It was another turn in the long gentry dance of uncertainty and establishment.
They let their house in Surrey ‘with the furniture standing till our return’,59 and in March 1758 sailed for America on a ship of the Royal Navy. But now the central catastrophe of Eliza’s life occurred: three weeks after landing in South Carolina, Charles Pinckney, who had been to her ‘that dear, that worthy, that valuable man, whose life was one continued course of active Virtue’,60 sickened of malaria, which he had caught when touring his plantations, and died.
For many years her spirit was broken. Her letters, which had been so bright and funny when she had been happy, now became long, sad and serious, for year after year turning back to the loss she had suffered, instructing her sons in England (they were going to Westminster School) on how to follow their dead father’s example. Her life stiffened, no longer an adventure, more a case of keeping going, holding a candle to the ideal of virtue which the memory of Charles Pinckney represented for her. To think of him, she wrote,
pleases while it pains, and may be called the Luxury of grief. O! Had Heaven added but one blessing more and spared him to see his dear children brought up and let us have gone to the grave hand in hand together, what a heaven had I enjoyed upon Earth!61
She continued to send pet turtles, ‘Non-parriels’ and American Summer Ducks to her friends in England. She couldn’t find any wild Turkeys for them and got hold of some Turkey chicks, which she raised herself, but behind all that, as she wrote in May 1759, she was ‘wholly taken up with my own moloncholy concerns’.62 She longed to go back to England to see her sons, but as she explained to a correspondent in February 1761, she was caught in a desperate bind:
You obligingly enquire when we return to England. I wish I could with any certainty fix a time for, though all countrys are now to me alike nor would I take the pains to cross again the Ocean for the best fortune in England. I have such inducements for coming that when I can prudently leave this Country and have fixt a sume in England to soport my self and the children in a retired, comfortable, and decent way – not in a ostentatious or vain one, for I have no ambitious views of any sort – nither fatigue, or suffering any thing in my own person, shall detain me longer from them for my heart bleeds at our separation. ’Tis no paradox to say nothing but the greatness of my affection keeps me from them, as it appears to me and my friends here that it will (with Divine blessing) be much to their advantage for me to continue here a couple of year longer; and when the question is whether I shall please my self or do them real service I should be inexcuseable to hesitate a moment.63
This extraordinary paragraph not only dramatizes the emotional reality of the eighteenth-century Atlantic family; it is the testament of a mother whose life was entirely and consciously given to the service of her children, an attendance to her posterity which is unequalled in these stories. It is the heroism of love, but love that was founded on entirely real and material concerns. The development of an American estate in the boom conditions of the mid-eighteenth century was the greatest act of love she could perform for her distant children. And the combined Pinckney–Lucas estate was both huge and scattered, spread across the full range of river basins, coastlands and coastal islands on the Atlantic side of South Carolina.
Eliza threw herself into work. So much
care, attention and activity [is needed] to attend properly to a Carolina Estate … to do ones duty and make it turn to account, that I find I have as much business as I can go through of one sort or other. Perhaps ’tis better for me, and I believe it is. Had there not been a necessity for it, I might have sunk to the grave by this time … A variety of imployment gives my thoughts a relief from melloncholy subjects.64
Not a drip of self-pity in that; but clarity and seriousness regarding the sombre and important truths about herself.
She was growing pomegranates and overseeing the inoculation of her slaves against smallpox, supervising the small hospital in which they were confined when ill, opening a magnolia nursery, from which two-and three-year-old seedlings would be shipped to England, denying the gossip that she was to be married again, arranging for her husband’s clothes to be altered for her sons, making enquiries over the suitability of Westminster School, feeling exhausted and falling ill for seven months in 1762, gently toying with the ‘Romantick’ idea that she might live in Geneva after the boys had finished at Oxford.
With all this, her roots were slowly penetrating the South Carolina earth. At Belmont, the Pinckney plantation five miles from Charles Town, she re-created the garden:
I am myself head gardener and I believe work much harder than most principal ones. We found it in ruins when we arrived from England, so that we have had a wood to clear, and indeed it was laid out in the old taste, so that I have been modernizing it wch has afforded me much imployment.65
She began to treasure the ancient trees, looking ‘upon an old oak with the reverencial Esteem of a Druid’ and raging against their destroyers ‘as sacriligious Enemies to posterity’.66
When Eliza’s youngest child Harriott was nineteen, she married a rich South Carolina planter, Daniel Horry, whose plantation at Hampton about forty miles from Charles Town sat among the slave-worked rice fields on which his fortune rested. The elder son, Charles Pinckney, came back to South Carolina in 1769, a qualified lawyer, radicalized against the British government by the Stamp Act of 1765, which had required all American public documents to carry an embossed stamp which could only be produced – and paid for – in London. Deeply ingrained English gentry instincts against arbitrary and unrepresentative acts of government fuelled the rage. Charles immediately became a member of the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly and on into the 1770s moved swiftly towards American independence. Five years after Charles, his brother Tom returned from England. Both fought in the war against the British, both became generals, both were captured, both were released in prisoner exchanges and both were seriously wounded.
