Landgraves of Carolina

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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27 May 2008 15:17
 

Charles E. Drake;35218 wrote:

Here are two of the relevant statues from The Fundamental Constitutions of July 21, 1669

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11. Any Landgrave or Cacique, at any time before the year 1701, shall have power to alienate, sell, or make over, to any other person, his dignity, with the Baronies thereunto belonging, all entirely together; but after the year 1700, no Landgrave or Cacique shall have power to alienate, Sell, make over, or let the hereditary Baronies of his dignity, or any part thereof, otherwise than as in Article 18; but they shall all entirely, with the dignity thereunto belonging, descend unto his heirs Male; and for want of Such heirs Male, all entirely and undivided, to the next heir general; and for want of Such heirs, shall devolve into the hands of the Proprietors.

 

14. Whosoever, by right of Inheritance, shall come to be Landgrave or Cacique shall take the name and Arms of his predecessor in that dignity, to be from thenceforth the Name and Arms of his Family and their posterity.

 

***

 

This sets out the mode of inheritance, and since it does not specific heirs of the body, but heirs male or heirs general, many of these "titles" should be extant.


Dredging up an old thread, I had a chance to do some digging over the weekend. It turns out that the validity of many of these titles of landgrave and cassique was in doubt from the time the British crown took over the Carolinas. There were three ground for this at the time.

 

1. The royal charter to the Proprietors authorized them to grant titles only to inhabitants of the province. Many of the men they created as landgraves and cassiques were not only not inhabitants but never set foot in Carolina. These grants were void ab initio.

 

2. Upon application of the Board of Trade, the English law officers ruled in 1730 and again in 1735 that land grants that did not specify the exact land to be granted were void. Because the patents of nobility specified that the dignity was held according to the provisions of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, and because the Fundamental Constitutions tied the dignity to ownership of the land, the landgravate or cassiqueship was void if the land grant was void.

 

3. Under English feudal law (as explained by the attorney-general of South Carolina in 1732), an heir can inherit only the land that his ancestor was seized of at the time of death. Many of the grants issued to landgraves and cassiques had not been surveyed and seated before they died; under feudal law, their heirs were out of luck—same logic on dignity being tied to land as above.

 

Moreover, in addition to the provisions of the Fundamental Constitutions quoted by Charles above, an amended version was issued by the proprietors in 1698. The 1698 Fundamental Constitutions required that a landgrave or cassique could not sit in the provincial parliament unless he had "actually taken up and has in his possession" some amount of the land granted, and some number of slaves. (Oddly enough, the published versions of this document leave the number of acres and slaves required blank. Perhaps contemporaries knew what the numbers were in practice, but clearly they had to have taken possession of at least some land and owned some slaves.) Any landgrave or cassique, or his heirs or successors, who fell below the minimum for a period of forty years "shall from thenceforth be for ever utterly Excluded & his or their dignity honour, Priviledge, & Title of Landgrave or Cassique shall Cease & be utterly lost and the Letters Patents of Creation of such Dignity shall be vacated."

 

The 1698 revision did omit the provision that all of the land attached to the dignity had to be kept intact forever, as well as the name and arms provision for inheritance contained in the original, and it permitted landgraves and cassiques to devise the dignity by will in default of heirs.

 

So for any of these titles to have survived until today, all of the following conditions would have to be met:

 

1. A grant particularly specifying the location of the land must have been issued.

2. The original grantee must have physically come to the Carolinas, had the land surveyed, and taken possession prior to his death.

3. The entire original tract of land must not have been transferred other than in toto prior to 1698

4. The land associated with the title must not have passed by sale since 1700.

5. The heirs or devisees of the original grantee must still own at least some of the land.

 

The possibility that anyone is capable of meeting all of these conditions seems extremely remote.  Technically, it’s impossible, since no one in the US has been able to meet the slave-owning criterion established in 1689, but even leaving that aside, the chances that the original land is still in the family with no part of it being sold some time during the last 300 years are pretty slim.

 
Charles E. Drake
 
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Charles E. Drake
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27 May 2008 16:05
 

Joseph, thanks for that very learned exposition. I agree that it is very unlikely anyone could meet that requirement today.

