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Bibliographical Essay
- University of Georgia Press
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Bibliographical Essay Nicholas Herbemont understood himself to be a useful citizen of the republic of letters. He participated in both its institutional life—involved in the committees, societies, and commissions that generated information and conversation—and its life on paper, in manuscript and in print. He cherished the sociable exchange of opinions and experiences. Tolerant, energetic, and committed to the process of debating matters of public interest, Herbemont was the ideal committee chairman. Repeatedly over the course of his life his peers deferred to his lead in a host of organizations. Within a year of his appointment to the South Carolina Board of Public Works, he was elected chairman in 1821.1 Upon the formation of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, he served as its first chair. In 1835 he joined with twelve other citizens to form the South Carolina Society for the Advancement of Learning and the Diffusion of Knowledge. He headed its most active component, the Agricultural Committee. He was elected president of the Regents of the Lunatic Asylum. A public-spirited man, he chose to join bodies than enabled him to perform beneficial actions to his community. Herbemont left a rich paper trail. The personal papers of numbers of southern planters contain manuscript letters from Herbemont on a variety of topics. His private archive, including his vineyard records, letter books, and private library, however, cannot now be located. His will, composed while he declined toward death over summer 1838, bestowed the bulk of his estate to his French grandson, Paul Bofill. Bofill’s whereabouts and history remain mysteries. Herbemont gave his vineyard at Palmyra and his gold medal and certificate of commendation from the South Carolina Agricultural Society to his best friend, lawyer William F. DeSaussure (1792–1879),2 who would in 1852 become U.S. Senator from South Carolina. The exact location of Palmyra cannot now be determined because of the burning of the early Richland County deed books in the Civil War, and the medal has passed out of memory among the DeSaussures, who remain an influential family in the state. The loss of his personal belongings, however, may be a matter of minor consequence. The viticulture books in his library can be adduced by the many citations in his published writings. The most significant of his letters to private individuals he forwarded to the agricultural press for publication, or they were supplied to journals by their recipients. Nicholas Herbemont had precise understandings of the literary world he inhabited and his role in it. In 1833 he offered his “Observation on the Interchange of Opinions among Planters”: Bibliographical Essay 282 The objects of Agricultural Societies is to afford their members opportunities of meeting together, and discussing those matters which concern essentially the success and welfare of the whole. That of agricultural publication, journals, &c. must necessarily be that of diffusing more extensively the particulars of their experience, practices and improvements; thereby furnishing a mass of knowledge by which the whole community is necessarily benefited, and they themselves (the planters and farmers) more directly and particularly so. Their daily avocation, and the distance at which they live from one another, makes it impracticable for them to meet and discuss their interest as frequently as would be desirable and beneficial; but an interchange of their views, through the medium of a public journal, is certainly the next best, if not the very best mode of communicating with each other, and indeed, under the circumstances, it is the only practical mode in which it can be done to any advantage; for private correspondence is too circumscribed to have any but a very partial effect. Although it is very desirable to have very well written essays on the various branches of the science and art of agriculture, the less labored, either in style or matter, the plain statements of fact or of speculation . . . is probably likely to do as much, if not more, than highly polished and learned discussions of highly gifted scientific men. A plain colloquial style is intelligible to all, and is in ordinary cases perfectly sufficient to communicate to the agricultural public, the improvement, discoveries, of beneficial practices in which they all feel an interest. (Southern Agriculturist 5, no. 7 [July 1833]) Herbemont’s meditation explains much about the character and style of his publications . His colloquial letters and reports outnumbered his essays. The essays and treatises were invariably occasioned by (1) the need to address a society or association concerning generalities of agricultural practice,3...