Untitled

A Heart Full of Flattery:

Cyrus Stuart and the Ambiguity and Anxiety of Becoming a Southern Gentleman

Craig Thompson Friend

University of Central Florida

In February 1828, Cyrus Stuart came of age in Pendleton, South Carolina, just as a plantation economy began to dominate the hilly uplands of the Deep South. Yet, as he celebrated his twentieth birthday, Stuart found himself without family or friends. His mother possibly died at Cyrus's birth. In 1818, William Jordon murdered his father, a local gunsmith: "the ball entered the body below the right nipple, and passed out below the left; he died a short time afterwards." A few years later, his brother John fled Pendleton for the newly available lands of Tennessee. By 1828, then, living at widow Sarah Lorton's boarding house, enrolled in the local academy, and serving as a teaching assistant to the headmaster, Cyrus was alone in Pendleton.(1)

On February 5th, Stuart began the first entry of a diary that he kept until July 8th. Thus began a daily record of the young man's life. The journal is brief, but it reveals much about Southern society from the perspective of one who, as a social outsider, coveted the status of Southern gentleman enjoyed by most of his associates. For decades, historians have enlightened us on what the intellectuals, statesmen, and upper crust of Old South society thought and believed about the proper roles of men. The task has not been overly difficult since members of plantation society left behind volumes of diaries, letters, and other personal testimonies. Yet, extant intimate records of the thoughts and experiences of more common Southerners, especially young men, are rare, especially those that reveal ambiguity or anxiety towards the formulated ideas and common assumptions that structured plantation society. In his origins, experiences, and aspirations, Cyrus Stuart was a very ordinary Southerner whose words shed new light on the Old South.

Two themes permeate Stuart's diary: an acute ambivalence about social class, and an uneasiness with courtship and sexuality. Both affected his life dramatically. Despite, and possibly because of, his awkward attempts to find his place in Southern planter culture, Stuart registered a growing abhorrence of genteel planter society (even as he vainly sought to participate in it) and an increasing disgust with more ordinary whites as he strove to rise above his most common station. He interpreted his world as a stratified society which, despite the windows of opportunity open to young males, suppressed them through its rituals. Stuart stood on the outside, excluded by a planter patriarchy which, by virtue of age or circumstance, he could not enter. So, he turned to courtship to satisfy his desires to participate in genteel society, only to discover that young adulthood was the sole period in a genteel man's life in which he was nearly powerless. Even the rites of courtship favored women over men. Since such was the case for planters' sons, the son of a gunsmith rarely had a chance. Additionally, the absence of a family and the lack of a distinguished lineage compounded Stuart's inability to make his mark as a Southern gentleman on Pendleton's economic, social, and political milieus.

Southern society blended, rather awkwardly, the aristocratic and the common. From their stagecoaches, visitors remarked on the stark contrasts between the columned mansions of cotton planters and the wooden shacks of a cracker culture, between the crinoline dresses of planters' daughters and the country linen blouses of farm girls, between the honorable violence of duels and the bawdy brutality of eye-gouging matches and drunken brawls. Genteel and vulgar were not necessarily antithetical, however; as historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown explains, the conventional wisdom that permeated all of white Southern society was an unspoken "code of honor" that immediately connected genteel people to the plain folk, and ultimately defined gender roles, political participation, class identity, and familial and communal relations. Still, while the plain folk appeared friendly and respectable enough, they lacked the sociability and virtue prerequisite to a higher consciousness of Southern honor. The more genteel elevated themselves above common whites by combining "moral uprightness with high social position." As a small but significant proportion of the Southern population, the social elite embellished their roles through refined manners, religiosity, and a determination to pass the legacies of honor and refinement along to their children. Wealthier Southerners hired tutors to teach classical languages and literature to their sons, and French, drawing, and needlepoint to their daughters. Gentility joined with honor as the discriminating characteristics of a leisurely, Southern planter class.(2)

This social portrait primarily reflected the rural South. In towns and villages throughout the region, other members of Southern society-merchants, cotton factors, educators, ministers, and doctors-blurred the distinction between genteel and common, making social status less certain and more easily contested. Townsfolk profited by catering to genteel demands; concurrently, they sought to mimic the ostentatiousness of the planter class. They rode about in carriages, wore expensive and imported clothes, and constructed opulent homes for entertaining. In order to match the refinement of planter residences, townsfolk physically ordered their communities and homes according to contemporary ideas about urban gentility. The Southern village became the economic, political, even spiritual center of Southern life. "Our bodies are in the country, our souls in town," proclaimed the South's leading circular, DeBow's Review in 1860. Indeed, a hierarchical system of cities, towns, villages, and even hamlets evidenced the genteel appearances and high society of Southern civilization. The centuries-long development of a Southern brand of urbanization hidden within a region of agrarian loyalties became a fundamental part of the region's society and culture.(3)

In the Southern village, then, existed the greatest opportunities for social dissension and social mobility. More prosperous citizens of these communities teetered tenuously between the aristocratic and the plain, crippled by their own irrelevance to the former and their own indifference towards the latter. Disgruntled professionals may or may not have had the fortunes sufficient to leisurely lifestyles, but their educations and manners often exceeded those of the wealthiest of planters. Cyrus Stuart saw himself as such a person. Although his politics bordered on the radical, he was no visionary who subverted the status quo or trumpeted an alternative concept of Southern society. Historically, he was a nobody, one of the faceless thousands who wandered the same streets, ate at the same taverns, and worshiped the same God as the renown men and women whose names adorn countless histories of the Old South. Still, his dreams, attainments, and failings as recorded in his diary represent those of common white Southerners who sought their destinies in small worlds inordinately controlled by the planter class.(4)

