[Illustration: Middleton Place]
The land that now comprises Middleton Place lies in one of the earliest
areas inhabited by Englishmen in South Carolina. In 1674, just four
years after the first colonists settled at Charles Town, Lord Proprietor
Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper granted lands for settlement along the lower
reaches of the Ashley River. Among these was the site of Middleton
Place, deeded in 1675 to Jacob Waight. Waight apparently forfeited his
claim to the tract, and in 1700, it was granted to Richard Godfrey, who
sold it in 1729 to John Williams, a wealthy landowner and justice of the
peace. The land passed into Middleton hands in 1741, when John Williams’
daughter Mary married Henry Middleton, the second son of former
provincial governor Arthur Middleton.
Henry and his two brothers were the third generation of Middletons in
South Carolina. Their grandfather, Edward Middleton, had arrived in the
colony in 1678 as part of the great influx of Barbadian Englishmen who
made up more than half of Charles Town’s early immigrants. Like many
other Barbadians, Edward settled along Goose Creek, north of Charleston.
His plantations there, along with estates in Barbados and England,
passed to his son Arthur in 1685. Arthur also inherited a prominent
position in Carolina society, and with it, an active role in the
political life of the colony. Edward had served as Lords Proprietors’
deputy and assistant justice in his few years’ stay in Goose Creek, but
Arthur, who held more than a dozen public offices, was the Middleton who
established the tradition of political leadership that was to
distinguish his family for four generations.
Probably the most significant of Arthur’s achievements was his role in
the overthrow of the Lords Proprietor. The eight British noblemen
theoretically owned and managed all of the Carolinas, but in later
years, they adopted policies that their colonists saw as inimical to
survival in the American wilds. Following the Lords Proprietors’ failure
to provide military aid during the bloody Yamasee Indian uprising of
1715-1717, Arthur Middleton led a convention that in 1719 persuaded the
king to remove the Lords Proprietor. Later, as president of the Ruling
Council, he served as governor of the province until the arrival of a
governor appointed by the king.
Arthur’s son Henry inherited a large share of his father’s estates in
Carolina and Barbados and was reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in
Carolina. According to one contemporary account, he owned some 20
plantations and 800 slaves. Nonetheless, after his marriage to Mary
Williams he moved his residence and base of operations to his wife’s
Ashley River plantation, which they named Middleton Place. The manor
house was already standing at that time, but Henry added the two flanker
buildings (the southernmost of which now serves as the main house), and
laid out the formal gardens, terraces, and ornamental lakes that made
Middleton Place one of the most elegant of the lowcountry plantations.
Rice, introduced into the Carolinas in the late seventeenth century, had
become by Henry’s time a staple crop of the Ashley River region and was
becoming the main product of Middleton Place (Fig. 1).
[Illustration: Figure 1. Locator map of Middleton Place, Dorchester
County, South Carolina.]
Like his father, Henry held a number of public offices under the royal
government, but it was in the rebellion against that government that he
gained political renown, first as president of the South Carolina
Provincial Congress and later as a delegate to the First Continental
Congress in Philadelphia. Only seven of Henry and Mary’s eleven children
lived to adulthood, but both surviving sons were members of the
Provincial Congress, and when Henry’s health began to fail in 1776 his
elder son Arthur replaced him as delegate to the Second Continental
Congress. At 34 Arthur Middleton was the senior South Carolina delegate
to sign the Declaration of Independence.
The American Revolution took a heavy toll on South Carolina. Several
major campaigns were fought in the former colony, and Charleston and the
surrounding lowcountry were occupied by the British from 1780 to 1782.
During this time, 63 leading Charlestonians, including Arthur Middleton,
were imprisoned in British St. Augustine. By 1780, Henry was seriously
ill, and, like other lowcountry residents, he and his sons suffered
serious financial losses from the plunder and disruption that
accompanied the British occupation.
Henry died in 1784 leaving Middleton Place and other plantations to
Arthur, who in the postwar economic climate soon regained his former
standard of living. Arthur and his family of nine children had lived at
Middleton Place for some time before Henry’s demise, and several
important economic changes took place under Arthur’s direction. In
Henry’s early years at Middleton Place, rice had been cultivated in
inland swamps irrigated with water from man-made reservoirs. By the late
eighteenth century, soil exhaustion had begun to pose a problem, and
many planters, including the Middletons, changed to tidal rice
cultivation that involved impounding freshwater swamps along the rivers’
edges and allowing them to be flooded by the natural action of the river
tides. Not only did the new soil and nutrients deposited by the
floodwaters remove the threat of soil exhaustion, but the tidal system
was more labor-efficient than inland cultivation, resulting in higher
yield per acre. This new efficiency was compounded by another late
eighteenth century innovation, the water-powered rice mill, installed at
Middleton Place about the same time.