A passionate American patriotism, a sense that honour and America were one substance, was now running in their veins. ‘I entered into this cause after reflection and through principle’, Charles Pinckney wrote during his captivity. ‘My heart is altogether American, and neither severity, nor favour, nor poverty, nor affluence can ever induce me to swerve from it.’67
To his friend and brother-in-law Edward Rutledge, he was even more unequivocal: ‘If I had a vein that did not beat with love for my country, I myself would open it. If I had a drop of blood that could flow dishonourably, I myself would let it out.’68
The war in South Carolina was bitter and vicious, the British armies laying waste the whole country, plundering and burning plantation houses including the Pinckney plantations at Ashepoo and Belmont. Tom reported the depredations to his mother on 17 May 1779. The British
took with them nineteen Negroes, among whom were Betty, Prince, Chance, and all the hardy Boys – They left the sick women, and the young children, and about five fellows who are now perfectly free and live on the best produce of the plantation. They took with them all the best Horses they could find, burnt the dwelling House and books, destroyed all the furniture, china, etc, killed the sheep and poultry and drank the liquors.69
‘Independence is all I want’, Eliza wrote consolingly. It is an intriguing use of the word – financial independence for themselves, but also political independence for their country. As she went on, ‘a little will make us that. Don’t grieve for me my child as I asure you I do not for myself. While I have such children dare I think my lot hard? God forbid!’70
South Carolina was tyrannized by the British Legion troops led by Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton, a daring and cynical cavalry commander, son of a sugar-and slave-trading mayor of Liverpool, who soon after the outrages became the subject of one of Joshua Reynolds’s most glamourizing images of the romantic warrior.
Eliza spent much of the war at her daughter Harriott’s Hampton plantation, about fifty miles north-east of Charleston o
n a creek of the Santee River.
Remote and protected, Hampton looked like a refuge from the troubles of the war. But one night Harriott was alone in the house, with her children, asleep upstairs, when she heard horse hoofs outside, ‘and then a man’s voice begging admission at the door’.71 It was Francis Marion, an unprincipled slave-owning Indian-hunter, now guerrilla leader of the resistance to Tarleton’s occupation of South Carolina. He was on his own and needed food. He asked for supper and while it was cooking, fell asleep in a chair. But as he slept, the British arrived outside. Harriott woke Marion, showed him the back door, ‘pointed down the long garden walk to the creek at its foot, and told him to swim to the island opposite, and lie there in the rushes until the English left’.72
‘He was off like a wild duck’, swam the stream and lay hidden in the reeds until morning, when he made his way up the river to rejoin his men. Delaying while she could, Harriott opened the front door to see Tarleton in front of her. His troopers searched the house and found nothing. Tarleton sat down to eat the supper that had been cooked for Marion, requiring Harriott to sit there with him and to be his hostess. When he left, he took with him ‘a fine volume of Milton, of a beautiful Baskerville edition, bound in crimson and gold’.73 The second volume, and the chair in which Marion slept, are still in the house. There was no shortage of courage in this world.
Hampton was subject to another night-time visitation the following year. Eliza herself was there this time, along with Daniel Horry and Tom Pinckney and others. They were all asleep when suddenly the entire household was woken by screams. As Eliza’s great-grand-daughter, Harriott Horry Ravenel, described it, a beautiful girl rushed into Eliza’s bedroom, shouting,
‘Oh, Mrs. Pinckney, save me, save me! The British are coming after me.’ The old lady [she was fifty-nine] stepped from the bed (one can fancy her majestic in bed-gown and kerchief!), and, pushing the girl under her own bed-clothes, said, ‘Lie there and no man will dare to trouble you,’ and such was the power of her presence … that those ruffians shrank abashed before her and offered no further insult.74
The war ended in American victory in 1782 and Eliza luxuriated in the pride she felt at the dignity of her sons:
when I contemplate with what philosophick firmness and calmness they both of them supported pain sickness, and evils of various sorts, and withstood the utmost efforts of the enemies malice, and see with what greatness of mind they now generously conduct themselves to all; my heart overflows with gratitude to their great preserver, for continuing to me such children!
