Ablaze: The 1849 White Supremacist Attack on the Pendleton Post Office

Ignition

In Pendleton, South Carolina, 1849, John B. Sitton had a difficult decision to make. He knew his neighbors were angry at him. He had a position as a postmaster with a small stipend. That job put him at the center of every local event, decision, and dispute. He was situated, too, in the very center of town on the Pendleton Green. The central post office, one of the largest in the area, operated out of the prominent Farmers Hall behind substantial white columns, a Greek revival building that couldn't be missed. The authority of the postmaster and the strength of the federal government, which accorded him power, was underscored by the placement of the post office.

Sitton knew that some of his white neighbors had recently received unwelcome antislavery pamphlets in the mail. Word had spread that there were likely many more of such scurrilous materials in the sack behind his counter, waiting to be sorted and picked up. Pendleton's newly formed "Executive Committee on Vigilance and Safety," which had been established thanks in part to encouragement by their local political luminary, John C. Calhoun, was now fired up.¹Stephen A. West sketches out the evolution of these Calhoun-inspired vigilance committees in From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 53–55. See also West's article entitled "Minute Men, Yeomen, and the Mobilization for Secession in the South Carolina Upcountry," The Journal of Southern History 71, no. 1 (2005): 75–104. The most thorough and broad context for this incident can be found in Manisha Sinha's book, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), especially chapter 3, "The Discourse of Southern Nationalism," 63–94. Her specific mention of Barrett can be found on page 80, in which Sinha persuasively characterizes the leaders of this movement to create viliance committees as essentially "potentates" seeking to suppress all "unorthodox" views on slavery. Here I wish to fold the role of Black witness back into the analysis because they were an implicit part of the policed audience for this bonfire.

What followed might seem merely like a small, local action: Pendletonians gathered on the village green and read aloud excerpts from offending documents, ran into the post office, and roughly pushed aside Sitton, who was trying to defend, perhaps half-heartedly, the mail. The white villagers found what they sought. On Pendleton Green, the mob burned thirty-eight pamphlets that were literally and figuratively "incendiary."²For a sense of how the word "incendiary" became a defining legal term in this context see Richard R. John, "Hiland Hall's 'Report on Incendiary Publications': A Forgotten Nineteenth Century Defense of the Constitutional Guarantee of the Freedom of the Press," The American Journal of Legal History 41, no. 1 (1997): 94–125.

At first glance, this event might seem inconsequential for the town. Although antislavery newspapers in the North picked up the story, there seem to have been no further episodes of collective burnings in Pendleton. No one appears to have held any ill will against Sitton, the postmaster. Indeed, he was elected mayor a few years later. This event occurred twelve years before the Civil War and was more of a symptom of growing tension than a cause of further rupture. Overall, the event reinforced how righteous white Pendletonians wanted to see themselves as on the vanguard of a battle, defending their way of life against anyone who might see things differently. In particular, it represented something unique about the place and the space—the town elites of Pendleton were insistent about policing ideas that might reach the less elite white neighbors.³West argues in From Yeomen to Redneck that this type of upstate vigilantism was largely carried out by the slaveholding elites and was "aimed to censor political expression that appealed to the interests of non-slaveholders"; for this region of South Carolina, West argues that "it appears more a an attempt by members of the slaveholding minority to police opinions among the slaveless majority," West, Yeoman to Redneck, 65.

And yet, the event was enormously consequential for a young man from Ohio, John M. Barrett. As those pamphlets burned, he sat in jail in nearby Spartanburg County throughout the summer heat. There he was abused and terrorized into giving up a story of those mailings and how they had found their way into the hands of citizens across South Carolina. He never fully took responsibility for these mailings, perhaps because he knew the terrible penalties for such a "crime." Still, the evidence made it clear to his allies and enemies that he was indeed involved in the scheme. Before he could confess or take on the mantle of hero or martyr, Barrett died while out on bail awaiting trial. Newspapers in Indiana, where he died, reported this as a consequence of his suffering in Spartanburg.⁴The jail time in Spartanburg is linked to Barrett's death in his obituary as reported in New Castle (IN) Courier, reprinted in Indiana State Sentinel (Indianapolis), April 11, 1850.

And the event was consequential, too, for the enslaved population of Pendleton, who knew and saw what was happening. The bonfire was a public spectacle for Black people, as well as any white dissenters. It was a calculated warning.

This essay explores the broader context of these events by understanding the initial spate of mailings that happened in 1835. This examination includes the author and instigator of these mailings, William Henry Brisbane; the Calhounist culture of Pendleton, SC, that fueled this particular demonstration; the sad fate of the young man, John M. Barrett, who was caught up in the materials' distribution; and the people held captive in the middle of it all, the enslaved men, women, and children of Pendleton.

Test Run: 1835 Antislavery Mail Campaign

Arthur and Lewis Tappan, a Massachusetts pair of evangelical philanthropists, directed much of their money to activist causes, particularly towards antislavery organizations and endeavors. In 1835, the Tappan brothers funded an extraordinary undertaking: they helped the American Anti-Slavery Society send unsolicited abolitionist messages, newspapers, and tracts to many ministers, prominent business people, and public figures in several states below the Mason–Dixon line. This brash endeavor might well have been, to use the words of one historian, "[a campaign that] sparked the country's first crisis over postal content."⁵Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 75. See also Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 257–58.

While mailings fanned out across various states, it was in South Carolina that they were met with the most dramatic fury.⁶For an overview of how this was received in different states, see Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, "The Abolitionists' Postal Campaign of 1835," The Journal of Negro History 50, no. 4 (1965): 227–386. When a large bundle of them arrived at the Charleston Post Office in late July, some were delivered, but several recipients returned them to the post office with umbrage. Knowing there were more bundles of such mailings in the post office's possession and likely more about to arrive, Postmaster Alfred Huger, an enslaver himself, was flummoxed, caught between his federal duties and his angry white constituency.⁷For an overview of the 1835 abolitionists' postal campaign, see Susan Wyly-Jones, "The 1835 Anti-Abolition Meetings in the South: A New Look at the Controversy over the Abolition Postal Campaign," Civil War History 47, no. 4 (2001): 289–309. Also Hollis Robbins, "Fugitive Mail: The Deliverance of Henry 'Box' Brown and Antebellum Postal Politics," American Studies 50, no. 1/2 (2009): 5–25.

