African American Life in South Carolina's Upper Piedmont, 1780-1900

By W. J. Megginson and Orville Vernon Burton

A rich portrait of Black life in South Carolina's Upstate

Encyclopedic in scope, yet intimate in detail, African American Life in South Carolina's Upper Piedmont, 1780–1900, delves into the richness of community life in a setting where Black residents were relatively few, notably disadvantaged, but remarkably cohesive. W. J. Megginson shifts the conventional study of African Americans in South Carolina from the much-examined Lowcountry to a part of the state that offered a quite different existence for people of color. In Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties—occupying the state's northwest corner—he finds an independent, brave, and stable subculture that persevered for more than a century in the face of political and economic inequities. Drawing on little-used state and county denominational records, privately held research materials, and sources available only in local repositories, Megginson brings to life African American society before, during, and after the Civil War. Orville Vernon Burton, Judge Matthew J. Perry Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at Clemson University and University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar Emeritus at the University of Illinois, provides a new foreword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643363394

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African American Life in South Carolina’s Upper Piedmont

1780–1900

African American Life in South Carolina’s Upper Piedmont

1780–1900

W. J. MEGGINSON

© 2006 University of South Carolina

Foreword © 2022 University of South Carolina

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2006

Paperback and ebook editions published in Columbia, South Carolina,

by the University of South Carolina Press, 2022

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov

ISBN 978-1-64336-338-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-339-4 (ebook)

Front cover photographs: (top) Ruthie Guyton, courtesy of the Pendleton District

Commission; (bottom) Vance family, courtesy of the Black Heritage in the Upper

Piedmont of South Carolina Collection

To THE AFRICAN AMERICANS of Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties, who persisted and persevered; to those whose names and stories are included here; to those omitted for lack of space; and to others whose existence has been forgotten

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Foreword by Vernon Burton

Acknowledgments

Editorial Note

Prologue: Milly Dupree

Introduction: A Piedmont Setting

PART 1 The Setting, the Peoples, and Their Work

Introduction to Part 1

1The Early Years, 1784–1810

2Piedmont Peoples, Their Environment, and Their Work

3The Puzzling Free Persons of Color

4Those Who Were Free Persons of Color

PART 2 Interactions between Black and White

Introduction to Part 2

5Laws, Courts, and Resistance

6Churches, a Shared Setting

7Ambivalent Interactions

PART 3 African American Subculture and Life on the Plantation

Introduction to Part 3

8Carving out a Niche

9Families, Mortality, and Names

10 Material and Emotional Conditions

PART 4 Transitions

Introduction to Part 4

11 War Years, the Home Front, and African Americans

12 Reconstruction’s First Months, 1865

13 Reconstruction Evolves, 1866–68

14 Panorama of Black Families in Freedom

PART 5 Community Building: Organizations, Concepts, and Opportunities

Introduction to Part 5

15 Black Political Activity, 1867–75

16 Black Politics Curtailed, 1876–90

17 Community Building: Churches and Schools

18 Black Communities, Town and Rural

19 Anderson’s Urban Community

20 Divergent Views of Blacks

PART 6 Changing Conditions, for Better, for Worse

Introduction to Part 6

21 Societal Attitudes and Oppression

22 Political and Economic Subjugation

23 1900: One Year in the Life of a Community

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Selected Bibliography: An Essay

