DURING the evening of the day after Christmas, 1860, United States Major Robert Anderson surprised South Carolinians by evacuating his indefensible garrison at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island and occupying Fort Sumter in the middle of Charleston harbor. Anderson’s refusal to surrender Sumter received the endorsement of the Buchanan administration and set the stage for the next four months of threats and counterthreats as politicians shuttled back and forth between Charleston, Washington, Montgomery, and Richmond. From December 26, 1860, to April 12, 1861, the eyes of the nation focused on Charleston and the impasse at Fort Sumter. By February, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas had followed South Carolina out of the Union and into the Confederacy. These were exciting, heady times for Southern politicians, abandoning an old government and staking claims to a new one. Leaders on both sides bluffed and postured, stood firm and retreated, skirmished and advanced, contesting the very existence of the Union, and all without shedding a drop of blood. The drama at Fort Sumter orchestrated these national themes on the small stage of Charleston harbor, and everybody watched, not quite certain what would happen if the play spilled over the footlights and engulfed the audience, as it seemed about to do, and did on April 12, when Confederate batteries opened fire on the fort.1
For Charleston’s polite society, the crisis at Sumter made an ideal drawing-room war. “This rebellion differs from all others,” one Charlestonian boasted, “in having spread through society from above, and not from below, from the gentlemen of society and not from the rabble.”2 Conversations had never before sparkled with quite as much high-minded patriotism, dinner parties had seldom savored such choice rumors, and few balls had previously been graced with such a dazzling array of uniformed officers. Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of former Senator, now Colonel, James Chesnut Jr. reveled in the excitement. “What a dear, delightful place Charleston is,” she wrote in late March 1861. “So many pleasant people, so much good talk….” A few days later she remarked, “the atmosphere is phosphorescent.” On the evening before the firing on Fort Sumter, she dined with friends and pronounced it “the merriest, maddest dinner we have had yet. Men were more audaciously wise and witty.”3 In no other four-month period after secession would spirits be so effervescent, politics so glamorous, and war so painless. For the South Carolina chivalry, these were the best months of their lives.
The political and military commotion in Charleston was bad for business, however. Shortly after Lincoln’s election, Charleston’s nine banks refused to discount the notes of the city’s merchants, many of them due to Northern suppliers. By late November Charleston merchants complained publicly of the “money pressure” created by the misguided policy of the cautious banks, or, as one merchant called them, “pecuniary synagogues.”4 Merchant spokesmen called for the suspension of specie payments to provide relief, and by November 30 all banks in the city complied.5 Three bank presidents signed a letter in the Mercury promising to resume specie payments “as soon as our political difficulties are adjusted, and the course of trade [is] again allowed to flow in its ordinary channels.”6 Events of the next few weeks made clear that time would not come soon. Early in December the correspondent of the New York Tribune reported “much financial distress among the mass of people,” especially among the several hundred unemployed workingmen.7 Merchants were also hard-pressed. “All kinds of property, save cotton, have gone down fifty percent,” the Tribune noted in mid-December.8 Shortly after Major Anderson occupied Fort Sumter, the Charleston correspondent of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that, with the exception of the cotton trade, “every class of business has been paralyzed.”9 At the beginning of the new year the Tribune reporter said, “There is almost a total suspension of business … there is no collection of debts, credit is collapsed, property is without sale or value; the avenues of trade are closed up; and the prospect is darkening every hour.”10 When the merchant ship Star of the West appeared off the Charleston bar on January 9 in an attempt to bring supplies to Anderson’s garrison at Fort Sumter, Citadel cadets began the barrage that repulsed the ship and raised the excitement in Charleston to such a pitch that, the Tribune reported, “All business is suspended.”11
The fortification of Charleston slowed shipping to a trickle. To prevent another attempt to supply Fort Sumter, authorities loaded the hulks of four old ships with granite and on January 11 sank them in the channels across the bar at the entrance to Charleston harbor, leaving only Maffitt’s Channel open to shipping.12 The channel nearly paralleled Sullivan’s Island, within easy range of the batteries along the shore, whose crews did not hesitate to fire warning shots across the bows of merchant steamers.13 The blocked channels diverted most vessels to Savannah, and the exuberant firing on ships creeping into Charleston made businessmen understandably skittish. Freight rates went up 50 percent, and the price of cargo insurance became “prohibitive.”14 The restriction of shipping began to pinch the cotton market by late January. In February a cotton factor told the Tribune reporter his business was ruined and that he was having trouble paying for his family’s food.15 Business did not improve in March and April, and after April 12 much of what had been business as usual became trading with the enemy, and ceased altogether.
For free people of color planning to emigrate, the business paralysis made it difficult to liquidate property, and the constriction of shipping made escape problematic. South Carolina authorities commandeered the New York steamer Marion to help protect the harbor when the Star of the West approached, then cleared the ship a few days later to resume its normal course to New York. As the Marion lay off Fort Sumter waiting out a storm, two Charleston officers boarded and seized H. T. Graddick, a free man of color who was attempting to emigrate with his wife and mother. Graddick was an experienced harbor pilot who had just quit his job, and South Carolina officials feared that he would make his services available to guide some Northern ship into Charleston waters. Although Graddick denied the charges, officials also removed his wife and mother from the steamer before allowing it to go on to New York. Twenty-three other free persons of color were on board; forty others were ready to leave the city at the time the Marion was seized to pursue the Star of the West but now were “unable to get away by reason of the turn of affairs,” the passengers said.16
The refugees aboard the Marion were mostly free colored mechanics and their families, “whose destination is someplace where Slavery is not recognized, and confiscation is not to be feared,” they told a reporter in New York.17 They explained the attempts in the legislature to enslave them, to prevent them from working at their trades, and even to forbid them from riding in a carriage. Coming on top of the August enslavement crisis and all the normal restrictions on free Negroes, which the refugees recounted, the new proposals made free people of color “fearful that their liberty may be taken away at any moment; so that all of them who have money at hand are leaving.” Another group of twenty free colored refugees had arrived aboard the Marion late in December, and the January emigrants said, “this is merely a beginning, and … all the intelligent free colored people are rapidly coming to the conclusion that safety is to be found only in getting entirely out of the reach of the Slave Power.” The December exiles had already departed for Haiti, and most of the January exiles planned to follow them.
As late as the middle of March free people of color were still able to get out of Charleston. The Tribune correspondent wrote that “free blacks continue to leave in large numbers, and cases of great hardship continue to occur.”18 A month earlier the reporter estimated that about 2,000 free people of color had left Charleston since the start of the new year, many experiencing “extreme hardship.”19 The narrow escape route through Charleston harbor closed for good on April 12. After the firing on Fort Sumter, the risks of escape included running the federal blockade and crossing enemy lines.
The Ellisons and the Johnsons did not carry out their plans to emigrate. No document survives that explains their reasoning while they watched the events of January, February, March, and April from the family compound in Stateburg. Most likely, the depreciation of property, the business standstill, and the shortage of cash and credit faced William Ellison with the prospect of simply walking away from everything he had built, a sacrifice he could not bring himself to make. It appears that Ellison’s property trapped him in South Carolina. At least, the Charleston refugees provide evidence that the more assets a free person of color possessed, the less likely the person was to emigrate.
Except for the newspaper reports, free Afro-American refugees left no records of their flight, making it impossible to reconstruct a clear profile of those who left. A rough group portrait of the refugees can be pieced together, however, by comparing lists of free persons of color present in Charleston in 1860 with the names in the 1862 Charleston Free Negro Tax Book. Although this comparison is far from perfect, it makes clear that few members of the free mulatto elite were among the refugees.20 Of well over 1,000 refugees, the vast majority were poor free Negroes who had little to leave behind in the city. Missing from the city in 1862 were 113 individuals who in 1860 had paid municipal taxes; 94 of them (83 percent) owned less than $2,000 worth of real estate. In contrast, of the 117 members of the free mulatto elite who paid real estate taxes on property worth $2,000 or more in 1860, 108 (92 percent) were still present in the city in 1862. Almost as many of the free colored slaveholders (106 out of 131) remained in Charleston. Those who emigrated were, as the newspapers reported, predominately poor free colored tradesmen and their families. Most of them were carpenters, but carters, draymen, painters, bakers, millwrights, tailors, laborers, and upholsterers also left, as did lesser numbers of other craftsmen. For these men and their families, the decision to emigrate was easier than for the Ellisons, the Johnsons, and other prosperous free Negroes simply because freedom was just about their only possession. Despite the decision of the Ellisons and all their Charleston friends to emigrate, they could not break their bonds to their property in the few months they had to escape. By default, they mortgaged their freedom to their wealth. After April 12, all they could do was hope for the best.
Well before then, many members of the free mulatto elite had taken steps to try to guarantee that the best would not be as bad as they feared. On January 10, the day after the Star of the West was turned back, thirty-seven leading free men of color from Charleston sent a memorial to Thomas J. Gantt, the clerk of the Court of Appeals, who lived on Coming Street just above Calhoun.21 The same day, twenty-three free colored leaders in Columbia sent an identical memorial to J. H. Boatwright, the Mayor of Columbia, and another memorial was sent to Governor Francis W. Pickens by twenty-three of Charleston’s most prominent free mulattoes.22 Among the signatures on the memorial to Gantt were those of John Lee, Jacob Weston, Frederick Sasportas, Richard Holloway and his sons, and James Johnston (not Johnson). The memorial to the governor came from the likes of William McKinlay, Robert Howard, Richard E. Dereef, Joseph Dereef, and Anthony Weston. Neither the Ellisons nor the Johnsons signed the memorials, but virtually all their Charleston friends did. The memorials represented a carefully coordinated attempt by the free mulatto elite to stake their claim to what was left of the middle ground.
The memorials wrapped the free mulatto elite in the flag of the white race. “We are by birth citizens of South Carolina—In our veins flows the blood of the white race[,] in some half[,] in others much more than half white blood.”23 White South Carolina nativity was the strongest possible claim to legitimacy. The memorialists reinforced it with a pledge of dependence and loyalty. “Our attachments are with you, our hopes of safety & protection from you. Our allegiance is due to So. Ca. and in her defence, we are willing to offer up our lives, and all that is dear to us.”24 This promise to die for South Carolina was qualified by requesting Gantt to offer the Charleston group to the governor for “any service where we can be most useful,” with two significant restraints: that if the men were ordered away from Charleston, the state would provide for their wives and children; and that the men themselves be subject only to such orders as met the approval of Gantt, a neighbor of William McKinlay, Jacob Weston, and other free mulatto leaders.25 It was surely no oversight that the Charleston memorialists, unlike those in Columbia, did not send their letter to the mayor, Charles Macbeth. In effect, they asked to be placed under the orders of a white man they knew and trusted, with a stronger promise than any white volunteers received: that their families would be protected. The memorial to Governor Pickens was equally circumspect. The signatories, “Free Men of the City of Charleston,” offered “to be placed or occupy any position” the governor designated, and professed their readiness “whenever called upon to assist in preparing the State a defence, against any action which may be brought against her.”26 Governor Pickens’s response was predictable; he refused the offer and told them he would come to them only as “a last resort.”27
As a ploy, the memorials were a master stroke. Two weeks earlier many of the memorialists had resolved to leave South Carolina as soon as possible. During the last few days they had not changed their minds, only their strategy. They resolved to ask for what they knew they could not get as a way of getting what they knew they could not ask for. They needed reassurance that they would be left alone, and to get it they asked to join the flower of white manhood and defend the state. They did not offer their money or their property; they did not request approval of a free colored company; and what they did offer was tied with two important strings. The new strategy grew out of an old commitment, to do whatever was necessary to preserve freedom. The memorialists did not declare their undying loyalty to slavery. But by professing their qualified loyalty to South Carolina, they hoped to reaffirm that old commitment. If their memorials, like their petition against Eason’s bill, were intended to do nothing more than buy time, they succeeded until April 12, when time ran out.