Aside from activist abolitionists, many political figures, even those who often clashed, could come to some shared perspectives— President Andrew Jackson advocated a federal law that would authorize censoring abolitionist mail.⁸Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 250. Senator John C. Calhoun argued that congressional legislation required northern postal officials to obey southern state legislation that prohibited transmission of abolitionist texts. He saw this as a power derived not from the Constitution but from states' rights and nullification, which were issues dear to Calhoun's heart.⁹Richard R. John, "Hiland Hall's 'Report on Incendiary Publications'", 99.

Postmaster Huger stalled before eventually deciding to have the abolitionist materials, including copies of the Emancipator newspaper, set aside in a distinct and separate bag. To no one's surprise, vigilantes calling themselves "The Lynch Men" broke into the post office. They burned the offending materials along with an effigy of antislavery activist William Lloyd Garrison. Torch-lit parades to protest these mailings were then held in towns throughout South Carolina.¹⁰Devin Leonard, Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service (New York: Grove Press, 2017), 25. See also Wyly-Jones, "A New Look," 289–309. As an 1835 lithograph suggests, the riot was well-publicized, and a gauntlet was now thrown: slavery advocates demanded mail censorship.¹¹Attack on the Post Office, Charleston, SC, 1835, political cartoon, 15.0 x 18.5 cm, The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, https://americanantiquarian.org/earlyamericannewsmedia/items/show/48.

Calhoun's bill was narrowly defeated, but the controversy was directly associated with him—something that northern skeptics and southern supporters were not willing to forget. White South Carolinians knew their course of action when the next abolitionist mailing campaign occurred.

The Firebrand: William Henry Brisbane

Nothing intrigues more than that which is banned. The burnings attracted attention that occasionally thwarted rioters' goals. Abolitionist pamphlets and newspapers and the growing debates over eradicating slavery contributed to a battle for minds. Certainly, too, the white supremacists' bonfires would have affected the Black people who watched or heard about them, signaling to the enslaved that there was opposition elsewhere, that people in bondage weren't alone but had allies in the broader world. That notion was precisely what had stoked the greatest fears of the Charleston "Lynch men": the possibility that abolitionist tracts might incite violent slave uprisings.¹²Wyly-Jones, "A New Look," 1.

One person who stumbled into conversations about abolition was the Reverend William Henry Brisbane (1806–1878) of Beaufort, South Carolina. A man of inherited wealth and property with considerable holdings that included men, women, and children, he found he could not fully counter abolitionist arguments and gradually came to denounce slavery. Eventually, he liberated most of the people he had control over and went on to help many of them relocate with him, as free people, to Ohio. Brisbane renounced his slaveholding past and joined with antislavery activists in the Midwest and nationally to rail against the cruelties of slavery.¹³See Blake McNulty, "William Henry Brisbane: South Carolina Slaveholder and Abolitionist," in The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture, eds. Walter J. Fraser Jr. and Winifred B. Moore Jr. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), 119–129. Also see a characteristic letter from Brisbane pledging to support captives through an Anti-Slavery Society effort. William Brisbane to Lewis Tappan, January 23, 1841, Doc. no. F1-4881, American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA.

Having been converted to the antislavery movement partly because of his own exposure to abolitionist pamphlets and arguments in the 1830s, Brisbane eventually aided the cause by authoring his speeches, sermons, and tracts, often with very pointed arguments for those South Carolinians he felt were vulnerable to persuasion.¹⁴Brent J. Morris, "'We Are Verily Guilty Concerning Our Brother': The Abolitionist Transformation of Planter William Henry Brisbane," South Carolina Historical Magazine 111, no. 3/4 (2010): 123.

Brisbane began to draft opinions under the pseudonyms of "Brutus," "A True South Carolinian," and other aliases that targeted non-slaveholding white men, particularly those from the inland and upcountry regions of the state (including Pendleton and its adjacent districts and counties)—all areas which featured less dense populations and far less concentrated wealth than was found in the coastal or "Lowcountry" region. The three most northwest counties of the state (Oconee, Anderson, and Pickens—often understood as the "Pendleton District") were perceived as being vulnerable to arguments that might appeal to white citizens feeling unrepresented or disenfranchised by the dominance of the planter politics of the state. Brisbane hoped to win "upstate" or "upcountry" South Carolina citizens over to the antislavery cause by arguing that their own best interests were to resist the political power of the class of elite enslavers and to embrace free labor.¹⁵The antislavery pamphlet, "An Address to the Citizens of South Carolina," by "Brutus" circulated in the 1849 campaign (and was actually found with John M. Barrett in Spartanburg). The pamphlet was included in his indictment. State v. John Barrett,
Spring Term 1851, Roll #17, Spartanburg County Court of General Sessions, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC.

These were hardly radical diatribes. They didn't reference immediate abolition and didn't dwell on the inhumane practices of slavery. But that was the point; these liberal pronouncements against injustices burdening the life of white southerners were designed to pique the interest of otherwise indifferent or complacent citizens.

Brisbane, along with other activists from northern states, planned to launch another wave of mailings that would not overtly advocate emancipation, but would primarily rail against the injustices of a state ruled by an elite. He also hoped this would skirt around some of the further restrictions passed after the 1835 campaign. He and his co-conspirators recruited a young man from Indiana, John M. Barrett, to travel through South Carolina, gathering names and addresses and facilitating the mailings, all under the guise of a "Gazetteer," collecting innocuous data for commercial reference work. 

