Jane H. Pease - A Family of Women: The Carolina Petigrus in Peace and War

1999 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Centaur type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Publication of this work was aided by a generous grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pease, Jane H. A family of women : the Carolina Petigrus in peace and war / Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2505-0 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Pettigrew family. 2. WomenSouth CarolinaHistory 19th century. 3. Women and warSouth CarolinaHistory 19th century. 4. South CarolinaHistoryCivil War, 18611865Women. 5. South CarolinaHistoryCivil War, 18611865 Social aspects. I. Pease, William Henry, 1924. II. Title.
HQ1438.S6P43 1999 305.409757dc21 99-12599 CIP

03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

James Louis Petigru

Harriette Petigru

Adle Petigru Allston

Madame Acelie Tognos school for young ladies

Caroline Petigru

Dean Hall

Caroline North Pettigrew

Jane Amelia Petigru

Caroline Petigru Carson holding Jem

Nursery governess Mary Armstrong

Chicora Wood

Robert E W. Allston

Adle Petigru Allston at age forty

Adele Allston

Pettigrew family cemetery at Bonarva

Susan Petigru King Bowen

Adele King Middleton Kershaw

Louise North

Exchange plantation

Vanderhorst mansion

Elizabeth Allston Pringle

Jane Allston Hill

Caroline Petigru Carson in Rome

Jane Pettigrew

1. The Carolinas

2. Charleston

For thirty years, we have pursued the South Carolina history of which the Petigru women are a part. In this endeavor, many librarians, friends, and acquaintances led us to a wide variety of sources and confronted us with numerous questions, insights, and qualifications that made us dig still deeper. To all of them we owe a debt of gratitude. But here we have room to thank only those who have shaped this study directly. Without the rich resources and helpful staffs of the South Carolina Historical Society, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, and the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, we could not have written this book. Also, Donald Yacavones knowledge of the Edward Everett Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society allowed us at last to conclude that Everetts correspondence with Caroline Carson had, in fact, been destroyed.

The timely award of an Archie K. Davis Fellowship from the North Caroliniana Society as well as the hospitality of friends David Moltke-Hansen, Connie and Carl Schulz, and Lee and Cheryle Drago made extended periods of research away from home both more efficient and more comfortable. Martha W. Daniels was most kind in allowing us to use the extraordinary Mulberry Plantation collection over which she presides. Ashton and Lavonne Phillips were similarly generous in giving us access to their extensive collection of Caroline Carsons paintings. Elise Pinckney, who also provided a variety of research leads, introduced us to Petigru descendants Adele Wilson, Sally Simons, and Margaret Allston, who shared their family portraits, artifacts, anecdotes, and genealogical knowledge with us. Chris Marlowe arranged a wonderful tour of Allston territory, during which the present owner of Chicora Wood, Jamie Constance, explained its architectural history and W. C. Grant showed us the remaining half of the Allston summerhouse on Pawleys Island. In North Carolina, Alex King introduced us to Mitchell Kings summerhouse in Flat Rock. Members of the Division of Parks and Recreation, North Carolina Department of Environment, Health, and Natural Resources, helped us locate the site in the present-day Pettigrew State Park where Bonarva once stood. Angela Mack of the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, and Nancy Benjamin and Catherine Wahl of the Morris Museum in Augusta, Georgia, arranged for us to see Carsons works in their institutions.

Finally, we are indebted to Bertram Wyatt-Brown for his helpful reading of the revised manuscript and to Alice Wilkinson for her partial reading and an anonymous referee for his or her full reading of its predecessor. So too we are grateful to Lewis Bateman of the University of North Carolina Press for edging us into and through the extensive revision of the manuscript and to Paula Wald for her sensitive copyediting.

The following institutions have kindly given us permission to quote material and/or use images from their collections: the South Carolina Historical Society, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, the University of South Carolina Law School, the Division of Archives and History of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, the Gibbes Museum, and the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia.

The following presses have given us permission to quote material from books they published: the Seajay Society, the University of South Carolina Press, Yale University Press, and the University of Chicago Press.

The following persons have graciously allowed us to reproduce images in their possession: Mrs. Donald McK. Allston, Jr., Mrs. John H. Daniels of Mulberry Plantation, and Mrs. Irne du Pont May.

Because the bulk of the narrative in this book comes from thousands of letters in a few collections, we have noted only the sources of direct quotations. Our practice has been to rationalize ambiguous punctuation marks when periods, commas, and dashes are indistinguishable in the original but to place in brackets any inserted punctuation not indicated by some mark in the original. Inserted letters or words are also enclosed in brackets. When misspellings occur in the original, we have left them as they were without the benediction of [sic]. We have capitalized or lowercased the first letter of the initial word in a quotation to accord with the capitalization our text requires but have left irregular capitalization as it was in the original. And in the interest of smoother reading, we have sometimes changed first- or second-person pronouns to the third person but have indicated that shift by putting the third-person pronoun in brackets. Words printed in italics represent underlined words in the manuscripts from which they are quoted.

Regarding names, we have used the collective Petigru women to refer to all women in the Petigru connection whatever their surnames. Since all of his siblings adopted James Louis Petigrus distinctive spelling of his last name, that spelling defines the South Carolina branch of the Pettigrew family. For each person, we have employed the most common first name or nickname the family used both to differentiate among those who shared the same first names and to avoid yet greater confusion had we tried to refer to them by their surnames, which are even more repetitious. In only two cases, Jane Amelia Petigru and Mary Blount Pettigrew, have we departed from the most common family practice by adding their middle names to differentiate them from others bearing the same first name. The following are names we have used to refer to Petigru family members throughout.