The life and legacy of David Rogerson Williams

Preface

Three and one hundred years ago, four South Carohnians in the House of Representatives, Williams, Cheves, Lowndes, and Calhoun were called by the Richmond Enquirer "a splendid constellation of talents." One of the stars in the group, David Rogerson Wilhams, was a large planter in Darlington District. His life was begun March 8th, 1776, and having been nourished through the Revolution by his widowed mother and educated at Society Hill, Charleston, Wrentham and Providence, he developed into a pioneer manufacturer and scientific agriculturist, while at the same time, his superabounding energy and public spirit made him one of the foremost in educational, political and military affairs. It has been the aspiration of the following chapters to retrace the footsteps, often effaced by the ravages of time and of men, and to rehabilitate, in a measure, the splendid figure of a Southern gentleman, with an occasional searchlight thrown upon the times, manners, morals, customs and high ideals which have almost vanished out of American life, in order that the force of his example might perchance "bear fruitage in the present and still richer fruitage in the future," in our farms, our schools, our mills, our homes, our politics and in all our human relations. The inevitable shortcomings and failure to reach the ideal cannot be ascribed to his friends and descendants, who so gener-

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ously furnished their credible traditions, manuscripts, rare books, contagious enthusiasm and even the sinews of war. Among those who contributed authentic traditions were Messrs. C. D. and J. W. Evans, of DarUngton, Major J. J. Lucas and Mr. N. W. Kirkpatrick of Society Hill and especially Mr. John Witherspoon DuBose of Montgomery, Alabama. Those who furnished manuscript material were Professor Walter Bronson of Brown University, Mr. Bright Williamson of Darlington, Pee Dee materials; Mr. C. C. Wilson of Columbia, Minutes of the St. David's Society; Mr. William Godfrey of Cheraw, Minutes of the brigade under General Erasmus Powe; Miss Mary L. Coker of Society Hill, Minutes of the Welsh Neck Church and the Constitution of the Female Benevolent Society; Professor J. S. Ames of Johns Hopkins University, Governor Williams* Diary, 1815-1816, and numerous letters found in the appendix; Mr. David R. WilUams of Camden, two letters written to Colonel Chesnut; Mr. A. S. Salley of Columbia, letter accepting the governorship; Mr. J. L. Farnum, Library of Congress Secretary, copy of one Crawford and one Wilhams letter; Adjutant General George Andrews, Washington, D. C, a copy of General Wilhams' resignation; Mr. G. M. Salzgaber, Commissioner of Pensions; Mr. J. R. Coggeshall and Mr. Robert Macfarland, copies of important documents.

Printed material was furnished by Professor Yates Snowdon of Columbia, Labor Organizations in South Carolina, 1742-1861 and Founders' Day, both issued as bulletins of the South Carohna State University; Mr. N. W. Kirkpatrick, the Newspaper Press of Charleston; Major J. L. Coker, pamphlets issued by the Pee Dee Historical Society; Mr. Bright Wilhamson, articles

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relating to Darlington County and its diversified interests; Mr. T. J. Kirkland of Camden, the Camden Journal, 1828-1830; Mr. A. H. Wells, The Mountaineer, 1827-1830, Greenville, S. C; Mr. August Kohn, The Cotton Mills of South Carolina and the Water Powers of South Carolina; Mr. Alfred Moore of Welford, Landrum's History of Spartanburg County; Mr. J. E. Swearingen, State Superintendent of Education, School Statistics, 1913-1914; Commissioner E. J. Watson, Sixth Report; the Charleston Library, Miss Eliza Fitzsimons, Librarian, bound volumes of the City Gazette, the Courier, Mercury, and also broken sets of early agricultural papers; the Library of the State University, a bound volume of the Telescope and the account of LaFayette's journey through the state in 1825; the Archives of the State, Columbia, deeds of the early settlers; the legislative records under the control of Secretary A. S. Salley of the Historical Commission; the Furman Collection in Greenville, the correspondence of Dr. Richard Furman and Rev. Edmund Botsford, 1785-1819. The Williams Family of Society Hill by Professor Ames, the Minutes of the St. David's Society, the Minutes of the Welsh Neck Church, Gregg's History of the Old Cheraws, and the Furman-Botsford letters are the groundwork of the earlier chapters. My acknowledgments are due especially to Professor Ames and to Mr. DuBose, both of whom read portions of the manuscript, corrected some errors, made some suggestions, but assumed no responsibility for the narrative; but all this kindly and generous assistance above mentioned would have been of no avail, if Mr. John Wilkins Norwood of the Norwood National Bank of Greenville had not been an active cooperator in the undertaking. He