Using information and addresses supplied by Barrett, several of Brisbane's tracts were mailed to South Carolinians in 1849. Most of these did not directly advocate for the immediate abolition of slavery, much less urge uprisings or rebellions. Materials authored by Brisbane and later found in the Spartanburg post office were quoted by the Spartan as pointing out that "the great mass of citizens of the State have no PERSONAL INTEREST in slaves, and they know that the benefits of the institution are confined to a very small number of the whole white population."¹⁶"The Rev. Wm Henry Brisbane, The Traitor," Spartan, (Spartanburg, SC), April 24, 1849, reprinted in Liberator (Baltimore, MD), October 19, 1849.

As characterized by the New York Tribune, the materials Barrett was accused of circulating materials that decried "the inequality of representation between the strong slaveholding and comparatively non-slaveholding portions of the state; the rigid monopoly of office by the great slaveholders; the degraded condition and gloomy prospects of the white freemen of South Carolina who do not own slaves, etc."¹⁷"Law in South-Carolina," New York Tribune, reprinted in Lancaster (PA) Examiner, August 1, 1849. As this paper continued: "as there is no such thing as answering the facts set forth in them [the materials found with Barrett], the slaveholders have sought to keep them from being read."¹⁸"Law in South-Carolina." The New York Tribune indignantly pointed out that Barrett had not advocated for abolition at all: "[Barrett] is accused of . . . enlightening the White Non-Slaveholders of South Carolina with regard to the glaring oppressions to which they are subjected by reason of the dominance of Slavery."¹⁹"Law in South-Carolina."

Regardless of such indirect arguments or the northern interpretations of the events, white South Carolinians in power knew a threat when they saw one. Being in possession of Brisbane's work could carry with it a death sentence.²⁰David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 7 (Columbia, SC: A.S. Johnston, 1840), 389–90. According to Act 15, theft of an enslaved person was a felony without benefit of clergy, which at that time meant that if convicted, you would be whipped, branded, or "suffer death as a felon."

The Spy: John M. Barrett

John M. Barrett (1825–1850) was, by his own admission, a passionate Free Soiler. He opposed the expansion of slavery into the United States' free territories and was generally aligned with abolitionist sentiment. Although he was only twenty-three, he agreed to undertake a covert and dangerous mission alone. The Anti-Slavery Society of Ohio, inspired by the 1835 campaign and with the leadership of the Reverend William Henry Brisbane, who by now had relocated to Ohio, sent young Barrett traveling throughout South Carolina. His job was to gather names of prominent clergymen, businessmen, and other white citizens, both those who enslaved people and those who did not.²¹One overview of the Barrett story can be found in William Sherman Savage, The Controversy over the Distribution of Abolition Literature (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1938), 115–6. A more recently scholarly study can be found in Chapter Two, "Forging a United People," in West, Yeoman to Redneck, 46–65. 

The plan seems to be that he would gather information and names of these influential people at various locales and send that information back to his handlers in Ohio, who would generate mailings. Occasionally his handlers would mail him things directly and ask him to forward post them on their behalf. In each imagined scenario, Barrett would be sure to leave town weeks before any incendiary mailings might arrive. This plan left Barrett vulnerable, alone, and far from any rescue if he attracted local attention.

Initially, things seemed to work as intended: post offices across the state received an onslaught of pamphlets. But authorities caught on fairly quickly: first in Columbia, where a warrant was issued for Barrett's arrest. He then turned up in Winnsboro. There he was let loose for lack of evidence.²²Morris, "Abolitionist Transformation," 40. Likely in Apil 1849, he made his way through Anderson County and the Pendleton District. When he reached Spartanburg, a letter from Columbia warning that he might make an appearance arrived with local officials. They detained and arrested Barrett when a letter directed to him (under a pseudonym) was found to contain what one paper termed "celebrated incendiary publications."²³McNulty, "William Henry Brisbane," 124–5. See also "Abolitionist Arrested," North Star (Rochester, NY), July 20, 1849. Vague and clumsy references to letters in code and cyphers in his correspondence directed to Barrett made his situation look damning. One newspaper from North Carolina noted that if it hadn't been for clumsy cyphers, the entire affair would have seemed quite innocent.²⁴See "Espionage in the Mails," Raleigh (NC) Register, reprinted in North Star (Rochester, NY), October 5, 1849, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026365/1849-10-05/ed-1/?sp=1&r=0.086,0.73,0.275,0.143,0.

When local law officials found Barrett at Colonel R. C. Poole's Spartanburg hotel, the suspect materials, including a "Brutus" tract railing about the disproportionate political power of slaveowners and some cryptic letters from a "B.H.W." were hard to explain away.²⁵Brutus, "An Address to the Citizens of South Carolina." See also the advertisement for Poole's hotel in Spartanburg. "Mansion House," Spartan (Spartanburg, SC), August 18, 1844.. Nor was it difficult to establish that William Henry Brisbane was the author (especially after Brisbane published a confused defense of Barrett and inadvertently confirmed his involvement).²⁶See Brisbane's letter in the National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), September 6, 1846. In it he ends with a rather incriminating postscript: "Perhaps at some future time I shall be at liberty to communicate with your readers some things connected with this affair that I cannot now do without a breach of private confidence." While Barrett might have been able to explain possessing antislavery materials, explaining away evidence of a conspiracy to distribute such materials was going to be a fraught defense.²⁷See "The Rev. Wm Henry Brisbane, The Traitor," Spartan, reprinted in Liberator (Baltimore, MD), October 19, 1849, and Keowee (SC) Courier, August 4, 1849.

As had happened with Postmaster Huger in Charleston in 1835, the hapless postmaster of Spartanburg, George W. H. Legg, was now caught in the middle of the controversy as he, too, refused to turn over the mail to unauthorized recipients who demanded it for inspection. By August of 1849, a warrant for Legg's arrest was issued, and he was held at least briefly in the same jail as Barrett. Legg, unlike Barrett, was quickly able to post bond.²⁸Legg's ability to post bond is recounted in "More Nullification" from the New York Tribune, reprinted in Brooklyn (NY) Eagle, July 31, 1849. And while he was free, everyone waited for clear directions from the federal authorities, including the attorney general, about policy.²⁹"Violation of Private Letters," Boston (MA) Evening Transcript, August 11, 1849. See also John, "Hiland Hall's 'Report on Incendiary Publications'," 275.

