If Southern agriculture, responsive to the demands of the world market, had not achieved a high general standard of physical comfort and social well-being, it had created, at least in Virginia and South Carolina, an aristocracy at once powerful and intelligent.  These landed gentry honored English traditions long after political independence had been won, and some could claim noble lords or country gentlemen among their English forebears.  At the close of the 18th century, London was still the metropolis for the Virginia Tidewater, for young Richmond as well as old Williamsburg transacted business in terms of bills of exchange originated in mercantile offices at the Thames.  Though these planters found it increasingly difficult to finance such elaborate country houses as Nomini Hall, Mount Airy, and Westover, these colonial mansions and many others like them continued to serve as symbols of a standard of living which their owners were striving to maintain.  Within the great houses there still was insistence on that courtly hospitality and social grace which superficially marked the landed aristocracy.  Far more vital in the Virginia tradition was the ancient custom of combining with plantation management some training in law and a career, however casual, in politics.  Though Virginia was the most populous of the thirteen states in 1790, that fact alone does not explain the preeminence of her sons in public service during the early years of the republic.  They were now playing on a larger stage the roles to which generations of provincial leadership had accustomed them.

In South Carolina the Tidewater gentry wore their social prestige with an urbanity scarcely equaled by the Virginians.  Charleston provided a focus for their interests and activities.  Here the aristocracy of the rice and indigo fields had joined with that of the wharves and countinghouses to create, in a semi-tropical setting, a graceful reminder of the variant groups whose customs and traditions were determining the pattern of American life.  If London was still the mirror of fashion for South Carolinians, their own little metropolis possessed a distinctive flavor, a rare blending of influences emanating from the West Indies, France and Holland as well as Great Britain.  No other city in English America was quite so Continental.

According to the 1790 census, Charleston was almost as large as Boston and ranked fourth in the nation, with a population of 16,000, of whom about 6,000 were black slaves.  Its rapid recovery after the Revolution was attested by the brigs, scows and schooners in the harbor and by the new houses of brick and stone replacing the wooden ones which had been burned during the war.  In adapting fire-resistant materials Charlestonians managed to escape the monotonous conformity, so oppressive in the residential sections of Baltimore and Philadelphia, by covering the brick with stucco in delicate shades of blue, green, yellow and pink.  Shingles likewise gave place to colored tiles rather than to drab slate, an additional symbol of the city’s individuality.  In most dwellings the Georgian style, with its balanced facade and ornate classical doorway, had supplanted the French and West Indian influences.  Householders, reluctant to give up the two or three-tiered piazzas which helped ward off the heat, sometimes compromised by placing a pediment above the piazzas and then constructing a partition with a false door at the street end.  Such a facade, however skillfully designed, illustrated the willingness of Americans to sanction minor violations of European canons of taste in order to secure greater utility.  If the effect was not always pleasing, it was at least distinctive; and it represented no revolt from the Georgian dominance.

The city was run by a planter oligarchy whose leaders, unlike their colonial predecessors, generally shunned trade just as the wealthy merchants ignored politics.  The planters thought of themselves as agrarian republicans and their principles were often expressed in the vibrant phrases of the rights of man, but the manner and tone of their society would have shocked the Republicans who were joining Jefferson’s party in Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, northern New York, and the towns of Vermont.  An observant Yankee called Charleston “the most aristocratic city in the Union.”  The ruling class may have admired certain philosophers of the Enlightenment and have sympathized for a time with the French revolutionaries, but such sentiments, even when reinforced by resentment against British creditors, furnished no solid foundation for democratic institutions.  The framers of the state constitution had made sure that no one with less than a fifty-acre freehold could vote and that only the well-to-do could hold office.

Charleston society suited its plans to the convenience of the wealthy planter.  He liked to visit his estate – sometimes fifty or sixty miles from the city – as soon as the November frosts had removed the danger of malaria, or “country fever.”  After the festivities of Christmas week in the plantation mansion, he brought his family back to town for the season from January to March.  During the early spring, when the routine of rice culture was most demanding, he returned to the country, where he usually stayed until the ponds began to green over.  The enervating summer months might find him in the seclusion of his darkened town house, or in his summer cottage on Sullivan’s Island or at such favored resorts as Virginia’s Hot Springs, Newport and, a little later, Saratoga.

The season in Charleston was filled with concerts and balls of the St. Cecilia Society, supplemented by private dinner parties.  So general was the spirit of merriment that the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, probably in exaggeration, remarked that from four in the afternoon the people rarely thought of anything but pleasure and amusement.  Race week in February, followed by the Jockey Club Ball, marked the climax.  Upcountry planters joined heartily with those of the Tidewater in supporting the Jockey Club; and numerous coaches, richly ornamented and bearing family crests, brought hundreds of spectators to the grandstand.