Chronicles of Chicora Wood. Elizabeth W. Allston Pringle
Pringle at Chicora Wood
PART I MY FATHER
CHAPTER I
ORIGIN OF THE TWO L ALLSTONS
JOHN ALLSTON, of St. John’s, Berkeley, was born in England in 1666, and came to this country between 1685 and 1694. He was descended from the ancient family of Allstone, through John Allston, of Saxham Hall, Newton, Suffolk, which was the seat of the Allstons for several hundred years. An Allston was the Saxon Lord of Stanford in Norfolk before the Conquest, and was dispossessed by the Normans. The old Saxon names of Rath Alstan, Alstane, were but variants of the name which John of St. John’s spelled Alstane, until the signature of his will (1718), when he wrote it Allston. The motto was “Immotus,”[1] “Az. ten stars, crest an estoile in a crescent argent.”
John Allston, of St. John’s, Berkeley, had a number of children, as self-respecting people of that date usually had, but we are concerned only with the descendants of his eldest son, John, who was the grandfather of Benjamin Allston, my father’s father, and those of his second son, William, who was the grandfather of Charlotte Ann Allston, my father’s mother. So his parents were second cousins.
Ben Allston died when his second son, Robert, was only eight years old. The boy was educated at Mr. Waldo’s school in Georgetown until he was sixteen, when his widowed mother determined to send him to West Point. He entered in 1817, graduating in June, 1821, this being the first class which made the four years’ course under Colonel Sylvanus Thayer. He was appointed lieutenant in the 3d Artillery, and assigned to duty on the Coast Survey under Lieutenant-Colonel Kearney, of the Topographical Engineers. In this position he assisted in surveying the harbors of Plymouth and Provincetown, Mass., and the entrance to Mobile Bay. While on duty here he got letters from his mother telling of her difficulties, which demanded his immediate presence at home. He asked for leave of absence, but being refused this by his commanding officer, he resigned his commission February, 1822, bought a horse and rode through northern Alabama and Georgia, then inhabited by Indians, to Charleston, and thence to Georgetown, S. C.
His mother’s difficulties in managing her property of landed estate and negroes had been great, and added to this was the effort of the purchaser of a plantation adjoining Chicora on the south to seize a tract of land (attempting to prove that this land belonged to his plantation), which when cleared became four of her best rice-fields. This had kept her in constant fiery correspondence, until my father felt it his duty to resign and come home and settle the matter.
He employed the lawyer of greatest repute at the moment, James L. Petigru; the case was brought into court, and my grandmother’s title to the land established beyond question. She did not long survive to enjoy having her son at home to take the burden of the management of her affairs, for she died October 24, 1824, after a short illness of pleurisy, in her fifty-fourth year. This was a very great sorrow to my father, for he had for her an intense affection with a sense of protection. She was beautiful and very small, so that the servants always spoke of her as “Little Miss” in distinction to Aunt Blythe, who was “Big Miss.” According to the custom of the day, the land was all left to the sons, charged with legacies to the daughters, so my father’s patrimony consisted of large tracts of swamp land in Georgetown and Marion and seventeen negroes, subject to a debt to his sisters which amounted to more than the value of the property. He entered upon its management with great energy, surveyed the land himself, cleared and drained the swamps and converted them into valuable rice-fields.
In this work his military education was of great service to him. In 1823 he was elected surveyor-general of the State, an office which he held for four years. In 1828 he was returned by the people of Winyah to the lower house of the legislature, and in 1832 was returned to the Senate. About this time he attained the rank of colonel of the militia, service of the State. He continued to be returned to the Senate, and was president of that body from 1850 to 1856, when he was elected governor. But I must go back. During the lawsuit about the land my father was entertained by James L. Petigru, came to know the lawyer’s sister, Adèle Petigru, and fell in love with her; and she finally yielded to his suit, and they were married in 1832 and went at once to his plantation, Chicora Wood, fourteen miles north of Georgetown, on the Great Pee Dee River.
I am always afraid of bursting out into praise of my father, for I adored him, and thought him the wisest and best man in the world, and still do think he was a most unusual mixture of firmness and gentleness, with rare executive ability. But I have always found, in reading biographies and sketches, that the unstinted and reiterated praises of the adoring writers rouses one’s opposition, and I write this with the hope of bringing to his grandchildren the knowledge and appreciation of my father’s character. I will try to draw his portrait with a few firm strokes, and leave the respect and admiration to be aroused by it. Now that slavery is a thing of the past, the younger generation in our Southland really know nothing about the actual working of it, and they should know to understand and see the past in its true light. Slavery was in many ways a terrible misfortune, but we know that in the ancient world it was universal, and no doubt the great Ruler of the world, “that great First Cause, least understood,” allowed it to exist for some reason of His own.
The colony of North and South Carolina, then one, entreated the mother country to send no more slaves. “We want cattle, horses, sheep, swine, we don’t want Africans.” But the Africans continued to come. The Northeastern States were the first to get rid of the objectionable human property when conscientious scruples arose as to the owning of slaves—in some instances by freeing them, but in many more instances by selling them in the Southern States. There is no doubt that in the colder climate slave labor was not profitable. When the Civil War came, the Southern planters were reduced from wealth to poverty by the seizure of their property which they held under the then existing