Susanna Ashton, ed.. I Belong to : South Carolina Slave Narratives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. ix + 317 pp. $24.95, paper, ISBN 978-1-57003-901-0.

Margaret Belser Hollis, Allen H. Stokes, eds.. Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields: Letters of the Heyward Family, 1862-1871. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. 344 pp. $39.95, cloth, ISBN 978-1-57003-894-5.

Reviewed by Ted Pearson

Published on H-CivWar (June, 2011)

Commissioned by Martin P. Johnson (Miami University Hamilton)

In December 1860, South Carolina moved de‐ people on the eve of the war, South Carolina was, cisively to the center of the national stage when, in many ways, a microcosm of the American after Abraham Lincoln’s election, it seceded from South. Within its borders resided some of its the Union, precipitating the crises that led to the wealthiest planters, including the Heyward fami‐ creation of the Confederate States of America and, ly, along with a small, infuential coterie of writ‐ a few months later, to civil war. The state that ers and politicians who had helped forge the ide‐ was, as local politician James Petigru remarked ology of Southern nationalism. However, if the right after secession, “too small for a republic and upper echelons of white society demonstrated a too large for an insane asylum” would lead the signifcant degree of solidarity and uniformity, charge for Southern independence while its ar‐ then the organization of throughout the tillery batteries in Charleston would fre the open‐ state exhibited considerable diversity and varia‐ ing shots of the confict.[2] Home to more than tion, shaped primarily by geography and the agri‐ four hundred thousand enslaved men and women cultural demands of its two main staples: cotton, and just under three hundred thousand white H-Net Reviews cultivated in the state’s midsection; and rice, The volume concludes with Sam Aleckson’s grown on low-country plantations. Before the War and After the Union: An Autobiog‐ In these two books, the authors have mined a raphy (published in 1919). In contrast to King’s wonderfully rich vein of primary sources (slave wanderings, Aleckson’s travels were far less ex‐ narratives and family correspondence) to provide tensive. He too was born a slave on a low-country a comprehensive picture of the diverse worlds in‐ plantation nine years before the war. In Charles‐ habited by enslaved Carolinians and their masters ton in the late spring of 1861, he watched men in the antebellum era and in the years during march of to war before he found himself in the which the seismic upheavals of war and devastat‐ army, serving his owner as an “ofcer’s boy” clad ing defeat tore this society apart. Moreover, in “a confederate gray jacket, blue pants, and a emancipation of its enslaved laborers and de‐ Beauregard hat” (p. 262). Stationed on James Is‐ struction of the Southern dream of independence land, his duties, he recalled, were “very light,” oc‐ made the war the transformative event in the casionally watching Union ships bombard lives of the men and women whose autobiogra‐ Charleston, hunting turkeys, and rowing ofcers phies and letters are collected here. Those wish‐ into the city (p. 264). Aleckson’s narrative is some‐ ing to hear the voices of masters and slaves in what vague about his experiences immediately peace and war will learn much about slavery and following the war, but he clearly found the years freedom in South Carolina from these volumes. of Reconstruction fraught with difculties, noting how white Carolinians laid blame for their prob‐ Edited by Susanna Ashton, I Belong to South lems at the door of freed men and women. With Carolina opens with the Memoirs of King, the rise of Wade Hampton, who became governor a Black Preacher, frst published in 1798. His nar‐ in 1876, and the reemergence of the Democratic rative serves as a useful reminder of the impact Party, which heralded the beginning of the Jim that the American Revolution had on black life Crow era, he moved North to the small town of both in North America and the broader Atlantic Spring Lake, Connecticut, to live among “the liber‐ world, and just how profoundly the war for inde‐ ty-loving men and women, who did so much for pendence dislocated their communities. Born a the amelioration of the race” (p. 284). slave on a low-country plantation in 1760, King fed to the British in 1780, eventually ending up in Perhaps the most valuable texts in this vol‐ New York, where, now a free man, he worked as a ume are those that transcend the traditional ante‐ pilot and got married before being evacuated bellum/postbellum divide. People’s lives, whether along with thousands of loyalists and former free or enslaved, rarely conform to convenient slaves to Nova Scotia at the war’s end. From here, chronological categories. In several narratives, he embarked on a series of Atlantic crossings. In the authors record their experiences of peace, 1792, he sailed for Sierra Leone. Two years later, war, and freedom. For Jacob Stroyer, born on a he went to a Methodist school in England, return‐ large plantation near Columbia in 1849, the war ing to Africa in 1796 where he died in 1802. For loomed particularly large. Only twelve when hos‐ King, it was the British defeat at the hands of the tilities commenced, he was soon put to work for revolutionaries that opened the door to freedom; the Confederate cause. In 1863, along with thou‐ for the other authors in this collection, it was the sands of slaves from across the state, he was tak‐ failure of the South to gain its independence and en to Charleston, and assigned to work on the de‐ the revolution of emancipation that provided a fenses on Sullivan’s Island, the place where his path to their liberation. African-born father likely disembarked in the frst years of the century. Although brief, Stroyer’s ac‐ count provides a fascinating glimpse of military