Barrett sat in the Spartanburg jail throughout the summer. And while he sat there, more unwelcome pamphlets and documents began to arrive across the state, stirring up fury and reviving or launching many local vigilance committees. These committees were well organized and increasingly militant.³⁰West, Yeoman to Redneck, 53–55. The Spartanburg Committee announced that "our object will be to prevent by all means in our power the spread of these abolitionist writings among our people if harsh means be necessary 'we will not hesitate to use them,' and any incendiary hereafter caught, may expect rough treatment—by this Committee."

They signaled their threats to lynch Barrett or any others: "In carrying out the views of the duties imposed on us, we may in some instances have to rise above the Law."³¹"Fellow Citizens," Pickens Keowee (SC) Courier, September 22, 1949. The Liberator quoted Brisbane stating that John Barrett had been threatened with death, "law or no law," and that if he were to stand for trial, Barrett would be sure to face "Lynch's law."³²Brisbane, "The Value of the Union," Crisis (Boston, MA), reprinted in Liberator (Baltimore, MD), January 11, 1850.

While there were some contrary expressions, on the whole, white South Carolinians followed the story with indignation and increasing fury.³³See "Espionage in the Mails" for a conciliatory editorial from North Carolina arguing that mail censorship was a bad precedent. And even though the disseminated materials promoted the Brisbane-style of argument that white non-slaveholders should oppose slavery because it disproportionately empowered elites, several newspapers in southern states assessed this argument as likely to incite rebellions and uprisings among the enslaved. The Charleston Daily Courier wrote: "There can be no doubt remaining but that this said John Barrett, is an emissary sent amongst us to further the Hellish purposes of the Abolitionists."³⁴"Another Letter," Charleston (SC) Daily Courier, June 18, 1849.

As the story developed, reporters who visited Barrett noted his ill health. A letter from him to his family was republished by the North Star in October of 1849 in which, perhaps to save his life, Barrett continued to assert his innocence and denied any knowledge of Brisbane. He was despairing, though, writing: "I almost feel that I am never to enjoy much happiness in this world. It seems to me that I am doomed to be a companion with misfortune in my course of life."³⁵Barrett's letter to his father, Centerville (OH) Sentinel, reprinted in North Star (Rochester, NY), October 12, 1849.

After several months, his father came down to South Carolina and finally secured his release by paying $200 in fees and posting $1,000 bail. Barrett never returned to Spartanburg for trial. He died a few months after returning to Indiana. As the New Castle Courier reported:

". . . [he was] collecting matter for a Gazetteer, to procure certain statistical information for them in South Carolina. Soon after his advent in the State, he was so unfortunate as to fall under the suspicion of the authorities as an abolition emissary from the North, engaged in disseminating abolition tracts and documents. On this suspicion, he was arrested at Greenville and thrown into prison, where he remained for several months. When finally liberated on bail, he returned home, the very ghost of his former self-broken down in spirit and a fatal disease seated and gnawing at his vitals."³⁶"Death of John M. Barrett, Esq.," New Castle (IN) Courier, reprinted in Indiana State Sentinel (Indianapolis), April 11, 1850.

The paper goes on to explain:

"Long confinement in a damp and unwholesome prison, want of exercise, and, above all, the chafing of a noble spirit under wrong and injustice—had well nigh completed the work commenced by disease, and he was barely allowed time to return home, to tell his friends of his entire innocence of the charge that had been alleged against him and then to lie down quietly in the bosom of home, and render up his spirit to Him who gave it— another victim to the dark and bloody spirit of Slavery, whose path is strewn with human lives and crushed hopes and bleeding affections, and the fearful aggregation of every human wo [sic] and misery."³⁷"Death of John M. Barrett, Esq."

Perhaps because Barrett never lived to see a resolution to his case and died while still professing his innocence rather than admitting guilt, he was never identified or honored as a prominent martyr for the antislavery cause. There was little recognition for his sacrifice aside from a few comments here and there, often quoting the New Castle Courier notice excerpted above. However, his co-conspirators, including Brisbane, would have carried the memory of Barrett's sacrifice with them for the rest of their lives.

The Outraged: Pendleton in 1849

Rumors and truths about Barrett reached towns across the state (often before any mail did). Citizens in Pendleton could read aloud to each other accounts of the unfolding drama of Barrett and the Spartanburg Post Office. They were keyed up for anything untoward that might appear. And then it did. 

The Pendleton Messenger reported:

"We had quite a stir in our village on Friday lest, when the Southern mail was delivered . . . Col. William Sloan was among the first to receive his, and upon examination, he found a printed, post marked Boston, mailed as a letter, charged with ten cents postage, signed Junius, and addressed to the Hon. John C. Calhoun of the most malicious, offensive, and insulting character to the Southern people. This document was read by Colonel Sloan aloud, and it produced much excitement among the persons assembled."³⁸See the August 17, August 21, September 21, and October 5, 1849 issues of the Pendleton Messenger.

There was no doubt in the minds of Pendletonians about the origin of these documents. The Pendleton Messenger wrote: "the most remarkable thing about them is the particularity and correctness with which they were directed to individuals in this neighborhood and in Pickens District on the route which Barrett traveled, and where it is known and can be proved that he obtained the names of the people."³⁹"Abolition Documents," Pendleton (SC) Messenger, August 17, 1849.

William Sloan, who read his letter aloud to the crowd, was a prosperous local farmer who enslaved several people. He was known as a leading citizen of the town. He and many of his relatives in town enslaved people, and neither he nor Calhoun would have been the working-class white men Brisbane had hoped to reach. Sloan was also evidently comfortable enough in his civic standing, righteousness, and relationship with Calhoun to open a letter addressed to Calhoun.

