The Allstons of Chicora Wood: Wealth, Honor, and Gentility in the South Carolina Lowcountry

2 POLITICS AND MARRIAGE, 1828–1840

18 2 politics and marriage 1828–1840 My political creed is based on the principles of Thomas Jefferson “as expressed during the discussions in Virginia in 1798 and the subsequent Canvass which resulted in his election as President in 1801. I adopted this creed some where about the year 1825 from a conviction of its virtue & purity, regarding the peculiar nature of our Polity, and the character of the elements of this great Republic.” —R.F.W. Allston to John A. Allston, September 5, 1838 In relation to politics—since the decision of the Convention there ought now be but one party in the State & that comprising the whole State. —R.F.W. Allston to Adele Allston, December 5, 1832 The extreme unhealthiness of this country makes me think often of the back country and of the great contentment to be enjoyed there but I have little hope of ever calling it my home again. Fate has decreed this as my abiding place, and I hope ever to acquiesce therein with cheerfulness. —Adele Allston to “My dear Emma,” October 20, 1835 A lthough Robert Allston occasionally seemed to manifest an almost casual attitude toward his contests for public office, it is clear that from an early age he courted public favor. Members of the family had long been active in politics, and the current generation was no exception. His cousin Benjamin George had been elected in 1822 to represent St. Luke’s Parish in the South Carolina House of Representatives, and his older brother, Joseph Waties, followed suit two years later when he was elected as a representative from All Saints Parish, one of the two election districts in Georgetown. Robert’s first op-  politics and marriage 19 portunity to hold elective office came in 1828, when, at age twenty-seven, he was elected as one of three representatives in the lower house from Prince George Winyah, the other Georgetown election district. Thus began a political career that was destined to last three decades, culminating with his election as governor in December 1856.1 Allston outlined his general political principles in a lengthy epistle to his cousin John A. Allston in the summer of 1838. Styling himself a Jeffersonian strict constructionist, a creed he had adopted in the mid-1820s, he asserted his belief “that a plain, honest, common-sense reading of the Constitution is the only true one, and that in legislating for the government of the United States, nothing absolutely nothing of authority should be allowed” to take precedence over that document. Consequently, like Jefferson, he found no authority in the Constitution for Congress “to incorporate a Bank of the United States,” and he lauded President Andrew Jackson, whom in other respects he detested, for vetoing the bank recharter bill in 1832. Indeed, like Jackson, Allston was opposed in principle to any form of banking. In accord with Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution , he also contended that “gold & silver” constituted “the only legal currency of the United States” and that neither Congress nor the state legislatures had the power “to make any citizen receive in payment for a debt due the bill of any Bank, however constituted.”2 As a firm adherent of the states’ rights philosophy elucidated by Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Allston supported that position in each of the three crises in Federal relations confronted by South Carolina in the decades before the Civil War. Thus, he acted with the nullifiers in 1830–33 and supported secession in both 1850 and 1860. Yet in all three instances his overriding concern was to promote unity within the state. In October 1830 Allston was easily reelected to his House seat, polling 227 votes to 288 for the leading vote-getter, Peter W. Fraser, and 217 for Solomon Cohen Jr., who claimed the third seat from Prince George Winyah. At the same time, his brother Joseph was elected to the State 1. Easterby, South Carolina Rice Plantation, 8, 14; Biographical Directory of the Senate of South Carolina, 171. 2. R.F.W. Allston to “Dear Cousin” [John A. Allston], Sept. 5, 1838, in Allston Papers, SCHS; Winyah Observer, July 12, 1843. See also Easterby, South Carolina Rice Plantation, 78–80. 20 the allstons of chicora wood Senate from All Saints Parish.3 During his second term in the legislature Allston soon became embroiled in the nullification controversy that had begun to divide the...