Three Peoples, One King
Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the American Revolutionary South, 1775–1782
James Piecuch
A new understanding of the wartime roles and fates of three groups who stood with Britain against colonial rebels
ABOUT THE BOOK
Three Peoples, One King explores the contributions and conjoined fates of Loyalists, Indians, and slaves who stood with the British Empire in the Deep South colonies during the American Revolution. Challenging the traditional view that British efforts to regain control of the southern colonies were undermined by a lack of local support, Jim Piecuch demonstrates the breadth of loyal assistance provided by these three groups in South Carolina, Georgia, and East and West Florida. Piecuch attributes the ultimate failure of the Crown's southern campaign to the ruthless program of violent suppression of Loyalist forces carried out by the revolutionaries and Britain's inability to capitalize fully on the support available. In the process of revisiting some cherished opinions respecting the Revolution, Piecuch provides a compelling alternative to long-held notions of heroism and villainy in America's war for independence.Covering the period from 1775 to 1782, Piecuch systematically surveys the roles of these three groups—Loyalists, Indians, and slaves—across the southernmost colonies to illustrate the investments each had in allying with the British, their interconnected efforts on behalf of their king, and the high price they paid for their loyalty during and after the war. In honing his focus on the Deep South, where British forces struggled to maintain control as their hold on the northern colonies waned and where some of the war's fiercest combat took place, Piecuch offers a sustained interpretation of the war from the British perspective.Although other studies have assessed the stance of white Loyalist militias and the efforts of revolutionaries to woo them or defeat them, Piecuch's is the first to offer a synthetic approach to all three Loyalist populations—white, black, and Native American—in the South during this era. He subjects each of the groups to intensive investigation, making new discoveries in the histories of escaped or liberated slaves, of still-powerful Indian tribes, and of the bitter legacies of white loyalism. He then employs an integrated approach that advances understanding of Britain's long hold on the South and the hardships experienced by those groups who were in varying degrees abandoned by the Crown in defeat. Aided by thirty-four illustrations and maps, Piecuch's pathbreaking study will appeal to scholars and students of American history as well as Revolutionary War enthusiasts open to hearing an opposing perspective.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Piecuch is an assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and the author of The Battle of Camden: A Documentary History. A former firefighter and newspaper journalist, he earned his M.A. in history from the University of New Hampshire and his Ph.D. degree from the College of William and Mary.
6 x 9, 456 pages, 34 illus.
cloth, $39.95s
ISBN 978-1-57003-737-5
July 2008
In Search of Ulster-Scots Land
The Birth and Geotheological Imagings of a Transatlantic People, 1603–1703
Barry Aron Vann
A cultural geographic view on Scots-Irish emigration from Ulster to the Bible Belt
ABOUT THE BOOK
Drawing insights from geography, history, social psychology, sociology, and theology, Barry Aron Vann investigates the ways in which Scottish Calvinism affected the sense of identity and the migrations of native Scots first to Ulster and then to the American South.Social and religious historians have conducted much research on Scottish colonial migrations to Ulster; however, there remains historical debate as to whether the Irish Sea in the seventeenth century was an intervening obstacle or a transportation artery. Vann presents a geographical perspective on the topic, showing that most population flows involving southwest Scotland during the first half of the seventeenth century were directed across the Irish Sea via centuries-old sea routes that had allowed for the formation of evolving cultural areas. As political or religious motivational factors presented themselves in the last half of that century, Vann holds, the established social and familial links stretched along those sea routes facilitated chain migration that led to the birth of a Protestant Ulster-Scots community. Vann also shows how this community constituted itself along religious and institutional rubrics of dissent from the Church of England, Church of Scotland, and Church of Ireland.Within a century of the birth of this "Ulster-Scots Land," five immigration waves to America served as conduits for diffusing significant elements of that culture to the upper American South, where the Scots-Irish presence helped to form the cultural area referred to as the Bible Belt. The resulting effects of this settlement are still observed in both public and private spaces. It is from this lineage that families including the Adairs, Grahams, Seviers, Crocketts, Voiles, Duncans, Boones, Morgans, McKarneys, McKameys, Collins, and Rogerses spilled over the Appalachian Mountains to establish communities that still bear their mark. Vann maps this significant portion of the South's ethnic mosaic to show the genesis of the educational, political, and religious institutions that stem from Ulster Scots' thought worlds. With such deeply ingrained values, the southern Scots-Irish have influenced the region's staunchly conservative belief system, political ideology, and landscapes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry Aron Vann is an associate professor of geography at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, where he also serves as the founding director of programs in Appalachian development studies, geography, and social studies. He is the author of Rediscovering the South's Celtic Heritage.