Within three weeks of hearing from South Carolina’s free mulatto elite, Governor Pickens received word that not all free Negroes were eager to take their stand with the Confederacy. Late in January 1861 James Redpath wrote Pickens, asking him not to destroy a brig Redpath had chartered “for the peaceful purpose of conveying people of color” to Haiti. Redpath explained that almost sixty free persons of color, “nearly all of them natives of South Carolina,” were “engaged” to sail on the vessel within weeks. “Many others, I am credibly informed, are preparing to leave your State for Hayti,” Redpath said. Since “South Carolina … does not desire to retain this class of her people,” Redpath asked permission to send an agent to Charleston to arrange for the emigrants to depart directly for Haiti, rather than having to go first to New York.28 If Governor Pickens replied, his remarks have not survived. But there is no uncertainty about his refusal to allow an agent of the abolitionist Redpath to come into Charleston, if indeed Redpath had an agent foolhardy enough to undertake the assignment. Even without an agent, Charleston’s free Afro-Americans were still struggling to get passage out of the city bound for free soil.
Free men of color who lacked the social standing to address the governor but who had decided to make the best of their situation offered their labor to help with fortifications around the city. Early in January a group of 150 “able-bodied free colored men” offered to work without pay on the breastworks being constructed along the coast.29 Slaves too were hard at work erecting batteries, but they were not the only ones. The correspondent of the New York Tribune noted that the white chivalry had to set aside their muskets and swords and grapple with “the spade and the wheelbarrow.” On the fortifications, “representatives of Carolina’s best blood labor side by side with the blackest slave,” the correspondent observed, savoring the irony.30 When the correspondent inquired among Negroes about their reasons for volunteering, they told him “the inducements were to escape the lash of the owner, and avoid being suspected of disloyalty to their masters.” Less than a month before the firing on Fort Sumter, “intelligent colored men” told the Tribune correspondent that they “are looking, as indeed all their race are, to this struggle as the beginning of that end which shall secure to them the possession of their dearest rights.”31
WHEN the Civil War erupted in Charleston harbor, William Ellison was seventy years old. Born a slave in the spanking new American republic, he was now a free man in a government that celebrated a new birth of slavery. His Confederate experience was brief, however. On August 5 his white guardian and family physician Dr. W. W. Anderson began to make frequent visits to “Wisdom Hall.” After November 2 Dr. Anderson came to see the elderly ginwright almost daily.32 On December 5, 1861, William Ellison died.33 Following a funeral service at Holy Cross the next day, his family laid him to rest alongside his wife Matilda, who had died eleven years earlier.34 From Charleston, James D. Johnson expressed to Henry “feelings of the Deepest condolences in your recent affliction in the loss of my Esteemed friend your father.” Johnson said he was “in hopes of seeing your Dear Father before he breathed his last in this world, but alas! little did I think that I would have been deprived of the pleasure.”35 Johnson and his wife Delia were aggrieved by Ellison’s death, but they did not make the trip to Stateburg because of the crisis in the low country. Early in November federal forces captured Port Royal, less than fifty miles south of Charleston, where they established a permanent Union stronghold on the coast.36 Charlestonians expected an attack on the city at any minute. The panic was such that Johnson feared his wife might “become distracted” by the additional stress of a visit to the bereaved Ellisons in Stateburg.37
William Ellison’s tombstone stood first in the first row in the family burying ground. The brief inscription on the stone concluded, “In God we trust.”38 Those words may speak as much for Ellison’s survivors as for his own faith in the tender mercies of divine providence. Ellison’s faith had never caused him to slacken his efforts in the world. With the patriarch’s death, responsibility for the survival of the Ellison family shifted to the shoulders of his children. Faced with their supreme crisis, Henry, William Jr., and Eliza Ann lost the strategist who had plotted the family’s course through the antebellum years. The outbreak of war broke the tension of the secession crisis, but it did not relieve the fears of the state’s free colored population. The files of the South Carolina legislature bulged with proposals to restrict freedom and even to end it. Anomalous in the antebellum South, free people of color were more of an anomaly in a nation that proclaimed slavery as its cornerstone. No one could predict that public professions of loyalty to the Palmetto State and its institutions would preserve the freedom of Negroes. Under the pressures of war with the North, white Southerners might well decide to rid themselves once and for all of these odd Confederates.
As directed by his will, William Ellison’s estate passed into the hands of his three surviving children.39 Each received the allotted portion, but the estate remained unified.40 As always, the Ellison family lived and worked together. All three children were appointed executors of their father’s property, but Henry, apparently groomed to succeed his father, became chief administrator. Routine legal matters—appearing at the Sumter courthouse, advertising for debts due the estate, appointing appraisers, filing returns of their administration of the property—ground on in the months after William Ellison’s death.41 Other tasks confronting the Ellisons were not as perfunctory.
To sustain what their father had achieved, the Ellisons had to demonstrate perceptions as keen and responses as astute as his. The children had imbibed the lessons of their father’s life, but they looked out upon a social and political landscape transformed by war. Lofty political arenas where whites would decide the fate of free people of color were beyond the Ellisons’ influence. Their politics lay in the High Hills, in Stateburg. In this familiar territory they encountered the war. Minor, practical exigencies irritated most Southerners. One resident of Sumter recalled that during the war, families who had lived in baronial splendor made dresses from homespun, parched cotton seeds, rye, and sweet potatoes as ersatz coffee, concocted plum cakes not from the customary ginger and jam but from red peppers boiled in watermelon juice, wrote letters with pokeberry ink, and read by the light of lard lamps.42 These deprivations called forth uncomfortable changes in private life. But the Ellisons could not meet all the challenges they confronted within the privacy of “Wisdom Hall.” Every master experienced hazards during the war, but the dilemmas of black masters were unique. To meet them, the Ellisons had to venture out into their community, where their own sagacity or stupidity promised to have direct, immediate, personal consequences for their security.
Cotton was an early casualty of the war. As gin makers, the Ellisons suffered quickly. The secession scare in late 1860 disrupted the normal marketing and financial arrangements planters relied on to dispose of their crop. By the time the bolls began to burst open in 1861, most planters still had unmarketed cotton on hand. The federal naval blockade of rebel ports and the Confederate embargo on shipping cotton outside the South sent cotton production into a tailspin. The cotton harvest plummeted from 4.5 million bales in 1861 to 1.5 million bales in 1862; in 1863, the crop barely reached a half-million bales.43 As cotton production tumbled, so did the planters’ need for gins. The meticulous reports Henry filed as administrator of his father’s estate in 1862 show only two gin sales: a fifty-saw gin to a Mr. Young for $100 and a smaller gin to a Mr. Hodge for $66.67. For the duration of the war, the Ellisons neither sold another gin nor advertised to try.
The gin shop was not covered with cobwebs, however. While the brothers stopped building gins, they repaired a few and maintained a strong trade in general blacksmith work. On December 8, 1863, for example, R. M. Durant paid “Henry and William Ellison” $30 for gin repairs.44 Workers in the Ellisons’ shop still mended buggies, shoed horses, crafted wagon wheels, forged nuts and bolts, and fashioned tongues for wagons and carts. The list of customers during the war included most of the names on antebellum accounts—Lenoir, Richardson, Anderson, Frierson, Reynolds, Cantey, Spann, Moore, Moody, Sumter, Singleton—but now the familiar names often followed titles of military rank. The stagnant gin business reduced the income from the shop, but, fortunately for the Ellisons, their survival did not hinge on blacksmithing.
Before the war, cotton surpassed the gin shop as William Ellison’s chief source of income. But the war strangled the Ellisons’ cotton production just as it did other planters’. In July 1862 Henry and William received $494.24 from the sale of fifteen bales, no doubt part of the 100 bales their father had in storage when he died. In April 1863 the brothers sold their last cotton of the war for $868.14. Like most Confederate states, South Carolina limited the number of acres a planter could legally seed in cotton. Growing cotton in the Confederacy was both unprofitable and dangerous. The duty of every planter, Southern newspapers trumpeted, required them to grow food for The Cause in fields previously sown with cotton. Planters who stubbornly defended their right to grow what they wished sometimes received unwelcome visits from local committees who came to inquire about the planters’ priorities. The Ellisons apparently did not bother to plant even their allotment. They wanted to avoid these nighttime callers.45
The Ellisons converted their entire plantation to food production. Almost all planters boosted their acreage of provision crops, but few matched the Ellisons’ metamorphosis. Before the war they had grown enough corn, sweet potatoes, peas, and beans to make their plantation self-sufficient.46 Now, however, food production was patriotic, and very profitable. Despite the unprecedented demand for provisions, other planters were either unable or unwilling to convert. They came to the Ellisons’ to purchase the food they did not grow themselves. Moreover, as one woman remembered, the hills of western Sumter District “were full of refugees from Charleston.”47 Migrants from the coast often brought their slaves with them, far away from Yankee raiding parties and from the land on which they might otherwise have grown food. They gave the Ellisons additional hungry customers. Early in the war, wagons loaded with food crops rolled from the Ellisons’ fields to plantations and farms throughout the High Hills and beyond.
At the Stateburg crossroads, corn became king. Planters who had formerly visited the shop to dicker for gins now came to bargain for grain. L. M. Spann, for example, paid $55 for corn in January 1863. Before the year was out he returned three times to buy several hundred dollars’ worth. Many of the Ellisons’ sales were large, like Spann’s, but some of them were tiny, such as Mr. Master’s purchase in June 1863 of one dollar’s worth of corn. Large planters and hard-scrabble farmers alike turned to the Ellisons. If corn could sustain the Confederacy, then they were doing their part. Rich and poor could attest to the Ellisons’ loyalty. Business was brisk enough to cause the Ellisons to invest $25 in January 1863 for a corn sheller to help them keep up with demand. Peaking in 1863, corn sales brought the Ellisons several thousand dollars during the war.
Just as corn bumped cotton at the beginning of the war, corn was later nudged aside by another food crop—sorghum. Military events and the disruption of slavery in Louisiana caused sugar production to collapse more rapidly than cotton.48 Lacking sugar, Southerners with a sweet tooth searched for a substitute. A woman who refugeed with her Manning and Richardson cousins remembered that “Everybody planted sorghum, a kind of sugar cane, the juice of which was pressed out by a small wooden mill in the barnyard, and then boiled in large iron kettles into syrup, and this was the only sweet thing we had….”49 Crippled by the absence of men to oversee the cultivation of this new crop, home production seldom proved sufficient.50 The Ellisons nimbly stepped in to supply plenty of sweetener. Although the technical requirements of sorghum production were modest, the Ellisons’ skilled slaves made their work force better prepared than any of their neighbors’ to produce syrup for sale. The Ellison brothers may also have discovered that syrup made a larger profit than corn. As syrup sales rose, corn gradually declined. The first sale came in September 1863—a mere $7.15—but the following month the Ellisons tallied $600 in sorghum sales. In 1864 they delivered several thousand dollars’ worth of their syrup to sugar-starved Sumterians.
The Ellison plantation became a giant general store for agricultural produce. Corn and sorghum were the major crops, but the Ellisons also raised bushels of surplus peas, potatoes, and peanuts. They usually sold these auxiliary crops in small lots, but in the aggregate they returned a sizable income. In addition, the Ellisons grew large crops of fodder for local livestock. They also increased their own production of animals for the marketplace. They sold a few live pigs, small amounts of bacon and lard, and larger quantities of beef. Local residents in need of basic provisions could satisfy their requirements by a trip to the Ellisons’.
