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CHRONICLES OF CHICORA WOOD
[Illustration: MRS. PRINGLE AT CHICORA WOOD.
Photograph by Amelia M. Watson.]
CHRONICLES OF
CHICORA WOOD
BY
ELIZABETH W. ALLSTON PRINGLE
AUTHOR OF “A WOMAN RICE PLANTER”
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
Published May, 1922
[Illustration: colophon]
PREFACE
As I sit in the broad piazza, watching the closing of the day, I gaze
into the vistas of moss-draped giant oaks. All is mystery, the mystery
of nature, the mystery of the ages. These oaks, still strong, still
beautiful, have seen generations pass. Through their filmy vistas the
god of the day is sending his gleaming shafts as he has always done.
But brighter to me than these last rays is the pageant of the Past,
which sweeps before me now: scenes as intense as the flaming sky,
incidents as tender as the fleecy clouds, years as dark and tragic as
that leaden storm-bank at the horizon’s edge, but redeemed from utter
despair by a courage and a sacrifice equal in splendor to its illumined
summits.
In my memory are stored the beauty and pathos of these years. Shall I
let all this die without a word? These pictures I have treasured--so
full of beauty and color--shall I let them fade, even as the sunset,
into gray oblivion? I cannot bring before you as clearly as I would the
charm and glamour of the past, but I can at least give a faint idea of
“the days that are no more.”
CONTENTS
PART I--MY FATHER
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ORIGIN OF THE TWO L ALLSTONS 3
II. PLANTER AND CITIZEN 12
III. MY BROTHER’S NARRATIVE 26
PART II--MY MOTHER
IV. EARLY DAYS AND OLD FIELD SCHOOL 43
V. DADDY TOM AND DADDY PRINCE--DEATH
OF LITTLE MOTHER SO BELOVED 53
VI. MARRIAGE 57
VII. MOVE TO CANAAN--AUNT BLYTHE 67
VIII. FIRST CHILD--PLANTATION LIFE 81
IX. FIRST GRIEVING 94
PART III--MYSELF
X. BABY WOES 107
XI. THE LITTLE SCHOOLHOUSE--BOARDING-SCHOOL 123
XII. SUMMER ON THE SEA--SCHOOL AND
DELLA’S ILLNESS AND TRIP ABROAD--PAPA
ELECTED GOVERNOR 137
XIII. CHRISTMAS AT CHICORA WOOD 150
XIV. LIFE IN CHARLESTON--PREPARATIONS
FOR WAR 160
XV. BOARDING-SCHOOL IN WAR TIMES 176
PART IV--WAR TIMES
XVI. THE WEDDING 187
XVII. CROWLEY HILL--OUR PLACE OF REFUGE
DURING THE WAR 192
XVIII. SORROW 200
XIX. LOCH ADÈLE 213
XX. SHADOWS 218
XXI. PREPARING TO MEET SHERMAN 221
XXII. THEY COME! 229
XXIII. DADDY HAMEDY’S APPEAL--IN THE
TRACK OF SHERMAN’S ARMY 239
XXIV. SHADOWS DEEPEN 248
XXV. GLEAMS OF LIGHT 250
XXVI. TAKING THE OATH 260
PART V--READJUSTMENT
XXVII. GLEAMS OF LIGHT FROM MY DIARY 283
XXVIII. AUNT PETIGRU--MY FIRST GERMAN 298
XXIX. MAMMA’S SCHOOL 307
XXX. THE SCHOOL A SUCCESS 316
XXXI. 1868 331
XXXII. CHICORA WOOD 340
XXXIII. DADDY ANCRUM’S STORY 349
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mrs. Pringle at Chicora Wood _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Robert Francis Withers Allston, President of the Senate 20
Portrait by Flagg about 1850
James Louis Petigru 46
Miniature by Fraser
Mrs. Benjamin Allston (née Charlotte Anne Allston),
Mother of R. F. W. Allston 90
Miniature by Fraser
Mrs. R. F. W. Allston (née Adèle Petigru) 140
Portrait by Flagg about 1850
Adèle Allston at Sixteen 188
Chicora Wood 244
Mrs. William Allston (née Ester La Brosse de Mahboeuf) 294
_PART I_
MY FATHER
CHAPTER I
ORIGIN OF THE TWO L ALLSTONS
John Allston, of St. John’s, Berkeley, was born in England in 1666, and
came to this country between 1685 and 1694. He was descended from the
ancient family of Allstone, through John Allston, of Saxham Hall,
Newton, Suffolk, which was the seat of the Allstons for several hundred
years. An Allston was the Saxon Lord of Stanford in Norfolk before the
Conquest, and was dispossessed by the Normans. The old Saxon names of
Rath Alstan, Alstane, were but variants of the name which John of St.
