Melancholy

Peter McCandless

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511977428.021

14 - Melancholy

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011

Peter McCandless

Show author details

Peter McCandless: Affiliation:
College of Charleston, South Carolina

Book contents

Get access

Summary

There is one thing wherein I find the people here generally like those of the West Indies, they are so well persuaded that what they do is well as to be very angry when their mistakes are shewn to them and they will find cunning arguments to oppose truth itself.

Francis Le Jau, 1709

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, 1770

Visitors during the late colonial period marveled at the glittering lowcountry mansions. During the antebellum period, the luster began to fade. An air of gloomy melancholy settled over a region that once seemed as bright with promise as the flowering of azaleas in a lowcountry spring. Defenders of the plantation system captured the mood best. Edmund Ruffin of Virginia expressed it well while on a visit in 1843: “The mansion houses of different plantations are numerous, and evidently the situations were beautiful in past time. But now almost every place is deserted as a residence and there is in all such places a melancholy appearance of abandonment and decay.” Why were the mansions no longer beautiful? Why were so many of them deserted, decaying, and melancholy? Ruffin thought much of the problem was due to poor agricultural methods, and that certainly played a part.

Type: Chapter
Information: Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry , pp. 271 - 280

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511977428.021 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston ed. by O'Brien, Michael and Moltke-Hansen, David (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986)Google Scholar

O'Brien, Michael, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene D., The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRef Google Scholar

Stephens, Lester D., Science, Race, and Religion in the American South: John Bachman and the Charleston Circle of Naturalists (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar

Weir, Robert, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar

Fraser, Walter J., Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 30, 39, 214–215, 236–237, 349Google Scholar

Coclanis, Peter, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 55–56, 145, 149Google Scholar

Edgar, Walter, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 174–176, 297–300Google Scholar

Easterby, J. H., A History of the College of Charleston, Founded 1770 (Charleston, 1935), 46–48, 55–63, 75, 83, 88–95, 136Google Scholar

Wood, Bradford J., “‘A Constant Attendance on God's Alter’: Death, Disease, and the Anglican Church in Colonial South Carolina, 1706–1750,” SCHM 100 (1999), 204–220Google Scholar

Bonomi, Patricia U., Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31–32Google Scholar

Kidd, Thomas, ed. The Great Awakening: the Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), chapters 6, 16Google Scholar

Boles, John B., The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Knoxville: University Press of Kentucky, 1996)Google Scholar

Rogers, Tommy, “The Great Population Exodus from South Carolina,” SCHM 68 (1967), 14–21Google Scholar

Miller, James David, South by Southwest: Planter Emigration and Identity in the Slave South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002)Google Scholar

Smith, Alfred G., Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton State: South Carolina, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1958), 25–26Google Scholar

Hart, Emma, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009)Google Scholar

Coclanis, Peter, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 64–65, 112–115Google Scholar

Haw, James, “‘The Problem of South Carolina’ Re-examined,” SCHM 107 (2006), 9–11Google Scholar

Sinha, Manish, The Counter Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar

Book contents

14 - Melancholy

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive