A slave woman’s life—like a slave man’s—could be enriched by a family, an independent culture and community, and the autonomous spaces created by the task system or wrested from the gang-labor system of the Chesapeake. In a sense, these were all forms of resistance to enslavement. But there were other forms of resistance as well—rebellion, suicide, murder, escape, self-mutilation, disobedience, the destruction of tools and equipment, arson, theft of supplies, feigned illness, feigned pregnancy, and feigned ignorance or stupidity. Colonial English society rarely assumed that slaves were docile or content, and slaveholders preferred to rely on repressive laws, a show of force, and harsh reprisals rather than a belief in the passivity or contentedness of their slaves.

  In many Southern colonies, women received the same punishment as men if they resisted their enslavement. Georgia’s list of capital crimes, which included insurrection, murder, assault, and the destruction of property carried a death penalty of hanging or burning without regard to the criminal’s sex. In 1774, when eleven “new negroes,” recently imported from Africa, joined with one creole slave in the murder of four white colonists, the Georgia authorities meted out the same punishment to the two women participants that they did to the men. When, in 1754, two female slaves set fire to their master’s buildings in Charleston, South Carolina, he did not hesitate to have them burned alive. And when Nat Turner led the rebellion that chilled the hearts of slaveholders everywhere, a slave woman named Lucy took and held a woman hostage until Turner’s rebels made plans to execute her. Lucy was hanged as a Turner conspirator just as the male rebels were, but she remained defiant, riding to her execution on top of her own coffin.

  Women poisoned mistresses and burned homes just as men did, but they were less likely to attempt to run away. There were female runaways, of course, as the 142 advertisements in the Chesapeake between 1737 and 1801 and the 61 notices of Georgia runaways between 1763 and 1776 attest, but as mothers and daughters, women proved reluctant to abandon the young and the old who were dependent on them. Even if they were willing to cut family ties and abandon family obligations, women had little chance to find employment once they fled the fields. Few whites would take an unknown black into their home as washerwoman or domestic servant, and unskilled women could not go to sea as unskilled male runaways often did. For the majority of black slave women, therefore, the bounds of family and the constraints of gender made flight less likely than endurance.

  The work demanded of Northern slave women was less grueling than the work done with mortar and pestle in the Carolinas or with hoes and hands in the Chesapeake tobacco fields. Indeed, slavery in the North was generally less brutal than in the Southern colonies. Yet enslaved women in the middle colonies and New England also resisted, ran away, and rebelled. Here, too, women fled their master’s home, determined to reunite with their husband or children. And here, too, women participated in the rare but violent uprisings of slaves seeking to overthrow their oppressors. When authorities moved against participants in the 1712 Slave Revolt in New York City, several women were among those arrested and convicted. And when a slave presented the first petition for freedom to the newly formed state legislature of Massachusetts in 1782, she was a woman. The woman, Belinda, pressed these Revolutionaries to make good on their state constitution’s pledge to discontinue slavery, stating her case with eloquence: “I have not yet enjoyed the benefits of creation … I beg freedom.”

  Decades before the American Revolution, a small number of blacks like Mary and Anthony Johnson had known the freedom Belinda sought. Even after the shift to slave labor in the Southern colonies had institutionalized chattel slavery, communities of free blacks had survived on the margins of Chesapeake society. Tax records preserve our knowledge of them. And in every colony the most fortunate runaways managed to pass from slavery into freedom. In Pennsylvania, where Quaker conscience wrestled with the morality of slavery as early as the 1720s and 1730s, a trickle of emancipations produced a free black community in Philadelphia. Between 1748 and 1752, at least fourteen free black adults and children were baptized in the Philadelphia Anglican Church. Free black children attended the Quaker schools of the 1760s, and complaints about free black vagrants appeared in Pennsylvania newspapers. But it was the social upheaval of the American Revolution that offered slaves the most dramatic opportunity to enjoy at last the “benefits of creation.”

  6

  THE RISE OF GENTILITY: CLASS AND REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  ELIZA LUCAS WAS THE DAUGHTER of a gentleman military officer, George Lucas, and his wife, Anne. By the age of fifteen, Eliza had enjoyed a taste of life in both England and the provinces, for her father’s career took the family first to London and then to the Caribbean island of Antigua. In 1738, Eliza arrived at her new home on Wappoo Creek, South Carolina, a move prompted by her father’s recent inheritance of three promising plantation sites in the rice colony. What we know of Eliza in these early years suggests a bright, energetic young woman, with little of the frivolous about her. If this is indeed an accurate portrait, her character was well suited to the life she would lead in Carolina. For, before her sixteenth birthday, her mother’s ailing health and her father’s military commitments would leave her entirely in charge of the family plantations.