Arthur’s eldest son Henry inherited Middleton Place at the age of 17,
apparently while he was still in school in England. Henry devoted a
great deal of attention to the gardens planted by his grandfather,
enlarging them and introducing many new plants, some of them newly
brought to America by the French botanist André Michaux. From 1801 to
1830 Henry was continuously in public office, first as a South Carolina
legislator and governor, then as a member of the United States Congress,
and from 1820 to 1830 as American ambassador to Russia.
By the time he returned from his service abroad, South Carolinians had
embarked upon the separatist agitation that would eventually lead to
their third attempt in 150 years to overthrow a government.
At issue were the 1828 and 1832 “tariffs of abomination,” designed by
Congress to protect fledgling industries in the northern states.
However, they were viewed by indignant Carolina planters, dependent on
direct trade with England, as an assault on their agricultural economy.
The South Carolina Nullification Convention of 1832 declared the tariff
null and void on the basis of John C. Calhoun’s doctrine that a state
had a right to vote to disregard onerous acts of Congress and, if other
states found its action unacceptable, to secede. As a member of the
opposing Union Party, Henry Middleton was perhaps the first of his
family to take an active conservative role in a dispute pitting South
Carolina against an outside governing body.
This early threat to the Union was deflected with a tariff reduction in
1833, but the nullification doctrine had laid the ideological groundwork
on which 11 southern states were to base their secession over the issue
of slavery 28 years later. Slavery was an economic mainstay of
agriculture throughout the South, but particularly so in South Carolina,
where slaves had been imported from Barbados with the very earliest
settlers at Charles Town and where a plantation system based on
involuntary servitude had existed since the late seventeenth century. By
the early 1700s African slaves already made up three-quarters of the
South Carolina population, and on the eve of the Civil War, South
Carolina remained the largest slaveholding state in the Union. Colleton
District, where Middleton Place was located, was nearly 80% black.
This enormous disparity meant that white slaveholders lived in constant
fear of slave insurrection. They were equally fearful of emancipation,
which, as abolitionist sentiment grew in the North, many planters came
to view as an inevitable outcome of northern political dominance. There
were slaveholders who staunchly opposed disunion, but South Carolina, as
it had been during the nullification dispute, was a hotbed of
secessionism. With the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, a Charleston
convention passed an ordinance making South Carolina the first state to
withdraw from the Union. Henry Middleton had died in 1846 before the
slavery controversy reached its height, but among the signers of the
Ordinance of Secession were his sons John Izard Middleton of Georgetown,
and Williams Middleton of Middleton Place.
The war that followed caused more devastation to the plantation economy
than emancipation, for in defeat the planters lost most of their
financial assets and their voice in local government. In areas that had
witnessed military action, they often saw devastation of their homes and
property. Middleton Place, plundered and burned by invading troops in
1865, was no exception. Williams and his family fled to Charleston where
they lived while renting the plantation grounds to a “Yankee captain.”
In 1867 Williams borrowed money from a sister in Philadelphia and began
the task of restoring the burnt-out southern flanker building to serve
as a family residence. In 1871, before repairs were complete, the
Middletons and their two children were again living at Middleton Place
in the shadow of the ruined mansion that had housed five generations of
their family.
Restoration of the plantation’s agricultural operations, however, proved
more difficult. The tidal rice fields, which required constant
maintenance, had been neglected, and the loss of the more than 100
slaves who had worked the plantation grounds and rice fields left
Williams without the necessary labor for large-scale cultivation.
Although vastly diminished quantities of rice continued to be harvested
elsewhere in the lowcountry, Middleton Place apparently never again
produced a successful rice crop. By 1890 rice from Louisiana, where flat
upland fields permitted mechanized cultivation impossible in the South
Carolina marshes, had begun to drive Carolina rice off the market. Today
no rice at all is grown in South Carolina.
Two new commodities that gained importance in the land-poor lowcountry
economy were phosphates, of which postbellum South Carolina was the
nation’s leading supplier, and timber, an important product in the
Southeast. Williams turned his hand to exploitation of these natural
resources, and by 1878, Middleton Place boasted both phosphate mines and
a sawmill. Although he and his heirs continued to lease the plantation
timber and mineral rights until the early twentieth century, by 1880 the
aging Williams had left Middleton Place, taking up residence in
Greenville, South Carolina. After Williams died in 1882, his wife Susan
made regular visits to the plantation. But following her death in 1900,
Middleton Place lay abandoned, except for periodic visits, for over 20
years. Williams and Susan’s son Henry, who had left South Carolina in
the 1870s to attend Cambridge University, was living in England, and
their daughter Elizabeth had married and settled in Greenville.
The plantation was inherited by a cousin, J. J. Pringle Smith, who, in
1925, moved his family into the southern flanker house and began the
slow job of restoring the Middleton Place grounds and gardens. Pringle
Smith built the present stableyard complex on the site of older
outbuildings, installed an electrical generator in the former privy
building, and opened the gardens to the public. In 1970 Middleton Place
became a Registered National Historic Landmark under the management of
the Smiths’ grandson, Charles Duell. In 1975, with the creation of the
Middleton Place Foundation, the south flanker containing many of the
family’s original furnishings was also opened to the public.