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was born on the Pee Dee as were his father and grandfather before him. To his admiration of sterUng character, business capacity and integrity wherever found is due the moral and financial support of this memorial of the self-reliant, energetic, resourceful and high-minded Pee Deean, David Rogerson WilUams.

Greenville, S. C, September 25, 1915.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Great Pedee in South Carolina and

Its First Settlers 3

Chapter I The Great Pedee In South Carolina And Its First Settlers

THE colony at Charles Town began, after the treaty of Utrecht, 1713, to stretch out its hands for the trade with the Indians. One rested at Savannah Town, just below Hamburg in Edgefield District, the other at the Congarees near Columbia. At the former place, a market was opened for barter with the great Indian tribes, the Creeks, the Chickasaws and the Cherokees; at the Congarees, similar arrangements were made to accommodate the middle and lower Cherokees and the Catawbas. One trail from the Congarees led northwesterly toward the Blue Ridge and another northeasterly between the Broad and Catawba, toward the hunting grounds of the Catawba Indians (Logan). The Catawbas, once a northern tribe, had been pushed southward until they met on the banks of the river which bears their name, a brave band of Cherokees in a great battle which, having lasted the whole day, was concluded with articles of peace ever afterward to be observed. The territory of the Catawbas extended from that of the Cherokees on the west and southwest far eastward beyond the Cape Fear River, including the upper Pedee (Gregg). South of them and part of them finally, was the dwindling band of the Cheraws, who gave their name to the precinct.

This upper Pedee, not lying on the main Indian trails which served then as railroads do now, was in the backwoods and not generally known even to prospective settlers. A standard geography in England in 1758 gave the " Wateree, Santee, Cooper, Ashly, Coliton and Savannah" as the rivers of South Carolina. In the period 1730-1765 the great Pedee System, which drains over 17,000 square miles now within two states, was but a speck on the map to British eyes. The mother country was continuing to send out from a populous hive swarms of human beings, as adventurers, traders, and homeseekers; and, as represented by the government, it was a great radiator of energy and daring, so conspicuous and successful in the efforts put forth in wresting the North American continent and the rich trade in East Indies from its powerful French rivals.

But the seemingly neglected upper Pedee was being preserved, unmolested and almost unvisited by white men, for a fresh and vigorous race, who found no fault with the situation. It was brought more prominently into notice in 1732, when the township of Queensboro on the lower Pedee was laid out and offered to settlers in tracts of fifty acres for each man, woman and child who would occupy and improve them and, after the first ten years, pay annually one dollar for every hundred acres. When the settlers in the Welsh Tract in Pennsylvania heard of these inducements, several of them came South to investigate and visit the townships opened for settlement. They were hospitably received and at their request 173,840 acres were laid off for the exclusive habitation of the Welsh. The immigrants

DAVID ROGERSON WELLIAMS

for this Welsh Tract which was extended in the following year up the river were expected to come direct from the counties of Pembroke, Carmarthen in Wales, and from the Smaller "Welsh Tract" of 30,000 acres purchased in Penn's jurisdiction. It was settled first by Welshmen from the Welsh Tract church, which, becoming a prohfic mother, sent out in thirty-four years successive detachments, north, northeast, south, west, and the colony to the distant Pedee. According to Benedict, there arrived on the Pedee, in 1737, James James and wife and three sons — Phihp, who was their minister; Abel, Daniel and their wives, Daniel Devonald and wife, Thomas Evans and wife, another Evans and wife, John Jones and wife, three of the Harrys — Thomas, David and John and his wife — Samuel Wild and wife, Samuel Evans and wife, and David and Thomas Jones and their wives. These thirty members, with their children and households, settled at a place called Catfish, on Pedee River, but they soon removed about fifty miles higher up the same river, where they made a permanent settlement, and where they all, except James James, who died at Catfish, were embodied into a church, January, 1738. In eight years the best land on the Pedee had been taken up and the tide of immigration had turned up the Saluda. The exclusiveness practiced had the appearance of clannishness, but when so many thousands of acres in the state were waiting for an owner, it loses all its ugly features. It was a useful precaution at the time and passed away insensibly and without the friction which accompanied ecclesiastical and political discrimination.

