Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—His name was Thorn

From Nick Lindsay's And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island:

"There was another man who came here from Charleston during Reconstruction. He was half-Spanish, but he passed for a Black man. His name was Thorn.

 "He ran a gin house and all the colored people took their cotton to him to gin it. He took their cotton and sold it and bought them land with the money. He bought several large plantations. He took that little money of the little people and put it together until they had raised enough to meet the asking price for a place, and he bought it. He took the bonds to a lawyer and got him to cut up the land into small tracts and gave a tract to each man according to how much he had paid. They had plenty of money. Whatever plantation they set out to buy, they bought it out spot cash.

He bought the land around Freedman's Village for the people. He took the first cut himself. He had his business there where Grant's store is now. The big house there is Johnny Thorn's house. That is John's barn there beside it, and John's gin house. John's other big barn burnt down. He cut up land that same way along the road that runs toward the D.D. Dodge place, back in the middle of the island, too. He used to own the land where the Berrys stay now.

He was a leader; he led the people well and did not abuse them, but still he wasn't shot by anyone. He didn't cheat them out of their money, but in spite of that he died of natural causes. He suffered and died right in that house there. His wife died there too. During his whole life he was a financial boss. He established himself as a money power around here. Many of the white people dealt with him in the cotton business...

John had some big things going on. We had a big man. And he was a good man too. Both he and Hutchinson were good men. They were two of the Black kings of Edisto Island...." (pp. 65-66)

Well now. Of course, one of the things historians do is to try to corroborate stories that are handed down within families with whatever other documentation is available—although in this instance, Sam Gadsden is not merely "handing down" a family story: Sam was born in 1882 and was thus old enough to have known John Thorne, who died on Edisto in 1904, when Sam will have been 22 years old.

Still, we like documentation. Call it an occupational hazard.

So here is some documentation from an old Quaker journal entitled The Friend. This excerpt was published in 1880, although to be sure, it is quoting from an earlier report from the Charleston News and Courier:

There's more: this is from an 1882 U.S. Department of Agriculture Special Report–No. 47 entitled Climate, Soil, and Agricultural Capabilities in Georgia and South Carolina. On page 14 of the section covering the Sea Islands of South Carolina:

Clearly we're hearing the story of somebody with considerable business acumen (to say the least) as well as a strong sense of social responsibility. John Thorne could have bought some land for himself, made his own fortune, and left his neighbors to their own devices. Some folks would say even say that that's the "American Way." But what John Thorne did was also the "American Way": he lent a hand to his neighbors, knowing that on Edisto, a rising tide would indeed lift all boats.

But who was John Thorne—and note well that the published accounts agree that it was "Thorne" rather than "Thorn"? Was he related to Jane's great-great grandmother, Rebecca Thorne Howard? How could he be if Sam Gadsden was correct in describing him as "half-Spanish"?


Sources:

Nick Lindsay (photographs by Julia Cart), And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island (Arcadia Press: 2000).

The Friend, Vol. LIII, No. 42, May 22, 1880.
URL: https://books.google.com/books?id=XIA4AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA329&lpg=PA329&dq=john+thorne+edisto&source=bl&ots=Q_3rd4Bf3i&sig=ACWq-jJbmLNsfNwaWp0ZNRgg1KQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6MH3VPPKDIyZgwTE-YDYAQ&ved=0CCAQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=john%20thorne%20edisto&f=false
(accessed 4 Mar 2015)

United States Department of Agriculture, Climate, Soil, and Agricultural Capabilities in Georgia and South Carolina Special Report–No. 47 (Washington, DC)
URL: https://archive.org/stream/climatesoilagric47hemp#page/14/mode/1up
(accessed 2 Aug 2017)