Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in Backcountry South Carolina, 1750-1805
Traditional though it was, however, William Richardson's world was not the static, isolated backwater commonly associated with the colonial backcountry. The Waxhaws was, in fact, a bustling community, dynamic and evolving, constantly in motion, responding to the push and pull of global markets, population pressures, and impe rial politics. In the years following Richardson's sudden death at age forty-two indeed, even as he lay dead in his upstairs study on a hot July evening in 1771 - these and other, more subtle, forces were working to transform his World. Farmers bound themselves increasingly to creditors as consumption increased and the Waxhaws was integrated into the regional commodities market. A new stream of immigrants intro duced class, neighborhood, and religious tensions that tended to paralyze the once unified and dynamic congregation. Population growth, changing land 'markets, and out-migration eroded the kin-based neighborhoods, just as surely as slavery and commercial farming weakened the web of neighborly dependencies that framed the local exchange economy. And fading memories of an Anglican establishment diluted the sectarian identity of the rising generation and opened it to new and controversial forms of religious experience. Thus while the memory of Richardson's remarkable piety and devotion to God lingered for more than a quarter century after his death, the world he inhabited changed profoundly in this same period. By 1800 it more closely resembled the slaveholding, staple-producing world of the South than the yeoman communities its early settlers had left behind in the mid-atlantic region.
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