Upcoming book by history professor Rita Reynolds documents the little-known community of wealthy, free Black families in pre-Civil War Charleston, S.C. One of them was her own.
History professor Rita Reynolds joined the Wagner College faculty in 2008. In those dozen or so years, she has become an integral part of the campus community, serving now as the chair of her department.
Throughout those years, there has been one constant in her scholarly career: her Book, with a capital “B.”
It’s a fascinating project that looks deeply into the life of the little-known community of free Black families in Charleston, S.C. before the Civil War, gaining access through a unique point of entry: Professor Reynolds’ own family heritage.
Now that the book is nearly finished — Rita is in the final stages of work with her editor at the University of Georgia Press — we thought that this would be a good time to fill the rest of the Wagner community in on this extraordinary research venture.
Rita Reynolds was born in North White Plains, N.Y., and raised in the Bronx, but “all of my mother’s family, White or Black, is from Charleston, going back 250 years.”
Rita’s maternal grandparents left Charleston for New York, separately, around 1929, fleeing Jim Crow discrimination, and never went back. They met again in New York, recognized one another from back home, courted, married and had nine children.
“My mother was deeply committed to me and my siblings,” Rita said, describing her own upbringing. “She was really a single parent.”
In the summer of 1986, while Rita was pursuing a graduate degree in photography at New York University, her uncle came over to go through an old trunk that had belonged to her great-grandfather. The trunk was full of old family papers, one of which was the family’s “freedom papers,” dated 1824.
“It was the first time I had seen an archival document like that,” Rita said, “but I wasn’t interested.”
Her mother, however, was finishing her own degree and had taken a course in Black history.
“My mom said, ‘You can’t know yourself if you don’t know your own history,’ ” Rita recalls. “So, in a matter of, like, a week, we went from knowing almost nothing about our family story to tracing our family tree to 1770.”
The freedom papers told of one of Rita’s earliest American ancestors, a Moroccan woman who had been kidnapped and enslaved. She was given the name Lucy Moor, for her Moorish heritage.
“At this point, my mother’s saying, ‘We have to go to Charleston!’,” Rita recalls. “Grad school didn’t start back up until October, and from Labor Day I had a whole month of nothing to do — so we took the train down.
“Charleston was like nothing I had ever seen: the architecture, the dialects, the way the people interacted with one another. What was interesting was that they — at least the Black community — seemed to know that we were from there. They would say to us, ‘Who are your people?’ and my mother would step up and start rattling off a list of names.”
One of the people they encountered on that trip was a woman who worked at the Avery Institute, a Black resource center run by the College of Charleston. As Rita’s mother recited the names of her 19th century family members, the woman nodded, saying, “I’m familiar with those. They were very respectable.”
Initially, Rita was startled at how this woman seemed so familiar with folks who had died so very long ago, “but the truth was that oral history was very important,” Rita acknowledges now. “In a really small community, that kind of information follows families for generations.”
It was a troubling, annoying experience, she explained, that set her on the course of researching her family story and the story of free, wealthy Black people in antebellum Charleston.
“We had the names of these people,” Rita said, “and we wanted to see their graves. They were wealthy; they would have had marked graves.”
Rita and her mother went from graveyard to archive to cemetery, but no luck. They knew that the family had belonged to a fraternal group for wealthy, free Black people of mixed heritage called the Brown Fellowship Society, and they knew that the BFS had its own cemetery, but nobody would tell them where it was.
“Whenever we asked where they were buried, we kept getting the runaround,” she said.
Eventually, she returned to the historical society.
“I went to a guy — who’s a friend now — and said, ‘Okay, I’m tired of this nonsense, and I’m not leaving here until I get some answers,’ ” Rita recalls. “ ‘Where the hell are they buried? Where is this Brown Fellowship Society cemetery?’ ”
Rita’s friend looked at her and said, “It’s been destroyed.”
A Catholic high school had purchased the land where the Brown Fellowship Society cemetery stood, adjacent to the school. When the school expanded, it paved over the cemetery.
“They moved the headstones,” Rita’s friend told her, “but the bodies are still there, beneath that parking lot.”
When Rita came home, she started looking for material to help her understand the era in which her ancestors had lived, “and I was just appalled — there was like maybe two books on free Blacks in Charleston,” she said. “Two books. And one of them had just come out.
“At that moment, enraged by what they had done to the cemetery, I said, ‘Okay, I gotta do this. I’m gonna do this.’
“My mother became my research assistant,” Rita said. “We spent hours going from the county library or the city records, historical society, church records, the state archives — that was really all we did, but the information we got … ”
“The group we focused on was wealthy, free Blacks in Charleston, because the number was small enough that it was manageable,” she said. In particular, she focused on the Brown Fellowship Society, to which her own family had belonged, which had a membership cap of 50 families.
The story of Rita Reynolds’ family in antebellum Charleston is told in “Free and Insane in Charleston: Freedom and Divorce Among Free People of Color in Antebellum South Carolina,” her forthcoming monograph.
It’s a story that is intimately intertwined with the American story itself, and particularly with the dark history of American slavery.
At its core are three people: Thomas Inglis Jr., his wife Rachel … and his wife Martha.
“I have pieced together the story of Thomas, Rachel and Martha Inglis by focusing on and carefully examining the archival evidence that remains,” Rita writes. “I have painstakingly reconstructed their story from city, state and federal records, church records, diaries and letters written by South Carolinians and the few private documents written by other free people of color in the Inglis community.
“By itself, the proof left by the Inglis family seems at times confusing, but as I unfolded it in historical context, a rich, important and meaningful part of American antebellum social and racial life comes into view.”