Index of People

Index of Subjects

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

Milly Dupree

Frances Dupree

Greenville laundress, 1899

Thompson family tools

Reuben and Martha Thompson and seven children

Charcoal drawing of Patsy, a cook

Runaway advertisement

Pass forged by Gilbert, a slave, 1842

Pass issued for Henry in 1830

Easter Reid

Nancy Legree

Ledger of John C. Calhoun’s slaves, 1854

Keowee plantation ledger (typescript), 1857

Batting tools for making quilts

Stone cabins on John C. Calhoun plantation

Lucinda’s cemetery marker

Aunt Becky Reed

Harrison Wiggins’s 1924 pension application

Dr. William Pickens

Jane Hunter

Grandpa (George) Scott

Thomas and Frances Fruster

Ku Klucks warning, 1868

Petition for a governor’s pardon, 1870

Silver Spring Baptist Church

Kings Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Pendleton

Kings Chapel AME stewardesses

1870 Teacher’s Reports

Vineland school, Pickens County

Railroad workers: Prince Nash

Gassaway bedroom suite

Middle-class family furnishings

Cotton hauled to the Greenville market, 1899

Sidney Burt’s blacksmith shop artifacts

P. S. Little’s advertisements for school and shoe work

Masonic regalia, early 1900s

Von Hasseln 1897 map of Anderson County

Addison’s family cabin, 1899

Addison cabin interior view

Susie Haywood

Workers building a road near Anderson

Sanborn Fire Insurance Company 1901 map of Anderson

Anderson street scene, early 1900s

Racist stereotypes

Seneca Institute trustees

Chain gang of prisoners building a public road

Next to last legal hanging in Pickens Co., ca. 1910–20

Harrison Haywood home

Jack Carter’s 1881 mortgage of cotton

J. S. Fowler’s stables, Anderson

Sidney Burt’s family, Pendleton, 1902

Terrel Wright’s 1906 mortgage of his cow

Hunter General Store charge account

Convict labor at Clemson Agricultural College

Ruthie Guyton

Maps

Pendleton District’s location within the state

Pendleton District area, 1784–1850

Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties, 1868–1900

TABLES

1.1 Density and Average Sizes of Slave Holdings by Region, 1860

1.1 Pendleton District Slave Holdings, 1790–1820

2.1 Population and Holdings: Pendleton, Anderson, and Pickens Districts

2.2 Taliaferro-Simpson Families and Slaves

2.3 Thompson Family Genealogy

2.4 Samuel Earle’s Slaves and Their Occupations

5.1 Capital Offenses: Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens, 1784–1865

6.1 Slave and FPC Church Members, ca. 1860

6.2 Church Minutes Consulted

9.1 Calhoun and Colhoun Family Genealogies (Selective), 1750–1865

9.2 Changes (Selected Years) on the Keowee Plantation

14.1 Comparison of AOP Population in Four Censuses

14.2 Black People Living in AOP, 1870, and Born beyond South Carolina

14.3 Distribution of Black People by Household Types, 1870

14.4 Skilled Crafts and Professions, 1870

16.1 Eligible Voters and Votes Cast by Race and by Party, 1876

17.1 Estimates of Black Church Members, 1900

17.2 Official State Superintendent of Education Reports

18.1 Town Populations and Occupations, 1880

19.1 Anderson City, 1880: Distribution of Black Occupations

19.2 Distribution of Black Occupations, 1880 and 1900

19.3 Analysis of Black Households and Population, 1870–1900

21.1 Lynchings in Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens: A Tentative List

21.2 Alleged Lynchings in Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens

FOREWORD

W. J. MEGGINSON DEVOTED a scholarly career to this important study of African Americans in three South Carolina counties, Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens, and the history profession, especially historians of South Carolina are beneficiaries. Most studies of Black Carolinians have focused on the South Carolina Lowcountry, many with a concentration in the colonial and early American eras. Megginson’s meticulously researched and well-written narrative balances our understanding of African American life by focusing on the Upcountry regions. Moreover, this book is one of the few studies that traces and analyzes Black lives and families from enslavement, across the Civil War divide, and through the long Civil War and Reconstruction into the twentieth century. This study of African American life in the Upper Piedmont is comprehensive in breadth and depth. It reflects an amount of careful historical research that equals, if it does not exceed, any local or community study. Megginson’s book enriches the quest to write history from the bottom up and ties it to an approach we now call deep empiricism. Before microhistory became popular, this book illustrated the importance for a return to the archives and the messiness, complexity, and confounding nature of the past, and the essentialness for the close study of the choices of ordinary Americans.

Explaining how so many voices have been omitted from our history, theoretician Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that voices outside of the making of sources, making of archives, making of narratives, and finally making of history itself works to silence African American voices, among others, from those four processes.¹ Megginson answers Trouillot’s charge to the production of history. He gives voice to the African Americans of three counties in the Upper Piedmont whose stories have been silenced by South Carolina’s years of refusal to allow African American scholars into white-only archives and lack of interest in collecting African Americans’s history. Megginson brings together disparate sources and analyzes them in a penetrating way. He masterfully uses aspects of oral history, digital history, census data, material culture, and genealogy; he carefully mines wills and estate records, manuscript collections, and secondary sources to create a narrative that gives depth to the lives of Jane Hunter, Ruthie Guyson, the Thompson family, and many others.

For the novice historian or the genealogist, this book is a blueprint for writing community, institutional or family histories. For the historian, it is a roadmap to sources with which they may be unfamiliar. For public historians it should be required reading. Megginson’s interviews with African Americans from the threecounty area are a literal treasure trove for further research and analysis. The invaluable interviews are achieved and in the process of being made available digitally from the Clemson University archives.²

Megginson is knowledgeable about the secondary literature as well as deed books, church records, all manner of reports, histories of families, newspapers, and more. Yet, the reader does not get bogged down in minutiae. Megginson tells real stories of real people. What was Patsy Adams buying at the store? How was blacksmith Tenus Winston occupying his time? What did thirteen-year-old hotel room cleaner Jane Hunter do to protect herself from sexual exploitation? We meet individuals and families, learn how they lived day by day, and see how their lives played out in the larger concepts of US history.

The time period covered spans from the colonial era to the twentieth century, 1784–1900. Antebellum years are covered in three parts, ten chapters total. For each part Megginson has written a cogent introduction. Part 1 describes the geography and details the life of free people of color, especially the kinds of work they did. Part 2 covers the interactions of white and Black people in courts, churches, and the community. Part 3 details enslaved life on the plantation. Megginson analyzes naming patterns and mortality rates as well as material and emotional circumstances.

In Part 4 Megginson discusses Transitions, which includes the Civil War and early Reconstruction. The Civil War marked no huge watershed; life, hard before and after, evolved rather than turned about face. Part 5 details various communitybuilding efforts during Reconstruction, such as organizations, churches, schools, and political activities. Because Megginson looks at the local situation, he is able to avoid gross generalization, and one of his chapters analyzes divergent views within the African American community, something few scholars have attempted. The last part of his book, Changing Conditions, for Better, for Worse, brings the story up to 1900. Sad but true, this history is the story of oppression and subjugation in South Carolina.

His work on Reconstruction is excellent, and Megginson is one of the few historians who correctly brings discussion of Reconstruction up to 1900. Megginson delineates the phases of Reconstruction without the usual tendency to assume that it would all work out poorly in the end. Because much of Reconstruction is still contested territory, his specificity of both place and context serves to document the successes of the most progressive period of South Carolina’s history.

Only on this local level can we clearly see all the shifts in political alliances, the nitty-gritty party politics, factions, and fragmentation. Megginson’s analysis of election results goes beyond our common conception of Democrats and Republicans. He shows the various factions within each party and discusses the Reform slate, Radical ticket, and New Departure Democrats. He shows how a split in the Black vote meant no African American would be elected. In area elections in 1870, 1872, and 1874, no Democrats ran. Instead, whites ran under other labels: Reform, Independent, or Conservative. The common refrain of corruption during Reconstruction has become part of the historical trope. Megginson’s analysis offers the correction to the simple acceptance or rejection of that trope. He deals with the real stuff of bribery, sleaze, and fraud, as well as the very common rhetorical deployment of corruption simply to foment discontent.

In Megginson’s examination of Reconstruction in this piedmont area, he examines the local development of leadership. He emphasizes individual activity, and he documents widespread African American involvement in political life, broadly construed. Megginson joins other historians in underscoring the successes of Reconstruction in African American voting, office holders, and active petitioning for redress of grievances. Political mobilization was amazing. In Anderson County, about 90 percent of eligible African American men voted, in Pickens-Oconee, nearly 100 percent.

He includes some white allies who worked with Black citizens in creating a new system of racial justice. He found white and Black people cooperating to build churches and schools. According to Megginson, White cooperation during the 1870s was closer than assumed by many people who read back into this era attitudes from a period of greater racial polarization (p. 293). He cites church members specifically from the Presbyterian and Baptist churches, but examples are plentiful. Megginson avoided the callous terms overused in Reconstruction historiography; supportive northerners who came south to help are outsiders rather than carpetbaggers. In his discussion of educational improvements and increased literacy, Megginson demonstrates the hopes and aspirations of this cohesive community.

Megginson found that local groups affiliated with the National Grange began appearing in fall 1873. By summer 1874 Anderson County had established twenty-five chapters of the Grange; Oconee and Pickens had fewer. His discussion of the Grange makes it clear that the group was not yet a political organization in 1870 but was antecedent to the Populists, or the People’s Party. Although Grange policy forbade groups from political involvements, Megginson feels sure that as Grange members met for networking, education, and social activities, they also had political discussions.

