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.
ARCHEOLOGY AT MIDDLETON PLACE
Modern historical archeology, like archeology in general, is based on two main premises. First, where man has lived for any length of time, he has left behind artifacts—bits of food, broken pottery, tools, and ornaments—that tell us something of his way of life. Second, human behavior is, to a certain extent, patterned and predictable, and similar artifacts will be found on similar sites. Thus, even if two household sites are separated by hundreds of years of technological innovation, they may yield utensils used for roughly the same purposes. If two contemporary sites produce artifacts of the same style and workmanship, then their inhabitants shared at least some aspects of a single culture, and variations between the sites can provide valuable clues to adaptations of that culture to different circumstances.
The distinction between prehistoric and historical archeology is based not on differences in technology but on the presence or absence of written records. While prehistoric archeologists reconstruct ancient cultures primarily from artifactual evidence, historical archeology employs both documents and material remains to study literate societies and the pre-literate populations whom they influenced. In much of Europe and Asia, the historic period begins centuries before Christ, but in North America, historical archeology is concerned with the period of recorded European exploration and occupation extending from the sixteenth century to the present.
From these four centuries we have innumerable written records covering a vast array of subjects. But although these records contain a wealth of information, they cannot always be trusted to be either thorough or accurate. In addition, historians are often most interested in aspects of daily life—such as health, diet, and the living conditions of the unlettered poor—that are frequently omitted altogether from written records. By examining the record of activities that people have left in the soil, archeology can provide written history with a comparatively unbiased account of the economic conditions underlying historical change.