In the summer of 1739, George Lucas took his whole family to South Carolina. The bleakness of Antigua had become too much, the simmering anger of the hard-driven slaves too threatening. His lands there were bowed down with debt. In South Carolina, which at that time had no designated western boundary but stretched theoretically on through the vast spaces of French Louisiana and Spanish New Mexico as far west as the Sea of Cortes, was the American sense of space and possibility. Perhaps there the Lucases would find the riches and contentment which Antigua had once promised.
They arrived in South Carolina in early August 1739 and settled at a plantation called Wappoo, which John Lucas had bought as long ago as 1714, a property to which George, his son, had added in the 1730s. It was a few miles west of Charles Town, the capital of the colony, on the north side of a salt creek, with many wonderful trees and wetlands in which rice could be grown. On the higher land were giant meadows, perfect for beef and pig pasture, none of which would thrive on Antigua. ‘An ox is raised at almost as little expence in Carolina as a hen is in England,’ the boosters had said, and Carolina farmers were known to feed their pigs on peaches.15
But the imperial rivalries with Spain in the Caribbean and on the northern coast of Venezuela were steepening fast. In November 1739, on pain of being cashiered if he did not comply, George Lucas, promoted Lieutenant-Colonel, returned to take command of his regiment in Antigua, and prepared to fight Spain in the War of Jenkins’s Ear. At Wappoo he left Eliza in charge of her withdrawn and sickly mother, her sister Polly, her ill and depressed cousin Fanny Fayweather and twenty-odd slaves. George also put the two other plantations which he had acquired in his daughter’s hands: 1,500 acres at Garden Hill, sixty miles away to the south-west on the Combahee River, and 1,650 acres in Craven County on the Waccamaw, the same distance to the north-west, both of them to be reached by sea. Both had their own resident overseers, but they were to report to her. When he left for the Caribbean, she was sixteen, six weeks short of her seventeenth birthday.
From the letters she immediately began to write and transcribe, she was clearly magnificently fearless. ‘The part of the world I now inhabit,’ as she wrote to her brother in England, was another version of the long-held dream – and the opposite of all the constraint and intensity of the Caribbean. South Carolina was a large country, wide in extent, with big navigable rivers and inexhaustible stands of timber. Fertility was in its soils and ‘there is very few European or American fruits or grain but what grow here’. It looked like an edible paradise:
The Country abounds with wild fowl. Venison and fish, Beef, veal and mutton, are here in much greater perfection than in the Islands, tho’ not equal to that in England – but their pork exceeds any I ever tasted anywhere. The Turkeys extreamly fine, especially the wild, and indeed all their poultry is exceeding good, and peaches, Nectrins, and mellons of all sorts extreamly fine and in profusion, and their Oranges exceed any I ever tasted in the West Indies or from Spain or Portugal.16
If the frontier was no more than a day’s ride away to the west, and the threat of Indian wars never far absent, if the four months of summer were ‘extreamly disagreeable, excessive hott, much thunder and lightening and muskatoes and sand flies in abundance’,17 none of this diminished the overwhelming sense of arrival which coloured the teenage Eliza Lucas’s world. The Atlantic-bordering low country of South Carolina in the 1730s was the place in which the gentry was liberated into the world it had always desired. The original constitution for the colony, drawn up in part by John Locke, had envisaged a dominating, hugely rich and vastly propertied aristocracy. ‘We ayme not att the profit of merchants’, the Lords Proprietors of Carolina had said in 1674, but ‘the incouragement of landlords.’18 Antony Ashley-Cooper, the colony’s great promoter, after whom the two rivers of Charles Town were named, like to call it ‘my darling’.19 That attitude was not going to last in the new century and by 1720, the small-time Carolina planter-gentry were in charge of their own destinies, dominating the House of Assembly and experimenting with new crops for the Atlantic trade.
