The Pendarvis Family of South Carolina
For a white plantation owner to take a female slave as a mistress was hardly unique in eighteenth-century America. So, few people would have been so shocked to see the wealthy Joseph Pendarvis become involved with a lady of color. However, Parthena was more than just a slave lover for Joseph. The pair were so close that they had seven children together. And so, when Joseph died, he remembered all of them in his last will and testament. The children, along with their mother, not only inherited a large expanse of arable land, they also took on dozens of slaves. Indeed, in 1830s Carolina, few families owned more slaves than the Pendarvis clan.
In fact, James Pendarvis, the eldest son of Joseph, inherited 1,009 acres of land close to Green Savanna. He was also bequeathed on a plantation in nearby Charleston Creek. Moreover, according to the record books of the time, James inherited 113 slaves to work this land, making him the largest non-while slaveholder in all of South Carolina. James carried on growing his business interests and so, by the time of his death in 1798, the Pendarvis family owned 155 slaves, the majority of them picking cotton or rice.
James himself left his property as well as his slaves to the next generation. Well into the nineteenth century, then, his heirs were among the most prominent individuals in all of not just their native Collerton County (modern-day Charleston) but of all of South Carolina. Notably, however, the Pendarvis family were not the only people of color to use slave labor to work the rice fields of South Carolina. The history books noted that the Holman and Collins families, both descended from a female slave brought to America from Sierra Leone, both traded in and made use of slaves during the second half of the 18th century.
From PBS Frontline: The Blurred Racial Lines of Famous Families
The Pendarvis Family
The Pendarvises, like the Gibsons, are another South Carolina family who in the beginning of the 18th century were black, at least racially so. For they were the lineal descendants of Parthena, the African mistress of the last Carolina Landgrave, Joseph Pendarvis. (The Carolina Landgraves were the first big landholders of South Carolina.)
These racially mixed Pendarvises knew neither poverty or slavery – at least personally. For in fact they themselves have now been identified as one of the largest slave-holding families in the history of the country. Despite being illegitimate, as the offspring of the eldest scion of the house of Pendarvis, they were able, because of the precautions their white father had taken, to inherit the vast holdings in slaves, land and livestock he had legally left to them.
Unable to override the stipulations recorded in his father’s last will and testament, a younger white brother who was only a few weeks old when the last Landgrave died expressed his outrage by later changing his and his children’s surname to that of Bedon, his mother’s. Besides the almost patricidal symbolism of this act, there was, of course, very racist reasoning underpinning it. Assuming, quite correctly in his case, that because of their wealth his nephews would wed whatever white wives they wanted, it probably became all too clear to him that within a couple of generations or so there could easily be confusion in the identification between his own and his brother’s progeny. The fact that his would be the considerably poorer cousins of a wealthy family “of colour” must have been absolutely unbearable for him.
Obviously, the curse of the Bedons on their Pendarvis kinsmen was meant to transcend the years. I could not help but find it intriguing, for instance, that the Mayor of Orangeburg, S.C at the time this southern city exploded into one of the more violent race riots covered in the ’60s was none other than a James Pendarvis. Since Orangeburg had been the seat of the Pendarvis Landgraves and since James was the eldest of Parthena’s male children and the “pater familia”, therefore, of the first generation of black Pendarvises, there can be no doubt regarding the African ancestry of the white Mayor of Orangeburg. Skimming through “The Orangeburg Massacre”, the only monograph I’ve come across to date on this incident, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of relief from the impression that, somehow, the Mayor had kept his nose clean.
Despite the comparative ease with which the uniqueness of the name should allow one to track members of this family, no matter how disparate, of all the descendants I have had a chance to identify this far, there have been very few Pendarvises history has taken note of during the last two centuries.
However, the Rumphs, a Swiss family that both the first James Pendarvis and his sister intermarried with have left their mark on the state of Georgia in a rather dramatically iconographical way. Besides producing a couple of senators and a general whose children, in turn, became relatives of the Wannamakers, what the Rumphs pioneered on their plantations was the famous horticultural symbol of the state – the peach. The cultivation of the Georgia Peach, however, cannot be exactly ascribed to an African American. For as close and as tight knit to each other as both these families were, Samuel Rumph was not actually a black Pendarvis descendant even though at least half his cousins were.
With all the data already in my records regarding these two families, there was a reference in the Pendarvis genealogy that the South Caroliniana Library had just received which I had never seen before and which I found to be especially interesting. A document located by the genealogist indicated that John Pendarvis, a younger brother of James described as a “free mulatto”, had been held for a time by the local government on the suspicion of formenting a slave rebellion. This is a clear indication, therefore, that despite wealth or social connections and given the political circumstances, race still could and did become an issue. On the other hand, as was just pointed out to me by a Southern genealogist I just telephoned, another Pendarvis wife, an individual by the name of Ursetta Jennings, was the daughter of woman who, in the original record, had been listed as a “half indian slave.” In the edited version published by Sally, South Carolina’s major historian at the turn of the century, he had passed her off as white since he himself was a Pendarvis descendant.
Read this letter from a descendant who discovered his roots from Joseph and Parthena.
https://www.glennumc.org/blog/2017/10/4/my-most-remarkable-discovery