The questions asked were. Is he a Welshman? Is he a desirable character? They were living in the woods, surrounded by Indians, with whom one indiscreet white man might embroil the whole settlement. They feared their white neighbors as well as the Indians and therefore kept out of their bailiwick men not speaking their own language. This racial fence was kept up perhaps in the lifetime of the first settlers and until the English language was coming into use. It was long enough to give their principles time to take root and estabUsh a sort of hegemony in the minds of men, to which immigrants from other allied races assented as an excellent standard for the community. "The country being in a wilderness state," said Bishop Gregg, "their position isolated, and their means limited, they selected such quantities of land, as suited their present necessities, influenced also, to some extent, by the consideration of compactness, which gratified their social propensities and enabled them besides to concentrate against sudden incursions of the Indians, by whom they were surrounded. Here on a virgin soil, they peacefully pursued their agricultural employments, being richly rewarded for the common toils and hardships endured. In their new and yet wilderness home, drawn together more closely than by the common ties of friendship and of blood, surrounded by common dangers, against which they vigilantly guarded, with common wants and necessities sufficiently supplied, and meeting weekly around the consecrated altar to worship the God of their fathers, a more perfect unity, or virtuous and manly life can scarcely be conceived. Such was the scene presented by this infant band of brothers in the early days of their history; with no court of justice in their midst to which conflicting claims and angry disputes might be referred, and no frowning gaol for the reception of the criminal. Nor were they needed. Few contentions probably were known and the voice of Society, though newly formed in this Southern home, was potent enough to silence the voice of the blasphemer and make evil-minded man pause in his ways." If natural laws were to prevail under these circumstances, the good seed, brought from the old world, winnowed from chaff and noxious weeds and dropped in virgin soil, would bring forth an abundant harvest of good quahties.

The Welsh were a branch of the great Celtic race which belonged to the same stock from which the Greeks, Romans, Germans, and English descended. They came long before the Christian era to France and the British Isles, and from time to time they migrated in great bodies eastward and became the terror of Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor. They made good soldiers before whom even a Roman army could not stand, but being deficient in political capacity, unattached to their native soil and too vain to labor with their own hands, they were sorry citizens, who preferred military and plundering expeditions to the quietude of peaceful pursuits. "They shook all the states," says Mommsen, "but nowhere did they make a great state or develop a distinctive culture of their own," a parallel to which is found in the misfortune of the Irishman, who has fought for so many countries and so unsuccessfully for his own Erin. Many generations passed and many lessons in the school of experience were learned, before the Welsh became noted for virtues which were conspicuously absent from their brave Celtic ancestors. As to the causes of some of the changes for the better, the remarks found in the biography of J. Glancy Jones, a descendant of a Welsh family in Pennsylvania, are luminous and to the point:

"The little remnant of the ancient Britons who had sought the security of the mountains of Wales, when they were driven out of England by the Anglo-Saxons, had been drawn closer by their adversities. They became more clannish in their mountain fastnesses, more tenacious of their Celtic language, their Celtic customs, their Celtic traditions; and when their descendants went up to London, with their hearts full of this clannishness, to confer with William Penn (himself of Welsh extraction) about the newly acquired lands in America, it was to secure from him the assurance that if they went there, they were to have their bounds and limits to themselves, within which all causes, quarrels, crimes, and titles were to be tried and wholly determined by officers, magistrates and juries in their own language, and by those who were equals, in the same manner as they had enjoyed their liberties and privileges in the land of their nativity, under the crown of England. They impressed upon him, with all the vigor of their clannish strength, that they desired to be by themselves in this new and strange land, to live together as a civil society without the intrusion of strangers, to endeavor to decide all controversies and debates in a gospel order, and not to entangle themselves with laws in an unknown tongue; as also to preserve their language that they might ever keep correspondence with their friends in the land of their nativity. . . . They knew how the English and the Saxons had supplanted their ancestors, the Britons, by force, and brought with them to the shores of England and firmly planted there, to the exclusion of everything else, the social and political life of their Teutonic fatherland; and they thought it would be an easy matter for them peacefully, in a new country, to establish a Welsh Colony, where they might retain the cherished associations of their old home and yet reap the advantages of this new and promising land. . . . They had nothing but logs to build their houses with, for that part of the Welsh Tract was the 'back country.' Many of the houses had not even locks or bolts on their doors. There were not many roads and the few they had were little better than trails. . . . The country was rich in soil, climate and beautiful scenery, but the landscapes were mild compared with the bolder landscapes of Wales. The trees were fine, game was abundant and though the conditions were as healthy as could be expected in a newly broken country, it was not long before there were many graves.

"Though descended from a brave and warlike people, these Welshmen were devoted to the arts of peace. They were a contented and prosperous little community. They were particular in their personal appearance and in their linen. The men dressed in buckskin breeches and plush coats, and the women in cambric, fine bonnets and silk. They were clannish and impatient of the intrusion of strangers.

"The isolation of the little group of Welshmen increased their strength, made them more self-reliant, inter-dependent and concentrative. It developed their strong sense of brotherhood. It made this httle valley the nursery of strong men who went out from it in later years to make their mark in the world. So deeply did the strong race that once dwelt there make its impression upon the land, that though they are gone, their unfading memory still fingers there, intermingled with the sweet fragrance of its fields, and inseparably associated with the native beauty, fertile stretches and graceful undulating lowlands.

"They were an emotional, proud, elastic people, with a quick eye for the beautiful and a strong instinct of nobility. They loved nature and everything beautiful that was to be found in it. To their romance and their fancy, they united courage and the more practical forms of life. Nothing of the narrowness of fanaticism was to be found in them. They were broad in their aims and their actions. What we see therefore, in their uneventful lives, is not unimportant. It becomes valuable to the biographer, when he seeks in it, back through the dim vista of time, the origin of many of those fine qualities that appear afterwards in remote generations of their descendants."

An appreciative visitor to the original site and neighborhood of the Welsh colony on the Pedee can heartily assent to one of these statements: "So deeply did the strong race that once dwelt there make its impression upon the land, that though they are gone, their unfading memory still lingers there, intermingled with the sweet fragrance of its fields, and inseparably associated with the native beauty, fertile stretches and graceful undulating lowlands"; but in respect to clothing, it may be surmised that the Welsh on the Pedee did not indulge in "buckskin breeches and plush coats and the women in cambric, fine bonnets and silk," or that they were at first richly rewarded for their toils. They did not suffer for food or other necessaries, but their means of making money were so limited that they confessed in their fourth year that they were too poor to pay the cost of running out and deeding their land.

The Council at Charleston, to encourage them, offered a bounty of five pounds in currency for each barrel of flour weighing two hundred pounds they brought to the city.

In all other respects the delineation of the forests, houses, and characteristics of the Welsh in Pennsylvania shows that the South Carolina Colony was a chip from the same block. These emigrants from wild Wales and Pennsylvania transplanted themselves on the wild Pedee, which they found adapted to agriculture and stock raising, leading pursuits in their mother country, and developed their civilization, Welsh in its texture, but modified by contact with hospitable and worthy neighbors. They were no doubt familiar with the prophecy, more than a thousand years old, uttered about their island home, whose name, like its territory, shrunk up from GuaUia, Walha to Wales:

"Their Lord they shall praise Their Tongue they shall keep; Their lands they shall lose Except wild Wales."

But in the new world they were to lose their tongue and become a part of that English army which, with axe and plough as weapons, helped to wrest the new world from the French and the Spanish.