When I take a retrospective view of our past sufferings, so recent too, and compare them with our present prospects, the change is so great and sudden! it appears like a dream, and I can hardly believe the pleasing reallity, that peace with all its train of blessings are return’d, and that every one may find Shelter under his own Vine, and his own Fig tree, and be happy. Blessed be god the Effussion of human blood is stop’d!75
In 1791 Washington himself came to Hampton to meet Eliza and Harriott, now a widow as her husband, Daniel Horry, had died of liver failure in 1785.
Together the two ladies greeted Washington in the portico Harriott and Daniel had added to the house a few years before. They were ‘arrayed in sashes and bandeaux painted with the general’s portrait and mottoes of welcome’ and ‘after a stately reception he was led to the large ball-room, just built, where an elaborate breakfast awaited him, the gentlemen of his suite, and many of the neighbors, who had gathered to greet him’.76
Before leaving, Washington observed ‘a handsome young oak growing rather too near the house, which Mrs. Horry proposed to cut down, as it interfered with the view. The general advised that it should be kept, as an oak was a thing no man could make.’77 It is still there, obscuring the portico but sanctified by the great man’s casual remark, with which undoubtedly Eliza would have agreed. When she died in Philadelphia of cancer in May 1793, Washington, at his own request, was one of her pall bearers, there to honour the mother of patriots.
One could end the story there, with that dignity, but maybe it is better to return to the material and actual foundations on which this self-consciously noble superstructure was built. After Daniel Horry’s death in 1785 – he had turned an intense yellow as his liver failed – an inventory was made of his possessions at Hampton.78 In the Long Room, the Blue Parlour, the Hall, Study and Dining Parlour, there were plenty of mahogany tables, some sofas and eight French armchairs, several hundred books but no pictures beyond some prints, a harpsichord and a guitar, several card tables, Turkey rugs and rolls of Wilton carpet, a cased clock, some silver, a few gilt mirrors and eight mahogany beds in the seven bedrooms, all curtained. Outside there were forty-four oxen at £4 each, as well as a dozen horses, and many stock cattle, sheep and hogs. The most valuable single thing the Horrys owned was their schooner, worth £500, their connection with the outside world.
Without fuss, attached to this list of possessions in which every piece was valued, was the inventory of 326 slaves, of which every one was valued too. As well as names of the classical figures, there were some from the Bible:
Solomon £70 Susannah £1 Isaac £100 Jacob £80 Rachel £60 Nimrod £80 Isaac £40 Daniel £100
And some named in a way that looks as if no one could be troubled to give these people any kind of human identity:
York £1 Cork £60 Glasgow £90 Belfast £100 Belfast £5 Cambridge £40 Oxford £100 Wapping £80 Lisbon £100 Tower-hill £1 Glasswindow (£20), Lazy (£20), Muddy (£80), Bounce (£70), Fork (£45), Safe (£20), and Monday (£40).
The old were practically valueless, twenty of them valued at a nominal £1 each.