This effectiveliy rules out any surviving title-holder. Someone could create an hereditary society of descendants of landgraves and give the members the title of "landgrave," I suppose.  This would be like the "barons" of the Magna Charta society. wink

 

/Charles

 
focusoninfinity
 
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focusoninfinity
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29 May 2008 01:08
 

It was a website society only; "Heirs of Hereditary Landgraves & Cassiques Society of South Carolina". Several years are in the archived websites, website. I was working then (now medically retired) and primarily web-published the roll of approximatelly 50 Landgraves and Cassiques, and some of their Baronies, so I could legitimately claim and prove, it was "Founded 1999"; which seems long ago to me today. I’d hoped the websitge could grew to encompas the history, legal, social, economic; but primarily genealogical, aspects of that long defunct (to me today, "silly") experiment. I’d hoped names linked on the roll would take one to a family group sheet, where an interested descendant, or otherwise interested person; would help maintain additions and corrections. This family group-sheet site would help re-unite this family. And the Society site help re-link 50 families again, in their early South Carolina history. The cyber "Society" would welcome any adult interested, including descendants (legitimate and illegitimate). I included one old estabished mulato family of which descendants say their once "Landgrave" status is in error. And I included a "noble" that was in an old South Carolina novel (as such, though).  My research is far from complete, and far from error free. It seems perhaps half the Landgraves and Cassiques never made it to South Carolina; so half the membership might be in today’s England?  Forms were sent to South Carolina so Landgraves could be created more quickly here. Don’t know if any were created in America? One Landgrave was created by the King. More than one once held both the titles of Landgrave and Cassique. I could not find webpage software that would make the family groupsheet concept work. In the, keep it simple scheme; I’d planned for no dues. I have a wonderful graphic I’d like to up-load, but don’t know how. Can I e-mail it to a member who can do that?

Mr. Drake, please translate your Latin motto into English so I know what it means?

 

focusoninfinity/Jim

 
Charles E. Drake
 
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Charles E. Drake
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29 May 2008 11:18
 

focusoninfinity;58764 wrote:

It was a website society only; "Heirs of Hereditary Landgraves & Cassiques Society of South Carolina"....  I could not find webpage software that would make the family groupsheet concept work. In the, keep it simple scheme; I’d planned for no dues.


I’m pretty sure I have no landgrave or cassique ancestors, but I think it would be a good idea for an hereditary society.  Perhaps you could model it on something similar, such as "Descendants of Lords of Colonial Manors."


Quote:

Mr. Drake, please translate your Latin motto into English so I know what it means?


It means "never catch flies."  This is my "answer," in the tradition of Scottish mottoes, to the chief’s motto.  In this case, the "chief" would be the senior Drakes of Ashe, Musbury, Devon, whose motto is "aquila non captat muscas," that is "the eagle catches no flies."  In other words, "don’t sweat the small stuff."

 

/Charles

 
Guy Power
 
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Guy Power
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29 May 2008 23:27
 

Jim,

I have governor Sir Nathaniel Johnson for an ancestor. As I recall, Sir Nathaniel held both Landgrave and Cassique status.  I recall reading within the Charter that one could not hold both titles simultaneously.

 

My link to Sir Nathaniel is through his son-in-law, Lt. Gov. Thomas Broughton.

Broughton is still used in my family as a middle name (my grandfather, father, younger brother, and nephew).

 

 

Regards,

—Guy

 
Kenneth Mansfield
 
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Kenneth Mansfield
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29 May 2008 23:48
 

Guy Power;58786 wrote:

Broughton is still used in my family as a middle name (my grandfather, father, younger brother, and nephew).


And still best known in The Old North State as the state’s premier mental institution, Broughton Hospital. wink

 

How did you get so far from home, Guy.

 
 
Guy Power
 
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Guy Power
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30 May 2008 00:09
 

Kenneth Mansfield;58788 wrote:

And still best known in The Old North State as the state’s premier mental institution, Broughton Hospital. :D (Are you old enough to remember the Navy enlistment advert?)  Anyway, I’m so far from home courtesy Uncle Sam: I’m an Army Brat and am also retired military.

Funny: I also lived in Charleston, SC as a boy; our family used to drive through Monck’s Corner going up to NC.  I never knew until a few years ago that Mulberry Castle was there!  Sure wish we could have visited the plantation (though it is in private hands now).

