by Tiya Miles
31. This statement was made by the journalist and descendant of slaveholders Edward Ball, quoting his cousin Elias Ball, in Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 47.
32. Unlike other southern colonies, Carolina had a Black majority population within two generations of European settlement, by around 1708. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), xiv, 143. By the 1720s, Carolina had reached a degree of wealth and concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite minority that would not be present in New York or Philadelphia until the 1760s or 1770s; the colony was also “the most inegalitarian.” Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 33.
33. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (1972; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 82, 84.
34. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 70.
35. Hilary Beckles, The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s “Barbarity Time” in Barbados, 1636–1876 (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2016), 160, 76.
36. Beckles, First Black Slave Society, 171.
37. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 71. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 4–11, 89. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 22–23, 36.
38. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 43. Cynthia M. Kennedy, Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston’s Urban Slave Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 18. Charles H. Lesser, “Lords Proprietors of South Carolina,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, June 2016, scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/lords-proprietors-of-carolina/.
39. Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 16, 20, 35, 40–41, 102–3, 124–25.
40. “Desire to resemble”: Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 2, 4. Kennedy, Braided Relations, 18. Peter Wood points out that in addition to tensions over limited land availability, natural disasters pushed Anglo-Barbadians to emigrate. Wood, Black Majority, 8–9.
41. Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 224. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 111, 112.
42. Wood, Black Majority, 19, 20. Taylor, American Colonies, 224, 225. Daniel C. Littlefield, “Slavery,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, October 2016, 2, scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/slavery/. Carolina B. Whitley, North Carolina Head Rights: A List of Names, 1663–1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
43. Taylor, American Colonies, 225. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina: March 1, 1669, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp, number 110. Lesser, “Lords Proprietors.”
44. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 19.
45. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 144, 115. Taylor, American Colonies, 225. Charles Duell, Middleton Place: A Phoenix Still Rising (2016 revision; Charleston: Middleton Place Foundation, 2011), 11. An influential group of early Barbadian planters, including the Middletons, settled on land around Goose Creek, just north of Charles Towne, and hence became known as the Goose Creek men.
46. Gregory O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 120.
47. Duell, Middleton Place, 12.
48. “Barbados style”: Beckles, First Black Slave Society, 203. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 111.
49. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 17, 18.
50. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 73. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 300. Taylor, American Colonies, 231. Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 289. O’Malley, Final Passages, 128. Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2016), 6, 7, 34, 36.
51. Charles M. Hudson, The Catawba Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1970), 1–3, 6, 10. Douglas Summers Brown, The Catawba Indians: The People of the River (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1966), 3. James Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (1989; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 27, 45, 57, 93. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 10–17, 52. Ball, Slaves, 28–30. Lesser, “Lords Proprietors.”
52. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 3, 5.
53. Hudson, Catawba Nation, 17, 22, 29, 30. Brown, Catawba Indians, 8–9. Hudson also notes that the Catawba location allowed them to hunt and store passenger pigeons for food, allowing them more time for winter hunting, which helped them secure their strong spot in the chain of trade (22).
54. Merrell, Indians’ New World, 88. Hudson, Catawba Nation, 39, 43. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 43–44, 50, 94, on Westos, 53–61. Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 49, 76, 77. As the historian Hayley Negrin points out, these personal attacks included sexual assaults on Native women in their villages. Hayley Negrin,“Possessing Native Women and Children: Slavery, Gender and English Colonialism in the Early American South, 1670–1717” (PhD diss., New York University, 2018), 90–91, on Westos 41–42. Regarding attacks on Native women, also see Merrell, Indians’ New World, 100. Robbie Ethridge, “Introduction: Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone,” in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 14–15. Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Avalon Project, number 112. Taylor, American Colonies, 226. Duell, Middleton Place, 11–12.
55. Hudson, Catawba Nation, 22. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 6.
56. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 49, on Kussoe Wars, 51–52. Negrin, “Possessing Native Women and Children,” 76–88. Christina Snyder argues that a long-standing practice of taking Indigenous captives in the Southeast supported the development of English plantations by providing labor; Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 75. Ethridge, “Introduction: Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone,” 25.
57. Wood, Black Majority, 38–40. Hudson, Catawba Nation, 39–40. Merrell, Indians’ New World, 92–94. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 65, 299. Negrin, “Possessing Native Women and Children,” 2, 5. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 78.
58. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 47; also see “Afterword: Africans and Indians,” 345–57. Richard Dunn calls this “noble savage” romanticization a “sentimental advantage” that Native slaves had over Africans; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 73.
59. Wood, Black Majority, 39.
60. Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1913), 315. Lauber cites a 1740 statute as the decision treated in South Carolina courts as the outlawing of Native enslavement. Hudson, Catawba Nation, 42–43. Kennedy, Braided Relations, 19. Wood, Black Majority, 38–40.
61. Alan Gallay argues that availability was the key feature that made African slaves more attractive to English settlers. Alan Gallay, “Indian Slavery in Historical Context,” in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, Alan Gallay, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 20. Local Native power diminished especially after the Yamassee War of 1715, a conflict that pitted Yamassees and like-mind
ed fighters against Charlestonians and their Native allies, ending in a Yamassee defeat and a decisive blow to Indigenous strength. Wood, Black Majority, 80–81, 85. Merrell, Indians’ New World, 101. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 119. Lauber, Indian Slavery, 232. Sylviane Diouf writes that English settlers saw Native people, especially Catawbas, as effective hunters of Black maroons and as barriers to the growth of maroon communities. Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 31–32.
62. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 134, 228. Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 85, 89.
63. Kennedy, Braided Relations, 19.
64. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 8.
65. Quoted in Maurie D. McInnis, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5.
66. “Distinctive crop”: Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 227.
67. Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 150–53. Wood, Black Majority, 59, 61, 119. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 228. Philip Morgan disagrees that rice expertise was a significant factor in the valuation and organization of African labor in South Carolina. While noting that many (but not the majority) of the enslaved came from a ricing region, he points out that rice cultivators in Africa were women rather than the men preferred by planters, and that African rice cultivation took place in the drier uplands, using different techniques than South Carolina required; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 66 (map), 182–83. Carney, a geographer, argues in her comparative study of African and U.S. mainland rice cultures that a wide range of ricing environments and practices were employed in West Africa. She suggests that African techniques are indeed evident in South Carolina wetland cultivation even as some technological modifications were made. She notes that women’s role in rice production did continue in South Carolina slavery in the form of a “female knowledge system.” Carney, Black Rice, 88, 92, 96, 104, 110, 117.
68. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 28.
69. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 115.
70. Both McInnis and Myers emphasize the contrasts that marked the city’s particular character; McInnis, Politics of Taste, 30. Myers, Forging Freedom, 26.
71. Brendan Clark, “Good Question: Who Coined Charleston as ‘The Holy City,’ ” Count on News 2, WCBD-TV, Charleston, March 11, 2019. Interviewed for this piece is Grahame Long, curator of the Charleston Museum.
Chapter 2: Searching for Rose
1. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 37.
2. Alice Walker, Foreword, “Those Who Love Us Never Leave Us Alone with Our Grief,” to Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” by Zora Neale Hurston (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), ix.
3. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. 1 (1838; repr., Bedford, Mass.: Applewood), 227–28.
4. Some 55 percent of the Charleston peninsula was filled in over time to make way for building. Christina Shedlock, “ ‘Prejudicial to the Public Health’: Class, Race, and the History of Land Reclamation, Drainage, and Topographic Alteration in Charleston, South Carolina, 1836–1940” (master’s thesis, Graduate School of the College of Charleston and the Citadel, April 2010), 6, 9, 24.
5. These findings reflect a search of federal, state (South Carolina), county (statewide), and city (Charleston) records. With the essential help of Charleston genealogist and trained librarian Jesse Bustos-Nelson, I searched hundreds of slaveholder records that have been preserved from the 1700s and 1800s and are publicly accessible. The process included a digital search of the online database of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History (SCDAH); an in-person search of property transfer books at SCDAH; review of the Slave Name database created by SCDAH and housed in the Charleston Public Library’s South Carolina Room Special Collections; a search of plantation records of the South Carolina Historical Society and the College of Charleston Special Collections housed at the Addlestone Library; a search of published and unpublished records at Middleton Place plantation; a search of records in the Charleston Office of Records/Mesne Conveyance; a search of the WPA narratives for the state of South Carolina; and a search of the Freedmen’s Bureau Records for the state. The process involved a direct review of 165 to 200 relevant sets of slaveholder records. These searches often revealed duplicate names and head counts for the most prominent slaveholding families, which I have tried to control for here. While it is impossible to conduct this search for Rose in a comprehensive fashion—due to the lack of genuine interest in enslaved people by record keepers of the time; the destruction of some records from that period, especially in the Civil War; the retention of some records in private hands; and the likely scattering of some records across the country and Europe that would take significant additional time to discover and access—the search was detailed and broad. I conducted this search independently with the aid of Jesse Bustos-Nelson and archivists in South Carolina, but I had the real benefit of not being the first scholar to search for Rose. My independent findings matched those published by Mark Auslander in 2016, suggesting that two researchers have pinpointed the family most likely to have been Rose’s, based on the records that survive. See Auslander, “Tracing Ashley’s Sack,” Cultural Environments blog, January 7, 2016, culturalenvironments.blogspot.com/2016/01/; Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces,” Southern Spaces blog, November 2016, southernspaces.org/2016/slaverys-traces-search-ashleys-sack; and Auslander, “Rose’s Gift: Slavery, Kinship, and the Fabric of Memory,” Present Pasts 8, no. 1 (2017): 1, doi.org/10.5334/pp.78.
