A BRIEF HISTORY OF MIDDLETON PLACE
The land that now comprises Middleton Place lies in one of the earliest areas inhabited by Englishmen in South Carolina. In 1674, just four years after the first colonists settled at Charles Town, Lord Proprietor Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper granted lands for settlement along the lower reaches of the Ashley River. Among these was the site of Middleton Place, deeded in 1675 to Jacob Waight. Waight apparently forfeited his claim to the tract, and in 1700, it was granted to Richard Godfrey, who sold it in 1729 to John Williams, a wealthy landowner and justice of the peace. The land passed into Middleton hands in 1741, when John Williams’ daughter Mary married Henry Middleton, the second son of former provincial governor Arthur Middleton.
Henry and his two brothers were the third generation of Middletons in South Carolina. Their grandfather, Edward Middleton, had arrived in the colony in 1678 as part of the great influx of Barbadian Englishmen who made up more than half of Charles Town’s early immigrants. Like many other Barbadians, Edward settled along Goose Creek, north of Charleston. His plantations there, along with estates in Barbados and England, passed to his son Arthur in 1685. Arthur also inherited a prominent position in Carolina society, and with it, an active role in the political life of the colony. Edward had served as Lords Proprietors’ deputy and assistant justice in his few years’ stay in Goose Creek, but Arthur, who held more than a dozen public offices, was the Middleton who established the tradition of political leadership that was to distinguish his family for four generations.
Probably the most significant of Arthur’s achievements was his role in the overthrow of the Lords Proprietor. The eight British noblemen theoretically owned and managed all of the Carolinas, but in later years, they adopted policies that their colonists saw as inimical to survival in the American wilds. Following the Lords Proprietors’ failure to provide military aid during the bloody Yamasee Indian uprising of 1715-1717, Arthur Middleton led a convention that in 1719 persuaded the king to remove the Lords Proprietor. Later, as president of the Ruling Council, he served as governor of the province until the arrival of a governor appointed by the king.
Arthur’s son Henry inherited a large share of his father’s estates in Carolina and Barbados and was reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in Carolina. According to one contemporary account, he owned some 20 plantations and 800 slaves. Nonetheless, after his marriage to Mary Williams he moved his residence and base of operations to his wife’s Ashley River plantation, which they named Middleton Place. The manor house was already standing at that time, but Henry added the two flanker buildings (the southernmost of which now serves as the main house), and laid out the formal gardens, terraces, and ornamental lakes that made Middleton Place one of the most elegant of the lowcountry plantations. Rice, introduced into the Carolinas in the late seventeenth century, had become by Henry’s time a staple crop of the Ashley River region and was becoming the main product of Middleton Place ([Fig. 1]).
Figure 1. Locator map of Middleton Place, Dorchester County, South Carolina.
Like his father, Henry held a number of public offices under the royal government, but it was in the rebellion against that government that he gained political renown, first as president of the South Carolina Provincial Congress and later as a delegate to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Only seven of Henry and Mary’s eleven children lived to adulthood, but both surviving sons were members of the Provincial Congress, and when Henry’s health began to fail in 1776 his elder son Arthur replaced him as delegate to the Second Continental Congress. At 34 Arthur Middleton was the senior South Carolina delegate to sign the Declaration of Independence.
The American Revolution took a heavy toll on South Carolina. Several major campaigns were fought in the former colony, and Charleston and the surrounding lowcountry were occupied by the British from 1780 to 1782. During this time, 63 leading Charlestonians, including Arthur Middleton, were imprisoned in British St. Augustine. By 1780, Henry was seriously ill, and, like other lowcountry residents, he and his sons suffered serious financial losses from the plunder and disruption that accompanied the British occupation.
Henry died in 1784 leaving Middleton Place and other plantations to Arthur, who in the postwar economic climate soon regained his former standard of living. Arthur and his family of nine children had lived at Middleton Place for some time before Henry’s demise, and several important economic changes took place under Arthur’s direction. In Henry’s early years at Middleton Place, rice had been cultivated in inland swamps irrigated with water from man-made reservoirs. By the late eighteenth century, soil exhaustion had begun to pose a problem, and many planters, including the Middletons, changed to tidal rice cultivation that involved impounding freshwater swamps along the rivers’ edges and allowing them to be flooded by the natural action of the river tides. Not only did the new soil and nutrients deposited by the floodwaters remove the threat of soil exhaustion, but the tidal system was more labor-efficient than inland cultivation, resulting in higher yield per acre. This new efficiency was compounded by another late eighteenth century innovation, the water-powered rice mill, installed at Middleton Place about the same time.