John’s spelled Alstane, until the signature of his will (1718), when he
wrote it Allston. The motto was “Immotus,”[1] “Az. ten stars, crest an
estoile in a crescent argent.”
John Allston, of St. John’s, Berkeley, had a number of children, as
self-respecting people of that date usually had, but we are concerned
only with the descendants of his eldest son, John, who was the
grandfather of Benjamin Allston, my father’s father, and those of his
second son, William, who was the grandfather of Charlotte Ann Allston,
my father’s mother. So his parents were second cousins.
Ben Allston died when his second son, Robert, was only eight years old.
The boy was educated at Mr. Waldo’s school in Georgetown until he was
sixteen, when his widowed mother determined to send him to West Point.
He entered in 1817, graduating in June, 1821, this being the first class
which made the four years’ course under Colonel Sylvanus Thayer. He was
appointed lieutenant in the 3d Artillery, and assigned to duty on the
Coast Survey under Lieutenant-Colonel Kearney, of the Topographical
Engineers. In this position he assisted in surveying the harbors of
Plymouth and Provincetown, Mass., and the entrance to Mobile Bay. While
on duty here he got letters from his mother telling of her difficulties,
which demanded his immediate presence at home. He asked for leave of
absence, but being refused this by his commanding officer, he resigned
his commission February, 1822, bought a horse and rode through northern
Alabama and Georgia, then inhabited by Indians, to Charleston, and
thence to Georgetown, S. C.
His mother’s difficulties in managing her property of landed estate and
negroes had been great, and added to this was the effort of the
purchaser of a plantation adjoining Chicora on the south to seize a
tract of land (attempting to prove that this land belonged to his
plantation), which when cleared became four of her best rice-fields.
This had kept her in constant fiery correspondence, until my father felt
it his duty to resign and come home and settle the matter.
He employed the lawyer of greatest repute at the moment, James L.
Petigru; the case was brought into court, and my grandmother’s title to
the land established beyond question. She did not long survive to enjoy
having her son at home to take the burden of the management of her
affairs, for she died October 24, 1824, after a short illness of
pleurisy, in her fifty-fourth year. This was a very great sorrow to my
father, for he had for her an intense affection with a sense of
protection. She was beautiful and very small, so that the servants
always spoke of her as “Little Miss” in distinction to Aunt Blythe, who
was “Big Miss.” According to the custom of the day, the land was all
left to the sons, charged with legacies to the daughters, so my father’s
patrimony consisted of large tracts of swamp land in Georgetown and
Marion and seventeen negroes, subject to a debt to his sisters which
amounted to more than the value of the property. He entered upon its
management with great energy, surveyed the land himself, cleared and
drained the swamps and converted them into valuable rice-fields.
In this work his military education was of great service to him. In 1823
he was elected surveyor-general of the State, an office which he held
for four years. In 1828 he was returned by the people of Winyah to the
lower house of the legislature, and in 1832 was returned to the Senate.
About this time he attained the rank of colonel of the militia, service
of the State. He continued to be returned to the Senate, and was
president of that body from 1850 to 1856, when he was elected governor.
But I must go back. During the lawsuit about the land my father was
entertained by James L. Petigru, came to know the lawyer’s sister, Adèle
Petigru, and fell in love with her; and she finally yielded to his suit,
and they were married in 1832 and went at once to his plantation,
Chicora Wood, fourteen miles north of Georgetown, on the Great Pee Dee
River.
I am always afraid of bursting out into praise of my father, for I
adored him, and thought him the wisest and best man in the world, and
still do think he was a most unusual mixture of firmness and gentleness,
with rare executive ability. But I have always found, in reading
biographies and sketches, that the unstinted and reiterated praises of
the adoring writers rouses one’s opposition, and I write this with the
hope of bringing to his grandchildren the knowledge and appreciation of
my father’s character. I will try to draw his portrait with a few firm
strokes, and leave the respect and admiration to be aroused by it. Now
that slavery is a thing of the past, the younger generation in our
Southland really know nothing about the actual working of it, and they
should know to understand and see the past in its true light. Slavery
was in many ways a terrible misfortune, but we know that in the ancient
world it was universal, and no doubt the great Ruler of the world, “that
great First Cause, least understood,” allowed it to exist for some
reason of His own.
