History Dissertations

The First World War was, and is, a seminal event in history. From August 1914 to November 1918, and beyond, history played an important role in discursive battles in Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. This dissertation examines historical discourses between advocates of mainstream and alternative histories in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand around five key issues— the origins of the war, conscription, rumors of peace, women’s suffrage, and the peace itself—in the First World War. In addition to demonstrating history’s staying power during an unprecedented war, this dissertation will argue that in some of the historical discourse, specifically conscription, women’s suffrage, and the peace treaty, a slight separation between Britain and the Dominions became noticeable. This separation did not signal a break between the metropole and peripheries, but it did suggest that the experiences of the First World War put the Dominions on a different historical path than Britain.

In 1878, Austria-Hungary crossed the Sava River into what was then the Ottoman Bosnia Vilayet. Its mandate in the Treaty of Berlin was to bring peace and security to the war-weary population. Yet, despite the self-declared noble intentions of the empire, the first four years of the occupation proved to be a struggle. Only after Emperor Franz Joseph appointed a relatively unknown Hungarian bureaucrat as Austria-Hungary’s Joint Finance Minister and administrator of the Bosnian occupation in 1882 did the tide seem to turn. For the next twenty years, Béni Kállay (1839-1903) governed Bosnia with a strong hand and the eye of a master publicist. If the absence of conflict was the only metric of success, then the Kállay era was a triumph. By the end of the nineteenth century, Kállay’s achievements were being recognized by his contemporaries in France, Great Britain, even the United States, as a model of colonialism. Kállay’s colonial governance represents an important moment in the history of European colonialism. I argue that Kállay was a modern innovator of colonial governance. Yet his overall governing ideology, what can be referred to as Kállayism, was not itself innovative. Rather, Kállay’s innovation was his ability to piece together a hodgepodge of different, often contradictory ideas popular among nineteenth-century Central European intellectuals. It was precisely this eclecticism that made Kállayism unique for its time and why, even today, the Kállay era in Bosnia is difficult to categorize. This project explores the intellectual history of Kállayism by mapping the diverse influences on Kállay’s political, philosophical, historical, and economic thought.

Many historians acknowledge the presence of apocalyptic thinking in the early years of the German Protestant Reformation, but the content and use of apocalypticism is rarely explored. This dissertation will investigate the presence and instrumentalization of apocalyptic thinking and rhetoric in the early phase of the German Protestant Reformation (1517-1525). We will begin by investigating the history of apocalypticism from ancient traditions up to the sixteenth century. We will also consider important apocalyptic themes, which help us appreciate how the early Reformers understood eschatological ideas and used them both to interpret political and ecclesiastical events in their time and also to motivate piety and loyalty from their audiences. This dissertation will explore many of the writings of Martin Luther between his posting of the Ninety-five Theses in 1517 and the German Peasants’ War in 1525. We will also consider the writings of Thomas Müntzer and Andreas Karlstadt, both of whom had different roles in the early Reformation movement and both understood and deployed apocalyptic themes for different purposes. We will discuss the apocalyptic motivations of peasants, burghers, and religious leaders who participated in the German Peasants’ War. While the peasant grievance documents discuss rights and material issues, they also demonstrate a desire to establish a society of justice and peace similar to what is described in apocalyptic passages by the Old Testament prophets. We will conclude this dissertation by noting the ongoing pervasiveness of apocalypticism in our politics and media today.

When the United Nations proclaimed an International Women’s Year in 1975, women members organized a conference of delegations from member-states and a parallel forum of advocates from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Mexico City. The highpoints of the United Nations Decade for Women that followed were two more meetings, in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1980 and Nairobi, Kenya in 1985. This dissertation project explores the last and arguably most decisive meeting that took place during the Decade, the United Nations Third Conference on Women and NGO Forum in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985. Without this event, the justly famous “women’s rights are human rights” gathering a decade later in Beijing in 1995 would have been inconceivable. This Decade’s finale answered the question of who belonged to, who counted in, who represented the actual diversity of women around the world? The agency and impact of transnational feminists is not just a matter of interest to historians of the 1980s. This dissertation historicizes what until recently seemed inevitable, going back to a transitional decade and highlighting the actions and visions of women who catalyzed another globalization whose meaning and merit we may only now be able to fully appreciate in the current geopolitical climate. This dissertation uses a wealth of primary sources to highlight individuals who took part in and helped plan the Nairobi 1985 meeting, the organizational records of key NGOs and UN agencies, as well as print and audio-visual material generated by mainstream and feminist journalists. This dissertation project shows that Nairobi 1985 was when and where a richer, transnational feminism came together before reverberating outward through feminist activism and media networks around the world.

This dissertation engages recent studies of empire and identity to investigate the German Empire and settler colonial identity in German Southwest Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A socio–cultural historical lens of identity provides an intimate sense of what the German Empire in German Southwest Africa meant to certain settlers who emigrated there and in so doing sheds light on the colonial process from the metropole in Germany and from the periphery in German Southwest Africa. Ethnic Germans first began to arrive in and write about Southwest Africa in 1828 mostly as missionaries. Then when Southwest Africa became a German protectorate in 1884 people intentionally emigrated in order to establish a permanent settler colony. This study ends in 1934 during the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Analyzing a range of primary sources during these periods including government documents, colonial–society documents, missionary literature, colonial novels, newspapers, journals, magazines, and ego–documents like autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries demonstrates the inner journeys that the settlers undertook for self–identification. Through the colonial process, this dissertation argues that some German settlers formed a unique and multifaceted Southwest African identity—distinct, though still borrowing, from their metropolitan German roots. Many settlers understood and categorized themselves as Germans or German colonists in the early years of colonization. Then, as colonial exposure increased, these settlers began to view themselves increasingly as Southwest Africans, especially after the collapse of the German Empire and into the Weimar years. The shared experience of living in a decidedly peripheral environment generated a commonality and a sense of connectedness with their fellow former German subjects.