6 x 9, 256 pages, 12 illus.cloth, $39.95t
ISBN 978-1-57003-708-5
November
The Letters of Pierce Butler, 1790–1794
Nation Building and Enterprise in the New American Republic
Edited by Terry W. Lipscomb
A political insider's perspective on the inaugural Congresses from one of South Carolina's signers of the ConstitutionABOUT THE BOOKEnlivened by Irish humor and colorful turns of phrase, this collection of Pierce Butler's letters offers a new perspective on the most enigmatic of South Carolina's signers of the Constitution and on the formative years of the American republic. Describing Butler as an intriguing question mark among the founding fathers, Terry W. Lipscomb presents a cache of correspondence that covers the senator's service during the First, Second, and Third Congresses of the United States. In the first major collection of Butler's writings to be published in book form, Lipscomb offers a detailed biographical sketch of the man and explains the value of his letters—including correspondence to such contemporaries as George Washington, John Adams, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, Wade Hampton, Andrew Pickens, Charles Pinckney, James Gunn, and Archibald Maclaine.Lipscomb recounts Butler's rise to prominence, from his early days as an Irish-born officer in the British army to his marriage into the lowcountry's Middleton family. More Virginian than Charlestonian in his political views, Butler holds a place of notoriety as the delegate who pushed for the adoption of an electoral college and who allegedly wrote the Constitution's fugitive slave clause. Lipscomb shows Butler to have been a strict constitutional constructionist, a persistent advocate of religious liberty, and an admirer of the French Revolution. He also favored making government actions more transparent and pioneered the tactic of leaking privileged information.
Offering an insider's view of the early Senate at a time when it conducted its business behind closed doors, these letters present a new resource on the history of the young republic.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Terry W. Lipscomb has been associated with the South Carolina Department of Archives and History and the South Caroliniana Library for more than thirty-five years. His numerous previous publications include South Carolina in 1791: George Washington's Southern Tour and South Carolina Revolutionary War Battles: The Carolina Lowcountry, April 1775–June 1776 and the Battle of Fort Moultrie. Lipscomb was also a longtime editor of the colonial journals of the South Carolina General Assembly.
REVIEWS
"Terry Lipscomb's edition of Pierce Butler's letters provides a fascinating window into the politics and society of the early American republic. A proponent of what he called "pure republicanism," Senator Butler applauded the French Revolution and opposed the consolidating policies of treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton. Butler's letters go beyond commentary on foreign affairs and politics and contain rich detail on such diverse topics as religion, slavery, cotton agriculture, land speculation, diplomatic relations with Native Americans, and indebtedness and honor among gentlemen. This volume is a valuable resource for all scholars interested in this pivotal period in American history."—Gregory D. Massey, author of John Laurens and the American Revolution
"Amid a flurry of recent biographies of the great men who established the American republic, Terry Lipscomb's volume introduces us to a neglected Founding Father. Pierce Butler's letters reveal his role in the drafting of the Constitution and later, the myriad concerns troubling the nation's early years, including relations with European powers, Indian affairs, and divisive disputes about the meaning of the Constitution. The letters demonstrate that intrigue, factionalism, and the 'leaking' of anti-administration information—practices decried today—originated in the first Congress. In addition to providing a comprehensive biographical sketch of Butler as introduction, Lipscomb has augmented the letters with rich annotation that interprets the significance of this correspondence."—Edward J. Cashin, director of the Center for the Study of Georgia History, Augusta State University
6 x 9, 440 pagescloth, $39.95s
ISBN 978-1-57003-689-7
Landscape of Slavery
The Plantation in American Art
Edited by Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius
Foreword by Todd D. Smith
An interdisciplinary approach to the social history and impact of plantation images and art
ABOUT THE BOOK
Bridging art history and social history, Landscape of Slavery undertakes an original study of plantation images from the eighteenth century through the present to unravel the realities and mythology inherent in this complex and often provocative subject. Through eighty-three color plates, nineteen black-and-white illustrations, and six thematic essays, the collection examines depictions of plantation structures, plantation views, and related slave imagery and art in the context of the American landscape tradition, addressing the impact of these works on race relations in the United States. Created by artists as diverse as Thomas Coram, Louis Rémy Mignot, Dave "The Potter" Drake, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Thomas Hart Benton, Hale Woodruff, Aaron Douglas, Juan Logan, Joyce Scott, Carrie Mae Weems, Radcliffe Bailey, and Kara Walker, the wide range of objects discussed includes paintings, drawings, photographs, statuary, ceramics, and items of folk art.A genre predominantly tied to the American South, the plantation view has received slight attention in the study of American landscape art. Regarded by art historians as derivative of the early-eighteenth-century British estate view, the plantation image straddles the aesthetic boundary between topographical depiction and landscape painting. In recent years, however, plantation views have increasingly attracted the attention of social and cultural historians who have identified the genre as a rich source for exploring themes of wealth, power, race, memory, nostalgia, and conflict. Landscape of Slavery provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of the aesthetic motives and social uses of this art in the shaping of Southern history and culture. The contributors analyze depictions of white dominion, Southern affluence, and the idealizing nostalgia of the post-Civil War era as well as the black aesthetic that has developed as a dissident counterpoint to this tradition.Serving as a companion to a traveling exhibit of the same name, the volume includes a foreword by Todd D. Smith, executive director of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina; an introduction by editor and chief curator Angela D. Mack; and essays by John Michael Vlach, Roberta Sokolitz, Leslie King-Hammond, Maurie D. McInnis, Alexis L. Boylan, and Michael D. Harris.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Angela D. Mack is chief curator at the Gibbes Museum of Art. She has served as curator for numerous exhibitions and written or edited accompanying catalogs. Among her recent exhibitions are In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad: 1740–1860; Henry Benbridge (1743–1812): Charleston Painter; and Edward Hopper in Charleston.Steven G. Hoffius is a freelance writer and editor in Charleston. A graduate of Duke University, he has served as publications director for the South Carolina Historical Society.