For Stuart, that world was "Old Pendleton," as it became known by the mid-1800s. Originating in the 1790s as a courthouse village that awakened once or twice a month, Pendleton inauspiciously sat in the foothills of the Southern Appalachians, where "the mountains from Mrs. Lorton[']s window," exclaimed Stuart, "[are] the most beautiful sight I ever saw." The upcountry of South Carolina, as throughout most of the South, offered little in the type of transportation and market connections prerequisite to town-building. Pendleton, like so many of the villages of the backcountry, formed not as a market town or a stop along a stage route, but as the judicial center of its respective district. South Carolina's judicial system remained so unsettled during the late eighteenth century, however, that not until 1798 did Pendleton begin to develop. By 1806, New England tourist Edward Hooker described the village as "pleasantly situated over a cluster of little stony hills and is laid out in four squares-has ten or twelve good houses (some of which are large and handsome) a strong stone gaol, and an old Court House."(5)

Hence, around the turn of the century, Pendleton abided a tranquil Southern village with minimal commercial and residential growth whose beautiful surroundings and judicial role seemed justification enough for its existence. But Pendleton's days as a sleepy, upcountry judicial center were few. By the early 1800s, news of the region's scenic and healthy environment summoned waves of lowcountry planters who, coincidental with vernal threats of malaria along the seaboard, packed up their belongings and sojourned to the upcountry village, lounged in vacation mansions throughout the summer, and returned to coastal estates with the first hard frost. "The society of our neighborhood was most of families from a warmer climate," recalled one of the lowcountry guests, Mary Ester Huger, "people of means who bought or built summer homes scattered around the Village of Pendleton from one to six or eight miles." Throughout the summer, "a frequent intercourse of visits & dinner parties" occupied the days and evenings of these lowcountry visitors. Francis K. Huger, John Laurence North, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Thomas Pinckney, Jr., Thomas L. Dart, Nicholas Bishop, Charles Gaillard, and Benjamin Savage Smith led the lowcountry contingent whose presence accentuated a more refined phase of Pendleton's history.(6)

This was the Pendleton into which, in 1808, Cyrus Stuart was born. Most of these families had little vested interest in the sleepy village of the upcountry. They dedicated their attentions, instead, to the economic and political needs of the lowcountry where their principal residences sat; and they found little social life in Pendleton that could compare to that of Charleston, the grand dame of the South Carolina coast. Yet, this genteel relationship of Charleston to Pendleton became particularly relevant to Stuart's life by framing the society in which he lived. Charleston, like Pendelton, appealed to the wealthy because of the apparent healthfulness of its location. Many of Charleston's residents were summer guests who escaped the annual threat of malaria on their own coastal plantations to lounge in a planters' playground. They built summer homes in the city, where the brackish sea water provided a relatively malaria-free environment. It was the most celebrated place in the Old South.(7)

Charleston's demographic growth after the Revolutionary War, however, proved troublesome to many South Carolinians and produced a natural antagonism between coastal and upcountry citizens. By 1790, the white residents of Charleston and surrounding parishes comprised only 11 percent of the state's population, but controlled nearly half of both houses of the state assembly. Meanwhile, as the state's first historian William Johnson noted, "the whole interior was languishing for want of some object to engage their attention and employ their industry." By the early 1800s, lowcountry elites, aware of the discontent of inland planters over the disproportionate share of power wielded by their coastal colleagues, attempted to appease the upcountry and create a unified state through a public school system, improved transportation routes, and the promotion of a cotton-based staple agriculture.(8)

The concessions of lowcountry planters hardly met the demands of backcountry elite. Andrew Pickens, Robert Anderson, and John Ewing Colhoun comprised the backbone of Pendleton's resident "families of respectability," as Edward Hooker described them. In the mid-1700s, all three men traveled the Great Wagon Road to Long Canes in Abbeville District, at that time the most remote of South Carolina's frontiers. After 1791, many Long Canes citizens migrated in toto to Pendleton County, among whom were Pickens, Anderson, and Colhoun who established themselves as leaders of the community and regularly served as state legislators. Still, in 1790, Anderson reiterated the thoughts of many of his peers that the upcountry elite felt alienated from South Carolina's political and social venues: "those who held lands below were opulent, many of their ancestors in the class of original settlers of the soil, long in possession of various advantages" while he and his backcountry companions were "newcomers, who had not time to accumulate much wealth." Education, transportation, and agricultural improvements were not enough. Beginning in 1801, the demands for constitutional reform by a burgeoning backcountry elite amplified throughout South Carolina until, in 1808, the state legislature provided for representation based on population and taxable property. The redrawing of political representation, along with the spread of cotton agriculture, brought backcountry planters into full political membership in the state's ruling class. Almost simultaneously, seasonal pilgrimages of lowcountry planters to their upcountry resorts provided a genteel milieu in which Colhoun, Anderson, and their sort could prove their social equality as well.(9)

By the year of Stuart's birth, therefore, two groups of planters-those who, beginning after 1800, migrated annually from the lowcountry to relax in upcountry plantations, and those who immigrated in the late 1700s and survived the challenges of a frontier wilderness in order to establish property and prosperity-had overcome political differences and formed the genteel elite of the South Carolina backcountry. Together they dictated Pendleton's economic and social development and, over the next two decades, transformed the village from a unremarkable backcountry judicial center into a premier planters' resort. Indeed, the Pendleton of 1828, the year in which he penned his diary, was alien to Stuart's fond (yet, probably whitewashed) memories of its more rudimentary years. Reflecting on Pendleton's transformation, Stuart regretted how "I have often thought that a village life was far preferable to a rural one, but experience teaches me the contrary." A Sunday School Society, a Social Library, a Bible Society, a Female Scholarship Society, and the Pendleton Farmers' Society all formed with the blessings and patronage of the planters. St. Paul's Episcopal Church even closed during the winter when its minister and most of its congregants returned to their coastal homes; and the Hopewell-Keowee Presbyterian Church reduced its numbers of services.(10)

