Et  In Arcadia Ego

The  Latin phrase most famously appears as the name of a painting by Poussin, in which rustic nymphs and shepherds contemplate a tomb. The phrase can be interpreted two ways: either "I, Death, am also in Arcadia;" or "I once lived in Arcadia, too." Mortality is ever present, even in a place that embodies the beauty and simplicity of country life.  

Everyone has his or her own Arcadia. For most it's in the past--but a few are lucky enough to be living there now.

Reviews: Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, by Flora Fraser

Well, what a sad book.  It's 400-odd pages are filled with the doings of Charlotte (always called "Royal," from her title as eldest daughter, or Princess Royal), Augusta, Elizabeth, Mary, Sophia, and Amelia.

And largely dull doings they are. Many of us may have had fantasies about being princesses. I can tell you that nobody would want to be one of these princesses. The main thing I learned from reading this book is that not even the King and Queen of England, with all their resources, could successfully rear fourteen children.

The eldest three girls did get quite a bit of attention from their mother, and fairly good educations. By the time the other three were of school age, their mother, Queen Charlotte, was largely burnt out: made exhausted and bitter by the King's illness.

Yes, the madness of King George largely ruined his daughters' lives. He was already reluctant to arrange state marriages for them, because his own two sisters had had terrible experiences. But with his madness, it became impossible. (The war with France did not help much, either). Their mother did not deal well with the illness: the King's behavior terrified her, and during his worst spells he said and did things to her that destroyed all her love for him. The sons could get away, to some extent (though all of them rebelled in different ways, and some made marriages that the King would not recognize). The girls were stuck in a kind of English purdah, hardly seeing anyone beyond their little royal world.

And yet the daughters managed to have a few adventures: Princess Sophia had an affair with general and bore an illegitimate child. (That romance did not survive, mainly because the father insisted on acknowledging and rearing the child, rather than hiding him away. It was terribly painful and embarrassing for Sophia). Beautiful and dutiful Princess Augusta had a decades-long romance with another soldier, and it is possible that they married secretly after her father's death. Amelia, who died quite young had a romance of her own. Three of the Princesses, Royal, Mary, and the artistic Elizabeth, actually did eventually marry (though apparently too late to ever have children themselves).

What disgusts me about the situation of these young women is the arbitrariness they were living under.  Marriages, relationships, even last wills and testaments were not what the law said: they were what the King or their brothers said they were. When Amelia died, it was discovered that she had left something to her beloved Charles Fitzroy. Her brothers destroyed her will to avoid even a hint of scandal. The King is historically held to be an unusually loving parent: but he was a benevolent despot at best.

If you're very interested in royal families, you might like this book. If you're looking for information about life in the 18th century, look elsewhere. The princesses were so cocooned from real life that their experiences don't really tell you much about anybody else!

History of Colonial South Carolina

So-- you want to write the great American novel about the Revolutionary War in the South--or you just want to write fanfiction.

 Obviously a modicum of familiarity with the place and period is desirable. You can't go far wrong with this month's recommended books:  Colonial South Carolina, A History, by Robert M. Weir, and All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry, by Lorri Glover.

Since my current project deals with the interactions of the British with a low country planter family  while invading South Carolina, I've found these sources very useful.

Weir's 431-page survey covers the period pretty thoroughly, from the first European incursions in the 16th century to just after the end of the Revolutionary War.  He discusses the unique nature of South Carolina colonial society: its founding by slave-holding Barbados sugar planters, which established it as a slave-holding society from the very first (and in a particularly large-scale way); its extreme insularity, in which a few elite families intermarried among themselves and largely kept all power within their hands (not just seats in  the Assembly, but the civil service, the courts, the established church, and trade); and its extraordinary prosperity, which gave South Carolina gentry the reputation as being, as a group, the richest in America.

The bases of South Carolina's wealth were three: rice, indigo, and to a lesser extent "naval stores," which means tar production. All of these were labor intensive. All of them took some expertise as well.  They were most easily produced in the low-country--the flat, tidewater area running about fifty miles inland, and including the valuable swampland (desirable for rice production). Until 1769, the rest of the colony was largely unrepresented, which led to political unrest through most of the period. Regulators--disaffected backcountrymen who formed vigilante groups-- were largely forced to take the law into their own hands, because the elite of the lowcountry did not want to give them political representation, which would have resulted had they been allowed to form counties.  This set the stage for the hostility between lowcountry and backcountry which the British were to perceive later as an opportunity for them.

Of course the situation was much more complex, made so primarily by threats from the French and Spanish, and the presence of threat Native American tribes with which the colonist fought a number of wars. South Carolina enslaved more Native Americans than any other colony: mostly women and children, who were considered more tractable. One amusing story from the early days involves a parley between Englishmen and Native Americans, who wondered if there were any women among the strangers, since none were represented in their council!

