The Invisible Line (54 page)

1
George Gabriel Powell to William Bull, August 19, 1768, in
South Carolina Council Journal
, August 26, 1768, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (hereafter SCDAH), Columbia. The description of the physical setting is based on the Reverend Charles Woodmason's diaries of his travels in the Pee Dee area and elsewhere in the South Carolina backcountry in the mid-1760s. See Charles Woodmason,
The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution
, ed. Richard J. Hooker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).

2
See Richard Maxwell Brown,
The South Carolina Regulators
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 56; George C. Rogers Jr.,
The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 63, 105; Suzanne Cameron Linder and Marta Leslie Thacker,
Historical Atlas of the Rice Plantations of Georgetown County and the Santee River
(Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 2001), pp. 281-83; Winthrop D. Jordan,
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 172-73; and Rachel N. Klein,
Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 69-71.

3
Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, p. 55; Woodmason,
Carolina Backcountry
, pp. 7, 13, 15, 18, 25, 31, 52; and
South Carolina Gazette
, August 15, 1768. Accompanying Powell on the journey upcountry was Roger Pinckney, South Carolina's highest law enforcement official, the deputy provost marshal.

4
Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768; Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 56-57.

5
Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768; Jordan,
White Over Black
, p. 172; Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, p. 192n8; Klein,
Unification
, p. 69; Robert L. Meriwether,
The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729-1765
(Kingsport, Tenn.: Southern Publishers, 1940), pp. 90, 96; Alexander Gregg,
History of the Old Cheraws
(1867; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: State Co., 1905), pp. 73-74; Paul Heinegg, “Gibson Family,” in
Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina
, online at
http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/Gibson_Gowen.htm
; and
Supplement to South Carolina and American General Gazette
, April 18, 1764, transcript available from South Carolina Newspaper Collection, Accessible Archives.

6
Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 1-12; Klein,
Unification
, pp. 37-38.

7
Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 29-37; Klein,
Unification
, pp. 57-60; “America,”
St. James's Chronicle or, The British Evening Post
, October 25-27, 1768, p. 3.

8
Woodmason, “The Remonstrance,” in
Carolina Backcountry
, pp. 213, 226; “America,”
St. James's Chronicle
, October 25-27, 1768; Klein,
Unification
, pp. 63, 68; Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 41-43, 70-73; Edward McCrady,
The History of South Carolina Under the Royal Government, 1719-1776
(New York: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 627-34; and Richard Cumberland to Roger Pinckney, July 31, 1765, in
Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina
, ed. Plowden Charles Jennett Weston (London, 1856), p. 115. King George had awarded the offices of Provost Marshal, Clerk of the Peace, and Clerk of the Crown to Richard Cumberland, a well-born civil servant just beginning a career as a London playwright, who in turn leased the office to Roger Pinckney, another Londoner seeking his fortune. From London, Cumberland resisted efforts to end his monopoly on legal process in South Carolina.

9
Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 38-39, 40, 45-46, 49; Klein,
Unification
, p. 47; “America,”
St. James's Chronicle
, October 25-27, 1768.

10
South Carolina Gazette
, August 15, 1768; Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, p. 54; “America,”
St. James's Chronicle
, October 25-27, 1768.

11
Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 54-55; George Lloyd Johnson,
The Frontier in the Colonial South: South Carolina Backcountry, 1736-1800
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 56, 135n47;
Robert Weaver v. Gideon Gibson
(1764), judgment roll, SCDAH.

12
The account that follows is drawn primarily from a petition one of the militiamen presented to the colonial legislature two years after the events at Mars Bluff: Petition of William White,
Commons House Journal
, August 15, 1770, SCDAH. See also Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 54-58; Johnson,
Frontier in Colonial South
, pp. 122-26; Jordan,
White Over Black
, p. 173; Klein,
Unification
, pp. 69-71; and
South Carolina Gazette
, August 15, 1768.

13
Petition of William White.

14
Ibid.

15
South Carolina Gazette
, August 15, 1768; Petition of William White; “A Proclamation,”
South Carolina Gazette
, August 8, 1768; Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, p. 58.

16
Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768.

17
Ibid.; Philip Gosse,
St. Helena, 1502-1938
(Shropshire, U.K.: Anthony Nelson, 1938), pp. 181-82;
Extracts from the St. Helena Records,
comp. Hudson Ralph Janisch (St. Helena, 1908), pp. 136, 181-83; A. S. Salley, ed., “Diary of William Dillwyn During a Visit to Charles Town in 1772,”
South Carolina History and General Magazine
36 (1935), pp. 29, 34-35; Woodmason,
Carolina Backcountry
, p. 270.

18
Extracts from St. Helena Records
, pp. 74, 183; Gosse,
St. Helena
, p. 182.

19
See generally Jordan,
White Over Black
; Ira Berlin,
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 29-46; Edmund Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 134-35, 185-86; Kathleen M. Brown,
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 109-16, 223-25.

20
Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 212-41; Thomas D. Morris,
Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 43-49; Heinegg, introduction to
Free African Americans
, online at
http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/introduction.htm
; Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860,”
Minnesota Law Review
91 (2007), pp. 592, 604-5, 614-16.

21
Brown,
Good Wives
, pp. 213-22; Ira Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
(New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 7-9.

