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The Carolina Backcountry Venture: Tradition, Capital, and Circumstance in the Development of Camden and the Wateree Valley, 1740-1810
The Carolina Backcountry Venture: Tradition, Capital, and Circumstance in the Development of Camden and the Wateree Valley, 1740-1810
The Carolina Backcountry Venture: Tradition, Capital, and Circumstance in the Development of Camden and the Wateree Valley, 1740-1810
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The Carolina Backcountry Venture: Tradition, Capital, and Circumstance in the Development of Camden and the Wateree Valley, 1740-1810

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A study of the transformative economic and social processes that changed a backcountry Southern outpost into a vital crossroads

The Carolina Backcountry Venture is a historical, geographical, and archaeological investigation of the development of Camden, South Carolina, and the Wateree River Valley during the second half of the eighteenth century. The result of extensive field and archival work by author Kenneth E. Lewis, this publication examines the economic and social processes responsible for change and documents the importance of those individuals who played significant roles in determining the success of colonization and the form it took.

Established to serve the frontier settlements, the store at Pine Tree Hill soon became an important crossroads in the economy of South Carolina's central backcountry and a focus of trade that linked colonists with one another and the region's native inhabitants. Renamed Camden in 1768, the town grew as the backcountry became enmeshed in the larger commercial economy. As pioneer merchants took advantage of improvements in agriculture and transportation and responded to larger global events such as the American Revolution, Camden evolved with the introduction of short staple cotton, which came to dominate its economy as slavery did its society. Camden's development as a small inland city made it an icon for progress and entrepreneurship.

Camden was the focus of expansion in the Wateree Valley, and its early residents were instrumental in creating the backcountry economy. In the absence of effective, larger economic and political institutions, Joseph Kershaw and his associates created a regional economy by forging networks that linked the immigrant population and incorporated the native Catawba people. Their efforts formed the structure of a colonial society and economy in the interior and facilitated the backcountry's incorporation into the commercial Atlantic world. This transition laid the groundwork for the antebellum plantation economy.

Lewis references an array of primary and secondary sources as well as archaeological evidence from four decades of research in Camden and surrounding locations. The Carolina Backcountry Venture examines the broad processes involved in settling the area and explores the relationship between the region's historical development and the landscape it created.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 15, 2017
ISBN9781611177459
The Carolina Backcountry Venture: Tradition, Capital, and Circumstance in the Development of Camden and the Wateree Valley, 1740-1810
Author

Kenneth E. Lewis

Kenneth E. Lewis a professor emeritus of anthropology at Michigan State University, is a historical archaeologist with a long-standing interest in the processes of colonization and has conducted research in South Carolina since the 1970s. Lewis holds an M.A. degree from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The American Frontier: An Archaeological Study of Settlement Pattern and Process; West to Far Michigan: Settling the Lower Peninsula, 1815–1860; and Camden: Historical Archaeology in the South Carolina Backcountry, as well as numerous monographs, articles, and chapters.

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    The Carolina Backcountry Venture - Kenneth E. Lewis

    The Carolina Backcountry Venture

    The Carolina Backcountry Venture

    Tradition, Capital, and Circumstance in the Development of Camden and the Wateree Valley, 1740–1810

    Kenneth E. Lewis

    THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS

    © 2017 University of South Carolina

    Published by the University of South Carolina Press

    Columbia, South Carolina 29208

    www.sc.edu/uscpress

    25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

    ISBN 978-1-61117-744-2 (cloth)

    ISBN 978-1-61117-745-9 (ebook)

    Front cover illustration map: An accurate map of North and South Carolina with their Indian frontiers …, Henry Mouzon, 1775, courtesy of the Library of Congress

    To the memory of Stephen I. Thompson, teacher, mentor, and friend, whose work inspired my interest in colonization and its impact on those involved in the processes of change associated with it

    Contents

    List of Illustrations

    Preface

    Chapter 1.    So Great a Change in a Small Community

    Chapter 2.    More Valuable to the Mother Country Than Any Other Province: The Economic Basis for Colonial Growth

    Chapter 3.    That Remote Part of the Province: Expansion into the Interior

    Chapter 4.    Those Townships Being the Frontier Places: Strategies for Settling the Backcountry

    Chapter 5.    The Great Inconveniences of People in Those Remote Places: Forging a Regional Economy

    Chapter 6.    The Pine Tree Store: Commercial Expansion into the Backcountry

    Chapter 7.    Kershaw & Co’s Store, … Where All Sorts of Produce Are Sold: Consolidating Commercial Trade in the Backcountry

    Chapter 8.    Camden’s Turrets Pierce the Skies: The Rise of an Urban Center in the Backcountry

    Chapter 9.    In Consequence of the Above Order: The Revolution Comes to South Carolina

    Chapter 10.  An Evil Genius about It: Occupation and War in the Backcountry

    Chapter 11.  To Promote and Enjoy the Blessings of Peace: Rebirth and Change in the Early National Period

    Chapter 12.  A New Generation and a New Town

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    List of Illustrations

    Preface

    It is hard to know where to start to describe a work that has occupied my life for the past forty years. I have not been immersed in it continuously during this time, but it has never been far away. I became acquainted with Camden in the fall of 1974, shortly after I joined the staff of the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. The site of the eighteenth-century town had been the subject of several archaeological projects sponsored by the Camden District Heritage Foundation in the 1960s, research aimed primarily at locating the fortifications constructed there during the American Revolutionary War. By the time I arrived, the town site was administered by the Camden Historical Commission, a local administrative unit created by the legislature to operate and develop it as a historical park. Seeking to expand its knowledge of the early settlement, the Commission turned to the Institute to initiate archaeological work designed to explore the town that had been one of the earliest European communities in South Carolina’s backcountry.

