Ordinary white folk in a lowcountry community: The structure and dynamics of St. Bartholomew\u27s Parish, South Carolina, 1850-1870

This dissertation focuses on ordinary whites in a lowcountry community notable for its African-American majority, for its rice planter aristocracy, and as the home of secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett. Careful examination of United States census data for 1850, 1860 and 1870 shows important variations in economic investment, production and productivity patterns among different categories of slaveowners, non-slaveowning landowners and non-landowners. This economic framework provides a background for the exploration of the educational, religious and political life of the parish during the late antebellum era and into the first years of Reconstruction. The lowcountry cannot be understood in terms of slaves and slaveholders alone. Ordinary whites--including lesser slaveholders, non-slaveholders both prosperous and poor, tenant farmers and hired laborers--played an important role in their community. From the Colonial period to the Civil War, whites along the entire socio-economic spectrum could co-exist without significant economic conflict because land ownership remained reasonably attainable and because slavery provided planters with a profitable labor force while still allowing other whites the chance for economic independence. Ordinary white folk had the opportunity for separate development and autonomy (as seen in organized churches), for some upward mobility (made possible by expansion of the market infrastructure and by increased production of both staple and subsistence crops for market), and for shared experience (seen in the convergence of subsistence and staple production and in the vital political life which achieved planter hegemony only by satisfying the needs of lesser whites). During the 1850\u27s, white males were drawn together by Rhett\u27s secessionist campaigns carried out in the context of a republicanism which united the interests of the elite and ordinary whites in the popular election of state legislators and the appointment of local officeholders. War and Radical Reconstruction shattered antebellum prosperity and confidence, transforming the economic and political order. Although both planters and freedmen presented threats to ordinary whites, shared white resentment over the loss of their antebellum political independence in community, plus a widely and deeply held racism, led to the formation of a new white unity