Masters of the Big House

Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South

William Kauffman Scarborough

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780807156025
• eBook ISBN: 9780807156018
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

William Kauffman Scarborough has produced a work of incomparable scope and depth, offering the challenge to see afresh one of the most powerful groups in American history -- the wealthiest southern planters who owned 250 or more slaves in the census years of 1850 and 1860. The identification and tabulation in every slaveholding state of these lords of economic, social, and political influence reveals a highly learned class of men who set the tone for southern society while also involving themselves in the wider world of capitalism. Scarborough examines the demographics of elite families, the educational philosophy and religiosity of the nabobs, gender relations in the Big House, slave management methods, responses to secession, and adjustment to the travails of Reconstruction and an alien postwar world.

1

SOCIAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS

This is indeed an afflicting stroke to me—So unexpected!—My most excellent Son—the ornament of my society—my friend & companion! In silence & tears I have to lament his death to the end of my days.

—NATHANIEL HEYWARD, September 6, 1819

About 6 O’clock in the afternoon… [Maria] gave Birth to one of the sweetest little daughters that ever was presented to a “Papa.”… the little stranger is admired by every one who has seen it, and all concur in its being the “largest and finest child” in the state.

—LEVIN R. MARSHALL, September 1, 1827

Jimmie Metcalfe was at Auntie’s several nights ago, and sent his love to me. Please tell him, the next time you have the very extreme pleasure of seeing him, “Not to waste his love on the desert-air.” Between you and myself, I don’t believe Jimmie’s love, is worth having. I should not prize it if he were so very generous as to bestow it upon me.

—GUSSIE PUGH, December 11 [postwar]

WHATEVER their background, geographic location, or extent of wealth, the elite slaveholders shared certain common social and cultural characteristics. Among these were large families; a relatively high infant mortality rate; an extraordinary degree of intermarriage, extending not infrequently to first-cousin unions; a cosmopolitan life-style and outlook; surprisingly close social, economic, and cultural ties with the Northeast; an emphasis upon quality education for both males and females; a catholicity of intellectual interests; and— not least—a confident belief in God as the omnipotent regulator of human affairs.

The structure of elite families mirrored closely the demographic patterns of the general population in the nineteenth-century South. Thus, the overwhelming majority of large slaveholders were or had been married, only rarely did they sever their matrimonial ties through divorce, and most of them fathered numerous children, a significant number of which did not survive to maturity.¹ Although the infant mortality rate was doubtless not as high among elite families as among those of more modest economic circumstances, it was still painfully high, thus bearing eloquent testimony to the ubiquitous incidence of disease in the rural South as well as to the primitive state of medical knowledge in the antebellum period.² The specter of death was omnipresent, not only among infants, but among older offspring as well. By no means unique was the experience of Louisiana planter David Barrow, eight of whose twelve children died at an early age. Similarly, his cousin William Ruffin Barrow lost five of his ten children before they attained their majority, as did South Carolina rice grandee Robert F. W. Allston. Thomas Spalding of Sapelo Island, Georgia, fared even worse, losing eleven of his sixteen children in infancy or early youth.³

One can only imagine the emotional toll inflicted upon planter families, especially the mothers, by such distressing losses. Levin R. Marshall’s first wife, Maria, was so distraught after the unexpected death of her four-year-old daughter that she followed her “most perfect… [and] dearest child” to the grave less than two years later. Maria “never was as cheerful afterwards,” observed a close friend at the time of her death.⁴ Occasionally, families would be stricken with multiple deaths within a short interval of time. Nathan Bryan Whitfield of Alabama reportedly bore the loss of his two youngest children with “considerable fortitude,” but when the specter of death appeared for the third time within a year, he could “hardly realize the death of so lovely a child as his dear little Edith.” Not less was the anguish produced by the deaths of successive infants. What must have been the despondency in the family of Gideon J. Pillow when he and his first wife lost the first four of their fourteen children in infancy.⁵