    I had recently completed graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma in which my work focused on the expansion of agricultural societies and their adaptation to conditions encountered on the frontier. As one of the earliest European settlements in South Carolina’s interior, Camden seemed to offer an excellent opportunity to investigate the development of a colonial community and the response of its residents to the conditions they encountered. Camden was also an ideal situation in which to examine the role of archaeology in historical research. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of debate among archaeologists, and questions had been raised regarding the field’s disciplinary orientation as well as the importance of material culture in the study of societies that produced a written record. Many still believed that archaeology could be employed only to support the more complete information revealed by documents. But the then-new archaeology promised an alternate way of examining behavior through an examination of its material remains and emphasized the processes, or regularities, that underlay the actions of people. By investigating the residue of past activities, archaeologists believed they could discern patterns that reflected the processes that shaped the world of the past. Already, archaeologists such as Jim Deetz had demonstrated that the popularity of objects followed regular curves over time, and Stanley South had employed statistical methods to discern historic occupation dates from the relative frequencies of ceramic fragments. Processual archaeologists had begun to explore the processes that underlay past change and the factors that influenced it. Surely the site of Camden held material evidence that could speak to its history and to the development of the backcountry as well.

    The key to Camden’s past was understanding its role in the colonization of South Carolina’s interior. The process of settlement expansion created frontiers, these transitory zones in which immigrant societies settled, interacted with Native peoples, overcame the temporary isolation of distance, and established a production base that eventually enabled them to become a part of a larger parent state. South Carolina’s experience in the eighteenth century was certainly distinctive, yet it also shared much with other frontiers. A comparative approach to the frontier had intrigued me as a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, where I worked with Stephen I. Thompson, a cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic work focused on modern colonization in South America and the adaptive changes that influenced immigrant societies on the frontier. Steve had studied with Julian Steward and Joseph B. Casagrande, two of the leading postwar American anthropologists, whose comparative perspective and understanding of human ecology contributed to his view of the frontier as a widespread experience. This approach had broad implications for explaining the histories of colonial regions, and I felt that examining Camden through the comparative framework of frontier studies would benefit my comprehension of the town’s distinctive development and assist in the design of archaeological research aimed at exploring the nature of this community and the world in which it existed.

    Central to the study of Camden are the twin themes of continuity and change. As immigrants from Europe of other parts of British colonial America, residents of the backcountry carried with them the capitalist economic orientation of their homelands and maintained cultural traditions that guided the region’s development. These formed the basis for their adaptations to the conditions encountered on the edge of settlement, circumstances that shaped the economy and society of the frontier and guided its transition. But the broader currents of politics and war also impacted the new communities and interrupted the processes that incorporated the backcountry into the society of Atlantic America. My research sought to examine the development of the region through the microcosm of one such community to reveal a complete and accurate picture of Camden’s history and the forces that shaped it.

    As my inquiry proceeded over the years, I became increasingly interested in the scale at which to observe change. While the grand scale represented by processes of agricultural colonization helped explain the outlines of the backcountry’s evolution, the nature of its details required a more narrow approach aimed at determining just how changes had occurred and how they had manifested themselves on the level of frontier communities and the households that composed them. Such an approach allowed me to explore more clearly the relations between the newcomers and indigenous peoples as well as those between the ethnically diverse immigrants themselves. More recently, studies of the interaction between individuals and their societies have focused on the role of agency in the emergence of social and economic structures. This level of analysis led me to investigate the activities of key persons and those with whom they interacted to create a viable economy in the backcountry and promote the region’s commercial growth. The scale of observation has helped guide my research, both historical and archaeological, and helped me understand the relevance of smaller actions and events to the larger processes that shaped the region’s development.

    The traumatic events of the American Revolution interrupted Camden’s growth as a community in a terrible way. This brief but significant episode brought a harsh military occupation and a bitter civil war to the backcountry and nearly destroyed all that had preceded it. Perhaps because a tour in Vietnam was barely four years in my past, I was sensitive to the situation the war created. On the one hand, it placed a British garrison at Camden far from home in what must have seemed a wilderness and embroiled it in a partisan conflict in which the losers awaited an unpleasant fate. At the same time, the pervasiveness of the conflict polarized the region’s population, forcing South Carolinians to take sides in a struggle that threatened the very existence of the society and economy so recently and tenuously formed on the periphery of European settlement. It was not hard to comprehend its impact on those who had cast their fortunes with the rebellious state as well as those who had opposed it. The war did not create or destroy the backcountry, and it was more than the fortifications around an occupied town. Occurring at a defining moment in Camden’s history, it influenced not only its future but also the interpretation of its past.

    My involvement with Camden and the backcountry has been a long road that involved many people over the years. Certainly none of the research there would have been possible without the work of those individuals and organizations concerned with preserving and maintaining the site of the eighteenth-century town. The Camden District Heritage Foundation, founded by Richard and Margaret Lloyd in 1967, provided the impetus for preserving the town site and was instrumental in raising funds to support the historical park, called Historic Camden, and conduct research there. Two years later, the state legislature created the Camden Historical Commission as a local administrative entity to operate and develop the site, which later became an affiliated unit of the National Park Service. In 2000 the Commission and the Foundation merged to form the Historic Camden Foundation, which currently administers the historical park.

    Many people and organizations have contributed to the success of the research at Camden. Historic Camden has been the sponsoring agency, and the directors with whom I have worked exhibited great foresight in recognizing the importance of archaeology in developing this important site. Both Hope Cooper, under whose directorship my work in 1974–1977 and 1981 took place, and Joanna Craig, who played a crucial role in the archaeological research in the 1990s, were instrumental in securing support for the major projects and, together with their staffs, provided assistance throughout the investigations and were of inestimable help in coordinating the support of other agencies. Shirley Ransom, who assisted Ms. Cooper, also worked tirelessly to ensure the success the success of our endeavors. I also wish to thank former director Stephen Smith for his support and encouragement of the research. Without the backing of the Camden Historical Commission and the Camden District Heritage Foundation, the archaeological projects could never have taken place. In particular, I want to thank Dick Lloyd for his continuing active support and John K. DeLoach Jr. and Lanning P. Risher for their interest in my work.

