Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

The Golden Rule in 19th-Century South Carolina: Labor People and their Parallel Government

            This study is about the golden rule. In the 19th century, southern capital used a "divide-and-conquer strategy" based on racism in its attempts to keep black and white labor down. Southern labor responded with a class unity strategy. Illustrative was Thomas Coghlan's admonition, "Do unto others as we would they should do unto us," as he led black and white labor in winning one of its victories over capital.[1] Coghlan was a Sumter politician and blacksmith. He represented Sumter County at the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention. Southern capital had been defeated militarily during the Civil War and its Democratic party was defeated politically at the 1868 convention.

            The capitalist system in the antebellum period had been harsh against the blacks. Yet the blacks were to a greater or lesser degree able to establish a parallel "government" based on the golden rule (Lk 6:31; Mt. 7:12). For example, Larry Hudson has shown that despite laws against it, blacks owned property and married. Hudson wrote:

Because slaves were property, they could neither legally own property nor marry; that they managed to do both was the reality of slavery. Antebellum slaves could and did act as if they were legal owners of land and other property, and slave owners, if not the courts, recognized them as property owners.[2]

            Capital had less control over white labor than over black. It should not be surprising that the whites had their own golden rule that ran parallel or in opposition to capital's rule and at the domestic level often dominated. This article focuses on this white labor as illustrated by the "golden rule" as operative in successive generations of an antebellum and postbellum family in Sumter County, South Carolina. Their combined lives extended across much of the 19th century. The basis and purpose of their parallel government was their labor. The golden rule they established in their home, communities and, to the extent they were able, at the state, federal and international levels, optimized the conditions and return on their labor.

            At the outset, a few words on method: in the classical political-economic tradition that prevailed in the 19th century, class analysis was the norm. This corresponded to the reality that class position largely determined everything else - housing, education, health care, life expectancy, life opportunities and even values and ideas. The struggle of labor against capital constituted the main substance of 19th century history. Historian Tony Freyer summarized the importance of class analysis in his study of 19th-century law:

Most politicians and publicists in the 19th century contended that the producing classes were most important to American prosperity. For the proponents of a labor theory of value, producers were those who made and deserved the fruits of all true wealth. The manipulative creators of false paper wealth - bankers, lawyers, corporations generally, and big merchants - were agents of capitalist enterprise that threatened the producing classes.[3]

            The Stafford Family (1786-1840). The domestic government of the two antebellum generations of the Stafford family will be outlined, along with their relation to the parallel state and federal governments. Then will follow an analysis of two postbellum Jones families. The antebellum generations were headed first, by Joshua and Charity Stafford and second by their daughter, Barbary, who married Eli Jones. In both generations a parent died prematurely, leaving small children and a struggle to preserve home and family.

            Joshua and Charity Stafford married in 1786. For the next 30 years they farmed corn, cotton, wheat and garden crops in South Carolina middle country, what is now Dalzell in northwest Sumter County (designated during much of the 19th century as Providence township).[4] Successful small farming was labor intensive.[5] Family government centered on collective production by the able-bodied. More specifically, as Stephanie McCurry documents, not only men, but also women and children, starting at age 12, normally did field labor.[6] The introduction of cotton farming in South Carolina's middle country coincided with the early part of Joshua and Charity's marriage and was an economic benefit to them.[7] A description of the type of work Joshua and Charity did in cotton production on a small farm appears in a diary kept by South Carolinian James Sloan. Sloan, his wife, son (age 15) and two daughters (ages 13 and 14) worked in the fields from late spring to the end of picking in early December. They were sometimes out from 6:00 in the morning until 7:00 in the evening. At midday when the heat was intense there would be a prolonged (2 hours or more) rest period, when lunch (dinner) would be eaten and a nap taken. On Saturdays they would work half a day, and in slack seasons there would be no Saturday work.[8]

            As American production increased after 1800, the price of cotton leveled off and then, with Jefferson's embargo, fell. During the War of 1812, the price bottomed at $.09/lb.[9] To maintain their income, cotton farmers like the Staffords expanded production. They got paid less per pound, but by producing more, they could still support a family. Increased capital (slaves and land) was often necessary for increased production. The demand for increased capital resulted in the doubling of land and slave costs at the same time that cotton prices were declining.[10] In the first part of the nineteenth century an adult cultivated about 10 acres. This included corn, cotton and garden acreage. The Staffords cultivated 20 acres, which they had doubled by 1817 with the help of adult sons, Lunsford and Hartwell (b. 1794), and the purchase of Hannah, a slave.[11]

            When Joshua died in 1817, Charity was able to continue production as usual because of her own increased labor and that of her son Hartwell and daughter Barbary (age 18).[12] This production continued for a decade despite the loss of son Hartwell and slave Hannah.[13] Charity wrote an account of her labors, although as she put it, "I had no learning."[14] That account is in several legal cases in which she gave testimony.[15] Illustrative is an 1829 case in which she described with pride how she had "worked in the fields as a laborer and in the house did chores proper for a free woman."[16] In her golden rule she worked early and late; she saved and skimped, ate chicken neck, sewed and patched and darned and hoped and planned and schemed and fretted. Every stick and stone, every tree and shrub and flower on the farm was partly her own planning and her own work. In her view she did more work and got more results than most women would have even attempted:

I was able to purchase the slave, houses, etc. in consequence of the most personal industry which I presume few if any other white women in the county would have attempted or could have sustained.[17]

She remarked on her success at keeping her family together in the manner to which it had been accustomed prior to her spouse's death:

I was deprived of the entire benefits of the estate of my husband for two years after his death due to it being taken by the executor. But after that I got the benefits and raised my family well in the manner it had been accustomed.[18]

            After 1825 the Staffords began to cut back on the acreage they planted. By 1829 their cotton crop was down to one bale (300 lbs), worth $15.[19] The reduction in part was the result of normal domestic changes. Daughter Barbary married in 1825 and moved away. What one 19th-century father said of his daughter could have been said of Barbary: "My papa said he lost his best hand when I got married."[20] The three remaining children were old enough but unable and/or unwilling to do the work that Barbary had done. For example, son Elijah, born in 1807, accepted the view of the idle rich that labor was negative and that alcoholism and the consumption of luxury goods was positive.[21] Charity, that is, Joshua Stafford's estate, was sued in an equity case by several merchants for Elijah's expenses on February 26, 1828. Elijah had "absconded secretly" at age 18 in 1826 "to seek his fortune" and to avoid his debtors.[22] Daughter Sarah shared the same anti-labor ideas as Elijah and was even more of a problem than her brother. She married a dead-beat who came to live with the family and added both his and his horse's mouth to feed without doing any work. When Sarah and Ruben Long (from Wilmington, North Carolina), sought a portion of Joshua's estate, Charity counterclaimed against Ruben "for one year of board, during which he had lived with her or lived at her expense" without rendering any service and for keeping his horse there for three months. Of Sarah's suit, Charity commented, "It is ungrateful. Sarah has been the least assistance and the most expensive and I have been most indulgent."[23] Finally, as Charity put it concerning the labor of her youngest son, "James was always sickly and unable to do hard labor."[24]

            The Stafford family produced less for the market but the mouths it fed stayed about the same. Son James Stafford at age 17 had married Marianna Mathis in 1836 and brought his wife home to live under Charity's roof.[25] By the time Charity died five years later, they had two children and were still living with her.[26]

            Jones Family 1825-1855. The Staffords accommodated their domestic government to the hardship of premature death and the weight of those who would not or could not carry their own weight. A similar accommodation was achieved in the next generation. Barbary (Stafford) Jones (1799-1884), one of Charity's older children, was 18 years of age when her father died in 1817. She continued to live with her mother after her father's death until 1825, when she married Eli Jones (1794-1839). Eli was one of the 9 children of William Jones and Ann Freeman Jones 1763-1847), who had migrated to Sumter County from Amherst Co. Va. during the period of the Revolution. Eli's boyhood farm neighbored the Staffords. When Eli was 15 years old in 1809, his own father died. Eli's mother and the children had always been partners in running the farm. His father's death did not cause significant problems for Eli's widow and the children (aged 2 on up). In 1813 Ann married John Parker (d. 1831).

            When Eli and Barbary married, they had no capital. This situation changed only to a limited extent before Eli's death in 1839. In 1829 after four years together and two children, Eli and Barbary had saved $300 and bought a 100-acre farm of mainly clay soil in Providence, about one-half mile north of Charity's farm just off the Sumter-Camden road.[27] Like the Staffords, the Jones had six children. They ranged in age from 3 to 12 at the time of Eli's death. They were younger than Charity's had been when Joshua died. It took Charity about 10 years (1817-1827) before her youngest child reached adulthood. It was 16 years (1839-1855) before Barbary's youngest (Mary Placida) married at age 20 and left home.

            To run the farm without Eli meant more work for Barbary and her children. But farm labor was nothing new for them. Throughout the 15-year marriage, Eli, Barbary and the children had run the farm. They had not had enough capital to buy a slave. But just before he died in 1839, Eli, perhaps in anticipation of death, did acquire a "Negro boy."[28] Historian Philip Racine commented with admiration on the work of a similar family of the period. This family kept a journal of its achievements. Racine's remarks might apply equally to the Jones family:

David and Emily Harris and their children worked with their hands every day, much of the time long and hard to maintain what they had. Farmers were not lazy, nor were they casual about their work. There is no evidence that they lacked either energy or ambition. What historians have recently been suggesting about southern farmers--that they valued leisure more than hard work may have been true for some, but not for most.[29]

            In addition to Barbary and the children's labor, the Jones family's government had help from several other sources after Eli's death. Most important, they had the use but not the ownership of Eli's estate, which was valued at $611 and included the young slave and the land.[30] Another aid was a gift from Charity's estate. Charity died in 1840 about a year after Eli. Her estate was valued at $549.93.[31] From it the Joneses received, in time, a life estate in an adult slave and her children, that is, in "Molly and her increase."[32]

            In 1850, ten years after Eli's death, the real estate of the Jones' farm was worth $500, which was about what it had been when Eli died.[33] All five of the Jones' children that had lived to adulthood were still under the family roof and helping with the farming. However the older ones were mainly doing wage labor off the farm and contributing part of their income. Ellerby H. (age 24) was working for a merchant. Washington Nicholas (age 22) was working as a laborer on the new South Carolina Railroad (Charleston-Columbia) branch line that ran between Stateburg (Manchester) and Camden.[34] The three younger children, Elizabeth Charity (age 20), Charles H. (age 18) and Mary Placida (age 14) confined their work to the farm.[35] The slave family was also helping.[36] Molly was 34 to 46. She had a son (age 19), two daughters (ages 15 and 17), and a granddaughter (age 2).

                After Eli's death, the Jones family kept itself together "in the manner it had been accustomed." They never lacked for food. Since the family had little money, they stayed at home, worked in the fields, sat on the piazza and talked, read the Bible, books and the weekly Sumter newspaper, visited the neighbors and relatives, chewed tobacco, fished in Pebble Creek and Rembert's Pond, trapped and swam. There were high-backed cain rocking chairs on the porch for the warm months and before the fireplace for the cold months. On special days such as George Washington's Birthday, the Fourth of July and court, election and market days, they went to Sumterville or further afield. During the 1850s in Sumterville on the Fourth of July there was a parade of the Claremont (Sumter) militia troop which included Barbary's three sons, Ellerbe, Nicholas and Charlie. After the parade there was a barbecue, fire works, band concert and square dance.[37] On Sunday and for funerals, weddings and baptisms, the family sang hymns and prayed at home or at Providence Methodist church, which neighbored their farm.[38]

            I-a.)  Relations with State and Federal Government. The domestic golden rule established by the Stafford-Jones family optimized their labor and its return. The challenge to the family government was not domestic hardship but the hostility of the capitalist economy.[39] Labor's parallel government supported agrarian reform, the growth of industry and public services that benefited workers. For example, from colonial times forward laboring people had sought an agrarian program that would assure ownership of land to those who worked it rather than to speculators.[40] Capital wanted the reverse. The magnates monopolized land, slaves and state government. The south was superior to the rest of the United States in agricultural resources, but the benefit to the white majority, not to mention the black, was limited.[41]

            The slave aspect of the system was for the benefit of capital, not labor. Slavery depressed the value and return on white labor. Small farmers like the Stafford-Joneses, who were able to hold on, saw their children forced out. Several of the Stafford-Jones' adult children had to migrate out of the area. Others stayed in Sumter County but owned no land and worked as laborers, overseers, tenants or took up a trade.[42] Beginning with the 1810 census, a net out-migration of whites from South Carolina was recorded until the Civil War.[43] Between 1850 and 1860 the white population in Sumter County dropped from 9,800 to 6,800, and that of the black from 23,000 to 16,000.[44] Those with insufficient capital or who failed to expand production were marginalized.[45] The out-migration of whites is often pictured as benevolent, especially in comparison to the forced migration of blacks.[46] But the market system was coercive. White as well as black families were broken up by forced migration.

            In the antebellum era southern and northern monopolists defeated most attempts at agrarian reform, such as federal homestead laws. Only in 1862 with the withdrawal of the south, and the need of northern capital to placate labor into joining its army, did Congress finally pass the Homestead Act.[47] Southern capital did not want land reform in the western states in part because it did not want white labor to leave the south in even greater numbers. Black labor gave a better return on investment, but capital needed the whites to keep the blacks under control. For example, by 1810 because of the white out-migration and black in-migration, 61% (11,600) of the Sumter County population were slaves, up from 54% (6,500) in 1800. By 1860 it was 70%.[48] This was dangerous. Capital had lost everything in the 1791 Haitian slave revolution and it did not want a repeat.[49] The problem concerned Governor Stephen D. Miller (1787-1838), from Stateburg Township, which bordered Providence Township on the west. In 1829 he brought up to the South Carolina legislature the possibility of enslaving or ensurfing the white population to keep them from migrating:

The right to set limits to emigration is an original principle in the body politic. The right to incorporate strangers into a government and to defend them when incorporated does not imply a right on the part of the citizen to secede. -- The assent of an infant to be governed by the law is a political fiction without which government would be dissolved. Every convict in this state is supposed to be a party to his own execution; nor is it a greater exertion of municipal law to cut off emigration than to punish by imprisonment for debt.[50]

The propertied commonly believed that slavery was the proper status of both black and white laboring people.[51]

            Governor Miller was an attorney for the magnates. A difficulty with ensurfing or enslaving white laboring people was that they were a majority in the militia. For example, during the 1820s the capital-intensive farmers were agitating for nullification of the tariff and succession from the union. But small farmers like the Stafford-Joneses were not against the development of U.S. manufacturing, especially in the south. Economic diversification and tariffs limited the big slaveowners but provided off-farm employment for laboring people.[52] When a call went out from monopoly for a state convention to ratify dismemberment of the union, the Sumter County militia took a vote. They did this in September 1830 at their annual countywide muster to elect the colonel of the Sumter regiment. After the speeches and debate, a majority of the 131 militia present voted against nullification or dismemberment.[53] Both Eli Jones and Lunsford, the son of Charity Stafford, were part of the militia. For small farmers separation from the union meant increased power for the magnates. Had they sought to ensurf or enslave the whites, the monopolists might have found themselves overthrown 30 years earlier than they were, by a union of whites and blacks.

            What the South Carolina assembly enacted was not agrarian reform but rather charity for capital at public expense. Typically, the assembly provided that when slaves were executed by the government for insurrection, their owners were compensated by the government.[54] Unlike some states the assembly, resisted the enactment of a homestead exemption to protect a debtor's land or farm equipment from confiscation by creditors.[55] For small farmers, it was creditors, not slave insurrections, that were a threat. The Stafford-Jones family were their own labor. To survive they needed to protect their land and tools from confiscation. They did not need slaves. It was only in 1851 that the legislature enacted a Homestead Act which allowed small farmers to exempt 50 acres of real estate and $500 of personal property from levy and sale.[56] The act was meant to keep whites from being forced out of the state. At the time of the enactment, the legislature was increasing its military spending and needed labor to fight the upcoming war.[57]

            Besides compensation for executed slaves, there was a second program offered by the assembly in place of agrarian reform. This was the conscript militia system. Its function was to make sure, via martial law when necessary, that there was no agrarian reform. Providence in the 1840s and 1850s was part of the Upper Battalion, 44th Regiment, South Carolina Militia.[58] The Jones' three boys and all white males between 18 and 45 years of age except ministers, school teachers and newspaper editors, by law had to report to the muster grounds at 8:00 am on the second Saturday of each month for a full day of marching, drills and mock battles. They had to provide their own muskets, bayonets, ammunition, drums, food rations and knap sack. Those who failed to appear were fined one dollar.[59] For the rank and file the musters were a drain from farm work. The beneficiary was capital, which needed an armed force to contain the slaves. When the propertied agitated for secession in 1850, the common objection of the middle country small farmer militia was that the rich should fight their own war.[60] The Sumter Watchman commented in 1855:

The militia system compels a poor man to leave his little crop in the busiest season, and walk from 15 to 30 miles to a review or if sick and unable to attend, to walk 20 or 30 miles to be tried by court martial.[61]

The Sumter grand jury in the April term of 1855 characterized the militia as "odious and oppressive in its operations and a nuisance."[62]

            Despite state and federal policies, the Stafford-Jones' parallel government had its own homestead law. To protect against the squeeze from creditors and the market system, the families in large measure boycotted the market system. They practiced what was called "safety-first, self-sufficient" agriculture.[63] They increased the goods they made at home. This decreased both their need for manufactured goods and their need and time to grow cash crops. The family made most of the cloth used on their farms from their own cotton and wool. During rainy weather and in the winter months the adults carded and spun thread from cotton or wool, then wove it into bolts of "jean cloth" on a loom and then stitched it into clothes, bonnets, stockings, curtains, mattress covers, diapers, and cotton-picking bags.[64] "Home spun" in the 1820s became a symbol of protest against the market system and the people wore it not only at home but to political meetings, church, school and to market and court days.[65] Laboring people who did not minimize market involvement, as in the 1820s and 1840s, often met with disaster. The squeeze came when the cost of slaves and land rose, along with the cost of manufactured goods, due in part to the federal tariff, while at the same time the price of cotton declined.[66] Households that borrowed to purchase land and slaves were often unable to pay their debts. The Sumterville and Camden newspapers were filled with notices of sheriffs' sales. Bankruptcies and foreclosures destroyed many small farmers.[67] Tony Freyer points out that in the early 19th century, not merely in the south, one household in five would, during its working lifetime, fail outright rather than merely default on a particular debt. And the incidence of difficulty rose as the century advanced.[68]

            The inheritance laws were used by the Stafford-Jones parallel government as another type of domestic homestead law. In 1840 Charity Stafford willed her farm, which by then was being worked by the family of son James, to James' infant daughter (age 2) "for the benefit of her father."[69] Because he did not have title, James had no collateral on which to borrow. The family with its 11 children was forced to engage in mainly non-market, non-slave, marginal production. The positive side was that 40 years later James' widow and children still had the farm at a time when many farmers had been wiped out by bankruptcy after the Civil War. Similarly Barbary Stafford, shortly before she died in 1884, deeded her farm to Elizabeth David Jones (1831-1887), the wife of her youngest son, Charles H. Jones (1833-1891).[70] Son Charlie had attempted farming for the market and ended up a bankrupt.[71]

            I-b.)  Public Services. Besides agrarian reform, labor's golden rule supported public services that benefited labor. The lack of government services such as decent roads, bridges and transportation, pauper support, public medical care and inexpensive and near-by courts, jails and schools was one of the complaints in the Declaration of Independence.[72] When the South Carolina assembly finally completed the 110-mile road between Columbia and Charleston (now US 176) in 1829, it was a toll road. A one-way stagecoach fare was $10 or almost as much as a laboring person could make in a month.[73] Similarly, court costs were so high that small farmers could not use them. Patrick Brady described the problem:

The operations of the court system were of little benefit to citizens lacking a large stake in the economy. Court costs were prohibitive for farmers with small claims. . . Debtors were forced to pay court fees as high as the original debt.[74]

            When the assembly enacted a public education law in 1811, it provided free education only for paupers.[75] Even these schools were under funded and limited in number.[76] The preacher, William Brisbane, complained in an 1849 pamphlet:

This state is said to have a republican form of government. It may be the form, but the substance is wanting. The great mass of the people cannot get their children educated.[77]

There were no free schools to serve the Stafford-Jones children.[78] They relied on their parallel government, that is, on the high-priced Woodville Academy and private tutors.[79] A laboring family with a $300/year income spent $25 a year per child on education. With three children, families like the Staffords spent one-quarter of their income ($75) on education.[80] The Joneses had to pay even more, since more of their children were of school age and for longer periods.[81] Like the Staffords, all of the Jones children learned to read and write.[82] It has been alleged that poorer farmers "kept their children at home for farm work, which inhibited the development of public schools throughout the southern states."[83] If the experience of the Stafford-Jones is any indication, it was the system that was deficient, not the laboring people, who managed, despite the system, to achieve literacy.

