The Southern Experience in the American Revolution

By Larry E. Tise and Jeffrey J. Crow

These essays pose new questions concerning the social and political origins of the Revolution in the South, the social disorder indiced by the war, and the impact of the conflict and its ideologies on blacks and women. Contributors are: Pauline Maier, Robert M. Weir, Jack P. Greene, Marvin L. Michale Kay, Lorin Lee Cary, John Shy, Clyde R. Ferguson, Mary Beth Norton, Michael Mullin, and Peter H. Wood.

Originally published in 1978.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780807837047

Larry E. Tise

Dr. Larry E. Tise is an author and historian. Due to his unique research on the lives of the Wright brothers, he was appointed Wilbur and Orville Wright Distinguished Professor at East Carolina University in 2000, a post he continues to hold.  He is the author of more than 50 articles and books, including Conquering the Sky, and the founder of World Aloft, an extensive website dedicated to the Wright Brothers. He lives in Philadelphia.

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Introduction

Were the southern colonies in British North America already a distinctive cultural region at the onset of the American Revolution? Could the outlines of a later, if partially mythical, Defensive South, Benighted South, or Romantic South be discerned in the social and cultural experiences of southern colonists on the eve of the American Revolution? Did the experience of the American Revolution have a marked impact on the evolution of social and racial configurations of the Old South? Did the American Revolution—which, Bernard Bailyn has argued, released a contagion of liberty—reshape or redefine the roles of blacks and women in southern society?

These and other questions relating to the experience of the American Revolution and its influence on southern life were examined by nine historians during the course of a symposium entitled The Experience of Revolution in North Carolina and the South in the fall of 1975.¹ A jointly sponsored event initiated by the North Carolina Bicentennial Committee in association with the North Carolina Division of Archives and History, the Institute of Early American History and Culture of Williamsburg, Virginia, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina State University, the symposium took place on successive Thursdays on the campuses of the three participating universities. Each of the lectures has been revised and edited for inclusion in this volume.

A panel of historians from the participating institutions conceived the symposium in 1974 as an effort to generate a new assessment of the South’s role in the Revolution, a period of southern history often ignored or neglected. Because southerners of the 1960s and early 1970s had just experienced a long decade of rearrangement in their basic social institutions— particularly with regard to the rights and opportunities of black Americans—and because historians were engaged in rewriting large portions of southern history, the bicentennial of the American Revolution offered a propitious moment to take another look at the South in a time of far-reaching political and social upheaval. Moreover, historians, working primarily with sources from other colonies, in recent years had begun to portray the American Revolution as a liberating event of near millennial proportions, which transformed or obliterated social and caste distinctions in other locales.² Finally, except for one major overview of the South in the American Revolution written in the mid-1950s by John R. Alden, historians had largely overlooked and disregarded the American Revolution as a significant event in the growth of southern society. In the words of Charles G. Sellers, Jr., A modern reader could almost go through the whole corpus of southern writings about the Revolution without finding any evidence that a southern sectional consciousness ever existed or that a sectional war ever took place.³

The paucity of major studies of the American Revolution in the South either in early or more recent historiography is suggestive of the manner in which southerners and southern historians traditionally have dealt with the revolutionary era.⁴ While a southern statesman might promulgate the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to justify or celebrate the Revolution, the folks down home just as eagerly attempted to maintain a caste society. While southerners have ever been among the vanguard of flag-waving patriots, of those who venerated the principles of the Revolution on the Fourth of July, and of those who clamored longest and loudest to uphold the nation’s honor in seasons of foreign crisis, they nearly dealt the nation a fatal blow by undertaking what they regarded as a second American Revolution in the Civil War. The resulting tensions between rhetoric and reality in the American South have provided a rich, if violent, history, but also, all too often, have prevented southern historians from probing more deeply the nature of the Revolution in the South and its implications for southern society. In the two-hundred-year history of southern writings on the American Revolution, one will not find historians who seemed willing to measure the war in the same terms or with the same intensity with which they analyzed the Civil War.

