Just kidding. It’s not the end times – at least, not as far as I know.
But yesterday was the last session of my Osher class, Interpreting the Past. I developed this course and taught it for the first time fall semester, and I taught it again this semester on the last three Monday mornings.
I’m not going to write much because I have a lot of other things to do today.
In two weeks, I’ll begin teaching my new three-week course called Founding Fathers: The Pinckney Family of South Carolina. I started thinking about this class two years ago, as I was teaching a class about the decade of the 1790s. It’s an era we don’t talk about very much in survey American History courses. We tend to teach history by jumping from war to war, and not paying much attention to what happened in between the wars. But after the American Revolution and before the War of 1812, much of the actual foundation of the United States was accomplished. We spend a couple of decades wondering what this new Constitution actually meant, and trying to apply it to the resolution of practical problems. Throughout this period, the Pinckney family kept popping up. So I decided I wanted to know more about them, and the ride since then has been fun.
After spending yesterday afternoon putting away the stuff left from my work preparing Interpreting the Past, I’m getting back to the Pinckneys this afternoon. They are a fascinating family that is often overlooked in the story of the founding of the United States.
When I teach an Osher course, I always tell class members about my sources. I do this for two reasons: I want them to feel confident that I’ve used reliable sources, but I also want them to be able to find sources to read on their own if they are interested in the topic beyond what I’ll be able to do in six hours.
The books provide an overview of what I’ll be emphasizing in the class. The first book, Hubs of Empire, places the colony of South Carolina in the larger context of the British Caribbean in the 18th century. In many ways, South Carolina was more closely related to these colonies – particularly Barbados – than it was to the rest of the mainland colonies further north. South Carolina was settled later than the northern colonies – in the 1670s rather than decades earlier – and almost half of its earliest settlers came from Barbados (where their families had been in some cases for generations) rather than directly from England. South Carolina’s plantation economic system grew from the sugar plantations in Barbados and other islands.
Three of the books focus on the men in the Pinckney family. Charles Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Thomas Pinckney are the most visible and well-known of the Pinckneys, but other men in this family served in important roles as well, both in South Carolina and at the national level.
There’s a lot to say about the men in this family, but you’ll note that three of the books focus on the women in the family: Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Rebecca Brewton Motte. As the spouses (and then the widow) of public officials in South Carolina, they were frequently left to run their plantation business while their husbands and other male relatives were away from home. Eliza managed three plantations and is credited with having developed a method of indigo cultivation that made that crop the second most valuable export from South Carolina (behind rice). According to Wikipedia, “Rebecca was known as a patriot in the American Revolution, supplying continental forces with food and supplies for five years. By the end of the war, she had become one of the wealthiest individuals in the state, having inherited property from both her older brother Miles Brewton, who was lost at sea in 1775, and her husband Jacob Motte, who died in 1780.”
The story of these remarkable women (and Eliza’s daughter Harriott) tell us a lot about life in the low country. We are fortunate that Eliza wrote copious notes about her life on the plantations, from the time she began her life in South Carolina in the 1740s through her death in 1793. Wikipedia notes that “The multiple volumes of her collected and published letters and records provide one of the most complete collections of writing from 18th century America and provides a valuable glimpse into the life of an elite colonial woman living during this time period.”
Over the past several months, I have done a lot of reading and thinking about the Pinckney family – and, more importantly, about how to tell this complicated story in the time I will have in my upcoming class. I have become very fond of this family and I want to be able to tell the members of the class about them. I’ve been shaping up the order of my presentation, and over the next two weeks I’ll get everything in order so that I can start this class on March 20 with as high-quality a presentation as I can muster.
I know.
I know it will be a SUPER class!