2 H-Net Reviews life along the low-country coastline with its vivid of Slavery by a Runaway Slave,” which frst ap‐ recollections of slaves boldly swimming from the peared in the Advocate of Freedom in 1838, the island to an adjacent one held by Union soldiers, anonymous author records the violence that he and the unsuccessful eforts of Confederate pa‐ both sufered and witnessed, recalling Frederick trols to recapture those who had made the jour‐ Douglass’s descriptions of the countless beatings ney to freedom. and foggings that Edward Lloyd and his over‐ He also experienced the terrors of war frst‐ seers inficted on the slaves at his plantation on hand when, working on the shattered walls and ’s Eastern Shore. Making his way to parapets of Fort Sumter, he found himself under a Charleston, he managed to stow away on a vessel bombardment from Union gunboats, barely es‐ taking cotton to Boston, arriving there in late caping alive when mortar shells exploded above 1837. John Andrew Jackson’s narrative, entitled the shed in which he had sought shelter. In fact, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina and some slaves from Edward Barnwell Heyward’s published in 1862, follows a similar pattern: born Combahee plantations may have worked along‐ on a cotton plantation in the state’s midsection, he side Stroyer on Sullivan’s Island or been killed records the brutality and cruelty of enslavement, during this attack. Returning to his owner’s plan‐ describing whippings and other punishments tation in late 1864, he only had to wait a few meted out by his owner who, he wrote, was months until General William Tecumseh Sherman “equal to the devil himself” (p. 91). He too fed to and his army advanced into central South Caroli‐ Charleston and, hiding between cotton bales on a na, bringing destruction to the plantation regime ship heading north, safely arrived in Boston in and freedom to its slaves. Stroyer’s account closes early 1847. Moving to nearby Salem, he managed on an elegiac note. He recalls the day of to avoid recapture when, in the wake of the Fugi‐ when, with the sun “just making its appearance tive Slave Act, bounty hunters came North, from behind the hills” on a beautiful spring day, searching for him and other escapees. he gazed down a gathering of freed men and In stark contrast to these accounts of violence women, crowded beneath the “fag of liberty.” and terror, the reminiscence of Irving Lowery in Then, with the Stars and Stripes futtering in the his Life on the Old Plantation in Antebellum Days breeze, these former slaves, voices raised “like ofers an alternative way of recounting and re‐ distant thunder,” began singing “Old master gone membering enslavement. Born a slave in 1850 away, and the darkies all at home / There must be and nineteen years later admitted as the frst stu‐ now the kingdom come and the year of jubilee” dent to Clafin University, the author downplays (p. 166). the brutality of slave life, ofering instead a series In addition to these texts, the volume contains of sketches of plantation life, including descrip‐ the brief account of the life of Clarinda, a black tions of possum hunting, log rolling, corn shuck‐ woman about whom we know very little other ing, church services, and Christmas celebrations. than an anonymous writer took down her ac‐ Opening by recalling “the wonderful old planta‐ count of her conversion and subsequent life of tion” on which he and about forty other slaves piety, a text that reads less like a traditional slave lived, Lowery paints a picture of a pastoral exis‐ narrative and more like a pilgrim’s progress. Even tence where the barns were “full to overfowing” her status remains a mystery, with the narrative with food, the orchards and grape arbors were providing no indication of whether she was free laden with fruit, and the animals grazed leisurely or enslaved. The remaining autobiographies are under “a large and beautiful walnut tree” (pp. more reminiscent of the genre. In “Recollections 183-184). The slaves were, he noted, “a fne-look‐ ing set of human beings” who, thanks to the Chris‐

