by Tiya Miles
African captivity and Native captivity were endemic to Carolina, despite Enlightenment-era rhetoric that romanticized notions of an American “noble savage.”58 By the 1680s, a decade into their experiment on the Carolina coast, English immigrants had developed a secondary use for the Indigenous enslaved. Because local Native people remained too close to their home villages for the comfort of enslavers who feared escape and rebellion, wily traders carted Indian slaves out of the colony to Virginia, selling them in exchange for Black slaves, white servants, and even cattle.59 We might wonder which of these forcibly separated Indigenous families had a mother like Rose with a daughter like Ashley who carried their story into the future.
Arriving at the determination that stealing large numbers of Indigenous people could harm trade relations and coming to prefer the use of readily available Africans as slaves, South Carolina settlers exercised self-imposed limits, decreasing their practice of Native enslavement over time and outlawing it by the mid-1700s. As the white settler population grew and the Native population decreased, due to disease, slave raids, and warfare with colonists, English settlers gained greater dominion over the landscape and began to enlist Indigenous people as Black slave-catchers and to position weakened Native towns as spatial barriers to African escape.60 Carolinians could import tens of thousands of Africans for less trouble than it took to continue enslaving rebellious American Indians, who were cheaper, to be sure, but more susceptible to transatlantic diseases (like the deadly and prevalent yellow fever), to which some Africans had already been exposed and, therefore had immunity.61
Over these same years, Carolina settlers inched toward the discovery of a profitable staple crop that the people they owned could raise and process. Colonial revelations about what would grow best where often depended on the knowledge of other groups, such as the Indigenous people of the Powhatan Confederacy, who were growing tobacco long before the Virginians of Jamestown arrived in 1607. On this low-lying land of Carolina everywhere permeated by water and marsh, the fortune-making miracle crop would turn out to be the rice plant. After experimenting with growing rice on higher, inland ground with the labor of white servants and enslaved people of color, South Carolina planters realized, in the mid-1700s, that the tidal flow of water from rivers and wetlands made an ideal environment for coastal rice cultivation. They learned how to reproduce their Barbadian Eden, as “irrigated rice was, here, what sugar was to the West Indies: a lucrative staple on the profits of which planters built a wealthy and leisured provincial culture.” When planters learned that indigo would flourish in the fallow periods of the rice plant’s growing cycle, they cultivated the plants in tandem. Both rice and indigo turned out to be jackpot crops, sought in local markets (for human diets and textile dye) as well as around the world.62
Early into this coastal experiment, European émigrés of different ethnicities discovered the economic promise of Carolina. Anglo-Bahamians and Irish sojourners soon joined the Barbadian transplants. French Protestants (called Huguenots) journeyed from France, as did French Acadians from Nova Scotia, Canada. Large numbers of Jewish immigrants traveled from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and Andorra) to take advantage of the colony’s legal protection of religious freedom, as did western Europeans from Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Scotland. No matter their varied spoken languages, religious affiliations (nearly all attended Protestant churches at first), or cultural practices, these founding Carolina families shared the opportunity to obtain land, own slaves of color, and thereby build heritable wealth.63 By the 1760s, the Lowcountry South, a ricing zone that included South Carolina and Georgia, stood as the “richest region in North America.”64 A century later, that aristocratic planter elite, joined by upper-class planter-merchants, still maintained outsized economic and political influence. As one Union soldier describing Charleston after the city’s capture by General William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces in the Civil War reflected: “The state was ruled by a clique, composed of wealthy men, of ancient name, who secured privileges and prerogatives for themselves at the expense of the people.”65
Rice, the Carolina planters’ fixation, “remained the coastline’s distinctive crop” for generations, fattening the colony with rich returns until the abolition of slavery in 1865 undercut a key factor of this success: unpaid skilled workers.66 For rice was also a labor-intensive crop, dependent upon smart engineering and meticulous management at certain times of the plant’s growth cycle. To ensure enough water to nourish the plant and at the same time ward off destructive flooding, planters required canals, dams, water gates, muscles, and minds to control the direction, intensity, and timing of the tide’s flow. Their solution was to increase the enslaved labor force through African importation, including from the cultures of the Windward Coast or the Grain Coast (such as Sierra Leone), of people who were experienced in rice agriculture.67 Following the alluring example of Barbadian sugar, elite Carolinians built their colony through the tragic alchemy of “white rice and black bodies.”68 And their principal port city, Charleston, was equally characterized by troubling contrasts, as a “brittle, gay, and showy society, compounded of old-world elegance and frontier boisterousness, [that] echoed the Barbados atmosphere of a century before.”69
Mary Elizabeth Hartt, a white student in South Carolina, created this award-winning map sampler made of silk on silk, chenille, and paint on silk in 1820. She worked her sampler at Steele Creek Female School under the direction of Miss Dorcas J. Alexander. This sampler is part of the “Bethel Group,” comprising needlework made in schools affiliated with Bethel Presbyterian Church in York District, South Carolina. Collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Old Salem Museum & Gardens. Given in memory of Nell Rankin Spratt and Bess White Rankin.