The authors of these essays, then, have not had a body of southern writings, comparable to the detailed examinations of New England and the Middle Atlantic colonies, on which to build. Whether one wants to ask about the nature and goals of southern Whig leadership, sectional consciousness, or the outlines of class conflict in the southern colonies, one will find few studies with which to begin and fewer still that relate such concerns to the rising South.⁵

The four essays published here on the social and political origins of the Revolution in the South thus pose some fresh questions and in two cases employ new approaches to the revolutionary experience in the South. Pauline Maier addresses a fundamental question underpinning the symposium by asking whether southern revolutionary leaders were different from those of the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies. While she finds southern leaders diverse in their backgrounds, occupations, and interests, she discovers many similarities in values and ideology with northern Whigs. Maier argues that the southern Whig leaders examined in her essay, though members of the provincial elite, often found themselves on the peripheries of power because of factional or political disputes with an inner, ruling clique. Robert M. Weir, in a provocative departure from previous lines of inquiry, scrutinizes the southern colonial family in the eighteenth century and establishes links between family background, the southern elite, and the nature of the Revolution. Weir contends that the southern family was experiencing severe tensions during the latter part of the century that pitted child against parent. The Revolution, according to Weir, induced emotions that had been conditioned by childhood experiences, and so rebellion against parents easily became translated into rebellion against the mother country. Jack P. Greene takes a close look at the provincial elite in one colony, Virginia, where, Greene asserts, the members of the gentry long had taken pride in their British patriotism, moderation, and virtue. But in the mid- 1760s these men were rocked by two challenges—parliamentary taxation and the Robinson and Chiswell scandals—that threatened to break their oligarchic control of provincial affairs by besmirching their corporate self-image. The gentry’s response to these crises, concludes Greene, ensured its domination of the colony’s politics for the next decade and the endorsement of its rule when the revolutionary crisis broke. While Greene argues against any sectional rift within the gentry or a democratic challenge from without by the lower and middling classes in Virginia, Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary paint quite a different portrait of North Carolina. Approaching history from the bottom up, these authors focus on the North Carolina Regulation and discuss the most extensive and prolonged class attack by poorer farmers on a provincial elite in colonial America. Using quantifiable data, they analyze North Carolina society in terms of demography, economy, wealth distribution, and mobility patterns and find a tense class conflict culminating in the often misunderstood Battle of Alamance in 1771.

In recent years the military history of the Revolution has seen some new beginnings. Several studies have attempted to place military developments in the social and ideological context of colonial America.⁶ The South’s image of the revolutionary war, thanks in large part to antebellum southern memorialists, writers, and novelists, has sparkled with tales of glory and chivalry. In fact, the war in the South was a bloody and brutal civil war once the British had decided on their southern strategy. The revolutionary character of the southern war is only now beginning to be explored,⁷ and the two essays included here offer additional evidence of the social disorder, chaos, and dissension generated by the war. John Shy describes British plans for pacifying the American South and winning the war. The key to the strategy, Shy posits, was the Americanization of the war, that is, the employment of American loyalists in the war effort, thereby freeing British troops to move on to other areas. While not discounting the fact that estimates of loyalist sentiment in the South were exaggerated, Shy also attributes the failure of the British strategy to a loss of nerve, vacillation, and ambivalence in implementing the policy effectively. Clyde R. Ferguson shows why the southern strategy was foredoomed from an American standpoint. Both patriot and loyalist militia played a significant role during the southern war in suppressing political dissent and maintaining social stability. He insists that the patriot militia performed its functions better than the loyalist militia from as early as 1775–76. Often maligned by contemporaries—notably Nathanael Greene—and historians since, the Carolina and Georgia militias earn high marks from Ferguson.

While southerners and northerners alike have celebrated the vast implications of the Revolution for the rights of man, southern historians have generally overlooked the question of how the struggle itself related to the rights and social roles of nonwhite and nonmale segments of society.⁸ Until a recent spate of publications on slavery and racism in the revolutionary period by such scholars as Benjamin Quarles, Winthrop D. Jordan, David Brion Davis, Duncan MacLeod, and Edmund S. Morgan (not to mention two contributors to this volume), the nature of black experiences and even the framework in which they occurred remained obscured. The experience of American women was even more vaguely understood.⁹ The three essays in this volume on the impact of the war on women and blacks in southern society expand the boundaries of our present knowledge. Mary Beth Norton probes the trauma of war for southern women, black and white, rich and poor, loyalist and rebel. The devastating effects of the war, she contends, caused southerners to bend all efforts toward rebuilding colonial society and more firmly securing it on a foundation of slavery. The result was an unusually confining role for southern women at a time when a more independent concept of republican women was emerging in the North. In Norton’s view, the seeds of the apotheosized antebellum lady were sown in the Revolution and its aftermath. Michael Mullin utilizes a comparative, hemispheric perspective to analyze two types of slave resistance in an era of revolutions. Examining African uprisings and Creole conspiracies as they erupted in the British Caribbean islands and North American colonies, Mullin attributes different black responses to the Western world’s revolutions to varying rates of acculturation, African ethnicity, urbanization, and the nature of plantation management by blacks as well as whites. Peter H. Wood turns his attention more narrowly to the Negro experience in revolutionary South Carolina. Wood asserts that South Carolina blacks were taking care of business in several ways while white patriots were confronting the crown and Parliament. Wood sees subtle but revealing links between white demands for liberty and slave unrest.