Wappoo was a pretty and gentle place, mild and sheltered, with huge oaks and bays, and woods filled with magnolias and in the springtime ‘the scent of the young mirtle and the yellow Jesamin with wch the woods abound.’20 From the very first day that her father left her there, Eliza was both at home and in command. The letters she immediately began to dispatch across this Atlantic world brim with an amazing authority:
Wrote to my father on business of various sorts desiring he will not insist on puting my sister to school. I will undertake to teach her French. Also gave him an account of my poor Cousen Fanny Fayweather’s melancholy.21
In part, this was because she was not alone. Her father had left her in the lap of a deeply effective and protective gentry network, which maintained a manner of life which would not have been out of place in southern England. Little three-cornered invitations have survived in the Lucas-Pinckney archive: ‘Governor Lyttelton will wait on the ladies at Belmont’; ‘Mrs. Drayton begs the pleasure of your company to spend a few days’; ‘Lord and Lady Charles Montagu’s Compts to Mrs and Miss Pinckney, and if it is agreable to them shall be glad of their Company at the Lodge’22 – no sense here that the Atlantic had done anything to alter, let alone destroy, the ligatures of sociability on which the gentry had always relied.
The teenage Eliza was immediately running a big and productive enterprise. At Wappoo she relied on the slave Mulatto Quash as her factor and mainstay but there is no question she was closely involved in the practicalities herself. ‘I have the business of 3 plantations to transact’, she wrote to her old friend Mrs Boddicott in London,
wch requires much writing and more business and fatigue of other sorts than you can imagine, but least you should imagine it too burthensom to a girl at my early time of life, give mee leave to assure you I think myself happy that I can be useful to so good a father. By rising very early I find I can go through with much business.23
She usually got up at five in the morning, read until seven, walked through the plantation, saw that the ‘Servants’, as she called them, were at their work, and then had breakfast. The first hour after breakfast was spent at her harpsichord, the following ‘in recolecting something I have learned, least for want of practise it should be quite lost, such as french and short hand’. The rest of the morning was spent teaching her younger sister ‘and two black girls who I teach to read, and if I have my papas approbation (my mamas I have got) I intend for school mistress’s for the rest of the Negroe children’. More music in the afternoon, and then needlework until the candles were lit. ‘Thursday the whole day except what the necessary affairs of the family take up, is spent in writing, either on the business of the plantations or on letters to my friends … I hate to undertake anything and not go thro’ with it.’24
Her energy and commitment to self-improvement were relentless: she planted a fig orchard ‘with design to dry them, and export them’, as well as an oak grove for timber staves, established a nursery of tender plants for export to English greenhouses, grew rice for the English market, beef for the Caribbean, supervised the collection and storage of pitch and tar from the Garden Hill plantation, experimented with cotton, maize, ginger, indigo, cucumbers, peach trees and potatoes.25
This was the new version of an old story. English gentry families had always used their landscapes to demonstrate who they were. Order, antiquity, rootedness, coherence, their own prominent place within their surroundings: this was the governing image of the class. But Eliza Pinckney’s version of this ancient marking of the territory had taken on a specific Enlightenment colouring. Her approach to her father’s lands was, above all, inventive. Improvement had long been part of the gentry enterprise but with Eliza Lucas improvement of the land and improvement of herself became two parts of a single enterprise.
Education – the Lockean idea that education and experience made a person what they were – dominated her consciousness. In his famous Es
say Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690, Locke had maintained that the human understanding at the beginning of life was like ‘white Paper, void of all Characters’.26 Any aspect of your identity only came from later experience, from what life did to you, and the way in which your mind then processed and combined those experiences. This was a revolutionary idea, the first erosion of the ancient principle of heritability, the idea that what you were was largely a product of what your parents had been. After Locke, there was nothing essential in a person, nothing unchangeable. You were what you became. In this way, every mind and every person was an America. There was nothing metaphysical about it; the only duty for every thinking being was to make themselves good. Locke saw the true philosopher as a simple gardener, ‘an Under-Labourer … clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge’.27 The soil of America and the receptive folds of the young mind were the same thing. Inheritance and material things were not enough; bringing to fruition the potential in the soil was the definition of a useful life. That is what cultivation meant and that was the goal to which she dedicated her life.