Always resourceful, the Ellison brothers discovered still other ways to make money and be of service to the community. When shortages of horses and mules developed, the Ellisons made theirs available for hire. On August 13, 1862, for example, they rented out a mule for a dollar, and the following week, a horse for 75 cents. More often, they hired out their horses and mules harnessed to their wagons and carts. Sometimes the Ellisons themselves did hauling for their neighbors. They received a few dollars for most hauling jobs, but in August 1864 one individual paid them $120. When the brothers purchased more household or shop goods than they needed—such as leather or cheap cloth—they made the excess available for sale to their white neighbors.
The Ellisons enjoyed the patronage of scores of white neighbors, but by far their best customer was the Confederate government. Seeking to keep a massive army fed, equipped, and in the field, the government needed huge quantities of goods the Ellisons produced. Sumter District’s inland location and network of railroad connections made it a center for army stores. Thousands of freight cars loaded with war supplies rolled north on the Camden branch, just a few miles from “Wisdom Hall.”51 The Ellisons’ first transaction as army provisioners occurred October 9, 1862, when the brothers received $550 from “Col. S. J. Bradley for corn and fodder sold to the Government.” A dozen purchases followed this initial sale, and by the end of the war the government had paid the Ellisons nearly $5,300, mostly for corn and fodder, but also for bacon, corn shucks, cotton, and a horse. A March 1863 impressment law gave Richmond officials authority to take what they needed and pay what they wanted. Planters complained that the government paid only half the going rate, and they haggled and refused to sell.52 With one exception—when the Ellisons received $700 from a Mr. Coles for a “horse impressed for govt.”—the brothers evidently sold voluntarily. Whether they received the market price or only half, they earned a small fortune from the government. They also earned a solid gold reputation as loyal Confederates.
The government may have hired several Ellison “Mechanics.” Skilled slaves whom the Ellisons no longer needed in the gin shop, these men earned their masters $444.50 for 1862 and $510.52 for 1863. In each instance the employer paid the hire the following spring. The collapse of the government in the spring of 1865 could explain why the Ellisons showed no income from slave hiring in 1864. But private businesses may also have employed their artisans. Shorthanded manufacturers desperately needed skilled workers, especially when they accepted government contracts. Within a few miles of the Ellison place, private firms entered agreements with the government to cast field guns, make artillery harnesses, and build gun carriages and caissons, all tasks suitable for the Ellisons’ slave mechanics.53
Whether the Ellisons volunteered their valuable slaves or the government impressed them is not clear, but the evidence suggests voluntary hiring. The brothers received a large sum for slave wages for 1862, the year before impressment became common practice and official Confederate policy. Early in the war the government usually secured slave labor by voluntary contracts with their owners. Field commanders still sometimes impressed slaves and sent them to the South Carolina coast, where they worked under brutal conditions on fortifications.54 Although the government paid planters for their slaves, the payments were tokens and erratic at that.55 By promptly and freely hiring out their slaves, the Ellisons received good wages for redundant workers, employed them in the neighborhood, and secured them skilled work. They may also have gained immunity from impressment. Although the Confederate Congress legalized impressment in March 1863, South Carolina allowed planters to sidestep the law until December by paying small fines.56 No fines appear in the Ellisons’ careful accounts. It was not because government agents overlooked the numerous slaves in the High Hills. Jacob Stroyer, a slave on one of the Singleton places, remembered that in 1863 a man went “to different plantations, gathering slaves from their masters to carry off to work on fortifications, and to wait on officers.” Stroyer was one of ten slaves impressed from Singleton’s plantation.57 The Ellisons were powerless to resist impressment, but they may have been shrewd enough to escape it.
They had somewhat more leeway in dealing with their High Hills neighbors. For instance, they set the prices they charged for the produce of their plantation. Unfortunately, it is not possible to compare their rates with market prices. Their accounts usually include the item sold, the purchaser’s name, and the amount of the total bill, but not the item price or the quantity bought. Furthermore, prices varied sharply from one time and place to another and fluctuated wildly in a single neighborhood within a few days. “Flour was 12$[,] today 25$ a bag,” a Columbia woman explained in June 1863, adding “fowls sold yesterday $1 pr pair, were $2.50 not long since.”58 What is clear is that the Ellisons were not hoarders, a charge Southerners increasingly leveled against many white planters. It is unlikely the Ellisons were gougers either. They did not want accusing fingers pointed at them as selfish speculators fattening on their neighbors’ miseries. They had no need to extort to make huge profits. Skyrocketing prices assured that anyone who could produce surplus food crops could do well at market rates. Rather than begrudge the Ellisons their profits, the government and the citizens of Sumter District evidently were grateful to have such bountiful providers.
While the income of most cotton planters shriveled to a fraction of its prewar size, the Ellisons’ soared. More diverse in their operations than most of their neighbors since the 1830s, they were prepared to take advantage of fresh opportunities. Just how well is revealed in their accounts. From March 1862 through January 1863 the income from their father’s estate was pennies less than $2,550. From February 1863 through December 1863 the estate earned just under $7,860. And from January 1864 through December 1864 the Ellisons collected a whopping $12,738.11. Even deducting for roaring inflation, the ledgers show that Henry and William Jr. were their father’s sons. In difficult times they proved to be as able and opportunistic as their father in his day. They also did not neglect their social and political flank. They managed the estate with such finesse that it combined patriotism with high profits.
AS producers the Ellisons benefited from wartime shortages, but as consumers they too were victims. Medicine was hard to come by in the Confederate states. In 1862 and 1863 the Ellisons paid $130 for quinine and other drugs, including $2.00 for “whiskey for medicinal purposes.” They also bought small quantities of fodder, tallow, wheat, nails, salt peter, and rye, but even small quantities were expensive. When they bought a mare and colt in 1864 they paid $1,800. Three years earlier their most valuable horse was worth $140. The price of salt ballooned during the war. In 1862 alone the Ellisons paid $400 for salt. The following year they reduced their expenditures for salt to $111, and in 1864 they did not spend a dime. They managed to barter their produce for salt from family members in Charleston. “This will acknowledge the receipt of the corn sent for which accept my thanks,” Henry’s sister-in-law Louisa P. Weston wrote from the city in March 1864. She added her regrets that “I was unsuccessful in getting the salt off to you.” She had hoped to send it with one of the Johnsons who was on his way to Stateburg, but signals crossed and she missed the connection. “I however trust God willing to get up there in about 3 or 4 weeks time and if that time will suit, I will bring it up myself.”59 By exchanging upcountry corn for low-country salt, the Ellisons saved cash and helped hard-pressed kinfolk in the city. Although Charleston lay under siege, members of the Ellison family still traveled freely from Stateburg to Charleston and back, maintaining close, mutually beneficial ties.
Family ties could bind in other ways. Henry and William Jr.’s expenses included $200 for “labor done.” One of their hired laborers was their nephew, John Buckner. Having received no bequest from his grandfather, Buckner did odd jobs for his uncles. For some carpentry and bill collecting, they paid him $55. But they did not rely on Buckner to collect all the bills due the estate. In 1862 and 1863 the Ellison brothers employed R. Gale “for collecting” and paid him $34. Perhaps he worked territory beyond easy reach of Stateburg, where Buckner lived. Close to home, the Ellisons hired “Sam belonging to the estate of Mr. Waties” for $53.60 and paid Mike $3 for “work done” on the plantation, wages Buckner could have used. He had a wife and a growing brood of small children to support, and he was able and willing to work. His wife Sarah brought in a little income from sewing. In October 1861 she made six items of clothing for James Moody for $6.75, and the following year she earned the same amount for making dresses and jackets for Moody youngsters.60 Sarah and John Buckner did not reap much of the Ellisons’ wartime harvest.
Another family member did not participate fully in the Ellisons’ wartime enterprises. In the 1850s James M. Johnson and William Ellison had a shoe business, but the fate of the business after Ellison’s death is unclear.61 It may be that Johnson, who returned to Stateburg on Christmas Day, 1860, and lived in “Drayton Hall” for the duration of the war, simply took over the business, accounting for its absence from the records of William Ellison’s estate. Henry and William continued to purchase large quantities of leather, spending almost $350 in 1863 alone. The gin business was nearly defunct, and they needed little leather belting. Perhaps they bought the leather for Johnson to make shoes. One purchase in January 1863 specified “sole leather.” However, the Ellisons reported no income from a partnership with Johnson, and they bought shoes elsewhere. In September 1862, for example, they “Paid Caesar Frierson for making 3 pairs of shoes.” A year later they paid Capt. John Frierson, presumably Caesar’s owner, $70.50 for making shoes. Whether the Ellisons’ brother-in-law continued to make shoes cannot be known from the Ellisons’ accounts, and no other records have survived. Although Johnson was a close friend of both brothers, the death of William Ellison does not appear to have drawn him any closer to the inner circle of the family’s economic life.
The Ellisons’ greatest expense was the Confederate government itself. What the government paid the Ellisons with one hand it very nearly took back with the other. Government purchases brought the Ellisons $5,300, while taxes cost them about $5,000, more than one-fifth their total wartime income. Unlike many Southerners, the Ellisons evidently paid without hesitation. Once they even overpaid and received a refund of $150 for “overcharge on income tax.” On April 22, 1863, they spent $1,500 cash for Confederate war bonds. They could afford to invest in the government. From March 1862 through December 1864 they had an income of $23,145 and expenditures of $11,857, a tidy profit of more than $11,000. Only blockade runners and similar wily souls did better.
Unfortunately for the Ellisons, most of their profits were in Confederate paper. At war’s end they held $1,500 in Confederate bonds, $1,100 in 7.30 Treasury notes, $4,700 in 4 percent certificates, and $1,772.10 in Confederate currency. Investing more than $9,000 in the Confederate cause may seem heedless, but blue-chip investments were hard to find. Moreover, while Confederate investments appear reckless in hindsight, at the time they were prudent politics. What better way to demonstrate faith and commitment than with 7.30 notes: 7 percent paper payable thirty years after victory. Through their service as provisioners and investors the Ellisons bought protection. Long after the war ended, white South Carolinians forgot little about the late unpleasantness, and the Ellisons’ behavior paid dividend after dividend.
Few planter families compiled a better war record than the Ellisons. They more than fulfilled every obligation the government imposed. As soon as the call went out, they quit growing cotton and began producing food crops. They supplied their neighbors and the rebel armies with provisions. They hired out their skilled slaves, apparently for war-related work. They paid all their taxes on time and invested their profits in government notes. Rather than slackers, backsliders, hoarders, or speculators, the Ellisons were model Confederates. All their record lacked was a long list of family members who wore gray. They could not match the military service of their lordly neighbors twenty miles west. “In the Preston & Hampton families, Wade Hampton is the only one not in the field,” Oscar Lieber wrote his parents from a Charleston battery six days after the firing on Fort Sumter. He hastened to explain that Wade Hampton’s “company has not yet been accepted.” Lieber ticked off the family roster: “Col. Preston is a corporal in the Mounted Rifles, Johnny is here in the Sumter Guards, Willie as Lieut, of Regulars in Moultrie. Venable is a Lieut, in the Mounted Rifles. Kit Hampton and Wade Jr and Preston Hampton also. Manning is an aide of Beauregard’s; and so it is in almost every family I know of.”62
According to the law, it could not be so in the Ellison family. People of color were not eligible for military service. In 1861 the South Carolina legislature expressly prohibited Negroes from using firearms.63 Some Southern states early in the war permitted free colored men to muster into state or local militias, but no state allowed Negroes to serve as regular soldiers. The Confederate government was equally cool to dressing brown and black men in gray, until the final days of the war.64 Most free men of color who aided the state were pressed into labor batallions by the conscription act of 1862. In Charleston free colored volunteers performed valuable service as firemen. By 1865 they composed the only fire companies in the city. James H. Holloway, a member of the Brown Fellowship Society, recalled proudly that “members of the Society, not as an organization, but as individuals” saved Charleston from the fires ignited by Union bombardment.65
The Ellison family contributed more than a laborer or a fireman. On March 27, 1863, John Wilson Buckner enlisted as a private in the 1st South Carolina Artillery. He was wounded in action on July 12, 1863, at Battery Wagner. He remained in the army, according to his official Confederate military record, until October 19, 1864. Because his “furlough expired,” he officially became a deserter.66 However, his desertion was a technicality because years later he was praised by local whites—who were in a position to have known the truth—as a “faithful soldier.”67 For most free Negroes, even to attempt to join the army was dangerous. When three brothers who were “very dark skinned” and “at the Turpentine business” tried to enter the Camden militia in 1859, a white man objected, claiming “they were not white and had no right to muster.” In the fight that ensued, one man was shot.68 Buckner served in the companies of Capt. P. P. Galliard and Capt. A. H. Boykin, local white men who were acquaintances of Buckner and the other Ellisons.69 Although everybody knew Buckner was a Negro, personal associations and a sterling family reputation nullified the law and made Buckner an honorary white man as a soldier. Seven Benenhalys also enlisted (and only one returned), but the Turks claimed they were white, and prominent white men from the area defended their assertions.70 Whatever Buckner’s motivation for enlisting—heartfelt loyalty, an itch for adventure, a desire to escape his stingy uncles, or a courageous assertion of manliness—he gave whites an unmistakable confirmation of the Ellisons’ political sympathies.