If death took a heavy toll of planter infants, it was no kinder to those who bore them. Elite families were consistently large, thereby subjecting wives to such intense physical and emotional distress that their own health suffered dramatically. This subject will be explored more fully in Chapter 3, but it will suffice to say here that successive pregnancies at short intervals over an extended period of time had an exceptionally debilitating effect upon plantation mistresses.⁶ To cite an extreme example, between August, 1827, and March, 1830, a period of less than three years, the youthful bride of Levin R. Marshall gave birth to precisely that number of children.⁷ Perhaps more typical was fellow Natchezian Gabriel B. Shields, who produced within a span of twenty-three years no less than fourteen children, most of them at regular two-year intervals. Even more prolific was Judge Edward McGehee of neighboring Wilkinson County, whose three wives bore him a total of nineteen children. In contrast to his spouses, the judge apparently suffered no ill effects from his procreative activities, for he lived to the ripe old age of ninety-four.⁸ McGehee’s record was nearly matched by Gideon J. Pillow, who sired fourteen children within the space of twenty-two years with his first wife and three more with a second, who was an eighteen-year-old widow when he claimed her as his bride.⁹

South Carolinians were equally fecund. Like Pillow, Langdon Cheves, Sr., a former congressman and one-time president of the Second United States Bank, fathered fourteen children in twenty-two years, a reproductive effort that ultimately proved fatal to his wife. Three other South Carolina rice barons— William Bull Pringle, Francis Weston, and James B. Heyward—produced at least a dozen children, each with a single spouse, within a span of about twenty years. Robert Barnwell Rhett, himself one of fifteen children, fathered a like number, twelve, by his first wife, Elizabeth, who died two weeks after the birth of her last child.¹⁰ It should be noted that the number of pregnancies may have been greater than these figures indicate, for they do not reflect any miscarriages that may have occurred. For example, Gertrude Thomas of Georgia miscarried in August, 1856, became pregnant again shortly thereafter, and gave birth to a daughter in late May, 1857, only to lose that child before the end of the year.¹¹

The obvious question is why these wealthy slaveholders made no apparent effort to limit the size of their families. It was surely not because they needed a plethora of sturdy sons to perform manual labor, as some have speculated was the case with the plain folk.¹² Nor can it be attributed to the desire to produce a male heir, for some planters sired a veritable parade of sons. Rather, it seems reasonable to conclude that knowledge of contraception was minimal, even among the most sophisticated elements of the nineteenth-century population. This is clearly the consensus among a wide spectrum of secondary authorities. Although publications relating to contraception and family limitation appeared in America as early as the 1830s and available methods were employed increasingly by middle-class northern women as the century progressed, such knowledge seems to have had little impact on southern family practices. The conclusion seems inescapable that families in that region made little, if any, effort, through either abstinence or contraception, to limit the number of their offspring until well after the Civil War.¹³

In choosing a mate with whom to produce such large families, planter aristocrats were usually confined to a relatively small pool of prospects. The result was an exceptional degree of intermarriage, frequently extending to unions between first cousins. There were, to be sure, some exceptions. About one-tenth of the wealthy planters married spouses born outside the slave states, about half of them from the Northeast and the remainder from Europe. The incidence was highest among the Natchezians, many of whom were themselves natives of the Northeast, and among Carolina Low Country planters, several of whom drew their mates from the British Isles.¹⁴ Much more common, however, was the tendency to marry within the elite group. This is scarcely surprising in view of the limited opportunities afforded sons and daughters of great planters to make social contacts with those outside their class. Growing up in rural isolation or in aristocratic citadels like Natchez and Charleston, and carefully chaperoned during their annual treks to such popular watering spots as Saratoga Springs, Newport, or the Virginia springs, they could make few acquaintances outside their closed society. Consequently, within every geographic sector of the plantation South the leading families were bound together inextricably by an intricate web of marriage alliances, which enhanced both wealth and social standing.

