Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era

Jennifer Goloboy

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780820355467
  9780820349961
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820349954
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Too often, says Jennifer L. Goloboy, we equate being middle class with "niceness"—a set of values frozen in the antebellum period and centered on long-term economic and social progress and a close, nurturing family life. Goloboy's case study of merchants in Charleston, South Carolina, looks to an earlier time to establish the roots of middle-class culture in America. She argues for a definition more applicable to the ruthless pursuit of profit in the early republic. To be middle class then was to be skilled at survival in the market economy.

What prompted cultural shifts in the early middle class, Goloboy shows, were market conditions. In Charleston, deference and restraint were the bywords of the colonial business climate, while rowdy ambition defined the post-Revolutionary era, which in turn gave way to institution building and professionalism in antebellum times. Goloboy's research also supports a view of the Old South as neither precapitalist nor isolated from the rest of American culture, and it challenges the idea that post-Revolutionary Charleston was a port in decline by reminding us of a forgotten economic boom based on slave trading, cotton exporting, and trading as a neutral entity amid warring European states.

This fresh look at Charleston's merchants lets us rethink the middle class in light of the new history of capitalism and its commitment to reintegrating the Old South into the world economy.

1 / “Very humble Servants”: Colonial Merchants and the Limits of Middle-Class Power

In the spring and early summer of 1763, Hogg & Clayton, a mercantile firm based in Charleston, was drumming up new business. The partners wrote to their most promising contacts, or “friends,” that they wanted to import dry goods and export Carolina produce. Again and again, in the most self-deprecating tones, they promised their entire willingness to please: “We make you a Tender of our Services we would Endeavour to Convince you how much we are, Sir Your very humble Servants.”¹ Like other middle-class merchants, they attempted to charm their contacts into doing business with them, rather than their competitors, by writing letters that combined a lively intelligence with willing deference.

This chapter explores the reasons for Hogg & Clayton’s epistolary style. Colonial Charles Town’s merchants believed themselves to be residents of a colony that, much like its peers in the Caribbean, produced valuable staple products that could not be grown in the mother country. They perceived themselves to be transporting information as well as goods throughout the Atlantic World. They expected to lead restricted but useful middle-class lives and to pass their status on to their children.

Merchants in colonial Charles Town could be successful—even remarkably successful—but their lives were stunted by the social and economic assumptions of the British Empire. In order to benefit the mother country, colonial trade with other European powers was limited and channeled through British ports. South Carolina’s rice and indigo were grown for British profit. Similarly, as middle-class men, merchants faced cultural restrictions. Even for the most successful merchants, wealth never trumped birth. But when we consider whether these merchants were really as lacking in ambition as they claimed, we can see signs of both contentment with and rejection of a middle-class role.

Merchants and Mercantilism

The demands of South Carolina’s economy shaped Charleston’s merchants. They served South Carolina’s plantations by importing what was necessary to sustain them and by exporting their products. Colonial merchants exported rice, indigo, deerskins, and naval stores. They imported the manufactured goods that South Carolina did not produce. Finally, they imported the huge number of slaves that made Sullivan’s Island in Charleston’s harbor, in Peter Wood’s words, “the Ellis Island of black Americans.”²

Charleston’s merchants were supposed to work within the British mercantilist system. Mercantilists sought to increase the power of a nation through foreign trade, by ensuring that it imported more specie than its rivals did, and exported more goods. The country with the most gold was the winner. Colonies could help this process by consuming goods that were manufactured in the mother country and by sending raw materials home that had previously been obtained from foreign lands.³

As the historian Peter Coclanis has written, “South Carolina was an exemplary mercantilist colony.”⁴ Charleston’s merchants felt the influence of mercantilism most strongly in two ways: the restrictions of the Navigation Acts and the bounties given for certain staples. The Navigation Acts, a product of the seventeenth century, mandated that goods be shipped from the colonies in British bottoms and enumerated certain goods that could be shipped only from the colonies to Britain or to other British colonies.⁵ South Carolina’s most important colonial export, rice, was named an enumerated commodity in 1705. In 1731, this restriction was relaxed so that rice could be exported to ports south of Spain’s Cape Finisterre. After 1763, rice could also be exported to the foreign West Indies.

