Unexplored Moments in Nineteenth-Century Upcountry South Carolina History

Recovering the Piedmont Past This page intentionally left blank recovering the piedmont past Unexplored Moments in Nineteenth-Century Upcountry South Carolina History Edited by Timothy P. Grady and Melissa Walker Foreword by Orville Vernon Burton The University of South Carolina Press © 2013 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Recovering the Piedmont past : unexplored moments in nineteenth-century Upcountry South Carolina history / edited by Timothy P. Grady and Melissa Walker ; foreword by Orville Vernon Burton. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61117-253-9 (hardbound : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61117-336-9 (ebook) 1. South Carolina—History, Local—19th century. 2. South Carolina— Social conditions—19th century. 3. Education—South Carolina—History—19th century. 4. African Americans—South Carolina—History—19th century. 5. South Carolina—Church history—19th century. I. Grady, Timothy Paul, author, editor of compilation. II. Walker, Melissa, 1962– author, editor of compilation. F273.R32 2013 975.7'03—dc23 2013010907 Contents Foreword vii Orville Vernon Burton Introduction 1 Timothy P. Grady and Melissa Walker Mineral Water, Dancing, and Amusements: The Development of Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Upcountry 6 Melissa Walker “Education has Breathed over the Scene”: Robert H. Reid and the Reidville Schools, 1857–1905 25 Timothy P. Grady Prelude to Little Bighorn: The Seventh U.S. Cavalry in the South Carolina Upcountry 53 Andrew H. Myers “At present we have no school at all which is truly unfortunate”: Freedmen and Schools in Abbeville County, 1865–1875 87 Katherine D. Cann From Slavery to Freedom: African American Life in Post–Civil War Spartanburg 107 Diane C. Vecchio African Americans and the Presbyterian Church: The Clinton Presbyterian Church and Sloan’s Chapel 135 Nancy Snell Griffith “Murder takes the angel shape of justice”: Rape, Reputation, and Retribution in Nineteenth-Century Spartanburg 159 Carol Loar vi Contents “May the Lord keep down hard feelings”: The Woodrow Evolution Controversy and the 1884 Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina 190 Robert B. McCormick Suggested Readings 215 About the Contributors 217 Index 219 Foreword The essays in this collection attest to the value of local history. Although many in the profession are moving to global and transnational studies, some fail to realize that these “higher” or “broader” levels are in fact intellectual constructs rather than concrete realities. It is also true that no history, properly understood, is merely local. On the local level, where the complexities of human endeavors transpire, is where we find the substantiation of national and international experience. Local historical study has the potential to illuminate behavior in a given community and to provide perspective for understanding behavior in other communities. Whether as a reflection or as a stark contrast, a study of a particular place illuminates U.S. history, and even world history. As Eudora Welty has suggested in The Eye of the Story, “One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction.” This collection of essays also corrects an imbalance. Too much of our nation’s history has been written from the northeastern urban historical perspective. In addition studies of Charleston, the earlier European-settled black-belt regions of the coast, and in the midlands state capital of Columbia, with its political maneuverings, have dominated the history of South Carolina. We need these histories of the South Carolina upcountry to get an evenhanded story of South Carolina and American history. These articles highlight the advantages of studying history in a particular place. Places have history and tradition. Local history deals with all the people in the community, with all their ambiguities and contradictions, all their negotiations across lines of race, class, gender, and power. Local history offers a way to explore Jon Gjerde’s idea of community (which he expressed in The Minds of the West) with its “curious amalgam of cultural retention and cultural change, tradition and modernity, authority and freedom.” Local history includes practicalities and metaphysics. It brings to the profession the capacity to challenge a historiography and methodology that now tends toward the study of ideas and ideologies, discourses and cultural stances. Moreover, local studies provide the evidence for historical generalization, sometimes verifying and sometimes challenging popular interpretation. It can ex- amine a larger subject, such as the civil rights movement, viewing it in microcosm vii viii Foreword to see how it really worked at the ground level. The civil rights movement from a national perspective, as explained by Taylor Branch (see Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire), can look one way, but examining it in three Alabama cities as J. Mills Thornton in Dividing Lines did at the grassroots level makes community studies more than simple local history and gives the context that