9.5 x 10.7, 240 pages
83 color plates, 19 b&w illus.
cloth, $49.95t
ISBN 978-1-57003-719-1
paper, $24.95t
ISBN 978-1-57003-720-7
January
This page copyright © 2007, The Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina
URL: http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/2008/3720.html
Votaries of Apollo
The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766–1820
Nicholas Michael Butler
A comprehensive account of the musical culture of Charleston's golden age
ABOUT THE BOOK
Blending archival research with musical expertise, Nicholas Michael Butler offers a definitive history of the dynamic and vibrant concert life in Charleston, South Carolina, during the era from 1766 to 1820, when the exclusive St. Cecilia Society functioned as North America's premier musical organization. In the process he provides an unprecedented look into the early membership and inner workings of this storied society.For fifty-four seasons during the late colonial and early federal years, the St. Cecilia Society offered the families and guests of Charleston's wealthy planters and merchants opportunities to enjoy the latest European musical fashions performed by a cosmopolitan orchestra, visiting professional musicians, and talented amateurs. Intermingling the practices and values of both the Old and the New Worlds, the society's events formed a social stage on which the patronage, performance, and appreciation of contemporary European concert music evinced the cultural and political authority of its participants.In reconstructing this era of the St. Cecilia Society's concert patronage, Butler begins with a survey of the socio-economic background of the golden age of Charleston's prosperity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then examines British modes of concert patronage that inspired this South Carolina institution. Following an overview of the society's half century of concert patronage, Butler focuses on specifics of the musical activity: organizational structure and management of activities, administration of finances, performance venues, performers and their relationship to the society, concert repertoire, and withdrawal from patronage.The details Butler offers of the society's concert series—which was commensurate with the content, form, and nature of those in the urban centers of contemporary Britain—greatly augment our understanding of the vitality of early American musical culture and challenge long-held historiographic misperceptions about southern cultural history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Michael Butler is a musicologist, historian, archivist, and musician. Formerly the archivist for the South Carolina Historical Society, he has taught at the University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston, and Indiana University. Butler is special collections manager at the Charleston County Public Library.6 x 9, 384 pages, 28 illus.
cloth, $49.95s
ISBN 978-1-57003-705-4
November
The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
David Gleeson, Simon Lewis, and W. Scott Poole, series editors
This page copyright © 2007, The Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina
URL: http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/2008/3705.html
Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present
Historical and Bibliographic Studies
Edited by Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell
ABOUT THE BOOK
Once nearly as ubiquitous as dictionaries and cookbooks are today, letter-writing manuals and their predecessors served to instruct individuals not only on the art of letter composition but also, in effect, on personal conduct. Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell contend that the study of letter-writing theory, which bridges rhetorical theory and grammatical studies, represents an emerging discipline in need of definition. In this volume they gather the contributions of eleven experts to sketch the contours of epistolary theory and collect the historic and bibliographic materials that form the basis for its study.
Robert G. Sullivan pushes back the origin of the genre to Isocrates' classical epistolary theory and letters, and Poster continues the search through antiquity by summarizing Greek and Latin works to discover the epistolary theory that permeated ancient schooling. Malcolm Richardson surveys medieval dictamen, and Martin Carmago places letter-writing manuals in their educational context of fifteenth-century Oxford.
Moving into the largely unchartered territory of Renaissance epistolary theory, Gideon Burton examines philology and letter-writing theory in relation to medieval precursors. Lawrence D. Green discusses editions of letter-writing treatises in England; W. Webster Newbold explores the relationship between epistolarity and rise of vernacular English literacy; and Judith Rice Henderson investigates the uses of Erasmus' Opus de conscribendi epistolis in sixteenth-century schools.
Drawing attention to the broadening of the Renaissance model, Mitchell traces modern letter-writing instruction through eloquence handbooks, self-teaching manuals, and grammar books. John T. Gage surveys the patterns of inclusion and exclusion from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composition textbooks, and Joyce R. Walker considers how the electronic medium is reviving a long-neglected form of the epistolary tradition. A substantial collection of bibliographies close the volume, offering a compendium of sources for this burgeoning field.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Carol Poster, an associate professor of English at York University in Toronto, has written numerous articles and book chapters on the history of rhetoric, the rhetoric of philosophy and religion, and classical tradition. She has also published translations of Arstophanes' Clouds and Plautus' Stichus. Poster has won the 2003 Kneupper Award for best article in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and the 1997 Gildersleeve Prize for best article in American Journal of Philology.
Linda C. Mitchell, a professor of English at San José State University, is the author of Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battleground in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England and coeditor, with Susan Green, of The Cultural History of Letter Writing.