22
Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line,” p. 616; Heinegg, introduction to
Free African Americans
; Jordan,
White Over Black
, pp. 171-72; Peter Wood,
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion
(New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 97-101.

23
Wood,
Black Majority
, pp. 150, 220-21; “Extracts of Mr. Von Reck's Journal,” in Peter Force,
Tracts and Other Papers Principally Relating to the Origin, Settlement and Progress of the North American Colonies
(Washington, D.C., 1846), p. 4:9; Jordan,
White Over Black
, p. 172.

24
Jordan,
White Over Black
, p. 172.

25
Klein,
Unification
, pp. 11, 44; Meriwether,
Expansion of South Carolina,
pp. 90-91; Donald G. Mathews,
Religion in the Old South
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 25-26; Gregg,
History of Old Cheraws
, p. 67.

26
Robert Mills,
Statistics of South Carolina
(Charleston: Hurlbut and Lloyd, 1826), p. 625; Michael Trinkley and Natalie Adams,
Archaeological, Historical, and Architectural Survey of the Gibson Plantation Tract, Florence County, South Carolina
(Columbia: Chicora Foundation, 1992), pp. 22-24; Meriwether,
Expansion of South Carolina,
p. 94; Amelia Wallace Vernon,
African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), p. 125; Wood,
Black Majority
, p. 324; Woodmason,
Carolina Backcountry,
p. 228.

27
Klein,
Unification
, pp. 62-63, 71; Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 31-32.

28
Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768; Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 56-57.

29
Powell to Bull, August 19, 1768.

30
Ibid
.

31
Ibid
.

32
Jordan,
White Over Black
, p. 173; Henry Laurens to William Drayton, February 23, 1783,
Papers of Henry Laurens
, ed. Philip M. Hamer et al. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 16:155-56; Wood,
Black Majority
, p. 324; An Act of the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province, May 10, 1740, in
Statutes at Large of South Carolina
, ed. David J. McCord (Columbia: A. S. Johnston, 1840), sec. 56, pp. 7:416-17.

33
Heinegg, introduction to
Free African Americans
; Larry Koger,
Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 12-16.

34
Laurens to Drayton, pp. 16:155-56.

35
Brown,
South Carolina Regulators
, pp. 96-104; Klein,
Unification
, pp. 74-77; McCrady,
History of South Carolina
, pp. 638-43, 716.

36
Klein,
Unification
, pp. 78-108. In 1867 Gregg, in
History of Old Cheraws
, reported that Gibson was murdered for his Tory sympathies during the Revolution, but there is no independent corroboration of the anecdote.

1
See, e.g., Emory Washburn,
A Treatise on the American Law of Real Property
(Boston: Little Brown, 1860-62), pp. 2:451-53.

2
Thomas Jefferson to John Randolph, August 25, 1775, in
Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies: From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Boston: Gray & Bowen, 1829), pp. 150, 151; Washburn,
Treatise on American Law,
pp. 2:452-53.

3
State Board of Agriculture,
North Carolina and its Resources
(Winston, N.C.: M. I. & J. C. Stewart, 1896), pp. 304, 388.
Wall v. Wall,
55 S.E. 283 (N.C. 1906), contains a discussion of Stephen Wall's landholdings.

4
Anne Wall Thomas,
The Walls of Walltown
(1969; reprint by author), pp. 21-25, 31-33;
Wall v. Wall
, 55 S.E. 283; “General Assembly: In the Senate,”
Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette
, December 22, 1820; classified advertisement,
Carolina Observer
, June 19, 1832 (Wall was a commissioner for the Cape Fear & Yadkin Railroad); “Communications,”
Fayetteville Observer
, July 29, 1834 (on the internal improvement committee of Richmond County); and classified advertisement,
Raleigh Register
, February 14, 1837 (on Raleigh & Columbia Railroad stock). On the Whig Party generally and in the South, see Arthur C. Cole,
The Whig Party in the South
(Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1914); and Sean Wilentz,
The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 431. On Wall's involvement in the party, see “Communications,”
Fayetteville Observer
, June 12, 1839; he was a delegate at a meeting that declared the Van Buren administration “corrupt and tyrannical.” See also “Communications,”
Fayetteville Observer
, April 24, 1839;
Fayetteville Observer
, March 17, 1836; and “District Convention,”
Raleigh Register
, May 10, 1836.

5
Fayetteville Observer
, October 8, 1845. This description is based on a photograph of Wall in Dean Papers.

6
Thomas,
Walls of Walltown
, p. 32;
Fayetteville Observer
, October 8, 1845.

7
Early Accounts of Stephen Wall, Leak and Wall Papers; William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek,
John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65
(Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1989), pp. 250, 273n27; and Mial Wall to Caroline Wall, March 16, 1853, Langston Papers. See also miscellaneous documents relating to the estate of Sara K. Fidler in Langston Papers. On Caroline Matilda of Denmark, see C. F. Lascelles Wraxall,
Life and Times of Her Majesty Caroline Matilda
(London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1864).

8
See John C. Inscoe, “Carolina Slave Names: An Index to Acculturation,”
Journal of Southern History
49 (1983), pp. 527, 541-43; Simón Bolívar, “The Angostura Address” (February 15, 1819), in
El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar
, ed. David Bushnell, trans. Frederick H. Fornoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 31, 38.