Description

Using the community of the Waxhaws as his proving ground, Peter N. Moore challenges the notion that the Carolina upcountry was a static, undeveloped backwater until entrepreneurial cotton planters entered the region after 1800. Moore looks through the lens of a single community - a predominately Scots-Irish settlement in the lower Catawba River valley in what is today Fairfield, Lancaster, York, and Chester counties - to document the social, economic, and cultural characteristics of a locale that was dynamic before planters set their sights on piedmont South Carolina. Moore shows that social tensions within the Waxhaw community drove its transformation, rather than the land-grabbing speculators and aggressive planters. He identifies the forces for change within the Waxhaw community - immigration patterns, neighborhood rivalries, population growth, and developing markets for slaves and wheat.