3 H-Net Reviews tian instincts of John Frierson, the owner of Pud‐ concerns and stylistic conventions present in den Swamp plantation, were “warmly clad, well these works. fed and humanely treated” (p. 190). This strategy In contrast to the geographical and chrono‐ clearly paid dividends. “Such things as blood‐ logical sweep of I Belong to South Carolina, Twi‐ hounds and nigger traders were,” he wrote, “ light on the South Carolina Rice Fields examines, scarce in that community ... it was a rare thing for through the letters of the Heyward family, a very slaves to be bought and sold in that neighbor‐ specifc time and place: the last three years of the hood” (pp. 185-186). This bucolic narrative ends war and the frst six years of Reconstruction on on a poignant note with Lowery recalling “The their extensive rice plantations along the lower Breaking Up of the Old Plantation” when, on “a reaches of the Combahee River. Although this vol‐ beautiful spring day” in 1865, Frierson stood be‐ ume spans less than a decade, its correspondents fore his slaves, telling them that “you are no touch on a number of topics addressed by the au‐ longer my slaves, but you all are now free,” con‐ thors in Ashton’s volume, including the impact of cluding with the hope that they would remain the war on the home front, the wide-reaching im‐ “friends and good neighbors” whether they pact of emancipation, and the efort to restore the choose to work for him or strike out on their own plantation regime in the face of insurmountable (p. 224). By the following year, however, many odds. Thus, for scholars working not just on black had “pulled out and made their homes elsewhere and white life in nineteenth-century South Caroli‐ ... all scattered, as it were, by the four winds of na, but for those concerned with broader ques‐ heaven, never to come together again until the tions, such as the making and destruction of the judgment” (p. 275). Lowey too left the plantation, Confederacy and the transition from slavery to becoming a teacher and a Methodist minister freedom, these books provide a wealth of primary rather than a tenant farmer, receiving his educa‐ materials. tion at Clafin and Wesleyan Academy in Massa‐ While Stroyer and hundreds of thousands of chusetts before returning south to teach and other enslaved Carolinians enthusiastically em‐ preach. braced freedom, the Heyward family struggled to The narratives collected in I Belong to South adjust to the new realities that defeat and emanci‐ Carolina complement the slave autobiographies pation brought. It is a tale told primarily through with which modern readers are more familiar, the letters of Edward Barnwell Heyward and such as Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains (1836) Catherine, his wife (although other family mem‐ and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Dou‐ bers are included here). Heyward’s lands were glass, An American Slave (1845). In fact, as Ashton part of the vast plantation complex that stretched and Cooper Leigh Hill note in their epilogue, “few‐ for over two hundred miles along the Atlantic er than a dozen [narratives] address in any detail coastlines of South Carolina and . Built the slave experience in South Carolina” (p. 294). with mud, water, and the agricultural skills of en‐ We are thus indebted to Ashton and her co-com‐ slaved Africans imported to the low country in pilers for bringing these seven texts to a wider the early eighteenth century, this agricultural readership. Moreover, the brief commentaries kingdom generated immense wealth for an elite that accompany each narrative provide readers that had consolidated its political and economic with valuable biographical details as well as a power by mid-century. Among those present at succinct analysis of the text itself while the intro‐ the creation of this vast hydraulic empire was the ductory essay examines the common thematic frst generation of the Heyward family; Barnwell’s generation, however, would preside over the frst