In many ways Eliza, under her father’s encouragement and love, was a self-made person. Her letters are full of extraordinary moments of self-recognition in which she understands her own place in this cultural framework. Looking into the pages of Virgil, lent to her by Mr Pinckney from Charles Town, she suddenly found herself confronting the cultural origins of what she had imagined until then were her own ideas:
I have got no further than the first vol of Virgil, but was most agreably disapointed to find myself instructed in agriculture as well as entertained by his charming penn, for I am persuaded ’tho he wrote for Italy it will in many Instances suit Carolina. I had never perused those books before, and imagined I should immediately enter upon battles, storms and tempests, that put mee in a maze, and make mee shudder while I read. But the calm and pleasing diction of pastoral and gardening agreably presented themselves not unsuitably to this charming season of the year, with wch I am so much delighted that had I butt the fine soft Language of our Poet to paint it properly, I should give you but little respite ’till you came into the country, and attended to the beauties of pure Nature unassisted by Art.28
With however much irony this was expressed, the English-Antiguan-Carolinan teenage girl suddenly recognized herself as a classically inspired English squire, if one who presided over an elegant American landscape maintained by African slaves.
It is, overall, a beautiful and charming picture but the fact of slavery in the centre of it cannot be glossed over. That fact confronts, in a particularly polarized way, one of the central questions about the gentry: was this deeply attractive kind of civilization, which nurtured and developed many virtues and graces, reliant, in the end, on the exploitation of people weaker and poorer than the few beneficiaries on whom this book has dwelt?
It can certainly look that way. If invited to dinner in Charles Town, Eliza and her mother, as her great-granddaughter Harriott Horry Ravenel described in the 1890s, wore their ‘brocade, taffety [and] lutestring dresses’ tightly stayed.
Their slippers, to match their dresses, had heels even higher and more unnatural than our own. Their cloaks, expansive to cover their enormous hoops, were much like the Mother Hubbard cloaks worn a few years since. They were made of silk, satin, or cloth, lined and quilted, very full and set into small yokes.29
In these voluminous and brilliant clothes, they set out from Wappoo for Charles Town in a
low boat, probably a long canoe, hollowed out of a mighty cypress thirty or forty feet long, with sitting room for half a dozen in bow and stern, and rowed by six or eight negroes, all singing in faultless time and cadence as they swung their paddles.30
These singing, paddling Africans were her father’s slaves. The eighteenth-century gentry always accepted slavery as a normal part of life. In Eliza’s letters that level of acceptance deepened into a kind of domesticity indistinguishable from English gentry attitudes to the servants and employees on an English farm. ‘June comes for thread, for the negroes are in want of their Cloaths’, Mr Murray, Eliza’s manager on the Waccamaw plantation, wrote to her:
Please send a Cooper’s broad ax for Sogo. it must be turned for the left hand, Smith Dick knows how to doe it, and a Cross Iron. Pompey has been very bad Twise with the Plurisy & I could not get the new barn finished being obleeged to take Sogo to make barrells.31
Sogo was the plantation cooper, Dick and Pompey blacksmith and carpenter, June the captain of the boat, all slaves.
Much later Eliza described to her daughter the domestic economy of her household, and the intimate connections she had with her slaves.
Mary-Ann understands roasting poultry in the greatest perfection you ever saw, and old Ebba the fattening them to as great a nicety. Daphne makes me a loaf of very nice bread. You know I am no epicure, but I am pleased they can do things so well, when they are put to it, and as to the eating part I don’t think I shall miss Onia at all. I shall keep young Ebba to do the drudgery part, fetch wood, and water, and scour, and learn as much as she is capable of Cooking and Washing. Mary-Ann Cooks, makes my bed, and makes my punch, Daphne works and makes the bread, old Ebba boils the cow’s victuals, raises and fattens the poultry, Moses is imployed from breakfast until 12 o’clock without doors, after that in the house, Pegg washes and milks.