macrohistory misses. Many of my generation and I were part of a revolution in history, the so- called new social history, which fundamentally altered historians’ understanding of the nature of their discipline and opened the door to local studies. To revert briefly to nostalgia and talk a little bit about what we tried to do in the 1970s, in those heady, early days, new social history employed systems and comparisons to explain human behavior and analyze patterns of change over time. Guidelines as presented decades ago included a quantitative emphasis in the use of records and in statistical presentation; the explicit use or refinement of social theory; and a spotlight on the lower social strata. One could add a fourth characteristic: a focus on community studies as an important tool to investigate social change. The social and cultural history of the South has grown steadily in recent decades, but it remains dominated by models illustrating a few themes—honor, paternalism, kinship ties, industrialization, race relations—through analyses that tend to sweep aside the complexities of life in local communities. A small group of scholars has focused closely on the retrieval of the dynamics of local life or the careful reconstruction of particular incidents, sometimes with the aid of anthropological insights: for example, Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside, Melton McLaurin’s Celia, A Slave, or my book on the South Carolina piedmont, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions. These studies, more than a quarter century old now, tended to approach the past with the certainty of a social scientist. The best of these drew inspiration from European and Chinese social historians such as Emmanuel LeRoi Ladurie, Nathalie Zemon Davis, and Jona- than Spence, whose brilliant books, including The Return of Martin Guerre and The Death of Woman Wang, cleverly and vividly built up social context before introducing elements of human contingency that were central to the plot. Here painstaking archival research was harnessed to the task of propelling readers from the solid ground of fact across a speculative void toward the conclusion that this must have been the way things worked out. Following this, Alain Corbin has taken this approach about as far as it might go, “rediscovering” in The Life of an Unknown a French clog maker—who apparently never did anything much of moment—entirely by reference to what he must have experienced, given the social coordinates of age, class, sex, and location that the author plots. Here the question of human agency drops out entirely. Working from a different set of assumptions, another group of culturally inspir ed historians, including Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms and Foreword ix Edoardo Grendi in “Storia sociale e storia interpretativa,” have drawn strength from Italian proponents of microstorie. They revel in documentary research and in the new adductive methods of analysis they have brought forward. Although scholars such as Simon Schama (Dead Certainties) or Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre) stopped short of invoking insight as method, they showed a greater willingness to treat seemingly irrelevant documents as potentially cru- cial clues, to follow their lead even down interesting trails which finally went cold. Books such as Laurel Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun or Asa Briggs’s Victor- ian Things turned social historians’ assumptions upside-down to great effect, treating material objects as clues from which layered strands of gendered cultural significance, political meaning, and social relations could be teased and interwoven. Other works, such as Spence’s brilliantly playful The Question of Hu or Greg Dening’s Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language, combined a willingness to let readers draw their own conclusions about complex, confusing, and deliberately ambiguous arguments with a powerful desire to retrieve the narrative form and the simple pleasure of reading history. These social scientific and culturalist tendencies have produced many estimable works, such as Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., History from Crime; R. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475; Patricia C. Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewet; Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian; Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary; and Richard D. Brown and Irene Q. Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler. In southern history the only examples that offer much assistance are Win- throp Jordan’s pathbreaking examination of a forgotten slave conspiracy—if such it was—Tumult and Silence at Second Creek, and Scott Nelson’s published journey in search of the legend of John Henry, Steel Driving Man. So far scholars of the South have been slow in developing the questions advanced by either the so-called New Social Historians or the culturalists inspired by the “linguistic turn.” They have also wavered between narrative and analysis.

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