Ralph Waldo Emerson Book

This history of colonial South Carolina has serious problems. Here are the three most egregious:

1) To fully understand the author one must have specialized historical knowledge he fails to provide.

2) The author makes many broad, general statements without providing any evidence or even citations. There is no way the reader can know if the statements are accurate. The author seems to want his generalizations accepted on authority.

3) Too many sentences have hedge words. The author even qualifies his specific statements.

Here is a typical example paragraph to illustrate what proliferates throughout the book, page 55-56:

"Political power and legal authority followed ownership of land. Eight administrative courts or councils, each headed by one of the proprietors, was to supervise government business. At the top was the palatine court composed of the proprietors themselves and named for their senior member. The proprietors and the other members of the subordinate courts were to constitute the Grand Council. Probably modeled in part on the English Privy Council, it was to function both as a court of appeals and a collective executive. Parliament -- like the Irish parliament which after 1494 could not consider legislation without the prior approval of the Privy Council -- could only debate matters that the Grand Council had previously approved. Composed of the proprietors (or their deputies), the nobility, and elected representatives of the freeholders, parliament was unicameral. Votes in it and (explicitly by later revisions of the Fundamental Constitutions) elections to it were to be by secret ballot. Elected members needed 500 acres to qualify for a seat; voters, merely fifty to exercise the franchise. Laws were to be enforced by an elaborate legal system which included manorial courts. To prevent packing, juries (according to another revision of the document) were to be composed of individuals meeting requisite property qualifications whose names had been placed in a box and drawn by a child under the age of ten. It being a "base and vile thing to Plead for money," the Constitution forbade fees for such legal services. Similarly, no one was to write commentaries on the laws, which were themselves to terminate automatically every sixty years."

Is that all clear enough? I hope so, because there is little to no further explanation offered for the seemingly random descriptive sentences found in this one lone paragraph that attempts to reveal the power structure and how the legal system worked. The next two paragraphs simply attempt to explain why it was thought wise to have laws expire every sixty years, followed by a description of the degree of religious toleration to be found in the colony, followed by other unrelated topics.

Every sentence raises questions never addressed. They look like topic sentences for paragraphs that need their own chapter! For example, "Eight administrative courts or councils, each headed by one of the proprietors, was to supervise government business." I presume the number was eight because that was the number of proprietors. So what was the specific name of one of the courts? Was there a Yeamans court? Were all the courts equal in power or jurisdiction? Were they divided by geographical location, types of cases they presided over, or how? What types of matters did they preside over? What does it mean to "supervise government business"? Did these collect taxes, appoint a police force, pass laws, deed property, run militias for defense against natives, incarcerate religious dissenters or the insane, run medical clinics, collect garbage, bury the dead, control liquor distribution? Going on to the following sentences, one would assume the Grand Council had been mentioned before, give the preceding definite article, but this is the only mention of it I could readily find. Who are the deputies? What is their role and power? Was jury packing a problem? Why? What cases were tried by jury? What are manorial courts, and so on? No obvious question gets adequate coverage, and this paragraph is fairly typical of the entire book!

There is a bibliography at the end of the book for each chapter, but no in-line citations in any of the text. We are given no idea where the "base and vile thing" quote comes from, for example. Which source Weir uses as evidence for any of his statements is impossible to trace or account for.

A history of colonial South Carolina can be successfully written. A helpful history provides the broad strokes. This book instead is an odd mixture of overly specific facts randomly mixed in with only tangentially related generalizations. It therefore isn't even all that helpful as a reference, much less a book one can read straight through as a narrative. It performs neither function adequately.