    During the course of my research, I have worked with many scholars who have contributed to the success of this endeavor. Several individuals at the University of South Carolina stand out. They include Jo Anne McCormick, who carried out documentary research in cooperation with the 1974–1975 project, organizing and compiling a great deal of primary information useful then as well as years later. More recently, Carolyn B. Lewis provided much-appreciated assistance with the additional archival research necessary to complete this study. Keith Krawczynski helped assemble plats and land records in the 1990s to provide a first look at the evolving settlement patterning in the Wateree Valley. I enjoyed many useful conversations with George Terry, historian of the lowcountry and later administrator at the USC. H. Roy Merrens also provided a helpful geographical perspective on the region. Always helpful was advice given by Charles F. Kovacik and John J. Winberry of the Department of Geography, whose knowledge of South Carolina’s history always emphasized the relevance of space to all things. I also benefited from discussions with historians Charles Joyner and Peter Wood, whose work has provided many insights into African American society in colonial South Carolina. Conversations with scholars of the Shenandoah Valley frontier, geographer Robert D. Mitchell, and historian Warren R. Hofstra, helped expand my understanding of the dynamics of colonial expansion in the Southern backcountry.

    From the beginning, the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at USC has been a part of my research at Camden. Robert L. Stephenson directed the Institute during the time of the initial archaeological projects in the 1970s and was particularly supportive of my work there. His successor, Bruce Rippeteau, continued SCIAA’s commitment to archaeology at Camden by generously providing specialized field equipment for the projects conducted in the 1990s. The success of an archaeological project owes much to the enterprise of the field supervisors, whose efforts and insights often go unmentioned and unappreciated. Without the assistance of Michael O. Hartley and Frank Krist, the results of the 1974–1975 and the 1996–1997 projects would have been greatly diminished, and I thank them both for their efforts. I conducted the analyses of archaeological materials recovered in the early projects at the Institute and wish to thank Jacqueline Carter for her efforts in processing and recording these data. Robert N. Strickland, who carried out earlier excavations at Camden, provided information crucial to later analyses conducted by W. Thomas Langhorne Jr. and myself. My later work required access to the records of all previous projects at Camden, a task greatly facilitated by the hard work and concern of SCIAA collections manager Sharon Pekrul and research associate Tommy Charles. Darby Erd produced the excellent illustrations of the Kershaw House. The Consortium for Archaeological Research at Michigan State University provided laboratory space for Frank Krist, Leslie Riegler, Andrew S. Farry, and Kevin Nichols, who conducted the analysis of materials collected in the later investigations. Cindy Davis-Fusel went beyond the call of duty to provide photographs of contemporary structures at Camden.

    Over the years my work has benefited from conversations with a number of archaeologists at USC whose knowledge and insights often helped me see what I might otherwise have overlooked. Stanley South has been a continuing influence on my work at Camden and elsewhere. As perhaps the most profound innovator in historical archaeology in the 1970s and certainly its greatest proponent, Stan offered encouragement that gave me the confidence to explore change on a broad scale and to use new methods to discover and examine the processes that shaped Camden and the backcountry. At SCIAA, Mark J. Brooks, director of its Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, was constantly supportive, and he and Adam King vetted my knowledge of the state’s prehistory. The directors of two South Carolina archaeological consulting firms provided information helpful in spatial analyses, and I wish to thank Carl Steen, of the Diachronic Research Foundation, and Michael Trinkley, of the Chicora Foundation. I also appreciate all that I learned in conversations and interactions with those involved in historical and archaeological research relating to the state during the past four decades, including David Anderson, Ron Anthony, Stephen G. Baker, Richard D. Brooks, Cort A. Calk, Richard F. Carrillo, Charles Cobb, David Colin Crass, Chester DePratter, Roy Dickens, Lesley M. Drucker, Leland G. Ferguson, Patrick Garrow, Stanton W. Green, Michael Harmon, Michael O. Hartley, Stephanie Holschlag, John H. House, Lisa Hudgins, Susan Jackson, J. W. Joseph, Chris Judge, Pelham Lyles, James Michie, Sue Mullins Moore, Nena Powell Rice, Michael J. Rodeffer, Elizabeth Reitz, James D. Scurry, Theresa Singleton, Katherine Singley, Russell Skowronek, Steven D. Smith, Linda France Stine, Roy Stine, Gail Wagner, Thomas Wheaton, and Martha Zierden.

    Recent archaeological investigations by R. P. Stephen Davis Jr. and Brett H. Riggs of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have revealed exciting new information on the Catawba people and their role in the economy of the upper Wateree Valley. Excavations at numerous village sites occupied during the late colonial and early federal periods have yielded material items that shed much light on the adaptations of these resourceful Native people. Catawba ceramics were a recognizable item of exchange at Camden and remained a staple of trade in later years. Archaeology has been crucial in understanding the larger context of this artifact’s development, and Davis and Riggs have willingly shared their research with me.

    My research at Camden has involved many individuals who have assisted me in numerous ways. I wish to thank Kershaw family scholar Frank K. Babbitt, whose insatiable quest for information relating to Joseph Kershaw made available sources otherwise not available. Charles Baxley, editor of Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution, and Michael G. Scoggins, research director of the Southern Revolutionary War Institute, helped me sort out the details of the conflict in the backcountry. Martha Daniels, curator of the Mulberry Plantation Archives, assisted me by providing details of John Chesnut’s early life, as well as a portrait of Chesnut. Camden historian Joan Inabinet helped clear up a nagging mystery concerning the early Methodist Church. I also want to thank Marge and Jim Faber for first bringing Phinehas Thornton’s letter by to my attention.

    This work could never have been complete without the help of those entrusted with the archival materials on which our knowledge of the past rests. They include Robert Mc-Intosh of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History; E. L. Inabinet, Allen H. Stokes, Sam Fore, and Graham Duncan of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina; J. Mitchell Reams and Neal Martin of the James A. Rogers Library at Francis Marion University; John White of the Southern History Collections at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Harry Miller of the Wisconsin Historical Society; Katherine Richardson of the Camden Archives and Museum; the staff of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; and the staffs of the Clerk of Court and Probate Judge in Kershaw County and Lancaster County, South Carolina.