Charleston was a cradle on the slip of the coast, tucked into the tender crook where the Ashley and the Cooper met. Rocked by Atlantic breezes, the world’s grand trading channel tainted by the cast-off bodies of unloved human cargo, the city fed its glistening life for nearly two centuries on the strange black fruits of this bitter sea. Here, on unpaved streets stinking of trash and saltwater, lay a city of extreme contrasts, a town of crepe myrtles and unchecked cruelty, a place of diamonds and dung.70 Fondly called “the Holy City”* because of its openness to religious diversity and stately churches with visible spires on every cobblestoned street corner, Charleston was actually the opposite.71 For Charlestonians chose to worship the idols of rice and cotton, plants that may as well have been spun from gold. And it was here, within a jewel box town that doubled as a prison house, that a determined woman named Rose envisioned the impossible: a future life filled with love for her unfree daughter of African descent. We would not know the names of Rose or Ashley, or where to begin a search for them in the wild country of Carolina slavery, were it not for Ruth’s embroidery, rendered, with a painful irony, on a slave-grown cotton textile manufactured with a “double locking chain stitch.”
Skip Notes
* “The Holy City” is a fairly long-standing nickname for Charleston. The term likely dates back to the late 1800s just prior to the city’s cultural renaissance of the early 1900s, when a history professor, Yates Snowden, and a local author, John Bennett, were exchanging letters comparing Charleston and Boston. The recurring suppositions are that the name developed (1) because a church steeple can be seen from every sidewalk of the old city and (2) because Carolina’s first government created by the lords proprietors did not exclude colonists on the basis of religion.
SEARCHING FOR ROSE
With this scant accounting we must write her history.
—Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, 2016
Relying on so spotty a record requires caution. Still, even its absences speak.
—Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, 2018
The lack of information about Ruth Middleton
’s ancestor Rose is enough to stop the heart. But as difficult as it will be for us to identify Rose with the use of historical records, images, maps, the Internet, and freedom of movement at our disposal, it would have been exponentially harder for Rose and Ashley to reunite once they had been split apart by sale. Yet throughout the course of their separate lives, mother and daughter did not forsake each other. Nor did their descendant Ruth consign a vanished ancestor to anonymity. Rose vowed to always love Ashley and pressed that promise into the sack. Ashley passed that promise down, along with the object and the story of its origins. Ruth reinforced their bond by stitching their story onto the bag. Despite the external devaluation of their family ties, evidenced by forced sale and absence in the formal written record, these women valued one another as kin and understood the transcendent worth of lineage. To bear proper witness to this testimony, to glean what this family’s tale can yield, and to count their story in the annals of history that would tend to exclude it, we will follow Ruth’s lead. Just as Ruth’s chronicle on the sack emphasizes individual women, a location, a single event, and the materials Rose packed, we will endeavor to augment these details of Ruth’s record, to confirm her account of southern transgression, and to write her foremothers’ history.
