Subject: Volume Preface, 1757-1761 Commons House Journal
Resent-Date: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 11:27:45 -0700 (PDT)
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Date: Sun, 07 Jun 1998 14:26:54 -0400
From: "Steven J. Coker" 
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The Colonial Records of South Carolina
The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly
October 6, 1757-January 24, 1761
Terry W. Lipscomb, Editor
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 51-62239
ISBN: 1-880067-28-5

Published in Columbia, S.C., by the
Public Programs Division
South Carolina Department of Archives and History
Director: Alexia J. Helsley
Production and design: Judith M. Andrews

Volume Preface
(footnotes omitted)

"THE NEW COMMONS HOUSE that convened in October 1757 showed no inclination to
resume the fight over legislative privilege that had inflamed relations with the
Council, exasperated royal governors, and stalled public business. As great
military events transpired on the North American continent and elsewhere, the
political climate changed. The British Crown's financial demands on South
Carolina dampened the feud between the Commons House and His Majesty's Council.
But it set the governor and Commons House at odds, and the colony's politics
fell into a monotonous pattern of petty bickering.

The task that confronted Governor William Henry Lyttelton might have frustrated
him even if he had been a really suave and gifted politician. By the time the
newly-elected legislators assembled in Charlestown's State House, the city
contained over 1,700 British troops-Royal Americans, provincials, and
Highlanders-sent to defend the southern frontier against French incursions. The
existing barracks had been built to house only the handful of British
Independents who normally composed the Charlestown garrison. Lyttelton had to
ask the Commons House for permanent quarters, bedding, and supplies for the
troops.

Though the legislature's allowances were neither prompt nor generous, they were
adequate. But the South Carolina planters' and merchants' penny-pinching habits
irked the governor and the military. For instance, when Lyttelton and Lieutenant
Colonel Henry Bouquet transmitted a statement of the quarters that Philadelphia
had provided for the Royal Americans, the members of a house committee tartly
observed that "they have not been able to Learn that it is generally Customary
in all His Majesty's Dominions to make the same Provission for Officers as in
Philadelphia was made for the Royal Americans; neither do they Conceive that the
Practice of Philadelphia ought to be a Rule for this Province."

The Commons House voted money for new barracks and bedding for the troops, but
in a resolution of December 1 it refused to provide officers' quarters. Colonel
Bouquet tried talking with house Speaker Benjamin Smith, but Bouquet's direct
approach accomplished nothing and inadvertently undercut Lyttelton's delicate
negotiations. The General Assembly adjourned on December 9 with the house
intransigent, Lyttelton furious at Bouquet, and local property owners renting
quarters to British officers with no prospect of payment.

In 1758, a confrontation threatened. Provoked by exaggerated reports of the
soldiers' living conditions in Charlestown, the Earl of Loudoun sent new orders
to Bouquet. "Tis ver y extraordinary," he told Bouquet, "that after the people
of that province were sensible of the Danger they were in from their Neighbours,
and did apply for Troops for their Defence, that as soon as they arrive, they
shoud Deny them the Common Necessaries of Life." Loudoun's letter, which Bouquet
received on February 13, continued as follows.

'Therefore, tis my Orders, that in Case the Assembly have continued obstinate in
not furnishing the Barracks with every Requisite of Barracks, that you directly
demand Quarters in Town, for as many of the Troops as you find necessary, either
for the Safety of the Place or for the general Service in Carrying on the War.
And if they shou'd continue so blind to their Duty . . . as to refuse you
Quarters on your Application, they drive me to the disagreable Necessity of
giving you the following Order, which is, to quarter the King's Troops, by your
own Authority.'

On February 28, Bouquet told Lyttelton that he would insist on having the field
officers, captains, and staff officers properly quartered either in furnished
barracks or in the town. By disclaiming responsibility for officers above the
rank of subalterns, the Assembly had "made a Distinction, for which there was no
Precedent in any part of His Majesty's Dominions either in Europe or America."
But when Lyttelton transmitted Bouquet's letter to the Commons House, the
legislators threw down the gauntlet. "That as officers & Soldiers cannot be
Legally and Constitutionaly Quartered upon private Houses without the Special
Consent of the Owners or Possessors of Such Houses and as the Provission
heretofore made by this House for Subaltern Officers only was a Grant of
favour," the house committee retorted, "they are humbly of Opinion that this
House ought to adhere to their former Resolutions."

