Mary's World by Richard N. Côté [Fourth Turning-style history of the Pringle family of Charleston, SC]

This is a history of a wealthy, well-connected South Carolina plantation family before, during and after experiencing an asteroid-grade event: the Civil War and the North's ensuing multi-year military and economic occupation of the South.

The family quickly lost everything, became impoverished to the point of barely having enough to eat, and eventually scattered all over the country and world. They were once one of the richest and most important rice growing families in the entire United States; now no one knows who they are.

Still more sad and sobering is how this experience changed the earnest, sincere, well-bred Christian matriarch of this family into an embittered and angry old woman--bickering with her husband, desperate for money, and starting little marmalade-making businesses in her 70s to try to make ends meet.

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Thus this book, which on a surface level is a fairly competent family history, offers an unexpected Fourth Turning guide for modern readers. Most importantly, by showing a family of once-elites utterly and permanently losing their place in a regime change, it teaches us exactly what not to do.

These were intelligent, cultured, educated people: the reader sees the incredible quality of their letter writing, their knowledge of history and literature (nothing like the hypocognized "elites" running looting the American administrative state today). This makes their downfall all the more disturbing: they should have had the tools and resourcefulness to make it! Instead, they--along with many other elites in South Carolina--were fragile and unready for the changes that were coming.

It's hard enough to survive a Black Swan like the Civil War when you're robust and ready, but if you're financially fragile in the first place you definitely won't make it. And this family was already financially fragile and over-indebted even before the war began, and the defeat and military occupation of the South (which our history books, written by winners, misleadingly call "Reconstruction") was the mother of all Black Swans for these families. The family repeatedly had to liquidate land, houses and business assets at firesale prices (they sold an entire plantation at a 90+% loss, and later sold a rice mill, a critically important piece of agricultural capital, at a 94% loss), while at the same time their money (Confederate currency) and investments (Confederate government bonds) hyperinflated to worthlessness. 

They had no backup liquidity, their income disappeared, and at precisely the time they needed the money, prices plummeted for all things they owned. It always seems to happen that way when you're fragile, which is why you don't ever want to be fragile in the first place.

Chapters 10, 11 and 12 are the most important chapters addressing this theme. They are excellent and worth a close reading, discussing the family's multiple forms of exposure to risk, including what might be thought of as quadruple leverage to the short-lived Confederate nation-state, as the family held 100% of their wealth in either 1) Confederate fiat money, 2) Confederate government debt, 3) physical properties in Confederate territory and, 4) obviously and reprehensively, slaves. 

And, as we learned in The Great Taking in its discussion of the 1930s-era "bank holiday" asset seizures, when your assets get seized or devalued, they always seem to leave you with your debts. This family's failures and oversights offer an attentive reader a different path to take to survive: store some of your wealth in another country, hold property in another country (or in the North--luckily one of this family's sons had married into a family with strong Northern ties and as a result he actually got rich during the Civil War), hold gold in Switzerland, etc. And of course in the modern era we have some new solutions to this problem like holding Bitcoin or stablecoins: an uncensorable value source that is both teleportable and easily self-custodied.

Finally, I offer my (working) list of heuristics should any of us ever find ourselves living through a regime change. You never know: one might be happening right now in the USA.

1) You cannot safely store most of your wealth in land: land can be seized by an adversarial nation-state, land cannot be moved.

2) You are fragile to your government if you are an elite, especially if there is a regime change. Don't be an elite.

3) What's even worse is to be a heavily indebted elite under a regime change. The new regime can effortlessly destroy your wealth and social position for generations.

4) The best kind of wealth is teleportable wealth: money that can be wired, encrypted Bitcoin that can be stored and sent, etc. Remember: if you hold your Bitcoin with a third-party custodian, it is not Bitcoin.

5) The worst kind of wealth is bulky, heavy stuff that you can't move (furniture, family heirlooms, houses), and even if you could move it there's no place to put it, especially in an emergency, and of course an adversarial government can easily see it and take it.

6) Another terrible kind of wealth, especially during periods of social disruption, is visible, ostentatious wealth: plantation homes, fancy carriages, etc. (or today: fancy cars, loud mansions, flashy accessories like watches, etc.). During periods like this these things are not just highly visible, they will be highly resented: and thus they will likely be stolen or vandalized--and you may be harmed or killed in the process. Do not own these things.

7) When you're already indebted, you're also fragile to selling your property at the worst possible time and price. If anything, you want to be the person buying things sold at firesale prices, not selling them. Be the person on the other side of this trade: stay liquid, stay out of debt, stay ready.

8) Think as broadly as you can about "diversification." Examples might include having family in more than one city, state or even country; holding assets in multiple places, holding widely diverse forms of wealth, some of it easily transportable. Other examples: be age-diversified: older people struggle much more during periods of disequilibrium, so if you're not young, stay connected to people who are, and so on.

[Readers, as always, read no further. Value your lives and your time! Below is a long list of notes and reactions to the book, which are just to help me order and remember what I read. It is way too long. It might be worth skimming the bolded parts. Might be.]

Notes:

Preface:

x Comments on the Pringle family correspondence: "Mary and her family are worthy of study for two reasons. First, they were extremely conventional, thus making them good representatives of the class of which they were a part. Second, they left behind a large enough body of personal records to make a serious study possible. Their papers present us with an intensely personal--and often raw--reflection of Southern social attitudes for the period from 1840 through 1880."

x-xi Other interesting points: the mother, Mary Pringle, was strongly anti-slavery, completely not politically correct, and "expressed herself freely on every subject which interested her." Contrasting the letters of Mary Chestnut who wrote for posterity; Mary Pringle wrote "only for her family"; also note that the Civil War scattered the family, two sons were dead, one went into an insane asylum, and other parts of the family spread all over the United States and Europe.

xii "It is my hope that the readers of this book will find themselves developing the same bonds of concern and affection with the Pringle and Stewart families that I did while researching and writing about them during these past twelve years."

Introduction:

1ff Fascinating details here of this family, which was incredibly wealthy, clearly 0.01% level wealthy, and part of a group of 500-600 planting families who revolutionized the rice industry, making it a major export crop for the United States, mostly to Europe; South Carolina alone produced 60 4% of the nation's rice, and the rice production just in the Georgetown district of South Carolina was 47% of that, grown by just 88 planter families. The labor was done mostly by slaves, obviously; along with a complement of field slaves, this family had as many as 32 house slaves.

2 Mary Pringle herself had 13 children (astoundingly, 12 survived to adulthood).

2 The author argues here that the family was deeply in debt. "Unbeknown to most was the fact that the Pringles, like many other antebellum rice planters, were deeply in debt from living far beyond their means."

2-3 "Sealed off in the self-imposed economic and intellectual cocoon that South Carolina had evolved into by the 1850s, the Pringles had little warning that an approaching war would soon rip apart their family, free their slaves, destroy their ability to make a living, and render their social class extinct."

3-4 Of her eight sons who volunteered to fight in the Civil War, three were killed.

4 "The last section of the book describes the aged, demoralized Pringle survivors as they sought to regain possession of their house and plantation lands" and of Mary's son-in-law and his "valiant but futile effort" to restart rice planting; then the book follows the family as they scattered to seek new opportunities elsewhere.

5 Interesting mention here of two married slaves born on a separate plantation: the woman was Mary Pringle's personal maid, and she "developed a deep affection for her" and presented her with a family bible which transcribed birth, marriage and death records for all of her children: "This Bible is one of the most important slave family records in South Carolina history." [You can't help but notice that in civilizations that engage in slaving--there have been many and slaving cultures still exist even today--most of the slaves are not only not remembered, but their existence is not even recorded; this exception here proves the rule. Also it's worth noting that in order to have records (or anything) preserved about your people, somebody has to sort of collaborate with the established power structure, you have to do it from within. It's very sobering and disturbing.]