Sloan and his neighbors, a group styling themselves the "Executive Committee on Vigilance and Safety," pushed their way into the building and overcame the resistance by John Sitton, a carriage maker, and merchant who also operated the post office. Appointed in 1835, he had run it from his home for a few years, but its operations had become so busy as to require a separate location.⁴⁰After Sitton built a new house for himself off the Pendleton Green in the 1850s, he moved the post office out of Farmers Hall and into his first floor for a few years (perhaps to better protect the mail), but the post office operations were later moved back into the Farmers Hall a few years later. See "Sitton House," Pendleton, City Profile, accessed July 20, 2022, https://www.cityprofile.com/south-carolina/sitton-house.html. By 1849, the Pendleton Post Office was officially situated in the Farmers Hall building on the Green.

A Pendletonian who witnessed the event wrote: "The Executive Committee . . . demanded the letters of the postmaster. On his refusal to deliver them, they entered his office and took them by force."⁴¹Frederick Douglass, "Doings in South Carolina," North Star (Rochester, NY), October 12, 1849. Postmaster Sitton was unlikely to have put up too much of a fight. All of the Executive Committee members probably pushed him aside and went over or around a counter in the small space, grabbing the bags they wanted. An architectural drawing of the Farmers Hall in the early twentieth century shows that the space was small.⁴²Thomas M. Sloan, Farmers' Hall, Village Green, Pendleton, Anderson County, SC, photograph, Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://www.loc.gov/item/sc0102. Sitton was no abolitionist. He enslaved several people. But he did his duty as postmaster as well as might be expected with, at least, performative resistance. 

This story differs from the conflicts elsewhere in South Carolina in part because Pendleton was unlike other communities Barrett had gone through. Some postmasters did not resist as Sitton had resisted. James E. Hagood in nearby Pickens had personally and preemptively burned some fifteen to twenty pamphlets when he realized they had arrived in his district. Nor did he wait around for a mob to help him. Newspapers recorded other incidents of irritated recipients of antislavery materials across South Carolina. Individuals across the state proudly announced that they, too, had taken it upon themselves to burn such documents.⁴³"Save Your Ink and Paper," Pickens Keowee (SC) Courier, August 25, 1849. But the collective effort in Pendleton suggests a reaction that speaks to the particularity of that place and time.

While the most intense spate of mailings targeted the Upstate, Pendleton was no backwater filled with poor white citizens who might conceivably be receptive to Brisbane's argument against the entrenched and elite political class that ruled the state. It was, instead, a densely populated and established enclave. Significantly, Pendletonians culturally and politically aligned themselves not so much with the Appalachian Scots-Irish settlers in the mountains or the white working-class of non-slaveholders common in the Piedmont. Instead, the town was quite invested in identifying itself with the wealthy sojourners from the Atlantic coast who often vacationed there to escape the summer heat and who had built numerous mansions encircling the town boundaries. Many of the town people were merchants or tradesmen, not planters, but they certainly aspired to join those more elite ranks that gave their town a reputation for gentility.⁴⁴A genteel and happy history of Pendleton can be found in Mary Esther Huger, The Recollection of a Happy Childhood (Pendleton, SC: Research and Publication Committee, Foundation for Historic Restoration in Pendleton Area, 1976). See also R.W. Simpson, History of Old Pendleton District: With a Genealogy of the Leading Families of the District (Anderson, SC: Oulla Printing & Binding Company, 1913).

While the Upstate or Piedmont region of South Carolina was generally white-majority with far fewer large slaveholders than the coastal region—and was populated with many small yeoman farmers who made a living on properties with poor soil or with the topographic challenges inherent at the foothills of the Appalachians—Pendleton itself was different. It boasted both female and male academies of some repute. It had a long-running circulating library.⁴⁵Frances Lander Spain, "Early Libraries in Pendleton," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 50, no. 3 (1949): 115–26. For references to the carriage-making reputation of the town, see "Pendleton," The Historical Marker Database, accessed July 20, 2022, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=9614. Local white artisans, usually assisted by enslaved workers, operated high-end cabinet making and carriage construction businesses that attracted an elite clientele. Pendleton featured wealthier and more politically influential families than many other Upstate towns. The opulent summer houses, hunting lodges, and manor-style properties built around the town by enslaved labor signaled to inhabitants and visitors that they were now in a special and more affluent place than other Upstate villages of comparative size.

Most of all, this town aligned itself with the reputation and identity of their great patron, the illustrious John C. Calhoun, who had long called for censorship of the mail when it came to abolitionist materials.⁴⁶West, Yeoman to Redneck, 52. Calhoun didn't just represent their state or district; he was their hometown celebrity and a founding member of The Farmers Society, which had built the impressive columned building that housed the post office. 

That the round of mailings included at least one pamphlet directed explicitly to the now quite elderly Calhoun may have especially raised the hackles of Pendleton, always protective of the revered statesman. This connection did not go unremarked: As the Brooklyn Eagle noted: "It appears that [the cause of] Mr. John M. Barrett . . . has been taken up by some of John C. Calhoun's minions in South Carolina."⁴⁷"More Nullification," New York Tribune, reprinted in Brooklyn (NY) Eagle, July 31, 1849.

The alignment of Pendleton and Calhoun was common knowledge. In his newspaper Frederick Douglass characterized the activities of the Pendleton vigilantes: "The hair-brained fools of South Calhounia [sic] are at their work again" above a reprinted letter from a Pendletonian about the Barrett case.⁴⁸Douglass, "Doings in South Carolina."