The magnitude of this phenomenon may be illustrated by a glance at the family networks in the Natchez District. Within that region there was heavy intermarriage among the Brandons, Hoggatts, and Stantons; among the Marshalls, Hunts, and Chotards; and among the Butlers, Duncans, Ellises, Farrars, and Mercers. Occasionally, these alliances became interregional in scope. Thus, the Minor family, which dated back to the Spanish period, developed ties, not only to the Bingaman, Chotard, Conner, Duncan, Ellis, Surget, and Wilkins families of the Natchez District, but also to the Kenners of Louisiana, the Gustines of Pennsylvania, and the Leveriches of New York.¹⁵

The latter connection illustrates not only the complexity of these family relationships but their potential economic effect as well. William J. Minor and Dr. Stephen Duncan were the central figures in a close-knit circle of friends, spawned originally by marriage alliances both within the Natchez District and with other families in the Northeast. In addition to Minor and Duncan, other prominent members of the group included Levin Marshall, William N. Mercer, Samuel M. Davis, and the two Francis Surgets. Perhaps a decade before Duncan removed to Natchez in 1808, his sister married Dr. Samuel Gustine, who, like Duncan, was a native of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and had received his medical training at Dickinson College. Four daughters were born to the Gustines before they removed to Mississippi in the 1830s and settled on a plantation near Natchez. Two of the Gustine sisters married Natchez nabobs William J. Minor and William C. Conner, and the two eldest married, respectively, brothers Charles P. and Henry S. Leverich, who were partners in a leading New York mercantile house. Two other Leverich brothers, James H. and William E., began operating a New Orleans factorage firm about 1840.¹⁶ Additional marriage alliances bound other prominent Natchez families to this group. Thus, the two youngest daughters of Francis Surget, Sr., married, respectively, Ayres P. Merrill II and Alfred Vidal Davis; one of his sisters married the first Adam Bingaman; one of his nieces married the son of William J. Minor, another wed Pennsylvania native Dr. Gustavus Calhoun, and yet another became the second wife of Stephen Duncan. In a continuation of the process into the next generation, Duncan’s daughter Charlotte married Samuel Manuel Davis, the brother of Alfred V.¹⁷ In view of these relationships, it is not surprising that many of the leading Natchez aristocrats conducted most of their business transactions through the Leverich brothers in New York.¹⁸

More typical of marriage connections among the southern elite was the in-traregional pattern that permeated the Carolina Low Country. Such old-line families as the Blakes, Heywards, Izards, Middletons, Pinckneys, and Rutledges comprised one such network; the Westons, Wards, and Tuckers of Georgetown District constituted another. So complicated were the relationships within another Georgetown family, the Allstons, and so frequently were first names repeated in successive generations that a variant spelling of the surname was introduced in the late eighteenth century. Thereafter, the family was divided between single-l and double-l Allstons.¹⁹ For the most part, the network of marriage alliances in the Charleston area was confined to that relatively closed society. There were, however, a few exceptions. The only direct link between the Carolina and Natchez elite was established in 1849 when John Julius Pringle, son of rice baron William Bull Pringle, married Maria L. Duncan, daughter of Dr. Stephen Duncan. About fifteen years later, there was a similar interregional union between Sallie Rhett, a daughter of fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett, and Alfred Roman of Louisiana, son of a former governor and, at the time of his marriage, a colonel on the staff of General P. G. T. Beauregard.²⁰

This intricate web of social relationships was by no means confined to the environs of Natchez and Charleston. Perhaps the most notable South Carolina Up Country alliance linked members of the Hampton, Preston, Manning, and Hammond families. In the neighboring state of North Carolina, similar ties bound together the Collins, Cameron, and Warren families, three of the largest slaveholding families in the state. It was the same story in Virginia, where the Wickhams and Carters intermarried, and in Alabama, where Gaius Whitfield claimed as his bride the sister of his North Carolina cousin, General Nathan Bryan Whitfield.²¹ Far to the south, the same pattern prevailed in the sugar parishes of Louisiana. Not atypical was the case of Charles Duncan Stewart of Pointe Coupee Parish, whose father had settled in the Mississippi Territory shortly before the War of 1812. Stewart’s sister married Judge Harry Cage, a wealthy Terrebonne Parish sugar planter; one niece wed William J. Fort, one of the largest cotton planters in West Feliciana Parish; and another niece and a nephew married children of Judge Edward McGehee of Mississippi, thereby uniting four of the most prominent families in the area.²²