Despite the development of an upcountry planter class and the influx of lowcountry elites, the village and district demographically appeared strangely non-"Southern." By 1790, over 81 percent of Pendleton District's population was white, and the pattern only sightly moderated over the next thirty years: 88.6 percent in 1800, 84.6 percent in 1810, and 81.9 percent in 1820. Pendleton ranked as South Carolina's most ethnically homogenous district throughout the antebellum era. Yet, slaveownership remained a, if not the, defining factor in social status. Of fifteen families that constituted the core of Pendleton's societies and churches, only three were townsfolk and only six owned less than twelve slaves. In a district with such low slave populations, the leisure and position granted slaveowners was unignorable.(11)

The genteel institution that brought Pendleton society the most acclaim was the Pendleton Male Academy. Founded in 1825 to prepare students for admission to South Carolina College, the academy attracted students from throughout the state to its well-equipped classroom and substantial endowments. Henry K. McClintock assumed the headmastership and implemented a curriculum that emphasized classical and military education, the type of program that the school's trustees-John C. Calhoun, Thomas Pinckney, Francis K. Huger, David K. Hamilton-and other wealthy Carolina planters sought for their sons. Beyond the educational value, however, Southern college life provided a parental role synonymous to planter father-son relationships which instilled social values and distilled career decisions. Academies like Pendleton's continued the socialization process by providing an institutional expression of paternalism and a framework for cultural transmission. Fathers or guardians maintained control over the process by holding trusteeships or as conspicuous contributors to the academy's coffers. The influence of trustees normally extended from hiring faculty to setting rules for student behavior. Consequently, in the absence of a father, the academy and the college provided the paternal direction and controls imperative to success in Southern society.(12)

Academy education, therefore, held promise for Cyrus Stuart, as it had for his idol, the politician George McDuffie. It is somewhat peculiar that Edgefield District's McDuffie, not Pendleton resident and academy trustee John C. Calhoun, served as Cyrus's role model. Probably, Calhoun and Stuart met at least once: Calhoun enjoyed quizzing the academy's graduates at commencement ceremonies; and both Stuart and Calhoun claimed St. Paul's Church as their parish. Calhoun was of a different world, however; he inherited his wealth and social position from an elite upcountry family and, in 1828, after years in the United States Congress, challenged for the presidency. McDuffie, in contrast, heralded from meager origins in the South Carolina backcountry, and, as the son of a blacksmith, his political and social future had appeared as dubious as Cyrus saw his own. Sponsored by the elite Calhouns, McDuffie made his reputation in an Edgefield District academy, gained political and social stature, and, in 1828, became a United States congressman. He even practiced law in Pendleton for a brief time, so there is a possibility that he met Stuart. His accomplishments testified to the opportunity within Southern culture to rise above one's humble origins.(13)

Stuart likewise enjoyed a benefactor, James Overton Lewis, and a local academy that filled the educational and social vacuums of his life. Indeed, he had little reason to think he could not reach the same heights as McDuffie. Yet, his animosity towards the headmaster wounded Stuart's chances. When he contemplated McClintock's "partiality" to the other students (most of whom were planters' sons), "my hair rises on my head, and apparently stands erect, my passions enkindle and my blood boils along my arters and reverberates with incredible rapidity." The tension between the two increased so much that by April 1828, Stuart complained that McClintock "hyp[e]s me so, that I can scarcely continue to go to school with him." Daily interaction with the sons of wealthy planters increasingly impressed upon the gunsmith's son the folly of his aspirations: "I hear the boys express their sentiments upon different subjects, with Whom I did disagree in almost every instance." The strain between teaching assistant and teacher, and teaching assistant and students grew unbearable.(14)

McClintock was almost surely at fault to a large degree. He was an ineffectual headmaster and, despite increased enrollments, some trustees considered his tenure at the school as counterproductive. Upon entering West Point, Patrick Calhoun received a letter from his father, John C., regretting that "when I reflect how imperfectly prepared you were . . . I ought to be satisfied." Unhappy with McClintock's curriculum, Francis K. Huger withdrew both of his sons from the academy and refused to send his daughters to the Female Academy, an 1827 extension of the Male Academy that prepared girls for Southern motherhood. Pressures on McClintock to appease the wealthy supporters of the academy would have made Stuart's competitive attitude toward the other students an unwelcome distraction.(15)

Additionally, Stuart's years as an orphan made him too independent to engage in a relationship with any surrogate father. In his mind, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the need for a patriarchal figure became insignificant to personal development and achievement. Southern culture expected the family to prepare a son or daughter for his or her respective role in society. Parents guided children in decisions of career, marriage, education; children responded with deference and eagerness to fulfill their parents' plans. Stuart did not have that advantage. He described himself as "a poor orphan boy, whose education was egregiously neglected at the most susceptible period of life." He resented the absence of a family; he rejected the academic institution designed to supplement it; and he withheld his deference. Ultimately, this fractured relationship with the academy lay at the heart of Stuart's disenchantment with Southern genteel culture.(16)

A substitute camaraderie did form, however, in Stuart's friendship with James Overton Lewis whose support and advice helped him withstand the difficulties at the academy. Lewis was the son of Colonel Richard Lewis, a planter whose exploits in the Revolutionary War and participation in North Carolina's Constitutional Convention made him somewhat of a local celebrity. As the oldest son of a wealthy planter, Lewis was in a position to pay some of Stuart's tuition and to provide "all the good advice which thou thought requisite to guide me in the ways of men." James's sisters, Sarah Ann and Lindamira, eventually became the focus of Stuart's affections. Consequently, he spent many hours at the Lewis plantation, just east of Pendleton.(17)

As in George McDuffie's life, Stuart's connections to a planter family and his attendance at the local academy evidenced a window of opportunity for non-planters into planter culture. Pendleton's society was not a closed, static world; as throughout the South, mobility into and out of the planter class was conceivable. Stuart's desire and ability to participate in planter society, however peripheral, was unexceptional. But his rejection of the academy hinted of a growing disdain for the tenets of Southern patrician circles. Even as he aspired to their wealth and status, envy and animosity made it impossible for the young man to ever join the ranks of the social elites.(18)