This, too, is a story of media power. It is not merely incidental that Pendleton, in 1849, had a newspaper office. At the time of the bonfire, the Pendleton Messenger directly faced the conflagration on the Green. The press was right there to witness, observe, opine, and energetically disseminate the happenings. The Pickens Keowee Courier, another leading paper of the area which at that time was run by editors previously involved with the Pendleton Messenger, also dedicated a lot of ink to the Pendleton happenings.⁴⁹See West, Yeoman to Redneck, 63. West argues persuasively that the hullabaloo about the press coverage of the Barrett case was not soon forgotten. When, in 1859, vigilantes in Greenville seized a man for holding books and pamphlets they found objectionable, they sought to keep it quiet and out of the newspapers.

Long associated with Calhoun, the Pendleton Messenger had first published his most famous writings on nullification in in the 1830s. It shouldn't be surprising that the paper was especially protective of the celebrity politician who put Pendleton on the map. In general, citizens of the Upstate and the media acolytes of Calhoun were determined to be at the forefront of outrage and resistance.⁵⁰See Susan Hiott, "Pendleton Messenger," South Carolina Encyclopedia, updated May 22, 2018, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/pendleton-messenger/.

While the Pendleton Messenger ended as the town's newspaper in 1851, its building at 1254 Exchange Street on the Green still stands as the locus of a different kind of political and media power. As of 2022, the old Pendleton Messenger building currently houses the office of longtime US Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham.

The Black Witnesses

Burning mail on the Pendleton Green was probably one of the least violent acts many of these white men enacted in any given week. Black men, women, and children, as well as many Native people, had long been held in bondage in the Upstate of South Carolina. They were controlled by the perpetual threat of violence that, as Orlando Patterson famously codified in his study Slavery and Social Death, was one of the defining and vital tools that enabled the practice of enslaving another human being.⁵¹See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study with a New Preface (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). The power of violent coercion, usually through implicit or explicit threats, was necessary to maintain control over others.

The burning of the antislavery mail was simply another manifestation of this threat. It was a violent rhetorical performance and visible event designed for publicity and to send a message to abolitionists and to white non-slaveholders in the southern states that no contrary thinking could be countenanced.

Black people, the resistors and agents of abolition and antislavery long before the creation of any organizations with those names, would not have needed pamphlets with timid arguments to tell them of injustices. But what might they have thought or felt upon seeing the flames in Pendleton?

Direct records of African Americans' thoughts are not currently part of the material archive. And while we have the outrage of Black audiences expressed in northern papers, we must be careful in speculating about the reactions of Black witnesses in Pendleton. But we would be remiss not to speculate. Their historical presence at the scene is indisputable. To affirm a different kind of Black memory work, we must grapple with the notion that many people watching or smelling that bonfire were aware that their presence was impossible, unregistered, and ignored. And yet, their presence was part of the story, perhaps the most crucial part.

Understood in part as an act of publicity and surveillance, the Pendleton bonfire and its newspaper coverage ensured a wider awareness of violence and racial control. Editors knew well that papers elsewhere would pick up and reprint their reporting. The bonfire also had the cruel effect and intent of warning anyone in the Black population not to feel emboldened or hopeful that they might have allies for liberation. The bonfire was, in many ways, for their witness.

Of course, that message was mixed: white townspeople were kicking up a fuss about a cultural force that had escaped their control. And as they railed against antislavery mail, perhaps it encouraged some Black villagers to self-liberate. Cyrus, for one, enslaved at a labor camp near Pendleton, escaped in 1851.⁵²"Committed to Jail as a Runaway," Pickens Keowee (SC) Courier, February 15, 1851. Although recaptured, he clearly had decided he wouldn't wait for someone to intervene on his behalf. 

Anderson courthouse records indicate that in the 1840s a woman named Sylvia hid for eleven weeks in a barn until she accidentally left some clothing in nearby Pendleton and was discovered. The enslaved man in Pendleton who harbored her, Harry, was sentenced to fifty-seven lashes. What happened to Sylvia is unclear but the family and friends of Harry and Sylvia knew to be fearful of the long reach of the Pendleton area authorities.⁵³For the story of Sylvia and Harry, see W. J. Megginson, African American Life in South Carolina's Upper Piedmont 1780–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 84. W.J. Megginson's work with the Anderson Court records provides many rich examples of the ways in which the culture of the justice system in the upstate of South Carolina controlled Black life. They had carved out some moments of resistance, but the surveillance culture of the Upstate left little room for triumph.

Like most southern-state newspapers of the era, the Pendleton Messenger drew a solid revenue stream from advertising sales of women, babies, children, and men. Almost every issue throughout the 1840s featured such advertisements. In one dated October 27, 1843, the local sheriff's office not far from Pendleton offered for sale Lenah and Jack with their children Beck, Peter, and three "younger ones" in order to pay off their enslaver's debts. From its inception the Pendleton Messenger specialized in silencing the voices and diminishing the personhood of Black people, marketing families like Lenah and Jack's. Literate or not, enslaved persons would have known to be wary of the ways in which news traveled.⁵⁴"Sheriff's Sales," Pendleton (SC) Messenger, October 27, 1843.

The Pickens Keowee Courier ran advertisements for enslaved people aligning them with sales of animals such as one in February 1, 1851, notifying the public of eighteen people available for purchase.⁵⁵"Administrator's Sale," Pickens Keowee (SC) Courier, February 1, 1851. The circulation of print in Upstate South Carolina helped set the value of the enslaved and affirm the values of enslavers. 

Black activists from afar took note of the frantic reactions to antislavery mailings. "These violent measures resorted to by the slave mongers," wrote Frederick Douglass, "may be regarded as evidence that they see their weakness and the untenableness of their position."⁵⁶Douglass, "Doings in South Carolina." That fact that updates about John Barrett and the protests were carried in the Anti-Slavery Standard and the Liberator, periodicals with significant Black readership, indicates a kind of displaced testimony to the events, particularly when you consider how these papers frequently reprinted in their entirety articles which had initially appeared in the South Carolina papers. 

More concretely, we can return to the site of Pendleton to imagine the role of Black witness. The archival record doesn't record specific witnesses by the people most affected by the event, but when we adjust our attention to see the presence of Black life around that village green, possibilities for seeing the space anew emerge.