 

Cheers,

—Guy

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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30 May 2008 01:00
 

I think my Pendarvises must be that "old established mulatto family" that was referred to. A PBS special a few years ago referred to the immigrant Joseph (d. ca. 1695, whose grandson Joseph had issue with a slave) as a landgrave, but the most knowledgeable genealogists have disputed this. I’d be interested to see conclusive proof one way or the other. Anyway, sounds like a great idea for a lineage society. Given the historic rivalry between Virginians and South Carolinians, I’m surprised the SCians didn’t counter the founding of FFV with a society of descendants of landgraves and cassiques immediately.

 
Donnchadh
 
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Donnchadh
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30 May 2008 01:24
 

you know…i have no such blood/lineage in my family…but i find this whole thread absolutely fascinating! :D

 
snelson
 
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snelson
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27 October 2015 11:58
 

Hi all,

Here is a link to a short article about Laurence Cromp, Carolina Herald: http://library.sc.edu/file/703#page=13

 

It reads, in part:
Quote:

...the Lords Proprietors in 1705 appointed Laurence Cromp, Esq., of Worcester to the position of Carolina Herald, with power to grant arms to the landgraves and cassiques. How many grants of arms Cromp, who died in 1715, may have made is uncertain, but the North Carolina Department of Archives and History holds one such document executed by the Carolina Herald by whose authority Christopher DeGraffenreid was appointed landgrave..

 

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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27 October 2015 12:12
 

snelson;105037 wrote:

Hi all,

Here is a link to a short article about Laurence Cromp, Carolina Herald: http://library.sc.edu/file/703#page=13

 

It reads, in part:  "How many grants of arms Cromp, who died in 1715, may have made is uncertain."


That’s an interestingly vague way of saying that the number is not known to have been greater than zero.  No one (including the authors of the Oxford Guide to Heraldry) has yet found evidence that Cromp made any grants of arms at all.  The document depicted is Cromp’s patent of appointment, not a document by him granting anything at all to De Graffenried, contrary to the introductory text.

 
snelson
 
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snelson
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27 October 2015 12:54
 

My guess is that the document referred to in the article (the North Carolina Department of Archives and History holds one such document) is this one: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31028775


Quote:

...the document is illustrated with images of emblems of status assigned to Graffenreid within the text: a coat of arms, robes, sunburst pendant on a purple ribbon, a gold chain, and other emblems of nobility. Original document held at North Carolina Dept. of Archives and History…

 

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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27 October 2015 14:09
 

But Graffenried already had a coat of arms that had been in his family for more than 300 years and never used any other.

http://www.americanheraldry.org/pages/uploads/Roll/graffenried.gif

 

I suspect that this is a case of the type frequently found among heraldists and others who write from an English frame of reference, assuming that any coat of arms depicted on letters patent is a grant of arms. We’d have to see the text, of course, but it would have been entirely within the practice of the time to illustrate Graffenried’s existing arms with the various additaments around them. This would not, however, have been a grant of arms.

 
snelson
 
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snelson
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27 October 2015 16:07
 

I’ll see if I can get a copy of the document.  Do you know the country of origin of Graffenried’s ancestral arms?  If his arms originated in another country/heraldic jurisdiction, I wonder if he would have wanted to obtain a new grant of his ancestral arms in the new heraldic jurisdiction that he relocated to?

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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27 October 2015 17:06
 

From my draft book on heraldry in Virginia:


Quote:

Christopher de Graffenried the younger (1691-1742) was the son of Christoph von Graffenried, a member of an old patrician family of Bern, Switzerland, who came to North Carolina in 1710 to establish a Swiss-German colony on the Neuse and Cape Fear Rivers.  After the elder Graffenried returned to Switzerland in 1714, the son stayed on in America, married Barbara Tempest Needham, and moved to Virginia.  He and his wife settled first in Williamsburg, where their son Anton Tscharner de Graffenried was born in 1722, then moved to Prince George County by 1734.  Tscharner lived in Lunenberg County, where his will, proven in 1794, left three seals of the Graffenried arms to his sons Christopher and Allen.

Those arms, shown above [see previous post], date in their basic form to at least 1385, when Peter de Gravenriet used a seal with a tree stump standing upon a mound flanked by two stars.  By 1496, the stump had come to be shown in flames.


It was Christopher the elder who was made a landgrave.

 

The family didn’t need a new grant; there was no law in Carolina or Virginia requiring such a thing.  It’s not like he moved to England or anything.