Cagey behavior was routine in the Ellison household, but never more so than during the war. War inflamed age-old fears of slave rebellion. Near Camden, Emma Holmes noted in her diary in October 1862, “It was only a few weeks ago that a plot of insurrection was discovered among the negroes in the upper part of this district—it was very weak and ill-arranged and was confessed by one of them. A number were put in jail and are to be hung this week.”71 War also fueled white suspicions of free Negroes. Vigilantes rode their self-appointed beats, and the state legislature kept an eye on free persons of color.72 In 1861 the legislature considered a bill calling for the enslavement of free people of color convicted of certain crimes, a renewal of the bill debated in the 1860 session. After lengthy deliberation, the bill passed the lower chamber but failed again in the Senate.73 When white mechanics in Cheraw asked for relief from slave competition, the legislature responded more positively and granted their request by “prohibiting free Negroes and People of color from carrying on mechanical pursuits” in Cheraw.74
The Ellisons must have seen an editorial in the July 1863 Sumter Tri-Weekly Watchman. After noting the Charleston Mercury’s attack on planters who refused to give up slaves to work on the defenses of Charleston, it asked, “The free negroes of the State—what is their number, and why are they not pressed into this service? The conscription forces white men into the army, and the law requires the planter to send his slaves to the coast; why then should the free negro, the most idle and unprofitable member of the body politic, be excused from all service? … In Sumter District alone there are over thirty, liable to road duty, who are abundantly able to make the dirt and timber fly—why are they not pressed into service?”75 Although the editorial was not aimed at the Ellisons, they could not be oblivious to its message. Pejorative stereotypes of free Negroes persisted. As the editorial implied, safety for free persons of color lay in service.
The Ellisons’ service was not limited to producing food, paying taxes, hiring out their slaves, and providing a soldier. They also continued as good parishioners at Holy Cross. Each Sunday they joined their white neighbors to hear the rector pray for victory against the Yankees. In June 1863 they arranged baptisms for Tina, Fanny, and Violet, “servants of the Ellison family.”76 The church had difficulty collecting pew assessments from cash-strapped communicants, but the Ellisons paid regularly. Assessments had doubled since the 1840s, and the Ellison family had expanded to two pews. In each of the war years they paid $140 in pew fees. By their attendance, participation, and steady contributions, the Ellisons constantly reconfirmed their reputations as reliable members of the Stateburg community. In April 1863 they went a step further and subscribed $20 to a special fund at High Hills Baptist Church, the sort of generosity any community appreciated.
Good citizenship could not protect them forever. Having survived the dangers posed by the white citizens of Sumter, the soldiers of the Confederacy, and the politicians in Columbia, the Ellisons confronted the destructive armies of General William Tecumseh Sherman. War was slow to reach the South Carolina back country, but in the last winter it arrived as a firestorm. After marching from Atlanta to the sea and capturing Savannah, Sherman pushed his 60,000 soldiers into the “hellhole of secession.” He entered Columbia on February 17, 1865, and when he left three days later much of the capital of South Carolina was in ashes. Sherman advanced to Winnsboro, William Ellison’s boyhood home, then veered east, crossing the Wateree about thirty miles north of Stateburg.77 The Ellisons and their neighbors could see the glare of burning buildings in night skies along Sherman’s route, and they probably breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they were spared.
Sherman had not forgotten them, however. He ordered Brigadier General Edward E. Potter to march north from Charleston to destroy the railroads and military stores in Sumter District. Burning as they advanced, Potter’s 2,700 men entered the town of Sumter in the second week of April. Before smashing the printing presses of the Sumter Watchman, which had printed William Ellison’s gin advertisements, Potter’s men published a declaration of emancipation, then promptly marched west. Bivouacking in Manchester, a railroad center, Potter established his headquarters in Richard Singleton’s home. The Yankee general then turned north toward Stateburg and destroyed, among other places along the route, the home of James Caldwell, a patron of James M. Johnson’s tailor shop in Charleston. Since “Wisdom Hall” stood less than one hundred yards from the road, the Ellisons must have trembled when a detachment of federal troops entered Stateburg on April 13. The soldiers destroyed several buildings and moved north, advancing as far as Camden. Then they turned back, skirmishing along the way, and passed again through Stateburg on their way to the coast.78 Within days, the war was over.
The Ellisons survived. Southerners had not enslaved them and Northerners had not burned them out. The preservation of the Ellisons’ freedom did not depend solely on their unique material contributions to the Confederacy. Whites permitted the entire free Negro population to remain free during the war. Their economic contributions, unlike the Ellisons’, were negligible. Even their labor was minimal, and often given reluctantly. Nevertheless, in the eyes of whites free Negroes had behaved themselves. They had not become a fifth column for federal forces, instigating slave revolts or sabotaging military operations. Their behavior allowed white people to turn their attention to the powerful enemy without, away from the few thousand suspect free persons of color within. The Ellisons’ escape from destruction at the hands of federal troops rested on pure luck. Northern armies occasionally took vengeance on well-known Confederates, but more often their assaults had military rather than political objectives. Still, had Potter’s troops known about the wartime activities of the black masters who lived at the crossroads, they might have paused long enough to light a fire.
Like other Confederates, the Ellisons did not escape the consequences of Northern victory. Defeat brought occupation and emancipation. The well-worn title “free person of color” no longer had meaning. Now all people were free. The special status that separated the Ellisons and their friends from the vast majority of Negroes died with the Confederacy. The middle ground between slavery and freedom on which the Ellisons had stood for decades slipped into the past along the new racial fault line created by emancipation. Now, the Ellisons were simply Southern Negroes. What that would mean in the years to come, no one could say. The only certainty in the spring of 1865 was that life in Stateburg would never be the same.
AFTER a bombardment by federal artillery destroyed her family home in Charleston in December 1861, Emma Holmes joined thousands of other low-country whites who fled inland. She spent most of the war in and around Camden, safe from all but the depressing news from the battlefields. When the war reached Camden in March 1865, however, her spunky optimism could no longer withstand the reality of the new order. “Every tie of society seems broken,” she declared. Yankees swarmed over the countryside like “locusts,” and “vile negro-soldiers” encouraged former slaves “to insult their former masters by every petty way malignity can suggest….” At church, Negroes “were all in the most ludicrous & disgusting tawdry mixture of old finery, aping their betters most nauseatingly….” Respectable whites were in a “constant state of anxiety and alarm,” especially since “the poor whites [were] as much suspected as the negroes, for they were equally active in using Yankee license to rob….” In May, friends and family members straggled back to the state, “homeless, penniless, clothesless, with the past an awful quivering wreck, and the future a blank….” Like other whites of her class, Emma Holmes lived a nightmare. “We are (I am quite sure) the last of the race of South Carolina,” she proclaimed. “All talked of emigration somewhere beyond Yankee rule.”79
Four years earlier, free Negro South Carolinians had contemplated emigration in order to avoid disaster. Now the emigrant’s shoe was on a white foot. Just the thought of leaving home made Emma Holmes shudder. “What a living death would exile be, away from all that made life dear.” Besides, there were bewildering practical problems. “For married men,” she observed, “emigration is easy to plan, but hard to carry out.” Money was scarce, and land almost impossible to sell. Transportation was no easier to come by. Consequently, she wrote, “All feel that whatever they might be able to do in the future, for many months at least, they have to sit passively & wait to learn the course to be pursued toward us.”80 For many of the same reasons that the free colored elite had not emigrated in 1861, the white chivalry bided their time in 1865. But they did not let their fate rest solely in the hands of their conquerors and their former slaves. Neither did the Ellisons.
The dust from General Edward Potter’s soldiers marching past the crossroads probably announced freedom in the Ellisons’ slave quarters. Elsewhere in the South slaves took advantage of the war to step up their campaign of resistance. By the time federal troops arrived, they sometimes could only confirm freedom the slaves had already seized.81 The circumstances in the Ellisons’ quarters at the end of the war are unclear. But compared to white planters, the Ellisons enjoyed certain advantages in the struggle for mastery. Except for John Buckner, the Ellison men stayed home throughout the war, directly supervising their slaves. Judging from the profits the Ellisons piled up, their slaves worked hard, at least through 1864. Records for the first half of 1865 show little production, but it is impossible to tell if they reflect the disintegration of slavery or merely the disintegration of careful record keeping.82 Whether taken by the slaves or proclaimed by federal troops, freedom was a reality for all Negroes in the spring of 1865. The Ellisons had become masters without slaves.
Southern whites predicted that emancipation would result in race riots, economic decay, and sexual chaos.83 For the Ellisons, freedmen were unlikely to conjure up the last of this trilogy of fantasies. Eliza Ann, after all, already slept with a Negro man. Slavery, moreover, held different meanings for the Ellisons and for white masters. To whites, slaveholding was the basis of power—political, social, economic, and racial. Mastery burrowed into the marrow of their identities. To the Ellisons, slaveholding was a tool, part of a pragmatic strategy to prosper and to obtain security in a society hostile to all people of color. The loss of slaves did not devastate the Ellisons’ self-conception. But emancipation was costly, just as it was for other planters. Assuming the Ellisons’ slave force grew by natural increase during the war and was not reduced by sales, the family probably owned about eighty slaves at the moment of emancipation, valued at perhaps $100,000. In addition to losing slave capital, planters predicted that the labor of former slaves would be worthless. The Ellisons could not ignore the prophecies that freed people would not labor without coercion and that King Cotton was as dead as slavery.
Former masters had no alternative but to test their auguries and attempt to rebuild with former slaves. Like others, the Ellisons moved quickly to procure workers. Freed men and women in 1865 commonly signed contracts under the supervision of agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Typically the contracts specified that freed people would finish out the year on their former owner’s plantation, usually working for a share of the crop already in the ground.84 Fresh from bondage, freed men and women had no money and were unable to pay the two-dollar capitation tax assessed by South Carolina. Their employers often paid their tax, refastening the old links of dependence. In 1865 the Ellisons paid the capitation tax for twelve men.85 Six of the twelve had first names that match those of slaves William Ellison bequeathed his children in 1861. Isaac Jenkins, who had carried messages and packages back and forth from Charleston, was among them.86 The Ellisons’ white neighbors also paid taxes for freedmen—James M. Caldwell paid for six, Isaac Lenoir for nine, Isham Moore for seventeen, and Dr. W. W. Anderson, the son of William Ellison’s guardian who had died in 1864, paid for twenty-six.87 Several of the twelve men employed by the Ellisons probably had families, and some of their wives and children may also have worked in the Ellisons’ fields. But the number of freed people on their plantation was far short of the number of slaves they had recently owned. If they had employed in 1865 the same slave men they owned in 1860, they would have paid capitation taxes for at least twenty-five men. Since six of their twelve laborers in 1865 did not belong to them at the beginning of the war, it appears that the Ellisons did not sign contracts with three-quarters of their former slaves.