    Writing is a complicated process of combining ideas and information in a form that is not only accurate but also understandable to readers. I am forever grateful to those who read and critiqued the manuscript versions of this book. Carolyn B. Lewis has always been my most valuable critic. Her perusal of the entire manuscript resulted in comments and suggestions that helped me work out many rough spots, and this study benefited greatly from her review. Woody Bowden, a retired English teacher, student of Southern history, and one on my oldest friends, offered many helpful suggestions that made the text flow more smoothly. Charles Baxley’s knowledge of the American Revolution in the South ensured the completeness and accuracy of my discussions of the war in South Carolina. Discussions with Helen Perlstein Pollard helped me unravel the mysteries surrounding the emergence of complex societies, Lynne Goldstein enhanced my knowledge of Jewish community structure, and conversations with Margaret Holman about a variety of topics were always enlightening. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers at the University of South Carolina Press. Illustrations are crucial to a study of regional change, and I am indebted to those who produced the artwork accompanying this study. The maps, plans, and other line art are the work of Christopher Valvano and Joshua Schnell. I want to thank Kathy McGlynn for helping me prepare the electronic copy of this manuscript for publication and Alex Moore of the University of South Carolina Press for his support during the publication process.

    In this study I have attempted to combine sources of knowledge from several disciplines to examine the historical question of how and why a region developed as it did. As an anthropologist who deals with complex, literate societies through both the written and the material records they leave behind, I feel I must acknowledge those who have given me insights helpful in guiding the scope and direction of my work. At the University of Florida, Solon Kimball introduced me to the idea of community, a concept he helped pioneer in anthropology. Functionalist in orientation, his community study approach focuses on human activities, the interactions and relationships of those involved in them, as well as their patterning in time and space. This approach has obvious implications for an examination of groups within an expanding immigrant society, whose structure derives from the interactions of their members and whose evolution is shaped by the success of their adaptive behavior. Throughout my work at Camden, I have employed the notion of community as an organizing element to explain its development as a frontier settlement and to interpret the nature and meaning of its material remains.

    Wisdom from others has helped shape the orientation of my work as well. William E. Carter’s insistence that to be anthropology, archaeology must examine questions of behavior drew me away from culture history. Similarly, Robert E. Bell’s admonition that historical archaeology must tell us something more than documents made me think beyond the written record. Delineating the material manifestations of behavior rests on archaeological methodology grounded in theory and capable of explaining the larger behavioral context of objects. Processual archaeology offers a logic that emphasizes the links between past activities and the material record they leave behind. Rich Pailes drew my attention to the potential of archeology as a powerful tool to examine human behavior and helped me explore questions beyond the scope of culture history. Stanley South insisted that historical archaeologists employ such sound methodology and derive their conclusions on the basis of clear and demonstrable links between material patterning and the behavior that produced it. The construction of bridging arguments tying the nature of Camden’s evolution to the form, content, and distribution of its archaeological remains was crucial to examining the historical processes that shaped South Carolina’s backcountry. The strength of my conclusions owes much to the logical soundness of Stan’s approach.

    Because Steve Thompson’s research in colonization inspired my interest in frontier studies, I cannot close without mentioning a strange twist that connected him to this study in an unexpected way. Not long after I had finished the first season’s archaeological field work at Camden, I presented the results at one of the annual Frontier Symposia held at the University of Oklahoma. At a party one evening Steve mentioned that one of his ancestors had lived in North Carolina and had fought in the American Revolution. Corp. Murdoch McLeod had served with Lt. Col. John Hamilton’s Royal North Carolina Regiment, a unit that was active in the Southern Campaign of 1780–1781. As part of Lt. Gen. Charles Earl Cornwallis’s command, it participated in the British victory at the Battle of Camden and subsequently became part of the Camden garrison. Under the command of Lt. Col. Francis Lord Rawdon, this force was charged with the unenviable tasks of occupying and pacifying a large portion of South Carolina’s backcountry. Murdoch McLeod’s residence at Camden was not a happy time. Indeed, it may well have been the worst year of his life. At war’s end he and other Loyalists suffered the further indignity of being deported to Nova Scotia, yet he and his family persisted. Steve and Murdoch are gone now. But perhaps, somewhere in the Great Beyond, they are sitting down with a cold beer, swapping tales, and laughing their heads off at the follies of those who study the frontier.

    Chapter 1

    So Great a Change in a Small Community

    Five days before Christmas in 1850, Phinehas Thornton began a letter to his niece Clarissa Martin in Philadelphia. After many years of separation, she had come back into his life through a chance meeting with a mutual friend who had boarded with her while traveling with his daughter the previous summer. During their stay, Mrs. Martin inquired about the branch of her family that had settled in South Carolina, with whom she and her northern relatives had lost contact. She asked particularly about her Uncle Thornton, whom she had not seen since childhood. Phinehas Thornton seemed surprised and pleased by her interest and expressed regret for the many years that passed since he had communicated with his sister’s children. Aware of his failing health, he was anxious to pass on details about the lives of her southern relatives. He was now seventy-one and one of the few survivors of the generation that had witnessed the family’s diaspora at the end of the previous century.¹

    Phinehas Thornton’s move to Camden, situated on the Wateree River in north-central South Carolina, was part of the wider migration of northerners to the state following the American Revolution. Their arrival coincided with the emergence of the backcountry, as the interior was generally known, as a commercial agricultural region. Born in New Jersey in 1779, he came to Camden in 1793 to join his parents and several siblings who had previously settled there.² Eleven years later he married Elizabeth Williams of Raynham, Massachusetts, who accompanied him to his adopted home. Thornton soon joined Camden’s growing retail establishment, first as a partner of his brother-in-law Dan Carpenter and then as an independent merchant, operating a general store not far from the town market. In 1820 he became the postmaster of Camden, a post he held for twenty-three years, until ill health forced him to resign his position.³ Now in retirement, he looked back over his nearly six decades there as one of the oldest surviving members of a family that included five generations. Though he was always a man of modest means, Thornton’s choice of career placed him literally in the center of Camden and at the heart of the town’s affairs. His roles as storekeeper, town postmaster, and leader in the Methodist Church brought him into contact with the influential as well as with ordinary citizens. As one whose life was intertwined with the affairs of the community, he possessed a unique perspective on the town and its evolving role in South Carolina’s interior.⁴