Critical to the criminal justice system, fair juries need to include peers. While African Americans continued on jury pools in the 1880s, few actually served. Coroners’ inquests were the exception to this rule; county officials included African Americans whenever the deceased was African American. The difference between all-white juries and integrated coroners’ inquests complicates our understanding of both the end of Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow. African Americans continued as part of the judicial system at least until 1900 as part of corners’ inquests and would expand their use of the judicial system for later twentieth-century victories in South Carolina courts, most famously in the Briggs v. Elliot case where a white Charleston federal judge would be the first to rule that separate but equal was wrong. This Lowcountry South Carolina case was the first, and would become the main case, that would be argued by the great Black lawyer Thurgood Marshall in the combined cases that became Brown v. Board in 1954.

Megginson’s examination of clubs and lodges revealed that the African American masons in the town of Abel named their lodge after Benjamin Banneker. How they might have learned about this Black mathematician of the eighteenth century is something Megginson surmises in the footnote. He searches out clues for how specific ideas began to be discussed locally or how wide an audience they reached. He also looks at baseball games, pool halls, camp meetings, and picnics. Religious music was important in many venues. He found that many local celebrations had bands and that the community enjoyed outdoor music. Nevertheless, he found that Little contemporary information survives about black music of the era (324).

The story of Reconstruction includes the opposition of the white population. Always the majority, always in control, they nevertheless felt the need to reassert total domination. The year 1874 marked dramatic alterations in local politics, as well as in the state of South Carolina, and Megginson found a palpable sense of white momentum, determination, and effectiveness (p. 274). It was by no means inevitable that whites would resort to lawlessness, but they did. Their willingness to go beyond lawful means to rely on intimidation and murder was effective in curbing activism, especially in 1876. White poll watchers recorded the name of any African American voter, and then the infamous night riders paid that man’s family a visit. Murder and assault were common; arson was also a weapon against activist African Americans and their white supporters. Sometimes white neighbors would help the Black victims of fires, if they agreed to vote Democratic. The guilty, murderers and arsonists, were known and never punished. Megginson’s book illustrates the endemic terror in the lives of African Americans.

As Jim Crow set in, whites instituted literacy tests, residency requirements, and poll taxes to keep African Americans from voting. These discriminatory measures did not apply to primary elections. These elections, all white by statute, were the only elections that mattered in a now one-party system. The 1880s saw nastier racial epithets, and lynching increased. Megginson points out that For over two hundred years South Carolina as colony and state had no law prohibiting interracial marriage or no legal definition of ‘Negro’ (p. 392). The year 1879 saw the first antimiscegenation law. New laws also defined Negro as anyone with one-eighth or more of negro blood. Another technique to eliminate Black voters was to remove the African American section of town from the official town limits, that is, a de-annexation.

Megginson does not allow an easy summary of this nadir in race relations. He complicated his own dismal portrait by addressing that more African Americans were teachers, ministers, and even businessmen; more African American families owned land than ever before; more were literate, more pursued education beyond the local, one-room school; some Republicans still voted in federal elections into the 1900s; and some occasionally served as town officials.

Megginson deplores sharecropping: Sharecropping, a continuing fundamental condition, was in many ways more devastating than the new 1895 constitution (407). But there is more work to be done here by ambitious scholars. How did sharecropping develop? Looking at the devastating poverty of the sharecroppers is not enough. It did not have to be that way. It was the lack of political clout that effected one-sided lien laws. Nevertheless, he shows that the dependency on white jobs, houses, and general stores is painfully clear to historians studying it, as well as the African Americans who had to experience it.

African Americans needed jobs, and whites were the employers. Even poor whites could afford to hire the even poorer African Americans, and Megginson found that some white tenant farmers hired Black laborers. A larger percentage of whites had African Americans working for them in 1900 than during slavery.

Several other items bear mentioning. Megginson looks at persistence and patterns of out-migration, of which there was very little. He does not discuss gender as a theme, but found that because men dominated politics, it was difficult to determine women’s attitudes (279). Women felt safer in towns, and some of the migration patterns were from countryside to town. In towns were larger churches and more schools, and, for women, some job opportunities beyond agriculture.

Megginson contributes to many important historiographical debates. For example, since Daniel Patrick Moynihan provoked the 1960s debate about a Black Matriarchy, historians have argued about the strength and nature of the African American family.³ Moynihan followed African American scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier, who argued that the familes of African Americans were more often headed by women, that this contributed to instability of the Black family, and resulted from the enslaved not having had the rights to legal mariage. In most of the historiographical debates joined in this book, Megginson provides data and statistical analysis, as well as the specificity of place and hard detailed evidence. Megginson found that African American families lived in two-parent households, a continuation of the strong families developed during slavery.

Megginson’s Selected Bibliography is extensive, readable, and very usable for scholars or keen history enthusiasts. His use of primary and secondary sources is appropriate, and the bibliography is a model of how to write local history. His book includes an index of people as well as of subjects, and Megginson’s illustrations add to the story and the interest level. Twenty-four easy-to-read tables are useful and add clarity to statistics. The tables include information such as Eligible Voters and Votes Cast by Race and by Party, 1876 (see Table 16.1) and Distribution of Black Occupations, 1880–1900, which chronicles location, gender, and classification of work (see Table 19.2).

This study is a great boon to historians and also an inspiration to those interested in African American genealogy. This book includes deft analysis and significant, overarching themes. The research undergirding this book is astonishing in its depth. Megginson makes history fresh and challenging. As a writer of history, he has a keen eye for large issues, telling details, and revealing quotations. It is a needed addition to the historiography of the African American experience, and to South Carolina history.

ORVILLE VERNON BURTON

Clemson, South Carolina

January 2022

1. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 28.

2. Black Heritage in the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina Collection (Mss 282), Special Collections and Archives, Clemson University.

3. Orville Vernon Burton, Revisiting the Myth of the Black Matriarchy, in Burton and Ray Arsenault, eds., Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of F. Sheldon Hackney (Montgomery, AL: New South Books, 2013), 119–65.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS WORK EMERGES in part from ongoing conversations with several people. They include Rik Booream, Vennie Deas-Moore, Elsie Goins, Will Goins, Stefan Goodwin, Fred C. Holder Jr., Anne McCuen, John Middleton, John Hammond Moore, Anna Reid, Peggy Rich, Anne Sheriff, and Dot and Bruce Yandle. All of these have also read portions of the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions and insights, as has been true of our dialog over fifteen years as well. Among these, Baker, Deas-Moore, Goodwin, Holder, and Moore have read extensive portions, as has Kenneth Whitney. Deas-Moore, Goodwin, and Holder have been involved, helpful, and supportive since I began this work in 1989 and have endured many inquiries, pleadings, and belabored stories of the latest findings. Bruce Baker, also reading much of the manuscript, has shared his insights, wide-ranging knowledge, and literary skills. These all deserve enormous thanks and credit for having read chapters in draft form, asking probing questions, and helping get it more coherently presented.