Under the contracts of 1865, freed people returned to plantations that operated along familiar lines, too familiar for most of them. Landlords continued to work Negroes in gangs, to stand over their work, to limit personal freedom, and sometimes more. One Sumter freedman remembered that when a white man came into the fields whipping, a former slave ran into town to report it to the federal provost marshal. He “met a crowd of other colored people,” all of whom had encountered “difficulties with their former owners, and came from all parts of the country, seeking redress.” In December, when freed people faced the decision of whether to sign on again, he reported that “Nearly all the slaves [sic] left and went out and made contracts with other landlords.”88
Denied land of their own, most freedmen had no choice but to work for white landowners. But they were determined to end the plantation system. They sought to bury gang labor, white supervision, and the old slave quarters with slavery. They demanded to live and work as free people. Whites tried desperately to preserve the routines of slavery and to retain their authority over the lives of former slaves. Freedom, whites hoped, would mean no more than paying low wages. The struggle between laborers and landlords over the content of freedom resulted in the system of sharecropping. This compromise emerged rapidly after the war. It permitted freed people to live in family cabins on small patches of land and to establish a family economy by working the land themselves, paying their rent with a share of the cotton they grew. For their part, landlords retained some supervision and the crucial control over land and production. Measured against slavery, freed people considered sharecropping a desirable, though far from ideal, form of freedom.89
On the Ellison place, the plantation system broke down as it did elsewhere, but sharecroppers did not replace slaves. Hardly anyone replaced slaves. The Ellisons evidently refused to compromise and insisted on hiring farm laborers for wages. Freed people rejected working for wages for white planters because it meant continued white control over their daily labor. They apparently did not find the prospect of wage labor for the Ellisons any more attractive. Furthermore, slave parents who had had their little girls sold away from them may not have been willing to work for the Ellisons under any circumstances. But it was not just the Ellisons’ former slaves who stayed away from them. By refusing to adjust to the minimal demands of freed men and women, the Ellisons virtually withdrew from commercial agriculture. They retained all the land they inherited from their father, but they stopped being large farmers. They almost stopped being farmers at all.90
The Ellisons managed to contract with a few wage laborers who cultivated just a fraction of their land. They hired too few hands to maintain the old plantation system. Instead, the Ellisons’ laborers farmed small, individual plots for subsistence wages. In 1868, for example, incomplete records show that the brothers paid Jack Wade, Monday Davis, Minto, and Jack $71.45 for labor, less than $20 each for the year. Two years later they paid $59.85 to Brutus Rawlinson, Charlotte James, and Joe Black. Some, and perhaps all, of these hired hands lived in cabins on Ellison land. The Ellisons charged rent for the cabins and maybe some garden space. In 1869 their seven renters paid $78.45. Toward hired hands and renters the Ellisons exhibited no more benevolence than their father had shown toward his slaves.
Cotton production resumed after the war, but the Ellisons’ fields no longer turned white in the fall. Since they had quit growing cotton during the war, the Ellisons had to buy cotton seed to plant again. In 1866 they paid W. E. Richardson $31.25 and James M. Caldwell $90.00 for seed. The next year they bought a little more seed from L. M. Spann for $40.00. Yet even these modest sums do not convey how precipitously the plantation declined. William Ellison had cultivated 500 acres in 1860, but in 1870 his children had only 118 acres under cultivation. James M. Johnson farmed a tiny plot of 8 acres of Ellison land, John Buckner worked 20 acres, and Henry Ellison 90 acres. Johnson evidently tilled his land by himself. Buckner hired laborers, paying them wages of $250 a year. He probably hired his wife’s relatives—Lawrence, Laurendon, and John Benenhaly—all young, illiterate farm hands who lived with him.
Henry’s bill for farm labor in 1870 came to $450, about five or six workers at the rate Buckner paid. But Henry may have employed even fewer, and not all of them black. In 1871 he paid A. P. Vinson, a white man, $282.27 for “making [a] crop” for the estate. That same year he also paid ex-slave Minto Spencer $45.00 for “work done in field.” Some of Henry’s employees lived in cabins near “Wisdom Hall.” According to the census, eight black families lived in immediate proximity to the Ellisons. Six of them were headed by illiterate farm laborers, three of whom definitely worked for the Ellisons. Peter Spencer, 49, had a wife and two children; Isaac Jenkins, 30, was married and had one child; and John Wade, 37, had a wife and two youngsters. Three other families—Isabella Spencer, 40, and her two children; Eliza Williams, 22, her six-month-old son, and Ellison Bennett, 21, a farm laborer; and Eliza Goodwyn, 50, and her young son—also may have worked for the Ellisons. Why these individuals worked for wages when most freed people opted for sharecropping is unclear. Some were former slaves of the Ellisons who may have stayed out of an attachment to their old masters or to the neighborhood. Others, especially the women with children and no husbands, may have been unable to do better.
With such a small labor force the Ellisons could not even approach their antebellum production. Their 118 cultivated acres produced only fourteen bales of cotton in 1870. On slightly more than four times that acreage, their father grew almost six times as much cotton. The wartime cornucopia of provision crops had dwindled by 1870 to small quantities of corn, beans, and sweet potatoes. The value of all agricultural produce in 1870 was $1,301. Wages consumed $700 of that sum. The Ellisons’ principal source of income since the 1840s was moribund. Approximately 770 acres of the plantation lay fallow—220 acres of “woodland” and 550 acres “unimproved.” They had not converted their unimproved acreage into grazing land, since their livestock comprised only two horses, three mules, four milk cows, five head of cattle, and six swine. The High Hills wilderness their slaves had cut back to make a plantation during the antebellum years now began to reclaim the land.
For half a century the gin shop anchored the Ellison family economy. At first glance, it would appear that the shop should have been in an advantageous position after the war. Cotton prices remained high until the early 1870s, and planters with cash, credit, laborers, and the heart to try planted cotton. Production in South Carolina rebounded from wartime lows, reaching 180,000 bales in 1868 and 374,000 in 1872.91 As always, cotton required gins and ginwrights, and the need in the High Hills was urgent. When Potter’s soldiers swept through Sumter District in 1865, they destroyed more than 100 cotton gins.92 Scattered records show that the Ellison shop was in business in the years immediately after the war, doing both blacksmith and gin work. In August 1866, for example, R. R. Briggs, whose gins Potter’s troops had missed, paid the Ellisons $42.25 for repairs. The following year an old customer, Isham Moore, paid them $39.00 for gin repair.93
The gin business resumed, but the shop never recovered. Like their fields, the Ellisons’ shop required the labor of freedmen. Skilled freedmen were even more difficult than field hands to hold to old routines. Freedom gave artisans fresh opportunities, which they quickly explored. Hundreds of blacksmiths and carpenters fled plantations and crowded into Charleston and other towns, where they tried to build independent businesses.94 Unable to hire their former slave artisans, the Ellisons had to rely on their own labor. Both brothers were close to fifty years old, and they may not have been eager to put in long days without skilled assistants to take care of the heaviest and dirtiest chores. But at age thirty-four in 1865, John Buckner was in his prime and ready to work. His uncles Henry and William Jr. retained ownership of the shop, but they turned over its daily operation to him.
In 1870, for the first time in forty years, just one member of the Ellison family declared the occupation of gin maker, John Buckner.95 However, the gin shop continued to be known as the Ellison shop, signifying its ownership and reputation. Most likely, Buckner worked in the shop with one or two other men. In 1865 he paid the capitation tax for Theodore and Robert, evidently his employees.96 Since the men’s names do not appear on the list of William Ellison’s slaves, they probably were not former slaves whom the old ginwright had trained to the trade. Instead, they were apparently unskilled freedmen, the only hands Buckner could hire.
The loss of skilled labor meant the quantity and quality of the shop’s production declined. In 1869 one of the Moody family, customers of the Ellisons for more than three decades, turned to a new blacksmith. The bill Jack Bowen submitted to the Moodys indicates he was barely literate, probably a former slave.97 Nevertheless, he took business away from the Ellison shop. Bowen was not the only freed blacksmith that dislodged loyal Ellison customers. In March 1867 a man named Peterson collected $97 for blacksmith work for Dr. W. W. Anderson. A year later he received an additional $34.98 Although Dr. Anderson continued to do business with the Ellison brothers, he no longer depended on them for his blacksmith trade. Without a smoothly functioning team of skilled workers, the shop could not remain a busy, efficient place. John Buckner’s economic status in 1870—$300 in personal property and no real estate—reflects the sorry state of the gin and blacksmith business.99
BY 1870 Henry and William Ellison Jr. called themselves neither farmers nor gin makers. Now they were general merchants.100 Sometime between the end of the war and 1870 the brothers built a general store within steps of the gin shop their father had constructed almost fifty years earlier. Although we cannot be certain, it appears the brothers built the store soon after the war ended. Whether they opened the store as a reaction to their difficulty hiring field hands and artisans or whether they had this business in mind before the war ended is not clear. In the months immediately after the war they had to consider the strictures of the South Carolina Black Codes. Among other provisions, the Codes provided that “No person of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade or business of an artisan, mechanic or shopkeeper, or any other trade, employment or business (besides that of husbandry, or that of a servant under a contract for service or labor) on his own account and for his own benefit …” without obtaining a license from the judge of the local district court.101 The Codes required free men of color to apply for a license each year, which involved convincing the judge of their skill and good character and paying a fee of $10 for mechanics or $100 for storekeepers. If whites complained about licensed workers, the licenses could be revoked. However, the Ellison brothers did not need to acquire licenses and accommodate their plans to the Black Codes, since Major General David Sickles, the commanding officer of the Union army in South Carolina, countermanded them early in 1866.102
By that time or shortly afterward, the brothers were already beginning to scale back their investment in agriculture. In that year and subsequent years they sold horses and mules. Richard Anderson, a son of their father’s guardian, bought a mule in 1866 for $117, and the next year his brother, Dr. W. W. Anderson, bought two for $260. Mules were in short supply, and earnest farmers wanted more, not fewer. At the same time they sold mules, the Ellisons placed sizable orders—$200 in 1867, for example—with Adams and Frost, their old factors in Charleston.103 Although the records do not indicate what they bought, they probably were adding stock to the shelves of their new store.
Surviving records do not permit us to reconstruct with certainty the reasons the Ellison brothers made this drastic break with their past as planters and gin makers. The exodus of skilled workers from their shop doomed the gin business immediately after the war, and the Ellisons could do little about it. The days of the shop were numbered anyway. Within a decade huge factory-produced gins drove small handmade machines like theirs to the fringes of the market, a development the Ellisons could not have foreseen.104 They continued to lend their name to the gin shop, but not their full attention. The brothers had a better chance to prevent the collapse of their plantation. Although freed Negro families kept wives and children out of the fields after 1865, creating a general labor shortage, other High Hills planters managed to secure enough labor to keep scrub oak from recapturing their land.105 The Ellisons do not appear to have tried. By rejecting sharecropping, they forfeited agriculture. Furthermore, it appears that they quit the freedmen before the freedmen quit them. But why?