The mere asking of questions about the social and political origins of the Revolution, its revolutionary character, or its impact on southern society, therefore, represents a new departure in southern historiography. By urging a group of distinguished revolutionary historians to explore these areas, the designers of the symposium were well aware that no new synthesis was likely to emerge. They, in fact, believed—as did the authors of the resultant essays—that the time had come to move beyond the limited parameters of southern historiography on the Revolution and to launch a discussion that long has been overdue. If historians and other students of southern history are to advance beyond the porous syntheses of the past, the carefully researched, though disparate essays in this collection should serve as a fillip to further scholarship.

We wish to thank the participating institutions that made the symposium possible and especially Thad W. Tate, Director of the Institute of Early American History and Culture; Don Higginbotham and William S. Powell of The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Bernard Wishy and Rudolph Pate of North Carolina State University; and Sydney Nathans of Duke University. Our colleagues and friends at the Division of Archives and History have offered encouragement and support at each stage of the symposium and book, and to them we express our gratitude.

Raleigh, North Carolina                                          Jeffrey J. Crow

August 1976                                                               Larry E. Tise

Notes

1. One of the nine historians invited to participate in the symposium, Marvin L. Michael Kay, read a paper that was written in cooperation with Lorin Lee Cary.

2. The most important study of this nature charting the impact of the Revolution on slavery, established religion, the rise of democracy, and the eroding of deferential social practices is Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). A subsequent study with considerably greater social analysis is Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969).

3. John R. Alden, The South in the Revolution, 1763–1789 (Baton Rouge, La., 1957). The best overview of the historiography of the revolutionary South, though somewhat dated, remains Charles G. Sellers, Jr., ‘The American Revolution: Southern Founders of a National Tradition,’ in Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick, eds., Writing Southern History: Essays in Historiography in Honor of Fletcher M. Green (Baton Rouge, La., 1965), pp. 38–66. Two excellent historiographical essays on the American Revolution, which include southern studies, are Esmond Wright, ed., Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (Chicago, 1966), pp. 11–62; and Jack P. Greene, Revolution, Confederation, and Constitution, 1763–1787, in William H. Cartwright and Richard L. Watson, Jr., eds., The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture (Washington, D.C., 1973).

4. Early national and antebellum historians recently have been the subject of a number of studies. See, for example, John Hope Franklin, The North, the South, and the American Revolution, journal of American History 62 (June 1975): 5–23; Lawrence H. Leder, ed., Historians of Nature and Man’s Nature: Early Nationalist Historians (New York, 1973); and Arthur H. Shaffer, The Politics of History: Writing the History of the American Revolution (Chicago, 1975).

5. Most studies of the revolutionary South have been at the state level, though the South occasionally is included in much broader analyses of the period. See, for instance, Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J., 1965), and The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1763–1778 (Madison, Wise, 1967); and Elisha P. Douglass, Rebels and Democrats: The Struggle for Equal Political Rights and Majority Rule during the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955). Jack P. Greene provides the fullest discussion of the southern colonies in The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963). Relevant state or regional studies include: Charles A. Barker, The Background of the Revolution in Maryland (New Haven, 1940); Philip A. Crowl, Maryland during and after the Revolution (Baltimore, 1943); Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore, 1973); Hamilton J. Eckenrode, The Revolution in Virginia (New York, 1916); Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia, 1705–1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing, Mich., 1964); Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952); Thad W. Tate, The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia: Britain’s Challenge to Virginia’s Ruling Class, 1763–1776, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 19 (July 1962): 323–43; Hugh T. Lefler and William S. Powell, Colonial North Carolina: A History (New York, 1973); Charles G. Sellers, Jr., Making a Revolution: The North Carolina Whigs, 1765–1775, in J. Carlyle Sitterson, ed., Studies in Southern History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957); Kenneth Coleman, The American Revolution in Georgia, 1763–1789 (Athens, Ga., 1958); William W. Abbot, The Royal Governors of Georgia, 1754–1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959); and Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (New York, 1965).

