walker. 184.
43. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
44. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
45. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
46. Wikipedia. "Franco-Prussian War."
47. Wikipedia. "Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians."
48. Prokofieva.
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Folk Revival - Russia
Topic: Folk Music Revival
English religious reformers were not the only ones to ban music because it was used by the Roman Catholic Church. [1] In 1648, the Russian Orthodox church pressured Alexis I to proscribe musical instruments. [2] The church had been combating the power of the minstrels [3] who arranged weddings and dances. [4] The patriarchy claimed all instruments and dances were pagan practices. [5]
Alexei Mikhailovich’s son, Peter the Great, neutered the church and introduced western ideas to modernize the economy and military. He defined four layers of society, the court, the nobility who were obliged to serve, the town that was restricted to trades, and the peasants whom he converted into serfs tied to the estates of nobles. [6]
By the time of Catherine the Great, each stratum had developed its own musical culture. [7] William Coxe observed the vocal traditions in the countryside during his visit in the late 1770s. He noted men sang while they worked and engaged in a form of chanting dialogue. [8] He was told people used prose lyrics and simple melodies that allowed "infinite variation." [9] More extraordinary to him were coachmen and soldiers who "performed occasionally in parts." [10]
Towns had been transformed by the acquisition of parts of Ukraine beginning with the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav. [11] Musicians exposed to western music gravitated to the centers of power, where "peasants arriving from the different regions brought with them their own repertoires and the open air became a living laboratory where traditions interacted and the peasant songs, detached from the ritual, became urbanized." [12]
Nikolai Novikov opened bookstores and solicited anthologies of popular poetry. Mikhail Chulkov produced a collection that included both new and traditional songs in 1770. [13] They were described simply as "various songs" with no reference to provenance. [14]
Peter’s niece, Anna Ioannovna, introduced Italian opera in 1736. [15] Vasily Trutovsky went to the court of Empress Elizabeth from the Ukraine in 1761 [16] as an instrumentalist paid by the budget for the Italian Company, [17] and remained when Catherine the Great took the throne in 1762.
As the empire absorbed more parts of Europe, Catherine began emphasizing a Russian national identity. Trutovsky [18] set some songs collected by Chulov to simple melodies in what was the first attempt to transcribe native music. [19] Marina Ritzarev noted he called his 1776 collection "Ruskaya" rather than "Rosskaya." The second referred to the urban music, while he alluded to the "authentic, pure Russian, old and peasant folk songs." [20]
Trutovsky’s first volume was published after James MacPherson’s 1760 Ossian collection and Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [21] but before Herder published his first collection of Volkslieder in 1778. [22]
Conditions changed in Russia after Napoléon. Nicholas I was married to the daughter of Friedrich Wilhem III of Prussia. He followed the German-speaking princes in closing universities to French ideas. [23] After Poles rebelled against him in 1831, [24] the minister of popular enlightenment decreed:
"our common obligation consists in this, that the education of the people be conducted, according to the Supreme intention of our August Monarch, in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality." [25]
Richard Taruskin said the legend of Ivan Susanin, a peasant who died protecting the tsar from a Polish search party in the 1600s, became especially popular after the defeat of Napoléon in the War of 1812. [26]
It was in this atmosphere that Mikhail Glinka mounted his first opera in 1836. His family descended from Polish-Lithuanian noblemen in Ukraine where he heard village music as a child. He studied music in Saint Petersburg as an adolescent and visited Italy. [27] When he mentioned a desire to create a uniquely Russian opera, the tutor to the tsar’s son recommended Susanin. [28] The heir and his secretary provided most of the libretto. [29]
Taruskin noted Glinka did more than provide propaganda with a sprinkling of folk tunes in The Life of the Tsar. By using only peasant characters, he was able to incorporate elements of traditional music into the Italian form, [30] including 5/4 rhythms from village weddings songs [31] and Russian Orthodox antiphony. [32] The most interesting adoption was his use of recitatives, rather than spoken dialogue. [33] The chanted passages recalled Coxe’s earlier observation on singing style.
