Black Urban Leisure Pursuits and Cultural Identity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina and Georgia

Abstract

On the eve of revolution Josiah Quincy Jr., both on the advice of his doctor and in order to satisfy his own curiosity, departed Massachusetts and for several months integrated himself amongst South Carolina's ruling elite. Rubbing elbows in the spring of 1773 with the wealthiest gentry in North America, the visiting Bostonian was struck that 'in grandeur, splendour. . .in almost everything, [Charleston] far surpasses all I ever saw, or expected to see, in America' . Quincy also left with the opinion that this opulent world governed by 'lordly planters' was a haven where 'cards, dice, the bottle and horses engross prodigious portions of time and attention', and whose 'gentlemen ... are mostly men of the turf and gamesters'. Indeed, the enormous fiscal prosperity and notorious leisured excesses of the lowcountry's elite rarely escaped the commentary of contemporary visitors and inhabitants alike. Nor have the subjects suffered a lack of scholarship by modem historians. However, it was Quincy's observations of a great number of blacks playing English games of chance in Charleston and that Sundays were generally a day of 'license, pastime and frolic for the negroes' which warrants closer attention. While the urban leisure habits of blacks may very well have come as a mild shock to the visiting northerner, they had been in reality a long-standing facet of everyday life in Carolina.I