The reality can be seen only in the full cumulative list, arranged like bricks, the basement for nobility:
Ned £80 Toney £80 Sally £80 Lye £40 Lizzy £40 Jule £150 Roxana, Percilla £100 Old Percilla £1 Thomas £90 Baran £100 Jemmy £50 Wambaw Philander £150 Jennet £80 Lucretia £1 Oxford £100 Muddy £80 Samuel £20 July £5 Sabina £5 Bella £30 Monday £40 Darcas £50 Wapping £80 Frank £20 Amey £30 Moll £5 Jassamin £80 Penelope £30 Sebell £80 Savey £60 Binah £25 Margery £20 Sukey £5 Pliny £60 Clement £60 Old Chloe £1 Lisbon £100 Matilda £40 Kent £70 Cato £90 Camilla £40 Mingo £90 Susanna £50 Cynthia £50 Glasgow £90 Strah £90 Sylvia £60 Lady £30 Moses £15 Paul £5 Cambridge £40 Cupid £40 Charlo £70 Nick £80 Hector £40 Trajan £70 Cudjo £15 Tom £30 Deborah £80 Pompy £70 Charles £150 Hagar £70 Corydon £5 Billy £90 Bella £70 Perry £40 Affy £20 Charles £15 Nelly £5 Andrew £1 Debo £40 Sharper £90 Lexette £80 Belfast £5 Old Guy £1 Robin £90 Grace £30 Lucy £80 Diana £50 Primus £100 Sam £60 Solomon £70 Myrah £30 Saul £70 Patty £40 January £90 Mary £70 Bob £80 Nick £30 Phillis £10 Old Bess £1 Big Sharper £20 Prince £30 Baker £80 Bounce £70 Mark £50 Affy £40 Cinda £5 Susannah £1 Sharp £70 Jonathan Bella £500 Peter Hannah £80 Big Patty £120 Juliet £50 Flora £25 Isaac £100 Old Frank £150 Sarah £20 Mathews £100 Little Frank £90 Fanny £40 Dick £25 Peggy £5 Sam £120 Rose £1 Hannah £70 Abba £5 Natt £100 Minda £50 Charlotte £80 Tenang £30 Limos £90 Katey £60 Dick £5 Old Amorintha £1 Venture £30 Caeser £80 Jacob £80 Bess £80 Safe £20 Potena £20 Minte £15 Old Statira £1 Daphne £80 Harry £100 Old Mary £1 Nimrod £80 Rosetta £40 Old Mount £1 Little Mount £80 Jacky £150 Maria £25 Seipis £40 Phebe £5 Quash £100 Sarah £70 Josey £15 Little Phebe £5 Johnny £10 Amelia £5 Nancy £60 Thomas £90 Old Benbo £1 Miley £80 Cotto £80 Little Benbo £20 Jemmy £15 Cupid £5 Caesar £90 Johnny £120 Philander £40 Nanny £5 Betty £80 Jack £100 Morris £90 Tower-hill £1 Caroline £50 Elsey £5 Ralph £50 Cook £20 Jacky £90 Mark £50 Lyddia £25 Marianne £80 Barne £80 York £1 Isaac £40 Anthony £100 Old Dick £40 Nelly £40 Rachel £60 Eboe John £90 Juliett £50 Billy £120 Hammond £90 Jenny £90 Cuffy £40 Susey £40 Flora £30 Bevis £30 Tamerlane £25 Caesar £20 Hope £1 Closs £1 Maria £1 Peter £50 Chance £30 Little Peter £5 Musa £1 Old Chloe £1 Melia £20 Dorinda £20 Caesar £40 Capers £40 Cumberland £50 Corporal £50 Collin
£50 Cork £60 Prosper £30 Paris £30 Roger £30 Sophia £20 Glasswindow £20 Calipso £1 Lazy £20 Phidella £20 Balaam £30 Sarah £20 Daniel £100 Philander £100 Saby £80 Violet £50 Archer £60 Chloe £40 Amorintha £70 Hercules £50 Babbette £30 Big Joney £25 Jupiter £25 Othello £50 Kitt £35 Ripley £30 Fork £45 Benson £50 Barber £50 Jack £40 Davy £100 Mimbo £60 Onia £80 Abba £70 Sogo £40 Celia £60 Catherina £20 Peter £15 Lin £80 Benebo £70 Metto £25 Hannah £15 Jemmy £10 Billy £80 Rose £50 Betty £5 Doll £5 Tom £80 Hanibal £35 Ossea £35 June £45 Daphne £80 Hellen £20 Cudjo £10 Big Sarah £50 Bess £10 Douglass £40 Little Sarah £50 George £10 Sansons £35 Old Bella £1 Cyrus £5 Beck £50 Carolus £30 Betty £1 Dye £70 Myrtilla £70 Mary £30 Pompy £90 Flora £80 Doll £80 Celia £50 Molly £15 Mary £10 Sue £50 Nelly £70 Roxana £5 Die £100 Daphne £90 Patty £90 Richard £40 William £40 Johnson £5 Libby £70 May £60 Sandy £25 Jenny £25 Archer £10 Cuffy £5 Hannah £1 Boat Negroes: Ormsby £100 Tom £100 Abram £100 Belfast £100 Bob £100 Will £90 Bluff Bob £40.
PART V
The Failing Vision
1790–1910
Every gentry man and woman was strung between past and future. Every new portrait joined a rank of others – the predecessors staring down, painted parenthood receding though the generations – and yet fragility hung in the gentry air. William Butler Yeats, the father of a son and daughter and the articulate voice of the class into which he was born, proudly if a little absurdly descended from the Norman Irish magnates who gave him his middle name, expressed the ancient conundrum.
From my old fathers I must nourish dreams,
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
The Gentry Page 28