I am especially indebted to Fred Holder, John Middleton, Peggy Rich, and Anne Sheriff for supplying me with compiled data in electronic format: 1790 census; 1850 and 1860 slave censuses; 1850 Oconee County census; 1867 tax records; Pickens County teachers’ certifications; and black Baptist memberships, clergy, and baptisms. Without this assistance, I would never have used those materials as extensively.

Others who have read portions and shared comments include Emma G. Anderson, Allen Ballard, William Brice, Philip Chancellor, Chris Elam, Willard Gatewood, Carl Gilmore, Gloria Hipple, J. B. Howell, Joy King, Charles Martin, Patrick McCawley, Jo McConnell, Don McKale, Joann Mickens, Elizabeth Sharpe Overman, Annie Patrick, Jesse Pennington, Heather Pritchard, Donna Roper, Ann Russell, Allen Stokes, Dean Wagner, Royce Walters, Anne Webster, and Jerry West. All have been gracious, helpful, and supportive as they found errors and gaps and provided compliments and support. Collectively they taught me much about writing and editing.

Among those who were especially helpful in the 1989–90 Black Heritage in the Upper Piedmont project and on later occasions are Sid Durham, Yolanda Harrell, Susan Hiott, Laurel Horton, Al Norris, and Dennis Taylor. Two colleagues from other projects, Pat Pritchard with his Tenus Maxwell Cemetery endeavor and Wendy Marshall, former director of Piedmont Harmony, have been friends and fountains of much insight and knowledge. Steve West supplied helpful materials from his research, and discussions with him sharpened some of my insights.

Many other people over a period of time have discussed this work with me, answered letters, helped find answers, or otherwise assisted. And many friends, relatives, and colleagues—including those mentioned by name here—have listened, usually patiently, as I talked repeatedly about the project over many years. My entire perspective has been shaped, less immediately, by friends, acquaintances, and strangers who have sensitized me over many years to a variety of minority problems, including class, disabilities, ethnicity, gender, poverty, religion, and sexual orientation.

Working with the University of South Carolina Press has been cordial and pleasurable. Acquisitions editor Alexander Moore has been invaluable in bringing this project to fruition through prodding, incisive, and constructive guidance. He believed in the project before almost anyone else and helped make this a much better book than it was a manuscript. Readers may thank him for its being one-third smaller. Managing editor Bill Adams has patiently and skillfully transformed the manuscript, photographs, and tables into a handsome book. Marketing namager Jonathan Haupt has then capably publicized the book’s existence and significance.

African American families in Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties have shared generously their time, memories, and photographs. Many discussions and visits with them have enriched my work and understanding. Through those contacts and membership in the Pendleton Foundation for Black History and Culture (PFBHC), I have learned much from them, and especially, as PFBHC board members as well as resource persons and interesting people, Albert Gantt, Annie Webb Morse, Robert and Elsie Thompson, and Lenora Vance-Robinson. Other families with ancestors from the area have corresponded with me, sharing information and insights.

Research and background study have taken me to over fifty libraries, archives, universities, courthouses, and museums; their staffs have often have been helpful and shared resources and knowledge gladly. Special recognition and thanks go to three institutions where I have spent the most time: Clemson University Library and its Special Collections; the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, with special thanks to Steve Tuttle, reference room supervisor, and his staff; and the University of South Carolina’s libraries, especially the South Caroliniana Library, headed then by Allen Stokes. Staff members at each of these have often shared relevant materials they found and assisted with special arrangements to view materials or photograph documents.

Several institutions have provided local support. The Pendleton District Historical, Recreational, and Tourism Commission (now Pendleton District Commission) sponsored an early phase, Black Heritage in the Upper Piedmont, and contributed substantially to its fulfillment. My thanks go to its then director, Hurley Badders, Donna Roper (especially for continuing interest, information, and other assistance), and Jo McConnell. The South Carolina Humanities Council awarded some financial support for that project in 1989–90 and provided encouragement. And the Clemson University History Department earlier supplied a courtesy appointment and access to library facilities; several department members have shared interest and encouragement in the research.

The University of South Carolina’s Institute for Southern Studies appointed me as a summer research fellow in 1994–96. Thanks are due there to Walter Edgar and to Nancy Vance Ashmore Cooper, Tom Brown, and Tibby Dozier. The Seneca River Missionary Baptist Association served as cosponsor for the Black Heritage Project and encouraged support from its member churches; J. D. Rutledge, its president, shared his time, knowledge, and insight.

Clemson University, Historic Columbia, the Institute for Southern Studies, the Pendleton Foundation for Black History and Culture, Pickens County Library, Richland County Library, and Tri-County Technical College sponsored talks involving earlier stages of this work. The South Carolina State Museum sponsored a traveling exhibit that similarly portrayed an early version of this study. Both the South Carolina Historical Magazine and the Oconee County Historical Society published my related writings on black soldiers in World War I.

Military reference and other reference staff at the National Archives in Washington and its regional branch in Atlanta have been kind and helpful. Documents of the federal army and the Freedmen’s Bureau are so voluminous that a novice could hardly begin to find relevant materials without skilled guidance.

Several libraries, including those of Clemson University, Drexel University, La Salle University, and the University of South Carolina, have provided interlibrary loan assistance.

Additional thanks are due to the persons and institutions that supplied illustrations, to Clemson University photographer Patrick Humphrey, and to Nathan Robertson for his maps.

Family members taught me much about the area during my childhood. Reputations of two—Louie S. Cochran and Charlie C. Bennett—in the local community have smoothed access to many people.

Interviewees and Participants

Sadly most of the people interviewed in 1989–91 then in their eighties and nineties are not alive to see what they helped accomplish. Fortunately some memories of all those formally interviewed have been preserved in taped interviews, and hundreds of their photographs have been duplicated for Clemson University’s Special Collections.

Cornelia Alexander

James and Alberta Mattison Benson

Clotell Brown

Irwin Brown

Velma Childers

Ida Mae Clinkscales

Allen Code

Tom Dupree

Alice Gassaway

David Green

Agnes Greenlee

Leah Greer

Douglas Hagood

Douglas Harbin

Rhuney Hawthorne

Montana Haynes

Elsie Henderson

Stacy Hicks

Harold Hill

Doris Hillerbrand

Emma Howard

Laura Keasler

Brenda Knox

Alice Lee

Lou Ida Maddox

Donnie Massey

Floy McDonald

Ida McDowell

Mr. and Mrs. Willie Mickler

Annie Webb Morse

Arminius Perry

Hiawatha Pettigrew

Runette Ponder

Anna Reed

Bessie Reese

Mattie Ross

J. D. and Mildred B. Rutledge

Grace Shaw

Cato Spencer

Bessie Stevens

Bertha Strickland

Dora Tidmore

Elsie and Robert Thompson

Lucille Vance

Lenora Vance-Robinson

Minnie and T. C. Walker

George Washington

Ernest Watkins

Eldora White

E. W. Whittenberg

Lucille Williams

Maxie Williams

Mrs. Red Williams

Viola Williams

EDITORIAL NOTE

PEOPLE FAMILIAR WITH the political history of Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties may find strange my simplified and sometimes idiosyncratic use of terminology, adapted to help readers unfamiliar with changing details; see chapter 1 and its notes.