Mary's Family: [This section is like a who's who/dramatis personae of the family]

Mary Motte Alston Pringle (1803-1884)

William Bull Pringle (1800-1881)

Children:

William Alston Pringle (1822-1895), married Emma Clara Pringle Smith

John Julius Pringle (1824-1901), married Maria Duncan

Edward Jenkins Pringle (1826-1899), married Cornelia Letitia Johnson 

Jacob Mott Alston Pringle (1827-1886), married Gabriella Ravenel

Susan Pringle (1829-1917), unmarried daughter, she ended up caring for her aging parents 

Mary Frances Pringle (1831-1901) 

William Bull Pringle, Jr. (1833-1859)

Miles Brewton Pringle (1835-1874)

Robert Pringle (1837-1863) 

Rebecca Mott Pringle (1839-1905), married doctor Frank Frost (interesting that they had six children, none married, none had grandchildren.) 

Elizabeth Pringle (Rebecca's twin) (1839-1844), died at age four

Charles Alston Pringle (1841-1862), died of typhoid fever while stationed at Camp Evans as a lieutenant

James Reid Pringle (1842-1871), married Coralie Butterworth

Francis ("Frank") LaJau Frost (1837-1912), son-in-law that tried to restore profitable rice planting in the region, without success.

Jacob Mott Alston (1821-1909) 

Lucrecia Stewart, "Cretia" (1807-1879), Mary Pringle's personal servant and cook, she remained with the family after emancipation.

Chapter 1: Mary's Charleston

15 "By the time of Mary's birth, Charleston had recovered from the damage and looting suffered at the hands of the British during the Revolutionary War." Her family was filled with elites, revolutionary heroes, public figures, government leaders, social elites.

16ff Discussion of the Brewton side of Mary's family (her mother's side); shipping, slavedealing, landowners, etc. [her great-great-great-great uncle Miles Brewton built the family house in the 1760s, basically using an Italian Villa-style design, it sort of reminds you of the faux Italian Villa-style houses built in Southern California by that periods elites; interesting to see how elites of any society tend to emulate some society that they think is even more elite.]

19 Note the security fencing installed in 1822 or thereafter; back then people thought the wheels were coming off of society too... [Note that if you call it "cheval-de-frise" in the real estate brochure you can pretend it's a property upgrade!]

21 Note that Miles Brewton and his entire family was lost at sea in 1775, during a coastal ship voyage from Charleston to Philadelphia [note that this isn't the first example of members of this extended family lost at sea, and it won't be the last--it was that era's plane crash I guess]; his two sisters, Rebecca Brewton Motte and Frances Brewton Pinckney, inherited his estate. Rebecca had married Jacob Motte, Jr. and among the three children they had who survived to adulthood was Mary, who married Col. William Alston "and brought forth the family we consider here."

21ff British bombardment in 1780; the city surrendered, then the Brewton house was used as the British headquarters. Also Jacob, Rebecca's husband died that year too (although the author doesn't say how).

Chapter 2: King Billy's Daughter

26ff Discussion of the immigrant founder of the Allston/Alston family dynasty, John Allston: born in England in 1666, arrived to America sometime between 1685 and 1694. Of his six children, William Alston married Huguenot Esther Labrosse de Marboeuf, and they purchased the thousand acre plantation The Oaks from Percival Pawley in 1730 [Hence the name Pawley's Island]. Among their 13 children was Joseph Allston, who inherited the plantation, he and his wife Charlotte had six children, including another William Allston, "who would one day be known as 'King Billy' for his great wealth and power." William married Mary Ashe, and among their five children, Joseph Alston [note here that apparently the family changed the spelling of their name at this point, dropping the extra "l"--although the author doesn't mention this until five or so pages later.]

28ff Sidebar discussion here of son Joseph Alston and his marriage to Theodosia Burr in 1801, the only daughter of Aaron Burr, considered the most educated woman of her time, this was seen as a political alliance between a Carolina rice planter and a cosmopolitan New Yorker, but they were "deeply in love." They had only one child, Aaron Burr Alston, born in 1802, after her pregnancy Theodosia had a prolapsed uterus and "gruesome" recurring uterine infections. Note that Burr-Hamilton duel happen in 1804, and then the grandson Aaron died of malaria in 1812. Also in 1812, "Theodosia had recovered enough of her health to plan a sea trip to visit her father" but a storm blew up and the ship was never seen again; then three years later Joseph Alston also died.

31ff Now back to father William Allston, cultivating rice in 1783 with "extraordinary success"; here we see how William changed his spelling of his name and dropped an "l" to differentiate the family from all the other Allston family members in the Georgetown region, in particular his first cousin who was also named William Allston.

32 William Alston's first wife Mary Ashe died in 1789, two years later he married 23-year-old Mary "Hesse" Brewton Motte, daughter of Rebecca and Jacob Motte, Jr. Note here that George Washington, now president, came to visit colonel Alston's rice plantations shortly after their wedding.

33 Alston buys the Miles Brewton House in Charleston by buying out the sisters, who were his second wife's (Mary Brewton Motte's) mother and aunt [now the reader finally sees the connection!].

34 Now on to the birth of Mary Motte Alston, the focus of this book: born in 1803 when her father was 47 and her mother was 34; nicknamed "Hesse" just like her mother.

35 On William Austin's proclivities for racehorses, also receiving a visit in 1819 from President James Monroe and other major government officials, also he was friends/political allies with former president Thomas Jefferson.

40ff Sidebar here on a young John Pierpont who served as the family's live-in tutor: he would ultimately be known as a minister, teacher and poet, as well as J.P. Morgan's grandfather. Pierpont, from Connecticut, hated it in South Carolina, he felt lonely, he thought the land wasn't that beautiful he had "contempt and outright hostility" towards the South, and his journals from that time rarely mentioned the Alston family, despite the fact that he was living with them. However, he had great esteem for the family and named his eldest child William Alston.

45ff Commentary on young Mary, a voracious reader, writing commentaries on the 31 biographies she read in one year; on other commentaries from her diaries at the time, for example at age 15 she "recorded the advice of Pythagoras: 'Always review the day before going to sleep. Be troubled at the ill you have done and rejoice for the good.'"

Chapter 3: Judge Pringle's Son

47ff More on Mary: in 1822 Mary Motte Alston marries William Bull Pringle, from a family that emigrated from Scotland in 1725; the author explains how Mary's family was far better politically connected and far more elite and wealthy, although both families were from the same social class. Per the author, Mary "towered over him intellectually."

48ff More Pringle family history: Father John Julius Pringle was federal district attorney under George Washington, he turned down the Attorney General position that Thomas Jefferson offered him in 1805, wanting to stay in Charleston and run his private practice, look after his aging mother, run his plantations, etc, his youngest son was William Bull Pringle.

53ff Details here on rice planting in South Carolina in the Georgetown region, there were tidal rivers there that could be used to flood and drain rice fields; on the various pests that would attack the stalks and grains, everything from grubs to ducks; the seeds were prepped by pressing them into balls of wet clay and then drying them: then they could flood the fields without the seeds floating to the surface; also flooding limited weed growth until germination; then they would drain the field and keep it dry; then later, patterned floodings during the season which would kill off insects and dead grasses, all using a system of irrigation trenches and gates connected to the tidal rivers.

58 Discussion of the harvesting; malaria and other diseases in the area; also the chain of command between ownership, plantation supervisors, slave overseers, and slave fieldhand labor. Also on Alston's and Pringle's philosophy of slave labor management, which basically was to keep them in very good condition, happily housed, fed and well-treated because it was much more profitable to do so.

Chapter 4: Children of the Pluff Mud

62 "Since there were many servants there was a temptation to exalt oneself." This quote is from Mary Pringle Frost, Mary's granddaughter, reflecting back on her grandparents' living conditions before the Civil War. [A modern reader might say this looks quite a lot like a wealthy person in the West today: you may not literally have a house full of "servants" like this family did, but you actually do have a sort of "paid" service class that you are dependent on to do most things for you: everything from your mani-pedi person to your car mechanic "guy," to the guy that comes and cleans your pool, who mows your lawn, who plows your driveway, etc. The temptation to have others do almost everything for us--and the temptation to see this as a form of status--exists today just as much as then. It invites fragility on many levels.]

62ff This chapter covers life on the plantation, what the children did, on the other plantations nearby that were further out in the countryside; this family also had different plantation homes in the region, etc.

