#80: The Lords Proprietors, Mary Boykin Chesnut, and a Colonial Tea Tasting
For South Carolina history lovers far and wide! Enjoy weekly SC history and upcoming SC historical events
Welcome to the first 100 days of the South Carolina History Newsletter! My name is Kate Fowler and I live in Greenville, SC. I have a 9-5 job in marketing, and outside of work, have a deep love of history. I started this newsletter as a passion project to learn more about our beautiful state and build a community of fellow SC history lovers along the way! To establish a foundation for the newsletter and to grow my expertise on a wide variety of South Carolina historical topics, this past February I challenged myself to post 100 newsletters in 100 days. After this coming May 20th, the newsletter will become weekly. Thank you for joining the journey!
Dear reader,
Welcome to Newsletter #80 of The South Carolina History Newsletter! I’m so happy you’re here.
As always, I’d like to also extend a special welcome to the following new subscribers — woohoo! Thank you for subscribing.
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And now, let’s learn some South Carolina history!
Yours truly,
Kate
(Writing from Greenville, SC)
➳ Featured SC History Event
Please enjoy our featured SC History Event below, and click here to visit my SC History Events Calendar that organizes all the upcoming SC history events I have discovered. Please let me know if you’d like to add an event to the calendar! Reply to this email or send me a note at schistorynewsletter@gmail.com.
Saturday, May 4th at 1:00 pm | “Colonial Tea Tasting w/ Oliver Pluff & Company” | Revolutionary War Visitor Center | Camden, SC | FREE Admission
“Visit the Revolutionary War Visitor Center for its Colonial Tea Tasting event with Oliver Pluff. Learn the history of tea in ColonialAmerica while tasting some of the most popular flavors, including Martha Washington’s favorite tea, Cacao. The event is free but reservations are encouraged.”
➳ SC History Fun Facts
I.
Did you know that there were 8 original Lords Proprietors of South Carolina?
King Charles II of England granted land in the “New World” that would become North and South Carolina to 8 English nobleman in 1663.
The 8 noblemen had been loyal to the Stuart monarchy and King Charles I, who had been executed “for high treason” at the end of the English Civil War in 1649.
After King Charles I’s execution, the monarchy was abolished for a number of years and the “Commonwealth of England” was established as a republic.
However, by 1660, the monarchy was restored by Charles I’s son Charles II who would ascend the throne.
The Lords Proprietors below were “key figures in the restoration” of the monarchy and were rewarded “elevated rank in the English nobility and colonial property” for their loyalty to the throne. You will notice that their titles (many “first”s) reflect their “newness” to nobility.
The Lords Proprietors were:
Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon
George Monck, first duke of Albemarle
William Craven, first earl of Craven
Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury
John Berkeley, first baron Berkeley of Stratton, and his brother Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia
Sir George Carteret
Sir John Colleton
The land charter from 1663 granted to the 8 Lords Proprietors “all of the territory between 31° and 36° north latitude from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Ocean, or in effect from about 70 miles south of the border of present-day Florida to about 40 miles south of the present northern boundary of North Carolina.” Wow!
The colony was named Carolina after King Charles I — with “Carolus” being latin for Charles — and would be divided 1710 into South Carolina and North Carolina.
In 1669, Ashley Cooper, persuaded the other proprietors to fund an expedition from England that would establish the first permanent English settlement in South Carolina in 1670.
None of the original proprietors ever set foot in their colony.
Ashley Cooper, with assistance from John Locke (yes, the John Locke) — who served as secretary to the proprietorship from 1668 to 1675 — drafted The Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina (1669), which, among other provisions, “guaranteed freedom of religion for all save atheists.” To this point, here is an excerpt from the The Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina:
“No person whatsover shall disturb, molest, or persecute another for his speculative opinions in religion, or his way of worship.”
That document’s elaborate provisions provided a governing structure for the proprietorship as well as the colonial settlements.