  Eliza’s responsibilities (and opportunities) did not arise out of economic necessity. When Anne Lucas grew too ill to play an active role in the domestic affairs of the family, her husband had the resources to hire a housekeeper. Instead, he turned the management of the household over to his daughter Eliza. And when George Lucas was called to active duty in a conflict with Spain popularly known as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, there were men available to oversee his affairs and attend to the operation of his plantations. Instead, he placed the family’s fortunes in his daughter’s hands. At an age when many wealthy Carolina girls were dreaming of marriage and children, Eliza Lucas was an established planter and the mistress of a complex colonial household.

  George Lucas’s confidence in his daughter was striking. Yet he knew her abilities and her personal character well, for he had taken an active hand in her education and training. From the start, he had encouraged her to develop into a woman of compelling intelligence rather than a woman of trivial refinements. Although he may have known little about the new, enlightened theories of nurturance or the power of emulation in shaping a child’s char–acter, proponents of these child-rearing methods would have approved of the affectionate manner in which he helped his daughter develop her sense of self. The young woman who emerged from his care had an intellectual bent, a broad education, an air of confidence, and a love of achievement that would have made her distinctive in any milieu. Yet she was not lacking in what eighteenth-century planter society considered female accomplishments. She was attentive to, and well versed in, the social skills expected of a South Carolina planter’s daughter.

  Eliza’s new responsibilities required her to master both male and female roles within her culture. That she had her hands full there can be no doubt, but there is little evidence of the tensions such duality of roles might have produced. By her own account, she quickly established a grueling daily schedule that blended male and female spheres. She rose at 5:00 each morning, read for two hours, and then took a quick tour of the work getting under way in the plantation fields. She returned home for breakfast and then devoted two hours to the study of music or French. By mid-morning she had shifted from student to instructor, giving reading lessons to her sister and two slave girls. In the afternoon she did needlework, and in the evening she wrote letters and read. From these quiet evenings alone came a familiarity with traditional works by Milton and with Samuel Richardson’s controversial Pamela. One day a week, she set aside all female duties and attended entirely to plantation business.

  Under Eliza’s management, the Lucas plantations prospered. From the beginning she took a bold approach, experimenting with new crops that might grow in South Carolina’s climate and soil. Her father approved wholeheartedly of her unorthodox methods and assisted her in her search for potentially profitable crops. In the midst of his military duties, he found time to send her indigo seeds, from which a blue dye could be made. Later he provided her with an expert indigo maker from Montserrat. It took more than five years for Eliza Lucas to show a profit in indigo, but her perseverence paid off, and indigo became a staple crop of the colony for several years.

  Eliza rarely discussed her management of the plantation with female friends. In her letters to them she usually focused on her activities as a gardener of vegetables and flowering shrubs. When she did broach the subject of her life as a planter, she spoke with confidence and authority. When, for example, Eliza described a “large plantation of Oaks” she had just created, she not only took credit for the project but also asserted her right to any profits in timber it generated. It was, she said, her business acumen that had led to the project, and she insisted that the oaks were “my own property, whether my father gives me the land or not.” The men who worked for her would not have been surprised by such a claim, for they knew her entrepreneurial side well. Eliza hired and fired the overseers, who reported directly to her, and she wrote regularly to the family’s agent in London on matters of property deeds, sales of land and livestock, and the purchase of goods through local Charleston merchants. In matters of business and legal affairs, as in other areas, George Lucas had laid the groundwork for his daughter’s expertise. He had instructed her fully on her feme sole rights and encouraged her to make good use of the legal library left behind in her care. And she did just that. Many of her neighbors relied on her to make their wills or assist them in suing for their debts. Male or female, these colonists knew less about protecting their property than this teenage girl who read law books, legal treatises, and philosophers of civil society such as John Locke.

  Despite his certainty and admiration of Eliza’s competence, George Lucas was keenly aware that his daughter was a young, unmarried woman. To remedy this situation, he encouraged several suitors. But Eliza, always eager to satisfy her father’s wishes if possible, refused to accede in the matter of matrimony. Not even “the riches of Peru and Chili,” she wrote him, were enough to make any of these men her husband. She believed she was too young to marry, and she meant to remain single until she was ready to live otherwise.

  In this, as in many other ways, Eliza Lucas protected her own individuality. She believed that she had a “true self,” which she had to both discover and honor. When she felt uncertain or uncomfortable with her own behavior or with emotions that troubled her mind, she turned for guidance to the writings of John Locke. As she told friends, she “consult[ed] Mr. Lock over and over to see wherein personal Identity consisted and if I was the very same self.” Locke confirmed her belief in rational self-scrutiny to keep her emotional balance, but it was Eliza Lucas who declared that the self she examined was unique, individual, and worthy of attention.

  When Eliza Lucas did marry in May 1744, she chose a man twice her age. The recently widowed Charles Pinckney was a leading lawyer and political figure in the colony, and a friend of several years. Intelligent and erudite, he had acted as Eliza’s mentor in the study in philosophy, science, and literature after her father’s departure.

