The Antebellum Years

A time of great change

Charles Drayton II inherited Drayton Hall upon his father's death in 1820 and owned it until his death in 1844. This was at a time of great change among the planters of South Carolina.

Approximately 50 letters dating from 1830 to 1840 that survive today provide a glimpse of the Drayton family at the time. One very interesting letter was sent by Charles II to Charles III in 1833. In it, he encourages his son with his education, but also advises him to consider a line of work apart from the plantation business. He goes on to write about the abolition of slavery in Britain and the growing abolitionist movement in the U.S. Charles III's mother, Mary, echoes these concerns in a letter that same year in which she wishes that her husband would "sell the slaves and quit the business."

The business of running a plantation was not a good one in the 1830s, as the rice economy was in decline in the Lowcountry. The letters describe several poor crops and seem to suggest a want of money on the part of the Draytons. Despite his father's warnings, Charles III did eventually become a planter, and when his father died in 1844, Charles III took over Drayton Hall. When Mary Drayton's father James Shoolbred died three years later, he left her tenancy of a large part of Kiawah Island, and upon her death, she willed that tenancy to Charles III and his younger brother James. Although Charles and James tried to make a go of sea-island cotton, James eventually sold the land to the Seabrooke family after Charles III died at age 38 in 1852.

At some point during the 1850s or early 1860s, the family installed a third ceiling in the lower great hall. Made of cast plaster with a large center medallion, it still adorns the great hall today.

With little opportunity left in South Carolina, the Draytons looked west as did many other Americans. By 1860, James and another of his brothers, Thomas, were living in El Dorado, Texas. It is likely that they took many of the enslaved people whom his family owned in an attempt to start a cotton plantation, undoubtedly breaking apart family and community bonds amongst the enslaved population. Whether they would have succeeded and revived the family's fortunes will never be known as the Civil War brought an end to the plantation era.