Despite the restrictions, being part of the empire had its benefits. To encourage the development of crops deemed important for the empire, the British provided bounties for their import. This encouraged the development of a trade in naval stores (especially the tall American trees that became British masts) and indigo.

Though the statistics on the ethnic origins of colonial Charleston’s merchants are slim, it is clear that not all merchants were English.Especially after the 1720s, a population of Scots merchants was resident in Charleston, which may have encouraged direct trade in goods from Scotland to South Carolina.⁶ R. C. Nash has calculated that between 1762 and 1767 about 22 percent of Charleston’s merchants were third-generation Huguenot immigrants. By the late colonial period, however, these men generally traded with English merchants based in London rather than Huguenots overseas.⁷

Because little was manufactured in South Carolina (or in any colony, for that matter), merchants imported goods of all kinds. Throughout colonial America, cloth and foodstuffs, especially alcohol, represented much of what was imported. “Probably nowhere else in the ‘civilized’ world did inhabitants produce their own fabric in such a primitive fashion and manufacture such a small amount of the textiles and the clothing they consumed,” as they did in the British North American colonies, comments Carole Shammas.⁸ A majority of the goods exported from Britain to the thirteen colonies that would become the United States were woolens and linens.⁹ South Carolinians particularly needed “slave cloth,” a rough, unattractive, but durable cloth purchased annually to outfit slaves on the plantations. As Hogg & Clayton explained, “Our consumpt for these Articles is in the Fall but our Planters to have time enough for the making up of their Negroes clothes frequently chuse to purchase about the beginning of August.”¹⁰

Merchants also served as a conduit for bringing genteel goods to America. Though eighteenth-century America could not be called a consumer culture on the same level as our own, as the country became wealthier, Americans began to collect elegant pottery, fabric, and food that would give them pleasure and comfort and display their refinement. Despite a growing number of local firms capable of making luxury goods like silverware and furniture, there was still a market for the importation of British luxury goods.¹¹ The Charleston firm Leger & Greenwood often ordered such products from their London contacts, such as the guns, concert violin, and enameled servingware they requested in one order.¹² Perhaps their most unusual request was a tombstone to be ornamented with “two or three detached Lines in Verse Expressive of a very Honest and Upright Man”—the presumption being that their British correspondents could best choose such verses.¹³

But we need not overemphasize the extent to which Carolina’s consumers were buying luxury goods. Tea—portable, affordable, and ritually consumed—was one of the status markers of colonial America. Comparing the percentage of tea imported to the Carolinas from England to the percentage of all goods imported to the Carolinas from England suggests whether Carolinians were spending most of their money on genteel items. Table 1.1 suggests that not only were Carolinians heavy importers of English goods, but, except for 1771, they were proportionately under-consuming genteel goods like tea. Presumably this is the result of the relative poverty of the backcountry and, more important, the restrictions on the state’s predominantly enslaved black majority. The mainstay of merchant importers’ business was not luxury goods but necessary manufactures.

Young, ambitious merchants just starting off in business were often drawn to the dry goods trade, where they could receive goods on credit from British commission merchants.¹⁴ Dry goods importers were often paid by their planter customers in staple crops rather than cash. These merchants could then pay their British creditors in staple crops rather than bills of exchange; their profits were not so dependent on the exchange rate as were, for example, the profits of Philadelphia merchants, who had no such valuable staple crop.¹⁵ On the other hand, they might be forced to buy staples whether or not they wanted them, as Josiah Smith explained to James Poyas, who had moved from Charleston to England.