Glinka’s second opera added parallel octaves [34] and whole tone scales. [35] Ruslan and Lyudmila was disliked by the Nicholas Pavlovich, and his Saint Petersburg courtiers when it opened in 1842, but was staged again in Moscow in 1846. [36] Without imperial protection, it was exposed to swirling political conflicts at the time when loyalty to Russia was being changed from loyalty to the people to loyalty to the state by Nicholas. [37]
Life was criticized by Alexy Nikolayevich Verstovsky because it did not contain enough authentic folk material. [38] Faddei Benediktovich Bulgarin did not believe court music, like Ruslan, should absorb local idioms. [39]
Later composers stayed away from folk song texts that could attract the interest of censors. Instead, they adopted themes from Russian folk tales for instrumental music that incorporated traditional elements, like Ruslan. [40] Glinka’s synthesis became the inspiration for Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and, later, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. [41]
End Notes
1. The English reformers attitudes toward music were discussed in the posts for 5 August 2018 and 9 December 2018.
2. Marina Ritzarev. Eighteenth-Century Russian Music. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2006; 2016 Rutledge edition. 21.
3. Minstrels were the Skomorokh. Ritzarev discussed them in Russian Music. 16–22.
4. This was similar to the practice of Roman Catholics prosecuting their rivals as witches.
5. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 16.
6. B. H. Sumner. Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia. London: English Universities Press, 1960. 158. Cited by Wikipedia. "Government Reform of Peter the Great."
7. Marina Ritzarev. "Russian Music before Glinka: A Look from the Beginning of the Third Millennium." Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online. 2002. 12.
8. William Coxe. Travels Into Poland Russia Sweden And Denmark. London: printed for T. Cadell, 1792. 2:209. Ritzarev brought this to my attention in Russian Music. 142. Her source was Alfred Swain. Russian Music and Its Sources in Chant and Folk-song. London: John Baker, 1973. 52.
9. Coxe. 210.
10. Coxe. 209.
11. Wikipedia. "History of Ukraine" and "Cossacks." This was followed in 1667 by the Truce of Andrusovo that ceded Kiev and Smolensk to Russia. [42]
12. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 142.
13. Mikhail Dmitrievich Chulkov. Sobranie raznykh pesen. Saint Petersburg: 1770.
14. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 142–143.
15. Ritzarev, Glinka. 11.
16. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 56.
17. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 75.
18. Vasily Fyodorovich Trutovsky. Sobraniye russkikh prostïkh pesen s notami. Saint Petersburg: 1776.
19. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 152.
20. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 151.
21. These were discussed in the post for 7 April 2019.
22. This was discussed in the post for 14 April 2019.
23. Wikipedia. "Nicholas I of Russia."
24. Wikipedia, Nicholas I.
25. Sergey Semyonovich Uvarov. Quoted by Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 26.
26. Taruskin. 28.
27. Wikipedia. "Mikhail Glinka."
28. Taruskin. 27. Vasiliy Andreyevich Zhukovsky was a poet [43] and "an official censor" who maintained a "literary salon" in Saint Petersburg. [44]
29. Taruskin. 28. Neil Cornwell said Vladimir Odoeysky was the one who recommended Yegor Fydorovich Rozen for the libretto. [45]
30. Taruskin. 34.
31. Taruskin. 31.
32. Richard Anthony Leonard. A History of Russian Music. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968. 46. Cited by Cory McKay. "Nationalism in Glinka’s Operas." 2001. McGill University, Schulich School of Music website. 2.