REVIEWS
"This book provides, for the first time, and in detail, a chronological account of how letter-writing has been taught from the fourth-century B.C. in Greece to the electronic communication of today. Included are analyses of numerous medieval, renaissance, and modern letter-writing manuals and collections of model epistles, as well as consideration of how these works reflect changing political, economic, and social conditions. Suggestions are made for additional research, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works is provided. The book will interest readers studying the history of education and interested in how letter writing has influenced the literature and thought of Western Europe."—George A. Kennedy, Paddison Professor of Classics Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Here is scholarship at its best. Eleven experts in the history of letter writing each present brilliantly their own area of primary expertise, from ancient Greece to the age of electronic communication. With its comprehensive bibliographies, meticulously compiled and painstakingly arranged, this book will be an indispensable tool for any scholar doing serious work in the field."—Manfred Kraus, academic councilor, Philological Seminar, University of Tübingen
6 x 9, 344 pages, 9 illus.
cloth, $69.95s
ISBN10 1-57003-651-9
ISBN13 978-1-57003-651-4
June 2007
To Make This Land Our Own
Community, Identity, and Cultural Adaptation in Purrysburg Township, South Carolina, 1732–1865
Arlin C. Migliazzo
Foreword by Lawrence S. RowlandA case study in the social history of frontier town building set in the swamps of South CarolinaOn the banks of the lower Savannah River, the military objectives of South Carolina officials, the ambitions of Swiss entrepreneur Jean Pierre Purry, and the dreams of Protestants from Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, and England converged in a planned settlement named Purrysburg. This examination of the first South Carolina township in Governor Robert Johnson's strategic plan to populate and defend the colonial backcountry offers the clearest picture to date of the settlement of the colony's Southern frontier by ethnically diverse and contractually obligated immigrants.Arlin C. Migliazzo contends that the story of Purrysburg Township, founded in 1732 and set in the forbidding environment bounded by the Savannah River and the Coosawhatchie swamps, challenges the notion that white colonists shed their ethnic distinctions to become a monolithic culture. He views Purrysburg as a laboratory in which to observe ethnic phenomena in the colonial and antebellum South. Separated by linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers, the émigrès adapted familiar social processes from their homelands to create a workable sense of community and identity. His work is one of only a handful of examples of what has been deemed the "new social history" methodology as applied to a South Carolina subject.
Initially devastated by privation and a high mortality rate, Purrysburg residents also suffered the vicissitudes of an indifferent provincial elite, the encroachment of lowcountry rice planters, Prevost's invasion in 1779, and ultimate destruction of the settlement by Sherman's army. Migliazzo details the community's changing military and economic fortunes, the gradual displacement of its residents to neighboring communities, the role of African Americans in the region, the complex religious life of township settlers, and the quirky contributions of Purry's climatological speculations to the fateful siting of this first township.
ABOUT THE AUTHORArlin C. Migliazzo is a professor of history at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, where he has also served as department chair and director of faculty development. He is a former Fulbright/Hays Scholar in American Studies and the editor of Lands of True and Certain Bounty: The Geographical Theories and Colonization Strategies of Jean Pierre Purry.
6 x 9, 464 pages, 20 illus.
cloth, $59.95s
ISBN 978-1-57003-682-8
July 2007
An American Aristocracy
Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia
Daniel Kilbride
The story of how elitism trumped sectional divisions in Philadelphia's leisure class
ABOUT THE BOOK
Placing class rather than race or gender at the center of this comparative study of North and South, Daniel Kilbride exposes the close connections that united privileged southerners and Philadelphians in the years leading to the Civil War. He finds that the bonds between these similarly educated and socialized groups were so durable that they resisted sectional warfare. Examining sociability, education, intellectual collaboration, leisure, travel, and political culture, he concludes that this would-be aristocracy remained a cohesive network until—and even after—the onslaught of hostilities.In An American Aristocracy, Kilbride traces the travels of southern planters throughout the North during the decades prior to 1860, noting that they were drawn particularly to Philadelphia because of its proximity to the South and a perception of the city as being untainted by the larger radicalism of the North. In addition Philadelphia possessed tangible attractions for southerners: well-regarded schools, prestigious intellectual societies, historical landmarks, and fashionable shopping districts. In the city's parlors, ballrooms, and classrooms, privileged Americans from the North and South forged themselves into a republican aristocracy that ignored the Mason-Dixon line.
The story Kilbride uncovers is one of the upper echelon's declining influence. He recounts how southern families and their friends and relations in the North fought against the forces of middle-class respectability and sectional animosity that threatened the stability of their world. Their ability to promote sectional peace weakened steadily during the first half of the nineteenth century as the middle class successfully wrested cultural authority from their social "betters." Kilbride suggests that this humiliating loss of power bound northern and southern gentry ever closer. Yet an inability to shape public policy left them helpless to stem the tide of sectional strife that eventually infiltrated their carefully insulated existence.