You certainly forget the custom of Dry-Good Merchants in Carolina, who are frequently obliged to take the Planter’s Commodities in a way of Payment, on the best terms they can make, & oftentimes under the Necessity of purchasing their whole Crop of Indico, at the heighth of the Market, paying them a great part in Cash, that they may thus secure their past Year’s Debt & engage their further Custom, for ’tis now a common thing for our Planters in general (who increase Pride with Riches) to deal only where they are most humour’d.¹⁶

The historian Thomas Doerflinger’s assessment that this branch of business was less lucrative than the export trade, because there was a perpetual glut of dry goods in Philadelphia, seems to be accurate for Charleston as well.¹⁷ However, even merchants whose primary interests were elsewhere became involved in the dry goods trade. Established merchants commonly joined partnerships investing in stores outside Charleston. William Ancrum was a partner in a group that invested in, among other things, stores in Camden and Chatham.¹⁸ Josiah Smith was a partner in a store in Beaufort.¹⁹

Novice merchants could also be exporters. As Hogg & Clayton wrote, “We Shall be Extremely glad to Serve you here either in the purchase of our produce procuring freights for vessels you may be Concern’d in or any other Bussines you have to transact in this part of the world.”²⁰ This trade was available to novices because of an unusual quirk in Charleston’s trade. In other plantation colonies, the wealthiest planters tended to sell their crops in Britain, through British merchants working on commission. Virginia, for example, developed no port as important as Charleston to handle its tobacco crop. Rice planters, on the other hand, sold their crops in Charleston, often using factors to broker the sale. The purchasers were export merchants, most of whom were working on commission for British merchants. Like Charleston, Northern colonial ports developed a population of local merchants, but Northern merchants tended to export on their own account and risk rather than on commission.²¹

Table 1.1. Tea and Other Exports to the Carolinas, 1763–1773

Among mainland colonies, South Carolina was valuable. According to the historians James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, from 1768 to 1772, the lower South, which includes South Carolina, was the second- largest exporter, at £551,949. Its exports were dwarfed by those of the upper South, at £1,046,883, but were larger than the middle colonies’, at £526,545, New England’s, at £439,101, and the Canadian provinces’, at £183,546. All the mainland colonies’ exports were far less than the value of the West Indies’, at least £3.9 million during the same years.²² Before the Revolution, rice, indigo, deerskins, and naval stores were the predominant goods shipped from Charleston. Between 1768 and 1772, rice composed 64 percent of the average annual value of goods exported from South Carolina, indigo 25 percent, deerskins 4 percent, and naval stores 1 percent.²³

Native Americans, especially the Creeks, were the main manufacturers of deerskins. While this had once been the most critical local trade, by the 1760s, it was suffering from overhunting, greed, and decreased demand for deerskins in Europe.²⁴

Naval stores were an especially important export in the early eighteenth century, when the British heavily subsidized their cultivation.²⁵ By the later part of the century, their importance declined, but merchants continued to profit from the sale of forest products from their plantations. According to Emma Hart’s analysis of tradesmen’s plantations, 34 percent of them were dedicated to lumber, compared to 25 percent of all plantations.²⁶

In general, however, deerskins and naval stores were crops of lesser importance. As R. C. Nash has written, “It was rice and indigo which generated the rapid growth of the Carolina low country in the eighteenth century, and which made the Carolina planters the richest social group in British America.”²⁷ The boom in indigo started in the 1740s and revived in the 1750s, when war cut off French exports. British duties on foreign indigo supported the rapid expansion of the crop until the Revolution.²⁸

Rice was colonial South Carolina’s most important crop, though it was primarily us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Graphs and Tables
• Introduction
• 1 “Very humble Servants”: Colonial Merchants and the Limits of Middle-Class Power
• 2 The Revolution, John Wilkes, and Middle-Class Mob Rule
• 3 City of Knavery: Trade before the War of 1812
• 4 Friendship and Sympathy, Family and Stability
• 5 The War of 1812 and Commercial Disaster
• 6 Mercantile Professionalism and Charleston as a Cotton Port
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index