Who was Rose? This question, while beguilingly straightforward, is mired in the obfuscations of the historical archive. As a leading historian of South Carolina, gender, and the Civil War South has put it: “Historical visibility is everywhere related to social power.”1 It is a madness, if not an irony, that unlocking the history of unfree people depends on the materials of their legal owners, who held the lion’s share of visibility in their time and ours. Captive takers’ papers and government records are often the only written accounting of enslaved people who could not escape and survive to tell their own stories. The wealthier and more influential the slaveholder, the more likely it is that plantation and estate records were kept and preserved over centuries in private offices and, later, research repositories.
As the richest U.S. colony for a span of time prior to the Revolutionary War and a nexus of economic growth into the nineteenth century, South Carolina has more than its share of these tainted but crucial, documents. The records are thin and flaked, yellowed and faded into pale lunar shades, tattered around the edges. They exist in the hundreds and thousands of pages, neatly filed in folders or compiled in heavy, aged books, leather-bound and massive. They are kept in tucked-away places: the official archives of the state, special collections of libraries, city deed offices, plantation attics, and the private files of personal homes. This makes information about the people whose lives are recorded there difficult and sometimes impossible to uncover, save how they appear as property tallied, as dependents receiving food and fabric rations, as laborers carrying out all the tasks necessary to sustain the southern way of life: from cooper to cook, servant to midwife, carpenter to blacksmith, boatman to field hand. To find Rose, we must fish for her in this wild current of records, casting out the widest, most delicate net. To find Rose, we must drag for her, combing the rivers of South Carolina, intent on a mission of historical rescue. This mission is similar to, but not the same as, the one Ruth Middleton undertook when she set her needle upon the cloth to stitch Rose’s name into memory. We search because we must remember. We seek because we need to find. We are “duty bound,” as Alice Walker writes, “to carry the ancestors.”2 But first we have to track them in the documentary briar patch of the past.
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
Charleston was once and is still Carolina’s emerald city, a crown jewel on the southeastern Atlantic coastline. On the foundation of slave-grown rice, the earliest Lowcountry planters here secured economic, racial, social, and cultural prominence and maintained that status for generations that followed. In the early decades of the 1800s, around the time when Rose was born, tourism to Charleston was already a popular pastime. Visitors eagerly tarried in this sparkling city. The scenes these travelers recounted in diaries and letters usually included unfree people like Rose in the frame, a recognition, if unconscious, of the fundamental and compelled role that African Americans played in building and maintaining this exclusive society. Harriet Martineau, a British writer on an American tour in the 1830s, fell into blissful reverie over the Charleston cityscape despite her anti-slavery views. From the top of a church steeple opposite the guardhouse where soldiers kept watch for slaves out of line, Martineau gazed out at the glistening rooftops, rivers, and bay.
Rosetta, ca. 1855–80. Unknown artist, ambrotype. Pictured here may be one of the many enslaved Roses in Charleston or South Carolina at large. Image courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art.
The city was spread beneath us in a fanlike form in streets converging towards the harbor. The heat and moisture of the climate give to the buildings the hue of age, so as to leave nothing of the American air of spruceness in the aspect of the place. The sandy streets, the groups of mulattoes, the women with turbaned heads, surmounted with water-pots and baskets of fruit; the small panes of the house windows; the yucca bristling in the gardens below us, and the hot haze through which we saw the blue main and its islands, all looked so oriental as to strike us with wonder.3
To hear Martineau tell it, Charleston was a kaleidoscope for the senses foreign in nature, awash, as it was, in aged splendor and “exotic” color, courtesy of enslaved people—from the fruit they grew, to the plants they tended, to the textiles wrapped around their heads. The very sediment that upheld the chapel where Martineau took in the view would not have existed without slave labor. To make way for the city, the colony’s early planter elites first had to make land in the early 1700s, filling in the swampy sod that permeated the subtropical peninsula. They commanded the people they owned or rented to carry out this dirty work. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, residents reclaimed over half of what would become the city’s land base from wetlands. The urban plan called for the use of soil to engineer elite areas, while the streets of outlying neighborhoods to the north frequented by poor whites and poor Blacks were filled with “cheap organic” materials, including garbage and animal carcasses.4 The aristocratic hierarchy of South Carolina society was rendered concrete in the built environment of Charleston, where ornate mansions lined the lanes inside the boundaries of the old walls, and neighborhoods in outlying districts were identifiable by the stench of their filth-filled streets.
