PLANTER AND CITIZEN
Now I must go back to my father’s early life, for I left him just
married, and bringing his beautiful bride from the gay life of the city
to the intense quiet, as far as social joys went, of the country. It was
wonderful that their marriage proved a success, and a great credit to
them both. They were so absolutely different in tastes and ideals that
each had to give up a great deal that they had dreamed of in matrimony;
but their principles and standards being the same, things always came
right in the end. My father was always a very public-spirited man, and
interested in the good of his county and his State. Of course, all this
public life necessitated constant and prolonged absences from home, and
the rejoicing was great always, when the legislature adjourned and he
returned from Columbia. He was a scientific rice-planter and
agriculturist; he wrote articles for _De Bow’s Review_ that were
regarded as authorities. His plantations were models of organization and
management. All the negroes were taught a trade or to do some special
work. On Chicora Wood there was a large carpenter’s shop, where a great
number of skilled men were always at work, under one head carpenter.
Daddy Thomas was this head, during all my childhood, and he was a great
person in my eyes. He was so dignified, and treated us young daughters
of the house as though we were princesses; just the self-respecting
manner of a noble courtier. His wife was the head nurse of the
“sick-house,” and the “children’s house,” also, so that she was also a
personage--very black and tall, with a handkerchief turban of unusual
height. We never went near her domain without returning with handsome
presents of eggs, or potatoes, or figs, according to season, for Maum
Phœbe was a very rich person and one of great authority. There were
always four or five apprentices in the carpenter’s shop, so year by year
skilled men were turned out, not “jack-legs,” which was Thomas Bonneau’s
epithet for the incompetent. Then the blacksmith-shop, under Guy Walker,
was a most complete and up-to-date affair, and there young lads were
always being taught to make horseshoes, and to shoe horses, and do all
the necessary mending of wheels and axles and other ironwork used on a
plantation. The big flats and lighters needed to harvest the immense
rice-crops were all made in the carpenter’s shop, also the flood-gates
necessary to let the water on and off the fields. These were called
“trunks,” and had to be made as tight as a fine piece of joiner’s work.
There was almost a fleet of rowboats, of all sizes, needed on the
plantation for all purposes, also canoes, or dugouts, made from cypress
logs. There was one dugout, _Rainbow_, capable of carrying several
tierces of rice. When I was a child, the threshing of the rice from the
straw was done in mills run by horse-power; before I can remember it was
generally done by water-power. The men and women learned to work in the
mill; to do the best ploughing; the best trenching with the
hoe--perfectly straight furrows, at an even depth, so as to insure the
right position for the sprouting grain; the most even and best sowing of
the rice. Then, skilfully to take all the grass and weeds out with the
sharp, tooth-shaped hoes, yet never touch or bruise the grain or its
roots, the best cultivation of the crop. Also they learned to cut the
rice most dexterously, with reap-hooks, and lay the long golden heads
carefully on the stubble, so that the hot sun could get through and dry
it, as would not be possible if it were laid on the wet earth, so that
it could be tied in sheaves the next day. For all these operations
prizes were offered every year--pretty bright-colored calico frocks to
the women, and forks and spoons; and to the men fine knives, and other
things that they liked--so that there was a great pride in being the
prize ploughman, or prize sower, or harvest hand, for the year.