    During his lifetime Phinehas Thornton observed events and changes that affected his family as well as the broad transformations that affected the larger world in which he lived. The Camden he initially encountered in the closing years of the eighteenth century had only recently emerged from its frontier past and the chaos of the American Revolution, and the people and places there represented a tangible link to the seminal period of its development. Over the next six decades, however, both the early town and many of its residents had vanished. There are not more than five or six persons a living now, and there is but two buildings now standing that was here when I came, he wrote; there is a new generation and a new town sprung up in that time.⁵ Camden’s rapid and profound transition following the Revolution was undeniable to one whose lifetime had spanned this time of recovery and economic growth. But Camden’s development did not begin in the closing years of the eighteenth century. Rather, this period witnessed the closing movement of a much broader pageant in which the settlement had played a central role, a performance whose drama and complexity fascinated contemporary observers as well as later chroniclers of South Carolina’s history.

    Camden’s antebellum expansion was the product of a larger process of evolutionary change whose roots lay in the historical milieu of British colonization and the expansion of European settlement into the interior. This experience significantly altered the backcountry, transforming the land and affecting the lives of its aboriginal and immigrant inhabitants, and set the stage for the town’s rise to prominence. Almost from its inception as a focus of frontier settlement in the middle years of the eighteenth century, its site at the mouth of Pine Tree Creek played a key role in the economic and social life of the Wateree Valley. As a center of agricultural production and trade in the interior and the focus of political and administrative authority on the frontier, the locale became the axis around which the region’s early history revolved.⁶ Camden’s emergence there was distinctive and extraordinary and begs for an explanation. Why did central traits manifest themselves here and not elsewhere? Why did they assume the form that they did? And how did Camden’s rise shape the region around it? It is tempting to attribute the course of Camden’s past to the colorful and dramatic events associated with the European settlement of South Carolina’s interior, the exotic adventure of the deerskin trade, the tragedy of the Cherokee War, the melodramatic violence of the Regulator movement, and the internecine viciousness and destruction of the American Revolution in the backcountry. Did these remarkable occurrences and the seemingly larger-than-life individuals who inhabited the world of the frontier mold history in their image? One cannot deny that any or all of these factors influenced the course of Camden’s development. Certainly exceptional events occurred and involved many of Camden’s inhabitants and often affected them profoundly. On the other hand, all of these influences operated within the broader historical framework of South Carolina’s participation in the greater Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. As a part of this larger phenomenon, distinctive developments in South Carolina were both a local adaptive response to particular circumstances encountered here and a manifestation of broader processes that governed British colonization on the eastern seaboard of North America. To understand Camden’s rise, we must look beyond its immediate surroundings and consider the broader processes that brought it into being and affected the actions of the individuals who settled the backcountry.

    Contexts of Colonization

    The colonization of South Carolina’s interior was a consequence of the global expansion of Europe, a process propelled by capitalist economic motives that encouraged nation-states to increase home production and enlarge markets by extending their overseas dominions into peripheral regions where resources and labor costs were relatively lower.⁷ British colonization of North America’s eastern seaboard was a manifestation of this process in that it brought valuable resources under the control of the home country through the occupation of new lands. Successful colonization required resettling people, creating a production base, and establishing a stable economy and society at the outer edge of Britain’s political sphere of influence. South Carolina’s success as a producer of specialized agricultural commodities for an export market depended on the ability of its new inhabitants to transplant complex European social, political, and economic institutions to a place where they did not previously exist.⁸ How they accomplished this affected the form of colonization and had far-reaching consequences for the nature and form of the settlements that arose to support it.

    As an element in the greater process of colonial expansion, the Wateree Valley and its inhabitants shared an experience comparable to that of settlers in other agricultural colonies. Comparative cross-cultural studies have identified similarities that describe the structure of frontier settlement and its change over time as the areas they occupied became an integral part of stable economies. They emphasize that individual frontier settlements are components of larger systems and may be studied in light of the roles they played in the evolution of the larger region in which they were situated. Camden’s links to a broader process of change can provide valuable clues to its development. At the same time, recognizing the function of the settlement and the larger system allows us to use the town’s experience to explore regional phenomena. In many ways Camden represents the history of the backcountry in microcosm.

    Explaining Camden’s remarkable past requires an understanding of how a wider process of change played out in the context of the South Carolina’s interior during the eighteenth century. How did agricultural expansion in the context of the backcountry influence the region’s particular growth and direct the form and nature of its settlement? As a frontier, South Carolina’s interior had much in common with Great Britain’s other North American provinces, but the circumstances of its geography and the order of its settlement also made it distinctive. Situated to the south of the longer-established colonies, its peripheral position placed it near lands claimed by Spain and adjacent to territories controlled by powerful Native societies. Because the province was settled later than its neighbors, its position in time also affected the direction of its development.

    Settlement of the backcountry was tied closely with South Carolina’s economy. Colonization occurred first in coastal lowcountry and followed the West Indian pattern of specialized commercial plantation farming based on enslaved labor, the nature of which fostered distinctive economic, social, and political institutions that created and molded the region’s character. Because the lowcountry produced great wealth, its perceived vulnerability prompted the subsequent colonization of the interior. Expansion into the backcountry dispersed a diverse pioneer population over a vast land where they encountered challenges different from those presented by the coastal region. Here immigrants developed economic and social arrangements capable of sustaining them on the periphery of settlement, organizing and administering an undeveloped region, and building a production base capable of supporting growth and fostering the backcountry’s incorporation within the expanding commercial economy of British America and, later, the nascent United States. Here factors particular to the backcountry influenced the region’s development and conditioned its transition into a mature agricultural region, a process that affected both the character and the appearance of its settlements.