The ground on which lovely Charleston stands is literally and figuratively unstable. And the records of its slaveholding past are just as slippery and unforthcoming about the nature of the muck that lies beneath. So how, in this seaport city built of sagging infill, do we go about finding one unfree woman? The particular Rose recalled to memory by Ruth Middleton’s looping stitch may have been given this name by a mother or a caretaker. She could have been called Rose, a flower of Old English derivation, by one of the people who owned her. She may have garnered the nickname Rose because she loved summer blossoms. She may have borne a rose-shaped scar on the tender skin of her back. And she was not alone, this woman named Rose, whose naming remains, whose parents remain, whose origins remain a mystery. She rises from the documents of South Carolina slavery along with many others who bear the same name, a sorrowful garden of captured Roses.
Rose was not an uncommon name in plantation office record books; it recurred again and again in the unfree population of antebellum South Carolina. Many plantations across the state claimed one or more Roses among their holdings. A search of paper and digitized records of South Carolina slaveholders’ wills, estate inventories, property transactions, and the household textile distribution indexes referred to by archivists as “blanket books” yielded just shy of two hundred women (198) named Rose (including derivations of the name: Roze, Rosie, Rosetta, and Rozella).5 “Rose” appears alongside enslaved people carrying names for days of the week and seasons of the year, in the West African tradition, such as Monday, November,
and Autumn. She appears as a small girl, as a woman in her childbearing years, as an elderly grandmother called “Old Rose.”6
The records of the extended Middleton family’s nineteen main properties kept between 1738 and 1865, for instance, list sixteen Roses, beginning in the year 1776, ranging in monetary value from $0 (indicating an aged person who can no longer work) to $225. Precious little is recorded about these women and girls beyond their age and pecuniary worth. The first Rose to appear in the Middleton family’s record is twenty-two years old and resides at Middle Place with seventy-nine other captive people sometime in the 1700s. Another Rose is a child at Middleton Place between 1742 and 1787 whose cash value is listed as £25; this child is named in a family grouping replete with poetic botanical associations: a father named Winter, who worked as a gardener; a mother named Flora, who worked as a washer; and two siblings, including a baby brother marked at £8. The only Rose in the Middleton records with any identifying feature beyond age and monetary value is Rose of 1854, kept at their plantation called Horse Savanna among ninety-four other enslaved people, where she labored as “a nurse for the children.” On Henry Middleton’s Weehaw Plantation, where he kept meticulous annual records of slaves’ births, deaths, tasks, rations, allowances, and blanket distribution in a journal titled “Weehaw People,” another skilled nurse named Rose labored without recompense.7
The Middletons’ neighbors, the Drayton family, also possessed at least one enslaved Rose. Drayton Hall, built around 1738, is a Palladian palace of a plantation home that still stands on the Ashley River, not far from Middleton Place. The Drayton “List for Negro Clothes and Blankets” from 1860 details each unfree person who received a fabric ration on the “country” estate as well as the mansion in “town.” The women enslaved by the Drayton family in the city received a wider array of fabric varieties, like calico and flannel—for the purpose, it would seem, of keeping up the appearance of Drayton wealth in the eyes of their Charleston neighbors. Outfitting one’s slaves well was an extravagance that gained more notice in the urban milieu than in the more sparsely populated rural landscape, where individual plantation estates extended for hundreds of acres. A single Rose on a textile list worked in the country for the Draytons and, in 1860, received five and a half yards of cloth, barely enough for two dresses.8