To a very large extent both Charles Town society and the colony as a whole were ruled throughout the period (and later) by a clique of Middletons, Draytons, Manigaults, Rutledges, Pinckneys, Balls, Laurens--and a few others. This group of wealthy planter/merchants regarded themselves as the most English of Englishmen, but outsiders, though impressed by the luxury, saw that their daily lives had little in common with their ideal.  Visitors were put off by the frankness with which the planter elite discussed their enjoyment of their slave women, and by the difficulties anyone not related to the ruling circle had in making a go of planting or running businesses. Many immigrants were squeezed out by the ruling families and tried their luck in the backcountry.

 While Weir discusses some of the cultural institutions they enjoyed (like concerts presented by the St. Cecilia Society), South Carolina did not found a college in the colonial period, preferring to send its wealthy sons either to England or north to Princeton and Harvard. Indeed, it was felt that furthering education to those not in their tight little circle would be giving opportunities for poorer families to compete.

As I mentioned, even the Church of England in South Carolina, which was the  established church in the colony, was largely co-0pted by the elite.  While the ministers in the churches were under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, and were sponsored by the Society for the Propagation fo the Gospel, once they actually got to South Carolina, their situation was precarious. Most were kept on yearly contracts by the wealthy men controlling each church's vestry (the council running the parish), and most were given tracts of land and slaves attached to the church. This immediately gave them a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Those who spoke out against slavery or injustice found themselves out of a job quite rapidly, or even in physical danger.  It was interesting to discover that very few slaves were allowed to join the church--or even attend. It was a special mark of favor.

From the founding, the elite pretty much ran everything their way. While paying dutiful lip service to the King, they regularly subverted royal officials. And after the Revolution, their power was largely undiminished. Only gradually did the rest of the population attain some share of political power, as the capital of the state moved from Charleston to Columbia.  The end of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina saw that things remained much the way they had always been--only the elite now had no royal governors to answer to.

In the end, the elite were largely done in by their own success and their exclusiveness. Rejection of industry and invention caused Charleston to lose its status as a great trading port (when railroads were invented, the still powerful city fathers refused to let the line go through the city to the docks--the rails stopped at the city limits, reducing Charleston's commercial viability.)  But until the Civil War, the same few families wielded disproportionate power over poorer whites, blacks, and Native Americans.  I will refrain from political commentary here.

In Glover's book, All Our Relations, the author explores the dynamics of this power elite in depth, examining family letters and histories to see how they functioned on a daily basis.

Social historians have tended to look at family relationships in the period as a clear cut archetype of the all-powerful patriarch, ruling wife and children in the nuclear family with an iron fist. One of Glover's interesting findings is how, since the elite were essentially a large extended family (constantly marrying among themselves and defining incest very narrowly), other family relationships often reduced the father's power. With rather short life expectancies in South Carolina, parents were not always around to boss the children. Uncles and aunts and elder siblings stepped in. Even when parents were alive, the influence of other relatives could trump that of the father. Sibling relationships were particularly important. While wives and daughters were under the thumb of their husbands and fathers, sisters and brothers could relate with a semblance of equality. Because there was so much unclaimed land in South Carolina, there was no tradition of entail or primogeniture (the eldest son getting everything).  While a younger sister might defer to her brother almost as to a father, an elder sister or aunt might make no bones about advising him on agriculture, business, or even military matters.

While marriage in England and in other colonies was becoming more a matter of romance, elite South Carolinians remained very hard-headed about arranged marriages. Marriage was a tool to maintain the wealth and prestige of the entire family, and impulsive, improvident marriages were punished harshly with rejection and disinheritance. Some curious marriage customs included exchange marriage: if an individual from one family married into another, someone from that family would marry into the first one. While uncles did not marry nieces, it was not unheard of for widowed uncles-by-marriage to do so.

Family records indicate many arranged marriages were unhappy, made more so by the open practice of men forcing their slave women into concubinage. Unhappiness in marital life made other familial bonds more precious, especially those between sisters and between sisters and brothers. The gallant language of the letters between siblings reads to us as being more appropriate between sweethearts. Glover found no overt evidence of actual incest, however.

Due to warfare and duelling, men often predeceased women, which regularly left the control of plantations and businesses in female hands.  One of the most successful planters in South Carolina history was Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who pretty much revolutionized indigo planting and raised a number of prominent Patriots (though her own views on the Revolution were rather ambivalent). She was the daughter of a British officer, who left her, at the age of sixteen, in charge of three plantations at once. She was a brilliant success, and like many other new residents who showed  promise, was coopted into the elite by her marriage to a Pinckney.

In a sense, the big extended family that ruled Colonial South Carolina enjoyed a certain equality within its own ranks.  They supported one another, covered for one another, and after the war, largely mended their political fences with one another.  Unlike other loyalists who might be  forced to emigrate, those of the elite who had backed the King found that when their property was seized, it was often seized by a relative, who  gave it back when things quieted down a few years later.  It's indicative of how much more important family was than politics, that in one case Glover cites, in which a family member did not return sequestered property, he (despite his loyalty to the Revolution), was held to have betrayed his family and was ostracized by the entire  elite and died a ruined man.