Only the African race, who seem by inheritance immune from the dread
malarial fever, could have made it possible and profitable to clear the
dense cypress swamps and cultivate them in rice by a system of flooding
the fields from the river by canals, ditches, and flood-gates, draining
off the water when necessary, and leaving these wonderfully rich lands
dry for cultivation. It has been said that, like the pyramids, slave
labor only could have accomplished it; be that as it may, at this moment
one has the pain of watching the annihilation of all this work now, when
the world needs food; now when the starving nations are holding out
their hands to our country for food, thousands and thousands of acres of
this fertile land are reverting to the condition of swamps: land capable
of bringing easily sixty bushels of rice to the acre without fertilizer
is growing up in reeds and rushes and marsh, the haunt of the alligator
and the moccasin. The crane and the bittern are always there, the
fish-hawk and the soaring eagle build their nests on the tall
cypress-trees left here and there on the banks of the river; the
beautiful wood-duck is also always there, and at certain seasons the big
mallard or English duck come in great flocks; but, alas, they no longer
come in clouds, as they used to do (so that a single shot has been known
to kill sixty on the wing). For them too the country is ruined, for them
too all is changed. Those that come do not stay. It was the abundant
shattered rice of the cultivated fields, flooded as soon as the harvest
was over, which brought them in myriads from their nesting-grounds in
the far north, to spend their winters in these fat feeding-grounds, in
the congenial climate of Carolina. Now there is no shattered rice on
which to feed, and in their wonderful zigzag flight they stop a day or
two to see if the abundance of which their forefathers have quacked to
them has returned, and not finding it they pass on to Florida and other
warm climes to seek their winter food. Thus this rich storehouse and
granary is desolate. With the modern machinery for making dikes and
banks these fields could be restored to a productive condition and made
to produce again, without a very heavy expenditure. But alas! those who
owned them had absolutely no money, and after the destruction of the
banks and flood-gates by the great storm of 1906 no restoration was
made. A few of the plantations in Georgetown County have been bought by
wealthy Northern men as game-preserves. One multimillionaire, Emerson,
who bought a very fine rice-plantation, Prospect Hill, formerly property
of William Allston, has some fields planted in rice every year, simply
for the ducks, the grain not being harvested at all, but left to attract
the flocks to settle down and stay there, ready for the sportsman’s gun.
Besides being a diligent, devoted, and scientific planter and manager of
his estates, my father was greatly interested in the welfare of the poor
whites of the pineland, spoken of always scornfully by the negroes as
“Po’ Buchra”--nothing could express greater contempt. Negroes are by
nature aristocrats, and have the keenest appreciation and perception of
what constitutes a gentleman. The poor whites of the low country were at
a terrible disadvantage, for they were never taught to do anything;
they only understood the simplest farm work, and there was no market for
their labor, the land-owners having their own workers and never needing
to hire these untrained hands, who in their turn looked down on the
negroes, and held aloof from them. These people, the yeomanry of the
country, were the descendants of the early settlers, and those who
fought through the Revolution. They were, as a general rule, honest,
law-abiding, with good moral standards. Most of them owned land, some
only a few acres, others large tracts, where their cattle and hogs
roamed unfed but fat. Some owned large herds, and even the poorest
usually had a cow and pair of oxen, while all had chickens and hogs--but
never a cent of money. They planted corn enough to feed themselves and
their stock, sweet potatoes, and a few of the common vegetables. They
never begged or made known their needs, except by coming to offer for
sale very roughly made baskets of split white oak, or some coarsely spun
yarn, for the women knew how to spin, and some of them even could weave.
There was something about them that suggested a certain refinement, and
one always felt they came from better stock, though they never seemed to
trace back. Their respect for the marriage vow, for instance, impressed
one, and their speech was clear, good Anglo-Saxon, and their vocabulary
included some old English words and expressions now obsolete. My father
was most anxious to help them, and felt that to establish schools for
them throughout the county would be the first step. In one of these
schools a young girl proved such an apt scholar and learned so quickly
all that she could acquire there that he engaged a place for her in a
Northern school, and got the consent of her parents to her going, and
she, being ambitious, was greatly pleased. He appointed a day to meet
her in Georgetown, impressing on the parents to bring her in time for
him to put her on the ship, before it sailed for New York. At the
appointed time the parents arrived. My father asked for Hannah; the
mother answered that they found they would miss Hannah too much, she was
so smart and helpful, but they’d brought Maggie, and he could send _her_
to school! My father was very angry; Hannah Mitchell was eighteen and
clever and ambitious, while Maggie was fourteen, and dull and
heavy-minded. Of course he did not send her. It was a great
disappointment, for he had taken much trouble, and was willing to go to
considerable expense to give Hannah the chance to develop, and hoped
she would return prepared to teach in the school he had established.
These people are still to be found in our pinelands, and have changed
little.
The public roads were also my father’s constant care, and all through
that country were beautifully kept. The method was simple; each
land-owner sent out twice a year a number of hands, proportioned to his
land, and the different gentlemen took turns to superintend the work.
Our top-soil goes down about two feet, before reaching clay. The roads
were kept in fine condition by digging a good ditch on each side of a
sixty-foot highway; the clay from the ditch being originally thrown into
the middle of the road, and then twice a year those ditches were cleared
out, and a little more clay from them thrown on the road each time. The
great difficulty in road-making and road-keeping, as I know from my
personal observation in the present, is not the amount of labor, but the
proper, intelligent direction of the work. In my father’s day, the
office of road commissioner and supervisor were unpaid, and my father
gave his time, work, and interest unstintedly.