Here the controversy ended, for on March 10, Bouquet had received Loudoun's
orders to sail for New York with the Royal Americans. Two companies of
Virginians also embarked at that time, and later that spring, Archibald
Montgomerie's Highlanders left Charlestown. The troops' departure averted
further trouble.

Some of the departing British officers may have shared the sentiments that
Captain George Mercer of the Virginia provincials had expressed in a November 2
letter to Colonel George Washington.

'I find my long Stay in this Place has only encreased the very bad opinion I at
first conceived of it. To say no more of it tis the most extravagant &
uncomfortable Place I ever was in-upon my Honor tis with some Degree of Oconomy
that I can Live here upon my Pay-The Towns People dont desire to cultivate an
Acquaintance or maintain a Society with Us, so that were it not for the Harmony
that subsists between Ourselves (the Officers) it woud be intolerable. . . .

I assure you I long much to see you again were I safe at Home So. Carolina woud
be the last Place I ever woud come to.'

The quartering dispute was merely one of the more noteworthy episodes in a
period when military expenditures dominated legislative business. The Crown
repeatedly demanded that South Carolina raise and maintain troops under arms,
even though Britain's major military efforts were occurring far to the north.
The unit most frequently mentioned in the journal was the South Carolina
Provincial Regiment authorized on July 6, 1757. Later, the outbreak of the
Cherokee War led to appropriations for frontier ranger units and to the
formation of the South Carolina Provincial Regiment of 1760 (Middleton's
Regiment).

The Cherokee Indians proved a drain on the colony's treasury whether they acted
as friends or foes. When the Cherokees campaigned with the British, they
demanded presents as compensation for the loss of their hunting season. Thus, in
March 1758, the Commons House voted £20,000 to outfit and reward war parties
going north to join General Forbes's expedition.

Moreover, most of the accounts for building Fort Loudoun in the Overhill
Cherokee Nation came before the house during the present journal. The
legislators handled Fort Loudoun very differently than they had handled Fort
Prince George just four years earlier. Then Governor James Glen had persuaded
them to forgo examining itemized vouchers; a lump sum payment of £5,000 had
settled matters to the mutual satisfaction of Glen and the legislature.11 Now,
in the case of Fort Loudoun, they read and debated every last sum Lyttelton had
spent.

The alleged reason for this thorough audit was that Lyttelton's
commissary-Colonel John Chevillette-had incurred "many extraordinary charges" in
connection with the fort.12 But ever since Lyttelton took office, he had
asserted royal prerogative and had attempted to exclude the Commons House from
knowledge of and power over Indian policy. Perhaps Lyttelton had thereby
forfeited some of the influence his predecessor had enjoyed. Whatever the
legislators' motives, their meticulous reading of Chevillette's accounts
provides a windfall for today's historians and archeologists, for these accounts
give an astonishing amount of detailed information about Fort Loudoun.

Another expense that vexed the Commons House was the charge of carrying
provisions to frontier British garrisons. The Earl of Loudoun had offered to
provision the Independent Companies if the colony would pay the transport
charges. Eager to be rid of the two pence sterling additional pay that South
Carolina paid the Independents, the legislature accepted Loudoun's proposal. But
afterwards, house members saw a July 1758 article in London Magazine that seemed
to suggest the contractors were liable to transport the provisions. Thinking
that Loudoun and Lyttelton had hoodwinked them, they demanded to see the text of
the supply contract.

Lyttelton forwarded a copy and pointed out that the Crown was responsible for
the carriage, and therefore Loudoun's deal with the colony still stood. The
legislators fumed that "this Province ought not, by any means, to be burthen'd
with the Expence of the Carriage of Provisions," but they voted the money,
anyway, "that His Majesty's Service may not suffer."

