•  
  •  
 

Abstract

While researching the history of his great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Gardner Stevens, Norman MacLeod discovered that Stevens and a significant group of Newport businessmen established stores in Georgetown, South Carolina, the epicenter of U.S. rice production, during the antebellum period. In his article, “‘Our Northern Friends’: Newport Merchants, Rice and Slavery in the South Carolina Low Country,” he writes that these men left families and homes in Newport for seven or eight months a year to live and work in South Carolina. Their businesses supplied the plantations in and around Georgetown with food, clothing, and fine wines for the enslavers and their families in addition to tools for planting and harvesting of rice, and cloth, shoes and other items for enslaved workers. MacLeod details how Newport merchants accommodated themselves to the plantation slavery system, as they sought financial opportunity and wealth. Norman MacLeod is a retired Episcopal priest, and a committed avocational historian. He has published articles on the early history of Guilford, Connecticut, and the Civil War experience of an abolitionist Union soldier.

Download

Share

COinS