The Bell Family and King Cotton

The South Carolina Sea Islands

The Sea Islands of the South Carolina lowcountry remain relatively isolated today, and retain much of the distinctive Plantation and Gullah cultures that defined them in the 19th century. Because they were  occupied by Union troops from near the start of the Civil War, the Sea Islands were for the most part spared the 1865 torch of Sherman’s troops, unlike many towns in his path from Savannah to Columbia. St. Helena is the largest of these islands, on which our ancestors the Bell family had a modest cotton plantation.

On the Margins of American Aristocracy

The primary Sea Island crops in the 1700’s were rice and indigo. The latter market suffered greatly following the Revolutionary War. Historian Lawrence Rowland writes, “By the opening of the 1790’s, the shift from indigo to sea island cotton had taken place, and a new era was opening up. Wealth was at hand. …There was a new crop, perhaps the premier crop in the history of the United States. By the 1850’s, politicians would talk about King Cotton“¹ The sea island cotton boom begot enormous wealth, and with it a Southern aristocracy. Families like the Elliotts, Barnwells, Rhetts, Coffins, Fripps, and Chaplins owned huge sea island cotton plantations with hundreds of slaves. These families summered in Beaufort and other towns away from their plantations and sent their sons to the finest schools in the North. In time, the town of Beaufort became known as “the Newport of the South.”

John Bell (1792-1864) and Margaret Hingston Bythewood Bell (1810-?), our third great-grandparents, were planters on St. Helena Island in the Old Beaufort Judicial District of South Carolina. John was a widower who had two children from his first marriage in addition to the three born to Margaret, the youngest of whom was Julius Bythewood Bell (1834-1897), our 2nd great-grandfather. Julius’ son Joseph was the father of our maternal grandmother Mary Bell Grayson.

Like Julius, Margaret was the product of a second marriage and the baby of her family. Her father John Bythewood (1767-1815) died when she was young, and her mother Ann Black Bythewood, who was about 40 years old at her birth, passed in 1846. As far as we can tell, John and Margaret Bell had a relatively small plantation. According to the 1850 Federal Slave Schedule, John owned 20 slaves. By contrast, Thomas A. Coffin of the Coffin Point Plantation owned 301 slaves along with summer homes in Charleston and Newport, Rhode Island.¹ Though it appears Margaret’s father John Bythewood was a sea captain and not a planter, he apparently left an estate which included a house in Beaufort (still standing) in which the Bells and Margaret’s sisters spent their summers. While not a core part of the wealthy planter class, the Bells enjoyed a secondary status due to their townhome and extended family connections.

Gathering Clouds

In the 1860 census, Julius was listed as 24 years old, a “Clerk” by occupation. Unlike many of his wealthy contemporaries, it seems he did not go to a northern college, though he possibly took classes at Beaufort College. His older full brother Charles was a married lawyer with a young child, while his half-brothers had married into the aristocracy and were running plantations of their own. John Bell was 68 years old, and it would appear that Julius was in line to inherit his father’s land and was being primed to take advantage of the growing family connections. The 1860 census is a timely snapshot of the our nation’s history in general, and the Bell’s fortunes in particular. It was taken in early September, and secession fever had been bubbling up for some time, led nationally by their elite planter neighbors. The election of an obscure rail-splitter from Illinois just two months later initiated a new era, and dark clouds began to gather over the planters of South Carolina, making no distinction between the wealthy, the subsistence farmer, and those like the Bell family who resided somewhere in the middle. The fire eaters of Beaufort led South Carolina in becoming the first state to secede in December 1860. The following spring a detachment from the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery, quite possibly including Corporal Julius B. Bell, fired upon Union-occupied Ft. Sumter in nearby Charleston Harbor. Thus the storm began in earnest, and the sea-island cotton planters would be among the first to suffer the consequences.

 

1. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina Volume 1, 1514-1861 by L. Rowland, A. Moore, and G. Rogers ©1996 Univ. of South Car. Press pg 280, 282
   

Adapted from A String of Bells: Stories of a Southern Family © 2020 by Nick J. Guevara, Jr.