            There was a fourth public service of interest to Sumter's laboring people in addition to decent roads, courts and schools. This was a county poor house to care for the homeless black and white aged, insane, infirm and orphans.[84] The inadequate response of capital forced labor's parallel government to serve this function.[85] For example, in 1860 Sarah Graham (age 45), a pauper who had been the Jones' neighbor, was living under their roof. Sarah had never married and lived with her mother until her mother died in the 1850s.[86]

            States' rights and racial division were what capital offered white labor in place of services. These were used to justify turning the bulk of government services into little more than protectionism for the profits that capital extracted from the slave system.[87] Governor Stephen Miller, the Sumter politician who suggested enslaving whites, was a founder of the states' rights party in the 1820s. While opposing internal improvements, public education and industrial development, he himself migrated to Mississippi in the 1830s and supported federal power for Indian removal, tracking down fugitive slaves, taking territory from Mexico and Spain, and naval protection of international agricultural trade against piracy.[88] States' rights, state control and territorial expansionism were of little consequence in labor's parallel government, nor did the Methodism - in the case of the Stafford-Jones family - accommodate capital. In the 1790s as the slavery system expanded, white labor resisted. Unlike South Carolina Episcopalianism, Methodism was a religion of laboring people. A majority of the Santee circuit's members, which included those in Providence and Sumterville, were black.[89] They were in disagreement with the Claremont district Baptist preacher, Richard Furman, who advocated slave-owner notions about subordination being God's idea:

The order of providence is that a considerable portion of the human race must necessarily move in a humble sphere and be generally at the disposal of their fellow man.[90]

            Women, slaves and laboring people in general had their own ideas about the order of providence. Frank Owsley's study found they had a "loving God" who was on the side of workers.[91] In the Methodist church there was a lack of distinction between clergy and laity. Slaves and women are said to have preached, exhorted and disciplined.[92] The church was paid for and controlled by the members. They ministered to their less fortunate neighbors.[93] Their golden rule condemned slavery as theft.[94] Some Methodist congregations dismissed pro-slavery clergy.[95] In turn the magnates had contempt for Methodism because of its egalitarian doctrines and the dominance of black and laboring people.[96] Historian Henry Lacy maintains that the ideology of antebellum "plain folk" sought to sharpen racial and gender boundaries.[97] This was not the experience of the Stafford-Joneses. To the extent capital dominated, those who resisted risked economic and physical survival. The result was a thick skin, racism, fear and few public services for laboring people.[98] But there remained a parallel government which capital could not dominate.

            II.) Civil War and After. For labor's parallel government, the Civil War period resulted at the state level in some improvements. Illustrative of the Jones family in this period were Robert Lorenzo Jones (1823-1896) and Susan Watts Jones (1834-1856), and second, Charles (Charlie) H. Jones (1833-1891) and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Margaret David Jones (1831-1887). As in the antebellum discussion, the domestic government of the two Civil War generations will first be outlined, then their relation with the parallel state and federal system.

            Jones Family I. Robert L. Jones was the third of eight children of James F. Jones (1782-1850s) and Susannah Jones (1790-1875).[99] Robert was raised on a 75-acre farm in Spring Hill Township about where present-day state routes 231 and 7 intersect. The Spring Hill Joneses were located 5 miles north of their cousins, the Jones that lived in Providence.[100] Spring Hill is now in Lee County, but it was in Sumter County in the 19th century. In 1850 the value of the Jones' Spring Hill farm was $200. The Spring Hill Joneses never had slaves and belonged to St. Johns Methodist Church, established in 1799.[101] Robert L. Jones did not learn to read or write.[102] As a young adult in the 1840s and 1850s, he worked as a farm laborer and overseer.[103] In 1850 he was living by himself in Providence in an outbuilding and working as overseer for J. M. Spann (b. 1810) and Elizabeth Spann (b. 1818). The Spann's property was valued at $6,000 and neighbored the farm of Robert's aunt, Barbary Jones.[104] When he was 28 years old in 1852, Robert married Susan A. Watts. Her family's farm was in the Rose Hill area of Spring Hill.[105] Susan's mother was Sarah Brown Watts, who had died in 1844 when Susan was ten. Susan's father, William Hampton Watts (1807-1873) then raised his 6 children and never remarried. In 1850 Hampton Watts' property was valued at $2,000.[106]

            Robert and Susan Jones had no land when they married and this did not change. Their families were not in a position to help them. In the 1850s, Robert's oldest brother, Rivers Jones (b. 1814), his wife Frances (b. 1815), and their 5 children were farming the land on which Robert grew up.[107] At the same time Robert's younger sister and two of his younger brothers were also living there along with their parents.[108] On Susan's side, her father was still raising several minor children on his farm.[109] Robert and Susan themselves had two small children by 1855. They decided to move to Geneva, Alabama and try their fortune. Robert's brother, Wade Jones had immigrated there earlier. Wayne Flynt finds that in opposition to the slaveowners, the working class in Alabama had by 1850 established an "alternative set of institutions," such as schools and churches, which served labor and had little regard for the slaveowners doctrine of states' rights.[110]

            In Alabama Robert found employment as an overseer.[111] The following year (1856) they had another child. Soon after, Susan died. The Joneses did not immediately return to South Carolina. Until the Civil War Robert continued his employment as an overseer in Alabama and raised his children alone. The 1860 census listed R. L. Jones (age 37), born in S.C., living with his three children, ages 4 to 7. His 7 year old was attending school. The Joneses had moved from Geneva to the Ramah, Alabama area. Robert was working as an overseer for T. J. Orum, who listed his occupation as horseracer. Orum was from Maryland and had a wife and three children. His wealth (in slaves) was listed as $45,000.[112]

            Robert Jones' situation as a widower, like that of Charity Stafford and Barbary Jones, was a challenge. His children, ages 1 to 3, when their mother died, were younger than Charity's and Barbary's had been when their spouses died. Charity and Barbary had the use of a farm and were able to limit their involvement in the market system. Robert had only his labor. As an overseer he was not allowed to have his own livestock, but he received wages averaging $150 a year plus lodging, meat and flour. This provided adequately for his family's necessities, including clothing, medical bills, childcare, church and school.[113] In time the family was also aided by a gift from Susan's father. At about the time that his daughter died, Hampton Watts on December 26, 1856 sold some or all of his slaves and turned the proceeds into bonds. Watts' six children by then were adults and he did not need to work. The bonds were held in a trust for his six children.[114] Susan's share went to her three children. That is, each year the income from the gift went toward supporting the children.

            The Civil War did not immediately have an effect on the Joneses in Alabama. Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860. In February 1861 the Confederate government was organized in Montgomery, Alabama, only a short distance from the Joneses in Ramah. Fort Sumter was taken on April 12, 1861 and the war began. Robert did not enlist. A year later on April 6, 1862, the Confederate Congress, which by then had moved to Richmond, Va., enacted a conscription measure against those who resisted military service. However, overseers were exempted for the first year.[115]

            In the fall of 1862, after the crops had been taken in at Ramah, the Joneses moved back to South Carolina. Robert enlisted on November 20, 1862 in Company G, 20th Regiment, South Carolina Infantry.[116] Already in the company were Robert's younger brother, George W. Jones (1836-1912), at least one first cousin on his deceased wife's side, and various members of his church including the company's captain.[117] Robert's children stayed with their widowed grandmother, Susannah Jones, on the family's Spring Hill farm. Robert's oldest brother, Rivers, and his family were still living there. The farm at the time was valued at $300.[118] Robert supported the children from the $11 per month wages which he earned as a soldier.[119] The children were able to attend school only for short periods during the war years.[120] While serving in the war, Robert came down with a chronic lung problem but he remained at his post until the end in May 1865.

            After the war Robert was unable to find employment as an overseer. He moved in at his mother's with his children and brother's family. He helped on the farm and did day labor in the neighborhood. Because of the difficult times, he went to the Sumter District Equity Court a year after returning from service to petition for an allotment of some of the assets to which his children were entitled from the gift of their grandfather to their mother. They needed the funds for their maintenance. The report of the equity commissioner described the family's difficulties:

Robert L. Jones, the father of petitioners was in the army up to May 1865. The petitioners lived with their grandmother, Mrs. Susan Jones during 1865. Robert L. Jones is now living with the grandmother, too, trying to farm. The place is very poor and it does not look like he can support the children. Robert L. Jones has been suffering for years with a very bad cough. Robert L. Jones tried to get employment as an overseer, after he came back from the army but failed.

The children have been going to school parts of three years past. There is no female connected with the minors who could take charge of them, besides the grandmother, except one aunt who is in feeble health, and in moderate circumstances, and has a large family. Robert L. Jones never remarried after the death of the petitioner's mother. There are certain bonds, valued at $4,300 which the children are entitled to because of the sale of Negroes.[121]

            Not long after Robert Jones petitioned for the allotment for his children in 1866, he married Videau A. Spann (1831-1914). He was 43 and she was 34 and had never been married. She was the daughter of James R. Spann (b. 1798) and Emily Dinkins Spann (1802-1875). The Spanns had had 9 children and lived on a 60-acre farm that neighbored Barbary Jones' farm in Providence. The Joneses moved into an outbuilding on the Spann's farm. Robert's three children finished growing up there. In addition Robert and Videau had three children of their own, only one of whom lived to adulthood. The Joneses had an informal sharecrop arrangement with Videau's mother, who by then was a widow. They raised corn, hogs, wheat, peas, oats, cotton, sweet potatoes, turnips, chickens and garden crops. They, or Videau's mother, had a mule, a horse and a milk cow. Robert and the children, as they got older, also did wage labor in the neighborhood.[122] A testimony to the Jones' parenting and fiscal reliability was given in 1872 by Dr. John B. Witherspoon, a local physician, and William E. Richardson, a lawyer:

We have been acquainted for many years with Robert L. Jones. He is a proper person to be appointed guardian of his children (Susan, age 16, Robert, age 18, and William, age 19). He is the guardian for the estate of his wife, Susan A., daughter of W. H. Watts, which is valued at $1100.[123]

After her mother died in 1875, Videau bought in her name alone part of the land which she and Robert and the children had been farming. Robert Jones died at age 73 in 1896. His granddaughter, Lizzie Jones (Troublefield) remembered him as heavy set and the one she would run to for comfort when unhappy. He had a sympathetic ear. After Robert died, Videau then farmed the place with several of her un-married sisters and with son Harry, who was age 22 when his father died and who had attended the University of South Carolina for a brief period and served in the Spanish-American war after his father's death. Videau died at age 85 in 1914.[124]

            Jones Family II. The premature death of Susan Watts Jones and the Civil War were challenges to the Robert Jones family's domestic government. A similar situation faced another Jones family of the period. Charles (Charlie) H. Jones, the fourth child of Eli and Barbary (Stafford) Jones was 6 years old when his father died in 1839. Charlie's father left him a cow as an inheritance. As a youth Charlie worked and went to school. In the later years he attended Sumterville Academy. He did not quit school until age 19, when he got married on February 23, 1853. His wife was 21-year-old Margaret Elizabeth (Lizzie) David. A hospital record later described Lizzie as cheerful, frank, quiet, industrious and never intemperate. She used snuff but later abandoned it.[125]

            Upon marriage, Charlie and his wife immediately took on the raising of his wife's younger siblings, the youngest of whom was age 2. Her father, George David (b. 1793) died in 1850 at age 58 and her mother, Lucy Kennon (Macon) David (b. 1808), died two years later at age 48. The Jones and the David children lived in the David's Sumterville home, which was bounded by what is now south Main St., Fulton St. and Davis (David) St. The house had earlier belonged to Lizzie's maternal grandparents, Hartwell Macon and Elizabeth (Powell) Macon.

            For the first 8 years of their marriage, the Joneses farmed, but did not own the land in the estate of Lizzie's parents. This land was 6 miles southeast of Sumterville.[126] The land and the slaves that farmed it had belonged to Lizzie's paternal grandparents, Isaac David and Margaret (Brunson) David. In the last 5 years of his life, Lizzie's father was insane.[127] When he died, he had significant debts, so that his widow and children had little to inherit. Even without insanity, the 1840s were difficult years for cotton farmers.[128] Also helping with the raising of the David children was Lizzie's next younger sister, Mary Ellen (Ellenora) David (1832-1908). She married Thomas V. Walsh (1838-1903) in 1852. They lived down the street from the Jones and also farmed the David's land.[129] Another help with raising the David children was Lenora (Leah) Capell, age 43 in 1850, who lived next door to the Jones-Davids. She was the sister of Lizzie's father and was married to Carter G. Capell. They had 8 children of their own.[130]

            The Jones, Walshes and Davids were Methodists, although George David's father, Isaac David, was Jewish in background. Lizzie's mother had been a charter member of the Sumterville Methodist Female Benevolent Working Society (Women's Aid Circle).[131] Lizzie's mother did not learn to read, but Lizzie and her siblings did. The Joneses had their first child, Thomas M., in 1856 and another, Frances Ellen (Fannie) in 1858. In 1860, the estate of Lizzie Jones' parents was distributed. The Joneses received $400, enough to buy a 144-acre farm near Cain Savannah Swamp, southwest of town.[132]

            Charlie Jones at age 29 and Lizzie were no more enthusiastic about going to war than was their first cousin, Robert L. Jones. On April 6, 1862 the Confederate Congress enacted a conscription measure because working people would not fight voluntarily. Charlie enlisted the following month on May 5, 1862, as a private in the Claremont Cavalry Company. The conscription law gave those of conscription age a 30-day grace period to allow them to enlist "voluntarily" and escape the "odium" of being forced into service.[133] Charlie and a number of his neighbors waited until the last day of the grace period to enlist.[134] Cavalry service was viewed by some as safer and less onerous than infantry service. Confederate General H. D. Hill offered a reward to anyone who would ever find a dead cavalry man with his spurs on.[135] The Claremont company captain was Charlie's brother-in-law and neighbor, Thomas Walsh.[136] Also in the company with Charlie was another brother-in-law whom Charlie had help raise, Isaac Macon David.[137] The Claremont cavalry was one of about 10 companies in Holcombe's Legion, South Carolina Volunteers and was soon designated as Company "A."[138] Its duty for most of the war was the protection of the eastern approach to Richmond, the Confederate capital. Charlie, as a private, was paid $12 per month, which included pay for the use of his horse.[139] Charlie got a furlough from the departmental headquarters for 30 days starting August 31, 1863. Shortly before the furlough Lizzie had bought a 15-acre plot in the town of Sumter next to where the family had been living at the David's.[140]

            On March 18, 1864 Holcombe's legion along with Trenholm's, Tucker's and Co. "A" of Boykin's Squadrons, South Carolina Cavalry, were consolidated to form the 7th Regiment of the South Carolina Cavalry.[141] Charlie's company "A" became company "I" of the 7th Regiment. Beginning in May 1864 the 7th Regiment, as the Confederacy's eyes and ears, patrolled, picketed, reconnoitered and scouted all the territory not occupied by the federals. This was a big part of the yearlong successful defense against the much larger federal army's siege of Richmond and Petersburg from the east. It was only when Richmond was evacuated that the federals were able to gain access.