    Levels of Observation

    Investigations of the influence of general processes and particular factors on the backcountry’s early development are complicated by the fact that they often manifested themselves differently at various levels of observation. Conditions associated with the time and location of British colonization affected the structure of regional society in its entirety as well as the elements that composed it. Pioneers entered a new world in which they encountered an unfamiliar environment and a multiethnic milieu, the nature of which shaped their settlements, the links connecting them, and all other elements that made up the cultural landscape of the interior. Collectively these settlements formed an integrated regional system composed of disparate but interrelated components. All were involved in the larger process of change, but not in the same way. The function of immigrant settlements varied, they shared unequal access to resources and trade, and their inhabitants met unique threats and opportunities that enhanced or diminished their potential for success in the new country.

    Although the backcountry’s new residents lived in an area under the nominal control of the crown, it lacked the presence of a central authority and the formal administrative structure necessary to integrate economic, political, and social activities within the region. As in other newly settled areas, members of pioneer households devised indigenous measures to provide for their security and created the linkages that helped them persist and establish a base for production and trade. Those with mutually beneficial economic and social interests formed rural communities that reflected their common needs.¹⁰ In place of the formal organizational structures found in longer-settled areas, they developed arrangements that laid a foundation for more conventional economic, social, and political institutions that transformed the backcountry and facilitated its integration within the larger commercial economy. The appearance of these community institutions was central to Camden’s emergence as a central place and may be observed in individual settlements as well as over the province as a whole. These different but complementary scales of observation offer the strength of two levels of analysis.

    A Broad Scale of Analysis

    A wider approach examines the nature of regionwide institutions within the larger context in which they operated and views their development from the perspective of the province as a whole. Contemporary observers and long-term residents recognized that Camden’s early rise to prominence was tied to its position in wider networks of production and trade and that greater outside forces had shaped the great changes they had witnessed during their lifetimes.¹¹ The structure of the pioneer economy in the South Carolina backcountry grew out of conditions encountered at the periphery of European expansion and changed as the region was subsequently incorporated within the larger colonial world. Broad-scale analyses of societal-level strategies help define the impact of wider conditions on the economic and social milieu of pioneer communities.

    A wider approach derives strength from its ability to define institutions in a general way and observe their nature on a comparative basis. For example, if we seek to explain the arrangements by which backcountry residents produced crops and goods, how they modified them for use or transport, and how they moved them to consumers, we must first investigate the nature of the regional economic institutions of production, processing, shipping, and marketing. On a broad scale, the organization of backcountry trade may be viewed as an outcome of the larger setting of the provincial and Atlantic economies and its characteristics explored by comparing them to trade in similar regions elsewhere. The impact of larger events, such as the Cherokee War, were felt throughout the backcountry and provided a context that prompted coordinated indigenous political action. This level of analysis can reveal the effect of regional arrangements, be they networks of trade or administrative institutions, on the composition of individual communities and the nature of their activities and identify evolutionary trends that provide a context in which to examine the impact of change in the Wateree Valley. A broad-scale approach also facilitates the investigation of the social impact of wider forces, such as evangelical religion or the significance of the militia or the Regulator movement, as political institutions in shaping the region and its settlement. Such a system-centered view further recognizes that the outcomes of early strategies affected existing resources and social arrangements and effectively altered the conditions around which new strategies would be designed. Although a regional scope provides a context in which to model Camden’s development, it limits the extent to which it can explain the form and precise direction of change. To examine these phenomena, we must employ a closer level of analysis.

    Narrowing the Scale of Analysis

    A more restricted scale of analysis, in contrast, assesses community institutions from the viewpoint of the individuals and households involved. The strength of this perspective lies in the detail its sources provide about activities that constituted community institutions and how they were carried out. The particular view offered by those involved in such activities also allows us to observe the adaptive nature of community institutions, examine their changes over time, and investigate their role in shaping regional variation. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the account of Sarah Thompson Alexander, another long-term Camden resident. Writing in 1850, she looked over the events that had affected South Carolina over the preceding half century but viewed them through the lens of the community in which she lived. Change is the irrecoverable decree of all beneath the sun, she wrote, but in no small place perhaps do you see so great a change in a small community as here. Although Mrs. Alexander accepted the existence of larger forces in Camden’s past, she also recognized that specific individuals and the institutions they created had affected the direction of change. Recalling the rise of the Methodist Church, she carefully portrayed it not as an organic development imposed from outside but rather as the result of actions taken by particular people in pursuit of distinct goals.¹²

    A narrow scale of analysis is particularly useful in exploring economic questions concerning production, processing, and shipping in the backcountry. Instead of looking at these solely in a broad regional context that emphasizes general influences such as crops and market demand, a narrower view focuses on how people organized community-level institutions to carry out those economic activities. The records of individuals and households that participated in the churches, assemblies, courts, fairs, markets, militia units, and other indigenous organizations of the backcountry, chronicled their development, and how they operated within frontier communities.¹³

    Emphasizing a narrow scale of analysis also recognizes that adaptations by individuals and small groups played a significant role in directing change. To understand their significance, we must first consider how they articulated with larger entities and why they were important to their structure and operation. In the backcountry, as in frontiers elsewhere, societal institutions did not appear full-blown and imposed from above but rather were created by individuals who recognized needs and possessed the labor and resources to provide them. Successfully establishing pioneer institutions depended on the ability of individuals to negotiate social alliances necessary to organize groups capable of carrying out specific activities. In this sense, this process of interaction shaped community institutions, whose form was largely contingent upon the actions of human actors as agents of change. In a developing society, rapid change continually altered conditions and necessitated constant innovation. Larger external forces underlay the settlement of the backcountry, but the course of Camden’s development was also affected by the cumulative actions of individuals and cannot be explained without reference to them.¹⁴

    This study of Camden focuses on its rise the focus of the creation of the backcountry’s central economic institutions. Survival on the frontier depended on a society’s ability to establish a subsistence base that allowed it to achieve a level of security and begin to generate wealth. Growth depended on viable economic institutions, the nature of which holds the key to understanding the backcountry’s development and the society it created. A subject-centered analysis will explore institution building from the perspective of those involved and examine how they employed resources and structured social relationships to help them persist and enhance their prospects for success. The economic strategies individuals implemented over time guided the course of backcountry history, and an understanding of these strategies helps explain their actions of in wider cultural context.