REVIEWS
"Focusing on Carolina planter families like the Izards and Manigaults and their relations with upper-crust Philadelphians, Daniel Kilbride shows how conservative women and men bridged sectional lines, using reactionary politics, exclusive education, and polite social rituals to forge a distinct aristocratic identity. Urbane planters and their city associates constituted a leisure class that gathered in the drawing rooms, public spaces, and scientific societies of Philadelphia. In these aristocratic circles, nationalism and elitism trumped sectional divisions until the Civil War. An American Aristocracy vividly recreates the opulent but precarious world of Philadelphia's cosmopolitan elite."—Cynthia A. Kierner, author of Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson's America"An American Aristocracy traces the ties of class, kinship, and culture which bound together groups of southern planters and Philadelphia elites in the antebellum years. Although we've known of these links, no one before Kilbride has so carefully and thoughtfully explored their meaning—especially in the light of regional identity and growing sectional tensions. This is a well-conceived, well-researched, and sharply written study which will add new layers to our understanding of the role of class and place in this era."—Steven M. Stowe, author of Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters
"An American Aristocracy is a significant contribution to urban history and regional history. In his meticulous, thoughtful study, Daniel Kilbride demonstrates that many factors combined to form cultural identity in antebellum America. Historians of the North and the South will benefit equally from this important book."—Joan Cashin, author of A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Kilbride received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida. He teaches U.S. history at John Carroll University near Cleveland, Ohio.
cloth, $34.95s
ISBN10 1-57003-656-X
ISBN13 978-1-57003-656-9
November 2006
The American Revolution and Righteous Community
Selected Sermons of Bishop Robert Smith
Edited by Charles Wilbanks
Advocacy for independence from South Carolina's first Episcopal bishop and founder of the College of Charleston
ABOUT THE BOOK
This selected edition of twenty-seven sermons delivered by Bishop Robert Smith (1732–1801) from the pulpit of Charleston's oldest Episcopal church gives voice to an influential clergyman and his rhetoric in support of a colonial rebellion. At the age of twenty-five Smith became the rector of St. Philips. He later became the first Episcopal bishop in South Carolina and the founder and first president of the College of Charleston. Charles Wilbanks has edited Smith's previously unpublished sermons, which were written, delivered, and sometimes repeated during a forty-year career. In his analysis of these sermons, Wilbanks illustrates how a theology of community, civic duty, and national piety led to Smith's advocacy of American independence.Wilbanks suggests that Smith articulated a southern perspective that constituted a radically distinctive justification for the American Revolution, a view drawn from Smith's notion of a righteous community. Contrary to Puritan teachings of individual rights and responsibilities, which often served as a validation for revolution, Smith's call for righteous community also justified the War of Independence. While New England republicans worked to separate the business of church and state, Smith insisted that in spirit the two were inseparable. His theology enabled him to join with revolutionaries who held quite different beliefs, and his rhetorical strategies allowed him to be heard more clearly and effectively than other public figures who held similar philosophies.
Wilbanks investigates Smith's rhetorical strategies in light of Max Weber's analysis of the evolution of religion in society and Robert Bellah's work on American civil religion. Wilbanks also integrates the perspectives of philosophers and theorists Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, and Kenneth Burke to explicate Smith's rhetoric of the righteous community.
ABOUT THE AUTHORCharles Wilbanks is the director of the speech communication program at the University of South Carolina. Editor of Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimké, 1828–1835, Wilbanks specializes in American public address, the history of rhetoric, and argumentation. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
6 x 9, 312 pages
cloth, $49.95s
ISBN10 1-57003-665-9
ISBN13 978-1-57003-665-1
December 2006
The Dawn of Religious Freedom in South Carolina
Edited by James Lowell Underwood and W. Lewis Burke
Introduction by Walter Edgar
The struggles of six diverse groups to garner religious freedom in the face of Anglican dominance
ABOUT THE BOOK
Although South Carolina's colonial charter promised a safe harbor of religious freedom for these who were oppressed, eighteenth-century religious minorities in the colony found their rights were subjugated to those of the Anglicans. A government-sponsored denomination, the Church of England received tax-funds from all property-holders, church members or not, and participation in the political process often depended on religious qualifications. The Dawn of Religious Freedom in South Carolina contains eight essays by historians and legal scholars that trace the quest for religious equality by Protestant dissenters, Huguenots, Jews, Quakers, Afro-Carolinians, and Roman Catholics. Uncovering the historical roots of the separation of church and state, the contributors use South Carolina's experience to illustrate that religious freedom is more secure when widely shared.South Carolina was a beacon of religious freedom when compared to many other North American colonies. The contributors recount the incremental steps that culminated with the 1790 Constitution's grant of "free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference." Separate chapters revisit the experiences of the Huguenots, who found themselves caught in a political crossfire between Anglicans and Protestant dissenters; the Quakers, who ultimately left the state because of their inability to reconcile with the principles of a slaveholding society; the Africans, who created "psychological living space" through religion while their masters watched nervously for signs of rebellion; and the evangelicals, whose emphasis on equality before God brought ideas about egalitarianism to South Carolina society. The volume's contributors also enumerate Catholic and Jewish efforts to gain religious equality, and recount the leading roles played by such individuals as Jewish patriot Francis Salvador, Catholic bishop John England, and statesman Charles Pinckney.The Dawn of Religious Freedom in South Carolina is augmented with an introduction by Walter Edgar, director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, the Claude Henry Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies, and the George Washington Distinguished Professor of History.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
James Lowell Underwood is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina Law School. His past books include four volumes on the Constitution of South Carolina and At Freedom's Door: African American Founding Fathers and Lawyers in Reconstruction South Carolina.W. Lewis Burke is a professor and director of clinics at the University of South Carolina Law School and coeditor of At Freedom's Door and Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy.