33. David Brown. Mikhail Glinka. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. 121.
34. Leonard. 51. Cited by McKay. 6.
35. Brown. 202.
36. Wikipedia. Ruslan and Lyudmila (Opera)."
37. Taruskin. 26.
38. Taruskin. 41–42.
39. Neil Cornwell. V. F. Odoevsky. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. 137.
40. Ruslan and Lyudmila was based on a fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin.
41. Brown. 2.
42. Wikipedia. "History of Kiev."
43. Wikipedia. "Vasily Zhukovsky."
44. Taruskin. 27.
45. Cornwell. 137.
English religious reformers were not the only ones to ban music because it was used by the Roman Catholic Church. [1] In 1648, the Russian Orthodox church pressured Alexis I to proscribe musical instruments. [2] The church had been combating the power of the minstrels [3] who arranged weddings and dances. [4] The patriarchy claimed all instruments and dances were pagan practices. [5]
Alexei Mikhailovich’s son, Peter the Great, neutered the church and introduced western ideas to modernize the economy and military. He defined four layers of society, the court, the nobility who were obliged to serve, the town that was restricted to trades, and the peasants whom he converted into serfs tied to the estates of nobles. [6]
By the time of Catherine the Great, each stratum had developed its own musical culture. [7] William Coxe observed the vocal traditions in the countryside during his visit in the late 1770s. He noted men sang while they worked and engaged in a form of chanting dialogue. [8] He was told people used prose lyrics and simple melodies that allowed "infinite variation." [9] More extraordinary to him were coachmen and soldiers who "performed occasionally in parts." [10]
Towns had been transformed by the acquisition of parts of Ukraine beginning with the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav. [11] Musicians exposed to western music gravitated to the centers of power, where "peasants arriving from the different regions brought with them their own repertoires and the open air became a living laboratory where traditions interacted and the peasant songs, detached from the ritual, became urbanized." [12]
Nikolai Novikov opened bookstores and solicited anthologies of popular poetry. Mikhail Chulkov produced a collection that included both new and traditional songs in 1770. [13] They were described simply as "various songs" with no reference to provenance. [14]
Peter’s niece, Anna Ioannovna, introduced Italian opera in 1736. [15] Vasily Trutovsky went to the court of Empress Elizabeth from the Ukraine in 1761 [16] as an instrumentalist paid by the budget for the Italian Company, [17] and remained when Catherine the Great took the throne in 1762.
As the empire absorbed more parts of Europe, Catherine began emphasizing a Russian national identity. Trutovsky [18] set some songs collected by Chulov to simple melodies in what was the first attempt to transcribe native music. [19] Marina Ritzarev noted he called his 1776 collection "Ruskaya" rather than "Rosskaya." The second referred to the urban music, while he alluded to the "authentic, pure Russian, old and peasant folk songs." [20]
Trutovsky’s first volume was published after James MacPherson’s 1760 Ossian collection and Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [21] but before Herder published his first collection of Volkslieder in 1778. [22]
Conditions changed in Russia after Napoléon. Nicholas I was married to the daughter of Friedrich Wilhem III of Prussia. He followed the German-speaking princes in closing universities to French ideas. [23] After Poles rebelled against him in 1831, [24] the minister of popular enlightenment decreed:
"our common obligation consists in this, that the education of the people be conducted, according to the Supreme intention of our August Monarch, in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality." [25]
Richard Taruskin said the legend of Ivan Susanin, a peasant who died protecting the tsar from a Polish search party in the 1600s, became especially popular after the defeat of Napoléon in the War of 1812. [26]
It was in this atmosphere that Mikhail Glinka mounted his first opera in 1836. His family descended from Polish-Lithuanian noblemen in Ukraine where he heard village music as a child. He studied music in Saint Petersburg as an adolescent and visited Italy. [27] When he mentioned a desire to create a uniquely Russian opera, the tutor to the tsar’s son recommended Susanin. [28] The heir and his secretary provided most of the libretto. [29]
Taruskin noted Glinka did more than provide propaganda with a sprinkling of folk tunes in The Life of the Tsar. By using only peasant characters, he was able to incorporate elements of traditional music into the Italian form, [30] including 5/4 rhythms from village weddings songs [31] and Russian Orthodox antiphony. [32] The most interesting adoption was his use of recitatives, rather than spoken dialogue. [33] The chanted passages recalled Coxe’s earlier observation on singing style.
