The forming and fracturing of families on a South Carolina rice plantation, 1812–1865

Abstract

This case study traces family formation among enslaved people on a South Carolina rice plantation owned by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in the first half of the nineteenth century. It uses a rare set of documents to show how enslaved people were brought together mainly via inheritance (rather than purchase) to form a new community, and how they responded to frequent mobility within the holdings of a single planter. It also highlights the peculiar challenges to stable family formation that were unique to the South Carolina lowcountry, including individuals being separated from the main body of the community for periods of time while working on other holdings; the presence of a higher percentage of African-born individuals than was usual for the antebellum South; and the devastating impact of the highest mortality experienced by a mainland slave population.

Keywords:

• Slavery
• marriage
• South Carolina
• slave trade
• mortality

Notes

1. Library of Congress, MSS division, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney family papers, 1703–1947. Plantation Journal (microfilm 21,048-1P). 1860 census for Henderson County, NC. (Retrieved from ancestry.com)

2. Account of Aukland, Plantation Journal, pp. 20–22. Aukland was finally sold in 1843.

3. Plantation Journal, p. 19.

4. Plantation Journal, p. 50.

5. All data taken from the historical census browser (http://www.socialexplorer.com/).

6. The Fairfield Plantation Book [unpaginated]. Microfilm, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. Sam, born around 1760, and Rinah born around 1770, were already a married couple in 1789.

7. All data taken from the Plantation Journal, pp. 1–11, 110–118.

8. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to Thomas Pinckney dated Aiken 3 November 1845. Pinckney Family Papers, South Carolina Historical Society [#495 Folder 5: Correspondence 1832–1845].

9. Throughout I am using the term ‘marriage’ to refer to long-term relationships between enslaved couples that produced children. Southern slave laws gave no formal recognition to enslaved marriages, though some owners accorded them an informal status.

10. Accounts with slaves. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Papers, South Carolina Historical Society.

11. Thomas Pinckney, ‘My Reminiscences of the War and Reconstruction Times’, galley proofs of an unpublished book in the Pinckney Family Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, [#495/15], 69.

12. 1870 census for Caw Caw, Orangeburg District, South Carolina. (Retrieved from ancestry.com)