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A Study of Elite Political Power in South Carolina, 1763-1776

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A Study of Elite Political Power in South Carolina, 1763-1776 “ALL MATTERS AND THINGS SHALL CENTER THERE”: A STUDY OF ELITE POLITICAL POWER IN SOUTH CAROLINA, 1763-1776 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Aaron J. Palmer, M.A. Washington, DC October 19, 2009 Copyright 2009 by Aaron J. Palmer All Rights Reserved ii “ALL MATTERS AND THINGS SHALL CENTER THERE:” A STUDY OF ELITE POLITICAL POWER IN SOUTH CAROLINA, 1763-1776 Aaron J. Palmer, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Alison Games, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This dissertation addresses a fundamental question about the nature of political power in South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution: how did the lowcountry elite wield political power in the colony and to what end? It argues that the ability to control the law, shape legal and governing structures, and determine how the law was enforced were the primary tools that allowed the lowcountry elite to establish the most centralized system of colonial government in North America. The Commons House of Assembly, which represented only lowcountry parishes until the revolution, seized control of the law, courts, law enforcement, infrastructure, and even the Church of England’s vestries through legislation. These government entities existed to protect property, manage society and maintain order. Yet, the lowcountry elite faced many challenges in the late eighteenth century. Slaves and plantations had to be carefully regulated to protect the economy. Growing population and rising poverty in the colonial metropolis led to higher taxes, disorder and threats to personal property. Most of the colony’s white population lived in the backcountry, and they resented their exclusion from the political and legal systems. British authority, however, posed the greatest threat to the centralized political system. iii By the time of the imperial crisis, the Commons House had effectively built a system that could manage the colony without autonomous local governments. However, British officials remained beyond the assembly’s direct control. The colonial legislature used an array of established tactics to bring officials to heel. A long series of battles with British officials merged with the imperial crisis by 1775. The lowcountry elite saw their political system challenged by royal executive authority and Parliamentary legislative power, and they could not win those political battles within the old system. Hence, they resurrected it through a resistance government that produced an independent state government. The new government resembled the old but featured a key difference: British and independent executive authority had disappeared. iv For my parents, Charles and Nancy Palmer, who gave me so much. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”—Philippians 4:13 v Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One Rule through Law: Legal Culture, the Courts, and Elite Political Power..……………...30 Chapter Two “Crimes of the Most Heinous Nature”: Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement..............94 Chapter Three “Nothing but Terrors and Punishments”: Slavery and the Law …..…………………....156 Chapter Four “Placed Therein and Managed”: The Church of England and Elite Political Power…..222 Chapter Five “His Late Misconduct should not Pass”: The Commons House versus the Placeholders.....................................................................................................................263 Chapter Six “Sign or Die”: The Imperial Crisis and the Reconstruction of South Carolina’s Government……………………………………….…………………………………….319 Epilogue………………..…………………………………………………………….....385 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………395 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………..419 vi List of Abbreviations SCAHC—South Carolina Archives and History Center, Columbia South Carolina SCHS—South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina CLS—Charleston Library Society, Charleston, South Carolina vii Introduction This dissertation addresses a fundamental question about the nature of government in South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution: how did the lowcountry elite wield political power? Broadly defined, the political system included all the various realms where life was managed. From this perspective, the most important questions when studying South Carolina’s political system are who governed, how, and to what end? The colonial elite used the legislature’s authority to structure and control a host of institutions that have not been considered as strictly political to manage or govern society in ways that secured the authority and protected the interests of the ruling class. When one approaches politics as a practical science—as the art rather than just the philosophy of governing—one has to go beyond the legislative and the ideological to examine all the tools of political power, how they were wielded, and what the ruling party hoped to accomplish. The lowcountry elite used South Carolina’s lower legislative house--the Commons House of Assembly--to bend other government institutions to their needs and shape them to govern in accordance with the ruling party’s agenda. That agenda included managing, ordering and preserving the plantation economy by creating, defining or extending legislative authority over administrative and legal entities that served to define and preserve social order and limit or direct the activities of all members of colonial society. South Carolina’s elite held a strong grip on authority over local matters in the colony, and they waged continuous battles with groups within the colony (i.e. lower class whites and slaves) and British officials to gain more control of government institutions. 1 The royal governor was theoretically very powerful, but long established precedents had reduced those powers. Moreover, though colonists revered the king, that reverence did not always translate into support for the king’s ministers, governors, and appointees.1 Governors lacked patronage powers, had no independent revenue, had a weak statutory backing, and had to depend on their legislatures for support.2 The king and his colonial representatives were important sources of political authority, but the people, represented in the legislature, were the “moral equal of the king.” The assembly, acting in the people’s name, could resist the king and his subordinates.3 The provincial elite and the assembly united around most issues, but they often fought with governors and other imperial officials.4 Provincial and imperial leaders fought especially difficult battles over the definition and control of other governing institutions. When the assembly successfully gained control over such institutions, it even further diminished the political authority of imperial officials. The system the elite fought to build was tremendously powerful, but it faced constant challenges that questioned or threatened the elite’s ability to maintain their control over local institutions. British imperial policy itself presented the most critical challenge. The American 1 Jonathan Mercantini, Who Shall Rule at Home? The Evolution of South Carolina Political Culture, 1748- 1776 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 10. 2 Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 158-160. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Robert M. Weir, “The Harmony We Were Famous for: An Interpretation of Prerevolutionary South Carolina Politics,” in “The Last of American Freemen:” Studies in the Political Culture of the Colonial and Revolutionary South, ed. Robert M. Weir (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986). Also see Mercantini, Who Shall Rule… Weir presents the traditional position that the unifying force of a shared ideology led to a high degree of political harmony within the South Carolina elite. Mercantini challenges the position by focusing on major conflicts between imperial and local authorities, arguing that these conflicts also reveal differences among local elites. 2 Revolution in South Carolina was thus a defense of the old order and a continuation of the elite’s struggle to maintain it that was informed by the model of government they had employed to rule the province during the eighteenth century. Historians have already provided a rich portrait of politics in colonial South Carolina.5 These studies focus on the assembly, its membership, its structure, and its ideologically driven conflicts with imperial officials. They have thoughtfully and thoroughly studied legislative privilege, the membership of the assembly, battles with royal governors, the institutional structure of the assembly, and constitutional ideologies that influenced the political behavior of assembly members. All of these works cover different pieces of the puzzle, but they share one common element. All of them focus on the assembly within the context of conflicts with royal governors and “country” or Whig constitutional ideology. Those struggles are critical issues, and this dissertation will also devote attention to them in the final two chapters. However, this work will frame the assembly’s political struggles in the context of how the elite wielded political power in the colony through institutions that the assembly created and controlled. Previous studies have then shown how the legislative assembly accumulated power at the expense of royal officials. They have further studied who sat in the 5 See Jack P.
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