Stuart's disenchantment with planter culture manifested in his preoccupation with wealth, written about repeatedly throughout the diary and a major theme in much of the literature that he read. "O! what a pitty [sic] it is that the two things Poverty and Pride should ever be united, they so crucify the feelings," he lamented. As the son of a gunsmith, Stuart did not have the money to enjoy the leisurely life he witnessed in the halls of plantation homes. His recognition of his own poverty elicited condemnations of the wealthy. He disliked lowcountry planters and their annual pilgrimages to Pendleton: "When they first come here the people think them the literate, but I do not, it is only because they have better society and habituates [sic] themselves to converse in company more." After a visit to William Hunter's plantation, "I observed some thing new to me, (i.e.) the jest of the rich are ever received with applause howsoever inspired they may be." Despite his close connections with the Lewis family, in their home, "I observed how influential men of high rank and wealth are, even when their talents are inferior to the ordinary." Stuart would not, could not, accept affluence itself as sufficient reason for deference and seemingly took satisfaction in knowing that "there is one consoling benison attendant on poverty, that the rich are prohibited from, that is the kingdom of heaven." Only George McDuffie elicited the diarist's praises, probably because the law proved more respectable to Stuart than other professions. Yet, even in his aspirations to the bar, Stuart still feared the trappings of wealth: "is it not aborring . . . to accumulate great wealth, for which he must inevitably barter my soul[?]"(19)

Actually, Stuart's rejection of wealth as a reason for deference betrayed his obsession with virtuous honor. "For I always intended to choose a wife, as she would her gown," he contemplated in early March; "not for the free glossy surface, but for such qualities as would wear well and with whom I could pass my life in moral and rural amusement with all the joy and satisfaction that is commonly obtained by mortals." Indeed, throughout the genteel South, the refinement that wealth could purchase often seemed antithetical to the virtue that money could not buy.(20)

Stuart's uncertainty about wealth and honor moved him one step closer to a radical critique of a planter culture that revered both. Politically, his rejection of aristocratic gentility made him a typical Jacksonian, situating him in conflict with many elite men of his district. Critics of the Southern patriarchy had long denounced its genteel arrogance as encroaching on egalitarian republican principles. Although, he recorded observations on both Henry Clay and John Q. Adams in his diary without partisan commentary, at the end of the journal Stuart kept a list of conundrums that confirm his image as a Jacksonian. He denounced Old Hickory's opponents:

A cobweb pair of breeches, a porcupine saddle, a long journey, and hard trotting horse to the enemies of Gen. Jackson.

May a limb of the huge hickory of the west fall upon Adams, and crush him to the clay from whence he came.

May the wheels of government never cease to run for want of a hickory axletree, nor its progress again be retarded by the clay of Kentucky.

Although Stuart's particular dislike for Clay was in concert with a nationwide denunciation of the Kentuckian for patronage distribution in the spring of 1828, the young man had clearly cast his political future with Jackson.(21)

The origins of Stuart's politics are not clear. His respect for Calhounite George McDuffie seemingly arose more from the senator's personal accomplishments rather than his political stance; and John C. Calhoun, favorite son of the South Carolina upcountry, received no mention from Stuart. His genuine disillusionment with planter society may offer some clues. Lowcountry planters controlled the reactionary factions of South Carolina politics; upcountry planters dominated the nationally-oriented Calhounites-politics of every brand were still the domain of the upper echelons of Southern society. Jacksonian democracy's exaltation of broader suffrage had yet to permeate South Carolina's political life. As an educated non-planter, Stuart keenly felt the political ostracism within his society. For this reason, Stuart's rhetoric was more egalitarian than the society in which he lived. "What is the race of mankind, but one family widely scattered upon the earth?" he pondered in March, "All men by nature are brothers, and should be naturally endeared to each other by a brother's love."(22)

Stuart did not speak of brotherly love from firsthand experience. He was seemingly incapable of establishing friendships with male peers. On occasion he fraternized at dinners or at the Pavilion Circus when it came to town, but Stuart never referred to other men as more than traveling companions or debate opponents. He mentioned his brother, John, only once when a canoe overturned in the Tennessee River killing John's wife and daughter. Stuart's discomfort with other men, especially at the academy, rivaled his dislike of the headmaster. Sadly, the evidence suggests that Stuart was a loner. He returned to the solitude of his room at Sarah Lorton's boarding house night after night, recording his "lucrubations" and dreaming of what never was to be. His awkwardness around women; his pride in his studies-in these regards, Stuart was the typical nineteenth-century male. But his failure to bond with those who shared his anxieties about becoming a Southern gentleman differentiated him.(23)

Apparently because he could not establish himself in the world of the Southern male, Stuart turned his attentions to the female realm. One method by which social mobility was most accessible to Southern youth was marriage across class lines. Although he never married, Stuart's courtship of Pendleton's planter daughters suggests that he aspired to such mobility. Yet, almost without exception, the women who Stuart met became "superhuman" so that he stumbled in speech and eventually left their company feeling a fool. Hence, although opportunity did exist for non-planters, their own deficiencies in etiquette worked against them. This curse, this anxiety over comfortably approaching women, became fixed in Stuart's psyche. Early in February, he wrote,

Now Flattery, with its silver tone, insidious smile and heartless scatters with unsparing hand its poisoned arrows where ever they may prove effectual to the attainments of its objects. Solomon says that "a flattering mouth worketh ruin." I think on itself, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, therefore, the heart must be replete with flattery and a heart full of flattery is like the house founded on the sand, which was overthrown when the winds and storms came.