The group was to be headed by a palatine, whose substantial powers in naming governors and vetoing laws sometimes had a major impact in South Carolina in later years. The title “palatine” had its origins in the feudal powers of the prince/bishops of Durham, powers granted to the shareholders in their charters. Here is another excerpt from the Constitutions:
“Our sovereign lord the King having, out of his royal grace and bounty, granted unto us the province of Carolina, with all the royalties, properties, jurisdictions, and privileges of a county palatine, as large and ample as the county palatine of Durham, with other great privileges; for the better settlement of the government of the said place, and establishing the interest of the lords proprietors with equality and without confusion; and that the government of this province may be made most agreeable to the monarchy under which we live and of which this province is a part; and that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy, we, the lords and proprietors of the province aforesaid, have agreed to this following form of government, to be perpetually established amongst us, unto which we do oblige ourselves, our heirs and successors, In the most binding ways that can be devised.”
The first three palatines, George Monck, John Berkeley, and Sir George Carteret, were “more like figureheads” during the years from 1669 to 1682 when Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury, took the lead in managing their affairs and the fledgling South Carolina settlement.
The Ashley River and the Cooper River were named for Anthony Ashley Cooper.
English noblemen “supported their opulent lifestyles from the rents from their landed estates,” and the proprietors expected to profit handsomely from their vast new American holdings. They were quickly disappointed when in the early years the “often-stubborn colonists did not repay the expenses of setting up the colony.”
Collection of quitrents on land granted to colonists was a continual problem. Here is a definition of quitrent from the SC Encyclopedia:
“Quitrents were annual land payments made originally to the Lords Proprietors and later to the British crown that permitted tenants to own, deed, bequeath, or transfer acreage in colonial South Carolina. The rents were synonymous with those that free English peasants had been paying since the Middle Ages and exempted their payers from all feudal obligations except allegiance.”
The Lords Proprietors dreamed of wealth “from gold and silver or the production of wine, silk, and olive oil” in the Carolinas — but those dreams proved elusive.
Shares in the joint enterprise “were bought and sold over the years, but none of the proprietors reaped much profit from their colonial investment.”
Only the Colleton, Carteret, and Craven shares remained in the hands of the families of their original owners in 1729. Later generations of the Colleton family were resident South Carolinians at Fair Lawn Seignory on the upper Cooper River. John Carteret, earl of Granville, the great-great-grandson of the original owner, did not join the other seven shareholders in selling out to the crown and received the Granville District along North Carolina’s northern border as his eighth share in the colonial property.
South Carolinians “early on asserted an irritating independence.” Attempts by royal officials to void the charter began as early as the 1680s in moves “to tighten control over England’s colonies.”
From SC Encyclopedia:
“From the South Carolinians’ point of view, the proprietors’ vetoes of their laws, their failure to adequately support the colony’s security, their cessation of further land grants at the same time that they reserved fifteen large tracts for proprietor’s baronies, and other grievances had ‘unhinged the frame of government.’”
In December 1719, the South Carolinians revolted against the proprietary regime and asked the crown to take direct control of the colony. A provisional royal governor arrived in 1721, and negotiations led to the 1729 surrender of the proprietors’ ownership of Carolina to the British government.
Please scroll to the bottom of this email for my source for this section
Please leave a comment below!
II.
Thanks to Mary Boykin Chesnut, did you know that her diary is one of the best primary sources we have that illuminates the people, places, and events of the Civil War, from the Confederacy’s perspective?
Mary Boykin Chesnut was born on her father’s plantation near Stateburg, SC in Sumter District on March 31, 1823.
She is recognized as “the preeminent writer of the Confederacy” because of the diary she kept during the Civil War and revised for publication in the early 1880s. (Note from Kate: I’m currently reading the diary!)
From SC Encyclopedia:
“No other southern writer of her era possessed the combination of literary cultivation, psychological perception, opportunity to observe closely the upper echelons of the Confederacy, and a willingness to write candidly about people, events, and issues–including slavery. The resulting publication, much revised and more appropriately labeled a memoir, secured her place in southern literary history.”