Buried among the financial dealings, an interesting cast of characters weaves in
and out of the legislative minutes. Various personalities who would become
prominent in the backcountry and in the American Revolution appear in these
pages-some of them for the first time. Andrew Williamson, Patrick Calhoun, John
Stuart, Richard Richardson, and William Thomson all appear in passing
references. In verbose contrast, the Reverend Charles Woodmason filled five
manuscript pages trying to convince the Commons House that it should support his
proposed floating bridge across Black Mingo Creek. This obscure Woodmason
document is one of the journal's more interesting gems, for it does not appear
in the published edition of his writings.

One key player in frontier South Carolina of the 1760s deser ves greater fame
than the state's past historians have given him. When the Cherokee Indians
turned hostile and cut off supplies and communications to Fort Loudoun on the
Little Tennessee River, Captain Paul Demere, the garrison commander, turned for
help to a black frontiersman named Abram, or Abraham. This slave, who belonged
to ex-Indian trader Samuel Benn, was an experienced and resourceful woodsman.
Two of Demere's messengers had already been killed or captured by the Cherokees
on the path to Virginia. If Abram could carry letters across the mountains to
South Carolina, Demere promised his freedom as a reward.

Abram navigated the dangerous mountain passes not just once, but repeatedly, and
survived the smallpox in Charlestown for good measure. Until Fort Loudoun
surrendered to the Cherokees in August 1760, and the Indians massacred or
captured the British troops, Abram served as the garrison's link to South
Carolina. The Commons House honored Demere's bargain and freed Abram by a £500
line-item entry in the schedule attached to the tax bill passed in 1761.

Some enterprising contemporaries spent their energies in less heroic
pursuits-like war profiteering. In 1757, a house audit committee discovered that
Alexander Montgomery, the Highland Regiment quarter-master, had tried to involve
Daniel Doyley, the assistant commissary general, in a kickback scheme.
Montgomery had planned to embezzle firewood and other supplies for illegal
profit, and he had invited Doyley-in an incriminating conversation Doyley
reported to the house-to "go snacks on it." The legislators indignantly referred
the matter to Lyttelton for appropriate action.

Historians reared in today's medically-advanced society may wonder at the £3,000
reward-over 2.5% of the total 1759 colony budget-that the General Assembly paid
Joseph Howard-a "doctor" with questionable medical credentials even by
eighteenth-century standards, and another of the era's enterprising characters.
Howard had devised an alleged cure for "the Lame Distemper, Yaws and other
Disorders proceeding from Corrupt Blood." A house committee received testimony
concerning "several Extraordinary Cures" Howard had performed, and the full
house voted £3,000 for "a full and particular Discovery" of Howard's methods and
medicines. Human nature being predictable across the centuries, modern readers
may assume that the formula's purported effectiveness against syphilis enhanced
its value in the eyes of the General Assembly.

For genealogists, this journal's interest lies not merely in great men, famous
men, and interesting men, but also in the multitude of ordinary men and women
who appear in its pages. Repeated expeditions to the Indian frontier led to vast
requisitions for supplies. All vouchers went through the yearly legislative
audits, and the clerks recorded the names of many obscure Germans or other
backcountry settlers who supplied wagons, horses, or provisions. Their accounts
provide a heretofore untapped source for family research.

In April 1759, Halley's Comet blazed silver-white against the dark early-morning
sky over South Carolina.20 Later, some South Carolinians may have recalled the
ancient superstition that linked comets with war, pestilence, and famine.
Colonists-especially backwoods settlers bordering the Cherokee country-cannot
have failed to note that the eighteen months following the comet's appearance
were among the most disastrous in memory. An Indian war and a smallpox epidemic
burst upon the colony simultaneously. Cherokee aggression against traders,
soldiers, and settlers, though justified in some Indian eyes, led the British to
burn villages and crops in reprisal, and the outcome proved tragic for Cherokees
as well as whites.

Nor did Charlestown go unscathed. On March 20, 1760, a correspondent in the
provincial capital painted a graphic picture for a northern newspaper.

'Tis to be presumed that you will naturally expect some News relative to the
present situation of this Colony, which you will, in a few Words, conceive, when
I assure you, that no Description can surpass its Calamity-What few escape the
Indians, no sooner arrive in Town, than they are seized with the Small-Pox,
which generally carries them off.'

