Josiah Quincy, though a Bostonian, believed in seeing America first. He had a most illuminating journey. He had never realized that Charles Town, in the Carolinas, was the richest city south of Philadelphia, nor that here he was to find a spirit of resentment against British injustice as acute as that of his own people. “This town,” he wrote, “makes a beautiful appearance as you come up to it and in many respects a magnificent one. I can only say in general that in grandeur, splendor of building, decorations, equipages, numbers, commerce, shipping, and indeed everything it far surpasses all I ever saw or ever expect to see in America.” From a Quincy of Massachusetts this was the perfect tribute.
What prompted it? In his diary of March 8, 1773 he writes: “Dined with a large company at Miles Brewton’s, Esq., a gentleman of very large fortune.... At Mr. Brewton’s sideboard was very magnificent plate. A very fine bird kept familiarly playing about the room under our chairs and the table, picking up the crumbs, and perching on the window and sideboard.” The bird was evidently the crowning touch to a panoply of culture and luxury such as he had scarcely anticipated among the outlanders. You may picture him, if you like, rising comfortably fortified with good cooking, at the end of a whole afternoon at the five-yard table; identifying with shrewd appraisal the excellent furniture which his host and hostess had picked up in England five years before; running a furtive proving finger over the carved woodwork which had also come across the Atlantic; knowing that the portrait of Miles Brewton on the wall was good, and knowing that another reason why it was good was because Sir Joshua Reynolds had done it. Though there were slaves in Boston at that time, you may conjecture that he tacitly disapproved of the substantial slave quarters across the courtyard—for he was the ancestor of a brilliant abolitionist. But for the architectural excellence of the interior, its carved woodwork, and its furnishings, he could have nothing but praise. And at the risk of invading the visitor’s privacy you may follow him to the King Street gate as he departs, and you may perhaps catch the emphatic wag of his head, and hear his conclusive whisper: “These people know how! They have atmosphere! I am amazed!” He carried back to Boston the warm friendship of Miles Brewton and the firm conviction that Charles Town could be relied upon.
Miles Brewton had for ten years been a member of the Commons House of the Colonial legislature. He had watched the smouldering of a spirit which would break out in flame the next spring, had given wise counsel to the hot-heads, yielded nothing to injustice from London. Then Charles Town heard the shot fired round the world. The Provincial Congress met, voted to raise three regiments and a million dollars. Into the uproar sailed his Majesty’s Ship Scorpion, bearing Lord William Campbell, to be the new colonial governor, apparently for no special qualification except that he had married Sarah Izard, of Charles Town. Miles Brewton made his wife’s cousin and her governor-husband his guests at once, and when the Provincial Congress promptly stuck its verbal bayonets under the uncomfortable young Campbell’s nose, His Lordship stayed up half the night wondering what he could do, and then called Miles Brewton out of bed to help settle the question.
A Committee of Safety presently supplanted the Provincial Congress, and Brewton became a member. We know of his value to the colony in trying to preserve equilibrium. Of what his service in war might have been we can never know. Josiah Quincy had been urging upon his friend the courtesy of a return visit. With Mrs. Brewton and the children he took ship to Philadelphia—and Miles Brewton and his family were lost at sea. Josiah Quincy lost a friend and the cause a level-headed patriot.
Although its builder was gone, and his direct line wiped out, the Brewton house remained. It was left jointly to his sisters, Mrs. Charles Pinckney and Mrs. Jacob Motte. It was Mrs. Motte’s home while Parker and Clinton hammered at the city gates in 1776, and it requires no documentary evidence to conceive how that “very magnificent plate” on the Brewton sideboard shone at dinner the night of August second—the night when the battered British fleet had sailed away, and the night when Captain Barnard Elliott read the Declaration of Independence to the soldiery and the cheering townsfolk.
There came a day, however, four years later when Sir Henry Clinton cut off the peninsula from the mainland, and forced the city to surrender. A conqueror likes to be comfortable, and Sir Henry and his staff camped down upon Mrs. Motte’s thoroughly comfortable house. You will find, scratched into one of its white marble mantels, a crude sketch of a British frigate, and a portrait of the conqueror himself, done by a staff-officer. Mrs. Motte, at the commander’s request, presided at table, but the lady was as wise as she was tactful—her three attractive daughters were behind barred doors in the garret—a knowing precaution against the notorious tendencies of Lord Rawdon, who succeeded Sir Henry Clinton. Other homes in the town fared less well: Mrs. C. C. Pinckney and her family were turned out bodily, and the families upon whom were quartered certain of the lesser invaders were made wretched indeed.
Charles Town endured and waited. In pleasant weather the enemy staff lounged in the deep-walled garden which reaches back of the Motte house to Legare Street; when winter forced them indoors there were gay dinners in the high-panelled dining-room, dinners attended by those of the citizenry who had “played safe” and England to win. The patriots wore brave smiles and old dresses. If you had been a sentry during those days you might have challenged a charming young woman with a pass through the lines to visit her plantation. If you had been a dutiful sentry you would have glanced into her carriage, to make sure she carried no contraband. If you had been an impertinent sentry you might have seen that she wore heavy boots—but if she had smiled at you you would not have been impertinent. And naturally when she returned through the lines two or three days later and smiled graciously upon you as an old friend, how could you know that those boots were men’s boots, and that they were now in the stirrups of some cavalier serving under Marion, the Swamp Fox? Or read behind her smile the secret that Marion’s men that night would ride the harder, harass the British patrols outside more bitterly, make foreign tenure of the city less and less comfortable? That was the secret of the women of Charles Town.
A British officer caught Colonel Isaac Hayne after a brilliant capture he had effected within five miles of the city. They brought him in and condemned him to death as a spy, which he was not. The drawing-room of the Motte house saw another phase of Charles Town’s women: heard their pleading for Hayne’s life; saw Rawdon refuse. Then imprisoned Charles Town saw Martyr Hayne hanged and bitterness crystallized to hate. The same Mrs. Motte who had been an unwilling hostess to the British in town went in 1780 to her plantation “Mount Joseph,” on the Congaree. The British seized and fortified it the next year and she was moved to a nearby farmhouse, so that Marion and “Light Horse Harry” Lee could lay siege to the property. When Lee suggested to her the destruction of her own home by fire-bearing arrows, she agreed heartily, and herself brought forth an East-Indian bow and arrows of great range. The good lady then watched the marksmanship of Marion’s men set fire to her own plantation house, applauded its surrender, and when the fire was out presided over captor and captive at her own table!
A watchman’s cry put an end to the poverty and distress in which the besieged city found itself slowly mired. Cutting through the rain it brought candle-light to life in every house as the news spread: “Half-past-twelve of a stormy night and Cornwallis has surrendered!” It meant victory, an end to suffering, reunited families. In 1782 Moultrie led his troops into the city, past “the balconies, the doors and windows crowded with the patriotic fair, the aged citizens and others congratulating us on our return home, saying, ‘God bless you, gentlemen! You are welcome home, gentlemen!’ Both citizens and soldiers shed mutual tears of joy.”
For ten years the Motte house followed the city’s returning prosperity. Of the three girls who had been hidden in the attic during the wretched Rawdon’s incumbency, one, who married Thomas Pinckney, died young; the second, whose first husband died, married Pinckney and lived to see him the first American ambassador to England and a candidate for president. The third, Mary Brewton Motte, married William Alston, a colonel in Marion’s Brigade.