Flattery and women became a recurring theme in Stuart's diary. His desperate need for affection slowly consumed Stuart's attentions so that, by June 1828, he abandoned completely his denouncement of flattery as a sinful and ruinous practice. In April, he resolved "to flatter every girl that I meet or converse with."(24)

Perhaps Stuart's uneasiness with women derived from his years as an orphan. The family elicited more sentiment in antebellum society than any other institution, including slavery. Protection and perpetuation of the family was a commanding ideal in Southern ideology. Society expected all members to draw upon explicit family ideologies. If the family were so essential to the emotional and mental development of Southern youth, then the reasons for Stuart's social ineptness in Southern society becomes more clear. The absence of a family as an example of a love relationship left Stuart with a cursory understanding of sexual interactions. He had no intimate preparation for life; his only training was in the formal education of the all-male academy.(25)

To complicate the situation, he discovered early the independent and unfathomable mind of the Southern belle. Without exception, belles captured the young man's attention and affection. Yet, his disdain for and exclusion from plantation society prevented him from fully understanding the rituals of courtship. Rejections, flirtations, and fickleness were all elements of the belles' world. He could not comprehend the coquetry and rebuffs he encountered from these planters' daughters.(26)

The status of belle offered a level of freedom that women could never recapture. Courtship was the one activity involving men that women largely controlled. Most took advantage of the opportunity to rise above their subordinate social and familial positions. One "charming nymph" who Stuart met at a local store, "commenced conversation and spoke with such facility and force, grace and refinement, that I was astonished and determined to go directly home and read the newspapers." Lindamira Lewis made "remarks and observations in my absence, which were intended to cast ridicule on me, as an opportunity presented of her making a display of her wit." On another occasion, Stuart sat with Mary Margaret Taliaferro, "alluring both in her features and manners";

Now as flattery was my trade, and I practiced it with the greatest ease imaginable, I thought I could insinuate myself into her favour, this I only hoped, for none every had a better nack [sic] of hoping than I have, but soon perceived from the cold water that she threw on me, that I would have to travel an immense distance before I could reach the climate of her favour.

On most occasions, that lesson repeatedly seemed to escape Cyrus Stuart: his journey would be long before he gained the favor of any Southern belle.(27)

The independence that these young women demonstrated in their dealings with Stuart reflected the latitude granted by parents. Courtship, after all, was a public affair. In the evening hours, "gentlemen escort the ladies almost continually. The ladies carress and flatter the gentlemen . . . enjoying themselves in the best manner." In Pendleton, possibly because it came only once every fourth year, February 29 was the "night which the ladies have the right and liberty of going to see their beaux." Yet, this latitude should not be interpreted too broadly. Pre-marital sex was not uncommon within the planter class, but it was not wise for young women to "give loose reigns to their brutal lust." Intense intimacy during courtship threatened ladies' virtue and discretion, a concern reiterated by Stuart: "any girl who will yield to man's colloquing flatteries becomes a compatible subject for their scoff and ridicule."(28)

Young people like Stuart could conquer timidity and avoid jeopardizing their reputations by resorting to "epistolary affairs." Courtships by correspondence temporarily removed the pressures of tête-a-tête relationships. In his love letters, Stuart conversed with the belles of his affections without suffering the embarrassments he so often faced. He sent a love letter to Rebecca Benson telling her that "to break the long cherished affiance would break my tender, amorous heart." His correspondence with a "Dulcinia" in Georgia elicited "a billet in which she declared that there was a deep and e[n]during affection in her heart toward me, which time would never erase." Yet, without recording a reason, he did not pursue this opportunity although he admitted that "it made my heart dilate with unutterable joy."(29)

But the love of Stuart's life arrived in late February when he attended a quilting bee in Lorton's boarding house "at which were several highly refined ladies," including Rebecca Whitner, "a perfect paragon for angelic indeed." She caught his eye and captured his heart. He sent an eighteen-verse poem in April that included the proposal of marriage:

Say charming, true-love wilt thou be

My comforter and mate,

And if thou wilt I'm sure that we

Our lives felicitate

Consent fair nymph I do implore

And let me not thy loss deplore.

Rebecca neither answered his request nor apparently those of other suitors: she never married. Her decision not to respond further hints of the power of the unmarried woman. The prolongation of courtship, even the avoidance of marriage, equated with continued independence and some degree of control over one's own life.(30)

The poem of proposal and Stuart's other courting rhetoric exemplified another pattern of Southern courtship associated with epistolary affairs. Men and women appreciated the revelation of feelings: a humorous, passionate, or melodramatic openness at which Stuart became adept. The knowledge of a courtier's intentions or a belle's feelings helped establish the relationship in its initial stages. Historian Steven Stowe explains that as "courtship was joined, a lover was caught up in a ritual almost like a paradox: one had to risk the game, guide it, cherish it, all the while searching for the single player who would free one from it." Stuart's difficulty lay in his inability to "risk the game." Although he could reveal his feelings to any woman and establish the relationship, he did not know what to say next. On 8 March, he visited the plantation home of Rebecca and Sarah Whitner, "two of the most beautiful, bewitching, elegant, etherial-minded girls every sent below the clouds." Of course, Rebecca was the object of his affection, but he soon realized that her own education outshone his: "Rebecca was too bright for me, yet I intend to study more than I have done heretofore and go back and see if she will excel me as far as she did this time." Unable to rely on substance in his blooming relationship with Rebecca Whitner, Stuart fell back upon "Flattery-of which it has been allowed by the best connoisseurs that their sex could digest a double draught." But flattery took him back to step one in the courtship ritual.(31)

An individual's ability to participate in the rituals of courtship further established his or her social role. For a young man already in a tenuous social position, repeated rejections and lost opportunities mired Stuart further into the middling level of the Southern social structure. He unhappily enunciated it best: "how very easy a crude cullion could win the affections of a woman provided he had a comfortable commorance, and treasures of gold." Unfortunately for Stuart, he had neither. Although he occasionally accompanied young ladies to and from church, escorted them on walks, and frequented their homes, Stuart never exceeded the playful flirtations of the early phase of courtship. Rather than showering his female acquaintances with gifts, Stuart relied on expressions of flattery and intimacy which, in a world where women could expect similar behavior in their homosocial relationships, proved unexceptional and counterproductive. In recording a dream, Stuart realized how unsuccessful he had been: after being elected to an office "of very considerable distinctions," he "joined in the holy bonds of matrimony, and O! delicious thought, I lay my neck upon her arms, and put my arm around her and reveled there with sweet kisses on her ruby lips, until We were both overcome by Morpheus. Yet, I woke alone, isolated, and still in celibacy."(32)

