How Grand a Flame: A Chronicle of a Plantation Family, 1813-1947

by Clyde Bresee

"Wake me at four o'clock. We're going to see some action." When the guns opened on Fort Sumter across the harbor in April of 1861, two young men, one white and one black, were watching together from the cupola of the big house on the Lawton plantation, which stretched for a full mile along the Ashley River near Charleston, South Carolina. The white man, Wallace Lawton, would shortly be plunged into a protracted, increasingly desperate struggle to retain his inherited domain during war, devastation, and defeat, and to restore it to a semblance of its pre-war prosperity. The black man, Peter Brown, as slave and freedman, would continue a complex and sometimes stormy relationship with Wallace and with the land. How Grand A Flame s the story of three generations of a proud, strong-willed aristocratic family, from the early nineteenth century until the plantation passed from their hands in the 1940s. Winborn Lawton II consolidated the James Island lands during the time when cotton was king. His son Wallace took control just as war came. He moved his operations temporarily to land near the Savannah River, where he won the hand of sixteen-year-old cousin Cecilia Lawton. He brought her back to James Island, where they began the long struggle to restore the land to prosperity. Drawing upon vivid diaries kept by Cecilia Lawton, records and old documents, court-martial proceedings, and personal memories, author Clyde Bresee has traced the story of a southern family in a memorable historical epoch.

Genres: History

270 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1992

About the author

Dr. Clyde Bresee was born on February 2, 1916, in Ulster, Pennsylvania. Early in Clyde’s life, the Bresees packed up their belongings and moved from their Bradford County farm to James Island, South Carolina. This move would later shape Bresee’s writing career. They remained on their sea island dairy farm until the mid- 1930s when they returned to Bradford County.
Back in northeastern Pennsylvania, Bresee attended Mansfield State Teachers College (now Mansfield University of Pennsylvania) and graduated in 1937. He then became an English teacher, first at Ulster and then at Athens. While teaching at Ulster, Bresee also earned a Masters degree in education from Penn State in 1942. In the midst of his tenure at Ulster High School, Bresee married another teacher, Elizabeth Barner, on June 19, 1941. They had two children: Jerome and Catherine.
Bresee left Ulster in 1943 to volunteer for the U.S. Army. His initial training period with the Tenth Mountain Division in Colorado occasioned a lengthy correspondence with his wife Elizabeth, a correspondence he would later collect for family purposes and for the Denver Public Library. A member of the Medical Administration Corps, Bresee would attain the rank of first lieutenant by the time he left the service in 1946.
After the war, Bresee taught English at Athens High School and earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1956. In 1953, he stopped teaching English at Athens HS and became a guidance counselor for the rest of his career. He was also a visiting instructor in psychology at Cornell from 1957 to 1975.
Upon his retirement from teaching and counseling, Bresee began to write the first of his two published books: Sea Island Yankee. This memoir of his years on James Island, South Carolina, would bring very favorable reviews. New York Times critic Andrew Harvey called Bresee “a writer of distinction from whom we must hear more. His prose is transparent, supple and spare; he evokes unhurriedly the smells and textures of the Southern world of his boyhood.”
Bresee’s second book, How Grand a Flame: A Chronicle of a Plantation Family, 1813-1947, was also stimulated by his time in the South, though in a far less personal manner. This book details the Lawton family’s ownership of a plantation in South Carolina, drawing its main research from the diaries of Celia Lawton and frequently supplemented by Bresee’s commentary throughout.

Reviews

[Shirley]

Three generations of Lawtons, plantation owners in South Carolina in the area which is now Charleston, are chronicled in this nonfiction book written by a man who lived on some of the land when the third generation was still there. Much of the information is taken from a diary kept by Cecelia Lawton. A great deal of this story takes place during the Civil War and reconstruction and shows the hardships endured there during that time.

I came across the book while researching my husband's ancestors - he is a Lawton and we can trace his lineage back to the 1400s. Thomas Lawton left England for America in the 1600s and settled in Rhode Island. Most of the Lawtons in the USA are descended from him, as is my husband. However, the South Carolina Lawtons are from a different branch that emanated from Thomas.

[Wileyoneone]

Book - no longer have

[Rhi]

I liked this book, but full disclosure, I am distantly related to the Lawtons seven generations back. My aunt passed along this book as assigned genaeology reading, even though this branch of the family...well, no spoilers. What I enjoyed most about this book? About midway through, I realized this true story has the bones of a Pride and Prejudice, or Sense and Sensibility, or maybe Wuthering Heights in it. The characters include an attractive man with authoritative demeanor and an interest in dueling, a 16 year old getting married to a persistent beau even though she really does not like him, and a servant who saves their lives twice, at least. While the author wrote it completely factually, as expected for a Nonfiction Historical story, the details really drew me in. I especially appreciated his way of starting off and ending the story with the perspective of a former house slave who was as committed to the land as the plantation owner (who seems like the main character). While I felt that the author did the black man's story justice, as well as bringing the diary of the plantation owner's wife to light, I could still feel that this was written from the perspective of a white northern man. In the end, I think that's appropriate, considering that this is mainly a tale of the American Civil War and the winner's write the history books.

[Michael]

This book was a very real depiction of the plantation life before, during and after the Civil War. There are quite a few characters and a lot of them are Lawtons. A bit of cuzin lovin it seems. The predominate antagonist Wallace Lawton is complex. On one side he is a compassionate, decent man. Flip him over and you'll find an utter jackass.

A good read nonetheless.