The Allstons of Chicora Wood: Wealth, Honor, and Gentility in the South Carolina Lowcountry by William Kauffman Scarborough (review)

Even by the spectacular standards of the South Carolina Lowcountry elite, the rice baron Robert Francis Withers Allston distinguished himself for his enormous wealth, extensive slaveholdings, and considerable political influence. Allston was a longtime South Carolina legislator, elected president of the state senate in 1850, and governor in 1856; his prosperity reached its summit in the dizzy final decade of the antebellum era. By 1860 he owned seven plantations and more than 600 slaves. “The history of Fathers life,” Allston’s son noted after his death, would inevitably center on “the most flourishing and last days, of Slavery” (181). William K. Scarborough’s brief, sympathetic biography takes up the challenge, but by training its focus so tightly on Allston and his immediate family, Scarborough does not manage to evoke either the color or the complexity of slavery’s final epoch. Scarborough is a distinguished historian, and this volume provides a compact, informative, and clearly written account of Robert Allston’s life and career, with some secondary attention to his wife, Adele Petigru Allston, and a one-chapter postscript on the lives of their children after the Civil War.

The central problem here is Scarborough’s excessive closeness to his major subjects. An unfortunate misprint on the volume’s handsome cover flap identifies one Allston daughter as “Elizabeth Allston Pringle Scarborough,” but one can almost forgive the publisher’s error, because Scarborough’s treatment of the family verges on filiopietism. In his telling, every Allston marriage was happy and every Allston career “useful and productive”; couples might quarrel and children might struggle at school, but they all rebounded to fill “respectable stations in life” (4, 80). Scarborough attempts to enlist readers’ sympathy for the Allstons chiefly through such leading adjectives: their Lowcountry settings are “idyllic,” political struggles “herculean,” deaths “untimely,” and business reverses “unfortunate.” (33, 74, 109, 147). The blandly positive portrait of the Allston clan, and especially Robert Allston himself, that emerges from this narrative is unlikely to persuade readers familiar with more penetrating presentations in William Dusinberre’s Them Dark Days or Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease’s A Family of Women.

Scarborough’s lack of distance from his protagonists leads him into trouble, too, when he considers the final days of slavery. His portrait of slave life on the Allstons’ plantation concentrates on the slaves’ tidy cabins, high-quality health care, expensive shoes, and jovial Christmas celebrations. So it might well have seemed from the parlor windows of Chicora Wood, but if Scarborough has a less limited perspective on slavery, he seldom shares it with his readers.

There is no question Robert Allston was an extraordinarily skillful and adept plantation manager: beginning in 1832 with just sixteen slaves, he built the eighth largest slave empire in South Carolina on the eve of the Civil War. But where Dusinberre stressed Allston’s eager adaptation of capitalist management methods—especially his prompt willingness to buy and sell slaves as business dictated and his stringent instructions to overseers on slave flogging—Scarborough emphasizes Allston’s “paternalistic benevolence” (49). The punitive regime at Chicora Wood and elsewhere was relatively mild, he argues, and Allston tried to avoid splitting up slave families, except of course in the case of ungovernable slaves whose “repeated disciplinary infractions” virtually “compelled” Allston to separate them from their families and communities as appropriate punishment (50). Even Scarborough, of course, cannot deny the gruesome mortality rates among Lowcountry slaves, although he notes defensively that “the high death rate on rice plantations was likely attributable more to the conditions under which [slaves] lived and worked than to any alleged callous disregard for the welfare of their human property by their paternalistic masters” (42).

The book’s depiction of the Allston family during the Civil War and Reconstruction is deeply colored by this paternalistic view of slavery. Scarborough recounts...