Glinka’s second opera added parallel octaves [34] and whole tone scales. [35] Ruslan and Lyudmila was disliked by the Nicholas Pavlovich, and his Saint Petersburg courtiers when it opened in 1842, but was staged again in Moscow in 1846. [36] Without imperial protection, it was exposed to swirling political conflicts at the time when loyalty to Russia was being changed from loyalty to the people to loyalty to the state by Nicholas. [37]
Life was criticized by Alexy Nikolayevich Verstovsky because it did not contain enough authentic folk material. [38] Faddei Benediktovich Bulgarin did not believe court music, like Ruslan, should absorb local idioms. [39]
Later composers stayed away from folk song texts that could attract the interest of censors. Instead, they adopted themes from Russian folk tales for instrumental music that incorporated traditional elements, like Ruslan. [40] Glinka’s synthesis became the inspiration for Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and, later, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. [41]
End Notes
1. The English reformers attitudes toward music were discussed in the posts for 5 August 2018 and 9 December 2018.
2. Marina Ritzarev. Eighteenth-Century Russian Music. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2006; 2016 Rutledge edition. 21.
3. Minstrels were the Skomorokh. Ritzarev discussed them in Russian Music. 16–22.
4. This was similar to the practice of Roman Catholics prosecuting their rivals as witches.
5. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 16.
6. B. H. Sumner. Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia. London: English Universities Press, 1960. 158. Cited by Wikipedia. "Government Reform of Peter the Great."
7. Marina Ritzarev. "Russian Music before Glinka: A Look from the Beginning of the Third Millennium." Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online. 2002. 12.
8. William Coxe. Travels Into Poland Russia Sweden And Denmark. London: printed for T. Cadell, 1792. 2:209. Ritzarev brought this to my attention in Russian Music. 142. Her source was Alfred Swain. Russian Music and Its Sources in Chant and Folk-song. London: John Baker, 1973. 52.
9. Coxe. 210.
10. Coxe. 209.
11. Wikipedia. "History of Ukraine" and "Cossacks." This was followed in 1667 by the Truce of Andrusovo that ceded Kiev and Smolensk to Russia. [42]
12. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 142.
13. Mikhail Dmitrievich Chulkov. Sobranie raznykh pesen. Saint Petersburg: 1770.
14. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 142–143.
15. Ritzarev, Glinka. 11.
16. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 56.
17. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 75.
18. Vasily Fyodorovich Trutovsky. Sobraniye russkikh prostïkh pesen s notami. Saint Petersburg: 1776.
19. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 152.
20. Ritzarev, Russian Music. 151.
21. These were discussed in the post for 7 April 2019.
22. This was discussed in the post for 14 April 2019.
23. Wikipedia. "Nicholas I of Russia."
24. Wikipedia, Nicholas I.
25. Sergey Semyonovich Uvarov. Quoted by Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 26.
26. Taruskin. 28.
27. Wikipedia. "Mikhail Glinka."
28. Taruskin. 27. Vasiliy Andreyevich Zhukovsky was a poet [43] and "an official censor" who maintained a "literary salon" in Saint Petersburg. [44]
29. Taruskin. 28. Neil Cornwell said Vladimir Odoeysky was the one who recommended Yegor Fydorovich Rozen for the libretto. [45]
30. Taruskin. 34.
31. Taruskin. 31.
32. Richard Anthony Leonard. A History of Russian Music. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968. 46. Cited by Cory McKay. "Nationalism in Glinka’s Operas." 2001. McGill University, Schulich School of Music website. 2.
33. David Brown. Mikhail Glinka. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. 121.
34. Leonard. 51. Cited by McKay. 6.
35. Brown. 202.
36. Wikipedia. Ruslan and Lyudmila (Opera)."
37. Taruskin. 26.
38. Taruskin. 41–42.
39. Neil Cornwell. V. F. Odoevsky. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. 137.
40. Ruslan and Lyudmila was based on a fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin.
41. Brown. 2.
42. Wikipedia. "History of Kiev."
43. Wikipedia. "Vasily Zhukovsky."
44. Taruskin. 27.
45. Cornwell. 137.
Sunday, June 23, 2019
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."
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."
Sunday, June 16, 2019
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.
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.
Sunday, June 9, 2019
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.
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.
Sunday, June 2, 2019
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.
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.
Sunday, May 26, 2019
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.
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.
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