This book reconstructs the experiences of two major American cities--each a center of regional culture--in an important historical period, the 1830s. Discussing such topics as economic growth, welfare, politics, education, class, family, religion, philanthropy, disorder and violence, and responses to economic and political reverses, this study offers a fascinating contrast between these two communities.

The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843

History

Pease, William H.

Americas

Oxford University Press

Business & Money

Pease, Jane H.

Economics

Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities: slave and free, rich and poor, married and single, those who worked mostly at home and those who led more public lives. Jane Pease and William Pease argue that legal, political, economic, and cultural contraints did limit the options available to women. Nevertheless, women had opportunities to make meaningful choices about their lives and sometimes to achieve considerable autonomy.By comparing the women of Charleston and Boston, the authors explore how both urbanization and regional differences -- especially with regard to slavery -- governed all women's lives. They assess the impact of marriage and work on women's religious, philanthropic, and reform activity and examine the female uses of education and property in order to illuminate the considerable variation in women's lives. Finally, they consider women's choices of life-style, ranging from compliance with to defiance of increasingly rigid social precepts defining appropriate female behavior.However bound women were by society's prescriptions describing their role or by the class structure of their society, they chose their ways of life from among such options as spinsterhood or marriage, domesticity or paid work, charitable activity or the social whirl, the solace of religion or the escape of drink. Drawing on a variety of sources including diaries, court documents, and contemporary literature, Ladies, Women, and Wenches explores how the women of Charleston and Boston made the choices in their lives between total dependence and full autonomy.

Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston (Gender and American Culture)

The University of North Carolina Press

The often-stereotyped belles and matrons of the nineteenth-century South emerge as diverse personalities in this compelling account of three generations of women from a South Carolina family whose fate rose and fell with the fortunes of the state. Through vivid, interwoven life stories, the book offers a unique perspective on how these women conducted their lives, shared personal triumphs and defeats, endured the deprivations and despair of civil war, and experienced a social revolution. A Family of Women focuses on the female descendants of Louise Gibert Pettigrew (later changed to Petigru), who rose from upcountry obscurity to privileged prominence in Charleston and on low country plantations, where they variously flourished as belles, managed large households, shocked society with their unconventionality, educated their children, endured troubled marriages, and maintained close family ties. Using the letters, diaries, novels, and memoirs of the Petigru women and the material culture surrounding them, the authors weave a complex story of women well worth knowing.

A Family of Women: The Carolina Petigrus in Peace and War

Biographies & Memoirs

This book reconstructs the experiences of two major American cities--each a center of regional culture--in an important historical period, the 1830s. Discussing such topics as economic growth, welfare, politics, education, class, family, religion, philanthropy, disorder and violence, and responses to economic and political reverses, this study offers a fascinating contrast between these two communities.

Univ of Georgia Pr

This is the first modern biography of James Louis Petigru (1789-1863), the dean of the South Carolina bar in the antebellum period and a major figure in the state's political and social development. As William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease explain Petigru the lawyer, the political persona, the private individual, and the family patriarch, they also illuminate the particulars of law practice in a nineteenth-century southern city and the processes of lawyering in the lower and appellate courts of both state and nation. The theme to which the authors continually return is the ambiguity that characterized Petigru's life, for he embodied principles to which the North or the South, but rarely both regions, laid claim. Though loyal to his native South, Petigru was often critical of its politics and ambivalent about economics. Nonetheless, southerners prized his sense of honor, his idealism and personal independence, and his gracious dignity and patrician bearing. In the North, Petigru was venerated for his loyalty to Union, Constitution, and country. This biography is replete with details about such aspects of Petigru's personal life as his rural upcountry childhood, his education, his marriage and friendships, and his financial travails stemming from disastrous land-speculation ventures. At the heart of the book, however, is the story of Petigru's political and legal career, which included service as South Carolina's attorney general and two terms as a state representative, and culminated in his codification of South Carolina law. Placing Petigru's frequent dissent from the political status quo in the context of South Carolina's radical sectionalism, the authors discuss such topics as Petigru's defense of Unionist interests during the nullification crisis and his work on the behalf of Northern clients against Confederate sequestration laws during the Civil War. To this day, both conservative and liberal elements of southern politics claim Petigru as one of their own. Although Petigru represented wealthy heirs in probate cases as well as merchants and corporations in matters of debt or commercial law, he is also remembered as an advocate for the disadvantaged - among them, imprisoned paupers, free blacks facing reenslavement, and abused or defrauded women. Informing all aspects of his professional life were the premises that protection of property was fundamental to individual liberty and that the U.S. Constitution and the common law tradition provided the best assurance of justice