The colony of North and South Carolina, then one, entreated the mother
country to send no more slaves. “We want cattle, horses, sheep, swine,
we don’t want Africans.” But the Africans continued to come. The
Northeastern States were the first to get rid of the objectionable human
property when conscientious scruples arose as to the owning of
slaves--in some instances by freeing them, but in many more instances by
selling them in the Southern States. There is no doubt that in the
colder climate slave labor was not profitable. When the Civil War came,
the Southern planters were reduced from wealth to poverty by the seizure
of their property which they held under the then existing laws of the
country. It is a long and tangled story--and I do not pretend to judge
of its rights and wrongs. I have no doubt that the Great Father’s time
for allowing slavery was at an end. I myself am truly thankful that
slavery is a thing of the past, and that I did not have to take up the
burden of the ownership of the one hundred people my father left me in
his will (all mentioned by name), with a pretty rice-plantation called
Exchange two miles north of Chicora Wood. I much prefer to have had to
make my own living, as I have had to do, except for the short six years
of my married life, than to have had to assume the care and
responsibility of those hundred negroes, soul and body. I have had a
happy life, in spite of great sorrow and continued work and strain, but
I am quite sure that with my sensitive temperament and fierce Huguenot
conscience I never could have had a happy life under the burden of that
ownership.
It would have been a comfort, however, if we could have gathered up
something from my father’s large property, but we did not. Just before
the war my mother’s brother, Captain Tom Petigru, of the navy, died,
leaving a childless widow. She lived in Charleston, in her beautiful
home with large yard and garden, at the corner of Bull and Rutledge
Streets, and was a rich woman, as riches were counted in those
days--owning a large farm in Abbeville County, where the Giberts and
Petigrus had originally settled, and also a rice-plantation, “Pipe
Down,” on Sandy Island on the Waccamaw, not far from my father’s
estates, also one hundred negroes. As soon as Uncle Tom died, Aunt Ann
wrote to my father, asking him as a great favor to buy her plantation
and negroes, as she felt quite unequal to the management and care of
them. My father replied immediately that it was impossible for him to
comply with her request, that he had his hands full managing his own
property, and that he specially felt he had already more negroes than he
desired. Aunt Ann continued her entreaties. Then the negroes from Pipe
Down began to send deputations over to beg my father to buy them. Philip
Washington, a very tall, very black man, a splendid specimen of the
negro race, after two generations of slavery, was their spokesman. My
uncle had been devoted to Philip, and considered him far above the
average negro in every way, and in his will had given him his freedom,
along with two or three others; he pleaded the cause of his friends with
much eloquence, saying they had fixed on him as the one owner they
desired. Then my uncle, James L. Petigru, entered the lists, and
appealed to my father’s chivalry for his old and feeble sister-in-law,
and to the intense feeling of the negroes, who had selected him for
their future owner, and were perfectly miserable at his refusal--if it
were a question of money, he argued, my father need not hesitate, as
“Sister Ann” did not desire any cash payment; she greatly preferred a
bond and mortgage, and the interest paid yearly, as that would be the
best investment she could have. At last my father yielded, and made a
small cash payment, giving his bond and a mortgage for the rest. The
deed was done--the Pipe Down people were overjoyed, and the debt
assumed. This debt it was which rendered my father’s estate insolvent at
the end of the war, for he died in 1864. The slaves having been freed,
the property was gone, but the debt remained in mortgages on his landed
estates, which had all to be sold. The plantations were: Chicora Wood,
890 acres, Ditchford, 350 acres, Exchange, 600 acres, Guendalos, 600
acres, Nightingale Hall, 400 acres, Waterford, 250 acres, beside Pipe
Down itself. Also the two farms in Anson County, North Carolina, and our
beautiful house in Charleston. Besides this, there were 6,000 acres of
cypress timber at Britton’s Neck; 5,000 acres of cypress and pine land
near Carver’s Bay; 300 acres at Canaan Seashore; house and 20 acres on
Pawley’s Island. Of all this principality, not one of the heirs got
anything!
My mother’s dower was all that could be claimed. In South Carolina the
right of dower is one-third of the landed property, for life, or
one-sixth, in fee simple. My mother preferred the last, and the Board of
Appraisers found that the plantation Chicora Wood, where she had always
lived, would represent a sixth value of the real estate, and that was
awarded her as dower; but not an animal nor farm implement, no boats nor
vehicles--just the land, with its dismantled dwelling-house. I tell this
here, to explain how we came to face poverty at the end of the war.