Abstract
In Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier, Edward Pattillo invites the reader to join the saga of his pioneering ancestors. True to the title, Pattillo focuses on the cotton frontier of the Old Southwest, although we do get sketches of those earlier generations from Bedfordshire, England, that produced the first of the family settlers in North America. The author also gives us a taste of the American Revolution in South Carolina, including a sense of its simultaneous and vicious civil war. The reader travels with some of the family through the Civil War, culminating with the generation that survived.
The style of the text is clearly rooted in the antiquarian tradition, but it reaches beyond the almost Biblical recitation of births, marriages, and deaths typical in that genre. Of course, strings of data can be invaluable to the genealogist and the historian, but they also can numb the mind of a reader as page follows page. While the text does contain its share of such lists, much of the book has an engaging narrative flow. In his Introduction, Pattillo explains the origins of his “life long effort to understand the South, past and present.” This and the author’s goal to publish formerly private information on the histories of the African Americans owned by his ancestors brings to mind Erskin Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, another rendering of a family history of black and white intertwined—that one set on the Georgia frontier. Clarke is a professional historian and Patillo is not, but Patillo sets Carolina Planters apart from many antiquarian family histories in his determination to probe and test his sources. The author does not always take family lore at face value. For example, he hunted for historical evidence that would confirm, deny, or leave open, the question of whether Samuel Spencer was indeed a captain in the French and Indian War. Pattillo searched the Connecticut military records for confirmation—which he could not find.
What will frustrate scholars is the way the author supports his evidence. There is no documentation for a number of claims and failure to use a standard citation form for others. In place of footnotes, Pattillo uses marginal glosses. Some contain source references; some do not. Quotes or summaries may or may not have a partial citation when one is needed. There are many short, boldface quotes from letters or other family documents sprinkled through the text. Rarely, however, does the author include the dates of the excerpts, although happily, Pattillo does provide dates for many of the longer letter passages.
There is a similar inconsistency in providing volume and page numbers for public records. These are often incomplete or missing altogether. For example, none is given for any of the Connecticut colonial military records mentioned above. The author shows familiarity with and draws insights from secondary sources like The South Carolina Rice Plantation by historian J. H. Easterby and articles in scholarly journals like the William and Mary Quarterly. He often limits the citation, however, to the journal title or, in the case of a monograph, to author and title, offering no page numbers. We also have to guess the size and makeup of Pattillo’s family sources. In the introduction, we learn that he has a “rich cache” of letters, diaries, plantation records, and public records, but historians cannot but wonder how many documents there were in each category. We would want to know, too, how well the quoted letters reflect the content of the total number examined.
Having said this, the author shows remarkable attention to detail in the mining of his family papers. For example, Pattillo carefully traces the trail of some personal possessions, tracking teapots, damask curtains, and slaves through letters, wills, and inventories. He enriches and brings animation to these notarial lists. “Slapdash” tombstone carvers and finicky appraisers populate the narrative. One favorite will likely be the story of Peter McKenzie’s 1865 inventory of “lost” slaves, entitled “Freed by the hellish Yankees.” On the other hand, readers may come away wishing that the details of the enslaved families had been woven together into a tighter narrative and one more consistently tied into the history of the whites. We get intriguing glimpses of Jupiter, servant of William L. Robeson, in the postscripts of Robeson’s letters. Jupiter was Robeson’s manservant, and later, a porter in his counting house. Robeson must have had high regard for Jupiter because he bought Jupiter’s wife and two children in 1832. Then there was Caty, whom Eliza N. Spencer repeatedly hired out, ostensibly to allow Caty to buy her freedom and that of her children.
Since Carolina Planters defends no thesis and has only light documentation, what can it offer academics? Some sources, wills, and mortgages on slaves are identified well enough to cite. The letters with clear citations could be used in courses as primary sources enriching monographs that expose students to the transitions required by life on the Cotton Frontier. Finally, although this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, Edward Pattillo gives descriptions of the contents of certain archives that researchers might find helpful.
General readers will enjoy and learn from Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier. It is a family history told with far more historical fact-checking, good humor, and dramatic flare than readers of family papers might expect. Edward Pattillo will leave professional historians wanting more from his family epic, but that will be because he has intrigued them with this intimate and compelling chronicle.