    Directions of Inquiry

    Any study of eighteenth-century South Carolina covers well-trodden ground, and the question inevitably arises as to what insights this work hopes to contribute to our knowledge of the state’s colonial past. Certainly the major figures, events, and places involved have been examined and are well known to those familiar with the period. The expansion of settlement into the backcountry, the development of an agricultural economy, the Revolutionary War, and the emerging plantation economy are all topics explored by scholars who have sought to describe, interpret, and explain events that transpired and explore their broader impact on what followed.¹⁵ Although this book deals with familiar territory, my intent is not to rehash the works of others. Rather, I seek to employ available information, both written and material, to examine what I believe was the key process that guided the direction, form, and nature of settlement in South Carolina’s interior. Agricultural expansion, arising in the larger context of the European world economy and its insatiable appetite for resources, was the engine that drove inland colonization. But, while continental in scope, it was carried out by individual people obliged to cope with the particular circumstances encountered in a distinctive regional setting. Neither a monolithic force directed from the outside nor the collective action of colonists acting independent of larger influences, colonization incorporated elements of both. The roots of South Carolina’s colonization lay in the capitalist world system, but the manifestation of this process reflected the manner in which its players adapted the system’s needs to a fluid regional situation complicated by a multitude of sometimes unanticipated factors. Only by addressing the dual nature of colonization will its structure emerge.

    Chapter 2 sets the stage for our study by reviewing the circumstances of South Carolina’s colonization in the larger context of European expansion and the British experience in North America. It examines the occupation of the southern Atlantic seaboard and the development of the economic, political, and social institutions that overcame the difficulties inherent in establishing a new colony along the Carolina coast and facilitated successful settlement and the creation of a viable agricultural export economy. Colonists transposed a Caribbean model of plantation farming based on specialty crops and enslaved labor, a strategy that accelerated the growth of commercial production and allowed the accumulation of great individual wealth, conditions that underlay the establishment of a stable administrative organization in the province. But the colony’s perilous geographical position, together with the demographic disparities that accompanied its plantation economy, left the province vulnerable.

    Efforts to alleviate threats to the rich coastal colony led officials to mandate an expansion of small farm settlement into South Carolina’s interior, a process explored in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. This movement differed markedly from those encountered by earlier immigrants to the coastal area. The backcountry’s new inhabitants had to adapt to conditions of physical and economic isolation, poor transportation, undercapitalization, an absence of integrating institutions, and the uncertainties posed by external threats in order to survive and persist in a region that remained tenuously linked to the larger Atlantic world and that lacked an adequate economic and administrative infrastructure. To ensure success under such conditions, immigrants developed strategies of regionally based social cooperation that encouraged internal production, promoted exchange, and provided security. These arrangements fostered interdependence among settlers and incorporated both immigrants and indigenous peoples in the emerging regional economy. Far from being an insurmountable challenge, the situation in the backcountry offered the opportunity to enlarge South Carolina’s commercial economy. Entrepreneurial individuals fashioned new strategies to expand trade through networks of alliances, stimulate agricultural production, and encourage the growth of the social, religious, and political institutions necessary to form rural communities on the frontier and organize a regional economy. Settlement in the central interior centered on Fredericksburg Township in the Wateree River Valley, and by the 1750s Pine Tree Hill had emerged as the center of regional trade. Its rise as a focus of activity established a precedent for the role it would play in the rise of the backcountry.

    Chapters 6, 7, and 8 examine the backcountry’s economic and political consolidation in the decade prior to the American Revolution. This period witnessed an influx of capital and expertise that underwrote the shift to wheat and indigo as cash crops for export by providing the infrastructure for processing and transportation necessary to support this transition. Shifts in the volume of production and an increasing orientation toward export markets restructured trade and drew the backcountry closer to the economy of the Atlantic world. The period also saw the beginning of the backcountry’s formal integration into the administrative structure of the province, a development that set the stage for the region’s rising importance in the closing years of the century.

    The growth of commercial mercantile activity at Pine Tree Hill was dominated by Joseph Kershaw and his associates. With access to lowcountry capital and connections, Kershaw built an infrastructure in the interior, but his success derived from his networks of personal alliances, which overcame the social diversity of the backcountry and created a complex support structure for the production, collection, and redistribution of goods and produce. A successful commercial economy depended on formal social and political institutions to ensure the security necessary for its efficient operation. To this end, residents worked to establish administrative and judicial districts in the backcountry, and the resulting stability they brought encouraged investment in large-scale, specialized commercial agriculture. This period marked the beginning of a shift toward plantation production with an increasing reliance on slave labor, changes that altered the region’s economy and demography. Now a prosperous settlement at the center of the backcountry’s increasingly complex economy, Pine Tree Hill took the name Camden in 1768.

    The American Revolution in the southern backcountry had a stifling impact on regional development at all levels. Simmering political differences began to divide its residents but remained beneath the surface until the British invasion and occupation of the interior in 1780 polarized its population and launched a bitter civil war. The conflict devastated the countryside and tore apart communities. It interrupted agricultural production, disrupted trade, destroyed settlements, and dislocated their residents. Chapters 9 and 10 explore the impact of this conflict on the backcountry and particularly at Camden. Occupied and fortified by the British army, the town became a military base, and two important battles and several skirmishes took place nearby. The army’s presence divided the local population, reordering personal and business relationships, and existing networks served to structure militias on both sides. But their bonds also crossed the political rifts that divided the backcountry’s residents. The war left few with their property and fortunes intact; many residents suffered devastating personal setbacks as they saw stores, mills, and plantations destroyed. Later, those on the losing side faced the confiscation of their estates and political exile. In the end, the waste generated by the violence and its aftermath delayed the transition begun in the prewar period and slowed the course of future development for the backcountry and those who lived there.