Initiation into Southern manhood, as Stuart discovered quickly and painfully, was a complex process. Without family, wealth, and social and courtship skills, he aspired to a status that required exceptional effort and extraordinary luck. But Stuart's education elevated him, at least in his mind, above the masses. He cringed at the crassness and violence common to cracker culture. On a "never to-be-forgotten day with me," Stuart witnessed the hanging of Uriah Sleigh whose intemperance led to murder. "O! to think that he would bring such disgrace and infamy upon himself and family, only for the love of spirits," bemoaned Stuart. But more shocking was the reaction of the crowd; "there was more dissipation in the village than had been in 12 months bef[or]e."(33)

While Stuart aspired to the gentility of planter society, he recoiled from the vulgarity of the common folk. On 23 February, he compared the village to "R.B.'s Godmother, remarked for its ignorance, credulity and superstition, for confidence went to market unpurchased and honesty was put up at auction, yet noboddy [sic] bought it." On saleday, Stuart expressed shock at the "deceitfulness & duplicity" exhibited by merchants and politicians. The latter, in particular, blurred the distinctions between gentility and vulgarity; an 1810 ad in the Pendleton Messenger explained:

SUPERB CATTLE SHEW!!!

On the 4^th of July next, at Pendleton Court-House, there will be, perhaps, the grandest shew of Cattle ever known in the brutal world. About one hundred NOHORNED BULLS of a species vulgarly called El-ct--n--r-ng C-nd-d-t-s will be there exhibited-This motley, MULEY, herd are mostly calves of our district, and have generally been shewn at our Regimental musters, with the unbounded applause of cake-women, fools, and drunkards!!

Stuart frowned upon the less genteel side of Pendleton society because he knew that if his attempts to enter planter society failed, he could easily slip downward into the unrefined masses. Consequently, he constantly reminded himself how very different he was from the majority; indeed, Stuart consciously removed himself from participation in village life.(34)

Unable to relieve the social pressures that he so keenly felt, Stuart became absorbed in his studies. Accordingly, he characterized those who did not educate themselves as foolish, lazy, and "under the superannuated weight of Superstition & Ease," a description that could apply to both the common and the refined in Stuart's mind. Education became crucial to the development of his self-esteem and identity: "nothing yields one so much happiness pure, holy, and unalloyed as Learning." As McClintock's curriculum demonstrated, the heart of Southern education was classical literature. Yet, Latin and Greek were not solely the domains of Southern intellectuals; the vocabularies of all white Southerners included classical names and phrases. Language rooted in the ancient republics gave substance to and validated a Southern culture increasingly under attack by Northern critics, and its own intellectuals.(35)

Interspersed among his Latin words and phrases was a string of Biblical allusions and religious expressions that relate another aspect of Southern vocabularies. At times, Stuart's journal entries developed into prayer: "Let thy son's sufferings be sufficient atonement for our forefather's disobedience, and through him may all mankind be saved, from torments eterne, and restor[e]d to eternal life." But more commonly, his religiosity emerged as inseparable from his common and classical language, as when he described Uriah Sleigh's execution on 22 February:

. . . But when I saw him strugling [sic] his last, I was shocked, vox haesit faucibus. I felt my blood to quiver, and run cold to my finger's end, I beheld his countenance grow palid [sic], and his blood curdled, and chilled as he was strugling [sic] with the last dissolving tie of nature, he soon gave up the ghost, but awful, awful to think that he most so quick appear at the tribunal of the great Jehovah to render an account of the deeds done by the body whilst still here.

But O! I hope he will meet a smiling Saviour who will say to him well done thou good and faithful servent [sic], thou hast been faithful over a few things, . . .(36)

With a substantial vocabulary of classical and religious language, Stuart believed himself well prepared to pursue what he considered the most honorable of activities: oratory. He appreciated, seemingly more than any other quality, the public speaking skills of men like George McDuffie and Henry Clay. Throughout the South, oratorical and literary associations formed at colleges and academies. Established before 1821, the Phileuphemion Society of Pendleton Academy met on Tuesday evenings. At these meetings, Stuart reveled in the recitations of the classics and belles lettres. Yet, orations were not merely speeches, but moments in which the speaker commanded respect by revealing his wisdom, virtue, and personality. Public demonstration of honor was the best way to exhibit one's learning within the context of Southern society. Stuart understood oration to be an opportunity to increase his own stature; in order to satisfy "an insatiable desire to acquire a facility in public speaking," he vowed to "attend to reading, conversation and reflection for reading enriches the memory, conversation polishes the mind, and reflection forms the judgement."(37)

Stuart's attempt to participate in this other institution of Southern gentility-the oration society-continued when, in July 1828, he moved from Pendleton to Elberton, Georgia. Although he ceased his diary entries in early June of 1828, he did record a copy of his sole speech to the Elberton Phileuphemion Society. Even on this occasion, however, when social acceptance depended upon the power of his oration, Stuart stumbled: "I have not given the subject the reflection due the importance which it merits," he apologized in the first sentence. He never finished writing a second speech.(38)

In Elberton, Stuart gained the approval of another established family. He tutored Jesse Marion Fortson, orphaned nephew of planter Richard Fortson. In return, the elder Fortson paid for Stuart's schooling in the last months of 1828 and first nine months of 1829. Stuart's possessions at the time-a bottle of ink, twenty-six books and a empty journal, an inkstand and paper, and a trunk-suggested his roles as plantation tutor and continuing student. Yet, his wardrobe reflected the sartorial style of an aspiring gentleman: a pair of boots and a pair of shoes, a blue frock coat, a brown dress coat, a black vest, two pairs of pantaloons, one pair of drawers, two shirts, socks, a morning gown, one pair of gloves, two hats, and suspenders.(39)

Then, in October 1829, at age twenty-one, Cyrus Stuart died. Doctor T.F. Gibbs, giving no details, assigned his death to an extended illness. Twenty months after Stuart celebrated his twentieth birthday by breaking the spine of a journal to record his dreams and anxieties, Elberton County's sheriff sold Stuart's possessions, including the diary, to pay medical and internment fees. Although Dr. Gibbs interpreted Stuart's death as natural, Stuart might have attributed it to

the ruins of a broken heart [which] cannot be amalgamated, the memories of that vision cannot be oblitterated [sic] from the soul. The votary pines away until its gentle spirit bids adieu to the treacheries of Earth and flits away to the bosom of its God.