The epidemic became so widespread that at times it even shut down legislative
business. For much of March and April, plantation owners fled Charlestown, and
the Commons House adjourned from one day to the next because it could not
maintain a quorum. With the onset of hot weather, the General Assembly finally
abandoned its State House chambers. A special August session met in Edward
Legge's tavern at Ashley Ferry, where the Commons House hoped to attract the
country members who shunned Charlestown.

Other government operations malfunctioned as well. The public treasurer reported
a shortfall in general tax revenue because some collectors were sick and others
were afraid to enter the town. And inevitably smallpox became part of the 1760
legislative agenda. On May 30, the General Assembly passed an act to control the
disease. The statute targeted the practice of inoculation-a popular but
ineffective procedure which merely spread the contagion. Also, it prohibited
planters from sending their infected slaves to town. This act, passed by a rump
assembly of merchants and lawyers, was a rare example of friction within the
merchant-planter coalition that governed colonial South Carolina.

No other segment of Charlestown's population suffered smallpox so severely as
did the small remnant of Acadian French exiles-340 in number. In February, the
Commons House asked the governor to provide them with less crowded living
conditions. Even so, 115 to 130 of them perished, and the disease took its toll
on the survivors. In July, a committee reported that "those wretched People
suffered extremely in the late Calamity, Some of them having lost their Limbs,
some their Eyes and others their Lives for want of proper Care, Necessaries and
Attendance." With the Commons House inactive during the height of the epidemic,
local merchant Gabriel Manigault had acted as benefactor to the Acadians,
supplying them £5,235 worth of food and medical assistance.

During the last nine months of Lyttelton's administration, his executive
monopoly of Indian affairs began to come apart. Use of British Cherokee
auxiliaries in the North had led to friction between Cherokee warriors and
western settlers in Virginia and North Carolina. Bloodshed erupted on both
sides, and caused Lyttelton to declare a Cherokee trade embargo until the
Indians delivered their offenders for punishment. As war threatened, Lyttelton
needed money to implement Indian policy, and he needed legislative cooperation
to get it.

When the Commons House refused to comply with a Crown request for troops in July
1759, it pushed Lyttelton into his first official disclosure of the Cherokee
raids. The legislators asked for and received all the papers relating to the
incidents-the first such parcel the governor had transmitted to the house in
more than two years. Later, Lyttelton called a special October session to raise
money for a military expedition that he intended to lead in person into the
Cherokee Nation. Dissatisfied with the size of the house appropriation, he
pointedly referred in his closing speech to its "scantiness and insufficiency,"
and labeled his critics unpatriotic. Indignant house members said his attitude
constituted a breach of privilege, and accused him of violating their "free
Liberty of Speech to propose or debate any Matter according to Order and
Parliamentary Usage."

Lyttelton's Cherokee expedition -plagued by disease and desertions- was an
ambitious military boondoggle that failed in its attempt to awe and pacify the
Cherokees. The governor's critics charged that he actually provoked an Indian
war when he broke faith with a Cherokee peace delegation and made hostages of
the high-ranking red diplomats who composed it. The £316,693 price of the
expedition left the provincial treasury awash in red ink for the ensuing five
years, but Lyttelton rationalized the cost in a letter to the Board of Trade.
"The Province will not be the poorer for the Sum it shall raise on this
Occasion," he wrote, "as it is for a local Service and the money is due only to
Persons who are Inhabitants of it."

That winter, Lyttelton returned from the Cherokee Nation to a hero's welcome by
the townspeople and a chilly reception by the Commons House leadership. His
speech of February 7 informed the General Assembly of the latest Cherokee
hostilities, but two days later, when the members of the Commons House addressed
the governor at his mansion, they "omitted the common form of giving thanks for
the Speech." The governor received the
address with stony silence, and the members sullenly withdrew.

If the governor and the legislature were on a collision course, further events
never had a chance to unfold. On February 13, Lyttelton received official notice
that the Crown had appointed him governor of Jamaica; a royal commission named
Lieutenant Governor William Bull to take over as interim chief executive, and
the political climate abruptly changed. The Bull appointment was so popular in
Charlestown that when the Commons House drafted its farewell address to
Lyttelton, it barely squelched a move by some of its members to insert a clause
applauding Bull's selection.