Spelling in the nineteenth century was not yet standardized and so varied enormously. Even John C. Calhoun, vice president of the United States and a Yale graduate, used erratic spelling and sometimes faulty grammar. Readers should assume that odd spelling in a quotation appeared in the original version. I found at least thirteen variant spellings of colored in nineteenth-century materials, most written by white men.

I have reproduced names of slaves, other African Americans, and whites as they appear in original sources, except when there is a reasonably definitive means of spelling that name for a specific individual. I have standardized one spelling, that of Frances for females and Francis for males, to avoid confusion.

I have put aside gender-neutral language when referring to runaways and for slave owners, instead using the masculine he or his. With rare exceptions, known runaways were male, and few women had absolute ownership of slaves.

White people, and sometimes those of African derivations also, used colored, negro (but rarely Negro), and black somewhat interchangeably. All three sometimes appeared on the same page of a white newspaper or in the minutes of a white-identified church; all appear at various times in black Baptist minutes.

Anyone familiar with census records knows that ages, far from accurate, often vary significantly (see chapter 8). Birth years or ages in this book are dependent on census or other records.

A parenthetical name appearing after a slave’s name refers to the owner, for example, Wiley (James Anderson). A name in brackets following a slave’s name indicates the slave’s known postbellum surname.

Reference notes are omitted for most resources, cited in the text, that are organized in chronological order: newspapers (which had only four pages prior to 1900), church and association minutes, petitions to the general assembly, as well as most other South Carolina Department of Archives and History series of documents (including governors’ papers), and most private collections. Deeds, wills, and similar documents are indexed at the relevant courthouse or at the SCDAH. Reference notes in chapters 5, 6, 7, and 17 supply details on locations of magistrates and freeholders trial accounts, church minutes (1790–1870), wills and estate proceedings, and postbellum black church records.

African American Life in South Carolina’s Upper Piedmont

1780–1900

Prologue Milly Dupree

ROCKING BY HER FIREPLACE in January 1900, Milly Dupree reflected on changes during the past century and major transformations in her own life. Nearly eighty years earlier she had been born ten miles away on Keowee plantation, owned by John Ewing Colhoun (Jr.), brother-in-law of Vice President John C. Calhoun. At Milly’s birth her family had already served the Colhouns and their in-laws for several decades. Brought from the lowcountry to the upper piedmont, Milly’s family enjoyed its healthier climate, which may have helped her survive so long. Utilizing Dr. William L. Jenkins’s services from Pendleton, Colhoun provided medical care for Milly and other Keowee people; that surely helped also.

Milly, a cook for the Colhouns for twenty-five years, married a man ten years her elder from the same plantation. They had thirteen children. Like many other women of her era, Milly lost several of them to childhood diseases and to fevers. After the war’s end brought freedom, Milly’s family continued to work the same land. Then, however, they had formal written labor agreements approved by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Within a few years she and her sons and daughters, mostly adults, began moving a few miles farther away. Two of her sons and other people from the plantation helped launch nearby Mount Nebo Baptist Church, which stood along the recently laid railroad. The plantation itself was sold, as almost all of the owner’s family died and his survivors were bankrupt.

Milly’s family not only held church offices but also had educational accomplishments and brushes with the law. Her grandson, Aleck Dupree—along with others from the same plantation—was among the area’s earliest students to attend Benedict College, a Baptist school in Columbia for freed people. Having graduated, Aleck taught at ungraded schools in Seneca—a town that was home also of Seneca Institute, supported by local black Baptists—and in the Abel community near the Calhoun plantation. Another of Milly’s descendants was charged with and cleared of killing her own baby. Two of Milly’s granddaughters moved into a new town, Calhoun, and worked as laundresses for townspeople and Clemson College faculty. They did their washing in a creek along former slave cabins at Cold Spring, previously another Colhoun plantation. Now they had new houses in town, in contrast to those who still lived in dilapidated antebellum cabins.

Milly Dupree, born ca. 1822 as a slave on John Ewing Colhoun Jr.’s Keowee plantation; photographed circa 1890s. Black Heritage in the Upper Piedmont

Political circumstances had fluctuated often since 1865. The protective federal army left after only a few months. Several from her plantation were present in 1867 when a white boy was murdered; six black men were soon sentenced for that crime. Reconstruction ended when Wade Hampton, a Civil War military hero, became the first Democratic governor following Reconstruction. The 1890s brought more dire circumstances with a new Jim Crow constitution and laws. While her family could get more education and job choices, they faced more legally enforced segregation and deprivation of voting rights. Five of Milly’s sons who registered to vote in 1867, and now their sons, could no longer exercise that right.

Milly, photographed wearing distinctive clothing and jewelry, reflected a serenity and dignity won by her many years. Her life, encompassing three-quarters of a century, spanned bondage as a slave, emancipation, an era of lively black political activity, and renewed repression. She and others had been called slaves and servants before 1865, freed people in the 1860s and 1870s, and—throughout her life—blacks, Negroes, servants (now legally free), and colored people. Before 1865 her family lived together on the plantation; now the younger generations spread over a wider area, concentrated primarily in or near new towns that offered better and more affordable housing and more employment opportunities. Most of them, however, still lived within fifteen miles of Milly’s birthplace.

This vignette of Milly Dupree’s life is something of a docudrama. There is no direct evidence that her parents or grandparents came from the lowcountry, the primary source of Colhoun’s slaves; nor is there specific information that she was born at Keowee, although that is highly likely. In the late 1790s Colhoun noted that forty-three slaves were at Keowee. Milly may be the daughter of Fanny and the granddaughter of Harriott, both among those forty-three, as were Cato and Sue, evidently other relatives.¹ The number of her children and the name of Milly’s husband also are not certain. In a Keowee plantation ledger she seems to be identified with Moses, who may have died before 1870, when she is shown without a spouse present. I have tentatively described him as her husband.²

A photograph of what evidently is Milly may have been taken in the late 1890s, but she has not been found in the 1900 census. Photographic and textile specialists place the photograph’s date as likely late 1890s. So I have set her in January 1900 for a convenient retrospective of the past century.³

Frances Dupree, Milly’s granddaughter, 106 years old, ca. 1960. Black Heritage in the Upper Piedmont

Introduction A Piedmont Setting

THIS STORY FOLLOWS Milly’s African American community in one locale for over one hundred years. Tracing perseverance, persistence, and accomplishments there has proved to be a daunting task. But it has yielded illuminating discoveries and abundant materials, far more than ever imagined; each piece … both told and withheld stories. The richly textured fabric of African American life in South Carolina’s old Pendleton District—now a three-county area—unfolds from these resources. And they help explore big issues in a small place, as a noted South Carolina folklorist advocates.¹ Facing many conditions beyond their control, African Americans, a subordinated minority, persevered through the strengths of their subculture and their families.

Examining three northwestern South Carolina counties—Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens—for nearly 120 years takes place within a rich localized context. It also adds new dimensions—in both location and time-span—to the state’s historical scholarship about African Americans. This account, studying African Americans in a small, white-dominated area and its black-white relationships, weaves together various aspects of black life during antebellum and postbellum eras, in rural areas and towns.²

Milly Dupree’s family itself blends together various settings and time periods. Her great-grandson Tom Dupree, whom I visited a few years ago, was living within a few miles of the Colhoun plantation where she had been enslaved. The Duprees are typical of other families who remained in the area not only throughout the nineteenth century but in many cases have done so until the present. Persistence is a technical term applied to people staying in one place over a period of time. Evidently 80 to 90 percent of the area’s African Americans in 1900 had ancestors who were there nearly a century earlier, perhaps longer in some instances. Persistence also means to endure to the end, or to persevere. Together both terms in this account mean hard work, both as slaves and as freed people; oppression through enslavement, impoverishment in freedom; and deprivation of most fruits of their labor.

Their story, however, is neither uniform nor unilinear. Although relatively small, this area still had many internal variations. Even on a narrow issue during a brief period, nearby churches dealing with freed African Americans shortly after 1865 adopted quite different dispositions. Throughout the 1800s a very mixed bag of white attitudes mingled paternalism, arrogance, oppression, kindness, and—whites probably thought—friendship in some cases. Some slaves fared better than others, and freed people prior to 1895 had more opportunities than often assumed. Generalizing about that period, many people have imposed onto it their views of a later, more racially polarized era. And accomplishments often occurred even during repression.

Persistence and perseverance took place amid a culture that African Americans did not make. Contrasted to the much-studied and celebrated Sea Islands and low-country Gullah culture, upstate black people were never a majority. They typically constituted less than 30 percent of northwestern South Carolina’s population, depending on time and location. Moreover, with small numbers dispersed over a large rural area, especially in the early 1800s, they had limited opportunity to preserve African traditions. Lowcountry African American culture began development in the late 1600s, but Pendleton District was first settled by black and white over one hundred years later.

Relatively few African-born men and women, then, could help mold a culture. Blacks were largely subsumed within the dominant culture, that of whites who shaped the politico-socio-economic-religious order. Nevertheless, within, or perhaps underneath, the prevailing culture, enslaved peoples shaped a subcultural community that included an extended communications network and a microeconomy. With freedom in 1865, newly emancipated people built on their slave subculture by establishing schools, churches, and—later on—beneficent, economic, and professional organizations.

Pendleton District’s location within the state

Although this is not an anthropological study, neither trained observers nor I detect many African continuities there today. At least during part of the nineteenth century, naming practices, some skills, and a black adaptation of Christianity perpetuated some African heritage. As late as 1880 a few elderly, African-born people were still living in the area, and about sixty others whose parents were born in Africa. New linkages were formed as a few people moved to Liberia and Sierra Leone, some returned, and black churches contributed to African missions.

This study traces the development of an African American subculture during slavery and its postbellum flowering. Set in one specific white-majority locale, this saga moves from frontier through slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, to late nineteenth-century racism. In contrast to this account, many earlier studies of slavery by John Hope Franklin, Winthrop Jordan, Eugene Genovese, John W. Blassingame, and others—originally ground-breaking, now standards—dealt with the entire South, as have many postbellum studies. Other writers have turned to broad regions, such as western North Carolina in Mountain Masters and coastal South Carolina in Black Majority among others, or individual cities such as Baltimore or Charleston.³

Most scholars in African American studies have neglected or totally ignored northwestern South Carolina and rural areas like it, which constituted large parts of southern states. This has happened partly because cities and rich plantation areas seem more interesting and also because upstate, rural sources are more scattered and elusive.

Among the state’s better antebellum studies, Charles Joyner chose to focus on Georgetown County for Down by the Riverside, and Margaret Creel limited her study of slave religion to the Gullah culture. Joel Williamson, Francis Simkins, and George Tindall largely omit northwestern South Carolina—except for brief references—from their studies of Reconstruction and the latter 1800s. Considering limited cataloging and indexing at the time of their research, they acted very sensibly. This is, in fact, one of the few studies that deal with South Carolina blacks beyond the lowcountry. Vernon Burton stands virtually alone among those who have systematically examined African Americans in the state’s interior.⁴

Locations with huge plantations have been more dramatized and more studied than Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens, an area that resembles in many ways regions of the South. The former really were an exception, compared to a large swath including Appalachian counties, where slaveholdings were relatively small, no major cash crop was produced, and, presumably, white and black lived and worked in close proximity. A glance at the Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture and maps of slave-holding areas shows that northwestern South Carolina fits more neatly within those patterns than it matches lower parts of its own state.⁵

South Carolina’s upper piedmont is dramatically different from the lowcountry, even in respective terms low and up, referring to altitude, terrain, and, by implication, crops. Societal patterns and ethnic mixes vary also. African Americans, a coastal majority, were a minority in Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties and had few African retentions, partly because they represented more diverse parts of Africa than did lowcountry counterparts. Both upcountry plantations and their holdings were smaller, and no single crop dominated life there, as did rice for coastal residents. Variations among the upper piedmont, lower piedmont, and coastal rice parishes appear clearly in the table. It shows wide differences in percentages of whites who held slaves, sizes of their holdings, and density of black population. A sharp contrast appears in holdings: 15 wealthy planters in All Saints Parish, studied by Joyner, owned 4383 slaves in 1860; all 500 owners in Pickens and Oconee had among them only 4195 slaves there.⁶

Table I.1 Density and Average Sizes of Slave Holdings by Region, 1860

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860, 452, and Agriculture … 1860, 237; Census of South Carolina from 1809 to 1859, Inclusive, Reports and Resolutions, 1860: 522–23; Exhibit of the General Taxes of the Upper Division for the year ending 30th September, 1860 and Exhibit of the General Taxes of the Lower Division for the year ending 30th September, 1860, part of the report of the Comptroller General, Reports and Resolutions, 1860: 134–37; and manuscript 1860 Population Schedules. These two Exhibits give the number of taxed acres, which fall short of the total area of the respective districts and parishes. That figure (converted to square miles), used to calculate density, does indicate the claimed and mostly settled area. It also allows comparisons with three parishes, which represent coastal rice areas; I omitted the three with the largest number of slaves. Most of the Lower Division is reported by parish; white population for the three parishes comes from the 1859 state census, slave population and acreage from the 1860 tax schedules. The figure for Union acreage (substituted from an earlier year) is missing in the 1859/60 report.

Writers have chosen various terms to describe that area. In the later 1700s and early 1800s people living near the Atlantic Ocean in All Saints, Georgetown, Charleston, Savannah and the surrounding area referred to the backcountry, which then applied to most of the state. Upcountry came into use to describe portions of the state north of the new capital, Columbia. Scholars such as Lacy Ford have more recently used the terms upper piedmont and lower piedmont to distinguish two cultural, geographic, and agricultural zones north of Columbia. Ford groups a northern tier of counties as upper piedmont. His area includes Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens, the primary focus of this study, plus Greenville, Lancaster, Spartanburg, and York.⁶

Perhaps called accurately the far northwestern corner of South Carolina, Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens have formed an historically distinct unit of sorts. From the area’s first white and black settlement, it was known as Pendleton District. Various organizational forms still use that term, such as Pendleton District Historical, Recreational, and Tourism Commission (currently shortened to Pendleton District Commission), and the Old Pendleton District Genealogical Society. There is also a Tri-County Technical College, and the state’s Heritage Corridor designates Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens as a separate region.

Contrasted to extensive lowcountry or Mississippi River plantations, the upstate’s scale of operation was quite different: relatively small slaveholdings; few overseers, let alone black drivers; daily contacts with owners in most cases; slaves who were known individually by their owners; lack of bachelors’ quarters or chapels (praise houses); many families divided among plantations; and more complicated naming practices on a single plantation.

These characteristics, hardly resembling fictional stereotypes, are much more complex than indicated by studies of slavery that treat the subject in broad terms. Those in turn have thrived during several decades of social and comparative history. The latter has spawned cross-cultural studies of New World slavery—a growing industry—that show varied patterns of slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America’s mainland. Less comparison, however, has been done within mainland North American colonies and among states. This is surprising since social history stresses variations.⁷

Looking at a black-minority, inland society, this book focuses on a variant form of African American life during the entire nineteenth century. This is the first effort to deal continuously and analytically with any specific group of South Carolina’s African Americans for over one hundred years.⁸ Doing so, it demonstrates continuities between antebellum and postbellum eras—not polarized opposites. Burton and Bernard Powers rank among those who bridge the supposed Civil War divide. Rapid change during the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s was not all generated by war. Most black people in 1800, virtually all slaves, tilled white-owned land; most did so in 1900. A statement in the introduction to part 4 applies to the whole century: much changed, much stayed the same.⁹

This exploration attempts to embrace the range of black life and draws upon all types of known, deposited documents, a sifting of every kind of available [written] record.¹⁰ Its major themes that run throughout the 1800s and interpretations emerge from this research. It was not designed to prove a predetermined argument, nor does it have the focus and slant produced by limitation to one particular subject—for example, religion, family, economics—or type of source material, such as 1930s WPA interviews or Freedmen’s Bureau records. Intending to encompass rather than to exclude, it results in a more rounded understanding of an African American community. Consequently it raises numerous big issues in one location, a full social context.

Working in most cases directly with owners who lived on the plantation, upstate African Americans had more interaction with whites, which may have softened some hardships. It also meant that slaves seemed far less of a threat to whites than in heavily black majority coastal and island areas. No Denmark Vesey– or Nat Turner–type revolt disrupted the upper piedmont. Those same whites feared rebellion less and operated in a more relaxed atmosphere than did lowcountry owners. Thus upper-piedmont African Americans had some latitude in their daily lives, including local travel and contacts.

Despite its title, this book is not confined to African Americans. It often turns to interactions with whites, who controlled most of the economic, political, and societal environments. Because blacks lived within a white-dominated area, understanding these interactions becomes all the more important. A focus on blacks alone would miss much of the story. Setting the African American account within its local white context sheds light on white fears, economic and other societal pressures, and repressions of slaves; it also shows linkages among these factors. Frequent cross-racial interpersonal contacts, which took place within an unequal equation, are highlighted. That is part of the full social context.¹¹

Almost all known sources come from whites, which affects the perspective.¹² I have tried to avoid that distortion as much as possible, or at least to make explicit that most information derives from white sources. On the other hand, virtually all of them were contemporaneous. Without more information directly from African Americans, it is hard to know what they thought. What they did, however—especially in terms of a subcultural communications network, involvement in churches, and Reconstruction political activity—sheds light on each of these subjects.

Much resource material may exist that has not yet been found or explored; much has perished; and most harshness—especially whippings, brutality, and sexual exploitation—was rarely recorded. Every sentence should be read with an implied evidently, as far as is known, or based on known, surviving sources.

Slavery was wrong, inhumane, and oppressive. Starting from that fundamental truth, this account is not a diatribe against slavery, which many writers have already done well. Vivid examples and statements by masters certainly reinforce those truths.¹³ Research and writing in recent decades, following a critique of slavery itself, have moved further to a focus on slave life and its nuances. As Mechal Sobel wrote, For over a generation we have been witness to a major reevaluation of American slave life … in which family, religion and community have been seen anew. Development of social history, quantitative analysis, and relatively new archaeological excavations of African American sites have laid the basis for these studies.¹⁴

This account builds on these insights, as it does on recent decades of increased attention to black-white relations and shared experiences. Burton described his dissertation as a step toward a unified black-white history of Edgefield County, a process elaborated further in his book In My Father’s House. John Boles and his students stress felicitous biracial experiences. Symposium volumes such as Ted Ownby’s Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South have extended this emphasis on interactions and cultural exchanges. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household provides a valuable dimension of space and relationships, as has Joyner’s Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Traditions.¹⁵

Some of these, especially authors in Ownby’s book, emphasize happy interactions and relationships while mostly omitting unpleasant ones. A focus on only one or the other produces a partial, misleading image and ignores both complications and contradictions. Inherent convolutions occurred as whites conceived of slaves simultaneously as humans and as chattel. While examining ways in which blacks and whites interacted, I have kept a constant emphasis on their unequal standings, harsh interactions, and convoluted white thoughts. But the story is primarily an assessment of constraints, latitude, and accomplishments during both slavery and freedom throughout 120 years. It stresses especially an expanding and richer African American subculture as it developed during slavery and in freedom.