            The regiment's rank and file fought not only the federal army but sometimes its own leadership. Regimental commander Col. W. Pinkney Shingler had been a merchant before the war and was well regarded by the troops. In May 1864 he was replaced by Col. Alexander C. Haskell (1839-1910).[142] Haskell had seen little combat and his appointment at age 25 was resented by the 7th Regiment veterans.[143] As regimental commander, historian Foster Smith commented about the resentment:

The officering of the 7th Regiment South Carolina Cavalry is a tale of ambition, influence and maneuvering. With the Holcombe Legion furnishing half the companies and a battalion organization already in place, the legionnaires naturally expected that they would form the nucleus of the new Seventh Regiment and their officers would dominate in the new command. However, their hope was not realized. . . Shingler had provoked his superior, General Wise at least once. Shingler lacked the battlefield dash and bureau support of Haskell.[144]

            Haskell maintained that the 7th Regiment had done "an immense deal of work in picketing, watching and scouting, but little fighting."[145] The veterans had less interest than Haskell in needlessly getting themselves killed.[146] Illustrative of this was an incident on Haskell's first day in command on May 10, 1864 at Bermuda Hundred, south of the James River. The federal army under General Benjamin F. Butler, the "beast of New Orleans," was moving toward Richmond. Confederate General Robert Hoke, who was serving as a major general under Beauregard's command, ordered the 7th Regiment, which was the only cavalry in the area, to ascertain the Union's position. To achieve this Haskell took several companies, one of which was Charlie's. Haskell rode out well ahead of the two companies, accompanied only by two young couriers. After several hours they came upon a federal picket post at the bottom of a long hill. After going halfway down the hill, Haskell sent a courier back to have the companies come forward and charge the enemy. The companies refused to come. Haskell commented:

I looked up the hill, and there they sat, pow-wowing. So I drew my sword and said to the two couriers, "Boys, you are not afraid. We can run them in." "Yes, colonel," they eagerly responded, and out flashed their sabers. "Charge," I cried, and we put the spurs in and dashed down the long-hill at the picket post.[147]

Haskell was pious and some of the entertainment indulged in by the troops did not please him. For example, one un-named captain, whom Haskell accused of being dissipated before he got to Virginia, would get drunk and send for a pious member of the company and have him pray for the captain.[148]

            Charlie Jones had a number of run-ins with Haskell. The most significant was in August 1864 when Charlie was elected lieutenant of Co. I. Haskell refused to let him assume the position.[149] When the Confederate Congress enacted the Conscription Act of April 6, 1862, it included a provision that companies could elect their captains; at the same time Jefferson Davis, the president, had the right to name staff officers. The provision for election was done over the objection of President Davis.[150] The election provision was included because labor viewed conscription as slavery.[151] The magnates, that is, those with 20 or more slaves, exempted themselves from the law. Allowing the election of officers made conscription look less like slavery. Hence the rank and file took seriously its right to elect its captains.[152]

            Despite Halskell's objections, Charlie took command after Haskell was put out of service by a wound on October 7, 1864 at the Battle of Darbytown Road/Johnson's Farm against Union General August Kautz's division. When Haskell came back on duty on January 31, 1865 after his recuperation from the wound, he had Charlie court marshaled for having gone on leave for several weeks with some of the troops during the slow month of January 1865.[153] Charlie, as an officer, had the right to resign. Because of developments in South Carolina and his dislike for Haskell, Charlie exercised his right.[154]

            After his resignation from the Confederate army, Charlie returned to Sumter and was soon involved in defending his own back yard. General Sherman's troops had taken Columbia, S.C. on February 17, 1865. Wade Hampton had surrendered it without a fight, but there was still much destruction of the city. Sherman then moved north in early March, 1865 to join up with Grant's army. Sherman requested that the federal forces on the coast at Beaufort, S.C. destroy the Wilmington and Manchester Railroad and the government stores and ammunition warehoused along the railroad's right-of-way.[155] Manchester, which was the southern end of the railroad, was about 10 miles from Sumter. Sherman's request resulted in an expedition of 2,500 federal troops led by General Edward Potter toward the middle country, which set out on April 5, 1865.

            Charleston had surrendered the day after Columbia was surrendered and suffered no destruction. However, the state authorities decided to put up a fight against the destruction of the railroad. This meant mobilizing the state military force to oppose the federal troops.[156] On April 4, 1865 Governor Andrew Magrath ordered the state militia, along with those in South Carolina on furlough from the Confederate army, and those who had been exempted from conscription, such as the politicians, clergy, journalists, physicians, educators and magnates, to report for duty or be arrested as deserters and punished accordingly.[157] Out of the 30,000 effectives then in the state, the governor's order resulted in a force of merely 600 troops at Sumter to oppose the 2,500 federals.[158] The unionist politician, Benjamin Perry, had complained in 1862 that the leading secessionists managed not to take up arms.[159] This continued until the end.

            By Saturday April 8, 1865, the federal force, having not had to fight as it marched inland through Georgetown, Williamsburg and Clarendon Counties, was nearing Sumter.[160] The authorities at Sumter requested that Charlie Jones lead a scouting expedition to find out the distance, direction and strength of the enemy.[161] Charlie had only returned from the north the previous day and was ill. He had celebrated his return the night before and had neither horse nor gun. Nevertheless, on a borrowed horse and still in uniform, he led a company of 6 mounted volunteers, mainly youngsters, to scout out the enemy. By mid-morning they had gotten to Manning, 20 miles southwest of Sumter. They had seen and heard nothing. Charlie had a headache and the horses needed a rest. He took up the offer of Martha Norris, a family friend at Manning to have a cup of coffee, while the horses and volunteers also took a rest. About the time Charlie was pouring a second cup, there was a commotion in the street. It was the federal army's advance guard. Charlie and his troops made it back to Sumter after a close escape and further information gathering.

            Based on the scouting party's intelligence, the Confederates on the next day just outside Sumter at the Battle of Dingle's Mill made the first and best stand that South Carolina was able to muster against the federal troops in the final days of the war.[162] But the Confederates were outnumbered and lost. The railroad through Sumter County was destroyed and Sumter was eventually garrisoned with federal troops. The magnates in Manning and Sumter were none too happy with Charlie and the military defense. The Manning Methodist minister William Mood had preached secession but claimed to be too sick to take up arms. On seeing the Confederate scouts ride into town, he told his wife, "I hope they will commit no rash deed and involve those of us who are left in trouble."[163] Charlie's escape from Manning involved killing a federal scout, the first blood spilled during the invasion of the middle country.[164] The federals retaliated by burning down the Manning courthouse, jail, academy and warehouses filled with cotton and corn, a loss valued at $100,000.[165] The federals took similar measures against Sumter for its defense at Dingle's Mill. One of the defenders commented:

It was all our fault. If we had not tried to stop five thousand men with pop-guns and school-boys, the Yankees would not have meddled with our stuff.[166]

            During the war Lizzie Jones and the David children had farmed corn, hogs, and garden crops at Cain Savannah and in 1864 on the 15 acre lot in town. After the war the Joneses took advantage of the disruption in the monopoly system to try to increase their market farming. This meant sharecropping, going into debt, and devoting a large proportion of acreage to cash crops. For example, in the spring of 1867 they borrowed $2,000 from Sumter merchant Leonard G. Pate (b. 1827) to plant a cotton crop on the land of the widow, Anna Bradford. In exchange for the loan a lien was given on the crop. One-third of the crop went to pay for the loan and another third went to the landlord.[167] The following April 1868 the Joneses made a loan of $1,000 to plant another crop.[168] Because of low cotton prices, the loans could not be repaid. The Joneses filed for bankruptcy in the federal court at Charleston in July 1868.[169] They lost their 144 acre Cain Savannah farm, which was sold to Collin G. Parker of Jefferson Co., Va. for $450.[170] Despite the bankruptcy they continued to plant for the market. The following spring of 1869 they borrowed $200 cash at 12% per year and $50 worth of supplies to plant their 15 acre plot in Sumter town. In return they gave a lien for $350.[171] In October 1869 they bought a 100 acre farm from the Sumter blacksmith Thomas Coghlan, which they had to deed away a few months later.[172] In January 1870 they got a loan for $1000 to plant a cotton crop.[173] In the spring of 1871 they borrowed $600 to plant a crop.[174] Each time they took out a loan, they gave a lien on the crop or on their other possessions. In 1871 in exchange for a loan they gave a lien on their cotton lint (1 bail weighing 466 lbs.), 1 bay horse, 1 bay mare mule and 44 stockhogs. According to the 1870 census, The Jones farm was worth $1,000 and their personal property was worth $500.[175]

            In the war years the Joneses had no further children, but in 1866 they had a girl and then two other children in 1869 and 1873. The two youngest David children (ages 15 and 17) in 1865 were still under the Jones' roof. In 1874 the family cut back on market farming. In his study of postbellum economics, Robert Pace talks of the farmers being forced into a cycle of planting more and more cotton and getting lower and lower prices. However, the Stafford-Jones experience shows that this was not unique to the postbellum era, but reflects the nature of capitalism.[176] After 1875 Charlie became a butcher in Sumter. He also worked as a keeper of the Sumter jail during his later years. Living in the Jones' house on S. Main St. in 1880 were Charlie (age 49), Lizzie (age 49), Mary E. (age 14), Joseph H. (age 11) and Elerbe H. (age 7). Also in the house was their oldest son, Thomas M. (age 25) and his wife, Hattie Bradford Jones (age 20).[177] Lizzie died at age 56 in 1887. Charlie died 4 years later at age 58 in Sept. 1891. They were buried in unmarked graves in Sumter Cemetery.[178]

            II-a.) Relations with State and Federal Government. Like the antebellum Stafford-Joneses, the domestic golden rule established by the Civil War era Jones families optimized their labor and its return. The challenge to family government, as earlier, was the hostility of the economic system. In the war period labor's parallel government took advantage of the disruption. Their agrarian reform and public service program achieved a voice in the state legislature that had not existed earlier. More specifically, after the Confederacy's surrender in April 1865, the federals appointed a provisional governor, a constitutional convention was called and a new legislature and governor were elected and met in November 1865. The new legislature was dominated by the old Democratic Party. It refused to enfranchise the black majority and enacted a Black Code that aimed to re-enslave the blacks. U.S. General Daniel Sickles, who dictated politics in Columbia voided the code in January 1866. At the order of the U.S. Congress, a second constitutional convention was held in Charleston from January 14, 1868 to March 17, 1868. It wrote a second constitution that was ratified on April 14-16, 1868.[179]

            There were 124 delegates to the 1868 Charleston convention, a majority of whom were black.[180] Of the 48 white delegates, most were laboring people.[181] Among them was Sumter's Thomas J. Coghlan (1803-1885), the blacksmith quoted at the start of this study.[182] He was an advocate for labor and had had its votes in the Sumter offices to which he was elected over a 25 year period.[183] In the 1850s he was Sumter's intendant (mayor). After the war he was elected by white and black voters as the chair of the county Union Republican Party. He was also elected as a Republican delegate to the 1868 Constitutional Convention and then to the state senate. Between 1868 and 1872 he served simultaneously as Sumter's sheriff, county treasurer and U.S. deputy marshall.[184]

            The 1868 constitution resulted in the election of a new legislature which met in the fall of 1868 that for the first time was based entirely on population.[185] The requirement that the legislature be based on population helped labor capture the legislature from the low-country landlords.[186] Coghlan pointed this advantage out on Feb. 14, 1868 at the Constitutional Convention when the provision was being considered:

In former days the low country swayed and influenced the power of the state entirely. A few parishes, with a white population only sufficient for a small tea party, were represented by one or two senators.[187]

            The South Carolina 1790 constitution had restricted membership in the legislature to those who possessed 500 acres and 10 slaves or real property worth 500 pounds.[188] Half of the Republicans in the 1868 legislature, including Coghlan, were those whose main assets were their muscles and brains.[189] Nevertheless, the Sumter Republicans, like those at the national level, were split along class lines.[190] The split between capital and labor included the blacks.[191] As Lou Faulkner Williams remarked:

Important class differences among the Republicans divided the party on many issues. Legislators from the prosperous antebellum free mulatto class tended to hold values that differed widely from those of the former slaves; their conservatism on economic issues often aligned them against other blacks.[192]

Despite the class divisions, labor made gains. These gains were reported by Coghlan and the other delegates at mass meetings of thousands of their Sumter constituents.[193]

            II-b.)  Agrarian Reform. Agrarian reform was a priority for Sumter County's laboring people in the Civil War period. As one Sumter delegate pointed out at the 1868 convention:

In my district not one in two thousand laboring men can buy an acre of land. I say they have not the money. I come to this convention desiring relief for the entire people of the state.[194]

One of the first agrarian reforms pushed by labor's parallel government and from which the Joneses benefited, was confiscatory land taxation. Land taxation had begun to increase in the 1850s during the military buildup and shot up 15 times over earlier rates during the war.[195] Capital had been willing to be taxed to fund their war. They were not happy when the 1868 legislature imposed similar taxes. These taxes aimed to strip them of their land and to pay for public services. Lou Faulkner Williams summarized labor's strategy:

The radicals legislated high taxes in a deliberate effort to redistribute land to the freemen. The Republicans expected the high taxes on unused land to force property on the market so the state could purchase it for resale or so private individuals could buy it.[196]

            Some magnates complained that they had idle land because they could force neither the blacks nor the whites to work it. This meant no revenue, an inability to pay taxes and forfeiture. Forfeited land was auctioned off for as little as a dollar per acre.[197] Low cotton prices also helped the land redistribution. Between 1860 and 1870 the average value of South Carolina land fell from $10 per acre to $4 per acre and the number of landowners increased from 33,000 to 51,000, while the average size of farms fell from 488 to 233 acres.[198] The Joneses benefited from the reduced land costs.[199] After her mother died in 1875, Videau bought in her own name some of the 60 acre farm, which was in her mother's estate. The Joneses had been working the farm as sharecroppers for 10 years. Videau had 7 brothers and sisters who also had an interest in the estate. The reduced cost of the land helped Videau buy out the interests of some of her siblings.[200]

            A second agrarian measure was the regulation of interest rates on crop loans. Farmers to a greater or lesser degree obtained credit from merchants or landlords until they could make a crop and liquidate their debts. To get the loan the farmer had to give a lien or mortgage on the crop. The merchant charged high interest rates, sometimes as much as 100% to 200% of cash value. Much of the profits went to foreign banks and mercantile houses which carried the local merchants. At the end of the year, on December 15, the farmer who had done the work was lucky to have any surplus after settling up.[201] By 1877 the legislature had reduced the rate on crop loans to a 7% maximum. A labor organization that backed anit-usuary legislation was the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry. The Grange was established in South Carolina in 1871. It had 10,000 South Carolina members in 342 local granges.[202]

            Another program that benefited laboring people was the lien system enacted by the South Carolina legislature in 1868 and 1869. It gave hired labor a lien on their crops that was superior to all others. The Freedman's Bureau used the law to seize crops held by merchants and landlords to distribute to those who raised them.[203]

            There were several other land programs. One was a homestead exemption to protect debtors. A prior exemption in the early 1850s had been eliminated in 1857. The new exemption was included in the 1868 constitution.[204] It helped Charlie and Lizzie Jones keep their house and get back on their feet when they filed for bankruptcy in 1868.[205] Sumter's Thomas Coghlan had been a supporter of the homestead provision at the 1868 convention. On Jan. 17, 1868 it was pointed out to the convention that:

One of the greatest troubles in American legislation has been in not protecting the homestead. It has made the American people almost as great wanders as the arabs. When a farmer planted an orchard or a vineyard, he had no assurance that 5 years thereafter the results of his care and labor would not pass into the hands of strangers.[206]

            II-c.) Public Services. Besides land reform the Joneses benefited during the Civil War period by increased public services. The increased land taxation not only redistributed land but funded public services. The budget for civilian public services had already been increased starting with the war buildup. Capital was not able to force labor to do its fighting without concessions. For example, war-widows were paid $16/year. A widow with two children got $40/year.[207] Poorhouses and hospitals went up in each county.[208] In addition to tax expenditures, which rose from $1 million in 1861 to $2.2 million/year in 1865, the legislature engaged in deficit spending.[209] Between 1868 and 1874 the public debt rose from $5 to $20 million.[210]

            The postwar spending went toward programs such as roads, bridges, railroads, jails, public schools, juvenile reform schools, county poorhouses for the blind, deaf and elderly, hospitals and a state militia, all of which capital equated with graft.[211] The 1868 state constitution for the first time mandated free public education for all. Videau and Robert Jones could not read or write, but their children all learned how.[212] In 1870 Robert's 15-year old, Robert Frederick and his 14-year old, Mary, were still in school. His 17-year old was employed as a farm laborer. In 1880 James Henry (Harry) Jones, age 6, the youngest and only child of Robert and Videau Jones who lived to adulthood and who ended up attending the University of South Carolina for a short period, was just starting school.[213] The expansion of education also benefited Hampton Watts, the father of Robert Jones' first wife. Nearing age 60, he took up school teaching in the 1860s.[214] Until the 1880s the public schools, especially in rural areas, were racially mixed and a majority of the students, reflecting the population, were black.[215] Those between the ages of 6 and 16 were required to attend school 6 months per year.[216] The curriculum was orthography, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, English grammar, history of the United States, history of the state, morals and good behavior. The schools were funded by the legislature and by local taxes and a poll tax of $1.00.[217] County treasurer Thomas Coghlan, who served between 1868 and 1872, reported in January 1872 that all taxes during the period of his tenure had been collected, the school teachers had been fully paid and the county was solvent.[218]

            A second public service that benefited some of the Joneses was the establishment of the state-supported Sumter County poorhouse and an improved mental health facility.[219] Charlie Jones' wife, Lizzie, for example, was confined at public expense at the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum for the last few months of her life.[220] The Asylum, which dated from the 1820s, was given increased state support in the postbellum. Located at Columbia, in the antebellum its revenue depended mainly on fees charged to the families and counties which committed patients, with state funding secondary. After the war, the funding came largely from the state legislature, the patient population expanded by a factor of four and the focus turned to the more expensive job of rehabilitating rather than warehousing patients.[221] The institution was racially mixed, with a majority being black.

            Lizzie's mother-in-law, Barbary Jones also benefited from the improved post-war services. The state-supported Sumter county poorhouse was located 4 miles southeast of Providence on the way to Sumter. Barbary Jones was able to place her long-term indigent border, Sarah Graham, in it.[222] Barbary was getting older and the poorhouse relieved her from having this care. Others in the poorhouse in 1870 were several white children (unrelated to Sarah)  and 7 blacks, including a 101 year old male named Mack Lennes. The live-in superintendents were Addison Troublefield (age 25) and his wife Julia. The poor house generally had 60 cleared acres which were worked by able-bodied residents and the superintendent. This provided enough corn to feed the residents.[223]

            A benefit to married women from the 1868 constitution was a provision that gave them the right to control their own property and that legalized divorce.[224] During the 1870s Videau Jones bought some of the land which she and Robert were farming. She bought it in her name alone. Similarly Barbary Jones sold her farm to her daughter-in-law alone in 1883. Putting land in the women's name could protect it against creditors or against probate and legal fees where the husband was in poor health and likely to pre-decease the spouse or where he was a drunkard (alcoholic).