    The remaining chapters examine Camden’s recovery in the postwar period and its subsequent fluorescence in the new century. The years following the Revolution brought both continuity and change. Although part of a now independent United States, South Carolina remained enmeshed in the larger world economy and responded to its role as a supplier of raw commodities for export markets. Strong demand for rice permitted rapid recovery of the lowcountry economy; however, debts and losses arising from the war and the cost of rebuilding a devastated infrastructure, coupled with diminished markets for older crops, delayed economic recovery in the interior. The adoption of cotton agriculture in the early nineteenth century restored the backcountry’s economic viability and encouraged the spread of large-scale production based on unfree labor. Agricultural prosperity also promoted the expansion of retail trade and the formal institutions that supported it. At the center of a region increasingly integrated within the national economy, Camden arose from the ashes of the Revolution to become a substantial county seat in South Carolina’s interior. Although the antebellum town faced economic competition posed by the rise of rival towns and newly opened western territories, its diminished position could not erase the glories of its past. Pivotal roles in opening the backcountry to trade and the conflict for independence ensured that Camden would always occupy a unique position among the settlements of the region.

    When Phinehas Thornton and Sarah Alexander looked back upon the changes that had occurred during their lives, they recalled not only experiences particular to themselves but also the changes that constituted the broader process that accompanied Camden’s transition from a frontier settlement to an integral element in the larger commercial economy. This process operated at the scale of individuals as well as that of the larger society in which they lived, and an awareness of the nature of the links between them is crucial to investigating the dramatic and far-reaching changes that shaped the South Carolina backcountry. Understanding the process that created Camden demands that we examine the events and forces that shaped the past of this extraordinary place at the multiple levels on which they occurred.

    Chapter 2

    More Valuable to the Mother Country Than Any Other Province

    THE ECONOMIC BASIS FOR COLONIAL GROWTH

    The year 1760 marked a turning point in the career of Henry Laurens. One of South Carolina’s most prosperous merchants, Laurens had amassed a fortune dealing in commodities flowing between the colony’s entrepôt of Charleston and England, Africa, and the West Indies. Laurens invested his profits in planting, and his success as a producer as well as a trader had made him one of the province’s wealthiest men. In the fall of that year he traveled far into the interior of South Carolina as a lieutenant colonel in the provincial militia on an expedition against the Cherokees on the frontier. Through his journey Laurens gained familiarity with large portions of the backcountry, and he became acquainted with many of its inhabitants. He spent time in the central region of the Congarees, campaigned in the mountains on the northern boundary of the province, and visited the Moravian colony of Wachovia in nearby North Carolina seeking recruits. When he returned to Charleston the following year, Henry Laurens had broadened his economic perspective considerably (Fig. 2.1).¹

    His experience as a merchant made Laurens aware of the extensive opportunities the region had to offer those with the resources and insight to take advantage of them. The short stay in Wachovia convinced him that the industrious inhabitants of this recently settled region in the backcountry constituted a favorable market for retail trade. In 1761 he approached the elders of the Moravian community, offering them lucrative terms to shift their business from other outlets to Charleston. His endeavor led to the incorporation of these remote settlements within the market sphere of South Carolina’s principal port.² Laurens’s labors to capture the Moravian trade mirrored his efforts to extend his activities elsewhere in the interior. His success reflected his business acumen but also bore witness to the expansion of commercial exchange into the South Carolina backcountry in the second half of the eighteenth century. This process marked the passing of the frontier and the beginning of the region’s incorporation into the larger Atlantic economy. The growth of the interior economy involved commodity production as well as exchange, and before the end of the decade Laurens and others were actively purchasing large tracts in the interior in anticipation of their rising value as plantation lands.³ The changing role of the backcountry was already evident in 1763 when Laurens revealed to one of his most important mercantile associates in London that we now have a large field for Trade opening … & a vast number of people setling down upon our frontier Lands. As the expansion of large-scale production buoyed land sales in the interior, it increased demand for enslaved labor and imported supplies and provided an excellent and reliable market for the merchants who imported them.⁴

    2.1 Henry Laurens was a successful merchant and planter and one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. Familiar with the backcountry through his military service, he promoted the expansion of trade into the interior. Prominent in the public affairs of the province, Laurens later played a central role in the movement for independence. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, District of Columbia.

    The experiences of Henry Laurens illustrate wider changes that accompanied the growth of settlement in colonial South Carolina after 1750. These developments were, of course, shaped by a multitude of distinctive factors unique to the time and place in which they occurred. But broader influences affected the expansion of the colony, providing the impetus for change and establishing the structure within which it occurred. Although political motives certainly played a role in this phenomenon, economic factors overwhelmingly guided settlement in the backcountry. These forces underlay British colonization in North America and directed its spread on the southern Atlantic seaboard, where it promoted successful commercial agriculture in South Carolina’s lowcountry. They constituted a process that arose with the emergence of a capitalist economy in Europe and accompanied the subsequent growth of a powerful global system centered in the nation-states of that continent. The expansion of Europe led to the creation of the modern world and influenced the economies of colonial areas everywhere.

    The Global Context of the Atlantic Economy

    The wealth and prominence of Henry Laurens and others derived from colonial South Carolina’s highly successful role as a producer of specialized agricultural commodities for an export market. Less than a century after its founding, the province was among the most productive of Britain’s North American colonies as well as one of the richest, and it developed more rapidly than others along the Atlantic seaboard. Following an inauspicious beginning in the late seventeenth century, South Carolina’s settlers established a staple economy based on crops that were well suited to the area’s distinctive coastal environment and transformed this low, flat region of forests, marshes, savannas, and swamps into a veritable agricultural factory. Known as the lowcountry, the area became home to literally thousands of residents of African and European descent and gave rise to highly prosperous plantations situated along its numerous navigable waterways. Although the bulk of production and much of

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