Thus I have formed my household, nobody eats the bread of idleness when I am here, nor are any overworked. Mary-Ann has pickled me some oysters very good, so I have sent you a little pott by the boat. Moses gets them at low water without a boat.32
Why was there no difficulty in accommodating slavery to a gentry frame of mind? Partly because the class-income-status gap between gentry and their servants was so extreme anyway. If, as was clear from John Oglander’s accounts, a member of a gentry family could expect to live on an income at least sixty times the average income of the people who were working for him (Chapter “Steadiness”), they were living in different conceptual universes. A man paid next to nothing, with no resources to fall back on, was only in a conceptual sense a free man. In reality, he had little room for manoeuvre. Besides, the system of indentured servants, by which white people travelled to the Americas as bound employees throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a form of temporary and inefficient slavery – white people working hard in tropical heat tended to die too easily – but the gap between servants who were paid next to nothing and slavery was not difficult to cross.
If slavery was psychologically near to hand, it was also economically efficient. The cost of a slave for life was no more than eighteen months’ wages for a free man.33 It was prudent and rational to buy slaves as a necessary part of the household economy. Slaves, like cheap petrol, made possible the expensive civilization, with its imported accoutrements, which the planter-gentry required.
It must also, in part, have been legitimated by the eighteenth-century’s classical ideals. ‘The calm and pleasing diction of pastoral and gardening’, which Eliza found in the Georgics, had also relied for its elegance on slave labour. This is surely one reason that slaves were so often given Roman names – even if the repeated occurrence of ‘Philander’ as a name is clearly a dirty joke about black men’s sexuality. When Eliza’s son-in-law died, an inventory and valuation was made of his possessions. Among them were:
Dorinda £20 Caesar £90 Caeser £80 Caesar £40 Caesar £20 Hector £40 Trajan £70 Roxana (no value given) Percilla £100 Cupid £40 Philander £150 Philander £100 Philander £40 Pompy £70 Corydon £5 Cupid £5 Daphne £90 Roxana £5 Pompy £90 Carolus £30 Hanibal £35 Othello £50 Tamerlane £25 Cato £90 Pliny £60 Amorintha £70 Hercules £50 Jupiter £25 Paris £30 Chloe £4034
All this was part of the Virgilian vision. Slaves were an unremarkable, rational and elegant part of the gentry world. They were an apparently natural feature of the landscape of contentment. Mysterious as this now is, they must have seemed essential t
o the goodness these people were cultivating.
When Colonel Lucas left his teenage daughter in charge of his American possessions, he cannot have been entirely at ease. From Antigua, clearly worried that he had left this girl unprotected in the wilds of America, he had proposed to her two possible, rich but antiquated husbands. Initially buried in the extreme formality with which she usually wrote to her father, her reply finally emerged into the full light of day:
As you propose Mr L. to me I am sorry I can’t have Sentiments favourable enough to him to take time to think on the Subject, as your Indulgence to me will ever add weight to the duty that obliges me to consult what best pleases you, for so much Generosity on your part claims all my Obedience, but as I know ’tis my Happiness you consult, [I] must beg the favour of you to pay my thanks to the old Gentleman for his Generosity and favourable sentiments of me and let him know my thoughts on the affair in such civil terms as you know much better than any I can dictate; and beg leave to say to you that the riches of Peru and Chili if he had them put together could not purchase a sufficient Esteem for him to make him my husband.35
The other candidate did no better. Eliza asked her father to put ‘aside the thoughts of my marrying yet these 2 or 3 years at least’ and assured him that she knew he would never make her ‘a Sacrifice to Wealth’. Although earlier fathers had often consulted their daughters over their prospective husbands and given them the power of veto over a choice, and some sons had gone ahead with marrying girls their parents knew nothing of, the teasing, friendly jokiness of Eliza in this letter to her father, on what was conventionally the most important decision in a girl’s life, is nothing short of revolutionary. Liberty, self-sufficiency and self-determination were all running in her veins.
The Gentry Page 26