Even more remarkable was the record of the Bringier family of Ascension Parish, one of the leading sugar producers in the state during the last fifteen years of the antebellum period. The Bringiers intermarried heavily with another French Creole family, the Tureauds, and also had close ties with many other prominent south Louisiana families. Michel Doradou Bringier, the principal nineteenth-century progenitor of the family, fathered nine children, three sons and six daughters. The marriage partners of the latter represent a veritable who’s who of men with wealth and status in their society. Five of the girls—all of whom wed in their midteens—married, respectively, General Hore Browse Trist, ward of Thomas Jefferson and brother of Nicholas P. Trist of Mexican War fame; Martin Gordon, Jr., a New Orleans commission merchant; Duncan F. Kenner, Ascension Parish sugar planter and Confederate diplomat; Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor and a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army, and General Allen Thomas, another wealthy sugar planter. The other daughter married a Tureaud first cousin, as did two of her brothers.²³

The Bringier-Tureaud connection exemplifies the most extreme form of intermarriage—that between cousins. Catherine Clinton has estimated that the rate of cousin marriage among a sample of southern planters was about 12 percent compared to none in a similar sample of northern farmers in the same period. Similarly, in her study of North Carolina planter families, Jane Turner Censer found that nearly one-tenth of planter children married either first or second cousins.²⁴ Whatever the percentage, it is clear that the practice was not uncommon in elite planter families, though not all were comfortable with it. Thus, when counseling his son on prospective marriage partners, R. F. W. Allston asserted unequivocally that “you can never marry a first cousin.” Allston was doubdess reminded of such a possibility by his knowledge of the Weston family, his near neighbors in Georgetown District, South Carolina. Francis Marion Weston, father of Plowden C. J. Weston and uncle of fellow Georgetown District rice baron Francis Weston, had married successively two sisters who were also his first cousins.²⁵

Such first-cousin unions, however, were no more common in the closed society of the Carolina Low Country than they were elsewhere in the South. Three of the greatest planter dynasties—the Hairstons, Heywards, and Barrows—provide extreme examples of this phenomenon. In the case of the Heywards and Barrows, two male first cousins in each of these families each married a sister of the other, consequently twice becoming brothers-in-law as well as first cousins.²⁶ Even more extraordinary were the relationships within the Hairston family. When Peter Wilson Hairston took as his first wife his first cousin Columbia Stuart, sister of J. E. B. Stuart, he was merely following the example set by his grandmother, mother, and sister. Moreover, the grandmother, Ruth S. Hairston, was the first cousin, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law of Samuel Hairston, another prominent member of the family.²⁷

The Hairston family also illustrates another type of connubial relationship, this one with female slaves. In 1841 Robert Hairston, second husband of the aforementioned Ruth S. Hairston, abandoned his wife and moved from Virginia to Lowndes County, Mississippi, accompanied by his slave mistress Elizabeth. Shortl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Social and Demographic Characteristics
• 2 Religious and Cultural Characherisrics
• 3 Wives, Mothers, and Daughters: Gender Relations in the Big House
• 4 Agrarian Empires: Acquisition, Production, Profits, Problems, and Management
• 5 Toiling for Old “Massa”: Slave Labor on the Great Plantations
• 6 Capitalists All: Investments and Capital Accumulation Outside the Agricultural Sector
• 7 Political Attitudes and Influence: The Response of the Elite to the First Sectional Crisis
• 8 The Road to Armageddon: The Role of the Planter Elite in the Secession Crisis
• 9 Days of Judgment: The Demise of a Slave Society
• 10 Postwar Adjustment: The Legacy of Emancipation and Defeat
• 11 Lords and Capitalists: The Ideology of the Master Class
• Appendix A: Slaveholders with 500 or More Slaves, 1850
• Appendix B: Slaveholders with 500 or More Slaves, 1860
• Appendix C: Elite Slaveholders by State of Residence, 1850
• Appendix D: Elite Slaveholders by State of Residence, 1860
• Bibliography
• Index