            The expansion and improvement of the highway and railroad system was an achievement of the 1868 legislature that made travel and trade easier for the Joneses. County treasurer Coghlan reported that between 1868 and 1872, he had collected $20,000 for Sumter's roads and bridges.[225] Although they complained about the state's bonded indebtedness, Democratic magnates like former governor James Orr and Confederate generals Martin Gary and Matthew Butler, joined their Republican counterparts to promote and speculate in the state railroad bonds.[226] In the 1870s Thomas Coghlan built a foundry and railway carts. He got a contract for railroad ties and built a steam-powered, five-worker sawmill. He also made a wooden tramway from the mill to the Sumter train depot. On it he transported lumber to market.[227] Robert L. Jones' son, Robert (Bob) Frederick Jones worked at the mill for $.75/day. He lost half his right arm in an accident there. In 1876 he had married his first cousin, Francis (Fannie) Ellen Jones, the daughter of Charlie and Lizzie Jones.[228]

            Another type of state public service that benefited labor was the militia. During the period that capital had dominated, the militia was used to keep black labor in place. The Militia Law of 1869 armed, equipped and paid wages for a racially-mixed 100,000-strong force. It kept the magnates in check.[229] In Sumter, as in most of the middle and low country, blacks were in the majority. Neither their violence, racism nor promises of benevolence were able to gain electoral victory for Sumter's Democrats. Initially the Klan burned several businesses of white Republicans in Sumter.[230] But the Sumter Klan was broken up by Sumter's militia, Union League and Sheriff Thomas Coghlan.[231] The Sumter News referred to Coghlan as the "Ku Klux Exterminator."[232] In 1868 the magnates could not beat him at the polls, nor could they effectively engage in criminal activity.[233]

            Conclusion. The Stafford-Jones' golden rule centered on labor and maximized its return by agrarian reform and public services. It minimized market farming, borrowing and consumerist fetishes, such as spending for luxuries, alcoholism, gambling, gluttony and sexual promiscuity. The disruption of the Civil War permitted their parallel government to make gains at the state level. Historians who have perpetuated the assumption that the capitalist government was the only one accepted by "all classes and races of society" are out of touch with the Stafford-Joneses and the South Carolina majority.[234]

            Capital, and those dominated by it among the preachers, media and politicians, always maintained that labor was denigrating.[235] But the Stafford-Joneses boasted of their labor in the public record.[236] In their view it was the brains and muscles of whites and blacks who worked side by side in the fields that were the South's economic, spiritual and sometimes governmental backbone.[237] Historians like James Allen are mistaken in accepting the capitalist government as the only one. Writing from the federal government perspective, Allen maintained that in the antebellum era, the U.S. became "the slave of the 300,000 slaveowners who ruled the south."[238] By 1856, in Allen's view, the southern magnates had imposed a type of reverse-carpetbagger domination over both houses of the U.S. Congress, the president, the cabinet, seven of the nine justices of the Supreme Court and all the principal committees in the Senate. All were owners of plantations or sympathetic to slavery. Though capital dominated federal politics and much of the media, clergy and educators, it could not dominate the laboring people. When labor got partial control, as during reconstruction, its government was as violent and destructive against capital as capital had been against labor.[239] It needed to make no concessions, unlike capital, which was unable to exist without labor. As antebellum magnate George Fitzhugh put it in 1857, "Your capital will not buy you an income of a cent, nor supply one of your wants, without labor."[240]

            Because capital dominated at the federal level did not mean it dominated labor. Similarly, at the state government level, it is a distortion to focus only on the power of the magnates. Illustrative of this tendency was Ralph Wooster's study of South Carolina's "all powerful" state legislature. He wrote:

The Constitution of 1790 under which South Carolinians were governed for more than 70 years created a highly unified, centralized system of government almost entirely devoid of checks and balances. All real power rested in the legislature, which was "a sort of House of Commons in the extent of its power." Not only did the legislature have the usual lawmaking powers, but it also elected the governor, presidential electors, U.S. senators, state judges, the secretary of state, commissioners of the treasury, the surveyor general and most local officials. Thus, executive, judicial and administrative functions of the state government were in the hands of the legislative branch.[241]

In the thinking of the Stafford-Joneses, they themselves were the ones who exercised "real power" in governing their lives. Their land and labor gave them power; the legislature and the magnates they perceived as on the periphery.

            Another error emerges from minimizing labor's parallel government and focusing only on the federal or state government. That mistake is to attribute to labor attitudes such as racism, states' rights and fear-mongering -- the weapons used by capital against labor. From the Stafford-Jones perspective, it was not the blacks who were monopolizing the land or restricting public education, decent roads, services and industrial growth -- it was the magnates. The 1868 legislature, and labor's golden rule generally, were dominated, if anything, by class, not racial, conflict.[242] For example, at the 1868 Constitutional Convention, Sumter delegate Coghlan had the sergeant-at-arms on Jan. 29, 1868 permanently evict R. T. Logan from the convention. Logan was the reporter for the Charleston Mercury. The Mercury was the mouth-piece of the magnates in the Democratic Party and edited by secessionist R. B. Rhett. Its main tactic was race-baiting against labor.[243] On Jan. 31, 1868, several days after the Mercury's eviction Coghlan proposed that the constitution include a provision against racial crimes. His proposal read in part:

Whereas, the prosperity of the state, like that of families, depends on the harmony existing among its members, and the precepts of true religion teach us to do unto others as we would they should do unto us. . .

Resolved that this convention take such action as it may in its wisdom deem compatible with its powers, and conductive to the public weal, to expunge forever from the vocabulary of South Carolina, the epithets "negro," "nigger," and "yankee," as used in an opprobrious sense.

Resolved, that the exigencies and approved civilization of the times demand that this convention, or the legislative body created by it, enact such laws as will make it a penal offence to use the above epithets in the manner described against an American citizen of this state, and to punish the insult by fine or imprisonment.[244]

            Laboring people did not generally advocate racism but rather used race to help promote labor unity. Typically, the blacks at the 1868 convention were split along class lines on most issues, with black capital opposing labor's program. In order to get the backing of black capital, labor appealed to black racial solidarity by emphasizing the disproportionally greater benefits which the blacks received from "class legislation," as it was called. The use of race by Thomas Coghlan and Franklin Moses to gain enactment of a homestead provision employed this tactic:

Mr. F. J. MOSES, Jr. Many have bought property since the close of the war. I beg you to remember that on almost all the land bought by colored men, since the close of the war, very little of it has been paid for. To make the homestead prospective only, would sweep almost every colored man, who owns a homestead, from his possession. I know that in my District it would be so. The other delegate from Sumter, I know, can substantiate that statement.

Mr. T.J. COGHLAN. I know that what you state is true.

Mr. F. J. MOSES, Jr. . . . I say, if you make this law prospective only, you hurt the colored man more than you hurt the white man because there are thousands of schemes by which the colored man may be deprived of his home. The white men are always smart enough to employ lawyers to do everything for them, smart enough, as a great many of them heretofore have been, to avoid the penalty of their just debts. They can avoid the Sheriff, but when the Sheriff comes to the colored man he has no sympathy for him. He says the white people don't want you to have lands anyhow. You have got it by your industry, perseverance and honesty, but we are determined to take it from you, and you will whistle for it when you get it again.[245]

            Racism had no place in the politics of labor. Similarly, states' rights and secession were not part of their program. Unionist politician Benjamin Perry stated at the time, that secession and states' rights got endorsed by many politicians, media, clergy and educators, not because it was a reflection of the laboring majority, but because capital exempted them from conscription and gave them a comfortable living.[246] Perry's biographer remarked:

Especially did he indict the clergy, newspaper editors, and politicians who had been largely instrumental in bringing on the conflict and were now exempted from service. The clergy, he said, in their zeal to plunge the country into war had departed from every principle of Christian religion.[247]

            Perry observed that the magnates turned their states' rights and racist rhetoric off and on as it suited their class interests - not unlike their modern-day descendent, Strom Thurmond. At the time that Charlie Jones and others were involved in armed combat against the federals, Sumter magnate John N. Frierson (1818-1887) was entertaining the same federal troops. Frierson and his wife, who was from the north and a friend of federal General Edward Potter, had him to dinner on the evening of April 19, 1865 at Cherryvale, their Stateburg plantation.[248] Frierson was a force in the county Democratic Party. In late 1860 he had encouraged Sumter's 150 minute men to organize the visit of secessionist Edmund Ruffin of Virginia to speak at the Sumter County courthouse. It was at that meeting that delegates to South Carolina's secession convention in December 1860 were selected.[249] Fierson himself did no military service.

            The Stafford-Jones parallel government worked for labor rights, not states' rights.[250] It is true they had little loyalty to the federal government, which was hostile to labor. Nevertheless, states' rights and the Civil War were not their issues. They ended up in the Confederate army because they were coerced. Even then, they fought the war on their own terms. Landowners like John C. Calhoun and states' rights politics are often made symbols of the south, but a more realistic symbol would be the Stafford-Jones golden rule.

            Besides capitalist reductionism, there is another school that does not reconstruct an accurate picture of southern history. Some feminist historians, ignoring labor's parallel government, have argued that 19th-century South Carolina women had no political power. Illustrative is Victoria Bynum, who wrote that poor females without a white male guardian were "without honor in the antebellum south."[251] One need only ask, from whose perspective were they without honor? Capital was blind to race and gender. All labor in its view was without honor. On the other hand, from the view of labor's golden rule, the idle landlords, including women landlords, had no honor. Those with honor and power in labor's parallel government, in the eyes of Charity Stafford and Barbary Jones, were themselves. They were self-sufficient and carried their own weight. High mortality and female-headed households were neither an anomaly nor a source of pathology. Academics are often critical of antebellum laboring people for not rising up against a system which was hostile to their families and their labor, but this interpretation does no justice to labor's accomplishments.[252] Social revolution and egalitarian societies are rare. Feminist history provides few examples. Under hard conditions, the maintenance of a parallel government was rational and effective. It was the only option! In the disruption of the Civil War, labor took advantage of the class fissures of the moment, rose up and made gains.[253]

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix I[254]

Hypothetical Annual Budget Incorporating Data from the Stafford's Farm: 1817

                        Expenses
cash:  education
            taxes[255]
            legal
            medical
            general store
            tools and implements
            farm (mason, carpenter, housing)
            stock and seed
            slave
            church
            miscellaneous   
Expenses (total)

  $
 70
  5
 10
 20
 40
 35
 25
 10
 45
 20
 20      
300

                        Income
cash:  cotton
            corn (140 bu)
            pork
            miscellaneous   
Income (cash subtotal)

  $
197
 84
 15
  4       
300

non-cash:  corn (140 bu.)
            pork
            wood
            wheat
            garden
            clothes
            miscellaneous   
Income (non-cash subtotal)

 84
 15
  5
  5
 10
 10
 10      
439

Appendix 2[256]

Hypothetical Annual Budget Incorporating Data from Jones' Farm: 1840

                        Expenses
cash:  education
            taxes
            legal
            medical
            general store
            tools and implements
            farm (mason/carpenter/house)
            stock and seed
            slave
            church
            miscellaneous   
Expenses (total)

  $
 65
  5
  5
  5
  5
  5
  5
  5
 21
  5
  5       
131

                        Income
cash:  cotton
            corn (60 bu.)
            pork
            miscellaneous   
Income (cash subtotal)

  $
 75
 36
 15
  5       
131

non-cash:  corn (140 bu.)
            pork
            wood
            wheat
            garden
            clothes
            miscellaneous   
Income (non-cash subtotal)

 84
 15
  5
  5
 10
 10
 10
139

 

Appendix 3

Hypothetical Annual Budget Incorporating Data from Robert and Videau Jones' Farm: 1870

                        Expenses
cash:  education
            taxes
            legal
            medical
            general store
            tools and implements
            farm (mason/carpenter/house)
            stock and seed
            church
            miscellaneous   
Expenses (total)

  $
  0
  5
  5
  5
  5
  5
  5
  5
  5
  5       
 45

                        Income
cash:  cotton
            corn (60 bu.)
            pork
            miscellaneous (off-farm wages)
Income (cash subtotal)

  $
 15
 15
 15
 75      
120

non-cash:  corn (140 bu.)
            pork
            wood
            wheat
            garden
            clothes
            miscellaneous   
Income (non-cash subtotal)

 84
 15
  5
  5
 10
 10
 10
139

 

 

Graphics for "Labor's Golden Rule" in Plantation Studies:

1. Diagram of Eli and Barbary Joneses' house and farm in Providence.

2. Topographical map of Providence, SC.

3. Map of SC.

4. Property ownership map of Providence and Spring Hill from McLaurin's map of Sumter County (1878).

5. Property ownership map of Providence from Mills Atlas (1825).

6. Page from Memorandum book of James F Jones.

7. Pedigree chart showing the names and relation of individuals discussed.

8. Sumter County documentation to provide free medical care for Lizzie Jones in the 1880s.

 


[1]J. Woodruff (reporter), Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention held at Charleston, S.C. Beginning January 14 and Ending March 17, 1868 (2 vols. in 1 vol., New York: Arno Press, [1868] 1968), pp. 178, 181.

[2]Larry Hudson, To Have and To Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. xv.

[3]Tony Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists: Constitutional Conflict in Antebellum America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), pp. 3-5.

[4]Joshua got the land in 1797 as the result of a state grant which was signed by the federalist Governor Charles Pickney. See "Grant to Joshua Stafford" (Dec. 4, 1797), State Grant Book (Sumter Co. Courthouse, Sumter, S.C.) [hereafter, SCC], vol. 43, p. 235. Both the Staffords and the Jones were originally from Virginia according to a Revolutionary War pension application claim, No. R 7934, U.S. Archives, Wash. D.C., filed on Feb. 2, 1854 by Elizabeth J. Jones (b. 1805). Elizabeth Jones was a daughter of William Jones (1764-1809) and Ann (Freeman) Jones (1763-1847). The claim was based on William's military service. One witness who furnished an affidavit concerning William's service was William Vaughn (b. 1765), a Revolutionary pensioner (U.S. Archives, certificate no. 23,437). In Vaughn's affidavit (National Archives, microfilm, p. 421) is the statement about Joshua Stafford and William Jones coming from Virginia:

Deponent has no acquaintance or knowledge of but one William Jones who served in Sumter. Although deponent was very young at the period when or sometime after the period that William Jones referred to came with other Continental soldiers, names Joshua Stafford, John Pollard, John Peek and many others whose names he cannot now recollect without having their names called; that said persons came with General [Nathaniel] Green from Virginia to the aid of South Carolina, that said Jones married one Ann Freeman, one or two years before the deponent joined the army in 1780 and came to reside with his family within 1 1/2 miles of where deponent's father resided in Sumter District.

See also, Lenora Sweeney, Amherst County, Virginia in the Revolution (Greenville, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, 1998), pp. 144-145 (abstract of the William Jones Pension application); Billy Jones (Myrtlewood, Ala.) and Ralph McCathern (Sumter, S.C.), Notes on the Jones-Freeman Family (Sumter, S.C.: Manuscript, 1999). There was a Stafford family in the Beaufort District of South Carolina. George M. Stafford in General Leroy A. Stafford: His Forbears and Descendents (New Orleans, La.: Pelican Pub., 1943), p. 18, published the speculation of a Stafford descendent, Walter Elvin Stafford, living in the 1940s in Columbia, S.C. that the Sumter Staffords descended from the Beaufort Staffords. But Walter Stafford had no documentation and was unaware of William Vaughn's affidavit in William Jones pension file.

[5]Middle country laboring people used the terms farm and farmer, not planter and plantation, in referring to themselves. They seem not to have wanted to ape the landlords. See Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeomen Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 285.

[6]Ibid. p. 79. See also, Marli Weiner, Mistress and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 8.

[7]The extent of the benefit can be gauged by looking at the typical farm budget. Small farmers made cash incomes averaging $150/year from the production of corn, wheat and pork. This was the same as a laborer's wages, which were $.50/day or $150/year. See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, History of Wages in the U.S. from Colonial Times to 1928 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1934), p. 225; Elmer Johnson (ed.), South Carolina: A Documentary Profile of the Palmetto State (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), p. 263. The addition of a cotton crop often doubled the income of these small farmers. In the 1790s with the first wide-spread use of the rolling gin, the farm price for short-staple cotton rose from near zero to $.30/lb. A farmer with little capital could make $300/year by growing 1000 lbs of cotton (3 bales) on seven acres of land. See Lewis Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern U.S. to 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute, 1933), vol. 2, p. 681; Louis Wright, South Carolina: A Bicentennial History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), pp. 149-150.

[8]In March the father and son harrowed the cotton and corn fields and the women planted and hoed. In June the women thinned out the cotton. In July the whole family hoed corn and thinned the cotton fields. The children went to school in August and part of September, but by September 15 the cotton opened up. The whole family picked from then until November 30. January and February were for raking manure on the fields, mending fences and cutting down and picking up corn stalks. See James Sloan, Journals (June 24, 1854 to Mar. 27, 1861), South Carolina Library, Columbia, S.C. See also, Plowden Weston, "Management of a Southern Plantation," DeBow's Review (New Orleans), vol. 32 (1857), 38-40; Orville Burton, In My Father's House are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, S.C. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina, 1985), pp. 5, 10, 12, 47, 131, 191, 199.

[9]Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, p. 681; Lacy Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 14.

[10]Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, p. 663.

[11]"Will of Joshua Stafford," Wills (SCC), Bundle 101, package 2. In the 1800 census the family owned no slaves. The family does not appear in the 1810 census. See U.S. Census Office, "Manuscript Population Schedules of the Second Census of the United States, 1800: Sumter (Claremont) County, S.C.," (Wash. D.C.: National Archives Microfilm Publications, 1965) [hereafter U.S. Census, 1800], p. 885; U.S. Census, 1810 (Sumter County, S.C.).

[12]Table 1 in the appendix illustrates a hypothetical budget using data from Charity's farm.

[13]Lunsford Stafford was already emancipated at the time of his father's death. He had married in 1813 and farmed rented land in Providence. By 1821 with three small children, he took Hannah as his inheritance from his father's estate. Hartwell Stafford ended up in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, where he married Elizabeth Turberville in 1828. To fill in for Hannah and Hartwell, Charity's three minor children did more work. See "Ruben Long et al," Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no. 441. Two years later Charity also bought a "Negro girl" named Judia for $400. See ibid.; "Estate of Charity Stafford" (Feb. 16, 1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 132, package 2. In time Judia had a son named Bluford.