Chesnut was the eldest child of Stephen Decatur Miller and Mary Boykin. Her father, a leader in the states’ rights campaign, was elected governor in 1828 and U.S. senator in 1830. Thus, she grew up in a political environment.
She received a fine education that was befitting of a southern girl of her day, first at home and then at Madame Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies in Charleston, where she acquired “all of the intellectual and social equipment needed to flourish in her milieu.”
Her father’s death in 1838 ended her carefree childhood, and she soon accepted a marriage proposal from James Chesnut, Jr., whom she had met in Charleston. They were married on April 23, 1840; she was only 17 years old.
She moved to Mulberry, the plantation home of her husband’s family, just south of Camden. Their life there was dominated by her parents-in-law, who would live 25 more years.
Mary was never able to have children and “suffered bouts of depression and illness in this unfulfilling setting.”
She regarded her father-in-law, James Chesnut, Sr., “as a tyrant and was appalled at the liberties he took with his female slaves.”
Although the couple moved to their own house in Camden in 1848, it was not until her husband’s election to the U.S. Senate in 1858 that Chesnut found a society that “suited her gifts and her zest for life.”
In Washington, Chesnut flourished as a charming literary lady and valuable asset to her husband, “attracting the admiration of several prominent men and arousing her husband’s jealousy.”
Among her intimate friends was Varina Davis, wife of the senator and future Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
When the secession of South Carolina ended this idyllic life after only two years, Chesnut quickly became an ardent southern patriot.
Chesnut began keeping a diary in February 1861, confessing regret that she had not done so earlier. Her husband’s prominent role in the new Confederacy carried her to the centers of action and allowed her to witness and record her impressions of those dramatic times.
She was in Montgomery, Alabama, while the provisional Confederate government was being formed, in Charleston for the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and in Richmond when the new government moved to its permanent capitol.
She describes when the Confederacy began the Civil War by firing on Fort Sumter:
“There was a sound of stir all over the house, pattering of feet in the corridors. All seemed hurrying one way. I put on my double-gown and a shawl and went, too. It was to the housetop. The shells were bursting. In the dark I heard a man say, "Waste of ammunition." I knew my husband was rowing about in a boat somewhere in that dark bay, and that the shells were roofing it over, bursting toward the fort. If Anderson was obstinate, Colonel Chesnut was to order the fort on one side to open fire. Certainly fire had begun. The regular roar of the cannon, there it was. And who could tell what each volley accomplished of death and destruction?
The women were wild there on the housetop. Prayers came from the women and imprecations from the men. And then a shell would light up the scene. To-night they say the forces are to attempt to land. We watched up there, and everybody wondered that Fort Sumter did not fire a shot.
Last night, or this morning truly, up on the housetop I was so weak and weary I sat down on something that looked like a black stool. "Get up, you foolish woman. Your dress is on fire," cried a man. And he put me out. I was on a chimney and the sparks had caught my clothes. Susan Preston and Mr. Venable then came up. But my fire had been extinguished before it burst out into a regular blaze.
Do you know, after all that noise and our tears and prayers, nobody has been hurt; sound and fury signifying nothing - a delusion and a snare.”
She recorded her perceptive observations of people and events, and her frustrations “of a spirited woman in a world of men,
many of whom she considered too “discrete, cautious, lazy for the roles they were playing.”Mary Chesnut, when provoked, could be “hot-tempered and sarcastic,” but in public she held her tongue on one subject — slavery. Although her wealth and privilege were built on slavery, she loathed the South’s peculiar institution.
“God, forgive us but ours is a monstrous system, and wrong and iniquity,” she wrote in a March 1861 entry.
After the battle of Fort Sumter, Chesnut was deeply curious about the inner thoughts of her household slaves:
“Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants…Laurence [her husband’s valet] sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent. So are they all. They carry it too far. You could not tell that they even hear the awful row that is going on in the bay, though it is dinning in their ears day and night. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they stolidly stupid or wiser than we, silent and strong, biding their time?”