The first few months of Bull's administration coincided with Archibald
Montgomerie's expedition against the Cherokee Indians. Both the Montgomerie
expedition and South Carolina's efforts to keep the Creek Indians out of the war
preoccupied Bull and prompted many of his messages to the Commons House. British
reluctance to commit troops for protracted warfare against the Cherokees led
Montgomerie to fight an abortive campaign that left besieged Fort Loudoun with
no hope of relief. The legislature's reaction to the expedition and its ensuing
debate with Bull over strategy highlight the final proceedings of this journal.

The 1757-1760 General Assembly dissolved on August 23, 1760, by the lieutenant
governor's proclamation, but this published volume contains additional minutes
for the short assembly that ran from October 6, 1760, until January 24, 1761.
One week later, official dispatches reported the death of King George II,
and-according to Bull's interpretation-automatically dissolved the legislature.
Unofficial word of the king's death had already arrived, and the members of the
Commons House are said to have attended the January meetings in their mourning
clothes.

The 1760-1761 sessions produced only thirty-six manuscript pages, which the
clerk appended to the volume containing the preceding Commons House Journal. In
this published edition, they provide a useful continuity of subject matter, as
the Cherokee War became almost the sole topic for debate. Stung by the fall of
Fort Loudoun and the massacre or capture of its troops, the legislators
augmented the colony's military establishment and voted supplies for Lieutenant
Colonel James Grant's newly-arrived British regulars. Moreover, they granted aid
for victims of the war and provided for redemption of Cherokee captives.

For historians interested in the Cherokee War, the South Carolina colonial
records are of uneven quality, for by the late 1750s, contemporary politics had
led to erratic record-keeping. Early in his administration, Governor Lyttelton
found that the clerk of the Council had been delivering its executive journals
and bound Indian documents to the Commons House committee that audited the
public debt. The alleged purpose was to tally the pages and pay the clerk, but
the procedure gave the people's representatives unrestricted access to Crown
records. Lyttelton invoked executive privilege and demanded that the Commons
House either pay the clerk on oath or put him on salary.

Although Lyttelton's prerogative ploy succeeded, it did little-from today's
perspective-to preserve the colony's historical records. Once implemented, it
removed any financial incentive to copy documents into the Council Journals.
William Simpson, who served as clerk of the Council during Lyttelton's
administration, produced no voluminous journals like those of his predecessor
Alexander Gordon. Instead, he kept a loose file of papers that has since
disappeared. And with no legislative oversight of the journals, he even omitted
twenty-four pages of Cherokee War documents that the Council had ordered him to
copy into the Indian Book.

The Commons House Journal recorded lists of enclosures to incoming governor's
messages that, in effect, serve as calendars of Simpson's files. During the
1759-60 proceedings, both Governor Lyttelton and his successor Lieutenant
Governor William Bull transmitted large bundles of Cherokee documents as
enclosures with their written messages. The footnotes to the present volume cite
other copies of the missing enclosures in collections such as the Lyttelton
Papers or the Fauquier Papers. Unfortunately, many of these documents have not
been found, and thus South Carolina's official archive of the war cannot be
totally reconstructed.

The declining health that afflicted house clerk Childermas Croft in the late
1750s did not impair the quality of his Commons House Journals. During the
1758-59 proceedings, Croft turned the journals over to acting clerk John
Bassnett and left the colony, but by 1760 Croft was back on the job. Despite the
problems with South Carolina's executive records of the Cherokee War, historians
may at least be grateful for thorough legislative minutes.

The text of this book has been taken from volume 32 (456 pages) and volume 33
(416 pages) of the original manuscripts in the South Carolina Department of
Archives and History. A few of the papers included in the 1757-61 Commons House
Journal were contemporaneously printed in the South Carolina Gazette, but most
of the material in this volume has never before been published. Another
manuscript of this journal exists in the British Public Record Office, and the
microfilm copy of it has been checked whenever there seemed to be errors or
omissions in the Archives manuscript. Comparison has also been made with
fragments of rough journals extant in the South Carolina Archives. The clerk's
rough drafts exist from May 12, 1758 to February 3, 1759, and from May 28, 1760
to July 14, 1760.

The editor worked from an electronic text transcribed by Elizabeth Harrison,
Sandra K. Tomes, Julie Petroff, and Sarah Prioleau."

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