| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

George Lloyd Johnson, Jr. The Frontier in the Colonial South: South Carolina Backcountry, 1736–1800. (Contributions in American History, number 175.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 1997. Pp. xvi, 200. $57.95.

Despite its title, this book is not an updated version of Verner W. Crane's The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (1928), and notwithstanding its subtitle, it is not a revision of Robert L. Meriwether's The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729–1765 (1940). Rather, as George Lloyd Johnson, Jr., acknowledges, his book "traces the economic, political, and social forces shaping the development of the Cheraws District" (p. 4), an area also variously known as the Welsh Tract or St. David's parish (the Welsh Tract because its original white settlers were Pennsylvania Welsh Baptists who moved to South Carolina in 1736 because of dissatisfaction with growing Arminian practices). Johnson partly succeeds in his less ambitious goal. 1

While there is little that is new in this book and much that is missing, it provides for a part of northeastern South Carolina a more detailed look at themes and topics examined by Rachel N. Klein in Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (1990). There is useful information about early settlers, in particular the intriguing Gideon Gibson. Gibson was a mulatto from Virginia, a large landowner, a slaveowner, and a Regulator who was at the heart of the Mars Bluff affair, when he and a few others held hostage a militia captain and whipped other militiamen. Not one of the Regulators pardoned by Lieutenant Governor Bull, Gibson was defended by other leaders and never punished. His children by his white wife married prominent area settlers, all apparently an indication that while slavery was becoming entrenched before the Revolution, racism had not yet come to dominate people's thoughts and feelings. . . .

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