69ff On "sickly season": there was likely malaria and/or yellow fever, both spread by mosquitoes and likely breeding in the standing water of the rice fields around the region in the late summer and fall. "The first question asked of one who had visited Georgetown in the sickly months of August and September, was who was dead?"

70ff The narrative is bouncing around a lot here; first a discussion of medical treatments during the period and homeopathic remedies that the family used; then a discussion of infant mortality rates; on Mary's 13 pregnancies, 12 of whom live to adulthood; she "spent almost half of her reproductive life pregnant." Note also that Mary's daughters also had "excellent reproductive health": one daughter having 12 children, the other having six. Then the discussion of Mary's responsibilities around the house, directing housekeeping, keeping records, etc.

75ff Again jumping around, now the discussion moves on to one of the family's houses on King Street; various details of the house that would only be of any interest to someone really into home decorating [I take it back, much of the details here will interest exactly no one. See for example where there were wrought iron meat hooks that the household cooks would hang game and sides of beef; where the family stored their unfortified wines; where the book closets were--one of which still has its original shelving! Or: "Most of their newer French blankets were trimmed with either red or black borders." The author could have dialed much of this back].

82 A telling "Fourth Turning" blurb right here foreshadowing what's to come: "With hard times knocking at the door in 1870, Mary allowed William to sell most of her silver..."

83ff Discussing of the art, portraits, other status competition behaviors that this social class engaged in.

89 "The plantation was a virtually self-sufficient community, and the rice planters raised not only their cash crop, but enough staples to feed their families and more than three hundred slaves." [In retrospect, as I go over these notes, this also turns out to be a foreshadowing: of how this family goes from "self-sufficient" to barely making it at all, as everything changes around them...]

Chapter 5: A Family of Substance

92 [Note that this chapter's epigraph quote is essentially the same as the prior chapter's, an editorial error.]

92ff The parent's generation starts dying off; the properties, cash and shares in various bank stocks go to the next generation; but also the family starts sliding into debt at this point, spending too much, per the author. [Hence the expression "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations."]

99 [You can tell by the quality of the letters that the family writes to each other, the level of language and vocabulary they use, and even quality of the letters written by the young children, that this is a hypercognized society. Compare this to the atrocious orthography of not just the mountain men (who you'd expect lack formal education) but even the wealthier business-owning westerners in Throne of Grace.]

103 Interesting section here describing how Mary really constructed her family: she educated her children with a classical education, inculcated family- and social class-based values, set expectations and basically built an extended family that was a tight organization. For now...

105ff On a preparatory school in the region that prepped the Pringle boys: son Edward went to Harvard to take the entrance exams in 1842; he entered as a sophomore and later graduated third in his class. Eight of the nine sons went to college, one went directly into business, some of them studied in Europe, etc.

109 Another interesting note here where the family made efforts to sell some 5,000 of their books in 1895, as well as a law library of another family member, and also letters from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (in this case one of the sisters purchased the letters herself). They were already experiencing periods of illiquidity!

113ff More discussion of the literacy of the family: on their education in Europe, on their working knowledge of Greek and Latin; their fluency in French and German; interesting to see Mary Pringle sent and recommended books to the kids along with analysis, meaning she already read them and had command of them. A very well-educated and hypercognized family. [Which makes it all the more sobering that they couldn't navigate the coming change of regime at all! Being smart, multilingual and well-read isn't enough.]

114ff Commentary on the family's very orthodox Protestant Episcopal beliefs and religiosity. 

Chapter 6: Anything but Planting

121ff Unintentionally hilarious comments that the mother makes about her different young children and their appearance while writing to her other children: "Brewton is a great big fellow, larger in every respect, then William. No genius, but very good, with the same pretty face that you left him with." Also on the two younger daughters being "much improved in appearance" [!!!]

123ff Now the book goes over each of the children, one by one, eldest to youngest, this chapter is the most massive of the book. 

123ff On Alston, who disliked plantation life, graduated from South Carolina college, "an unexceptional student" then began a legal education as a law clerk in 1842, married at age 23 in 1845, ultimately had 13 children with his wife Emma, a cousin. He had a "stagnant" career and a low income but "presented an upper middle-class facade" with ten house servants. Gets a job as Recorder of Charleston, interesting blurb here: he "became the only antebellum Charleston official who also held office after the war" [so basically all these dudes are disintermediated from their positions of power, the North systemically DOGEd out all the old elites.]

128ff Julius: became a Navy midshipman in 1840 at age 16, a 6-year tour of duty on the USS Concord to start. Note that this kid went away for two maybe three years to begin his service in the Navy, and when you read the letter he wrote to his parents at that age, it's incredible. He certainly had miles more competence and maturity than I had at age 16.

131ff Julius serves on a couple of ill-fated ships, handles himself well, then goes to the Naval Academy, then serves in the capture of Veracruz during the Mexican-American War in 1846, experiencing two minor wounds.

135ff Julius retires from the Navy to become a gentleman planter, marries very well, into a wealthy Louisiana cotton and sugar plantation family. "Julius probably did not know how valuable his father-in-law's [Dr. Stephen Duncan] Northern birth, business and political connections, holdings, and sympathies would be in the future, but the matrimonial alliance with this avowed Unionist was to play a key role in the post-war financial survival of the Pringle family."

138 Interesting blurb here talking about how the southern rich would spend summers in Newport, Rhode Island; but the southern rich were "the merely rich" going to "watch the super-rich hold court and practice conspicuous consumption."

139ff Details on Julius's plantation, Torwood, which was very large much, larger than typical South Carolina plantations, also indications that the parents were in financial distress here, because he had sent money to them that they sorely needed.

140ff Edward: his father pulled him out of South Carolina College and sent him to Harvard; when he graduated he then went to the bar at Columbia (after a two-year grand tour of Europe for a graduation present--and during this trip he had dinner in London with Carlisle, Dickens and Emerson [!!] at the house of Dickens' editor and biographer John Forester), then returns to South Carolina 1848 to practice law, he wasn't particularly successful at it.

144ff Edward writes a carefully written defense of slavery, a 54-page pamphlet which was a rebuttal to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, arguing "To preach distant reform is very cheap philanthropy." Some of the arguments are interesting in here: see for example the argument that is no worse than the wage slavery in the factories of the North. [I wonder if this was actually true?] The author shares several quotes out of his pamphlet here.

147ff Edward hears of opportunities in California, he moves there to practice law and also invest/speculate in real estate, he continued to be subsidized by his family.

153 Interesting blurb here on how Edwards legal work handled disputed land claims "between newly arrived Californians and those claiming to hold earlier land grants from the Spanish government." [This is something to think about when one regime collapses and is replaced by another.] See for example the fabled Limantour case, a dispute over half of San Francisco, part of Tiburon and several islands--a gigantic tract of land; Edward took the case on contingency in exchange for 1% of the property, but it turned out that Limantour's documents turned out to be forgeries.

154 More commentary here on Father William Pringle's severe financial distress.

156 Motte: "the most enigmatic" of the family's 13 children, there's very little in the public record about him; there was some sort of strange financial disaster that struck a merchant commission and factoring firm that he had started as a partnership in 1853; it required William Pringle, his father, to mortgage one of their plantations, it isn't clear but there are hints that he or the firm was speculating in cotton prices and blew up; the family had come to call it "Motte's folly" and he didn't really get over the stigma or the financial implications until the Civil War (the book foreshadows that his service in the war overshadowed this memory. [Another thought about being financially fragile: you could have any one of your kids that needs help, or has a big problem, or blows up, and then your fragility becomes everybody's fragility, you can't help them, and in fact their problems make your problems even worse.]

158ff Susan and Rebecca: Susan was not a particularly zealous student, she was also sent off to the Pelham Priory, a boarding school in Pelham, New York at age 16. Interesting to read about some of the friction between Susan and her mother: see for example this quote from one of her mother's letters: "I am satisfied your mind is quick, your comprehension clear, your love of literature remarkable for one of your age, but you must exhibit application, and you must submit to control, for as Johnson says, 'negligence and irregularity, long continued, make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous and genius contemptible.'" Susan was never married. The discussion of Rebecca is pretty limited here, she had a debutante ball at the age of 18 and did some traveling.