Many Black people lived and labored within a short stroll to the Green. Many of the Pendleton men involved in the bonfire, if not all, were enslavers or likely aspirational enslavers. Both Sitton and Sloan, for example, held men, women, and children laboring in bondage on their properties only a few hundred feet from the Green. 

A blacksmith's shop was only half a block away from enslaved workers. Indeed, almost every house close to the Green in that period was owned by an individual who shows up as an enslaver on the Federal Slave Schedules of 1850. Black people must have seen the event, perhaps peeking from windows or viewing from alleys. Perhaps from porches at mansions only a block away, enslaved people washing linens or handling horses saw the smoke and heard the yelling. Would they have shrugged and kept their heads down? Likely they realized this agitation represented something more. Were the white people in Pendleton enraged because they were being challenged? Somebody had caused problems and drawn their ire. Doubtless the news traveled.

The enslaved were all around, on acreage outside the town limits as well as close by to attend to domestic tasks. Elam Sharpe, for example, who owned a large house steps away from the Green, held six enslaved people according to the census record of 1840; by 1850 a slave schedule reported he owned thirteen unnamed people. Some of those were women and young children.⁵⁷"Elam Sharpe," 1850 United States Census (Slave Schedule), Anderson County, SC, NARA series M432, Roll 861, Family Search, accessed July 25, 2022, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:HRWH-H73Z. They might not all have resided at his "in-town" property; some of these women exploited as domestics would undoubtedly have worked in the two-story house in Pendleton. Would these women, occupied with cooking or laundry, have seen a stream of agitated white men passing by their home on the way to the Green? Would have heard the cheering and smelled the smoke? Sharpe's brother-in-law was the editor of the Pendleton Messenger, operating two blocks away, so his household, including the enslaved, would undoubtedly known all about the events. The carriages or horses of the Pendleton Vigilance Committee would have passed by the front porch on the way to the conflagration.

Owned and run by the Maverick family in the 1840s, Montpelier, one of the large plantation labor camps sited on what is now Old Greenville Highway was only a few minutes by wagon from the town center. At least thirty-seven men, women, and children were held in bondage there.⁵⁸"Samuel Maverick," 1850 United States Census (Slave Schedule), Anderson County, SC, NARA series M432, Roll 861, Family Search, accessed July 25, 2022, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:HRWH-4ZZM. Would word reach them, soon after the event? Would they know people out there in the world were decrying slavery and perhaps have felt a little less alone?

Given the social space of Pendleton, many Black people would have been in the vicinity of the bonfire, watching it or perhaps doing their best to keep far away. Pendleton's population (both the town proper and the broader "Pendleton District") during the early nineteenth century was notably more dense than in many other areas of the Upstate, and their holdings of enslaved people considerable, albeit dispersed among numerous white families. White Pendletonians enslaved people at higher rates than surrounding white populations. According to the 1860 census, the combined population of Oconee and Pickens counties, which encompassed much of the Pendleton District, included 500 enslavers who held 4,195 people in bondage. That's a high number but nothing like comparative statistics in the central or southern parts of the state.⁵⁹For a good understanding of these numbers, see Megginson, African American Life, 8. Consider how Charles Joyner, in his study of the All Saints Parish in coastal South Carolina (known as the Lowcountry) demonstrated that in the 1860s fifteen wealthy planters enslaved 4,383 people.⁶⁰Charles W. Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 19. Certainly the Upstate or Pendleton District was quite unlike the Lowcountry. But, the small town of Pendleton was itself quite different from its surrounding areas—and would have felt a bit more like a Lowcountry town in terms of its affluence and its ratio of enslaved people to the white slaveholding populations. The town of Pendleton, as the 1860 census reported, counted 383 white people, one lone free person of color, and 470 enslaved persons.⁶¹Population data from 1860 can be found in Joseph Kennedy, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), 448–455, accessed July 25, 2022, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/population/1860a-32.pdf. Individual enslavers in town held humans in their inventory but so did business entities: The Pendleton mercantile firm of W.H.D. Galliard & Co., for example, listed four enslaved laborers sited on premises near the Pendleton Post Office.⁶²Megginson, African American Life, 8, 114.

Even though many of the affluent white sojourners from the Lowcountry who spent extensive vacation periods in Pendleton left the bulk of their enslaved work crews to endure the rice or cotton plantation labor camps, they would have traveled with a domestic retinue of the enslaved to their Pendleton retreats.

There were more Black people close to the Green for other reasons, too. A few free Black people could even conduct business at the establishments there, but almost every business owner in the town held a few people in bondage. James Hunter, for example, ran a blacksmith shop right off the Green, doubtless assisted in part by one of the three Black people he enslaved, most likely the unnamed eighteen-year-old man listed in the 1850 slave schedule.⁶³"James Hunter," 1850 United States Census (Slave Schedule), Anderson County, SC, NARA series M432, Roll 861, Family Search, accessed July 25, 2022, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:HRW4-GYN2.

There were boarding houses and hotels located within shouting distance of the Green, all of which had travelers with enslaved servants passing through as well as a handful of enslaved people, ensuring that hosting routines went smoothly. They, too, might have seen the fires or the ashes. The Female Academy of Pendleton was located kitty-corner from the Green. While the white students did not board there (they tended to live at houses within walking distance), at least one or two enslaved Black workers stayed on hilly site to tidy the property, clean the classrooms, stoke the fires, and stand ready with carriages and horses to pick the young ladies up and transport them as needed.⁶⁴For references to the various incarnations of the Female Academy in Pendleton see "South Carolina Education—Anderson County," Carolana, accessed July 20, 2022, https://www.carolana.com/SC/Education/sc_education_anderson_county.html.

A creative cognitive map of Pendleton's enslaved population of 1849 reveals plenty of Black people in proximity to the fiery events. They would have mapped the terrain differently as their perceptions of joined places and slave neighborhoods would not have coincided with officially sanctioned property lines defined by enslavers.⁶⁵For an overview of this concept see Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and "'In the Neighborhood': Towards a Human Geography of US Slave Society," Southern Spaces, September 3, 2008, https://southernspaces.org/2008/neighborhood-towards-human-geography-us-slave-society/. The entire township, not merely a particular site of bondage, would have encompassed their neighborhood.

The Pendleton Green, town center for white villagers, was likely traversed with great care by Black Pendletonians, who would have understood the performative terrorism and the threat it signified. News carried fast. This was a story for them, about them, and directed at them with cruel menace.

Conclusion

Pendleton today benefits from proximity to nearby Clemson University and tourism. The entire town is on the National Registrar of Historic Places, making it one of the country's largest designated districts.⁶⁶For details about this historic designation, see "Pendleton Historic District," South Carolina Historic Properties Record, accessed July 20, 2022, http://schpr.sc.gov/index.php/Detail/properties/11705. For the claim that the district is exceptionally large, see "Anderson County, South Carolina," Carolana, accessed July 20, 2022, https://www.carolana.com/SC/Counties/anderson_county_sc.html. It features over fifty buildings dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While now promoting restaurants and antique stores more than carriage making or agriculture, it's a lovely place to stroll.⁶⁷ "Pendleton Historic District, Anderson County (Pendleton)," South Carolina Department of Archives and History, accessed July 20, 2022, http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/anderson/S10817704013/index.htm.

The Pendleton Foundation for Black History and Culture has worked hard to redirect and enrich much of the public discussion about local history. They have drawn attention to local sites important to Black history; in particular, the significance of the Keese Barn site, only a few hundred steps from the Green, which in the early twentieth century became a gathering place for African Americans.⁶⁸"About Us," Pendleton Foundation for Black History & Culture, accessed July 19, 2022, https://blackhistorypendleton.org/about.

The story of the Green demands a more complex reckoning than the current historic markers allow. The Farmers Hall still stands in its stolid beauty with its colossal columns. A bustling restaurant called the 1826 Bistro on the Green now occupies its first floor, where the post office once operated.⁶⁹"1826 Bistro," 1826 Bistro, accessed July 19, 2022, http://www.1826bistro.com/. A bookstore overlooks the Green as do gift stores and a Mexican café.⁷⁰"Home," The Pendleton Bookshop, accessed July 25, 2022, https://www.pendletonbookshop.com/; "Welcome to Vaquaros Mexican Restaurant," Vaquaros Mexican Restaurant, accessed July 25, 2022, https://www.vaquerosinthesquare.com/; "Home," Mountain Made American Handcrafts, accessed July 25, 2022, https://potteryinpendletonsc.com/. Farmers markets, annual festivals, and local protests, particularly those seeking the attention of US Senator Lindsay Graham, whose office overlooks the Green, regularly enliven the public space.⁷¹"Home," US Senator Lindsey Graham, accessed July 19, 2022, https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/. But the story of the gathering of white supremacists attacking the federal post office and casting pamphlets into a bonfire remains little known.

About the Author

Susanna Ashton is a professor of English at Clemson University. She studies the writing and witness of enslaved people, particularly those from South Carolina. Ashton holds an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Iowa and received her BA from Vassar College. She has held fellowships at Yale, Harvard, Emory, and the University of South Carolina, and has served as a Fulbright Faculty fellow at University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland. Most recently, she was a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies for 2021-2022. Ashton's current project, John Andrew Jackson, the Hidden Inspiration Behind Uncle Tom's Cabin, is forthcoming from The New Press, 2024. She lives approximately three miles from the Pendleton Green.

Acknowledgments

I thank Doug Seefeldt (Clemson History) for the opportunity to assemble this story for the public. Thanks are also due to Tara Wood and Brenda Burk for their kind assistance. Staff members at the Anderson County Main Library’s Genealogy and Local History section were especially helpful in finding images of Pendleton. Librarian Mary Lanham, especially, was quite generous with her time. Librarian Daniel Bonsall helped me sort through some puzzling Pendleton statistics. Clemson Colleagues Jessica Serrao, Josh Catalano, and Amanda Regan were models of kindly instruction. The staff at the South Carolina Room at the Hughes Main Public Library in Greenville, the Pendleton Branch Public Library, and the South Carolina State Department of Archives and History (particularly Dr. Steve Tuttle) went beyond the call of duty in helping me assemble the materials undergirding this project. The curators at the South Carolina State Dept of Archives and History were especially helpful in getting me court documents related to the trial, including an actual and rather extraordinary copy of the particular Brutus tract the Spartanburg authorities held as evidence against Barrett. A research sabbatical from Clemson University's College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities allowed me the luxury of time to hone my professional skills as well as complete this modest storytelling endeavor.

I’m grateful to the editorial team of Southern Spaces and the anonymous peer reviewers, all of whom helped me further develop this project and bring it to the public.⁷²This incident of 1849 was first brought to my attention in Stephen West's terrific book, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850-1915 (University of Virginia Press, 2008) and I thereafter independently kept bumping into complaints about Brisbane in antebellum newspapers from the Carolinas. It took a few years for me to be able to see how an angle on this story might be particularly about the ways that the Upstate of South Carolina, particularly Pendleton, saw its allegiance to the culture of Calhoun and the culture of the coastal Low Country. Even that only made sense when the Black people at the heart of the story could be appropriately understood to be at the center, not the periphery, of the scene.

While little of my specific information in the Black Witness section comes directly from W. J. Megginson's work, African American Life in South Carolina's Upper Piedmont 1780-1900 (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), I am grateful to him for his deeply felt research that undergirds my approach to apprehending the different kinds of possible witness there. Brent Morris' thorough and thoughtful work on the Reverend William Henry Brisbane was also vital to this project and I suggest anyone seeking more information on Brisbane start with Morris' fine writings on the topic.

• fSlavery
• fWhiteness Studies
• fAfrican American History
• fAfrican American Studies