4 H-Net Reviews years of its long, slow disintegration that began in never questioned the confict’s underlying as‐ the years after the war. sumptions. In these wartime letters, he emerges Although the Heywards spilt much ink on ev‐ as a dutiful and conscientious ofcer; a loyal and eryday matters, including family news, health, loving husband; and a man desperate to keeping and the weather, there are few letters in the frst his plantation operations running, a task that he half of the volume in which the war does not in‐ placed in the hands of Stephen Boineau whose let‐ trude. In fact, hostilities came to their neighbor‐ ters to his employer reveal the considerable dif‐ hood in late 1861 when Union forces took the Sea culties entailed in managing an increasingly in‐ Islands, setting up their headquarters in Beaufort transigent workforce as the war moved ever clos‐ on Port Royal Island. Yet, even though the enemy er and as daily life on the home front disintegrat‐ was just a few dozen miles away, the labyrinth of ed. creeks and rivers helped protect the family’s plan‐ Catherine is perhaps less accepting of the tations on the mainland. Only in early 1865 did war, although she held frm opinions about its the war come to their front door when Sherman’s prosecution and lamented, like many white army, advancing from Savannah en route to Co‐ Southern women, about the immense toll that the lumbia, marched along the Combahee, forcing confict took on soldiers and their families. “Oh Heyward to evacuate his plantation. “It is sad dear,” she wrote on one occasion, “I do wish the enough leaving the place,” he told Catherine in war was over” (p. 26). Learning about Chancel‐ January 1865, “but now the time is come” (p. 194). lorsville and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s death And along the Combahee River, slavery’s time too in May 1863, she wrote to her husband, arguing had come. Rather than issue orders for local de‐ that “Gen’l Lee has paid too dearly for his great fense, Heyward, who served as a lieutenant in a victory” (p. 27). Two months later, lamenting the corps of engineers, now sat down to write labor fall of Vicksburg and, after receiving contradicto‐ contracts between himself and “the freedmen on ry reports about Lee’s campaign into Pennsylva‐ the plantation of E. B. Heyward” (p. 204). nia that would end in defeat at Gettysburg, she The letters written during the war cover a va‐ wrote that “if he does not succeed, the Yankees riety of topics, ranging from the vicissitudes of will hold their heads up again, and the peace par‐ military service and the considerable problems ty will lower theirs” (p. 38). In other letters (and that Heyward faced while he struggled to grow after 1863, her letter writing drops away signif‐ rice and other crops to broader discussions about cantly), Catherine conveys a sense that the Con‐ the prosecution of the confict and its larger pur‐ federacy was a doomed enterprise. pose and meaning. Writing from his camp outside And so it was. Its collapse in 1865 resulted in the coastal hamlet of Chisolmville, he plainly stat‐ the world of the Heywards and thousands of oth‐ ed what he believed to be the central issue of the er planters being turned upside down. Now un‐ war. “We ask only one thing--Independence,” he able to coerce his labor, Barnwell struggled to ad‐ told Catherine, “that being granted everything just to a new regime in which labor contracts else is included,” further noting that “it is not slav‐ rather than whips organized social relations be‐ ery we are fghting for” (p. 90). As an ofcer in the tween employer and employee. For Heyward, per‐ Confederate army; a leading member of the low- haps the real moment of recognition that his for‐ country elite; and a graduate of South Carolina mer slaves were “forever free” came when nearly College, a center of Southern radicalism and the 250 freed men and women signed (or made their alma mater of men like James Henry Hammond mark) the “Terms of Agreement Between Charles and the cane-wielding Preston Brooks, Heyward and E. B. Heyward Esqrs and Certain Labourers”

5 H-Net Reviews that described the rights and obligations of both tion and they must have government” (pp. 329, parties for the next six months. For these former 344). Then, again realizing just how profoundly slaves, the document’s last clause--“We freedmen circumstances had changed and that old order on plantation of E. B. Heyward ... accept this ofer needed to be restored, he noted, “Our late institu‐ and hereby bind ourselves by this contract”--was tion furnished this very perfectly so we all their frst practical step toward freedom (p. 204). thought. But it has been changed for us and we It was also a world in which the Federal govern‐ must try to recover our position among the ne‐ ment was a very real presence. In early 1866, groes and I am perfectly satisfed that gentlemen Brigadier General Ralph Ely, the commander of can be found ... who can ‘direct the storm’ and the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, en‐ bring the old ship safely into port” (p. 344). Not dorsed that Heyward and his employees had until Hampton’s election to the governorship in “faithfully performed all the obligations of this 1875 and the return of the Democratic Party to contract” (p. 206). The transition from slavery to power in Columbia were such people back in free labor was now underway along the Comba‐ power.[3] hee. Barnwell and his fellow low-country planters, The region’s occupation by Federal ofcials however, would neither direct nor manage to and Union soldiers along with the activities of weather the storm. His death in 1871 at the age of newly emancipated men and women, busily test‐ forty-fve further contributed to the slow, but in‐ ing the limits of their freedom by overturning old exorable decline of rice cultivation along the forms of racial etiquette that had informed prac‐ coastal plain. Even before the devastation that tices during the antebellum years, only deepened war and emancipation brought to the region, rice the rage and frustration of white Southerners, still planters were no longer generating the immense reeling from defeat. In late August 1868, these profts that they had once enjoyed. With rice from powerful currents of discontent combined with a South and Southeast Asia dominating the interna‐ wave of labor militancy by freed men and women tional marketplace in the last third of the nine‐ demanding better wages led to the “Combahee teenth century, the vast estates along the Comba‐ Riot.” The editors include local newspaper ac‐ hee and the other rivers of the low country were counts and Heyward’s correspondence, providing slowly abandoned. It would be Heyward’s son, a complex and, at times, contradictory picture of Duncan Clinch Heyward, who, in Seed From this incident in which strikers intimated those un‐ Madagascar, frst published in 1937, describes the willing to join them and then overpowered the lo‐ rise and fall of his and other low-country planter cal sherif and his men who had come to restore families, a book that was as much a work of histo‐ order. The arrival of Union troops only added to ry as it was an epitaph for the rice kingdom. the chaos. For the editors of the Charleston Mer‐ In his introductory essay, Peter Coclanis pro‐ cury, this incident was yet another opportunity to vides a survey of the history of rice cultivation in excoriate the Federal government and its agents, the low country. Author of articles on the history and to damn “the negro conventicle in Columbia” and economics of rice production and The Shad‐ (i.e., the state legislature) along with Republican ow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the lawmakers (p. 337). For Heyward, however, it South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (1989), forced him to consider his own attitudes toward the defnitive economic and demographic history the new social order. Even though he regarded of the region, he is the ideal guide to the region’s soldiers stationed locally as “a low set and I wish agricultural and economic history. Along with an them all out of the neighborhood,” he also ac‐ elegant and succinct discussion of the “rice revo‐ knowledged that the “negroes must have protec‐