163ff Mary Frances: in 1853 at age 22 she married Yale professor Donald Mitchell, a popular author; his family including the father had some misgivings of her marrying a northern intellectual, they ultimately settled in West Haven with 12 children.

167 William, Jr.: took a job as a civil engineer with the Blue Ridge Railroad, but then came into some money suddenly "the source of which remains undetermined" per the author. He then opened a rice mill in South Carolina but "with the same bad luck at business as several of his older brothers." He died in 1859 of peritonitis at age 26.

169 Brewton: went also to South Carolina College, graduated in 1855, then started a hardware business with a partner shortly before the Civil War broke out.

170 Robert, graduated South Carolina College in 1856 and took a clerking position with his uncle's factorage firm, after his first training year he was offered "a pittance of a salary" of $200 per year, further underscoring "the financial desperation of the family."

170 Charles and James: Charles studied at Harvard, the family didn't have the money to send James to college, but then in 1859 he was sent to a small private school in France, then to Berlin. [The story of the children of the family sort of tails off all of a sudden here in this relatively oddly arranged chapter]

Chapter 7: Trials and Triumphs

174ff More discussion of how the family's plantations were prosperous but the family spending was more extravagant than it should have been; "the family was staggering under the weight of its debts by the middle of the 1850s." Other problems: "over-investment in mortgaged land and slaves," son Motte's business disaster, the financial catastrophe of William Jr, and the failure of some of Edward's California mortgage investments. Also "only one of William's nine sons chose planting as a vocation," so William didn't have help from his own family running his own plantation.

176ff Discussion here of various angsts that Mary writes about in her journal: certain unstated frustrations with her relationship with her husband, the indebtedness of the family, there were even legal actions "underway to attach or seize the family home," more tensions in the house as their financial problems deepened; Mary is 57 in September of 1860, and "after a wearying decade of disappointment and financial calamities, it was probably for the best that Mary did not know that her most fearsome trials were still ahead of her."

Chapter 8: The Peculiar Institution

180ff The author asks what the family thought about slavery: obviously son Edward had written a tract defending the institution, but also Mary had what would be seen as radical views for her time and place, believing that "slavery was indefensible from a Christian point of view."

183ff Interesting debate here between those who believed in educating slaves and servants in Christianity like the Pringle family, and others of the region who were against religious education; the Pringles, who were earnest Christians, felt that it was a moral obligation to bring their slaves to Christ, planters also could use scripture like Ephesians 6:5 [Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.] to inculcate obedient behavior from slaves, other biblical messages suggested reward for toil here on Earth would come in heaven, also religious morality was a control mechanism to stop theft and lying by slaves, etc.

185 Comments here on the excessive household staff the Pringles had: more than five servants for each white family member, 32 staff for six Pringle family members, although this might indicate the family's wish to not to break up slave families.

187 Mention here of Mary's gift to Cretia of a Bible in which she copied down Cretia's birthday, marriage date and the birth, marriage and death dates for all of her children and grandchildren.

Chapter 9: Soldiers, Slaves, and Refugees

191ff The 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln; the Democratic convention in Charleston in April 1860 where a pro-slavery platform was rejected and eight Southern States walked out, forming the Southern Democratic Party. Then on December 20th, 1860 South Carolina voted to secede; then the resupplying/attack/false flag event at Fort Sumter in 1861. Then Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana all seceded in January, and in February they form Confederate States of America under President Jefferson Davis.

192 Mary writes to her sons what was almost certainly a consensus view (probably in both the North and South): "we are anticipating but one battle and that will be over before this reaches you." April 12th, 1861: the first shot fired at Fort Sumter, the fort surrendered two days later. The Pringle's sons all scrambled home to defend their homeland: Robert, James, Charles, and Motte all obtained commissions.

193 Comments here on the dangers facing any southerner returning to the US, either past enemy ship blockades or if they "returned through Northern ports they were subject to arrest." There's an interesting anecdote here of a relative of the Pringle family who was encouraged to erase every trace of being a citizen of South Carolina and getting rid of anything about indicating where he was from because he'd be searched carefully. [This tells readers a few things: first, you didn't need passports to get around then, you could get around without having identification, and also identification actually carried a risk!]

194 Seven of Mary's eight sons served in uniform. Note that Edward stayed in California to run the family's real estate investments, "tormented with guilt at his relative safety and comfort" also Julius "seems to have served in uniform" based on a surviving photograph but "his actions and whereabouts create interesting mysteries."

194ff A huge fire in Charleston; a significant Union navy presence in the region, specifically with a blockade of Winyah Bay; the Pringle family arranged to evacuate their slaves and their valuables further inland.

195 Interesting to note here that the Fort Sumter "first shot" was fired in April, 1861, but other than some blockading or presence of ships offshore nothing really happened to this part of South Carolina until April 1862, a year later, when Union warships entered the bay and began steaming up the Santee and Waccamaw rivers, torching plantations and confiscating crops.

199 The family kind of bottom-ticked here selling their retreat property Runimede at firesale prices, just $59,000 in Confederate currency for the slaves and the property. [Of course that currency would soon hyperinflate to worthlessness.] Things got even worse with the family's financial situation and they had to sell more assets: they sold another of their plantations, Beneventum, which was exposed to Union gunboats steaming up the rice rivers, for $52,000 (likely Confederate dollars here too, although the order doesn't say) again including land and slaves.

200 Sad blurb here about William writing about an auction of this Beneventum property and how he had to see the intoxicated and vulgar crowd roaming through the house, his despair about all this, the fact that the proceeds fell short of estimates, etc.

200 Another notable blurb here that the father "paid all of his debts that could be paid, that is, to all who would receive Confederate notes." [You can't even get funds in a fiat currency that people want when you're under this kind of duress, you're going to need gold or hard money to pay people.]

200 Also disease comes through their region: Mary gets dysentery, some of the most valuable slaves die of typhus.

201ff Here the author goes through each of the family's children and their experiences during the war:

201 Alston: joins the South Carolina militia as lieutenant, the author says this means that he didn't have to serve too far from home (although he doesn't explain why this is); later he and his family moved from Charleston to Columbia and then to Dukeville to avoid Sherman's armies rampaging through the state.

202 Julius: this guy had the most mixed-up situation because his father-in-law was an ardent Unionist and had land in Louisiana, and that region was occupied by Union troops for the duration of the war, so Julius was in a difficult position; he got pressure from his mother to not show any allegiance to the Union in terms of the federal oath, note also he was really the only person in the family making any money at the time, thus the family was dependent on him.

205-6 Very interesting quote here, from a work describing the change in plantation operation in the Natchez district but which applied directly to Julius and his situation (although not necessarily to the Carolina region at the time): "Southern men with Northern interests were the first to come to terms with Federal authorities during the occupation. ...their behavior and professed Unionism won them favored treatment. They were allowed to lease their plantations at great profit and were given access to markets for their cotton. In the end their financial position was scarcely diminished by the conflict." [What do you do in a situation like this? Especially when your side is the "lost cause" side and your family is increasingly dependent on your money to survive?]

206 Note here that by the end of the war Julius was enormously wealthy; the war helped him and his family as he navigated it in a way that allowed him to keep his lands, get them back into full production quickly, etc.

206ff Edward: spent the duration of the war in San Francisco.

207ff Motte: his work in the factoring industry gave him preparation to be a quartermaster, dealing with supplying and transportation of stores for the troops; he was a quartermaster under Beauregard, then promoted to major, and served most of his time in Charleston. There's an interesting blurb here about a huge mistake he committed as he commanded a steamer to transport troops to Morris Island but forgot to notify the battery and garrison commanders that the ship would be sailing past about the transport: they took the ship to be hostile because it came from the direction of the enemy, and five men were killed as it was fired upon, and then 20 more men drowned as the ship sank. According to the author he later redeemed his military reputation afterwards.

209ff Mary Frances: her daughter Hesse was in Charleston with sister Susan while her parents were trapped in New Haven; during the war the daughter would die at age 7 of what their doctor called "tubercular meningitis" in "the family's first wartime tragedy." "Mary was not able to reunite with her family until the war ended." [Another example of how your freedom of movement will likely be radically constrained during war.]