REVIEWS
"The Dawn of Religious Freedom in South Carolina explores the checkered history of religious toleration in the colonial Carolinas from the earliest settlements into the five decades following independence. From the perspectives of various religious groups, the book's contributors delineate the smoldering tension between post-Restoration 'tolerance' and the growing strength of Anglicanism, both institutionally and electorally. Sensitive to the political and cultural aspects of religious belief, the authors provide broad coverage of a topic as vital today as it was in the seventeenth century."—Herbert A. Johnson, professor emeritus, University of South Carolina School of Law"This collection of well-documented and well-written essays will edify specialists and new readers alike. The authors adduce much fresh evidence to show how colonial South Carolina tolerated a surprisingly large number of religious groups and after statehood gradually extended religious freedom to all. Although it delayed the dawn of religious freedom for some religious groups, nineteenth-century South Carolina proved surprisingly progressive and expansive in its protection of religious freedom."—John Witte Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University, Atlanta
CONTRIBUTORS
W. Lewis Burke · Orville Vernon Burton · Peter Clarke
Belinda Gergel · Richard Gergel · David Herr
Alexander Moore · W. Scott Poole · Bernard E. Powers Jr.
James Lowell Underwood
6 x 9, 248 pages
cloth, $39.95st
ISBN10 1-57003-621-7
ISBN13 978-1-57003-621-7
March 2006
Who Shall Rule at Home?
The Evolution of South Carolina Political Culture, 1748–1776
Jonathan Mercantini
A new telling of how principles of self rule developed in colonial South Carolina
ABOUT THE BOOK
A reinterpretation of the origins of the colonial revolutionary movement, Who Shall Rule at Home? charts the changing nature of South Carolina’s political culture from the end of King George’s War in 1748 to the decision for independence in 1776. As he follows the colony’s shifting political landscape, Jonathan Mercantini challenges the prevailing interpretation of South Carolina as a politically harmonious colonial entity. Examining a series of constitutional and political conflicts, he highlights the increasing tensions between local authorities and royal officials in both London and Charles Town—disputes that demonstrate the growing resistance by the colony’s elite to imperial control. These disagreements are all the more striking in South Carolina, according to Mercantini, because the colony benefited considerably from its relationship with Great Britain.Mercantini explains this rejection of British rule through the transformation of the “rights of Englishmen” into the “rights of Carolina Englishmen.” He suggests that South Carolinians, accustomed to authority as slave masters, took the British idea that certain inalienable rights accompanied an English birthright and reinterpreted the concept in ways related to self-rule. These “rights of Carolina Englishmen” centered on local control of elections, representation, finances, and taxation.In addition Mercantini details the strategies South Carolinians used to resist royal control, the most notable of which was a refusal to compromise. After 1748 South Carolina politics were not geared toward conciliation or compromise but an all-or-nothing strategy that Mercantini calls “brinkmanship.” Such tactics culminated with a bold threat to shut down government operations and suspend all business with the royal governor rather than concede to the demands of political rivals. Mercantini concludes that brinkmanship reveals what high political principles South Carolina’s leaders believed to be at stake in their conflicts with outside authorities and the lengths to which they were willing to go to resist external interference.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Mercantini received his B.A. from the University of Richmond and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University. He is an assistant professor of history at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York.
cloth, $49.95s
ISBN10 1-57003-654-3
ISBN13 978-1-57003-654-5
December 2006
William Bartram and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier
Edward J. Cashin
A detailed look into what Bartram omits in Travels and why
ABOUT THE BOOK
In Travels, the celebrated 1791 account of the “Old Southwest,” William Bartram recorded the natural world he saw around him but, rather incredibly, omitted any reference to the epochal events of the American Revolution. Edward J. Cashin places Bartram in the context of his times and explains his conspicuous avoidance of people, places, and events embroiled in revolutionary fervor.Cashin suggests that while Bartram documented the natural world for plant collector John Fothergill, he wrote Travels for an entirely different audience. Convinced that Providence directed events for the betterment of mankind and that the Constitutional Convention would produce a political model for the rest of the world, Bartram offered Travels as a means of shaping the new country. Cashin illuminates the convictions that motivated Bartram—that if Americans lived in communion with nature, heeded the moral law, and treated the people of the interior with respect, then America would be blessed with greatness.In addition Cashin offers a detailed portrait of the often overlooked southern frontier on the eve of the Revolutionary War, revealing it to have been a coherent entity united by an uneasy coexistence of Native Americans and British colonials.
