My slight Caroline problem

When Caroline Brooks wed James Lilly, she married into one of the elite families of Montgomery County, North Carolina. The Lillys owned land and slaves, were politically consequential—James had served one term in the House of Commons in the 1830s—and were connected by marriage and acquaintance with other wealthy families along the Pee Dee River. The patriarch of James’ generation, Edmund, Jr.,--James’ older brother—had removed to Fayetteville and James lived at the family seat, Scuffleton, in the southwestern part of the county.

Why is this a problem? Because I am allegedly talking about common people yeomen ordinary people. To be one of the squirearchy seems by definition to not be ordinary. But I am continuing to call Caroline ordinary, and fiddling with the definitions and imagery of elite people and common people is part of the deal.

Part of the reason is that Caroline herself experienced poverty, marginalization, and ignorance in her own family growing up. Indeed, she was born illegitimate, raised partially by her grandmother and partially by her mother and stepfather, who put her to work in the kitchen and the field at an early age. She ended up in an elite family, but absolutely came of age in poverty, and remained painfully conscious of that fact for the rest of her life.

Another part is this—being elite in Montgomery County, North Carolina is not like being elite in Hillsborough, Charleston, or Natchez. James and his neighbors did not command legions of slaves, multiple farms, and small capital empires. In 1840, one year after their wedding, James reported the ownership of nine black people, only two of which worked alongside him in Scuffleton’s fields. (In addition to two men between ages 10 and 35, the Lillys owned four boys under 10, one girl under 10, and two women over 10.) Actually, one or two of these enslaved people might have been hired, and not owned by James and Caroline.

James’ status as a slaveowner certainly set him apart in Montgomery. In the East Pee Dee District (that part that became Montgomery after Stanly County split off in 1841), only 126 of 413 households owned slaves (about %30*). Of that %30, the average household owned 6 or 7 slaves. The largest slaveowner (John Steel) possessed 33 slaves. At nine slaves, James held just two more than the average, but did not stand out in any way. (*Vicki Bynum has %21 of free families owning slaves in Montgomery in 1860. I’m doing back-of-the-envelope math here.)

Here is one smaller problem. Caroline died in 1847. Between 1840 and 1850, James increased his holdings considerably. By that later date, the widower James reported ownership of eighteen slaves and two thousand dollars worth of land. This is a considerable increase, and the eighteen slaves nudges awfully close to the traditional academic definition of planter. But I don’t know under what circumstances this increase happened. Was it before or after 1847? I suspect it was gradual, part of a general rise in the value of southern plantations and slaves that increased slave-owners’ wealth across the board by 1857. (Caroline never talked of slave purchases, aside from the person James purchased for her upon their wedding.)

(I’ve complicated this all myself by thinking and saying that Caroline’s family owned nineteen slaves, which is not a real accurate statement, but something that has got lodged in my head. From what we know, when she was alive in 1840, they owned nine slaves. The difference makes my assertion that Caroline is ordinary, on its face, less striking.)

So we have a family in the 1840s that owned nine slaves (yeoman by almost any standard) and yet socially and politically sat atop a their community. Yes, James would likely have considered himself the political and social equal of Wade Hampton and James Henry Hammond. (McCurry is right in that.) But James worked in the crops and Caroline in her garden in a physical and daily way that those former men did not. (Caroline never worked in the fields like McCurry’s yeoman wives, but her physical labor in the garden, the flocks of fowl, the kitchen, and the loom—and her centrality to the household economy—is a major theme of her diary.)

So what am I getting at here? The Lillys undoubtedly enjoyed economic and social privileges that their landless and slaveless neighbors did not. But their lived experience (sorry)—especially hers—was so much closer to Strong, Flintoff, and other demonstrably ordinary people that I can’t think of them as anything but… average.

Strong Thomasson never owned slaves, and so according to historiographical convention, his actions don’t have to be rationalized.

 

Comments

[pedrog]

Things you’ve probably pondered extensively.
You’ll never know what their neighbors thought of them except for the election of James. Which party? Did he run again?

[cg]

Whig. That whole area was dominated by the Whigs. I don't know why he ran and I don't know why he didn't continue to serve. He was active in what we would call the "courthouse circle" in Montgomery, but I get the impression that he just didn't really have political or public aspirations.