6. The seeming obsession of southern historians with biographical and local studies or with battlefield strategies has largely precluded the emergence of studies examining socioeconomic aspects of the colonial militia, attitudes toward a standing army, or the social impact of the revolutionary war. One of the best of the political-military works is Hugh F. Rankin’s The North Carolina Continentals (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971). John Shy’s Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965) opened the field for a different approach to the military history of the war as a whole. Don Higginbotham’s The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789 (New York, 1971) is perhaps the most important book on the subject.

7. See especially Paul H. Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats: A Study in British Revolutionary Policy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964); Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The American Adventure (Boston, 1970); and Ronald Hoffman, The ‘Disaffected’ in the Revolutionary South, in Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, 111., 1976), pp. 273–316.

8. The impact of the southern war on Indians is not addressed in this book. A number of studies have been done on the subject but usually from a Euro-American perspective. See, for example, John R. Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1944); and James H. O’Donnell III, Southern Indians in the American Revolution (Knoxville, Tenn., 1973).

9. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961); Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge, England, 1974); and Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975). On women, see Joan Hoff Wilson, The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution, in Young, ed., American Revolution, pp. 383–445.

Part One

Social and Political Origins of the Revolution in the South

1

Early Revolutionary Leaders in the South and the Problem of Southern Distinctiveness

by Pauline Maier

The temptation to read mid-nineteenth-century assumptions back into the period before independence, to see the colonial South as a distinctive and separate section of North America, remains clear and present in any effort to examine the experience of the Revolution in North Carolina and the South. As a result it is particularly important to define how the South was distinct during the revolutionary period, before differential population growths, the disappearance of slavery in the North, and divergent patterns of economic development made the division between those sections more marked and before a southern myth emerged to separate the world of Cavaliers from one of Yankees.¹ This concern is as relevant to a study of the early champions of resistance to Britain as to that of other aspects of southern revolutionary history. Were southern revolutionary leaders different from those in the middle colonies and New England? If so, what was the nature of their differences? The answers are interesting not just for what they tell us about early revolutionary leadership in the South, but for their implications as to the place of the South in the nation both during the revolutionary era and in the century that bridged the War for Independence and the Civil War.

The revolutionaries who concern us here are not the founding fathers who won fame in designing and establishing the American republic during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, who have been called the young men of the Revolution.² They are a prior generation of Americans, born in the 1720s and 1730s, whose major contribution was in spearheading colonial resistance to Britain four decades later. The men emphasized here, preeminent leaders of the opposition to Britain in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland, with one exception, led crowds against supporters of the Stamp Act. They characteristically favored the nonimportation associations that answered the Townshend duties of 1767 and opposed the importation of taxed East India Company tea. Above all, they joined and often led the extralegal organizations that institutionalized resistance to Britain. They were, in short, organizers, committeemen, congressmen—magistrates in what gradually became American revolutionary government. They constituted, as do all leadership groups, a minority and by definition an elite. But their power derived from the support of other colonists and reflected the appeal of their policies, their skill as popular politicians, and, to some extent, the continuing tendency of late colonial Americans to defer toward men of family or fortune for leadership.

In South Carolina, Christopher Gadsden (1724–1805) emerged during the Stamp Act crisis as a spokesman for Charleston’s Sons of Liberty, an organization composed largely of local artisans. Later a leading advocate of nonimportation, he was identified as one of the Tribunes of the people by Lieutenant Governor William Bull, and remained the chief figure at every meeting under the ‘Liberty Tree’ through the 1760s and 1770s until the final break with Britain. Not all his service was without doors: he served nearly thirty years in the South Carolina assembly, beginning in 1757. He was a conspicuous member of the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, participated in the South Carolina Provincial Congress, and was one of his state’s first four delegates to the Continental Congress, which he left in January 1776 to assume command as senior colonel of South Carolina’s military forces.³

North Carolina’s resistance movement centered in the Cape Fear region, and its preeminent leader was Cornelius Harnett (1723–1781), who served as spokesman for an uprising at Brunswick in February 1766 that demanded the release of ships seized by British customsmen for lack of stamped papers. He was also a ringleader of those daring North Carolinians who in July 1775 set fire to British-held Fort Johnston. His main contributions to the colonial cause were made as chairman of the Cape Fear Sons of Liberty and of the region’s nonimportation association of 1770, as presiding officer of both the Wilmington and the New Hanover County committees of safety, as a delegate to the provincial and later the Continental Congress, and as chairman of the North Carolina Provincial Council as well as of its successor, the provincial Council of Safety. These last offices made him in all but name the first chief executive of the newborn State.⁴