REVIEWS
“Edward Cashin’s research and analysis of Bartram is extensive and complete, giving his book the weight of a major authority on the man and his travels. . . . By pairing Bartram with the political and military events which the naturalist chose to disregard, Cashin offers us a valuable lesson in the art of historiography.”—American Historical Review“Brilliant in conception, exhaustive in research from archives and fieldwork, this book introduces a new genre of historical writing. It is thus far the most definitive work on the southern Indian frontier during the Revolutionary era.”—Choice
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of Augusta, Georgia, Edward J. Cashin is director of the Center for the Study of Georgia History at Augusta State University and the author of fourteen books.
paper, $19.95t
ISBN10 1-57003-685-3
ISBN13 978-1-57003-685-9
January 2007
Back in Print
George Washington's Beautiful Nelly
The Letters of Eleanor Parke Custis to Elizabeth Bordley Gibson, 1794–1851
Edited by Patricia Brady
New Introduction by the Author
An intimate portrait of the first "first family" from the vantage of Washington's adopted daughter
ABOUT THE BOOK
Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis (1779–1852) was in many ways the quintessential southern lady, but as Martha Washington's granddaughter by her first marriage and George Washington's adopted daughter, she was also something of an American celebrity. Her lifelong correspondence with childhood friend Elizabeth Bordley Gibson records the experiences of the first family, the social and political gossip of the new republic's elite circle, and the difficulties of motherhood and marriage. Edited by Patricia Brady, the voluminous and unguarded letters also reveals the complex cast of family and friends associated with the Washington household, the details of plantation life, and the social limitations placed on even the most privileged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women. This edition features an updated introduction from Brady.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Patricia Brady is author of Martha Washington: An American Life and editor of Nelly Custis Lewis's Housekeeping Book and Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists, 1718–1918. Brady holds a Ph.D. in history from Tulane University and served for twenty years as director of publications at the Historic New Orleans Collection. She lives in New Orleans.
REVIEWS
"This collection of intimate, chatty letters from Washington's adopted daughter to her lifelong friend in Philadelphia charts the narrowing compass of her life, from youthful exuberance as the darling of the president's family and a well-educated observer of public life to an embittered wife of an unambitious, aloof husband. . . . Revealing much about the daily concerns of a Southern woman over a lifetime, these letters remind us that, even as the nation was coming apart, the private worlds of women (and men) were held together by family, faith, and friendships."--Library Journal"In Nelly's letters can be traced the passage of a Virginia belle of unique privilege into a mature woman who had a share of unhappiness in the premature death of her children and other family members. The letters are expressive; Nelly is forthright in her attitudes about the evils of slavery, the need for culture, the frustrations of societal expectations for women."--Publishers Weekly
"A fascinating window into Nelly's life and times."--Journal of American History
6 x 9, 320 pages, 9 illus.paper, ISBN 1-57003-631-4, $19.95t
March
Jefferson and the Press
Crucible of Liberty
Jerry W. Knudson
Neither fair nor balanced, journalistic warfare during America's first transfer of power
ABOUT THE BOOK
With the exception of Abraham Lincoln, no president prior to the twentieth century has been more vilified by the U.S. news media than Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson and the Press demonstrates the power of the press in the early years of the Republic. Four-fifths of the young nation's 235 newspapers were Federalist but, as Jerry W. Knudson explains, the minority Republican newspapers combated these odds through direct invectives and vehemently candid reportage.Knudson details the coverage of four Federalist and four Republican newspapers in wide circulation to six major episodes of the Jeffersonian era: the election of 1800–1801, the return of Thomas Paine from revolutionary France, the Louisiana Purchase, the Hamilton–Burr duel, the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, and the economic embargo of 1807–1809. Rocked by domestic scandals, the American nation read accounts in Federalist papers that demonized Jefferson and in Republican papers that lauded the president's achievements. Knudson profiles the men projecting these radically different views—savvy editors who embraced their ability to channel public opinion and who often became famous personalities in their own right, including Samuel Harrison Smith of National Intelligencer in Washington, DC, and William Duane of Philadelphia's Aurora. He shows these editors to have been sophisticated political "scribblers" who fearlessly printed what they thought with bluntness and ferocity that might shock twenty-first-century readers.Concerned with how these charged verbal skirmishes in the press both molded and reflected public opinion, Knudson reveals the power, abrasiveness, and polarizing effects of a free but quite partisan press as the only source of public information during the young nation's first major shift in leadership. Diverging from accepted views, he frames his argument to illustrate that newspapers reached their height of influence and malevolence during Jefferson's presidency rather than that of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jerry W. Knudson, professor emeritus of journalism at Temple University, is a former journalist who has specialized in the history of the press in both North America and Latin America. He earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Virginia, where he was one of the first Jefferson Fellows, and received a Freedom Forum Award from Gannett Foundation for his long-term coverage of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.