James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter (Studies in the Legal History of the South)

Leaders & Notable People

In the years before the Civil War, a number of communities were founded by free African Americans, with the aim of establishing vocational and academic training and political and economic independence. This book tells the stories of these utopian experiments in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, southwestern Ontario, and elsewhere, including Frances Wright’s Nashoba, the Port Royal settlement in Carolina, and the Canadian communities founded by William King, Hiram Wilson, and Josiah Henson. Distributed for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America

Pease, Jane

Wisconsin Historical Society Press

The often-stereotyped belles and matrons of the nineteenth-century South emerge as diverse personalities in this compelling account of three generations of women from a South Carolina family whose fate rose and fell with the fortunes of the state. Through vivid, interwoven life stories, the book offers a unique perspective on how these women conducted their lives, shared personal triumphs and defeats, endured the deprivations and despair of civil war, and experienced a social revolution. A Family of Women focuses on the female descendants of Louise Gibert Pettigrew (later changed to Petigru), who rose from upcountry obscurity to privileged prominence in Charleston and on low country plantations, where they variously flourished as belles, managed large households, shocked society with their unconventionality, educated their children, endured troubled marriages, and maintained close family ties. Using the letters, diaries, novels, and memoirs of the Petigru women and the material culture surrounding them, the authors weave a complex story of women well worth knowing.

In the three decades before the Civil War, James Louis Petigru became the dean of the South Carolina bar and Charleston's leading exponent of the constitutional conservatism that placed federal union above state rights, the economic views that underlay Whig politics, and the liberal vision of individual rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. In the only modern biography of Petigru, William H. and Jane H. Pease trace the rise to social and professional preeminence that not only placed him among South Carolina's elite but also gave him national visibility. In doing so, they explore the workings of the extended family he headed, the politics of the state he loved, and the intricacies of the legal system he mastered. Central to Petigru's life was the ambiguity into which his competing loyalties plunged him. Loyal to his native state, he was a vocal opponent of its political values. Despite his dissent on the critical issues of nullification and secession, Petigru was elected attorney general, served as a state representative, and codified the state's laws. Born in South Carolina's upcountry to a family of Scots-Irish and Huguenot ancestry, Petrigru achieved such high distinction as an attorney and politician that both Confederates and Yankees eulogized him when he died in Charleston in 1863. Throughout his career, his espousal of private property, individual liberty, the rule of law, and the United States Constitution remained unflinching and gave Petigru the wisdom and assurance to be the state's most notable dissenter.

James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter

Historical

University of South Carolina Press

Caroline Petigru Carson (1820-1892), the elder daughter of Charleston intellectual James Louis Petigru and sister of the novelist Susan Petigru King, seemed destined from birth for life as a southern plantation mistress. Yet, like her sister, Carson challenged the conventions of nineteenth-century Charleston and defied traditional expectations by living apart from her husband and later as a very merry widow. Like her father unwilling to support secession, Carson, a staunch Unionist, left her native South Carolina at the onset of the Civil War. She settled first in New York and then, a decade later, in Rome among the prestigious social circles for which her background and bearing fitted her. In both locales she created for herself the life of an artist and southern expatriate. From Italy, Carson wrote hundreds of discursive letters to her younger son in America. Gathered in this collection, these narratives offer intimate insights into the emotional life of a mature woman, the accomplishments of an artist determined both to perfect her craft and sell her work, and the intellectual and social pursuits of a well-educated, vivacious American living abroad. With painterly eye and incisi

The Roman Years of a South Carolina Artist: Caroline Carson's Letters Home, 1872-1892 (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)

Literature & Fiction

Carson, Caroline

History & Criticism

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pease, William H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pease, William H.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pease, William H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843

The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843

Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston (Gender and American Culture)

A Family of Women: The Carolina Petigrus in Peace and War

The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843

James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter (Studies in the Legal History of the South)

Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America

A Family of Women: The Carolina Petigrus in Peace and War

James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter

The Roman Years of a South Carolina Artist: Caroline Carson's Letters Home, 1872-1892 (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)