My father’s love of art, and of music, and of all
[Illustration: ROBERT FRANCIS WITHERS ALLSTON, PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE.
Portrait by Flagg about 1850.]
beauty was very great. It made all the difference in the world to us,
his children, growing up in the country, so far from picture-galleries
and concerts and every kind of music. At the sale of the Bonaparte
collection of pictures in Baltimore my father commissioned the artist,
Sully, to attend the sale and select and buy for him six pictures. Papa
was much pleased with Mr. Sully’s selection. They included:
“A Turk’s Head,” by Rembrandt.
“The Supper at Emmaus,” by Gherardo del Notte.
“The Holy Family,” a very beautiful Gobelin tapestry. For this
picture Mr. Sully was offered double the price he paid before it
left the gallery.
“Io,” whom Juno in jealous rage had transformed into a white
heifer. A very large and beautiful canvas, a landscape with the
heifer ruminating in the foreground, watched by Cerberus, while on
a mountainside Mercury sits playing on his flute, trying to lull
him to sleep. (I still own this painting.)
“St. Paul on the Island of Melita,” a very large canvas
representing a group of shipwrecked mariners around a fire of
sticks; in the midst stands the figure of St. Paul just shaking
from his finger a viper, into the fire, very dramatic.
“St. Peter in Prison,” awakened by the angel while his keepers
sleep.
This is the match picture to the above and the same size.
These works of art on the walls of our country home awoke in us all an
appreciation and recognition of fine paintings for which we can never be
sufficiently grateful.
This great love for art and his confidence in its elevating influence is
shown by his buying and having placed in the grounds of the State
capitol a replica of Houdon’s statue of Washington.
Another and most characteristic evidence is furnished by the following
note from a friend, to whom I wrote, asking for some facts as to my
father’s public life, for I had thus far written of him entirely as I
knew him in his family and home life, except for the bare outline by the
dates of his election to different offices, and though I have no desire
or intention of making this a history of his official and political
career, feeling myself entirely unfitted for that, I felt I should give
something to show his service in his own State. In reply Mr. Yates
Snowden wrote:
“The day before your letter came my eye lit upon the invitation of R. F.
W. Allston, president of the Carolina Art Association, inviting the
members of the Convention Secession to visit the Gallery of Art in
Meeting Street whilst deliberating here for the public weal. It is hoped
that an hour bestowed occasionally in viewing some specimens of art,
including Leutze’s illustration of Jasper and the old Palmetto Fort, may
contribute an agreeable diversion to the minds of gentlemen habitually
engrossed in the discussion of grave concerns of state.”--(“Journal of
the (Secession) Convention,” p. W225, April 1, 1861.)
I can quite imagine that this invitation was a source, to some of the
members of that convention, of great amusement, as being most unsuitable
to their frame of mind.
My father’s full sympathy with the convention is shown by the following
extract from Brant and Fuller’s “Eminent and Representative Men of the
Carolinas”:
“Robert Francis Withers Allston, South Carolina statesman, scholar, and
agriculturist, was born April 21, 1801.... During the nullification era
and for many years afterward Mr. Allston was deputy adjutant-general of
the militia, and from 1841 to 1864 was one of the trustees of South
Carolina College at Columbia.... In politics he belonged to the
Jefferson and Calhoun school, believing in the complete sovereignty of
the States.”
During his prolonged absences in Columbia my father did not like to
leave my mother alone on the plantation, with no one but the negroes to
care for the children, so he secured a good, reliable Irishwoman to take
charge of the children and the nursery, with the others under her.
Strange to say, this was never resented, and Mary O’Shea stayed with us
about fifteen years, when some of her kinfolk called her away. We called
her “May” and were devoted to her. She had her trials, for my father did
not approve of fire in the room where the children slept, and this,
along with the open window, was a terrible ordeal to May. The
day-nursery, with its roaring open wood-fire, only made the contrast
more distressing to her; she never became reconciled to it, and I only
wonder that she stayed all those years. As soon as the older children
were big enough, we had an English governess--Miss Wells first, and
afterward Miss Ayme.
I have asked my brother, Charles Petigru Allston, to write for me what
he remembered of my father, and I will insert here what he has written
for me.