213ff Brewton: this son served in the South Carolina 4th regiment, a state militia unit, he was shot in the leg during an engagement in Pocotaligo, SC; his wounds affected his ability to serve and he was given light duty; he survived the war (although we eventually find out he was driven insane by the war and was committed to an asylum). 

216ff Robert: signed up right away for three years served as adjutant to the battalion commander, promoted to captain six months later in December 1861, then promoted to battalion chief of artillery upon the death of his predecessor. Note the striking letter he wrote to brother Motte in case the worst happened to him: "Do not think that I anticipate being killed from this business like manner of arranging my affairs, but I think that every one ought guard against all emergencies. In case I should be so unfortunate I have only one request to make, and that is, that my own family will write no obituary of me. In the words of another, my worst torture at this moment, is the overestimate which generous friends form of me." Ultimately he was killed at Battery Wagner by a Union shell that exploded directly in front of him.

223ff Charles: Charles Pringle returns from Europe, running the Union blockade during the summer of 1861, he promptly enlists; there was a dispute between the Alston and Pringle sides of the families when Charles failed to get an officer's commission through what he thought was neglect by Charles Alston. The following summer, 1862, he died of typhoid fever, age 21.

225ff James: after making his way through Union blockades from Europe, was promoted to artillery officer at Battery Gregg, only a mile from the battery where his brother was killed; he survived the war, was promoted a captain.

228 Discussion here of the sad condition of the family, having sold out to other plantations, one plantation basically stripped bare by freed slaves; and then Union soldiers chose the family's King Street house in Charleston as headquarters--just like the British had done 85 years earlier.

Chapter 10: A Bitter Homecoming

229ff The family essentially becomes stateless; Mary is filled with "impotence, bitterness, and rage." Charleston, once an elegant and refined city, was "reduced by war to a barren, gutted derelict."

230ff Comments here on the union blockade, strangling cotton and rice exports, which "destroyed planters and merchants alike." Slaves in the region were notified of their freedom but their former owners were required to feed them for 60 days; note that most food supplies had been stolen; "In short order, freedman discovered that their first new freedom was the freedom to starve." Food production had plummeted, starvation was a real risk for everyone; the Pringles and their relatives had little money but they had enough, thus they did not show up on the list of people accepting rations at the time.

232ff Their plantation at Rose Hill more or less "ceased to exist"; there was damage to the river banks and the rice fields had flooded; no crops were there; all the cattle had "disappeared"; most of their buildings were burned etc.; also the emancipation of the family's 300 slaves meant loss of the entire labor force and of "approximately $150,000 of his capital." Note also William, like many planters, "had invested heavily in Confederate bonds" and he held some $47,000 worth of Confederate currency that had become worthless. [Talk about quadruple leverage to your nation state: fiat, gov't debt, property and slaves]. Note also that all of William Pringle's debts "survived the war fully intact and dogged him until his death. [Just as with the Great Depression and that era's bank failures--and see also the book The Great Taking--your assets get taken but you are left with your debts, this is part of the extraction process.] 

235ff Comments here on looting by Union soldiers; one party entered one of the Pringle plantations, taking silverware, food, a horse, bags of flour, etc.; at another location their horses were taken, although there were many other worse situations for other people in the community. Note also the Union regime confiscated "abandoned" lands and redistributed them to freed slaves, or in some cases sold the plantations off for cash; also Congress imposed taxes on Confederate states to pay for the war, kind of like reparations, and provided that land could be seized and sold to satisfy this tax lien.

239 Interesting passage here where Alston wrote that he drew two bills on Edward in San Francisco, each for $500 payable in "American gold" negotiated through a New York banker "who proposes settling here at 20 per cent premium." Basically they're able to telegraph the son in California to get access to some money but it was based on the son out west being able to take care of the debit, and worse the New York banker charged a 20% premium to front the payment. (!) Also: "I am not sure that the Santee lands will be worth the taxes paid on them... our prospects are as uncertain and dark as it is possible for them to be. We are constantly discussing a general immigration of the whole family but we do not know if we can accomplish it." [So, just count up the problems: a new nation state regime assessed a tax on the family lands that was more than their plantation was even worth, they have no way of getting access to any money to pay it, and all their money/investments in govt' debt was hyperinflated away, thus they are in kind of a kafkaesque situation to the point where they're just thinking about picking up and leaving everything. Thus, under the right kinds of duress, land can be completely worthless or even have negative value, even though it's tangible, physical. Also note, you cannot take your land with you when you leave, unlike more fungible/transportable wealth like gold (or today, Bitcoin) if your regime situation changes radically.]

240 "Alston's banking arrangements illustrate the family's financial plight and the scarcity of capital in Charleston after the war--situations which would not change appreciably over the next four years." [Basically this is a type of deflation that happens in a crisis, when liquid capital/hard cash (if you can hang on to it through this period) explodes upward in value in relative terms, because the value of assets you would buy with that cash declines. This is not unlike the situation in Germany/Austria/Hungary in the book When Money Dies, if you have hard money in a situation like this you can take care of your family and you can buy almost anything because so many people will be desperate to sell to survive. It's in these types of situations where the social pecking order totally upends, new rich and new poor are created at the same time.] "Northern carpetbaggers with ready cash, such as C.C. Leary, could make fast fortunes for the simple reason that they had the one thing that ex-Confederates did not: Union greenbacks, backed by gold." [In other words either you have the cash, or you're going to end up selling your illiquid assets to someone who does in order to survive. Stay liquid, my friends.]

240 The family was totally dependent on Edward in California and Julius in Louisiana for money, cash, etc., and those two branches of the family were later to be called the "California Pringles" and the "rich French Pringles." [One way to think about this was yes, the family was scattered, but thank God it was. This is the only reason they made it is because they had diversified without really realizing it.]

242 Note this comment from William the patriarch to his son Julius in the North in a very sad, depressing letter: "We are badly off but my heart sickens when I look into the future of your brother Alston's large family of eight children with his five growing daughters going bare footed and without the means of education."

243 On the dispossession of many of the plantation owners and ex-Confederates, to the point where hundreds of them left their native states and moved West or Southwest, or even left the United States entirely, leaving for Latin America or Canada; likewise the Pringle family debated the pros and cons of emigrating to California as they "had serious doubts that they might ever regain possession of their house and lands."

244 Note here also that Mary and William were in their 60s at this point. Too old to make too many radical shifts in location or lifestyle, certainly not able to start new careers, or start a new venture, etc. [These civilizational disruptions really break you if you're older, they really break you. Note also examples in When Money Dies where older people committed suicide in despair in Weimar Germany, while younger people often handled--and sometimes even thrived--in the new disequilibrium. Another heuristic: stay plastic, stay antifragile, stay like the kind of person who thrives during a disequilibrium.]

244-5 Note these comments here in a letter from William to his son Edward in California on tyranny and how it can be shocking to people to the point where they're shocked into paralysis, they can't believe that a regime would be as brutal and cruel as it is. "The tyranny despotism and oppression and injustice to which we are subjected is beyond the conception of any man who has any other conception of right and might. We are regarded and treated as a prostrated and powerless people whom our rulers and subsisters [sic?] clothed with little brief authority used to pluck from us everything that might assist us to rise from our prostrated condition." He then writes about an example of how a general came into Charleston and seized all unoccupied houses when Charleston was evacuated and divided, likewise seizing all lots within 40 miles of Charleston to be divided up and "sold to negroes" despite the fact that the previous general, when he was about to shell the city, warned all non-combatants to leave. Thus everyone left!! And so their land could be later seized because it was "unoccupied" when Charleston was evacuated. [This is really very much like the great taking, just a creative, kafka-esque way to take people's stuff through rules that they can't possibly follow in the first place.]

247 Finally, on September 18th, five months after Appomattox, after the end of the war, the family gets their King Street house back from Union headquarters.

247 Mary has to let all the servants go except for Cretia, "she could not afford to retain them" [I can imagine a former slave thinking "hey thanks freedom!" right here; I also wonder what Erich Fromm would think...]

