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.