Twilight On The South Carolina Rice Fields

Coclanis that places these letters and the legacy of the Heyward family into a broader historical context.

The Civil War and Reconstruction eras decimated the rice-planting enterprise of the South, and no family experienced the effects of this economic upheaval quite as dramatically as the Heywards of South Carolina, a family synonymous with the wealth of the old rice kingdom in the Palmetto State. Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields collects the revealing wartime and postbellum letters and documents of Edward Barnwell "Barney" Heyward (1826–1871), a native of Beaufort District and grandson of Nathaniel Heyward, one of the most successful rice planters and largest slaveholders in the South. Barney Heyward was also the father of South Carolina governor Duncan Clinch Heyward, author of Seed from Madagascar,the definitive account of the rice kingdom's final stand a generation later. Edited by Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen H. Stokes, the Heyward family correspondence from this transformational period reveals the challenges faced by a once-successful industry and a once-opulent society in the throes of monumental change. During the war Barney Heyward served as a lieutenant in the engineering division of the Confederate army but devoted much of his time to managing affairs at his plantations near Columbia and Beaufort. His letters chronicle the challenges of preserving his lands and maintaining control over the enslaved labor force essential to his livelihood and his family's fortune. The wartime letters also provide a penetrating view of the Confederate defense of coastal South Carolina against the Union forces who occupied Beaufort District. In the aftermath of the conflict, Heyward worked with only limited success to revive planting operations. In addition to what these documents reveal about rice cultivation during tumultuous times, they also convey the drama, affections, and turmoil of life in the Heyward family, from Barney's increasingly difficult relations with his father, Charles Heyward, to his heartfelt devotion to his wife, the former Catherine "Tat" Maria Clinch, and their children.

"The basis for this book began twenty years ago when I enrolled in the College of Charleston's summer archaeological field school. After spending the first half of the semester honing our technique by digging five-foot by five-foot units, identifying soil stratigraphy, and collecting artifacts at the Charleston Museum's Stono Plantation, the archaeologists reoriented us students to a new site. For the remainder of the field school we investigated Willtown Bluff on the Edisto River, an early-eighteenth century township surrounded by plantations. My interest in inland rice cultivation grew from our work at the James Stobo site, a 1710 plantation located on the edge of the Willtown township and one mile from the tidal river. For three archaeological seasons between 1997 and 1999, I participated in excavations of the Stobo Plantation house foundation located on a hardwood knoll surrounded by a sea of low-lying Cypress wetlands. During this time, I had a unique opportunity to walk off the dry terra firma and explore miles of inland rice embankments sprawling to the east and to the south of the house site. Major embankments traverse the wetlands on a magnetic north/south and east/west axis, intersected by smaller check banks and drainage canals as far as the eye can see under the dense cypress and hardwood canopy"--

The University of North Carolina Press and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University are pleased to Publish The Journal of the Civil War Era. William Blair, of the Pennsylvania State University, serves as founding editor. The Journal of the Civil War Era Volume 3, Number 3 September 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS Articles Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture Steven Hahn Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of a New American Nation-State Beth Schweiger The Literate South: Reading before Emancipation Brian Luskey Special Marts: Intelligence Offices, Labor Commodification, and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century America Review Essay Nicole Etcheson Microhistory and Movement: African American Mobility in the Nineteenth Century Book Reviews Books Received Professional Notes Megan Kate Nelson Looking at Landscapes of War Notes on Contributors The Journal of the Civil War Era takes advantage of the flowering of research on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century

The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations, huge industrial working class, and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New York in the world of finance, America has come to symbolize capitalism for two centuries and more. But an understanding of the history of American capitalism is as elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential across multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a range of geographic and chronological settings? And how does a focus on capitalism change our understanding of American history? American Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women’s rights; slavery and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge, including the idea of the economy, among other topics. Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with capitalism as it is made by political authority, how it is claimed and contested by participants, how it spreads across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized without being universalized. A major statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work that the history of capitalism can provoke.

Few people are familiar with the full history that shaped and preserved the fish and wildlife of coastal South Carolina. From Native Americans to the early colonists to plantation owners and their slaves to market hunters and commercial fishermen, all viewed fish and wildlife as limitless. Through time, however, overharvesting led to population declines, and the public demanded conservation. The process that produced fish and game laws, wardens and wildlife refuges was complex and often involved conflict, but synergy and cooperation ultimately produced one of the most extensive conservation systems on the East Coast. Author James O. Luken presents this fascinating story.

Travelers' accounts of the people, culture, and politics of the Southern coastal region after the Civil War Charleston is one of the most intriguing of American cities, a unique combination of quaint streets, historic architecture, picturesque gardens, and age-old tradition, embroidered with a vivid cultural, literary, and social history. It is a city of contrasts and controversy as well. To trace a documentary history of Charleston from the postbellum era into the twentieth century is to encounter an ever-shifting but consistently alluring landscape. In this collection, ranging from 1865 to 1947, correspondents, travelers, tourists, and other visitors describe all aspects of the city as they encounter it. Sojourns in Charleston begins after the Civil War, when northern journalists flocked south to report on the "city of desolation" and ruin, continues through Reconstruction, and then moves into the era when national magazine writers began to promote the region as a paradise. From there twentieth-century accounts document a wide range of topics, from the living conditions of African Americans to the creation of cultural institutions that supported preservation and tourism. The most recognizable of the writers include author Owen Wister, novelist William Dean Howells, artist Norman Rockwell, Boston poet Amy Lowell, novelist and Zionist leader Ludwig Lewisohn, poet May Sarton, novelist Glenway Wescott on British author Somerset Maugham in the lowcountry, and French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Their varied viewpoints help weave a beautiful tapestry of narratives that reveal the fascinating and evocative history that made this great city what it is today.

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution's development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina's long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.