Aside from a clique of Sons of Liberty in Norfolk, Virginia’s resistance movement centered in the Northern Neck, where initiative often was taken by Richard Henry Lee (17321794). Fully as much as other resistance leaders, Lee proved willing to act out of doors, as when he arranged a demonstration against stampman George Mercer at Westmoreland Courthouse on 24 September 1765, or when he organized the Westmoreland Association of February 1766 that forced a local merchant, Archibald Ritchie, to renounce any intention of clearing vessels on stamped paper. Lee served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and in the provincial revolutionary conventions. Unlike Patrick Henry, whom Thomas Jefferson described as lazy in reading and committee work, at best a silent and almost unmeddling congressman, Lee proved to be one of the busiest members of the Continental Congress, just as he had been the work-horse of the Assembly in Virginia. Within a four-month period, for example, he served on eighteen different congressional committees. Finally, like Harnett, who consistently complained of the fatigue and financial losses incurred by service at Congress, Lee panted for retirement from the most distressing pressure of business he had ever conceived of, much less experienced.⁵

In Maryland no one leader emerged above all others throughout the decade before independence. Some individuals who gained prominence in the Stamp Act resistance retained importance into the mid-1770s: the Annapolis lawyers William Paca and Samuel Chase, for example, or William Lux, who helped transform Baltimore’s mechanical company, a civic organization that included both merchants and tradesmen, into the Baltimore Sons of Liberty. Chase organized local mechanics and small tradesmen not just against the Stamp Act, but against the corrupt city government of Annapolis, thereby winning the mayor’s and aldermen’s denunciation as a busy restless Incendiary—a Ringleader of Mobs—a foul mouth’d and inflaming Son of Discord and Passion—a common Disturber of the public Tranquility. When a cohesive revolutionary movement formed in Maryland, it centered instead around Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737–1832), whose prominence dated from his First Citizen letters, published in the Maryland Gazette during 1773. Although his correspondence reveals that Carroll was a strong opponent of the Stamp Act, he had far greater reservations on the use of direct popular force than did Lee, Gadsden, or even his own colleague Chase. Disqualified from office during the colonial period because of his Catholicism, Carroll first appeared in a political body during 1774 when he attended the Maryland Convention, but he became in rapid succession a member of the provincial Committee of Correspondence and Committee of Safety and of the Annapolis Committee of Correspondence. He, too, served in the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence.⁶

Contemporaries regularly compared southern leaders to their counterparts in the North. Josiah Quincy, Jr., the Massachusetts patriot, once described Harnett as the Samuel Adams of North Carolina (except in point of fortune). After hearing Christopher Gadsden speak at the Continental Congress, Silas Deane of Connecticut concluded that Gadsden had if anything outdone Deane’s neighbors at their own game. Mr. Gadsden leaves all New England Sons of Liberty far behind in the extremity of his devotion to the cause, he wrote.⁷ The constituencies of southern leaders also were much like those of their counterparts further north. Harnett’s following was somewhat unusual in that it included the principal gentlemen and freeholders of the Cape Fear region, and Lee’s Westmoreland Association was signed by members of several leading families of Virginia’s Northern Neck. But the tradesmen and shopkeepers who followed Chase in Annapolis, Lux in Baltimore, and Gadsden in Charleston were much like the men who lent their strength to the Sons of Liberty in Boston and New York. Nor were the southerners’ techniques characteristically more genteel than those of northerners. Stamp supporter Archibald Ritchie was so harassed in Virginia that one of his opponents feared Ritchie would commit suicide and so deprive patriots of the Satisfaction of seeing the Wretch who so insolently defied his Country, mortified. Nine years later the young James Madison considered Virginians significantly more spirited than some northerners. A fellow was lately tarred & feathered for treating [one] of our county committees with disre[s]pect, he wrote his friend William Bradford, while in NY. they insult the whole Colony and Continent with impunity!⁸ Finally, southerners won the wrath of the British in equal measure with their northern peers. Just as John Hancock and Samuel Adams were excepted from General Thomas Gage’s Proclamation of Amnesty at Boston in 1774, Cornelius Harnett and his colleague Robert Howe were excluded from Sir Henry Clinton’s proclamation of May 1776 that offered pardon to all North Carolinians who would lay down arms and submit to British law. Two years earlier, Harnett and three other North Carolina patriots were identified by Governor Josiah Martin as persons who have marked themselves out... by their unremitted labours to promote sedition and rebellion here from the beginnings of the discontents in America to this time and who stand foremost among the patrons of revolt and anarchy⁹—words used with only minor variations by loyalists and British officials throughout the colonies to describe Harnett’s fellows in the American cause.

