Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family [Hardcover]

Malcolm Bell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1987

Master of vast rice and cotton plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Major Pierce Butler bequeathed his family and nation a legacy of slavery--an inheritance of immense wealth sown with the seeds of Civil War. In Major Butler's Legacy, Malcolm Bell charts the unfolding of the Butler patrimony, an epic story that reaches from the eve of the Revolution to the first decades of this century and includes in its course such figures as George Washington, Aaron Burr, Fanny Kemble, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pierce Butler (17441822) resigned his British army commission in 1771 when he married into the gentry of South Carolina, where he subsequently established a family fortune based on the plantation labor of nearly 600 slaves. This academic study of Butler, his plantations and the lives of his descendants through the early 1900s provides instructive glimpses of the Southern slave economy and its dissolution after the Civil War. Historian Bell uses primary sources to reveal Butler's inconsistency as an advocate of slavery (he helped ensure its continuation as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention) who efficiently managed his lands from the distance of a Philadelphia townhouse, all the while regretting that he ever came to own one of the "Wretched Affricans." Later, the race issue deeply affected the lives of Butler's heirs, including a grandson married to British actress-abolitionist Fanny Kemble and great-greatgrandson Owen Wister, the novelist, who sold the last of the family estate. Illustrations.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A life and times family biography. In abundant (and sometimes deadening) detail Bell weaves together the lives of whites and blacks who occupied the Butler properties in Georgia, South Carolina, and Philadelphia. The focus is on Pierce Butler, the "patriot" patriarch who bequeathed a legacy of property and self-interest to his family and, as a public figure, a Constitution and government committed to the protection of slavery. While we meet many fascinating members of the Butler family, most striking is the counterpoint of white and black playing out its intricate and contradictory theme in slavery and freedom. Bell's rich account clarifies why the Old South and the New defy easy summary and ensnare our imagination. With the epic sweep of the Children of Pride (1972), this is highly recommended for major libraries. Randall M. Miller, History Dept., St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 673 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press; 1St Edition edition (July 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820308978
• ISBN-13: 978-0820308975
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,713,786 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a sojourn into a past free of delusions, June 11, 2011

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Siegfried Sutterlin "a diplomatic and economi... (midwest) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Brown Thrasher Books) (Paperback)

Those still believing in the popular myth that the War of Independence and the Constitution were major steps in the unfolding of Western liberties will be shocked by this book. In tiny and hesitant hints sprinkled here and there, Malcolm Bell tells us that Britain, after independence, was no longer the West's foremost slaveholding nation. The Revolution removed 600,000 slaves from the British Empire so that by 1814 the United States, in effect, was the West's greatest slaveholding nation, though Bell does not quite dare to use that description. The story he tells deals with the fate of these slaves in general and, in particular, with the thousands of slaves owned by the Butler family over four generations.

Likewise, the book does not perpetuate the myth that the Revolution and the Constitution created a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. From the perspective of the Butler family, it created, more accurately, a government of the dynasties, by the dynasties, and for the dynasties. Five generations of the Butler dynasty are given roughly equal coverage with the slaves. Thus, this book describes dynastic upwellings originating in Britain with Major Pierce Butler and eventually stretching from Georgia and South Carolina to Philadelphia, Boston, France and Switzerland. Nearly all imaginable dynastic interests interplay: political, economic, as well as familial ones down to the education of the off-springs. Interwoven are the important relationships of the Butler aristocrats with their plantation managers like Roswell King.

The chapters dealing with slavery tell the heartless tale of the servitude of blacks. Living in filfth and unsanitary conditions, their mistreatment was unrelenting, yet they bore their fate with surprising dignity and unexpected occasional loyalty to their masters. Their humaneness outshines the character qualities of their owners. Nevertheless, while receiving equal focus, even empathic treatment, they do not come to life like the major stars of this dynastic book. The latter associate with the famous and powerful and, thus, this book also sheds light on George Washington, Benjamin Rush, Charles Lyell, the famous British geologist who decisively influenced Darwin, Thomas Pinckney, Thaddeus Steven who condemned Pierce Butler in 1848 for having slaves by likening him to an insignificant insect, and Henry James.

By 1859, a heavily indebted Butler estate caused the gang sale of the slaves. It was weeping time and chattel slavery, the worst form, permitted slaves to be sold individually, ripping families apart. It recalls the observation of a European visitor in 1835 who emphatically stated upon witnessing a slave auction "you call this the land of liberty and every day things occur at which the despots of Europe would recoil in horror."

Bell draws from massive primary sources, diaries, steamship records, newspapers, legal records, etc. and allows the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. He does not develop the theme of humans as commodities that is the crucial underpinnings of slavery and which surfaced in indentured immigrant servitude and in subtle elements of America's economic processes of subordinating humans to corporate interest far too excessively, even in the recent transmogrification of former depts. of personnel into "Human Resource Department." The view of humans as commodities pulsates throughout society and surfaces even in organized sports, the military, the educational system, etc. Had Bell dared to expand the theme of humans as commodities, his superb book would have acquired brilliance.