247ff A moving and bitter letter from Mary to her daughter Mary: about her feelings, on attempting to pay her house servant, on walking through town and seeing the complete change of culture there, the looting by both black and white troops, and then Mary raging against how the Union was so malicious after victory "to crush the unfortunate victims who lie helpless under their power. Would Lee or Jackson have placed their foot upon a prostrate foe? As nations are more powerful, so should they be more magnanimous than individuals." [Unfortunately, here, she could not be more wrong: as nations are more powerful they become more cruel and tyrannical.]

Chapter 11: The Rice Paupers

262ff "Emancipation of the state's 400,000 slaves sounded the death knell for the cultivation of rice in the Lowcountry." Many of the plantations in the region were abandoned, the ones that kept working had to arrange some type of sharecropping arrangement that were enforced by Union forces: former slaves had to sign a work contract, or were required to leave the plantation. For example, the Pringle family retained some of their slaves as freedman laborers on the family's Richfield plantation and paid them half the crop as their share, but some of the freedmen who were living there refused to sign, and when ordered off the property they burned down the big house on the plantation in retaliation [Another heuristic: the problem with large plantations (or large houses or fancy cars), is that they can be seen, resented, and vandalized].

266ff Strange sudden transition here to describing daughter Rebecca's marriage to physician and Confederate war hero Dr. Frances LeJau Frost. It was a wedding of two families impoverished by the war. 

268 As the South Carolina Pringle family and the Connecticut Pringle/Mitchell families got back in contact after the war, Rebecca and Susan, and then William and Mary visited the Mitchell family up north, both "encountering the jarring difference" between the two regions; they were shocked by the improvement, the progress and the prosperity in Connecticut, compared to the "desolation" of South Carolina. William wrote a letter to his sister saying, "I was obliged to see enough to convince me that in the ratio that the war has been ruinous to the South it has been promoted of the prosperity of the North." [History shows us that wars tend to do exactly this.]

269ff "The threat of homelessness was very real for many once-wealthy members of Lowcountry society." Here the author describes instances of Mary's sister Elizabeth and brother-in-law (and former US senator) Arthur P. Hane, who moved into the ground floor of their house. He was in his seventies and they were living in Columbia when Sherman came through and Union soldiers robbed them of "everything that could be carried off." The Pringle family also rented out their entrance floor, their coach house, "experiencing many a problem with their tenants." Mary writes to daughter Rebecca: "...your Papa says I shall not let stragglers come in the basement again. How can I make money now? I am so distressed."

271ff Mary makes orange marmalade and sends it to her daughter Mary Frances to sell in New Haven, she doubles her money. She considers selling turtles, considered a delicacy up north. Her daughter Susan (who's now 40 and still unmarried) made bouquets and corsages of flowers from their garden.

273 Son Julius and his wife Maria had become rich by war's end, he starts sending money to help his parents in Charleston.

273ff More discussion of the family various debts: they owed $8,000 to a Mrs, Singleton; William had to borrow in order to prepare the following year's crop, incurring a $20,000 debt at 7%. He also sold the plantation rice mill in 1868 for $3,000, it had been valued at $50,000 before the war [!!!] [Again, never get liquidated, holy cow on seeing such an important piece of capital sold off at a 94% loss, this is like a memecoin-caliber loss right there.]

274 The author also talks about how Mary and William were not getting along well at this point. [Note that when you're under financial duress or other external stressors it can be very hard to get along, the wheels really come off of everything in your life.]

275 A photographer from Boston comes to photograph the exterior and interior of their home; this is also striking, you can see the house structurally looks fine but there's bits of brick facing showing where the plasters come off the exterior of the house for example [it's sort of like when an increasingly aged and infirm Boomer or Silent is living in a house and you can see it's getting more and more difficult to "keep up appearances."]

278 Interesting throwaway comment in another of Mary's letters about a Senator coming down to South Carolina "haranguing the blacks, recapitulating the origin and cruelty of slavery; lauding the philanthropy that had torn them from oppression, impressing on them the position they now held as equals in freedom to the governor of South Carolina or the mayor of the City of Charleston--and appealing to them to unite with the Republican party in maintaining the government." [Note here how the new regime wants to drive wedges between the old elites (now serfs) and the old slaves (also now serfs!) in the new territory that they control. The best way to control a populace is to divide the serfs with pitchforks from the serfs with torches....]

278 Mary continues in her letter: I thank God that some of my children are away from our ruin and humiliation... I would be content to lie down and die, amidst the ruins of our old home." [This is another very unfortunate aspect of governmental control systems: they want the populace--and especially the previous/former elites--to be defeated in every way, including psychologically. Heuristic: do not break, especially psychologically. Somehow you have to figure out a way to keep going, to not let the control system get to you.]

279 Also one of the Union military governors of South Carolina appointed a freedman to be on Charleston's city council, this was appalling to Mary. Then on the election of 1868: residents were finally permitted to vote for the mayor in Charleston, a choice between a conservative Democrat and a Republican radical reformer/abolitionist outsider from Massachusetts. 

<begin rant>

279ff [Bear with me a bit while I make some sidebar commentary: It is both maddening and disturbing how the post-war control of the South was later "solved" with the so-called "corrupt bargain" in 1877 to 1) end Reconstruction and 2) resolve the disputed (and almost certainly stolen) election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. The deal was this: in return for supporting Hayes' questionable election, the Union would leave the South, ending "Reconstruction" (itself an interesting propaganda term by the way), all Union troops would be pulled from the South, and the South would be allowed to govern its own affairs once again. One way to think about is to see the new uplifted slave class (uh, "uplifted" into "serfs" if you can call that being "uplifted") as being basically abandoned by the system all over again. Why? Because it was in the nation-state's interest to do so to preserve the nation-state's own internal stability!! In other words, ideology is just a convenience: it was self-evident that the North had no real or sincere interest in assisting its African-American serfs/citizens, this group was just another political football to kick around, to use or dispose of in a later compromise as needed. For a fascinating read on this, look into the so-called corrupt bargain after Rutherford B. Hayes's election, Wikipedia, surprisingly, gives an unusually blunt and candid history of it. Finally, I hate to say it, but it is just gross to see the disingenuous and pusillanimous scheming of the US government over and over and over again across history. And people somehow still think that "their party" or "their president" will come running to save them, failing to see that the entire system hates us, and will use us or lie to us in a heartbeat. There was never anything there to trust or believe in.]

</rant> :)

279-80 Back to the discussion of the 1868 Charleston mayoral election, between a local attorney and a radical abolitionist who came from Massachusetts to South Carolina after the war to "right the wrongs of slavery." This interloper candidate was elected by a majority of only 20 votes. [It's shocking to see the rage in Mary's letters and the casual racism where she feels that Northern interlopers came down to muck up Southern politics, and arouse the passions and potentially violence of black citizens, by making claims like "if the Republican won then black citizens would be put back in slavery again"; but then she describes black voters as "poor ignorant animals" for being under the influence of such assurances. Worst of all, she sends her (black) servant Cretia to the market with instructions to not buy meat from a "Radical N*****" while also worrying aloud that her servant is Radical too. It's just heavy all around. Rage hypocognizes just as much as fear.]

283ff Discussion here of how the family, which had more than 20 servants in the house prior to the war, was down to three by 1866, and then in 1871 down to two. And then the long-time family servant Cretia tells Mary that she wants to move out of the servant yard and live with her son. 

284 On family bookkeeping records from 1870 showing that they purchased nothing more than basic necessities: no petticoats, gloves, bonnets, toys, etc., just things like coal, sugar, potatoes, flour, etc. Also in 1871 the "final indignity" where the family had to sell the Richfield plantation for $10,000 which they had bought years ago for $160,000 [holy crap: this is the mother of all liquidations for them], the family now no longer had rice lands and "ceased to be planters" with the sale, although at least this finally got them out of debt. William is now 72 and Mary is now 69, both are increasingly weak and infirm.