[14]"Ruben Long et al v. Estate of Joshua Stafford" (1829), Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no. 441.

[15]Ibid. See also, "Will of Joshua Staffords," Wills (SCC), Bundle 101, package 2; "Estate of Charity Stafford" (Feb. 16, 1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle no. 132, package 2; "Elijah Stafford & Charity, Sarah, James Stafford v. Stuart Dutton" (1827), Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no. 436.

[16]"Ruben Long," Equity Court Rolls, (SCC), Old Series, no. 441.

[17]Ibid.

[18]Ibid.

[19]Ibid.

[20]Quoted in Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois, 1997), p. 150.

[21]Louis Wright in South Carolina, pp. 106-109, describes the aping of the English gentry by the South Carolina landlords and merchants. They imported English furniture, silver, linen, pictures, architecture, politics, religion and beliefs about alcohol and labor.

[22]Elijah Stafford ended up in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana and later Livingston Parish. See Stafford, General Leroy A. Stafford, p. 18. Typical of the $39 debt young Elijah owed to Stuart Dutton's general store in Providence was:

January 5, 1825, one quart whiskey ($.35); January 15, one bottle of whiskey ($.37), one coffee pot (8), one-fourth pound tobacco, one-half Port Brandy ($.58); February 7, two ginger cakes ($.12), fine tooth comb (18); March 4, three bottles of whiskey; March 15, one set tea spoons; March 28, one quart whiskey; April 16, one Turk cap (37); April 17, one ribbon, calico, one loaf sugar; May 13, sugar and coffee; June 4, pocket knife ($1.50), one tobacco, one razor, one fancy handkerchief, one pair kid gloves; August 31, one pint whiskey; September 6, one razor, one razor strop, one pint whiskey; September 12, pad lock; September 2, four skiems silk, one-half pint whisky, one tobacco. See "Elijah Stafford & Charity, Sarah, James Stafford v. Stuart Dutton" (1827), Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no. 436.

[23]"Ruben Long et al," Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no. 441. In general an estate (both profit and principle) devised to a child went to raise the child. If anything was left, it went to the child on coming of age. See Jacob Wheeler, A Practical Treatise of the Law of Slavery (New York: Negro Universities Press, [1837], 1968), p. 185.

[24]"Ruben Long et al," Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no. 441. The doctor bills which Charity had to pay for James and Sarah "were considerable."

[25]See U.S. Census, 1840 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 515, p. 1.

[26]James and Marianna Stafford had 11 children, none of whom learned to read or write. Charity Stafford willed the farm to James' infant daughter "for the benefit of her father." See "Estate of Charity Stafford," Wills (SCC), Bundle 132, no. 2. By 1870 James had died. His widow, Mariann (age 53) and 6 of his 11 children (ages 10 to 21) were running the farm. See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 173. In 1880 Mariann (age 64), her son Hartwell (age 32) and his wife and 4 children, plus several of Mariann's other children were running the farm. See U.S. Census, 1880 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 198.

Charity's son Lunsford Stafford, aged 50 or older, was a widower by 1840 but still farming in Providence. He had no slaves. Single-handedly he was also acting as the foster parent of a grandson, who was less than 5 years old. Lunsford was in poor health and died in 1842. Lunsford had three adult daughters in Sumter Co., two of whom married about 1840. Juliann (age 25) married a carpenter, Jesse Allen. Marian (age 24) married a boot and shoemaker, Benjamin Folsom. Placida married William Duncan. See U.S. Census, 1840 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 515, p. 8.

[27]"Deed of Tyre Jennings to Eli Jones" (Dec. 7, 1830), Deed Books (SCC), Book H, p. 439; "Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 113, package 13; "Deed to Robert F. Jones" (1891), Deed Books (SCC), Book DDD, p. 580. On the east the farm was bounded by Providence Methodist church to which the family belonged. Barbary and a number of her descendants were buried in the church's cemetery. A federal soldier who camped out on the night of Apr. 15-16, 1865 at a site (crossroads of old U.S. Highway 521 & S.C. Highway 441) about 400 yards from the farm described the area as "hilly and rolling country sparsely settled with poor whites." See Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: The History of the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865 (New York: DeCapo, [1890] 1995), p. 299; Allan Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, Apr. 5-21, 1865 (Sumter: Gamecock City Printing, 1998), p. 524.

[28]"Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 113, package 13. Like the Staffords after 1825, and like most other laboring people, the Jones, both before and after Eli's death, emphasized production for self-consumption as much as for the market. One-half the South Carolina cotton growers in the 1850s produced only one bale each. See Philip Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1855-1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Pres, 1990), p. 2. Cash crops and dependence on the market for manufactured goods were believed by laboring people to be inequitable and dangerous for small farmers, who had to go into debt to plant. A poor harvest, drop in produce prices or rise in the price of manufactured goods resulted in frequent bankruptcy and the loss of the farms during the 1840s and 1850s. See Anne Gregorie, History of Sumter County (Sumter, S.C.: Library Board of Sumter, 1954), pp. 165-166, 233; Charles Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northwest Mississippi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 24; Rachael Klein, "Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Plantation Class in the South Carolina Backcountry: 1760-1808" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1979), pp. 288-291. Besides cash crops of cotton and corn, the Jones raised hogs which they slaughtered and cured in a home-made smoke house. They sold bacon to R. Solomon's general store in Providence for $1.75 per slab ($.10/lb.). See "Administratrix's Report of Barbary Jones" (Nov. 7, 1845) in "Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 113, package 13. Since they frequently purchased goods from the general store, they got little cash from their produce but rather credits against purchases. Barbary contracted with Ozias Mathias, a neighbor, to build a chimney for $3 in the addition. The Jones' typical expenses in 1845 included the blacksmith who got $.93 for one job, W.F. Wright who was paid for work done in his "shop," Noah Graham, who was a clergyman and tutor, John Ballard, Wm. Bell and H. Watts. Barbary paid $11 to her brother, James Stafford for "sundries." See "Administratrix's Report of Barbary Jones" (Nov. 7, 1845) in "Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 113, package 13.

[29]Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer, p. 17.

[30]See "Administratrix's Report of Barbary Jones" (Nov. 7, 1845), in "Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 113, package 13. It was not until after her children had grown up and departed, that Barbary was able to buy the farm at a sheriff's sale. She paid $350 on Apr. 4, 1860. See "Estate of Charity Stafford" (Feb. 16, 1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 132, package 2; "Deed of Barbary Jones to Elizabeth M. Jones" (December 1883), Deed Books (SCC), Book YY, p. 149; and "Deed of Sam Watson to Barbary Jones" (Apr. 6, 1860), Deed Books (SCC), Book QQ, pp. 212-213.

[31]See U.S. Census, 1840 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 515, p. 1; "Estate of Charity Stafford," Bundle 132, no. 2.

[32]"Estate of Charity Stafford," Bundle 132, no. 2. If they were similar to other slave families in the area, they lived in a two room house with a shed porch. They had their own poultry and garden. Part of their produce they consumed themselves and part they sold or bartered. John Drayton in A View of South Carolina as Respects her Natural and Civil Concerns (Charleston: W.P. Young, 1802), p. 145, wrote that "slaves are encouraged to plant for emolument; raise poultry for their own use or for sale; and are protected in the property they thus acquire." See also, Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 204; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 177.

A contract made by a slave was not enforceable in a court. But slaves had their own system for exacting accountability. Their tactics included faking injury and illness, work slow downs, theft, arson, injury to animals, poisoning and suicide. If a husband was sold away from his family, it was common for him to take the law into his own hands, abscond and return to his family. A. J. McElveen, Broke by the War: Letters of a Slave Trader, ed. Edmund Drago (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 20, 43, 86, 128, lists frequent runaways and other resistance. If owners wanted work done, they had to pay: food, clothing, shelter, including liquor and cash. Typically in 1849 South Carolina enacted a law requiring that slaves be properly fed. This was not out of benevolence but because of slave militancy, as the assembly stated, "It is necessary to protect property from the depredation of famished slaves." See Wheeler, A Practical Treatise of the Law of Slavery, p. 196; Jenny Wahl, The Bondsman's Burden: An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 149. For similar reasons (slave-owner self-protection), the selling of children away from their mother was outlawed. For example, in probate cases whoever got the mother in a division of property also got the children. The person that got the mother had to compensate the other heirs for the cost of the children. See Wheeler, A Practical Treatise of the Law of Slavery, p. 188. Table 2 in the appendix illustrates a hypothetical family budget for 1840 using data from the Jones' farm.

[33]U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 392.

[34]Gregorie, History of Sumter County, pp. 166-167.

[35]U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 392.

[36]U.S. Census, 1850 (slave schedules, Sumter County, S.C.), p. 175.

[37]See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 229; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 253.

[38]Less frequently they went in the wagon to Sumterville for Sunday school and services at the First Methodist Episcopal Church (later called Trinity) or to the other evangelical churches (Baptist, Presbyterian) when a special preacher would visit. An interdenominational, interracial week-long camp meeting was held yearly in the fall at the Providence Springs campground. Providence Springs was located at the crossroads of old U.S. Highway 521 and S.C. Highway 441, near the present Hillcrest School. This is also near Providence Methodist Church. See Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, pp. 333, 420-421; Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer, p. 9; Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 223; Dickson D. Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), p. 75; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 25; Porcher G. Rembert in "The Bradford Springs," The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 510.

Even after the children had grown up and had their own families, Barbary helped them in difficult times. By 1870 her daughter Elizabeth Charity (Jones) Barkley (age 39), who had married William R. Barkley, was a single parent with three children and living in an outbuilding on the Jones' farm. See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 186. Barbary also provided housing for several indigents. In both the 1850 and 1860 census Betsie (Elizabeth) Jones (age 47 and age 57) was living in an outbuilding on the Jones' farm. Betsie was Eli's sister. See U.S. Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 152. Living with Betsie in 1860 were 4 orphaned children (aged 10 to 22) of her first cousin, James and Mary Freeman. They had died in the 1850s.

[39]The monopolistic control of the government was resented by the white majority. The 1808 state constitution, which based representation half on property and half on the white population, gave thirty men in a low county parish as much weight in the legislature as 3500 small farmers in the middle country. A farmer-politician criticized the constitution:

The constitution of South Carolina is more aristocratic in its fundamental principles than that of any other state in the union. The basis of representation in this state is as unwise and as anti-republican as it is possible for it to be. [Benjamin Perry quoted in Lillian Kibler, Benjamin Perry, South Carolina Unionist (Durham: Duke University Press, 1946), p. 229].

Patrick Brady, "Political and Civic Life in South Carolina 1787-1833," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1971), p. 196, described South Carolina's political-economic division in the antebellum:

The main economic division within South Carolina was not between competing market interests but between those who were and those who were not part of the market economy. Farmers. . . were simply neglected.

[40]Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Co., 1910).

[41]Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, p. 611. Throughout the antebellum the south was the leading agriculture region of the United States. It had 30% of the land and 40% of the population but produced all the cotton, rice, sugar, sweet potatoes, 85% of the tobacco, half the corn and 30% of the wheat and rye.

[42]Charity's son Elijah Stafford ended up in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Son Hartwell migrated to Wilkinson County, Mississippi. Son Lunsford C. Stafford lost his property as the result of a sheriff's sale in 1833. See "Deed of Lunsford C. Stafford to Sheriff William G. Richards" (1833), Deed Books (SCC), Book I, no. 41. Grandson Washington Nicholas Jones (b. 1828) moved to Bonneau in Berkeley Co., S.C. where he worked on the railroad and farmed. Granddaughter Juliann Stafford (Allen) (b. 1815) married a carpenter, lived in the town of Sumter, and raised 8 children. Granddaughter Marian Stafford (Folsom) (b. 1816) married a boot and shoe maker and raised 4 children in the town of Sumter.

[43]Brady, "Political and Civic Life in South Carolina 1787-1833," p. 120, table 10. Between 1800 and 1810 some 49,000 left the state.

[44]Michael Johnson and James Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: Norton & Co., 1984), p. 339.

[45]In 1810 54% of the whites in the Camden district owned no slaves and 20% owned from 1 to 4 slaves. See Klein, Unification of a Slave State, pp. 296-297.

[46]Burton, In My Father's House, p. 180.

[47]Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942), pp. 101-116; Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 67.

[48]U.S. Census Office, "South Carolina Manuscript Census: Sumter County," Third Census of the United States, 1810 (Washington, D.C.: 1811), p. 79; Eighth Census of the United States, 1860 (Washington, D.C.: 1864); John S. Otto, "The Migration of Southern Plain Folk: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis," J. of Southern History 51 (May 1985), 183-200; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 45.

[49]Alfred Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). South Carolina's most famous slave revolt was in 1822. Thirty-five were hanged and thirty-two deported. Included among the revolutionaries were four whites. The revolt leader, Denmark Vesey, was a Methodist. The goal was to liberate Charleston with the help of Haiti and the north. See John Lofton, Insurrection in South Carolina: The Turbulent World of Denmark Vesey (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1964). Another slave conspiracy and trial took place just up the road from Sumterville in Camden in 1816. See Steven Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 21; Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 133.

[50]Quoted in Brady, "Political and Civic Life in South Carolina," p. 128.

[51]See William Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, [1935] 1960), pp. 283-295; Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays on Interpretation (New York: Pantheon, 1969), pp. 156-234.

[52]Kibler, Benjamin Perry, pp. 218-219. The great nullifier himself, John Calhoun, had voted as a member of the U.S. Congress in 1816 for a protective tariff. See Wright, South Carolina, p. 163.

[53]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, pp. 253, 267; Sumter Gazette article, reprinted in Charleston Mercury (Sept. 13, 1830 & Sept. 14, 1830). Despite small-farmer opposition, South Carolina big landowners and merchants held a nullification convention in November 1832 and adopted the Ordinance of Nullification, which declared the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void. They warned that any attempt to collect it would result in secession. About the same time there was a minor battle in the streets of Sumterville between the nullifiers and those who were questioning the slave system, such as the readers of the Sumterville Southern Whig newspaper. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, pp. 149-150; Freehling, The Nullification Era, p. xii; William Freehling, Prelude to the Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York: Harper, 1965), pp. 83-85.

[54]Jenny Wahl, The Bondsman's Burden: An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 170, 259.

[55]In 1838 Texas, then dominated by small farmers who had been evicted from their farms in South Carolina and elsewhere, enacted the first homestead exemption law. It protected 50 acres of land and $500 worth of improvements from seizure for debt. See Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 82.

[56]Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, pp. 322-323, speaks of the intense popular hostility toward banks, financiers and money lenders. In 1857 the "usurers, merchants, and money-changers hereabout clamorous against the law" gained the retraction of the Homestead Act.

[57]Under Governor John Hugh Means, South Carolina's defense spending and taxes went up by 50% between 1850 and 1852 to $350,000 in preparation for secession. See Jean M. Flynn, The Militia in Antebellum South Carolina (Spartenberg: Reprint Co., 1991), pp. 16, 141; Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 161; "Militia Law of 1794," Acts and resolutions of the General Assembly, of the state of South Carolina, passed in April, 1794 (Charleston: Timothy & Mason, 1794); Thomas M. Cooper & David J. McCord (eds.), The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (11 vols., Columbia: A. S. Johnson, 1836-1873); John H. Franklin, The Militant South: 1800-1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1956).

[58]Manuscript Census of South Carolina, 1849 (SCL).

[59]Flynn, The Militia in Antebellum South Carolina, pp. 148-149.

[60]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, pp. 284-285, 288, 294. When secession finally did come in the 1860s, it was from the top down. There was little debate or voting and vigilantism against those who opposed the war. See Channing, Crisis of Fear, p. 292.

[61]Sumter Watchman (1855), quoted by Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 202.

[62]Sumter Co. Grandjury (April Term, 1855), quoted in Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 202.

[63]Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in North Carolina (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), pp. 102-103.

[64]"Estate of Charity Stafford," Bundle 132, no. 2. A worker could make 100 yards of homespun cloth (worth $.08/yd) in a winter. In "Dorcas Brown v. U.S.A.: A Petition to Recover Losses Incurred during Potter's Raid," (Columbia: South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, 1868), was listed the costs of homespun in the 1860s.

[65]See McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 78.

[66]The federal tariff on imported manufactured goods in 1816 averaged 25% of value. It went to 33% in 1824 and 50% in 1828. It was reduced to 20% by the late 1840s because of the opposition against it. At the same time the cost of cotton (at the port of Charleston) dropped from $.31/lb in 1818 to $.14/lb in 1821, to $.10/lb in 1826 and to $.08/lb in 1831. The cost at port included the price paid to the farmer and the cost of transportation to Charleston. The price of cotton in Sumter in 1847 was $.10-$.12 and was down to $.5 in 1855. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, pp. 165, 228; William Freehling (ed.), The Nullification Era: A Documentary Record (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1967), pp. x, xii; Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 663, 666; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 14.

[67]See Camden Southern Chronicle (Jan. 8, Jan. 12, & Mar. 12, 1823; Dec. 8, 1824, Mar. 19, 1825); Camden Journal (July 22 & Aug. 26, 1826; Oct. 11, 1828); Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 15. The 1827 protest of Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College, is illustrative of the resentment against the monopolistic forces behind the market economy:

The motto of a manufacturer now and always, here and everywhere, is monopoly: to put down all competition and to command exclusively every market. To compel every one to buy at the manufacturer's prices and to sell at the manufacturer's prices. (Thomas Cooper quoted in Freehling (ed.), The Nullification Era, p. 22).

South Carolinian James Hamilton, "Annals of Congress," The Great Tariff Debate, 1820-1830 (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1953), p. 23, in April 1824 remarked on the "public spirit" of the monopolists who were behind the tax on some 300 items:

The avarice of the monopolists invariably approaches under the guise of public spirit. They have public meetings and the press--more prolific than the herrings of Norway--are all united in the alliance."

[68]Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists, p. 37.

[69]See "Estate of Charity Stafford," Bundle 132, no. 2.

[70]See "Deed of Barbary Jones to Elizabeth M. Jones" (1883), Deed Books (SCC), Book YY, p. 149.

[71]See "Petition for Bankruptcy of Charles H. Jones" (July 6, 1868), Deed Books (SCC), Book RR, p. 545. There was a third type of homestead law that benefited Barbary Jones' son, Charlie Jones, when he was bankrupted. Starting in the 1780s with the Revolutionary War, labor militancy obtained enactments to discourage imprisonment for debts of trivial amounts. First, each creditor who prosecuted was required to pay for the support in prison of the insolvent debtor. Second, paupers were allowed to take an oath of insolvency. Upon taking it, they were released from prison. Third, debtors were kept in the custody of the sheriff within "prison bounds," which were fixed by law as 350 yards in a direct line from each side of the prison walls. In 1841 prison bounds were extended to the borders of the judicial system. At that point imprisonment ceased, although it continued on the books. Not having to serve time in debtor's prison made it possible for Charlie Jones and his family to get back on their feet after their bankruptcy. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, pp. 198, 200; David Wallace, History of South Carolina (New York: American Historical Association, 1934), vol. 2, p. 465.

[72]Klein, Unification of a Slave State, p. 130.

[73]See J. William Harris, Plain Folks and Gentry in a Slave Society, White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Heartland (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), p. 104. Patrick Brady in Political and Civic Life in South Carolina, p. 151, quotes a small farmer's letter to a middle country newspaper that the failure to provide decent transportation was hurting agriculturalists who would "as many are doing and have done years past, be compelled to abandon the soil for situations in other states where the effects of labor afford a more certain and profitable return." In 1818 two-thirds of the market crops in South Carolina were harvested within 5 miles of a river because the poor road condition. See George Taylor, Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951), p. 56. When the railroad came in the 1850s, Sumter's working class, including Barbary Jones' son, Nicklus, who was a laborer on the railroad, fought for government regulation of rates and labor conditions. For example, in 1853 the Sumter Methodists forced the South Carolina Railroad Company and the Southwestern Railroad Bank to discontinue Sunday labor "except as regards the carrying of public mail and cases of emergency." A railroad magnate complained that "a Methodist Conference brought stock in the South Carolina Railroad Company for the sole purpose of intermeddling." See McElveen, Broke by the War, p. 18.

[74]Brady, Political and Civic Life in South Carolina, p. 176.

[75]Ibid., p. 161.

[76]As Brady, ibid., p. 165, puts it, "without provisions for boarding (or transportation), the free school system was only a perfunctory gesture toward the goal." Governor Stephen Miller, a Stateburg lawyer-landlord, served as governor in the 1820s. He did little for free public education. His children went to a boarding school in Charleston. See Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, p. 83.

[77]Harris, Plain Folks, p. 73. John Wolfe in Jeffersonian Democracy in South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), p. 175, studied the split between Federalists and Republicans (Jeffersonians) in the South Carolina legislature in the early part of the 19th century. He maintained that the Republicans had "Jeffersonian principles," which translated into support for the "free school system" and for labor in general. But the examples Wolfe gives show that the South Carolina legislature was dominated by a "one-class (capital), two-party system."

[78]See Klein, Unification of a Slave State, p. 277; John Thomason, The Foundations of the Public Schools in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: The State Company, 1925), pp. 126-175.

[79]Woodville Academy was established about 1816. Among the subjects taught were Latin and Greek. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 178. Sumterville Academy, which existed from 1837 to 1867, and which was similar to Woodville, charged $6 per quarter per child to learn reading, spelling and writing. The cost went to $10 per quarter for modern languages, music, painting and needle work. See Thelma Magalis Gaston, "A History of the Sumter Secondary Schools Prior to 1888 and Since 1935: The Sumter Academy" (MA thesis, University of South Carolina, 1950).

[80]For daughter Sarah's and son James' education in the 1828 winter quarter at Woodville, Charity paid $12.50 on Jan. 14, 1828. She also paid $2.90 for a private tutor named John Parbus on July 22, 1828. See "Ruben Long et al," Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no. 441.

[81]In 1845 the children were being instructed by John P. Cook and William Evleigh. Tuition was $6 per quarter per student. See "Administratrix's Report of Barbary Jones" in "Estate of Eli Jones," Bundle 113, no. 13. The tuition paid by the Jones was similar to the $12/month ($108/year) paid by the well-documented Harris family. See Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer, p. 5. According to the 1850 census the Jones still had two children in school more than 10 years after the father's death. They were Charlie (age 18) and Mary (age 14).

[82]See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 173; see Gregorie, History of Sumter County, pp. 175-176. The politicians, media, clergy and educators, following the lead of the big landowners, attached a stigma to the public schools in the same way a stigma is now attached to those who live in public housing or receive welfare.

[83]Klein, Unification of a Slave State, p. 282.

[84]As early as the 1780s there was an incorporated orphanage society in Claremont and Clarendon counties (Sumter District). Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 175. Poor houses, almshouses and work houses were common in America from the colonial period forward. They carried on traditions of caring for orphans and destitute families and providing work for the able bodied which dated back even before the sixteenth-century Elizabethan poor laws. See June Axinn, Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 10.

[85]Burton, In My Father's House, p. 50, discusses the South Carolina poor relief system. Those who could work were given jobs by a superintendent who was supported by an appropriation from the general tax. Some areas of the state had workhouses for indigent families, but not Sumter.

[86]See U.S. Census, 1840 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 37; U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 391.

[87]Landlords had used beliefs about racial superiority since the slave system of classical antiquity to attack laboring people of different races, languages and religions. See Ellen Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Social Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 3-4, 142; Adrian Sherwin-White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. vii, 2.

[88]Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 146.

[89]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 161. Francis Asbury, the first American Methodist bishop complained in 1804 that the Baptists got the rich and the Methodists got the slaves. See John Boles, The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), p. 169.

[90]Richard Furman, quoted in Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 40. In 1803 Thomas Sumter, a landlord, donated land to Furman in Stateburg for a Baptist church. Stateburg neighbored Providence to the west. Furman owned 6 slaves. Both he and Sumter ran into economic problems because of their involvement in the get-rich-quick market system. Capital (the Bank of the State of South Carolina) was no respecter of persons. Despite being a Revolutionary war hero and advanced in years, Sumter ended up imprisoned for debt. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 199; Harvey Cook (ed.), A Biography of Richard Furman (Greenville, S.C.: Baptist Commission, 1913), pp. 12-15; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, pp. 263-265.

[91]Frank Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), p. 96.

[92]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, pp. 139, 142.

[93]Burton, In My Father's House, pp. 23, 60.

[94]Donald Matthews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 35, 142, 152; Matthews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 3-61; Ira F. McLeister, History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America, ed. Roy Nicholson (Syracuse, NY: Wesley Press, 1951).

[95]Anne Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and Social Order: 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 197.

[96]Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 24; Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah, p. 43.

[97]Lacy Ford, "Ideology of the Old South's Plain Folks," in Samuel Hyde, Plain Folks of the South Revisited (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), pp. 225-226.

[98]Methodist bishop Francis Asbury accepted donations of land and slaves from slaveowners. He ended up using his office to keep anti-slave clergy out of the pulpit. At his suggestion the Methodist General Conference of 1804 dropped all condemnations against slavery from the book of discipline. See Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 24; Matthews, Religion in the Old South, p. 122. In the 1840s the Methodist Episcopal Church split over the slavery issue. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, dominated at the top by property, ended up apologizing for slavery. As a result, the blacks split from it in 1865 with the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. See Bernard Powers, Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (Fayettsville, Ark.: University of Arkansas, 1994), pp. 195-197; Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 282.

[99]James F. Jones was the oldest brother of Eli Jones, the husband of Barbary Jones.

[100]The Revolutionary war pension application for William Jones, No. R 7934, U.S. Archives, Wash. DC. lists the children of William Jones, along with their dates of birth and death. See also, "Will of Susannah Jones" (Dec. 1875), Wills (SCC), bundle 170, package 22; "Deed of Sale of Edgar S. Jones, Robert L. Jones, Albertus S. Brown and Willis A. Brown, partners, to A. S. and W. A. Brown" (Oct. 7, 1893), Deed Books (SCC), Book HHH, no. 423.

[101]U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 394. In the 1850 census the area was referred to as beat no. 1, upper battalion, 20th Regiment, Clarement Co. under Capt. Mathis.

[102]U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 295 [p. 78].

[103]U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 392.

[104]Ibid. Close by was the family of James R. (b. 1798) and Emily E. (b. 1802) Spann. See ibid, p. 393.

[105]U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 397. See "Deed of Robert L. Jones (for William Hampton Jones) to Franklin and Emma Moses" (1875), Deed Books (SCC), Book UU, no. 348.

[106]U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 392. In 1860 the Watts' farm was worth $12,000. See U.S. Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 102.

[107]U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 394.

[108]Ibid.

[109]U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 397. Hampton Watts was also serving as the guardian of the 8 minor children of his brother, Benson Watts, who died in 1847. See "Will of Benson Watts" (1847), Wills (SCC), bundle 123, package 1.

[110]Wayne Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), pp. 2-5.

[111]Between 1850 and 1860 the number of overseers in Alabama doubled from 1,800 to 4,100. See William Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), p. 10.

[112]See U.S. Census, 1860 (Montgomery Co., Ala.), p. 82.

[113]Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 33; Scarborough, The Overseer, pp. 24-25, 29.

[114]See Miscellaneous (Columbia, S.C.: Department of Archives and History), vol. 2, p. 485. In 1866 the amount of the gift which the children were entitled to was referred to as $4,300 in bonds from the "sale of Negroes." See "Report of the Commissioner," in "Petition for Apportionment of Funds for Maintenance," Ex parte William Hampton Jones et al. (June 5, 1866), Equity Court Rolls (SCC). In 1872 the gift was referred to as "the estate of his [R. L. Jones] wife, Susan A., daughter of W. H. Watts, which is valued at $1,100." See Guardian Files (1872, SCC), vol. 7, no. 36.

[115]Albert Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 14, 65; Harris, Plain Folks, pp. 147, 152; Marli Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina (Urbana, Ill. University of Illinois Press, 1997), 180. The Congress also enacted legislation that restricted the amount of cotton that could be grown. This was to assure that sufficient quantities of corn were produced to feed the population. Nevertheless, the cost of corn went from $.50/bu in 1859 to $1/bu in 1862 to $25/bu in 1865. See Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer, p. 10; Harris, Plain Folks, p. 162.

[116]Robert Jones was enlisted at Sullivan's Island by Capt. R. L. Heriot for the duration of the War. He was detached at the Palmetto Battery, C.C. Parrish from July to December, 1863. He was sick and given a furlough from July 18, 1863 to July 25, 1863. He got $.25/day ($3.75 total) during the furlough. The last entry in his service record was May/June 1864, in which he is listed as "present." See "Service Record of Robert L. Jones," Combined Confederate Service Records (Wash. D.C.: U.S. Archives).

[117]The 20th S.C. Infantry spent 1862-1863 in garrison duty protecting Charleston from federal invasion via the ocean. There was constant low-scale fighting. In May 1864 the federals gave up their efforts to take Charleston from the sea and withdrew their troops. The 20th Regiment then went to Virginia, where they were immediately involved in the defense of Richmond and Petersburg on both the north and south side of the James River. In early August 1864 the brigade was shifted to the Shenandoah Valley where they were only slightly engaged (at Charlestown, WV, August 26, 1864; Berryville, Va., September 3, 1864 and September 13, 1864; and Hupp's Hill, Va., October 1, 1864). In early December 1864 the brigade returned to the Richmond area and a month later was sent to defend their native state against Sherman. For the rest of January and most of February, 1865 the brigade alternated between the front lines along the Salkehatchie River and Charleston. Sherman cleverly confused the Salkehatchie line and then forced the Southerners to abandon Charleston. After a brief stand near Cheraw, the brigade was engaged at Averasboro, N.C. (March 16, 1865) and Bentonville, N.C., (March 19-21, 1865). About Apr. 9, 1865 the 20th Infantry was consolidated with the 2nd (Palmetto) Regiment, S.C. Infantry and a part of Blanchard's S.C. Reserves and formed the (New) 2nd Regiment, S.C. Infantry. They were part of general Joe Johnston's surrender at the Bennett House near Durham, North Carolina on April 26, 1865. On May 2, 1865 the survivors received their paroles at Greensboro, N.C. and returned home. See U.S. War Dept., The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Wash. D.C.: 1880-1901), 70 vols.

[118]U.S. Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 132.

[119]Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 158.

[120]See "Report of the Commissioner," in "Petition for Apportionment of Funds for Maintenance," Ex parte William Hampton Jones et al. (June 5, 1866), Equity Court Rolls (SCC); see also, "Robert L. Jones, Guardian for William Hampton Jones, Robert Frederick Jones and Susan Mary Jones" (1873), Deed Books (SCC), Book UU, no. 350.

[121]See "Report of the Commissioner," in "Petition for Apportionment of Funds for Maintenance," Ex parte William Hampton Jones et al. (June 5, 1866), Equity Court Rolls (SCC).

[122]See Appendix 3 for a hypothetical annual budget of the Jones in 1870.

[123]The statement was part of a court proceeding concerning Hampton Watts' gift. Robert Jones petitioned to have himself appointed guardian for the children. See "Affidavit of Dr. John Witherspoon and William E. Richardson" (1872), Guardian Files (SCC), vol. 7, no. 36.

[124]Harry Jones then farmed the place with his unmarried aunts and took as his wife a woman of "color." She was a "Turk," which was a group of people of middle eastern origin who had lived in the Providence/Dalzell area since before the Revolutionary War.

[125]Elizabeth Jones, "Dept. of Mental Health Case Histories," (manuscript, Sept. 1886-Aug. 1888), p. 192, at South Carolina Dept. of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C.

[126]George and Lucy David had lived in Sumterville. They also had had a 527 farm and 22 slaves worth $7840 in the 1840s.The farm was in Concord Township off what is now Boulevard Rd. (County Route 82), which was called Plowdens Mill Rd in the nineteenth century. It was not far from the village of Brogdan and the Black River tributaries of Davis (David) Creek, Tear Coat Branch and Boots Branch.

[127]The U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 331, stated that George David was "insane". In a hospital record of his daughter, Lizzie Jones, George was described as "slightly deranged, more childish than insane." See Elizabeth Jones, "Dept. of Mental Health Case Histories," (manuscript, Sept. 1886-Aug. 1888), p. 192, at South Carolina Dept. of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C.

[128]The U.S. Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 331, listed the family as having $1200 in real estate.

[129]The Walsh's bought the David's family farm from the estate in 1855 for $700. This was less than it was worth. See "Sale of Land to Thomas Walsh" (1855), Equity Court Rolls (SCC), no. 488. In 1859 the Walshs sold the farm to William C. Chandler for $1500. See "Deed of Thomas Walsh to William Chandler" (Feb. 8, 1850), Deed Books (SCC), Book Q, p. 532. After the sale the David's land, the Walshs gave up farming and began to run a dry goods store.

[130]There was one other source of help for the David children. On August 5, 1855 James H. Dingle and his wife Frances Ellen Dingle conveyed a four acre tract in Sumter District to Isaac Macon David, the third David child, because of "love and affection." It was to be held in trust for his sisters and brothers: Lizzie Jones, Manly J., William Henry and George Hartwell. On George's 21st birthday in 1869 the land was to go to Lizzie Jones for life and then to her children. See "Plat" (1854), Deed Books (SCC), Book PP 74.

[131]See James M. Burgess, Chronicles of St. Mary's Parish: Santee Circuit and Williamsburg Township: 1731-1885 (Columbia, S.C.: 1888), p. 107; Clarendon County Historical Society, Report: 1968 (Sumter Co.: Wilder and Ward Printing, 1968); "Members of the Methodist Church, South Carolina Conference, Sumter, 1832," (Historical Society of South Carolina Archives, Wofford College, Spartenburg, S.C.). Such groups in the nineteenth century helped provide some of the services which the social security system now provides, such as financial aid to widows, orphans, and retired ministers.

[132]The farm was described in "Deed of Charles H. Jones and Elizabeth M Jones" (Dec. 23, 1868), Deed Books (SCC), Book SS, p. 193:

Bordered on the N by the land of Robert S. Mellette, on E by Robert S. Mellette and R. J. Dick, on the S by the Run of the Cain Savannah Swamp and on the W by John S. Bradford and Robert S. Mellette, which was deeded by Emily S. Dargon on Jan. 24, 1860 in Book QQ 575 and 576.

The farm was also described in Deed Books (SCC), Book RR, p. 674.

[133]Albert Moore, Conscription and Conflict, pp. 7, 14. One of the jobs of the South Carolina militia was to arrest conscripts and deserters. See F. Foster Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War (Spartenburg, S.C.: Spartenburg Reprint Co., 1993), p. 25.

[134]E. M. Hodge enlisted into Holcome's Legion the same day as Charlie. See "Service Record of E. M. Hodge," Combined Confederate Service Records (Wash. D.C.: U.S. Archives).

[135]See Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War, p. 87.

[136]Walsh contracted chronic bronchitis with a deposit on the right lung during the fall and winter of 1862-1863. He was absent in January and February 1863 due to the sickness. By the summer of 1864, he had lost 30 pounds due to the bronchitis, was too weak to work and was given a medical discharge.

[137]See "Service Record of Isaac Macon David," Combined Confederate Service Records (Wash. D.C.: U.S. Archives).

[138]Holcombe's Legion, which in time was placed under the command of Col. W. Pinkney Shingler, was part of Wise's Brigade (Apr.-Sept., 1863) and Hunton's Brigade (Sept. 1863-March 1864), the Department of Richmond, Army of Northern Virginia.

[139]Charlie was detailed as regimental forage master. Captain Walsh's service record mentions lack of food as a big problem. In a report to headquarters dated September 27, 1862, he complained that his men were not getting enough to eat, only what they could forage. Lack of food was one reason that several confederate soldiers, as Walsh noted in the same report, "escaped to the enemy."

[140]Charlie's $12 monthly wages covered the cost of the lot. See "Lawrence M. Brunson to Charles H. Jones" (Aug. 3, 1863), Deed Books (SCC), Book S, p. 149, which read: "Deed for 15 acres in Sumter town bordered on W by Main St., N by L.M. Brunson's lot, E by Road to Pocotaligo, S by land of Thomas Hoyt, with a plat attached, recorded Feb. 1869."

[141]See U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 33, p. 1232. General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) wrote from Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia to James A. Seddon (1815-1880), Secretary of War, about sending up more troops from South Carolina:

I know that the commanders of these departments will make objections to this, but I think it for the department to decide whether our forces are to remain scattered over the country or to be concentrated to meet the superior forces of the enemy. I recommend that a South Carolina regiment be formed of Holcombe Legion (five companies) in the Department of Richmond, and four companies under Major Whitman in Southwestern Virginia, and one of the detached companies in South Carolina. This and one regiment from South Carolina will be added to the two South Carolina regiments in this army to form a South Carolina brigade. I would recommend that General Butler be sent to South Carolina to complete this brigade and to recruit the two regiments here from the excess reported in the regiments and companies in that state. . . I think the proposed arrangements would bring together and make effective troops which in detached companies and regiments are now of but little service. See U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, vol. 33, p. 1118.