The marked differences between individual southerners within this first generation of revolutionary leaders makes more exact comparisons with their northern counterparts unnecessary. If the existence of a typical southern leader is suspect at best, that of a leadership distinctive to the South is still more unlikely. Even in temperament southern leaders were notably diverse. The group included the ardent Gadsden, whose pungent language Josiah Quincy, Jr., described as plain, blunt, hot, and incorrect, though very sensible (Gadsden once suggested that the British considered the Americans a parcel of very tame asses), but also Harnett, a man of dedication and reserve, as sparing of words for contemporaries, it seems, as for posterity. It encompassed Chase, big, fun-loving, uncouth, unthinking . . . and quick to anger along with Carroll, aloof and possessed of a remarkable self-discipline forged through years of dealing with his outspoken father. And it included Lee, Spartan in prose and body, perhaps as complex a man as any in the revolutionary movement. Educational backgrounds also were dissimilar. Some were schooled or otherwise prepared for their occupations in America, others in Europe. Harnett, Lux, and Chase apparently did not study abroad. Gadsden was schooled in England for a few years before being apprenticed at age sixteen to a merchant in Philadelphia; Lee attended Wakefield Academy in Yorkshire until age nineteen. Carroll had perhaps the most extensive formal education of any American, attending Jesuit schools in Flanders, Paris, and Bourges before reading law in London, a task that required separation from his family in Maryland from the ages of eleven to twenty-seven.¹⁰

The level of wealth among these revolutionary leaders ranged widely, although most were either in, or near enough to aspire to, the upper orders of colonial society. Their different occupations dramatize the economic diversity of the late colonial South. Southern revolutionary leadership included men on the make like Chase, the son of a debt-ridden Episcopalian minister, himself a lawyer who specialized in defending debtors. Gadsden, a merchant, was better born than Chase but also was upward mobile: he wrote during the Stamp Act crisis that he had not a large but... a clear Estate, and later built one of the largest wharves in prosperous Charleston. William Lux, by contrast, was a dry goods merchant who expanded a business inherited from his father by acquiring vessels, establishing branch stores, and opening a rope walk. Cornelius Harnett inherited a fortune once estimated at £7,000 from his father, a self-made Irish immigrant whose profits were won, it seems, largely through land speculation. But the elder Harnett had been one of the leaders in the industrial development of the Cape Fear section, operating an inn, ferry, and sawmills. His son was similarly involved in diverse economic activities, including a partnership in a local distillery.¹¹

That early southern revolutionary leaders often were involved in commercial activities suggests that if there was a typical southern revolutionary leader, he was not, as the stereotype goes, a gentleman planter. Major planters were, of course, often deeply involved in commerce, selling not only the products of their own lands but those of their neighbors and importing products for the use of planters with smaller holdings. But Lee and Carroll, both members of the planter class, were so deeply involved in activities beyond the plantation as to make any simple categorization of them as planters extremely problematic. Carroll, the sole heir to one of the largest fortunes in America (in 1764 his father listed assets worth nearly £89,000 sterling), was given a ten-thousand-acre estate when he completed his education and returned to Maryland. He served, however, less as a planter than as the manager of several Carroll plantations, as an entrepreneur engaged in marketing Carroll products, putting out loans, carrying on land speculations, and, above all, presiding over the family’s substantial interest in the Baltimore Iron Works. Richard Henry Lee was a landlord whose livelihood came from rents paid for the use of his land and slaves. He himself was in fact a tenant. His home in Westmoreland County, Chantilly, stood on land leased from his eldest brother, Philip Ludwell Lee. Although Lee was committed to the interests of planters by tradition and by family, he was also concerned with the state of the Atlantic trade since he managed the estate of his younger brother, William, a merchant based in London.¹²

There were few if any equivalents elsewhere in the resistance movement of Carroll’s fortune or Lee’s family. But social position did not free Carroll or Lee from the anxieties over rank characteristic of the upward mobile. Lee’s fears were particularly acute. Though born into one of the first families of Virginia, he was chronically