286 [The author backs up a bit here in the timeline] On how William and Mary had to deal with their son Brewton and his "unpredictable mental behavior"; they were forced to commit him to the South Carolina lunatic asylum in 1866; he stayed there until July 1874 when he came home to spend his final months at home, he died in December 1874, age 39, the listed cause of death was myelitis.

Chapter 12: The Ghost Planters

289ff A "startling prediction" from Edward B. Heyward that Rice planting in the low country would be profitable for no more than 20 years from 1868, and he was right: by 1890 none of the planter families were planting rice at all in the Lowcountry region. [The ground literally moved from under this market, labor costs went up (obviously, with the end of slavery) and the fragility of the families combined to ruin the economics.] Discussion here of how some of the main plantation owners never came back, some were too old, some had been killed or were in federal prison camps in the North, some left the United States entirely. Plantations had largely been ransacked, they were lacking equipment, seeds farm implements, working capital; rebuilding had to happen first, etc. Also, interest rates were way too high: up to 3% per month [!!], land prices had collapsed from some 80% or more from $250 per acre to now $40-50 per acre. [Basically anybody who was living under year-to-year, harvest-to-harvest kind of thinking (think of this like the farming version of living paycheck to paycheck) could never be able to make it in a situation like this: you needed to have a much bigger "capital stack" behind your farm, you needed much more financial buffer. And of course an investor with such resources could easily acquire all the land he wanted to at 80% off! Then just wait a while until stability returned, and then grow whatever could be grown profitably.  The problem was this region's "prior establishment" plantation families couldn't possibly do this, and thus their land was inevitably going to be bought out from under them. Again, I recommend readers think through any relevant heuristics: if you want to make it through an extinction event, an asteroid event, you have to be liquid with hard money, you have to be mobile, you have to have backup plans, and you have to be diversified geographically.]

289ff [One more thought here: freeing the slaves destabilized labor markets for a long time; and the idea of an aristocratic planter wooing or bargaining with black laborers had to have been structurally nearly impossible. Thus it causes most plantations to be broken up into small farms, and then rented or sharecropped. Note also specifically with rice cultivation, much of labor (dealing with ditch clearing, handling the floodplain management system) couldn't be done except at much higher wages than these plantations could possibly afford.]

291 Interesting blurb here about how one generation can't change, but the next generation perhaps can: William (the father/patriarch) wasn't able to handle the new labor relationship with freed slaves; worse, he could never forgive the freedman who burned his house at Richfield; by stark contrast, his son-in-law Frank Frost (he married daughter Rebecca) was able to earn the trust of free labor and secure as many hands as he needed. [Perhaps an analogy today would be most Boomers will be unable to adapt to Fourth Turning American culture today--they won't be able to handle it; X-ers will succeed or not on a spectrum, some of us will be able to navigate it, some won't; and Millennials and Zoomers will likely adapt far more easily to the new environment. We saw the same thing in the German hyperinflation described so well in When Money Dies: young people simply adapted to the bizarre economic environment much more easily, while the older people mostly became totally unmoored. The heuristic here is: stay plastic, stay adaptable, and at all costs do not be a booming Boomer.]

292ff Discussion of the planters considering Chinese labor, impossible because of immigration restrictions, then Irish labor, although their work according to one of the plantation owners "always cost more and was never entirely satisfactory."

293 [Interesting discussion here that analogizes well to modern immigration and labor disputes; they couldn't find workers to do the work at the too-low wage rates they were offering, so this becomes justification to bring in immigrants; but consider: maybe you just had to have the wages "clear" to a higher wage rate--even a uneconomic price: this would reveal the true underlying economics of the industry of rice planting. Ultimately, unfortunately, this eventually results in replacing labor with capital: it's the same intractable problem that McDonald's, Amazon or Walmart (and their workers) face today.]

293ff The story backs up again: to the day after Rebecca and Frank Frost's wedding, then backing up still further to Frank's service as a surgeon in the war (he was at Gettysburg and at other campaigns throughout the entire Civil War under generals Lee and Jackson). He was shot through the shoulder in 1864 "nearly losing his arm and his life."

296 Discussion here of Andrew Johnson's May 1865 general pardon of most Confederates on condition of swearing an oath of allegiance; interesting exceptions here were "Confederate generals, high officials and those now worth over $20,000, who had to apply for individual pardons." [If you think about this on a systems level, I guess the new regime would want to have some kind of mechanism of control over anyone who might be or become an elite in the new regime.]

296ff Discussion here of Frank Frost's effort to reclaim his plantation in Georgetown: he was told by the government that it was "seized" because it had been "abandoned"; on how they had to go from official to official before even getting straight answers on anything; on his attempts to sell what little rice remained as well as other produce of the farm, but wrote that "the market is so glutted" [possibly he means here freed slaves had stolen and sold off stuff at pennies on the dollar]; the letters Frank writes here to various family members are fascinating: it really goes into how everything came apart; the freedman still hanging around had no one telling them what to do, and then a white person comes back and they're understandably not at all interested in taking orders, or even seeing a white person; the white people are totally outnumbered, and there's still lots of free stuff on the plantation that they can take, eat, claim as their own, etc. They also don't understand how they could be set free but yet given no land; reality under the new regime had not set in yet, not by a long shot, and most former slaves were led to believe, delusionally, that a Utopia was coming, obviously it was not.] 

299ff A fascinating letter here from Frank Frost to his mother about the situation on the plantation: "It is impossible to say what we will do next year. The negroes are entirely indisposed for anything like regular, systematic work. What they want is to be let alone. The Yankees assure us that if they do not make contracts that they will turn them every one off the plantation. This is the only hold that we have upon them. We may by this measure force them to work. If we only had the money to pay wages, I think that we would operate more successfully. As it is we will be obliged to work the crop on shares with people."

303ff "Unlike [patriarch] William [Pringle], Frank got along with the freedman." [Again, it helps to be young and flexible in order to deal with a complete change in circumstances, although in the long run it still didn't matter: we will soon learn that Frank couldn't make a go of rice cultivation here either. The economics no longer worked.] Note also that Frank Frost was one of the first planters to return. By 1867 there were only a handful of others; the author gives an example of the plantation of William Rivers Maxwell which produced 1.485 million pounds of rice in 1860 but only 1740 bushels in 1868; this owner basically gave his share of the plantation to his brother and left town. Also a blurb here on how the black workers can't stand, much less submit to, the overseer, presumably a white person and possibly someone who was also their overseer under slavery. One certainly can understand.

305 Rebecca Frost becomes pregnant right away, September 1867; a freedwoman was eager to work as a seamstress for Rebecca for $3 a month, likewise a washerwoman worked for $4 a month for her; some cute examples here of Rebecca conserving every penny. [Yet again, you want to be young and plastic and adaptable and make sure you have a teammate who's likewise, who can "forget where she came from" because it's absolutely necessary to do so if you want to have a shot at making it.]

307 William Pringle Frost, born December 30th, 1867, the first of the fourth generation of descendants.

308ff Discussion here of Frank at age 29, "already weary, a man who bore an enormous burden on his shoulders." Also he was the region's only physician, so he saw patients after his long days on the plantation, also, astoundingly, he doesn't charge for his medical services! [It's romantic here to see how Frank cites Rebecca as his inspiration, it's a good example of how a good dude will literally move mountains for love. Men truly are the romantic gender.] Also notes here on how his near-daily letters to his wife paint a "vivid and detailed picture" of postwar agricultural life in the region.

313 Note that the farm's yield was 4,000 bushels per acre of rice versus before the war yields of 34,000 bushels per acre, with a cost structure that's triple compared to when the lands were worked by slaves. [This is interesting to put alongside Robert William Fogels' groundbreaking book Without Consent or Contract that argued--bravely and politically incorrectly--that the slave system was much more efficient than anyone was willing to admit, at least the non-gang systems used in the US South (contrasted from the gang systems used in sugar plantations on say Jamaica or the West Indies).] The following year likewise the farm produced about 4,400 bushels of rice but after expenses there was only "enough to pay the interest on our debts and we will have nothing to live on." [Thus, again, free labor economics simply didn't work for rice planting in this region.]

