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1 introduction A number of distinguished Lowcountry families have left an indelible mark upon the political and economic history of South Carolina. One thinks immediately of such names as Heyward, Lowndes, Middleton, and Pinckney. Just north of Charleston in Georgetown District, which was destined to become the leading rice-producing county on the coast, other powerful families emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chief among them were the Pringles, LaBruces, Wards, Westons, and Allstons. It is upon the latter, or more precisely, the fifth generation of that family in South Carolina, that this book will focus. John Allston, the first of the family to settle in Carolina, migrated from Middlesex, England, to the colony just two decades after it was founded. After establishing his residence near Charleston, he enjoyed some degree of prosperity, but two of his sons elected to venture beyond the Santee River, where they began to accumulate land in what later would become Georgetown District. With the introduction of rice culture into South Carolina at the end of the seventeenth century, the slave population began to increase dramatically. The Georgetown Allstons were among those who reaped handsome dividends from the cultivation of the primary Lowcountry staple crop. By 1800 the Allstons and their cousins (who shared a surname but with a different spelling, “Alston”) had collectively accumulated more than 850 slaves. That number climbed to more than 2,000 by 1820 and, when combined with those of their other cousins, the Pyatts, to nearly 3,500 on the eve of the Civil War—or approximately one-fifth of the entire slave population in Georgetown District.1 1. J. H. Easterby, ed., The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston (Chicago, 1945), 11; MS census returns, 1800, 1820, Georgetown District, S.C.; William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York, 1996), 287, 512 n. 9. 2 the allstons of chicora wood Following the untimely death in 1834 of Joseph Waties Allston, planter, state militia general, and former state legislator, the patriarchal mantle of the Georgetown Allstons passed to his younger brother, Robert Francis Withers Allston. After graduating from West Point in 1821 and serving briefly in the army, Robert embarked upon a planting career with a patrimony consisting of only half a plantation and 16 slaves. In 1832 he became the sole proprietor of Matanzas (also called Matanza and renamed Chicora Wood in 1853) and, through hard work and capitalistic entrepreneurial skills, gradually increased his holdings until by 1860 he presided over an agrarian empire that included seven rice plantations and 631 slaves. During that time he earned an international reputation for the quality of his rice and for his expertise in rice culture. In the words of editor James D. B. De Bow he became “one of the most practical and well-informed rice planters of South Carolina” as well as “one of the highest-toned and most enterprising citizens” of the state. But Allston’s contributions extended far beyond the realm of agriculture.2 In 1823, at the age of twenty-two, he began a lifetime of public service with his appointment as surveyor general of the state. After two terms in that position he was elected by the citizens of Prince George, Winyah, in 1828 to the South Carolina House of Representatives and then, four years later, to the State Senate, where he served for twenty-four years— the last six as president of that body—before he was elected governor in 1856. While still a member of the Senate, he was chosen as a delegate to the Nashville Convention of 1850 and to two Southern Commercial conventions in the mid-1850s. Politically, he was a states’ rights Jeffersonian Democrat, strongly opposed to both the National Bank and the protective tariff. In the three major confrontations between his state and the federal government, he supported nullification in 1832, acted with the secessionists in 1850, and supported secession in 1860, though in the last two instances he could not be described as a rabid fire-eater in the vein of Robert Barnwell Rhett. Indeed, on the eve of the bombardment of Fort Sumter he described himself as a “moderate” and was confident and hopeful that secession would not lead to war.3 2. Charlotte Ann Allston to Robert F. W. Allston, Nov. 1, 1820, in R.F.W. Allston Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston (hereafter SCHS); De Bow’s Review...

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