Everywhere in the South in 1865 planters predicted that emancipation meant agricultural disaster. Their pessimism continued even after cotton production began to rise. “I can see no hope for the South in our time,” Dr. Mark Reynolds, a friend and customer of the Ellisons, wrote in February 1870. Economic catastrophe could only be averted, he believed, by attracting a new class of farm laborers—white Europeans “from England if possible.”106 The white gentry perceived farming on a large scale as risky business. The Ellisons had never been much for taking risks. Their principal economic rule was always safety first. Their accustomed conservatism may have dissuaded them from pouring money and energy into agriculture, especially into a sharecropping arrangement that diminished their control and raised the stakes of the gamble. No one knew how the experiment in freed Negro labor would turn out. Those who claimed to know promised utter failure, and even optimists worried.
Race probably influenced the Ellisons’ decision to pull out of agriculture. Some whites abandoned planting because they could not stand to negotiate in their own fields with freedmen. They found it demeaning and humiliating to put their signatures on contracts with former slaves, now their legal peers. Formal distinctions between free and unfree vanished. Now, racial and class divisions were all that stood between landlords and tenants, whites and blacks. For the Ellisons, such distinctions may have been uncomfortably fine. Extensive farming would make them economically dependent on freed people, and it would draw their lives closer to large numbers of former slaves. From the time April Ellison moved to Stateburg in 1816, he and his family had distanced themselves from the mass of blacks. Slavery made an effective barrier between the free brown Ellisons and their black slaves. But after the war that barrier lay in rubble. Restoring agriculture with freed Negro labor promised the Ellisons social and economic risks. They chose not to take them.
The Ellisons rejected agriculture because they had an alternative that was both economically and socially attractive. In every way, a general store looked promising. The brothers would not lose status by moving from planting into storekeeping, for they were already businessmen. They had years of experience dealing with customers, ordering supplies, and keeping careful accounts. They already had long-standing business relationships that stretched to factors and suppliers in Charleston. Not even the challenge of economic change was new to them. During the war they had transformed their father’s cotton plantation into a vast garden of food crops. As wartime provisioners, they had operated what amounted to a huge grocery for the citizens of the High Hills. And throughout their lives they had honed the skills of pleasing customers, acquiring temperaments that many whites found lacking in themselves.
R. L. Burn, a young white man who opened a general store in Greenville, explained the special qualities required to succeed. “I have nothing to do but sit in the store,” he wrote a family member in 1866. “Today may be a right good day for trade but tomorrow will make up for it in dullness,” he said. He tried to read or do some writing when things were slow, but “some one is sure to come in and look at something for an hour and then go out without buying or to want a spool of thread[,] a paper of pins or needles or some other little things with a five dollar bill to change before you can sell it to them.” He would become “disgusted with the world and sit down to smoke my pipe when in steps some dainty little female and wants a thousand things that you have not got and winds up by saying that she does wish you had your spring goods for she is afraid to buy any thing until she sees what the fashions are going to be.” At such times he wished he were “out on a good farm plowing a lazy mule so that I could take my fill of abusing it and so let off some of the steam that will accumulate until you almost burst if you try to suppress it.” He concluded, “a store is a great place to study human nature….”107
Studying human nature was the Ellisons’ stock in trade. They knew the white planters of Sumter District, and that knowledge paid dividends in their new store. With the breakdown of the plantation system and the factorage arrangements that supported it, thousands of small country stores sprang up to provide provisions, credit, and marketing services to hundreds of thousands of back-country sharecroppers. Landlords usually supplied their tenants with land, mules, farm tools, and housing, while country merchants stocked food, clothing, and household items. Merchants advanced goods on credit, taking as collateral a lien on the freedmen’s share of the cotton crop.108 Had the Ellisons been typical country store owners they would have catered to the black freed people in and around Stateburg. But they were not typical.
Accounts for the store have not survived, but it is clear that the Ellison brothers’ clientele was white, not black. Old Burrel Moody, a rough-cut white planter with more than 600 acres, was a regular customer in the early 1870s. He bought cheap calico cloth, lye, plug tobacco, brogans, buttons, thread, homespun, pepper, peas, nails, handkerchieves, pots, and pans, a shopping list little different from that of the average sharecropper. The Ellisons may have had a few local black croppers among their customers. But even Moody sometimes bought luxury goods like tea, rye whiskey, and sherry, which were beyond the reach of most freed people.109 The Ellisons stocked their shelves with items from the top of the line. A white resident of Stateburg recalled that her mother patronized the store at the turn of the century. Her mother told her the store carried an assortment of first-quality products, including fine cloth and fancy tinned goods from Charleston.110 Rather than becoming furnishing merchants for black tenants, the Ellisons ran a general mercantile establishment for white landlords.
Because they served the quality, the Ellisons did not take liens on their customers’ crops. Their patrons paid with cash or personal notes, just as they had for gin and blacksmith work in the old days. In February 1868 Dr. W. W. Anderson paid the Ellison brothers $80 on his account.111 Occasionally the Ellisons received baled cotton in payment. In January 1874, for example, Burrel Moody paid part of his bill with a cotton bale. The Ellisons promptly returned him $20 to pay his taxes.112 But the Moody family was often slow to pay. “We write to say to you that we are very much pressed for money to discharge our obligations in Charleston for goods bought there,” the Ellisons informed R. J. Moody in October 1876, “and we would be glad if you would Come and See us this Coming week, and let us have the money for your account.”113 Sometimes the Ellisons had to go to court to get the Moodys to settle up. When the inheritors of Burrel Moody’s estate failed to make good his debts, the brothers laid their claim before Judge Thomas E. Richardson in Sumter, and three months later they received their money.114 Many country merchants had cotton gins and presses on their premises that small farmers could use for a price.115 Although the Ellison brothers still owned the gin shop, nothing suggests they provided ginning services, further evidence of their unusual list of planter customers.
The Ellison brothers’ decision to become merchants did not represent a complete break with their past. They changed businesses, not customers. Always, the list of patrons, not the particular trade, was what counted. Wise conservatives, the Ellisons decided to change in order to keep what they had. A store freed them from association with and dependence on freed blacks. Their store required only their labor, and it allowed them to continue to mix with prominent white people. The same whites who had come to buy gins before the war and provisions during the war now came to purchase the special goods the Ellisons freighted up from Charleston.
During the postwar years the leading white families of the High Hills were a little threadbare, as were the Ellisons. Storekeeping could never rival their antebellum income from the gin shop and plantation, most of it produced by their slaves. Storekeeping in the postbellum South came with no guarantee of survival, much less prosperity. Some stores were fly-by-night operations run by no-accounts who were not above buying cotton after dark with no questions asked. But even well-educated, respectable storekeepers could not always make a go of it. After the war, the Ellisons’ neighbor Richard Anderson—a former Confederate general—tried his hand at farming, then moved up the road to Camden to open a store. “The business of the Road has fallen off to little of nothing,” he reported in June 1873. “We have nothing to do, except fan ourselves and fight the flies—varied occasionally with the highly intellectual employment of twirling our thumbs.”116 Anderson’s empty cash register eroded his good humor, and five years later he grimly announced that he was going broke in Camden and thinking of moving to Baltimore.117
Inexperience may have contributed to Anderson’s failure, but he also faced stiff competition. In 1880 the little town of Camden counted twenty-seven stores.118 Down the road twenty miles, the Ellisons had the only store in Stateburg. However, they did not have a stranglehold on the neighborhood. Rural merchants who provisioned sharecroppers often gained monopolies because they were the only local source of credit.119 With a crop lien, merchants came into conflict with landlords, vying for first claim to the sharecroppers’ produce.120 The Ellisons neatly sidestepped this class conflict by avoiding crop liens and extensive trading with black sharecroppers. No landlords depended on the Ellisons for credit to tide them over from season to season. White planters obtained those funds elsewhere, and they shopped at the Stateburg crossroads simply because it was convenient and agreeable. Anytime they found fault with the Ellisons’ stock or service, they could take their business to stores in Camden, Sumter, Columbia, or even Charleston. In 1870 Henry mentioned that he kept the store open until 10 o’clock in the evening and sometimes even slept there.121 The lamp in his window announced that he was ready to sell whenever his customers wanted to buy.
High Hills residents purchased enough to make the Ellisons a success in their new business and to sustain their reputation for good and useful service. The credit ledgers of the R. G. Dun Mercantile Agency chart their achievement. Dun reporters went from county to county investigating businesses. They talked to local people and checked public records to establish as best they could the owners’ financial assets. They then sent their estimates of each firm’s “pecuniary strength” and “credit rating” to the main office in New York. Reputable merchants wanted a good listing in order to obtain credit from wholesalers.122 From 1872 to 1880 the Ellisons received twelve ratings. The brief reports assess the economic condition of the business as well as their character and standing in the community.
The first report, filed in November 1872, stated that the Ellisons, once “colored slaveholders,” were worth $2,000 to $3,000 and were “very hon[est] upright men.” Subsequent reports embroidered these themes, reassuring lenders. In March 1874 the agent observed that the brothers had been “always free and before the war owned 30 slaves, are men of good character, steady, hardworking and industrious.” He estimated their worth at $7,000 to $8,000. Three years later the report stated, “Doing well. Honest & industrious. Temperate Reliable & in good credit for business wants.” It gave $6,000 as their estimated worth. In February 1878 a verbose investigator wrote, “Have been Free Negroes for most of their lives. Are industrious hardworking men, of good standing[,] always acted honestly & regarded worthy & safe for credit.” The last two reports emphasized that the Ellisons were “Men of very good standing. Economical & have accumulated some ppty” and that they were “spoken of highly.”123
The Ellisons had survived the transition from gin makers and planters to storekeepers. But as the Dun reports reveal, they were no longer wealthy men. The highest estimate of their assets in the 1870s was $8,000. Their father’s estate had been worth almost ten times as much. Plumeting land values, a crippled shop, and emancipation made them much poorer. Still, a June 1875 entry in the Dun ledgers describes them as “Rich,” a word that says as much about the poverty of the postwar South as about the prosperity of the Ellisons. The standards by which the white community judged Negroes did not undergo a similar decline. If anything, the turbulence of Reconstruction and Redemption made white men more vigilant and unpredictable than ever. Nonetheless, the Ellisons’ sterling reputation remained intact. Whites continued to appreciate their hard work and careful habits and to reward them with patronage and respect. The network of relationships that bound the Ellisons and their white neighbors endured, reinforced now by the store. Stateburg remained their sanctuary.
DURING Reconstruction the Republican party became the political sanctuary of the overwhelming majority of South Carolina’s Negroes. Ex-slaves flocked to the party of Lincoln after Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, requiring rebel states to adopt new constitutions that authorized, among other reforms, Negro suffrage. Many well-educated members of the antebellum free mulatto elite also found a home in the Republican party, where they assumed positions of leadership. Several of the Ellisons’ Charleston acquaintances—including members of the McKinlay, Sasportas, DeLarge, and Shrewsbury families—sought to exploit the new political dimension of their freedom by reaching down toward freedmen. As Republican leaders, the members of the old free mulatto elite attempted to shape the freedmen’s efforts to enhance their formal freedom with rights and privileges previously reserved exclusively for whites. As politicians, mulatto Republicans also hoped to consolidate a position in the new order between white and black that would approximate their old prewar status on the middle ground between slavery and freedom.124
One of the delegates to the South Carolina constitutional convention of 1868 that formalized “Black Reconstruction” was Henry Jacobs of Fairfield District, the husband of William Ellison’s daughter, Maria, whose legal slavery lasted until the general emancipation. A Republican, Jacobs represented his district in the state legislature between 1868 and 1870.125 In Sumter District, eleven Negro Republicans either sat in the constitutional convention or served in the state legislature between 1868 and 1876, but only two were, like Jacobs, free before the war.126 Neither of them was an Ellison.