The couple returned to South Carolina in 1862 as James became chairman of the state’s Executive Council. James, urged on by Mary, accepted a post as aide to President Davis in December, and again in Richmond she experienced and wrote about the highs and lows of war.
By 1864, Union armies had swelled with black soldiers, the large majority of whom were emancipated slaves. The Confederacy, meanwhile, was desperate for additional troops. Mary Chesnut wrote in her diary: “We have lost nearly all of our men, and we have no money . . . Our best and brightest are under the sod.”
In early 1865 Union forces ravaged the family’s Mulberry plantation and the Chesnuts took refuge in North Carolina and then in Chester, South Carolina.
After the war James inherited his father’s property but also large debts. A “butter-and-egg business provided the little cash they had for some time, but they grew closer as a couple.
Since her father-in- law’s will left his property to his son and, on James’s death (he died in 1885), to his grandsons, Chesnut found security only in the new Camden home built for her in the early 1870s. There she completed the revisions and extensions of her war diary by the mid-1880s. However, before it was published, Mary Chesnut died of a heart attack on November 22, 1886.
Mary Boykin Chesnut was buried next to her husband in Knight’s Hill Cemetery in Camden.
Chesnut’s diaries were published in 1905, 19 years after her death. In 1949, new versions were published after her papers were discovered by the novelist Ben Ames Williams.
Then in 1981, historian C. Vann Woodward created an annotated edition of the diary, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982.
Literary critics have praised Chesnut's diary. The influential writer Edmund Wilson termed it "a work of art" and a "masterpiece" of the genre — as “the most important work by a Confederate author.”
Mary Chesnut was posthumously inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 1987.
Please scroll to the bottom of this email for my sources for this section
Have you read Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diaries? Please leave a comment below!
➳ Quote from an SC historical figure
“Lee’s tears - outsiders’ sneers - Yankees’ jeers. Did we lose by imbecility or because one man cannot fight ten for more than four years? We waited and hoped. They organized and worked like moles, with the riches of all the world at their backs. They have made their private fortunes by their country’s war. We talked of negro recruits. The Yankees used them - 18 million against six. The odds too great.”
—1865 excerpt from Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diary
Lords Proprietors article sources:
“Carolina Charters (1663, 1665) | NCpedia.” NCpedia, 2006, https://www.ncpedia.org/carolina-charters-1663-1665. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.
Lesser, Charles H. “Lords Proprietors of Carolina.” South Carolina Encyclopedia, 8 June 2016, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/lords-proprietors-of-carolina/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.
Towles, Louis P. “Quitrents | South Carolina Encyclopedia.” South Carolina Encyclopedia, 20 June 2016, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/
quitrents/#:~:text=Carolina%20as%20well.-,Quitrents%20in%20South%20Carolina%20were%20designed%20to%20encourage%20immediate%20colonization,ownership%20through%20a%20perpetual%20lease. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.
Mary Boykin Chesnut article sources:
“Carolina Diarist: The Broken World of Mary Chesnut.” S.C. Sea Grant Consortium, 28 Mar. 2011, https://www.scseagrant.org/carolina-diarist-the-broken-world-of-mary-chesnut/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.
Farmer, James O. “Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller | South Carolina Encyclopedia.” South Carolina Encyclopedia, 15 April 2016, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/
sce/entries/chesnut-mary-boykin-miller/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.
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Kate, your topic of Mary Boykin Chestnut is impeccably timed. Just yesterday, Erik Larson's new book, The Demon of Unrest, was released. It explores the days between Lincoln's election and the firing on Ft Sumter in 1861. Chestnut plays a prominent part in the book!
https://allgoodbooks.com/item/p5lAnqxqGBRFIRPT_WnrRQ
Just received "A Diary from Dixie" after reading this article!