Unmarried and still on the fringes of planter society, Stuart never accomplished the two goals he set for himself. The tragedy of his life was that he never recognized his own ambivalence towards the very gentility to which he aspired or the very anxieties that arrested his search for a wife; he never comprehended the futility of his efforts. He always had hope.(40)

Notes:

For their direction in the research and writing of this manuscript, the author thanks Theda Perdue, Lorri Glover, Steven Stowe, Michael Kohl of the Clemson University Special Collections, the staff of the Pendleton District Historical and Recreational Commission, Peggy Johnson at the Elberton County (Georgia) Public Library, Karen Ellenberg, and Diane Svarlien.

1. Pendleton (S.C.) Messenger, 12 August 1818; Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 3 March 1828, Special Collections, Clemson University, Clemson, S.C.

2. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 392, 398; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 88-89.

The theme of gentility permeates Southern history, historiography, and culture. The South is "traditionally genteel," writes Richard Bushman in his study of gentility in early America; Bushman, The Refinement of America, 390. Beginning with W.J. Cash's exploration of the Southern character in 1941, historians face the Southern past having to account for its aristocratic obsession with gentility; see Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941); Clement Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790-1860 (New York: Harper, 1960); Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson's Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964); William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: G. Braziller, 1961). Bertram Wyatt-Brown has done the most, however, to bind honor and gentility to "Southernness." In Southern Honor, Wyatt-Brown elaborates on an informal conventional wisdom that permeated all of white Southern society, serving to define gender roles, family relations, the political arena, and ideas about community.

3. Bushman, Refinement of America, 390-91; DeBow's Review 29 (1860): 613-14. Merchants and tavernkeepers were not hesitant to advertise their genteel offerings. William Robertson wished to "inform the public and particularly those Gentlemen from the Lower Country" of his boarding house; Taylor and Cherry's mercantile promoted its "elegant assortment of Lady's, Gentlemen's, and Children's Fashionable Hats" recently arrived from Philadelphia; see Miller's (Pendleton, S.C.) Weekly Messenger, 16 January, 2 May 1808.

4. Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: the South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 89; David R. Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1982), 32; Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 28; Michael Steven Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 5-9; Hurley Badders, Pendleton Historical District: A Survey (Pendleton, S.C.: Pendleton District Historical and Recreational Commission, 1973), 23.

For an excellent study of the significance of villages and towns to the primarily rural South, see Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, "The Village South," in Small Worlds, Large Questions: Explorations in Early American Social History, 1600-1850, ed. Darrett B. Rutman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 231-272. Also, Joan N. Sears, "Town Planning in White and Habersham Counties, Georgia," Georgia Historical Quarterly 54 (1970): 23-25.

5. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 6 March 1828; J.W. Babcock, ed., "Diary of Edward Hooker, 1805-1808," American Historical Association Proceedings (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1897), 902.

6. Lawrence Fay Brewster, Summer Migrations and Resorts of South Carolina Low-Country Planters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1947), 1-2; "Reminiscences," Mary Ester Huger File, Special Collections, Clemson University, Clemson, S.C.

7. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1970), 6; Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 172; Carville Earle, "Why Tobacco Stunted the Growth of Towns and Wheat Built Them into Small Cities: Urbanization South of the Mason-Dixon Line, 1650-1790," in Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems, ed. Carville Earle (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 94-96.

8. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States 1790: South Carolina (Baltimore: Southern Book Co., 1952); William Johnson, quoted in Lacy K. Ford, "Yeoman Farmers and the South Carolina Upcountry: Changing Production Patterns in the Late Antebellum Period," Agricultural History 60 (1986): 22; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 113, 238-68.

9. Babcock, "Diary of Edward Hooker," 902; Robert Anderson, quoted in Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 156, also 255-56.

10. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 17 March 1828; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 65-6; Sarah Edith Ann Smith Mills Reminiscences, Special Collections, Clemson University.

11. Julian J. Petty, The Distribution of Wealth and Population in South Carolina (Columbia: South Carolina State Council for Defense, 1943), Appendix F. Between 1800 and 1820, Pendleton District's slaveholding households increased by less than 3 percent. Of the 833 slaveholders in Pendleton District in 1820, 560 owned no more than five slaves. Only 1 percent, or thirty-three families, owned at least twenty slaves. Although indicative of the opportunity generated by the cotton boom of the early 1800s, the established planter elite obviously gained the most from the expansion of cotton and slaves; see Ford, "Yeoman Farmers," 23.

A comparison of memberships in the Bible Society, the Sunday School Society, the Female Scholarship Society, and the Social Library, evidences a core of fifteen prominent families in Pendleton's societal life whose relationships, as Darrett Rutman described, "were multistranded in the sense that one dealt with the same group of 'others' over and over again and in a variety of ways"; Rutman, "Community: A Sunny Little Dream,' in Rutman, ed., Small Worlds, Large Questions, 293. Those families, determined by their participation in two or more organizations, were the Lewis (47 slaves), Anderson (39), Pinckney (33), Story (24), Dart (20), Cherry (18), Whitner (18), Gaillard (15), Harris (12), North (8), Benson (5), Grisham (3), Sharpe (0), Ross (unknown), and Walker (unknown) families; compiled from Federal Census 1820: South Carolina, Pendleton District; Caroliniana Committee, Records of the Pendleton Sunday School Society, 1819-1824 (Columbia: University of South Caroliniana Library, 1936); Pendleton Social Library Society, Special Collections, Clemson University, Clemson, S.C.; Addie S. Vance, cop., Pendleton Female Academy, Pendleton, S.C. (Columbia: Work Projects Administration, 1936); and Pendleton Messenger, 18 October, 13 September 1820.