Arthur’s eldest son Henry inherited Middleton Place at the age of 17, apparently while he was still in school in England. Henry devoted a great deal of attention to the gardens planted by his grandfather, enlarging them and introducing many new plants, some of them newly brought to America by the French botanist André Michaux. From 1801 to 1830 Henry was continuously in public office, first as a South Carolina legislator and governor, then as a member of the United States Congress, and from 1820 to 1830 as American ambassador to Russia.
By the time he returned from his service abroad, South Carolinians had embarked upon the separatist agitation that would eventually lead to their third attempt in 150 years to overthrow a government.
At issue were the 1828 and 1832 “tariffs of abomination,” designed by Congress to protect fledgling industries in the northern states. However, they were viewed by indignant Carolina planters, dependent on direct trade with England, as an assault on their agricultural economy. The South Carolina Nullification Convention of 1832 declared the tariff null and void on the basis of John C. Calhoun’s doctrine that a state had a right to vote to disregard onerous acts of Congress and, if other states found its action unacceptable, to secede. As a member of the opposing Union Party, Henry Middleton was perhaps the first of his family to take an active conservative role in a dispute pitting South Carolina against an outside governing body.
This early threat to the Union was deflected with a tariff reduction in 1833, but the nullification doctrine had laid the ideological groundwork on which 11 southern states were to base their secession over the issue of slavery 28 years later. Slavery was an economic mainstay of agriculture throughout the South, but particularly so in South Carolina, where slaves had been imported from Barbados with the very earliest settlers at Charles Town and where a plantation system based on involuntary servitude had existed since the late seventeenth century. By the early 1700s African slaves already made up three-quarters of the South Carolina population, and on the eve of the Civil War, South Carolina remained the largest slaveholding state in the Union. Colleton District, where Middleton Place was located, was nearly 80% black.
This enormous disparity meant that white slaveholders lived in constant fear of slave insurrection. They were equally fearful of emancipation, which, as abolitionist sentiment grew in the North, many planters came to view as an inevitable outcome of northern political dominance. There were slaveholders who staunchly opposed disunion, but South Carolina, as it had been during the nullification dispute, was a hotbed of secessionism. With the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, a Charleston convention passed an ordinance making South Carolina the first state to withdraw from the Union. Henry Middleton had died in 1846 before the slavery controversy reached its height, but among the signers of the Ordinance of Secession were his sons John Izard Middleton of Georgetown, and Williams Middleton of Middleton Place.
The war that followed caused more devastation to the plantation economy than emancipation, for in defeat the planters lost most of their financial assets and their voice in local government. In areas that had witnessed military action, they often saw devastation of their homes and property. Middleton Place, plundered and burned by invading troops in 1865, was no exception. Williams and his family fled to Charleston where they lived while renting the plantation grounds to a “Yankee captain.” In 1867 Williams borrowed money from a sister in Philadelphia and began the task of restoring the burnt-out southern flanker building to serve as a family residence. In 1871, before repairs were complete, the Middletons and their two children were again living at Middleton Place in the shadow of the ruined mansion that had housed five generations of their family.
Restoration of the plantation’s agricultural operations, however, proved more difficult. The tidal rice fields, which required constant maintenance, had been neglected, and the loss of the more than 100 slaves who had worked the plantation grounds and rice fields left Williams without the necessary labor for large-scale cultivation. Although vastly diminished quantities of rice continued to be harvested elsewhere in the lowcountry, Middleton Place apparently never again produced a successful rice crop. By 1890 rice from Louisiana, where flat upland fields permitted mechanized cultivation impossible in the South Carolina marshes, had begun to drive Carolina rice off the market. Today no rice at all is grown in South Carolina.
Two new commodities that gained importance in the land-poor lowcountry economy were phosphates, of which postbellum South Carolina was the nation’s leading supplier, and timber, an important product in the Southeast. Williams turned his hand to exploitation of these natural resources, and by 1878, Middleton Place boasted both phosphate mines and a sawmill. Although he and his heirs continued to lease the plantation timber and mineral rights until the early twentieth century, by 1880 the aging Williams had left Middleton Place, taking up residence in Greenville, South Carolina. After Williams died in 1882, his wife Susan made regular visits to the plantation. But following her death in 1900, Middleton Place lay abandoned, except for periodic visits, for over 20 years. Williams and Susan’s son Henry, who had left South Carolina in the 1870s to attend Cambridge University, was living in England, and their daughter Elizabeth had married and settled in Greenville.
The plantation was inherited by a cousin, J. J. Pringle Smith, who, in 1925, moved his family into the southern flanker house and began the slow job of restoring the Middleton Place grounds and gardens. Pringle Smith built the present stableyard complex on the site of older outbuildings, installed an electrical generator in the former privy building, and opened the gardens to the public. In 1970 Middleton Place became a Registered National Historic Landmark under the management of the Smiths’ grandson, Charles Duell. In 1975, with the creation of the Middleton Place Foundation, the south flanker containing many of the family’s original furnishings was also opened to the public.