Political creatures to their toes, the Ellisons had long engaged in the subtle, informal politics of personalism. In 1868 Henry Ellison, William Jr., and John Buckner registered as “colored” voters in the Stateburg election precinct.127 Enfranchised for the first time, the Ellisons entered a world in which the nuances of personalism became denatured and formalized into a vote. In Sumter District, whites had no more use for neutrality on Reconstruction than they had on slavery before the war, on Yankees during the war, or on carpetbaggers afterward. As new voters, the Ellisons had a simple choice: they could vote with their old white friends or against them. No evidence suggests they hesitated or wavered, even for a moment.
The Republican party offered the Ellisons little but trouble. In South Carolina the party sponsored numerous democratic reforms, including a cautious program of land redistribution.128 As large landowners, the Ellisons had no desire to share with anyone, white or black. Proposals to promote racial equality held little more attraction for them. Since the 1820s the Ellisons had made every effort to set themselves apart from blacks. They maintained that posture after the war when they shifted from being planters to storekeepers. Each year after 1865, whites made fewer distinctions between black and shades of brown. The mulatto Ellisons were not about to hasten the destruction of their special status by joining hands with ex-slaves in Republican politics.
If the war had severed the Ellisons’ associations with High Hills whites, perhaps the family might have been tempted to experiment with new allies. During the war, however, the Ellisons’ ties to the Stateburg community became stronger. After Appomattox the Ellisons continued to nurture those customary relationships in their store, at church, and in the neighborhood. But more than ingrained habit and social reflex animated their upward alliances. As always, sober self-interest dictated their actions. Why should they jettison old white allies who still provided economic and personal security? The Ellisons had nothing to gain by turning toward ex-slaves and maverick whites in the Republican party. Instead of trying to bridge the antebellum gap between brown and black, they worked constantly to preserve the antebellum proximity between brown and white. Their politics grew out of time-honored social and economic relationships.
The Ellisons became Democrats. Records of their votes from one election to the next do not exist, but their political allegiance is beyond doubt. A remarkable document from the turn of the century—the Minute Book and Roll of the Stateburg Democratic Club—reveals choices the Ellisons had made twenty-five years earlier. During the 1890s, when whites lynched to defend white supremacy and defined blackness by the “one-drop rule,” when almost all Negroes were disfranchised and thousands fled the state, the Ellisons were ensconced in the local Democratic Club, surrounded by old white friends.129
Records for the Stateburg Democratic Club span the years 1890 to 1910 and are crowded with familiar names.130 Dr. W. W. Anderson and W. M. Lenoir presided over the organization, and Spanns, Sumters, and Reynoldses belonged. In 1890, so did John Buckner and two of his sons, and William Ellison Jr. and his eldest son, William John. Within the next twenty years two more of John Buckner’s sons appear on the rolls along with two of the sons of Henry Ellison. The Ellisons’ participation in the Stateburg club reflected the Democratic party’s policy of permitting county organizations to set their own rules for membership. At the local precinct level, where, historian William J. Cooper Jr. observes, “everyone knew everyone else,” membership in the Democratic club “became mandatory for social acceptance.”131 Late in the 1870s some Democrats advocated a straight-out white man’s party, but Sumter District whites reminded them that Negroes had rallied “to the support of honesty and home rule” in 1876, when the party redeemed the state from Reconstruction. They urged the straight-out faction to remember that “colored Democrats stood by us in our time of need.”132 Nevertheless, most local organizations had purged Negroes from the party rolls by the early 1890s.133 The few who remained had to prove that they had indeed voted for Wade Hampton and Redemption in 1876 and had been loyal Democrats ever since.134 The Ellisons’ presence in the Stateburg club at the turn of the century confirms their politics in the 1870s. When John Buckner died in 1895, an obituary in a Sumter newspaper commemorated his loyalty by recalling, “when the war was over he remained true to his friends and was a true and tried democrat.”135
The conservative strategy William Ellison devised early in the nineteenth century continued to guide his family into the twentieth. They hugged to the contours of the political and social landscape he had first mapped. After the war, for example, when most Negro parishioners abandoned Holy Cross, the Ellisons stayed put. In 1868 the Ellisons comprised four of Rector Robert Wilson’s seven colored communicants, the last remnant of 150 prewar Negro worshipers.136 As before the war, Holy Cross rectors baptized Ellison children and buried Ellison dead. Yet repetition of familiar rituals did not engender a new passivity on the part of the Ellisons. The old, familiar South changed. Poverty eroded personal associations, race relations became harsher and more rigid, and the elevated status enjoyed by the antebellum free mulatto elite deteriorated. To maintain continuity in their lives, the Ellisons had to be as astute and diligent as their father.
Stateburg remained friendly territory, but Sumter District, like the rest of the South, grew increasingly hostile and dangerous. The words “Strictly a White Man’s Paper” were emblazoned on the masthead of the True Southron, the newspaper with the largest local circulation. Editorials confirmed the motto. “The intellectual differences between the races are not artificial or imaginary distinctions,” the True Southron proclaimed in 1881, “but are as marked and real as those which God has stamped upon their physical appearance.”137 The editor’s racial opinions made him an advocate of lynching. Some white Southerners denounced the practice, but the True Southron editor cautioned against sentimentality. There are “cases in which lynch-law is necessary,” he explained. Each lynching “should be judged on its own merit, and condemned or condoned” accordingly. He cited as an example of a good lynching a recent incident in Orangeburg in which a black man was accused of raping a white girl. “Do not abolish the lynch-law,” he said. “Let it remain as one of the unwritten statutes of our land. Let its right hand of death be held out over the people.”138
In the rough, bitter world of the redeemed South, the Ellisons avoided the lynch rope. But the general deterioration of racial civility abraded their reputation and, in one celebrated instance, made their name a term of reproach. In 1880 a long-standing blood feud between the Cash and Shannon families of Camden degenerated into a duel. When William McCreight Shannon saw the “Camden Soliloquies” in the July 9 issue of the Kershaw Gazette, he issued a challenge to Bogden Cash, the author of the doggerel. Shannon had served in the state legislature in 1857 and in Kirkwood’s Rangers during the war, returning home afterward to succeed his father, Charles John Shannon, as president of the Bank of Camden. The elder Shannon had named his son for William McCreight, the respected ginwright of Winnsboro with whom he had worked in the frontier days of the upcountry. In 1880, Bogden Cash began his slanderous attack on Shannon with
My Daddy was a Gin Maker
And worked cheek by jowle,
With Ellison, a negro,
(’Tis a secret) by my soul.
Cash’s insults also charged Shannon with stealing, swindling, and running from a fight. The two men met in a duel in Darlington County, where Cash killed Shannon. Cash was tried for violation of the anti-dueling laws but acquitted. Said to be the last duel in South Carolina, it was far from the last act of violence. Cash himself was later cut down in a shootout after he had beat to death a sheriff and a bystander.139
From Stateburg the Ellisons could hear their name mentioned in the public outcry against the Cash-Shannon duel. Rather than being praised as epitomes of respectability, the Ellisons had become simply Negro workingmen whose color degraded white co-workers. Outside Stateburg, the Ellisons’ name tarnished white reputations by association. The Ellisons lived out their lives inside the village, secure in the cocoon that protected them from the meanness that lurked within a few miles of “Wisdom Hall.”
THE Ellisons preserved peaceful relations with local white people for the duration of their lives. But in 1870 the Ellison family itself began to disintegrate. After William Ellison’s death in 1861 his family had remained a cohesive social and economic unit. The death of his daughter a decade later triggered dissension within the family.
On March 4,1870, when she was fifty-nine years old, Eliza Ann Ellison Buckner Johnson died. Her family buried her in the family graveyard, and her husband James M. Johnson inscribed on her tombstone, “My Angel Wife, Gone to Rest.”140 William Ellison’s will provided that, upon Eliza Ann’s death, her share of the estate be passed not to her husband but to her surviving children, William Ellison’s blood kin.141 Eliza Ann’s only child was John Buckner, who still lived in “Drayton Hall” along with his second wife Sarah and their four youngsters. When his mother died, Buckner was thirty-nine and almost propertyless. He owned no real estate and valued his personal assets at $300.142 He evidently appealed to his uncles to divide his grandfather’s estate and give him his mother’s share. Henry and William Jr., however, refused to relinquish control over the family property.
In February 1871, almost a year after his mother’s death, Buckner brought his claim to the probate court in Sumter. He sued his uncles for one-third of William Ellison’s estate.143 He pointed out that he had met the one qualification his grandfather had specified before he could inherit his mother’s share: he was legally married. Buckner estimated the value of William Ellison’s personal property at just over $42,000 and the extent of his land at 430 acres, “more or less.” His estimates illustrate his distance from his uncles’ management of the estate, which actually contained more than twice that many acres.
Two days after Buckner filed suit, Sheriff Thomas Jefferson Coghlan served the Ellison brothers with a summons to appear in court the first Monday in April “to show cause, if any you have, why the prayer” of Buckner “should not be granted.” The brothers won a brief delay until mid-April, when Judge C. M. Hursh ruled that William Ellison’s land be divided among the three men. Judge Hursh did not parcel out any personal property, most likely because it had evaporated with emancipation and the collapse of the government that guaranteed the Ellison’s Confederate paper. The judge named five commissioners to survey the Ellison land and present the court with an equitable partition. Among them were Dr. W. W. Anderson, R. J. Brownfield, who had married into the Sumter family, and A. P. Vinson, the white man who farmed for the brothers and presumably knew the property as well as anyone else outside the family.
By late August the commissioners had completed their work, and Judge Hursh accepted their proposal. In February 1872 he awarded John Buckner slightly more than 300 acres and each of the brothers slightly less, indicating that the value of the land was considered in the decision. Buckner also received his mother’s half-interest in “Drayton Hall.” His uncles, as directed by William Ellison’s will, retained “Wisdom Hall” and the six-acre shop lot. For the first time in his life, John Buckner owned land. He obtained it by unraveling the estate a half-century after 1822, when his grandfather had begun to stitch it together by purchasing the shop lot from General Sumter.
Although Buckner’s lawsuit fractured the estate, his uncles were responsible for the breakup. They reaped what they had sown. Since their father’s death they had treated their nephew less than generously. During the war they hired him just for occasional odd jobs. Afterward, they permitted him to manage the gin shop and farm a little land, but Buckner barely squeaked by. Despite his uncles’ stinginess, Buckner remained on good terms with them so long as his mother lived. In 1864 he named his first son John William Buckner for himself, his grandfather, and his uncle. Two years later he named a second son Henry Ellison Buckner.144 But after his mother died and his uncles refused to give him his due, he had no choice but to sue. His uncles may well have been a bit jealous of Buckner. As a youngster he had been the apple of his grandfather’s eye, William Ellison’s first, and for fourteen years his only, grandchild. As adolescents during the 1830s, Henry and William Jr. had to toe the line for their father, while the young John Buckner romped and received indulgences from his grandfather. William Ellison trained Buckner to the gin maker’s craft, just as he did his sons, and he looked forward to having Buckner extend the family business another generation into the future. That dream shattered in the early 1870s, the casualty of family strife.
Eliza Ann’s death severed the Ellisons’ ties to her husband, James M. Johnson. Without his wife, Johnson had no place at the crossroads. He owned no land and had no claim on the house in which he had lived since 1845. Whether his stepson John Buckner dispossessed him or he simply decided it was time to go, Johnson left Stateburg shortly after he buried his wife and returned to his father’s home in Charleston. The move scarcely improved his prospects as a tailor, however. Postbellum aristocrats struggled to buy another mule, not a hand-sewn suit of clothes. When his father James Drayton Johnson died in 1871, he inherited three-quarters of his property, consisting principally of the houses at 7 and 9 Coming Street. The other quarter of the estate went to Gabriella Miller Johnson, whose husband Charley had died in Canada sometime during the 1860s.145 Within a few years Johnson, who was fifty-one when his father died, drifted away from Charleston and disappeared from the historical record.