318 After a few years of breakeven farming Frank's health begins to break down, he has a near fatal accident with a Rice Mill, contracts malaria; Rebecca has a second child, a daughter, Mary Pringle Frost.

320ff The story jumps ahead in time here, apparently Frank and Rebecca had two sons in addition to their daughters, but one son died of yellow fever, at age 2; it's sad and disturbing here how Rebecca blames herself: she believed that she was too proud of her two young boys. "I so seldom remembered that they were only lent to me."

322 "The next four years saw no improvement in Frank's crops, and his neighbors had little better success. One by one they bit the bullet, admitted defeat, retired from planting, and took whatever they could get for their lands." Frank, after a decade of toil, finally gives up farming in 1876 and sells his land, equipment and animals to another plantation owner. They move their family back to Charleston. [Sometimes you have to sell the stock early: the first sale, the earliest sale, is often the best sale. Instead, this guy logged 10 years trying to do something that couldn't be done. These things are hard to know in prospect of course, you can only know them in retrospect.] The family never made it to California per Rebecca's dreams. [We will later learn that Rebecca died in 1905 of cancer at age 66, and Frank, failing basically in almost all of his business ventures, was basically supported by his three daughters, none of whom married.] Frank ultimately dies of pneumonia in 1912 at age 75 [we will learn this in chapter 15].

Chapter 13: A Seven-Bottle Man

324ff This chapter focuses on Julius, the Pringle family son who had landholdings in Louisiana and who married into a family from New Haven, Connecticut. He was "the only one [of the Pringle children] to increase his wealth and carry it through the war." He then began moving his family and most of his money to France, to the city of Biarritz. "By 1870 he was one of the richest men in the South." Discussion here on has how his pragmatism which saved his fortune "sullied his honor" in the eyes of some family members. Note also here that Mary herself wrote that his financial support every quarter was "magnificent" and "we could not have lived without it." Sometimes he would support them to the extent of $25,000-30,000, which would be gigantic sums in today's dollars. [Heuristic: if you want your family to make it, you'll want to have a "diversified portfolio" in many senses: family-wise, geographically, politically, socially, in their decision sets, etc., Further, you also need to tolerate (even encourage) a spectrum of pragmatism in your family; you have to want different members of your family to look at things differently, to make very different ranges of choices, etc., as a form of meta-diversification. Most importantly: if you begrudge those family members who make it, if you look down on them, see them as somehow "sullied," then you're fucking yourself, and you--just like Mary Pringle and her immediate family--are not going to make it.]

327ff [This is the saddest part of the book: it shows that the family allowed itself to be divided by the overall system of regime change. The pitchfork people were persuaded that the torch people wanted to take away their pitchforks.] "...there was now a detectable coolness between Julius and his brothers and sisters." They seldom visited each other; also a "rambling and disorganized family history" by Mary Pringle Frost from the next generation hardly spoke about Julius at all, not saying anything about his postwar generosity. [!!! No good deed goes unpunished, apparently. If someone is in a situation like this where they can help out their extended family, how do you go about doing so without ego-insult to those being helped? Or if you flip it: can you be the kind of person who accepts help without ego-insult and resentment? Are either of these things even possible?]

329 Note that of Julius and Maria's six children, only one married and that child had no children.

330ff Pages here discussing Julius's shooting hobbies, the snakes that he bags, the house that he stays at, etc.

335 Julius dies in 1901, he sold his plantations in 1898 and 1899 and then moved to France, where he spent the last two years of his life; then left all of his property to his wife who survived him by seven years. His children became important members of the Biarritz community, thanks to their charity with the community during the First World War. Two surviving sisters were still alive during World War II when Germany occupied Biarritz, but the daughters stayed, feeling "more closely tied to France than to America."

Chapter 14: The Pringles in the Golden West

338ff Discussion here of James Pringle, how he tried to find work in New York, failed, and then went out to join Edward in San Francisco; he marries Cora Butterworth, daughter of another San Francisco lawyer; they have two sons; then in 1971 James was suddenly taken ill, and then [weirdly] they decided to travel by boat to Charleston, SC. They arrive partway to New York, and he dies in a hotel there. Cora returns to California stays with Charleston-based Pringle family and goes to Europe for two years to stay with Julius and Maria; she then returns to San Francisco in 1871 for the rest of her life, staying in touch with the Charleston Pringles. [Sometimes you have a family member, in this case an in-law, who can somehow bridge the gap of "coolness" between branches of a family. Families need to have members like this.]

341ff On Edward, continually encouraging his family to come out west; he also didn't inform the family of losses that he had experienced previous to the war, thinking he could make the money back; he gets married in 1868 to Cornelia Letitia Johnson, a distinguished lawyer's daughter, they have five sons and two daughters; at age 73 he's appointed Commissioner of the California Supreme Court but then died of typhoid fever before he was able to take on these responsibilities.

Chapter 15: Of Rice and Ruin

349-50 "Grim is the only word which adequately describes the last ten years of William and Mary's lives." Here readers get a two-paragraph summary of all the awful things happened to this couple: during the war they lost three sons and a granddaughter, lost yet another son to insanity after the war; their "wealthy" son the family suspected of treason; they were forced to sell two of their plantations, and their own freed slaves burned down one of their houses at a third plantation that the family was later forced to sell at a huge loss. "Mary was in a state of profound depression toward the end of her life" and "William appeared to be drinking heavily. They spent the last ten years of their lives in quiet anticipation of the inevitable."

350ff William dies of pneumonia 1881 at age 82, his estate was valued at $89. [!!] He was worth half a million dollars in the 1850s. Mary dies in 1884 also at age 82.

352 Cretia dies in 1879, age 72, from pneumonia.

353ff Various death and late-in-life information about the different sons and daughters: Alston returns to his Recorder of the City Court job in Charleston; his wife dies in 1879, he moves back into the family home on King Street and dies at the age of 72. Motte attempts to take up farming after the war despite impaired health, and dies at age 59 in 1886. Susan, age 55 and unmarried, continued to live in the family house after her parents died, until her own death in 1917. 

354 Blurb here on the 1886 Charleston earthquake (this was 2 years after Mary the family matriarch's death), which left the city in ruins, although their house escaped with moderate damage.

356 Mary Mitchell lived in New Haven with her husband until she died at age 70 in 1901, he died 7 years later.

357 Frank Frost moved into the family house with Rebecca and her children after giving up rice planting in 1876, he tried to go into the phosphate business but it failed, he was dependent on income from his three daughters while their sons were in college. His daughters never married; Frank's wife Rebecca died of cancer in 1905 at age 66 and Frank died of pneumonia in 1912 at age 75.

358 After daughter Susan's death her third of the house went to her nephew James, the rest was owned by William Alston Pringle's daughter Mary. The three Frost daughters offered to buy out the house for $45,000 cash in 1918, and the rest of the heirs accepted the deal.

360 When the last of the Frost daughters, Rebecca, died in 1971, she left the house to Mary Pringle Hamilton Manigault, who then passed it to her son Peter Manigault in 1987, who was publisher of the Charleston Post and Courier.

361ff Discussion here of how in the 1880s South Carolina still produced half the Nations rice but by 1890 most was being grown in Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. By the 1880s plantation land collapsed in price, rich northerners then bought up many of the plantations as hunting land; and then devastating hurricanes hit the area in the 1890s and early 1900s, destroying the dikes and submerging the rice fields in saltwater.

Epilogue

363ff Discussion here of Mary's last surviving letter to a granddaughter, enclosing $50 in gold pieces; then on the 1987 museum-grade restoration of the family house after a century of deferred maintenance; the author notes that he "had the privilege of serving as the historical researcher for the project from 1990 to 1992."

To Read:

Theodore Rosengarten: Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter

Robert Manson Myers: The Children of Pride (letters of the Rev. Dr. Charles Colcock Jones)

The Rev. William Barrow: Essays on Education 

Lord Chesterfield: Letters to His Son

Rosser H. Taylor: Ante-Bellum South Carolina: A Social and Cultural History

Ik Marvel (Donald G. Mitchell): Fresh Gleanings

Henry Nelson Coleridge: Six Months in the West Indies 

****Michael Wayne: The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880

****C. Vann Woodward: Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction