City Directories and History: “Cheves, Langdon of “Delta” plantation and Savannah, Ga. Bom June 14, 1814 (Pa.); married Dec. 27, 1839, Charlotte Loraine McCord (Nov. 15,1818-June 30, 1879) ; died July 10, 1863. Education: College of S.C., A.B., 1833; read law (admitted to S.C. Bar, 1836). Church: Episcopalian. Public Service: Justice of the Quorum; State Reporter, Court of Appeals; Delegate to Secession Convention, 1860. Other: One publication. Slaves: 289 (St. Peter’s Parish, Beaufort District).”
The Last Foray, C. Gaston Davidson, SC Press – 1971
The last member of the triumvirate of influential South Carolina planters who moved to the Savannah River by 1830 was Langdon Cheves I (1776-1857). Cheves was a lawyer, politician, and planter originally from the Pendleton District of South Carolina. He moved to Charleston in 1797 and became active in public life. Cheves served in the South Carolina legislature from 1802 to 1808. From 1808 to 1811, he was attorney general of South Carolina. In 1811, he was elected to Congress, where he became a friend and political ally of John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay. Cheves was elected speaker of the House of Representatives in 1814 and served until 1815. From 1816 to 1819, Cheves was an associate judge of the South Carolina Court of General Sessions and Common Pleas until he was succeeded by his friend and neighbor on the Savannah River, Daniel Huger. In 1819, Cheves became president of the Second U.S.Bank in Philadelphia and moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he resided until 1829. In 1829, Cheves returned to South Carolina and began to put together the pieces of what was to become the largest rice plantation on the lower Savannah: the 2,752-acre Delta Plantation.”
The principal transaction made by Cheves was the purchase of the Inverary Plantation from Dr.Charles W. Rogers. Rogers had bought the plantation from the estate of Lord William Campbell in 1823. He advertised it as having 473 acres of cultivated fields and 103 slaves in 1829. Cheves purchased the plantation and slaves intact in 1830 for $52,420, $40,400 of which was paid in Ohio, New York, and U.S. government securities. Cheves also bought the neighboring Smithfield Plantation from the estate of Edward Telfair of Savannah. The two plantations were combined to form the Delta Plantation with 1,132 acres of land. Later purchases of adjoining land brought the total to 2,752 acres.”
The census of 1830 listed only seventy-nine slaves owned by Langdon Cheves in St. Peter’s Parish, though his own records indicate that he bought 103 slaves from Dr. Charles Rogers that same year. Late in 1830, Cheves added to his labor force by the purchase of fifty-four slaves from Hugh Rose for $14,812. By 1840, Cheves had 180 slaves working in his rice fields on the Savannah River. Cheves’s move to St. Peter’s Parish was influenced by his friends, Daniel Huger and James Hamilton Jr. Hamilton acted as Cheves’s agent and attorney in the purchase of Inverary while Cheves was still in Pennsylvania. Early in 1830, the three men began a cooperative arrangement for the operation of the three adjoining properties. Hamilton wrote from Pennyworth Island to Cheves suggesting a meeting between himself, Cheves, and Huger on the Savannah River in May 1830, when they would all be inspecting their crops. He had some caution, but high expectations nevertheless, for the prospects of himself and his friends. “The mortality on the river … is a drawback to the otherwise certain profit of our fine and fertile lands which … all in all I think the best in the state.” For the next quarter century, the three powerful South Carolinians operated their St. Peter’s rice plantations in concert.
In 1840, Cheves had 180 slaves on the Savannah River. By 1850, he owned the largest labor force in St. Peter’s Parish with 283 slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, Delta Plantation had 289 slaves working 1,100 acres of rice fields which produced 44,000 bushels, or approximately 1,056,000 pounds, of rice.” On the plantation was a steam rice mill, two steam-powered threshing machines, an overseers house, an owner’s house, and necessary outbuildings along the river. There were also two slave villages: one by the river and one with a slave hospital on the high pine land behind the rice fields. In 1845, the slave community at Delta Plantation consisted of 112 full hands, 8 male and 9 female half-hands, 3 drivers, 3 carpenters, 2 blacksmiths, a watchman, 2 trunk minders, 2 dike men, 3 field cooks, 2 children’s cooks, and a hospital nurse. At the residence there were 3 domestics: 1 in the garden, 1 in the cookhouse, and a trusted servant who had been dispatched to prepare the Cheves’s summer residence in Pendleton.
The natural increase of this slave community averaged five births per year for the decade ending in 1845. In addition to tending to the rice crop, these slaves grew provisions and raised livestock. A stock of cattle was added to Delta in 1846, and by 1847, hogs were introduced. These hogs were actually owned by some of the slaves. The shoats were sold to the plantation under contract. The Cheves’s plantation house on the Savannah River was a relatively modest story-and-a-half frame structure built well of the ground. It was used by the family only during the winter months, and then only occasionally. Other than managing the plantations, the principal activity while at Delta was hunting.
Information from: A History of Beaufort County, Vol. I, Rowland, Moore and G.C. Rogers, Jr. – Un. of S.C. Press, 1996
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