The rest of the Ellisons stayed at the crossroads. Their houses, tracts of land, and work made physical separation impossible, but they were no longer laced together by affection. John Buckner and his growing family lived in “Drayton Hall” and Henry and William Jr. nearby in “Wisdom Hall.”146 Economic necessity made some cooperation imperative. To keep their gin and blacksmith shop open, the brothers had no choice but to rely on Buckner. The specifics of the arrangement have been lost, but Buckner continued to run the shop his uncles owned. Buckner still called himself a gin maker in 1880, when the brothers identified themselves again as general merchants.147 The two brothers continued to work as a team, but John Buckner went his own way.
Buckner put all the distance he could between himself and the rest of the Ellisons. He and his family quit Holy Cross Episcopal Church for High Hills Baptist Church, the spiritual home of his wife’s family, the Oxendines, and many other Sumter Turks.148 Buckner evidently sought a new form of freedom, away from the Ellison brothers’ scrutiny, and, perhaps, unwelcome avuncular advice. Nonetheless, Buckner did not thrive. His gin business gradually petered out, and his farming paid few rewards. When Buckner died in 1895, he was still a poor man, despite his inheritance. His family buried him in the Baptist cemetery, not in the Ellison family graveyard.149 His eight children became small farmers in the neighborhood. A local historian reports that they assimilated into the Turk community.150 The census of 1910 lists one son, Samuel, his wife, and seven children as Turks. Another son, Henry Ellison Buckner, was a tenant farmer married to an illiterate woman named Bricky.151
Despite Buckner’s defection, life at the crossroads did not turn sour. Resilient men, the Ellison brothers established new families early in the 1870s. After two decades as widowers, Henry and William Jr. remarried. In the 1840s they had married within a year or two of each other, and in the 1850s they both lost their Charleston wives within the space of eighteen months. Now they moved again in tandem into new marriages. In July 1870, just four months after the death of his sister, Henry wrote James D. Johnson in Charleston that “my loneliness makes me feel every thing but happy.” He mentioned a recent visit to the city and remarked, “the time did seem very short, as being so agreeably entertained by all, the Ladies in particular….” In gratitude, he sent along some home-grown melons, one especially for “Miss Shrewsbury.”152
Amelia Ann Shrewsbury, twenty years Henry’s junior at thirty-three, was from a well-established free mulatto family in Charleston. Her brother, Henry L. Shrewsbury, was a Republican state legislator, and she taught in one of the schools established in Charleston by the American Missionary Association shortly after the city fell to the Union army.153 James Redpath, the abolitionist who had tried to woo the city’s free colored population to Haiti on the eve of the war, was now superintendent of education in the city. The principals of Amelia’s school were Thomas, and later F. L., Cardozo, sophisticated free mulattoes in antebellum days.154 When Amelia applied to Thomas Cardozo for her teaching position, he asked her a series of specific questions, to which she replied: she was an Episcopalian; she was unmarried; she had taught privately in Charleston for five years; for four months she taught at the Ashley Street public school; she now sought a higher salary; and, yes, she was willing to teach freedmen.155
The staff she joined included representatives of several other old mulatto families—Sasportas, Holloway, and Weston. In July 1865 Thomas Cardozo praised his “southern Teachers” as “very faithful … good Christian young ladies of respectable parentage.”156 Two years later a woman who visited Cardozo’s school complained that the student body was comprised almost “entirely of freemen’s children, many of whom owned slaves before the war.”157 She feared that special treatment for “free browns” would “make the difference between them & the freed people even greater than it was in slavery.”158 Old distinctions died slowly, especially in Charleston. In 1875 another observer reported that the “light colored people of the city are quite as much prejudiced against the Negro as many of the whites.”159 By that time, Amelia Shrewsbury had left Charleston, married Henry Ellison, and settled into “Wisdom Hall” in Stateburg.
While Henry courted Amelia, William Jr. established a new relationship to an old friend. After Charley Johnson died in Canada during the 1860s, his widow Gabriella returned to Charleston, the city of her birth. The daughter of Eliza Vanderhorst, who claimed to be half-Indian, and George Miller, a white man, Gabriella was considered a colored woman in Charleston.160 Thirteen years younger than William Jr., she was thirty-eight in 1870. “I told William nothing about Mrs. Gabriella Johnson’s letter,” Henry wrote James D. Johnson in July 1870. “I hope you did not, as you know there was nothing secret in it, but you know how some females will not accept a gift, when there is any publicity about it, as it broaches too much upon their delicacy.”161 The precise meaning of Henry’s remark cannot be deciphered, but it is clear that his brother was courting Gabriella. Evidently just after Henry married Amelia, William brought his new wife home to the family compound.
William Jr. and Gabriella had no children, but Henry and Amelia had four. With Dr. W. W. Anderson attending, Amelia gave birth to Henry Shrewsbury in 1873, Louisa in 1875, George in 1877, and Amelia G. in 1881.162 When young Amelia was born, Henry was sixty-four. She was only two years old when he died on August 20, 1883.163 His obituary in the Sumter Watchman and Southron identified him as a man “known to many of our planting friends throughout the country, and the firm of which he was a member has built gins for hundreds of farmers, not only in Sumter, but also in surrounding counties.” Henry was still very much the son of William Ellison in the eyes of local whites. “His father,” the obituary pointed out, “who was a free colored man before the war, built up a thriving business as a gin maker at Stateburg, and Ellison’s gins were known far and wide for their superior qualities.”164 Although Henry had not worked in the gin shop for almost twenty years, his father’s reputation as a gin maker still clung to him.
Amelia and her children, the oldest of whom was only ten when Henry died, did not find the next few years easy. Amelia had two sources of income—rents from the 300 acres of land she inherited and proceeds from Henry’s share of the store trade.165 William Jr. was sixty-four in 1883, and for the first time in his life he worked without his brother and partner. Amelia received $174.81 from the store in 1885, but as her brother-in-law aged, the store income and her receipts declined. In the mid-1890s they ceased entirely. Amelia’s rental income also dwindled. William Ellison’s land still helped sustain his family, but by the end of the century it was wearing out. In 1894, for example, Amelia collected just $183 from ten renters. In that year’s annual report of her administration of her late husband’s estate, Amelia declared, “I have exceeded limit of rents received this year, to the amt of one hundred and sixty four dollars.”
Education expenses were the primary reason for Amelia’s red ink. She scrimped on many things, such as paying 75 cents to “renovate [a] bonnet” instead of buying a new one. On education she did not cut corners. As a former teacher, she was fiercely committed to giving all her children an education. When they were small, they learned at home, taught by their mother and by Miss Mary Dereef, whom Amelia employed as a tutor. When the children grew older, Amelia sent them to proper boarding schools, sometimes as far away as Raleigh, North Carolina. It is impossible to document how much schooling her children received, but her son Henry was still a student when he was eighteen. All of Henry and Amelia’s children evidently received at least high-school diplomas. Although William Ellison never knew his new daughter-in-law, he surely would have approved of her close attention to the education of his grandchildren. Gin making and planting held no promise in the 1890s, and Ellison children had to learn new ways to survive.
Other Ellison children lived in “Wisdom Hall” during the last decades of the century. “Billy John,” William Ellison, Jr.’s eldest son, returned home after 1865 from Philadelphia, where his father had sent him and his sisters for safety in 1860. His sisters also came back, although they evidently married in the 1870s, left the family compound, and disappeared from view. Billy John went to Canada soon after the war, where he met and married a young Irish woman named Catherine. Kate, as she was known, returned to Stateburg with Billy John in the mid-1870s. They had five children, and Billy John tried to support them by keeping bees and raising silkworms, a shortlived fad in Sumter District in the early 1880s.166 Local tradition has it that Kate chafed at the “social isolation” she encountered as the white wife of a Negro man in South Carolina, and that she induced her husband to take her and the rest of the family back to Canada.167 Although Billy John was a member of the Stateburg Democratic Club in 1890, in 1892 his name is scratched through and followed by “Republican.”168 It is logical to suspect that Republican sympathies and a white wife gave Billy John reason enough to desert Stateburg for the harsher weather and more benign social relations of Canada. But he died in Stateburg in 1894.169 Only then, apparently, did Kate and the children depart for Canada.
On July 24, 1904, his father, the last of William Ellison’s children, died.170 The Sumter Watchman and Southron gave eighty-five-year-old William Ellison Jr. a long, glowing obituary. This “highly respected colored citizen of Stateburg,” the notice read, along with his brother Henry “succeeded their father, William Ellison, who was the inventor and maker of the well known Ellison gin, and continued the business in the same shop, which is still standing in Stateburg.” The entire “family has always been highly respected as colored citizens,” the item reported. William’s death, the paper suggested, was brought on by a failing of the Ellisons—a constitutional inability to quit working. “His health was never robust,” the report said, “and a walk to his fields on one of the very hot days during the preceeding week brought on the attack which at his advanced age, was necessarily fatal.” The old man “was twice married, his second wife being from Canada. She survives him and lives at the old homestead with his brother’s widow and children.”171
Gabriella had lived in Canada as the wife of Charley Johnson, but she encouraged the rumor that she was a white Canadian. For several years after her husband’s death she shared “Wisdom Hall” with Amelia and her children. The census of 1910 captured the two old widows together for the last time—Gabriella, 77 and Amelia, 72. Both listed themselves as farmers who owned their farms outright. All four of Amelia’s children were unmarried. Henry S., 37, was a teacher in the Graded School. Louisa, 35, and George, 33, did not claim occupations. Amelia G., 29, carried on in her mother’s footsteps and taught at the high school. The column designating the Ellisons’ race identified them as neither blacks, mulattoes, or whites. They were “other,” a term reserved in Sumter District for Turks.172
In the next decade young Amelia died, and the three other children scattered east and west, far away from Stateburg. No Ellison had to return to the village to inherit and dispose of property, for William Jr.’s will directed that, after Gabriella died, the estate should be sold and the money divided among the surviving family members. All William Jr. insisted on preserving was the small plot of land for which his father had also made special arrangements in his will, the family “Burying Ground.”173
Within a few years Amelia returned to Charleston after more than forty years in the upcountry. Gabriella lived on in “Wisdom Hall,” alone, infirm, and later helpless.174 In an upstairs bedroom at the back of the empty house, she was attended by a little girl who was a descendant of one of William Ellison’s slaves. After 1914 Gabriella also had the assistance of a white family who moved next door into what had once been “Drayton Hall.” The white man came over to Gabriella’s each evening to lock up and returned each morning to open the house. His wife occasionally went upstairs to Gabriella’s room and wrote letters for the old woman. His young daughter carried meals to Gabriella every day. In the evenings the deserted house was spooky as the girl climbed the steep stairs at the back. Sometimes, when Mrs. Ellison felt spry, she would open her bureau and show the young girl a beautiful piece of lace, which she said she intended for her shroud. Twice the girl became impatient with the old woman’s repeated questions and answered her sharply. Each time Gabriella remembered to mention the incident to the girl’s mother, and she received her two worst spankings for disrespect to Mrs. Ellison.
On December 14, 1920, when she was eighty-eight, Gabriella died in “Wisdom Hall.” Only one member of the Ellisons’ far-flung family returned for the funeral, Henry Shrewsbury Ellison, Henry and Amelia’s eldest son, who traveled from Greensboro, North Carolina. A Stateburg resident recalled that white friends carried Gabriella’s casket on their shoulders down to the family graveyard, where she was buried near her husband. After the funeral, members of the Ellison family in Greensboro wanted to express their appreciation for the care Gabriella had received from white friends nearby. To the white family who had looked after Gabriella they sent a silver spoon.