6. I have taken some license here in using the term “grandmother”; whether or not this old woman had children—biological or adoptive—is not recorded. For more on African day and seasonal names as well as naming ceremonies, see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 181; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 65; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 194–96. Middleton Family Papers, Middleton Place Foundation office, Charleston, S.C. Barbara Doyle, Mary Edna Sullivan, Tracey Todd, eds., Beyond the Fields: Slavery at Middleton Place (Charleston: Middleton Place Foundation, 2008). “Principal Middleton Family Properties,” Eliza’s House Exhibit, Middleton Place Plantation.
7. Middleton Family Papers, Middleton Place Foundation. Beyond the Fields, 44, 47, 55. Henry Middleton, Weehaw Plantation Journal, Addlestone Library. I am grateful to Mary Edna Sullivan, who pulled MP records for me and shared with me the story of the Middleton Place Foundation’s decades-long history of compiling African American history and slavery history data. Sullivan credited a former president of the foundation, Charles Duell, with inaugurating a concerted effort to preserve Black history in the 1970s and with working with Black site staff members and volunteers Mary Sheppard, Anna Perry, Eliza Leach, and Martha DeWeese to do so. Middleton Place seems to have been decades ahead of the local and national curve of incorporating African American history into plantation site interpretation, although this incorporation has not been smooth or uncomplicated, as curators readily share.
8. For Drayton Hall architecture, see draytonhall.org/. Drayton Family Papers, Drayton Hall List for Negro Clothes an
d Blankets, 1860, Addlestone Library. Notably, in 2020 Drayton Hall staff members integrated enslaved people’s names and stories into the historic site’s audio tour narrative. Emily Williams, “Untold Stories and Names Now Part of Historic House Tour at Drayton Hall,” Post and Courier, December 28, 2020.
9. Brown, Barnett H., “Petition for Compensation for the Execution of his Slave, Rose,” November 23, 1853, Petitions, Series S165015, SCDAH. Treasurer of the Upper Division, Journal 1849–57 S108091, pp. 153–54, May 1855, Rosanna, slave of B. H. Brown, SCDAH. Report of the Committee on Claims, General Assembly, Committee Reports S165005 1853 No. 89 (House), H-B Brown, SCDAH. Treasury Office, Columbia, April 1855, Melton A. McLaurin, Celia: A Slave (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), ix, 18, 20, 21, 22, 27–31. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 80–81. McLaurin’s study is the classic text on Celia’s ordeal. In the 2000s, a group of scholars began convening in an effort to inaugurate the Celia Project, a new investigation and interpretation of the State of Missouri v. Celia court case. This project is currently in progress and will result in a website and edited collection. One of the project founders, historian and attorney Martha S. Jones, has begun a process to appeal to the Missouri legislature to have Celia pardoned. For information on the Celia Project, see sites.lsa.umich.edu/celiaproject/ and c-span.org/video/?321554-1/female-slaves-law.
10. I borrow this language from Vincent Brown: Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
11. I have adopted an interpretive approach modeled by Marisa Fuentes, a historian of slavery in Barbados, the island from which many of Charleston’s first white settlers and slavers emigrated. Fuentes exposes the “distortion” of Black women in the archives and offers a strategy of reading along the flexible “bias grain,” as if documents were textiles. Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1, 78. For a discussion of knowledge gleaned beyond the archives in slavery studies, see Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 12–13.