Focusing throughout on the Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens tricounty area, this story does not assert grander generalizations. Any reference or statement should be construed to apply specifically to that area, unless otherwise stated. Issues raised, findings, and broader implications need testing by more studies for similar white-majority areas. Then, a much more complete understanding will emerge about variations of southern slavery.

Seven broad themes, characterizing the entire 1780–1900 span in the three counties, run through virtually every chapter. Significant variations, however, occur within the way each theme is played out. Several subjects are directly treated in specific chapters for both antebellum and postbellum periods: types of work, families, black subculture, churches, literacy and education, and laws constraining African Americans. The seven major themes follow.

Most African Americans remained in the three counties by 1810 and became a continuous, cohesive community. Although population was transitory during early decades of frontier settlement, it became much more stabilized by 1810, perhaps earlier. Similarly only a small percentage, probably less than 5 percent, of freed people left Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties after emancipation, and fewer moved in. The word community is used here without precise definition and in more than one sense: either all African Americans within three counties, ones on a particular plantation, or those in a post-1865 town or rural grouping.¹⁶ Because of extensive contacts among blacks, considering these counties together as a community fits with available evidence.

Families over generations formed a strong core of the African American community in the counties. Despite many complications and obstacles, African Americans maintained a core institution: their families. Sometimes separated by owners during slavery and afterward by economic necessities, slave and free families nevertheless often maintained close contacts. When families were divided, they mostly lived within a few miles, and often their white owners were related, which increased opportunities for slave visits. Even without such occasions, families otherwise kept up contacts through a communications system. They passed family names, skills, and sometimes prized possessions to successive generations. Men who lived on a different plantation from their wives and children still played an important role in African American family life and headed most black households in 1870.

Many conditions impacting African Americans’ lives and their community depended on circumstances beyond their control. Matters beyond African Americans’ control began with slavery itself and consequences that flowed from it. A central factor of enslavement was their status as property that could be relocated at their owners’ whim. Slaves had no choice about where they lived, limited selection—sometimes none—of spouses, and little control over their families, especially when separated between two or more plantations. Immediately after emancipation, freed people’s lives were framed in part by federal laws, programs, and failure to support economic policies that would enable independence. Forty acres and a mule may have been mentioned in Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15, on January 16, 1865, but they were not forthcoming. Soon, freed people again faced more repression as southern whites lashed out at them. Late-1800s racism, which accelerated worldwide, thrived in South Carolina. Conversely technological change led to benefits as it spurred growth of towns, communities, and new job opportunities.

African Americans constituted a minority population; their status was complicated further by living in a rural, piedmont region. Whether during enslavement or under the 1895 Jim Crow constitution, African Americans were legally subjugated. However, because slaves were a sparse minority in Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties, whites there tended to be less fearful than those in black-majority areas. Rural people, then, had more opportunity for travel on weekends and in various facets of their daily lives. Living among a dominant white population, peoples of African descent were partly subsumed by white culture, including the English language—in contrast to lowcountry Gullah—and Christianity. So, there was little cohesion based on shared African culture. Rather, they had more in common because of their status: as slaves, as a racial minority, and as a subordinated class. The latter two factors persisted after emancipation.

Although a minority, slaves often were not passive. Some objected to owners’ treatment, occasionally by accusing masters in church, more often by grumbling or slowing their work pace. Other forms of resistance involved running away, though often only for a few days, stealing, and standing up for themselves or for relatives against whites. Repeatedly they tested and challenged some constraints of their enslaved status. Testing boundaries, African Americans slowly reshaped them.¹⁷ After enjoying political opportunities during Reconstruction, African Americans faced a major obstacle again, their minority status. It remained an enduring constraint on political, social, and economic advancement.

Interpersonal relations and paternalism affected whites and blacks in unequal, complex, and contradictory ways. Because of their sparse, minority population, blacks lived among whites and interacted often with them, although on unequal terms. White owners acted in inconsistent and unpredictable ways. Given their contradictory concepts, that is not surprising. Individual owners and South Carolina’s laws dealing with slaves considered them simultaneously as both chattel and human beings. Whether during or after slavery, blacks worked mostly for whites and were, in most cases, supervised directly by them. They lived near one another, went to the same churches prior to 1865, and often were buried in the same cemeteries. Throughout the entire 1800s whites and blacks periodically shared social occasions: circuses, fairs, antebellum musters, camp meetings, executions, and parades.

Plantations, as conglomerations of black and white folk, encompassed complicated emotional and sometimes sexual relationships. All those on a plantation, both black and white, were considered by some as a family, but they certainly were not equal. Interpersonal relationships did not always follow predictable lines. White kindness could quickly disappear, to be replaced by hostility and harsh racist attitudes. Complex relationships between blacks and whites involved many complications: paternalism, black economic dependency for work and housing, a white presumption of superiority, and a symbiosis created by long-term interactions.

A black subculture developed and thrived. A subculture emerged early in Pendleton District and developed further throughout the nineteenth century. Some slaves could travel for their work, church services, social events, and trading. Travel and weekend family reunions forged an extensive communications system—building on a strong African tradition of oral culture—complemented by a microeconomy of goods and money. African Americans also had ritual and occasional celebrations during slavery—especially year-end, weeklong holidays—and after emancipation. Although few African continuities are readily apparent there today, naming practices, skills, and a black adaptation of Christianity perpetuated some African traits during the nineteenth century.¹⁸

This subculture depended more on its status as a minority, subjugated group than it did on African traditions. Churches provided important occasions for socializing during slavery and formed a core of the black community after emancipation. Most postbellum leaders emerged from people previously enslaved there. Virtually none came from the North or from the lowcountry. In contrast to Charleston, upper-piedmont antebellum free people were never a dominating factor.

By the 1880s African Americans increasingly articulated their views in racial terms and talked of race improvement, including education. They made progress, aided by individual ambitions of improving their own status through education, economic betterment, and, occasionally, ownership of land. Simultaneously there was community development in rural areas, towns, and cities. As numbers of churches, schools, and property owners increased, the African American subculture grew stronger.

African Americans, occupying a subordinate status, suffered structural oppression: slavery, racism, and dependency. From 1780 through 1900 and beyond, most blacks lacked political, economic, or legal clout and thus suffered disproportionately. Whites had legal controls over blacks during slavery, and also under a later racist constitution. Sexual exploitation of women occurred during slavery and in later decades. After 1865 blacks faced economic subservience through sharecropping and the crop lien system, which created a dependency relationship. Most brutality was not recorded in contemporaneous documents, and there are few African American sources in the three counties prior to the twentieth century.¹⁹ A larger percentage of white