Thomas Inglis Jr. was one of Charleston’s wealthiest free men of color. (At his death, Thomas’ estate was assessed at the equivalent of $1.2 million today.) Thomas’ father was a Scottish slave trader and a Loyalist; nothing is known of his mother, but she is presumed to have been a slave. Thomas, born in 1778, was trained as a barber before his father’s death in 1788, a trade that allowed him to make a decent living.
One of the documentary clues to the magnitude of Thomas’ wealth that Rita discovered was a notice he placed in a local newspaper in 1802, offering a reward for the return of a “small French gold watch” that had been stolen from his home. The rather considerable reward offered, $5, is today’s equivalent of more than $125. The watch may have been recovered; 34 years later, Thomas left a similar timepiece to his son.
Another major documentary clue, an inventory of the Inglises’ household goods, compiled for a lawsuit following Thomas’ death, gave Rita an extraordinarily detailed picture of what the interior of the Inglis home looked like.
“Most free blacks rented substandard dwellings that were little more than poorly constructed shacks,” Rita writes, “yet the interior of the Inglis home resembled those of wealthy whites. The abundance of expensive items in their home attested to Thomas’s ability to provide for his family.”
Thomas’ will, of course, provided for his wife Martha, a free woman of color, and their five children.
But it also provided for the needs of someone named Rachel Inglis, “who the providence of God has deprived her of reason,” Thomas wrote. Rachel was identified as being confined to the Charleston Insane Asylum, but her relation to Thomas — and Martha — was not spelled out.
“I remember my mother and I going back and forth,” Rita recalls. “Who is she?
“One day I said, ‘You know, I have a feeling: I think she’s his wife.’
“My mother said, ‘She can’t be his wife. He’s married to Martha.’
“We looked at the poorhouse records,” Rita says, “and, sure enough, she was his wife.”
Further research added detail to Rachel’s story. She and Thomas were married in 1800; they had no children. In 1811, Rachel was committed to the city insane asylum on an attempted arson charge, and there she died 25 years later.
Nine years after Rachel Inglis’ commitment, Thomas remarried. Although South Carolina did not, under any circumstance, grant divorces at that time, Rita believes that the documentary circumstances indicate Thomas used a legal loophole to nullify his marriage to Rachel in order to marry Martha.
“Legally, at the time, all Blacks are slaves unless they can prove otherwise,” Rita said. “Thomas Inglis understands this. If he says that she is a slave … well, slaves cannot get married, because you’re property. If he says that she is his slave, then their marriage is void.”
“Most free blacks rented substandard dwellings that were little more than poorly constructed shacks,” Rita writes, “yet the interior of the Inglis home resembled those of wealthy whites. The abundance of expensive items in their home attested to Thomas’s ability to provide for his family.”
The law said that the city would bear the cost of holding free Blacks in the insane asylum, but that the cost of committing slaves to the asylum had to be borne by their owners. Asylum records show that, shortly after Thomas married Martha, “the asylum says to him, ‘You got to start paying for Rachel now,’ because he declares her his slave,” Rita explains.
Thomas’ second wife, Martha Sophia, was a good match for the well-to-do, free Black barber. She was the granddaughter of Lucy Moor, an enslaved woman brought from Morocco to Charleston in the early 1770s. Lucy was herself freed in 1791 as the result of a treaty negotiated by U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson with the emperor of Morocco. Her daughter Susannah, however, remained enslaved for reasons that are still unclear.
Rita’s monograph goes to considerable lengths to explain how numerous White slaveholders had children through illicit relations with enslaved members of their household, and how the White fathers then sometimes provided for the future of their children of mixed heritage, sometimes by freeing them. This, she says, would be a reasonable explanation for why Susannah’s mistress, Sarah Smith, freed Susannah and her children — her valuable property — at the turn of the 19th century. Believing that Susannah was the daughter of Lucy Moor and Sarah Smith’s son, Roger, “Sarah Smith was freeing her granddaughter and protecting her” from Roger Smith’s creditors, Rita writes.
Likewise, Rita believes that Susannah’s daughters, including Martha Sophia, had been fathered by the Smith’s next-door neighbor, Henry Middleton Rutledge, a descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence. The surest evidence of this, Rita says, is that Rutledge issued “freedom papers” for Martha and her family in 1824 certifying that they were not enslaved persons, validating Martha’s marriage to Thomas Inglis and serving as a declaration of white guardianship over the Inglis family, especially important in the civil turmoil following Denmark Vesey’s abortive slave uprising in Charleston two years earlier.
Thomas’ second wife, Martha Sophia, was a good match for the well-to-do, free Black barber. She was the granddaughter of Lucy Moor, an enslaved woman brought from Morocco to Charleston in the early 1770s.
“Rutledge’s act acknowledged his paternity of Martha and her sisters,” Rita writes, “since unrelated White men did not intervene in the family affairs of biracial children of the planter elite. Henry Rutledge was the undisputed patriarch of his family with Susannah.
“[Rutledge’s] intimate knowledge of more than 40 years of Martha’s heritage strongly suggests that he was probably her biological father who would not formally acknowledge paternity. He instead provided indisputable proof that Martha and her sisters were not slaves.”
And that, in the broadest of outlines, is the story that Rita Reynolds has spent 35 years of her life and her academic career researching.
“Free and Insane in Charleston” is a work of deep scholarship that is also deeply personal, exploring the little-known community of wealthy, free Blacks in antebellum South Carolina through the experience of Rita’s own forebears. It is being published by the University of Georgia Press.