12. Miller's Weekly Messenger, 1 October 1807; Edgar W. Knight, Public Education in the South (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1922), 75-77; Contract with headmaster, Dr. James H. Saye Papers, Special Collections, Clemson University; John C. Calhoun to Sylvanus Thayer, 28 July 1828, in Robert L. Meriwether, The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 11 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959), 10: 405; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "The Ideal Typology and Antebellum Southern History," Societas 5 (1975): 5-28; Jon L. Wakelyn, "Antebellum College Life and the Relations between Fathers and Sons," in The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family & Education, eds. Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 111.

Pendleton Male Academy had its origins in the Pendleton Circulating Library Society, a social organization formed in 1808 to supply literature to its members. In 1811, the South Carolina legislature authorized the library to raise funds through a lottery of public lands in Pendleton. Although in 1814 the library commissioners received permission to reform the library into a school, it was not until 1825 that the state incorporated the Pendleton Male Academy; see Albert Glenn, "The Pendleton Male Academy" (unpublished manuscript, 1967), Special Collections, Clemson University.

13. Goodman G. Griffin to John C. Calhoun, 13 April 1822, in Meriwether, Papers of John C. Calhoun, 7: 31; Burton, In My Father's House, 67.

14. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 15 March, 22 April, 2 June 1828. A complete list of Stuart's fellow students is not extant. Among the "school boys" of 1828 were Andrew Pickens Calhoun, Joseph Galuchat, Cleland Kirloch Huger (son of Francis K. Huger), Peter Charles Gaillard (son of James Gaillard), and William Henry Drayton Gaillard (son of Peter Gaillard)-all except Calhoun came from coastal South Carolina to study in Pendleton; Academies File, Pendleton District Historical and Recreational Commission.

15. John C. Calhoun to Patrick Calhoun, 9 June 1841, in Meriwether, Papers of John C. Calhoun, 15: 559; Mary Stevenson, ed., The Recollection of a Happy Childhood (Pendleton: Foundation for Historic Restoration in Pendleton Area, 1976), 22; Vance, Pendleton Female Academy, Pendleton, S.C., 1; Glenn, "Pendleton Male Academy," 4; "Reminiscences," Mary Ester Huger File. For the changing purpose for women's education in the late-1820s South, see "'Grown Girls, Highly Cultivated': Female Education in an Antebellum Southern Family," Journal of Southern History 64 (1998): 23-64.

16. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 8 February 1828.

17. R.W. Simpson, The History of Old Pendleton District (Covington, Tenn.: Bradford Publishing Co., 1970), 166-167; Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 4 April 1828.

18. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 67.

19. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 10 February, 26 February, 10 March, 19 May, 20 May, 23 May 1828.

20. Ibid., 1 March 1828.

21. Ibid., "Conundrums"; Bushman, Refinement of America, 390; Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Spokesman for the West (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988), 315. For an analysis of South Carolina's political culture, see Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, especially 120-127. Ford suggests that the state's political climate was controlled by Radicals and National Republicans (or Calhounites), apparently neither of which Stuart appreciated.

22. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 120-130; Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 21 March 1828.

23. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 58-61.

24. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 7 February, 27 April 1828.

25. Oakes, The Ruling Race, 60.

26. Guion Griffis Johnson, "Courtship and Marriage Customs in Antebellum North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review 8 (1931): 384; Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 128; Rotundo, American Manhood, 111-16.

27. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 11 February, 13 February, 24 February 1828; Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 61-63.

28. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 29 February, 12 May, 27 May 1828. For a brief discussion of premarital sexual relationships within the planter class, see Johnson, "Courtship and Marriage Customs," 392-393.

29. Steven M. Stowe, "'The Thing Not Its Vision': A Woman's Courtship and Her Sphere in the Southern Planter Class," Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 119; Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 18 February, 19 February 1828; Simpson, History of Old Pendleton, 216.

30. Ibid., 26 February 1828, "A Piece sent to Miss Rebecca Whitner"-April 1828; Simpson, History of Old Pendleton District, 170.

31. Stowe, Intimacy and Power, 93; Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 8 March 1828.

32. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 13 May, 29 May 1828; Stowe, Intimacy and Power, 96; idem, "The Thing," 119-123.

33. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 22 February 1828; Beth Ann Klosky, The Pendleton Legacy (Columbia, S.C.: Sandlapper Press, 1971), 34. Wyatt-Brown provides a brief analysis of Southern intellectuals in Southern Honor, 92-99.

34. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 23 February 1828, 3 March 1828; Pendleton Messenger, 23 June 1810.

35. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 16 February 1828; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 92-94.

36. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 21 March 1828, 22 February 1828; Edward R. Crowther, "Holy Honor: Sacred and Secular in the Old South," Journal of Southern History 58 (1992): 617-36. "Vos haesit faucibus": "my voice stuck in my throat."

37. Pendleton Messenger, 25 April 1821; Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 12-13; Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 27 February 1828.

38. Diary of Cyrus Stuart, "Speeches to the Phileuphemion Society, Elberton, Geo."

39. Elbert County Will Book N, Court of Ordinary Mixed Records, Elbert County Court House, Elberton, Geo.; Elbert County Will Book 1830-1835, Office of the Probate Judge, Elbert County Court House, 119-120.

40. Pendleton Messenger, 28 October 1829, 3; Elbert County Will Book 1830-1835, 119-120; Diary of Cyrus Stuart, 7 June 1828.