The Houses the Indigo Built

When visitors come to Beaufort, they come for the houses. The antebellum architecture is genuinely extraordinary — a concentration of Greek Revival, Federal, and vernacular styles that makes the historic district one of the most intact in the South. What I try to do is get people to think about what they're not seeing.

The houses date mostly to the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. The money that built them came from the Sea Island cotton economy that replaced the indigo and rice economy after the Revolution. What disrupted the economy between the colonial period and the antebellum period — what made the transition from indigo to cotton necessary — was in part the Revolutionary War and the destruction of the labor system that the war enabled.

The houses the visitors admire were built with the wealth accumulated after Patriot planters reimposed control over a population that had exercised collective agency during the British occupation. That doesn't make the architecture less beautiful. But it means that looking at the houses and not asking what preceded them is a specific kind of historical incompleteness.

The Revolutionary War layer of Beaufort's history is present in the landscape if you know where to look: in the church with headstones reportedly used as operating tables during the British occupation; in the waterfront that British ships controlled from 1779 to 1782; in the absence in the plantation records where people's names should be. Learning to see that layer doesn't displace the antebellum story. It makes it more honest.