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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 661-663



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All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry. By Lorri Glover (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 248pp. $39.95


Wealthy men of South Carolina, like their counterparts throughout colonial British America in the early eighteenth century, established themselves as a coherent class of social and political leaders partly by cultivating bonds through marriage. For the planters and merchants who presided over the low country's rice-producing plantation and slave society, the unification of this nascent elite produced unparalleled political agreement and deep interfamilial ties. Beginning from this point of social distinctiveness, Glover examines family relationships, particularly bonds among brothers and sisters, as this society's pervasive inculcator of values and the basis for its elite's unique collective identity.

The book's revisionist objective involves leavening a traditional historical focus on the vertically oriented power relationships between fathers and dependents with new attention to lateral kinship ties. Glover argues that sibling bonds offered an oasis of egalitarianism and gender equality within an otherwise dominant patriarchal culture. Experiences within such subversive relationships, Glover argues, introduced a "female culture of cooperation" into the heart of patriarchal competitiveness (70). Because these planters and merchants appear to Glover have been as hostile to outsiders as they were generous to one another, she concludes that at the core of this "inward-looking, reactionary culture lay an intense class identity fostered by bonds of kinship" (141). In other words, the learned "equality" within sibling and kin relationships became the leading social value of a large, interrelated insider group at the helm of South Carolina's colonial society.

All Our Relations seeks to build this image of a kinship-based society from the affective center of family life outward. Extant correspondence between family members reveals a culture of kinship in which economic and emotional responsibilities reinforced one another. Stern fathers set rigid expectations for children's obedience and accomplishments in this society. But brothers did not expect sisters to defer, and uncles eroded paternal strictures with notable leniency. As siblings and affinal kin collaborated with one another to raise children, gain educations, and enter into enterprises ranging from wealth-preserving, endogamous cousin marriages to planting and commercial partnerships between brothers-in-law, [End Page 661] they elaborated nurturing customs beneath the shadow of patriarchal command. Letter writers displayed their expectations for reciprocity among kin in missives that seem to have been emotionally sincere. Yet Glover's analysis of correspondence among kin, on which the book's conclusions are largely based, should have taken stock of these letters as belletristic performances that elaborated refined conventions for the display of emotion rather than as texts that reflect social values and practices transparently.

The book does exit the closed semiotic circuit composed of exchanged letters at times, offering statistical portraits of low-country elites as they gave birth, named children, and left property in wills. One of these statistical samples is based on genealogical accounts relating to only eight families; another tabulates data from seventy-five wills (of thousands probated in colonial South Carolina) left by individuals disproportionately represented as correspondents in this study (169, n. 10; 149-150). It would be easier to leave aside such unsteady forays into empirically grounded social history if Glover did not make such strong claims for the preeminent influence of familial culture on all aspects of public life in the low country.

All Our Relations attempts nothing less than a comprehensive reinterpretation of one of colonial British America's major regional societies by privileging the role of families in shaping its culture and promoting a range of economic, political, and social behaviors. Such a vast interpretive edifice overwhelms the book's narrow research foundation. To say that every aspect of life and work in colonial America possessed a familial dimension is a truism, but one worth exploring to reveal hidden textures of social experience. To assume that kinship structured belief and behavior at every juncture, however, leads to...

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