6 x 9, 240 pages, 12 illus.cloth, ISBN 1-57003-607-1, $34.95s
January
The Southern Strategy
Britain's Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775-1780
David K. Wilson
A reexamination of major southern battles and tactics in the war for independence
ABOUT THE BOOK
America's popular memory of the Revolutionary War casts New England minutemen facing off against redcoats at Concord Bridge and George Washington's frostbitten soldiers huddled together at Valley Forge, but David K. Wilson's new study challenges the generally accepted notion that the war was fought primarily in the North. Recalling that the ramparts of Savannah were no less bloodstained than Bunker Hill and the siege of Charleston no less important than the battle for New York, Wilson considers the waging of war in the southern colonies during the critical and often overlooked period from 1775 to the spring of 1780. He suggests that the paradox of the British defeat in 1781--after Crown armies had crushed all organized resistance in South Carolina and Georgia--makes sense only if one understands the fundamental flaws in what modern historians label Britain's "Southern Strategy." Wilson closely examines battles and skirmishes in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to construct a comprehensive military history of the American Revolution in the South through May 1780. A cartographer and student of geography, Wilson includes detailed, original battle maps and orders of battle for each engagement. Appraising the strategy and tactics of the most significant conflicts, he tests the thesis that the British could raise the manpower they needed to win the war in the South by tapping a vast reservoir of southern Loyalists. According to Wilson, the policy was flawed in both its conception and execution. The sheer amount of empirical data Wilson has amassed here distinguishes this work and makes Wilson's recounting an invaluable guide to the war in the South.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David K. Wilson is an independent scholar who lives in Plano, Texas. He holds an M.A. in history from the University of Texas at Arlington and has taught history and English. He currently works in the advertising industry.
6 x 9, 38 illus., 376 pagescloth, 1-57003-573-3, $39.95t May 2005
From New Babylon to Eden
The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina
Betrand Van Ruymbeke
A retelling of the first generation of Carolina Huguenots' strifes, settlement, and survival The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
David Gleeson, Simon Lewis, and W. Scott Poole, series editors
ABOUT THE BOOK
From New Babylon to Eden traces the persecution of Huguenots in France and the eventual immigration of a small bloc of the French Calvinist population to proprietary South Carolina. Once there, rather than isolate themselves as a separate religious and cultural enclave, they chose instead to integrate into the Southern strain of nascent Anglo-American society. Through intermarriage and adaptation to the new economic, religious, and political environment, Huguenots soon numbered among the most influential and successful colonists and have left a persevering legacy throughout Charleston and the lowcountry. In a volume devoted to the first generation of Carolina Huguenots, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke describes in detail their gradual transformation from French refugees to South Carolina planters. Van Ruymbeke recounts the escalating persecution that led to the Huguenot exodus from France and tells how approximately five hundred émigrés settled in South Carolina. He credits their decision to relocate to the vigorous marketing efforts of the Lords Proprietors, the owners and rulers of the province, who promised the French Calvinists a veritable Eden. The Huguenots quickly discovered the colony was not paradise, but they adapted to the new environment by abandoning their Old World silk, olive oil, and wine trades for the more lucrative pursuits of Indian trade, cattle ranching, and rice planting. Placing the Carolina migration in the context of the larger Huguenot diaspora, Van Ruymbeke proffers an account that challenges accepted history. Describing their settlement as a process of acculturation and creolization rather than simply assimilation, he contends that the majority of these French Calvinists sought to create their own churches but were thwarted by an Anglicized elite eager to dominate carve itself a niche within Anglo-Carolinian society. He also reveals that most members of the initial generation were moderately--not exceptionally--prosperous and, rather, that it was their descendants who acquired the wealth often associated with lowcountry Huguenots. Van Ruymbeke concludes with an epilogue describing the Huguenot legacy in South Carolina.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is a professor of American civilization at the Université de Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Paris VIII) and a former visiting professor at the College of Charleston. He is the coeditor of Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora and has published in the fields of Huguenot history, early American history, and Atlantic history.
6 x 9, 20 illus., 424 pagescloth, 1-57003-583-0, $49.95s
August 2005
The Final Victims
Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810
James A. McMillin
A reassessment of the post-revolutionary slave trade Includes searchable CD-ROM
ABOUT THE BOOK
With this detailed study of the importation of slaves to North America in the decades following the American Revolution, James A. McMillin tests long-standing assumptions about an enterprise thought to have waned in the wake of the United States' successful revolution against Great Britain. Combing through previously untapped public and private sources, McMillin uncovers data that challenges entrenched beliefs about the slave trade and, as a result, has far-reaching implications for our understanding of American life in the early republic.
McMillin examines the volume and business of importing slaves from 1783 to 1810, the African origins of those captives, and their treatment by shippers and North American merchants. Tracing a shift in North American slaving commerce from New England to the lower South, McMillin tracks the vessels that imported slaves to America, particularly into Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. McMillin suggests that previous scholars have underestimated the number of slave voyages and consequently the magnitude of American overseas slave trading during this era. He maintains the founding fathers did little to discourage the importation of slaves and asserts that—with the lengthening duration and distance of the notorious "middle passage"—conditions for African captives most likely worsened after the Revolution.
To his revisionist narrative McMillin appends, on a searchable CD-ROM accompanying the volume, the massive data that led him to these conclusions. The information includes places of origin for the captives; names of vessels, captains, and owners; size of slave cargoes; ports of arrival; and other data pertinent to his investigation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James A. McMillin holds a Ph.D. from Duke University. The associate director of Bridwell Library and an associate professor of American religious history at Southern Methodist University, McMillin was a contributor to Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2003. He lives in Dallas.
ALSO FROM THE AUTHOR
Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
6 x 9, approx.200 pages
1 halftone, 10 tables, 2 line art
cloth, ISBN 1-57003-546-6, $39.95s
May 13, 2008