  As Charles Pinckney’s wife, Eliza turned all her energies and attention to domestic concerns, and especially to maternal ones; within five years she had given birth to four children. Of her three sons, Charles Cotesworth and Thomas survived their childhood. Eliza’s second child, named George Lucas Pinckney in honor of her father, died in infancy. Her only and much loved daughter, Harriott, was born in 1747. Eliza undertook motherhood with the same energy and clarity of purpose she showed in her years as a planter and businesswoman. She resolved to be a “good Mother,” by which she meant that she would “instill piety, Virtue, and true religion into them” and would “correct their Errors whatever uneasiness it may give myself.” Her goal was to raise moral, honorable, and intelligent children; not surprisingly, her method was to be “Mr Lock’s.” She believed in Locke’s theory that a child could “play himself into learning” and was confident that, through play-linked instruction, she could teach her oldest son his letters by the time he was able to speak. By contemporary standards, she could claim great success as a parent. Both sons grew up to be political leaders during the Revolutionary struggle, and both enjoyed long careers in American politics after the war. Harriott’s successes were far less public and thus less well recorded, but she did replicate many of her mother’s life choices. Like Eliza, Harriott was an avid reader and showed an aptitude for business matters. And like her mother, Harriott married a man significantly older than herself. She too married well, for her husband, Daniel Horry, was a wealthy South Carolina rice planter. When Horry left her a widow in 1785, Harriott took up the reins of management of her late husband’s extensive estate, just as Eliza Lucas Pinckney had done in 1758 when her own husband died.

  Charles Pinckney died fourteen years after his marriage to Eliza. The family had been living in England while Charles served as an agent for the Carolina colony. When he was called back to America, twelve-year-old Charles Cotesworth and seven-year-old Thomas remained behind to pursue what provincial elites considered a proper education. Although the separation from her sons was painful to Eliza, the loss of her husband soon after their return to Charleston brought her true grief. In the letters she wrote in 1758, she relived the experience of loss and spoke bluntly of her depression. Yet left to manage on her own once again, the thirty-six-year-old Eliza Lucas Pinckney revived the skills she had developed at the age of fifteen. Until her death from cancer in 1793, Eliza managed the complex business and plantation affairs that were her family legacies.

  The Eliza Pinckney who emerges from letters and journals is an accomplished, talented woman with a zest for life that is conveyed across the centuries. The fullness with which her life is documented—in her own letters and in the records of others—and the care with which it has been reconstructed—because she was matriarch of a leading political family—accounts in part for her vivid image in contrast to the sparer, or more stylized images we have been able to construct for Mary Johnson or Hannah Duston. Yet there are obvious lines connecting these seventeenth-century colonial women and this eighteenth-century planter, wife, and mother. The rhythms of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s life cycle are similar to Mary Cole’s and Hannah Duston’s. She was married in her early twenties to an older man. And once married, she immediately became a mother who also knew the experience of burying an infant child. Like these women, Eliza Lucas Pinckney was excluded by her sex from direct political participation and her behavior was filtered through a set of gender assumptions. Her larger world, like theirs, was bounded by its colonial relationship to the British Empire.

  But there are sometimes subtle, sometimes striking differences that seem to separate Eliza Lucas Pinckney from colonial women of an earlier century. There is the matter of her erudition and her catholic taste in the ideas she sampled and mastered. She could both read and write, and she did not claim the Bible as her primary text nor did she simply recollect her daily tasks when she sat down to record her thoughts. There is her perception of herself as a competent planter and businesswoman in her own right, her unapologetic interest in politics, both local and international, her scientific experiments in agriculture, and her expertise in the law. There is a consciousness of self and a confidence in reason that seemed to serve Eliza as both guides and tools for success. Indeed, in these and other ways, she seems strikingly modern. It takes only the slightest stretch in empathy for a twentieth-century white woman scholar to feel she understands Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s character, emotions, and experiences. She was, after all, a woman of intelligence and acquired learning, a woman with what today would be called a good liberal education. She had focus and drive, ambition and energy, and she took unabashed pleasure in her achievements. Even in her youth, she insisted that what she had created or produced was her own, from an oak plantation to an indigo crop. She resisted pressures to marry, chose her own mate, and, when she became a mother, consulted the experts of the day on parenting and child education. As a widow, she relied on her own skills and talents as a planter rather than depend on sons or male advisors in matters of property and trade.

  There is little to suggest that Eliza Lucas Pinckney thought of herself as an anomaly in colonial South Carolina, and nothing to suggest that her friends and neighbors did either. Of course, she and her contemporaries recognized a critical, if unspoken corollary to Pinckney’s image of herself: her behavior and her experiences were possible only in the context of her social class. Eliza Lucas Pinckney was, in the language of her day, a member of genteel society. If hers was an acceptable style of life, it was also an exceptional one, marked by privilege and opportunity not enjoyed by most Americans of the day. And yet there is more to understand here, for locating Pinckney within a social elite does not answer all the questions her life raises. Indeed, for historians, it threatens to cloud and confuse what we believe we know about this class-based ideal of gentility.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26