6 H-Net Reviews lution” in the early eighteenth century and its de‐ sequences on the low-country plantation regime mographic consequences, and the subsequent ex‐ will fnd Twilight on the South Carolina Rice pansion of the plantation complex along the Car‐ Fields a fne place to start their investigations olina coast, Coclanis also places the low country’s while those wishing to move beyond the coastal rice economy within an international context. plain should consider I Belong to South Carolina This essay, however, rarely moves beyond the as a point of departure. Moreover, with the confnes of the rice feld to examine some of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War now in full major political and cultural storms that bufeted swing and with publishers taking full advantage the Heywards and other prominent low-country of the moment, one hopes that these volumes will plantation families. This is, I believe, a missed op‐ not be lost in the food of books that will doubtless portunity as Coclanis has trenchant insights into be pouring forth from the presses in the next few this revolutionary moment in American history years as the nation’s relationship with this trans‐ when millions of enslaved people were emanci‐ formative period in its history grows ever deeper pated; when the government endeavored to safe‐ and more complex. guard that freedom; and when the South’s ruling Notes race sought to reassert its power and authority, in [1]. The title quotation comes from Sam ways both legitimate and illegitimate, over the Aleckson, Before the War and After the Union: An shattered remnants of their society. Hollis and Autobiography, in I Belong to South Carolina, 239. Stokes have done an excellent job editing and an‐ notating the letters and other related documents, [2]. Earl Schenck Miers, The Great Rebellion: including the roster of the freed men and women The Emergence of the American Conscience who worked on Heyward’s lands right at the end (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1958), 50 of the war. Perhaps the only omission is a map [3]. On the Combahee riot and other episodes that would enable readers unfamiliar with the of unrest and violence in the postbellum low low country to locate the various places men‐ country, see Brian Kelly, “Black Laborers, the Re‐ tioned in the correspondence. publican Party, and the Crisis of Reconstruction in These volumes are a signifcant addition to Lowcountry South Carolina,” International Re‐ the library of printed primary sources on slavery view of Social History 51 (December 2006): and freedom in the nineteenth-century South. 375-414; Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Eman‐ Placed alongside other collections that give voice cipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana to the experiences of slaves and freed people, State University Press, 1983), 74-135; and George such as Freedom: A Documentary History of C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Vio‐ Emancipation, 1861-1867 (edited by Ira Berlin and lence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: others [1985-2008]) and other anthologies of slave University of Georgia Press, 1984), 170. narratives, including those collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s (later pub‐ lished as The American Slave: A Composite Auto‐ biography, edited by George P. Rawick [1972-79]) or those digitized in Documenting the American South and other electronic archives, these vol‐ umes further complicate our understanding of slavery and freedom in nineteenth-century South Carolina. Any student or scholar seeking to under‐ stand the experience of the Civil War and its con‐

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Citation: Ted Pearson. Review of Ashton, Susanna, ed. I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives. ; Hollis, Margaret Belser; Stokes, Allen H., eds. Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields: Letters of the Heyward Family, 1862-1871. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. June, 2011.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32698

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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