| In the early settlement period, the lowcountry gentry struggled to consolidate its hegemony in the face of two potent demographic threats: an extraordinarily high mortality rate and a substantial black slave majority. Planter and merchant families responded to this dual challenge by developing a strategy of community oversight of children, property, and slaves. Parents delegated broad child-rearing responsibilities to grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings, and family friends, even as they helped rear other people's children. Men and women of the planter class monitored parent-child relations, matchmaking, and inheritance among their peers and sometimes intervened in other families' affairs in order to ensure the orderly succession of property and power. Planter men relied on wives, other female relatives, and teenage and adult children to supervise routine plantation affairs. They also consulted neighboring planters and community elders for advice; planters and merchants often made economic decisions in concert. Gentry families hired and lent slaves, traded advice about slave management, and sought to inculcate habits of mastery in their children, particularly their daughters, from early adolescence. Indeed, they often treated slaves as community rather than individual property. During the American Revolution, patriot and Loyalist families cooperated across political lines in order to preserve the region's social and economic stability. Most lowcountry planters and merchants were more deeply committed to the needs of their individual families and the lowcountry gentry community as a whole than to any higher political authority. In the 1780s, the Jacksonboro Assembly chose not to punish Loyalists harshly but instead sought to reabsorb them into the ruling class as quickly and effectively as possible. |