[142]Charlie Jones' brother-in-law, Thomas Walsh, named his son, born July 31, 1863, Pinkney Shingler Walsh. Haskell was from an upcountry (Abeville County) landlord family. He had been valedictorian of his class in 1860 at South Carolina College (University of S.C. after 1866) and had "led the college" in demonstrations for secession. After graduation he along with his "body-servant" joined the headquarters staff of Col. Maxcy Gregg in February, 1861. Haskell remained as Gregg's personal secretary until his patron was killed on Dec. 14, 1862. Haskell then set about getting himself promoted in rank. He was eventually assigned as commander of the 7th Regiment. He maintained that he had always wanted to be a cavalry officer and had carried a pair of spurs in his knapsack from his first entry into the war. He wanted to achieve "great results." See Louise H. Daly, Alexander Cheeves Haskell: The Portrait of a Man (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1934), pp. 38, 49, 125-126.

[143]Haskell wrote at the time, "I find there is bitterness and jealousy about a `new man' coming in and the old members not getting promotion." See ibid., p. 126.

[144]See Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War, pp. 43-44; see also, Waring (ed.), "Civil War Diary of William C. Hinson," p. 17.

[145]Daly, Alexander Cheeves Haskell, p. 127.

[146]Ibid., p. 96.

[147]Ibid., p. 128. Col. Shingler was later arrested by General Hoke for failing to support the charge. But Hoke and Haskell backed off and released Shingler. Soon after Shingler resigned from the Confederate army. Not much later on May 29, 1864 Haskell was wounded because of his recklessness and was out of action for a month. See ibid., p. 131; Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 60.

[148]Daly, Alexander Cheeves Haskell, p. 136.

[149]Daniel Bradham (1841-1915), who lost his arm as a result of wounds at 2nd Manassas, knew Charlie. He wrote about Charlie's election as captain:

In the early days of the late war Charlie Jones entered the service of his country by joining Capt. Webb's company of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of S.C.V. By pluck and energy equaled very few of his day, he won the rank of lieutenant in his company. See Daniel J. Bradham, "How Charlie H. Jones Killed a Yankee Soldier and Defied his Pursuers," Manning Times, reprinted The Watchman and Southron (Sumter, S.C.: Sept. 23, 1891); also reprinted in Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 167.

Another contemporary wrote about Charlie, "He was well known at home and had made himself a character in the army by his prowess and daring as an efficient scout." See ibid., p. 83. Charlie was officially designated lieutenant in February 1865.

[150]Moore, Conscription and Conflict, p. 3.

[151]Ibid., pp. 18, 20-21.

[152]Ibid., p. 68; Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War, p. 35.

[153]Daly, Alexander Cheeves Haskell, p. 148. In Charlie's military service file is a letter of March 6, 1865 in which Haskell stated:

                This lieutenant (Charles H. Jones) was elected in August 1864. I did not consider him as one fitted for commission and would not allow him to go on duty until he had been examined by a Board announced by Brigade Command. He did not feel capable of standing examination. For this and other reasons, it was delayed. On 7 October 1864 I was wounded and disabled and obliged to leave my company. During my absence, Charles Jones succeeded me and went on duty without examination.

                Upon my return to duty I found C. H. Jones a lieutenant but he had been absent without leave for several weeks with a number of men from his company. The whole business was censured by a certificate. This was disrespectful of a cavalry officer to receive and showed him not only ignorant but incapable of appreciating his duty. For this he has been court martialed.

                I certainly request the acceptance of his resignation as this will render unnecessary to call upon the Boards after the company has tried this officer but I cannot approve his application for transfer. I am quite willing for him to go but regard it as a wrong principle.

[154]Charlie had in mind to transfer to Wade Hampton's command. Hampton had returned to South Carolina in February, 1865 as had General Matthew C. Butler with his division of cavalry. They wanted to help against General Sherman. See Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War, p. 142.

In a letter also dated March 6, 1865, one month before the war ended, Charlie tended his resignation to General S. Cooper:

I hereby tender my resignation for reasons of a private nature and respectfully ask a favorable consideration thereof, and also to be allowed the privilege of joining General Hampton's Command of Cavalry.

                                                                                Very Respectfully Yours

                                                                                Your Obt Servant

                                                                                C. H. Jones

In Charlie's service record there was a notation for February 23, 1865, which stated that he was subject to C. M. (court martial?). The title of the Confederate military legal code under which he was charged was G. O. 5 Par. 23, Dept of Richmond/Elzey. The reason for the court martial in the February 23, 1865 notation was not stated. If "subject to C.M." meant he was tried, there is no indication that he was convicted.

Lieutenant General James Longstreet (1821-1904), who was from Edgefield, S.C. approved Charlie's resignation on March 10, 1865. An entry in Charlie's service record seems to indicate he was "promoted on March 16, 1865" and gave a reference, "remarks: S. O. 62, Confed. Arch. chap. l, File No. 92, page 459." On March 12, 1865 at about the time Charlie's resignation was accepted, the 7th Regiment was at Goochland Courthouse. It took prisoners near Columbia and Louisa Courthouses not far from the Rivanna River.

Charlie's resignation from the Confederate army was similar to what the South Carolina legislature had done two month earlier. On January 4, 1865 the legislature, following the lead of the new governor, Andrew Magrath (1864-1865), enacted a measure to separate South Carolina from the Confederacy. The local magnates wanted to defend against William Sherman and were concerned that the Confederate government was  giving them little help. General R. E. Lee was upset that the South Carolina regiments were no longer being recruited. Historian Albert Moore commented, "At the end of the war the state authorities of South Carolina were in virtual rebellion against the central government." See Moore, Conscription and Conflict, p. 302.

[155]Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 213 & preface (un-paged).

[156]Col. C. J. Colcook on March 20, 1865 commanded those in the state who were in the Confederate forces. Col. George W. Lee commanded the state militia. See Ibid., pp. 207, 213.

[157]Ibid., p. 211.

[158]William Guess, South Carolina: Annals of Pride and Protest (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), p. 244. By April 1865 South Carolina had many who were furloughed, absent without leave or had overstayed their leave, and deserters. See Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War, p. 27. See Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War (New York: Century Co., 1928), p. 51; Articles of War for the Armies of the Confederate States, art. 52; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol. 49, pt. I, p. 1042; vol. 47, pt. III, p. 730.

[159]Perry wrote of the secessionists' failure to join the military:

Barnwell Rhett, James L. Orr, Andrew Magrath, James Chestnut, Boyce, Colcock, William W. Gist, I. Hayse, W. P. Miles, Myzyche, Pickens, Whitner, William L. Yancy and hundreds of others who inaugurated this revolution are at home or in some civil office and not in the army where they ought to be. See Kibler, Benjamin Perry, pp. 363-364.

[160]Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 93.

[161]William Mood, "The Recollection of Potters Raid," Watchman and Southron News Paper (Sumter, S.C.: July 6, 1886-Jan. 27, 1887), reprinted in Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 83.

[162]They also made a few other stands at Stateburg (April 15, 1865), at Bradford Springs and Boykins Mill (April 18) and at Dinkin's Mill (April 19).

[163]See Ibid., p. 87.

[164]There were several versions of how Charlie and his company escaped. The federals maintained that Charlie surrendered, got on his horse, then shot his guard and escaped. The Confederate version was that when the federal troops outside the Norris house told Charlie to surrender, he refused, grabbed his horse and shot one of the federal scouts who was aiming his gun at Charlie. See Mood, "The Recollection of Potters Raid," pp. 89-90. For leading the defense at Manning, Charlie was posthumously awarded the Confederate Medal of Honor in 1999 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The ceremony at Manning included re-enactors who fired a salute from rifle muskets. See Denise Jones, "Finally at the Gates of Glory," Sumter Daily Item (Dec. 14, 1999).

[165]Will Warwick, "The Destruction of Manning," Clarendon Recorder (October 27, 1865), reprinted in Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 172. The federal hostility was not lessened when they heard that some months earlier 5 local blacks, including an old man, had been hung for arming themselves and for shooting back when discovered. A great part of Potter's troops were black. See ibid., pp. 116, 125.

[166]Ibid. p. 337.

[167]See "Lien of Charles H. Jones to L. G. Pate" (Apr. 30, 1867), Deed Books (SCC), Book RR, p. 52 Pate's house in Sumter was next to that of Thomas Walsh, the Jones' brother-in-law. The Jones also lived nearby. See U.S. Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 157.

[168]See "Lien of Charles H. Jones to L. G. Pate" (Apr. 10, 1868), Deed Books (SCC), Book RR, p. 441.

[169]See "Petition for Bankruptcy of Charles H. Jones" (July 6, 1868), Deed Books (SCC), Book RR, p. 545.

[170]See "Deed to Collin G. Parker," (Dec. 23, 1868), Deed Books (SCC), Book SS, p. 193. On December 7, 1868 Charles had deeded to James R. Kendrick the same 144 acre farm as collateral for a $128 debt.

[171]See "Lien Given by Charles H. Jones" (Feb. 27, 1869), Deed Books (SCC), Book S, p. 140; "Lien by Charles H. Jones on a Crop to George W. Williams & Co." (Feb. 8, 1869), Deed Books (SCC), Book S, p. 109.

[172]See "Deed of Charles H. Jones to Stephen Richardson" (Jan. 3, 1870), Deed Books (SCC), Book SS, p. 703.

[173]See "Loan to Charles H. Jones from George W. Williams & Co." (Jan. 1, 1870), Deed Books (SCC), Book SS, p. 307.

[174]See "Lien of Charles H. Jones to Oliver Hoyt" (Apr. 20, 1871), Deed Books (SCC), Book TT, p. 187 and Book TT, p. 188.

[175]See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 56.

[176]Robert Pace, "Abandoning Self-Sufficiency: Corn in the Lower South, 1849-1879," Southern Studies, 4 (Fall 1993), no. 3, p. 286.

[177]See U.S. Census, 1880 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 350.

[178]They bought their lot on December 18, 1884. See "Sumter Cemetery Record," (manuscript, Sumter Cemetery, Sumter, S.C.), p. 106.

[179]Kibler, Benjamin Perry, pp. 463, 466. The 1868 constitution was ratified by a vote of 71,000 to 27,000. The total South Carolina population in 1860 was 703,000; Woodruff, Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention.

[180]Sumter County elected 11 black Republicans either to the 1868 Convention or the state legislature between 1868 and 1876. All but two had been slaves before the war. See Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 228-240; Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, p. 325.

[181]The delegates to the 1868 convention contrasted with the 169 delegates to the Secession Convention of Dec. 17, 1860. The average delegate to the Secession Convention was worth $104,000. See Ralph Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 16-18.

[182]Coghlan was born at sea. His parents died while he was a child and he was apprenticed at age 14 to a Charleston blacksmith. When his apprenticeship expired, he came to Stateburg to work at the Cherryvale estate of John Frierson. While smithing at Stateburg he married Penelope Sledge (1810-1883), who was the daughter of Daniel and Nancy (Jones) Sledge (1789-1861). There was continuous business between the Coghlans and the Stafford-Jones over the years. Coghlan's business partner was G. L. Jones. Coghlan was a witness to the will of Lunsford Stafford in 1842. Lunsford Stafford was Charity Stafford's son and Barbary Jones' brother. See "Will of Lunsford C. Stafford" (Nov. 9, 1842), Wills (SCC), vol. 2, p. 46; Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, pp. 295-296; Gregorie, History of Sumter County, 98.

[183]In 1849 Coghlan was elected president of the Sumterville Mechanical Association. The association worked to establish and expand industry and culture for working people in Sumter, including schools, roads, bridges, railroads and libraries. The association was critical of the state's landlord system that, in the 1840s, was making California look attractive to South Carolina labor. Sumter needed industrial development, as Coghlan commented:

Wipe off the reproach attached to the noble old South Carolina and arose her from her Rip Van Winkle slumbers and leave California to take care of herself. Quoted in Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, p. 295.

Another office to which Coghlan was elected was Worthy Patriarch of Sumter's National Sons of Temperance. This organization, as reflected in the editorials which Coghlan contributed to the Sumter Watchman, took a negative view of idle landlords and their glorification of alcoholism, luxury and contempt for labor. Coghlan's fellow temperance promoter and fellow delegate at the 1868 state constitutional convention was Manuel Simeon Corley (1823-1902). From Lexington County, S.C., he edited the South Carolina Temperance Standard (1855-1856). His opposition to the first attempt at secession in the 1850s was strong enough that capital attempted to expel him from the state. He served in the Confederate army during the war and was a member of the U.S. Congress in 1868-1869. See Anonymous, Biographical Dictionary of the American Congress (Wash. D.C.: G.P.O., 1950).

[184]Coghlan's Republican allies in county politics were blacks such as Rev. William E. Johnson, who was later a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Sam Lee, J. W. Westberry, Ben Lawson, Jack Witherspoon and Jim White. His white allies were Franklin J. Moses, Sr. (b. 1805) and Franklin J. Moses, Jr. (b. 1840). Both were Sumter lawyers and lived in the same block as the Coghlans. Moses, Sr. had been Sumter's  state senator (Claremont election district) from 1841 to 1866 and in the 1870s was a member of the state supreme court. Moses, Jr. was speaker of the house and then beat out Republican Reuben Tomlinson for governor (1872-1874).  One of Coghlan's jobs as Sumter sheriff in 1871 was mentioned by Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, p. 330. See also, Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), p. 126.

Coghlan was less close to Governor Robert K. Scott (1868-1872). Scott was accused of having more interest in pleasing the Democratic magnates than in serving the laboring people who elected him. For example, those who had held office under the Confederacy had had their civil rights revoked. As governor, Scott wanted their rights restored. The federal military was the basis of the Republican's power. As governor, Scott wanted the military withdrawn. Scott had been second in command at the Freedmen's Bureau. As governor, he wanted the bureau terminated. The 1868 Constitution did not permit segregated schools. As governor, Scott sought to segregate the schools. After one battle, Scott removed Coghlan from the office of Sumter County treasurer. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 284; Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, p. 295. See Robert Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Re-Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 143; Peggy Lamson, The Glorious Failure: Black Congressman Robert B. Elliott and the Reconstruction of South Carolina (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 72.

[185]Wright, South Carolina, p. 193.

[186]The Democrats won 6 of the 31 senate seats in the state and 14 of the 124 house seats. See Kibler, Benjamin Perry, p. 466.

[187]Woodruff, Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, p. 372.

[188]Francis Simkins, The Tillman Movement in South Carolina (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964 [1926]), p. 4; South Carolina Statutes I, 185.

[189]Coghlan was worth $5,000. This included a slave family which Coghlan's wife, Penelope, had inherited from her parents, Daniel Sledge and Nancy Jones Sledge. See U.S. Census, 1850 Slave Schedule (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 429; U.S. Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 177.

[190]In Georgia the white workers joined with their black counterparts in the Union Leagues and Republican party after 1866 when the Democratic party-controlled State Supreme Court struck down a debtor relief law. See Edmund Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 30.

[191]Edmund Drago, ibid., p. 37, compared the class split among blacks in Georgia with the split in South Carolina:

Like South Carolina's black reconstructionists, Georgia's black politicians stood somewhere between the white former ruling class and the black peasantry, but they were undoubtedly much closer to the latter. Their origins were humble in comparison to those of their black colleagues in South Carolina, whom Thomas Holt described as "basically bourgeois in their origins."

[192]Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 11. Robert Current in Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, p. 230, noted that laboring blacks would not vote for blacks who identified with property. Amstead Robinson, "Beyond the Realm of Social Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for American History," Journal of American History 68 (1981), 276-297, similarly observed, "It seems clear that class tensions were the fundamental impediment to the success of southern Republicanism." See also, William C. Hine, "Frustration, Factionalism and Failure: Black Political Leadership and the Republican Party in Reconstruction Charleston, 1865-1877" (Ph.D. dissertation, Kent State University, 1979), pp. 105, 107, 153.

In Sumter County black landlords like Henry Ellison and William Ellison, Jr. voted for the Democratic Party. Prior to the war the Ellisons had owned 83 slaves worth $100,000 and 800 acres. They lived in Stateburg, the township that bordered Providence to the west. Sumter had 320 free blacks in 1860. See Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, pp. 128, 312, 326, 329. According to Thomas Holt in Black Over White, pp. 3-4, the "bourgeois" blacks in the legislature differed from laboring blacks in their origins and ideology. They pursued policies that were not in the interest of the majority.

When Sumter's capitalists sought to win back power in the state legislature in 1876, they needed a portion of the black vote. The Hampton Democrats got that support from the black red shirts who voted Democratic. These blacks included house servants, body servants, those willing to accept a political office from the Democrats such as county coroner, school commissioner or representative to the legislature and artisans such as musicians. Black musicians and their brass bands had served in the Confederacy and provided entertainment at the Hampton rallies in the 1876 campaign. Not unlike their modern-day counterparts who work for consumer capitalism, the musicians and other black red shirts were hated by black Republicans, expelled from the black churches, and exposed to beatings, whippings and other physical and verbal abuse. When the capitalists sought to boycott the Republicans, white and black labor fought back with their own boycott. They refused to work for capital or to rent land. Instead they bought land forfeited for taxes of which there was plenty for sale cheaply. Edumnd Drago in Hurrah for Hampton! Black Red Shirts in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Fayettesville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1998), p. xi, has attacked historians who ignore black class struggle, "For many American historians, especially scholars of black history, the term community has become a romantic construct that obscures more than it reveals." See also ibid., pp. xiv, 8, 13-14, 49; Alfred Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts: South Carolina's Deliverance in 1876 (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, [1935], 1970), pp. 173, 230.

[193]Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 285.

[194]Woodruff, Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, p. 147.

[195]Harris, Plain Folks, p. 154. The annual head tax on slaves went from $.60/slave to $.75/slave in 1856 and to $.95/slave in 1859. The real property (ad valorem) tax went from $.50/$100 accessed value to $.60/$100 in 1856 and to $.81/$100 in 1859. This was about 5% of the state's cotton income. See Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, pp. 312-313.

[196]Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, p. 12.

[197]Wright, South Carolina, p. 190; Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, p. 20 (the upcountry landlords were desperate for labor).

[198]Simkins, The Tillman Movement, pp. 5, 8; U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1870 (South Carolina), p. 92. According to Robert Current in American History: A Survey (6th ed., New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 467, emancipation led to an overall doubling in black wealth and income (housing, clothing, food and other material rights). In the prewar era blacks earned 22% of the profits of the plantation system. By the end of Reconstruction, they were earning 56 percent of the return on investment in Southern agriculture. Measured another was, the percapita income of the former slaveowning class and their allies declined 35%.

[199]As Francis Simkins, The Tillman Movement, p. 9, commented on the gains made by labor after the war:

Elements in the white population that had previously been unable to compete with the planter and his slaves used the discomfiture of the planter class to their own advantage. The former overseer, who was experienced in the management of land and negroes, purchased land from his former employer and went into the business of working Negroes for his own profit. Likewise, the former "poor white," personally experienced in farming, added to the small farm he had inherited from his ancestors, tracts of land which the planter sold at a sacrifice.

[200]In 1875 Videau E. Jones paid her sister-in-law, Carolina Virginia Spann $158 for her share in the estate of Videau's mother. The property was described as "60 acres, bounded on the north by Joshua Myers, on the south by Cook and Jones, part of the estate of Emily E. Spann." See Deed Books (1875, SCC), Book U, no. 608. See also, "Deed of Videau A. Jones, James W. Spann, et al to Mariah Spann, et al" (Feb. 4, 1879), Deed Books (SCC), Book OOO, no. 664.

[201]Wright, South Carolina, pp. 196-197.

[202]Solon Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and its Political, Economic and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), Simkins, The Tillman Movement, p. 17; Writers' Program, Works Project Administration, South Carolina, p. 61. The Grange also organized cooperative buying and selling and fought for the regulation of railroad freight rates. In 1877 it amalgamated with the Agricultural and Mechanical Society.

About the same time that limits were being set on crop loans, labor achieved another debt-related goal, the final abolition of imprisonment for debt. This had been achieved de facto in the 1840s, but was still on the books until 1868. See Wright, South Carolina, pp. 193; South Carolina Constitution of 1868, Art. 1, sec. 20 in Francis Thrope (ed.), Federal and State Constitutions (Wash. D.C.: GPO, 1909); see also, South Carolina Statutes, V, 78; VII, 231; XI, 153.

[203]South Carolina, Acts 1868-1869 (Mar. 19, 1869); Harold Woodman, New South - New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Post-bellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), p. 78.

[204]Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, p. 97. The Democratic legislature in 1866 had initially re-established the Homestead Act. The law was repealed in 1876. See Clarence Stone, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 180.

[205]The freed slaves, following the labor theory of value, believed they had a right to the property of the former slaveowners. Their labor had created that property and they redistributed it to themselves to the extent they were able. As a result of the demands of the landless whites and blacks, a Board of Land Commissioners was established. It purchased large estates and resold them in parcels of 25 to 100 acres to those who worked them. The new owners were given 8 years to pay. The redistribution work of the Land Commission in Sumter County was not great, only 454 acres. See Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, p. 222; Carol Bleser, The Promised Land: The History of the South Carolina Land Commission (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), p. 167; Kibler, Benjamin Perry, p. 465; Edwards, Gendered Strife, p. 92.

A program concerning low-country blacks began with General William Sherman's Field Order No. 15 of January 1865. He set aside for those who had been working it, the Sea Islands and rice fields extending from the coast for 30 miles inland. The Freedman's Bureau, established in March 1865, aided the blacks in legalizing the land seizures begun by the army. However, because of federal politics, only about 1,600 of the 40,000 blacks who had worked the land and made claims to it, got titles. Land was given only to those who had joined the Union army or worked for it in a civilian capacity. Toward the end of the war, black Union regiments such as Potter's, did combat in the state. See Edward Magdol, A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedman's Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pub., 1976), pp. 139-145; Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, p. 43; Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 124.

[206]Woodruff, Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, p. 50.

[207]Harris, Plain Folks, p. 154.

[208]Kibler, Benjamin Perry, p. 465.

[209]Ibid., p. 463; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 311.

[210]David D. Wallace, The History of South Carolina (New York: American Historical Society, 1934), vol. 3, p. 267.

[211]Woodruff, Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, pp. 206, 264. One "public service" which the legislature refused to provide was repayment of the investment in slaves that had been lost or of the war debt. The legislature elected in 1865 had voted to pay back the war debt. But the 1868 Convention and legislature repudiated the debt. Labor's view was that slavery and the war were not legitimate. The magnates should not profit. That much of the war debt by 1868 was in the hands of northern speculators, as was pointed out at the convention, made repudiation all the easier. See ibid., p. 248; Kibler, Benjamin Perry, p. 465.

[212]See U.S. Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 197; U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 295 [p. 78]; U.S. Census, 1880 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 194.

[213]See U.S. Census, 1880 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 197.

[214]In 1870 Wm. Hampton Watts was 63 and listed his employment as school teacher. His property was valued at $4500 and he was living with the family of Leonard (1814-1896) and Mary Ann (Michaux) Brown at Oswego, S.C. They were members of Bethel Methodist church in Oswego. See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 307.

[215]The 1868 Constitution did not allow for racially segregated schools. See Woodruff, Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, pp. 150, 265-266, 691-693, 706, 724, 901. Schooling was often channeled through the churches. Thirty-five percent of the teachers were employees of the Freedmen's Bureau. See Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss (eds.), Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 144, 152, 157.

The gains in education made during Reconstruction were permanent. With a population of 4,500 in 1890 in the town of Sumter, 1,100 were school-age (between 6 and 21 years-old). Of these, 731 were in school, including 361 whites and 370 blacks. See Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, p. 431; Anonymous, Minutes of Board of Education, City Schools (Sumter: 1890).

[216]Elmer Johnson (ed.), South Carolina: A Documentary Profile of the Palmetto State (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina, 1971), pp. 428-429, 431.

[217]Ibid., 429.

[218]Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 317.

[219]See Peter McCanless, "The Right Man in the Right Place: J. F. Ensor and the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, 1870-1877," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 90 (1989), pp. 218, 222, 235.

[220]In July 1886 at age 56 Lizzie Jones began to have severe pains in her head and eyes. She had the attention of a "special oculist" but the pain got worse. She allegedly became violent and attempted suicide. The family was not able to care for her at home. Those with mental problems got better medical treatment at the state facility than at the county poor farm. On June 9, 1887, Thomas V. Walsh, who was the Sumter County probate judge, ordered that Lizzie be committed to the asylum. Walsh was Lizzie's brother-in-law, neighbor and the former Civil War cavalry comrade of Charlie Jones. The Sumter County Commissioners certified that Lizzie's expenses be covered by public funds. According to the court papers, Lizzie owned 100 acres of real estate with a value of $700 but with a mortgage of $500 on it. She also owned $100 of personal property. See "In the matter of Elizabeth M. Jones," Sumter County Probate Court Journal (Sumter County Courthouse, Sumter, S.C.: June 10, 1887), No. 4975, pp. 759-760; Elizabeth Jones, "Dept. of Mental Health Case Histories," (manuscript, Sept. 1886-Aug. 1888), p. 192, at South Carolina Dept. of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C.

[221]In 1865 there were 60 paying and 68 state supported patients in the Asylum. By 1881 the state supported patients outnumbered the paying patients 20 to 1 (464 free to 26 paying). See Peter McCanless, Moonlight, Magnolias and Madness: Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial Period to the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 252.

[222]See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 298.

[223]Maybelle Coleman, "Poverty and Poor Relief in the Plantation Society of South Carolina: A Study in the Sociology of a Social Problem" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1943).

[224]Wright, South Carolina, pp. 193.

[225]Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 318.

[226]See Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, pp. 218, 221, 231, 366. The legislature approved $4 million in bonds for the Blue Ridge Railroad to run from Charleston to the Ohio Valley.

[227]Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, p. 296.

[228]The lack of an arm did not prevent Bob Jones from doing his share of the work at the mill and on the farm that had belonged to Barbary Jones. He rigged a strap that attached to his stump so that he could plow. To eat meals with one hand he used a combination fork-spoon that he made himself.

[229]Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, pp. 22, 25. The criminality of the magnates was a problem in the upcountry where a majority of the population were white tenants and sharecroppers. Property tried to use their economic influence plus criminality to maintain their political power. As in the elections of 1868 and 1870, this did not work. Not only black but also white labor voted Republican. The militia protected against criminal activity, such as the Ku Klux Klan. See Ibid., p. 19.

Lou Falkner Williams noted that the Klan and the politics of racism were established and led by capital--"men of substance," "our first families." The Klan functioned against white labor to keep it from voting Republican. The Klan was not a labor organization. Landlords and merchants, to the extent they could get their laboring tenants and debtors to join, did it by economic coercion. See Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, pp. 19, 29, 91, 93-94; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, pp. 73, 102. The Klan leaders in South Carolina were those like Martin Gary, who with 3,000 acres and a Harvard education, was an upcountry lawyer, Democratic party politician and would-be railroad capitalist. He had contempt for white labor and its preference for the Republican party. It was from Gary's brigade that Charlie Jones resigned in March 1865 after being denied the office to which he had been elected. See Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, pp. 228, 351, 354-355, 366.

[230]One of the Sumter merchants, John Fereter, wrote Governor Scott that "The parties committing these outrages were comprised at least in part by some of our first families." See "Letter of John Fereter to Governor Robert Scott" (Nov. 9, 1869), Box 9, Folder 35, Governor Robert K. Scott Papers (Columbia, S.C.: S. C. Department of Archives and History).

[231]Zuczek, State of Rebellion, p. 73; Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, p. 15.

[232]Gregorie, History of Sumter County, pp. 283-284; Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, p. 295.

[233]Zuczek, State of Rebellion, p. 99; Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, p. 93.

[234]For such reductionist views, see Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), p. 96; and Channing, Crisis of Fear, p. 293. Channing wrote:

For the people of South Carolina perpetuation of their lives beyond 1860 meant the steady and irresistible destruction of slavery, which was the first and the last principle of life in that society, the only conceivable pattern of essential race control.

The Stafford-Jones' history and that of the South Carolina majority would suggest that the first and last principle of life was labor. Their interest was in controlling the magnates, not the blacks.

[235]Illustrative of the tendency to minimize were writers like D. R. Hundley. He characterized South Carolina laboring people as lazy, illiterate, alcoholic and their beliefs as superstition. See D. R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: Henry B. Price, 1860), pp. 259-294.

[236]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 83; Weiner, Mistress and Slaves, p. 193. The agricultural historian Eric Jones has remarked on the "passion" which farming people had for their work and for the idea that labor was the source of value and the basis of economic progress. As they labored in the fields, they sang songs and ballads which celebrated their crops set in straight rows, their well-kept homesteads and the satisfaction of completing the day's labor. See Eric Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of Weather in English Agricultural History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 7; Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah, p. 27.

[237]Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 44. John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was a U.S. senator and vice president (1825-1832) in the administrations of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He led the fight to nullify the federal tariffs that protected northern industry but drove up commodity prices and encouraged reciprocal tariffs in Europe on South Carolina exports. See John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A Biography (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

[238]James Allen, Reconstruction: Battle for Democracy, 1865-1876 (New York: International Publishers, 1937), p. 17.

[239]Sumter County magnate John Frierson complained in March 1867 about the "oppression" to which his class was being subjected:

Our country is groaning under a load of affliction and distress unparalleled in its history, involving not only political oppression and difficulty, social disruption and disorganization of our industrial system, but stern, absolute and pressing want of bread. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 281.

[240]George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960 [1857]), pp. 19-20.

[241]Ralph Wooster, The People in Power: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Lower South, 1850-1860 (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), p. 6.

[242]Magistrate Julius Fleming remarked in 1865 that from the point of view of the blacks, it was the landlords with whom they had difficulty, not with labor. See Zuczek, State of Rebellion, p. 35. Similarly, from labor's view, it was property that degraded labor, not the blacks. A meeting of white labor in Charleston declared in 1865:

The result of the war has elevated the working men and made labor respected. Henceforth it will not be considered degrading to fulfill the divine command to "earn our bread by the sweat of our brow?" See South Carolina Leader (October 21, 1865), quoted in Powers, Black Charlestonians, 109.

The mixed-race, state labor organization promoted class partisan-goals. At its convention on November 25, 1869 to elect delegates to the National Labor Conference, it advocated a program that would raise wages to $1/day from $.50-$.75/day and that would give sharecroppers one-half instead of one-third of their crop. See Lamson, The Glorious Failure, pp. 77-78. Conversely, from the view of Charleston magnates like Emma Holmes, who had taken refuge during the war in the middle country, the enemy was both white and black labor, "We are in a constant state of anxiety and alarm. Some poor whites are as much suspected as the negroes, for they are equally active in using Yankee license to rob." See John F. Marszalek (ed.), The Diary of Miss. Emma Holmes, 1861-1866 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), pp. 186, see also, pp. 395-439.

[243]See Woodruff, Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, pp. 178, 181.

[244]Ibid.

[245]Ibid., pp. 500-501. C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, [1955] 1974), pp. 5, 33, 51, remarked that the notion that the post-confederacy, 19th-century south was a well-established society whose institutions were cherished by the people is a myth. Disfranchisement, violence, segregation and racial bigotry in politics did not dominate until the early 20th century.

[246]George Fredrickson, "Masters and Mudsills: The Role of Race in the Planter Ideology of South Carolina," South Atlantic Urban Studies 2 (1978) 34-38.

[247]Kibler, Benjamin Perry, p. 362. In a "Letter by Benjamin Perry to John B. O'Neall" (July 20, 1862), Perry Papers, quoted in ibid., p. 363, Perry talked about the recruits who left for the north in July 1862:

It was distressing to see the poor fellows taking leave of their mothers and wives and children. They cried heartily and seemed greatly distressed. These poor men from the mountains had nothing to do in bringing on the revolution. They opposed it with all their ignorant strength. And now they are called forth to go and fight, be killed, or die of disease in camp while those who urged on the contest and have property and fortunes are safe at home and enjoying all the ease and luxuries of life.

[248]Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 488.

[249]Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, p. 274.

[250]States' rights politics were no more fundamental to the magnates than to labor. When it suited property, federal intervention was promoted as in the assumption of the Revolutionary War debt and pensions, restrictive bankruptcy laws, the regulation of banks, the provision of a "stable" currency and low interest rates, Indian removal, the tracking down of fugitive slaves, winning territory against Mexico and Spain, protection of international agricultural trade and defense against British aggression.

[251]Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 7.

[252]See Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, pp. 203-204, 438.

[253]Similar to the "no honor" interpretation is the view which reduces history to patriarchy. Sally McMillen maintains that antebellum men normally held the upper hand in both the public and the domestic spheres. This was necessary, she says, because without rigid roles, the slave system would have fallen apart. For the Stafford-Jones parallel government, the issue was not gender but class. Capitalist men and women were the obstacle. See Sally McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth and Infant Rearing (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 35, 183.

 

[254]Appendix 1 illustrates a hypothetical budget using data from the Stafford farm. On such a farm with four adult workers, 40 acres (40%) were fenced and under cultivation. This acreage expanded or contracted with the number of children or slaves available to work. On the cultivated land 14 acres of corn were planted. The yield was 240 bushels (20 bu./acre), half of which was consumed on the farm (20 bu./person) and the other half sold for $87 ($.60/bu). See Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 815 (yields in bu./acre of corn); 812 (cost/bu. of corn); McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 67 (corn consumption of 20 bu./person/year); Raymond Battaglio and John Kazal, "The Structure of Antebellum Southern Agriculture: South Carolina, A Case Study," Agricultural History, 40 (1970), 25-37; Frank Owsley, Plain Folks of the Old South (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), p. 63 (1 bu. of corn meal/month sustained an adult).

 Nicholas Hardeman, Shucks, Shocks and Hominy Blocks: Corn as a Way of Life in Pioneer America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).

One of the weekly chores during much of the year was to shuck and shell a bushel or two of corn, half of which was for grits and half for meal. The corn was ground by handmill or taken to the mill in Providence. From 1815 to 1850 when it was outstripped by cotton, corn was South Carolina's most important product. See Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 20.

Another 26 acres of the cultivated land was planted in cotton. This yielded the $197 cotton income which the Staffords reported for 1817. The figure for the amount of acreage planted is based on the assumption that the farm price was $.05/lb., and that 150 lbs./acre were produced, and that each of the four adults made 1000 lbs./year (3 bales). See "Ruben Long et al," Equity Court Rolls, no. 441; Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 708 (cotton yields in lbs./acre); 709 (price/lb. and poundage/person). Cotton prices fluctuated even within a single year. The $.05/lb. figure is meant to be illustrative only and is on the conservative side. When the price was double or triple $.05/lb., then the amount of pounds to make the same income would be reduced or the income increased.

The uncultivated 60 acres was used as pasture for the cows and for woodland in which the hogs fed. It was not unusual for farms to have 15 hogs, some weighing up to 300 lbs. From this came a production of 200 lbs. of pork, a quarter of which was sold as slabs of bacon to the general store and the rest consumed by the family. See Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 26.

[255]Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 310, discusses the tax system. The annual tax on land was $.30/year/$100 of land value and $1/slave. The land on which Charity paid taxes was valued at $700 and she had one adult slave and, in time, some slave children.

[256]Appendix 2 illustrates a hypothetical family budget for 1840 using data from the Jones' farm. There were three adults engaged in agriculture according to the census that year: Barbary (age 40), her oldest son, Ellerbe (age 13), and the "Negro boy" (aged between 10 and 24). See U.S. Census, 1840 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 515, p. 39.

There were 20 cultivated acres. This expanded during the 1840s as more children became adults. In 1840 the farm had 10 acres of corn, which yielded 200 bushels. See Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 815 (yields in bu./acre of corn); 812 (cost/bu. of corn); McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 67 (corn consumption of 20 bu./person/year). Harris, Plain Folks, p. 32. (corn consumption of 15 bu/person/year; a horse got 35 bu/yr, a mule 30 bu/yr and a milk cow 5 bu/yr).

Of the corn, 140 bu. were consumed by the family and 60 bu. were sold for $36 ($.60/bu.). There were also 10 acres of cotton, which yielded 5 bales or $75. This figure is based on a yield of 150 lbs./acre or a 1500 lbs. yield total, selling at $.05/lb. See Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 708 (cotton yields in lbs./acre); 709 (price/lb. and poundage/person). By way of comparison the Harris family in the Piedmont area of South Carolina in 1860 grew 420 lbs. of cotton and sold it for $43.26 ($.10/lb.). Their total income was $310. This included $231 from pork sales and $36 from corn (48 bu. at $.75/lb.). See Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer, p. 5.