There were no great men in the company which first settled on the east side of the Pedee, but their descendants have shown that the pioneers were men and women of sturdy virtues and no mean talents. They built and graced the log cabins which dotted the river margin, made them centres of domestic virtue and happiness, and filled their humble spheres of duty to their offspring and, better than they knew, to the state. Their last resting place is still pointed out, where they lie in unmarked graves, overgrown with weeds, overflowed in the great freshets, and forgotten almost as completely as the pater noster they used to repeat in their own dialect.

Sources: Logan's History of Upper South Carolina, Gregg's History of the Old Cheraws, and Benedict's History of the Baptists, original in their contents; Jones' Biography of J. Glancy Jones, and Woodward's Expansion of the British Empire.

Chapter II Amalgamation, Characteristics And The Family

THE settlements of Welsh, English, Scotch, Irish, French and German, dotted here and there, were to expand and cover the whole state and use one universal language. It was history repeating itself. Emigrants to a new country from closely allied races, or speaking dialects of the same language, lose their inveterate antipathy and, after two or three generations, amalgamate so completely by intermarriage that the children of later generations have the blood of three or four races coursing in their veins. The descendants of these early immigrants still make up a large part of the 98 per cent, of the present native-born population. None of the branches of these new settlers remained unmixed. Even the Welsh, with their segregating tendencies ingrained for centuries, could not continue in their separateness and clannishness; but in the intermixture along the Pedee they remained the prepotent factor. Their fine qualities and discreet cohesive power were all in their favor; and they were fortunate in their amalgamation with excellent incomers from allied stocks.*

*Editor John E. Williams of the American Pioneer said in 1843: "If you will look around and see the Joneses, Evanses, Thomases, Johnses, Edmundses, Enoches, Williamses, Cadwalladers, Davises, Jameses, Robertses, Owenses, Phiiipses, or any Christian name used as a surname, you more than conjecture the extraction to be Welsh;

As emigrants they differed in motives and in character from the Pilgrim Fathers, "who emigrated in search of the freedom of worship denied them in their own country." Nor were they Hke the settlers on Massachusetts Bay, "where the public opinion was intolerant by conviction and neither politician nor pastor raised a voice for freedom of worship, where a question of church order or biblical controversy was the chief concern of life." The Welsh differed also from the colony at Charles Town with its classes of mixed population and unequal opportunities and from Maryland and Providence, the former accepting religious toleration, the latter restricting the magistrate to the province of politics.

They were like the Pilgrims in having "taste mainly for country life, in being inured to self-denial, thrift and hard work, in having common aims and beliefs, animated by high motives and accustomed to act together for their joint welfare"; and they agreed with the men of Massachusetts in their valuation of learning, though it led not to taxation for the schools but to a cultivated private liberality. In short the men and women on the Pedee were noble by nature. Their history was marred by no religious fanaticism which led to burning witches, hanging Quakers or beating dissenting preachers; nor by political inequalities made in their own interests. It was a place where Freedom had its sway unconfmed save by the moderation of sane public opinion. Had the Welsh in larger numbers settled in a

just as sure as son is English, Mac is Scottish, O and Fitj, Irish, yan, Dutch, and De and La French." He gave his fellow-Welshman the name of a fearnaught, restless, go-ahead people. The Celtic people were easily moved en masse and their amalgamation on the Pedee balanced that tendency with the Teutonic sense of individuality, or the Anglican love of personal liberty.

strategic position like Massachusetts and leavened the new world, the history of the United States might have been a more attractive study.

In their social relations there was freedom within legitimate bounds. In the family, the father was the legal and nominal head and in field and farm he was master and director. His primacy in the family rested also on a moral basis. He took to money making as naturally as birds do to the air; and behind all his planning and industry were the love of his wife and children and respect for the community's name and welfare. To the wife as the weaker vessel was accorded the highest place in the heart and home and as mother she shone in the graces of her daughters and in the manly virtues of her husband and sons. The mother and the daughters, to whom all paid deference, belonged to the household and were therefore excused from labor on the roads, sitting on juries and from military service. The men belonged to the state as well as to the family and were liable in any emergency to be called out from home. In the earlier times the sons were sometimes more carefully educated than the daughters, whose training in reading, writing, and arithmetic and comely conduct was a sufficient female adornment. The authority of the parents as a rule was exercised with discretion, and in not a few families there was a subordination of parts, due to strength and weakness, affection and reverence, that left no room for friction. Such harmony makes a family become an organism, with its members sympathetically united and contributing each its share to the efficiency and happiness of the whole. In a similar arrangement of its members, an apostle and a pagan philosopher saw, one the possibility of a perfect church, the other of a perfect state.

Underneath the family and a part of its possessions was a class of colored dependents or slaves, varying in number from one to several hundred. Their habitation was generally in the yard or in small houses conveniently situated near the "big house." There was in consequence a division of labor in the master's family. The mistress with her chosen female servants cared for the house and table, the milking, and making of cloth and garments for the establishment. Large numbers of cows filled the pen at night and furnished milk and butter as well as beef, hides, and yearhngs to be sold in the market. The spinning wheel made music before the piano appeared in the home, and prepared wool and cotton for the loom. Excepting in the color of the slaves, Penelope in Homer's Odyssey, three thousand years ago, would have been at home on the Pedee with her industrious servants.

It was the master's function to plan and plant such crops and direct the labor of his "hands" in a way that the whole family might be self-supporting and that there might be some compensation for supervision. Subservient to this purpose, nearby the home were built blacksmith and carpenter shops, where skilled artisans made themselves useful in rainy weather and in emergencies. Early in the nineteenth century, the cotton gin and screw became a necessary adjunct for the preparation of the cotton for sale and exportation. Prior to the appearance of the gin, a flock of sheep and a patch of cotton, with its seed picked out by hand, furnished the material for the use of the spinner and the weaver.

The woods were kept stocked with swine and the crop of acorns, sometimes killed by the frost, was watched by the farmers with the same interest they noticed their growing corn. When abundant, the mast made the shotes sleek for the fattening pen and less corn needful in fitting them for slaughter on some crisp December morning, when the whole force congregated to convert by laborious processes the living rooters into palatable pork. The hams in the Gheraw precinct attained a celebrity and retained it until cotton and negroes lessened the amount for sale. As late as 1812 it was sold in Charleston, "in small handy casks of 200 pounds, suitable for family use." It was pronounced to be "of superior quality, well saltpetred and warranted sound."

A full smokehouse was a necessity for the backwoods paterfamilias and some of them continued in the provident mood to the end of slavery. In the forties and earlier Kentuckians had estabhshed a hog route to Greenville, South Carohna, with stations ten miles apart, along which were driven fifty to eighty thousand fat swine, averaging 300 pounds, to be distributed among the cotton planters.

Among the crops outside of cotton, corn was the great staple. The vine followed the Greeks, wheat the Romans and cotton the Arabs (Humbolt). Maize or Indian corn followed the Indian, while his successor, the white man, in one part or another of his great country, has been followed by all the great crops. Wheat has furnished the best bread, but corn, being prolific and cosmopolitan, is the most valuable of all the cereals. It is the gift of a beneficent Creator who designed that the provident man and his beasts should live in abundance. The intelligent master said in substance to his slaves: "You must labor and be obedient. In return for your labor, I give you food and raiment and care for your health. You shall not beg in your old age nor fill a pauper's grave." The great majority of the slaves were light-hearted and chafed not at their lot. They lived in the present, were social, musical, and even hilarious where noise was not forbidden. Their wants were few and simple, and having no anxiety for the future they received at birth the ability to say what cost the apostle Paul much tribulation, "I have learned in whatever state I am therein to be content." But there were evil masters who sinned greatly against their human chattels, and there were both men and women slaves who were insubordinate, not in the interest of their freedom, but out of motives not far from brutish, causing severe punishment. The runaways graduated out of this latter class, both male and female; but as the years passed and they outlived their native wildness, absconding slaves became relatively fewer in number. The lot of the slave under white or colored superintendents and in families ambitious to increase their possessions was harder than that of the servants who lived under the direct supervision of well-to-do masters. Such was the family on the Pedee and like it on an extended scale was the community.