It has been difficult to gauge the cultural impact of the intimate combination of sex and death that unfolded in the form of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the Bowers v. Hardwick Supreme Court decision. Television proved to be one of the most relevant and accessible sites of contention in the cultural discourse about queer lives in the 1980s: Whether they absorbed it from VCR tapes, local-access cable TV, talk shows, network news, even from MTV, a generation was exposed to and experienced new ideas about privacy, sexuality, and mortality in astounding velocity and depth from television—and in turn, American culture grew more aware of the queer community as that community divulged more of itself in the most public of ways, in its quest for empathy and equality.

In no small part because of the epidemic and the Hardwick decision, the queer emotional community was able to transform a grassroots political movement into cultural change. Queer activists and actors leveraged the atomization of television to take root in newly available channels of distribution; they embraced new technologies that enabled them to broadcast pro-queer messages that laid the groundwork for progress. They began to change the popular understanding of their lives in emotional communities outside their own, in a long-running prelude that generated new visibility inside a changing emotional regime. In the 1980s—gauged by some as the nadir of queer life in modern America—queer people created a distinguishable shift in the cultural conversation, while they were in turn galvanized to come out and take up common cause of activism, to broadcast it over the most influential medium of the moment: television.

In 1790, Salem, Massachusetts was the sixth largest city and, in terms of per capita wealth, the richest city in the United States (US). I explore Salem’s maritime trade with port cities in the North Atlantic Basin to the South China Sea during 1785-1815. This study is based on primary archival data on trade and shipping obtained from the Peabody Essex Museum (Phillips Library). I examine the trajectory of Salem’s global trade through three lenses: Trade circuits, merchant networks, and commodities. Salem merchant ships made commercial voyages to major port cities in six trade circuits: US Coastal, West Indies (Caribbean), Northern European (Baltic), Southern European (Mediterranean), Indian Ocean, and South China Sea. A significant feature of this trade was that Salem ships called at several ports for selling and purchasing merchandise for the final destination and for the return voyage. East Indiamen (ships sailing to Indian Ocean and South China Sea) carried cargoes consisting of goods procured at port cities in the Baltic, Caribbean, and the Mediterranean Seas before voyaging to Calcutta, Padang, Batavia, Manila, and Canton to obtain Asian goods, especially tea and cotton textiles. This study examines the role of merchant networks and institutions in the unprecedented commercial success of Salem during the Early Republic. Salem’s economy underwent a major transformation in the early 19^th century due to partisan legislation and the Napoleonic Wars. From being a distribution center, re-exporting Asian and European merchandise, Salem and its hinterland emerged as a center of industrial shoe manufacturing and cotton textiles production. I question Salem’s decline as a port after 1815 and argue its merchants continued to play an active role in world trade for the US along with Boston, New York, and Canton (Guangzhou) where many prominent Salem merchants relocated after 1810.

In 1980, over one hundred twenty thousand Cubans fled to the United States as part of the Mariel Boatlift. Though the vast majority were admitted to the United States, several thousand found themselves in long-term detention due to criminal records or mental illness. The federal penitentiary in Atlanta served as the primary detention site throughout much of the 1980s. In November 1987, the Cuban detainees led an uprising and took control of the prison for eleven days after learning that the United States had reached an agreement with Cuba to repatriate Cuban detainees. This dissertation examines the expansion of immigrant detention during the 1980s through the lens of Mariel Cubans at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. I explore the local debates that took place and the ways in which many Atlanta residents attempted to aid the Cuban detainees. I trace the long arc of resistance in Atlanta, examining how Cuban detainees and their allies in Atlanta protested detention policies and prison conditions before and after the 1987 uprising. This work sheds light on how local debates and inside-outside resistance can shape national immigration policies.

European imperialism in the Americas was predicated on violent regimes of indigenous genocide, transatlantic enslavement, and environmental exploitation. Conquest of pre-contact indigenous societies in the New World intended to secure possession of valuable reserves of natural resources, like the gold and silver mines of colonial Mexico and Peru. European empires commissioned maps of these territories to generate and shape knowledge. Maps are the product of specific social and political frameworks and are informed by the priorities and preoccupations of empires. What they represent or omit reveals much about the colonial regimes that were imposed on the landscapes of the Americas. Maps present an image of imperial dominion that was totalizing even in places beyond the bounds of the colony. Blank spaces featured on colonial maps were not merely unconquered or unincorporated space, but rather spaces where the colony – and thereby the empire – failed to project or maintain authority. This dissertation demonstrates that these landscapes were never blank, they were instead home to indigeneity and resistance.

In the mountainous interior and on the northside of Jamaica, the indigenous persisted and resisted imperialism long after European conquest. Intricate networks of communication, subsistence, and collaboration connected these spaces and formed geographies of resistance that were the foundations of Jamaican Marronage. Maroon ecological practices and social traditions embedded in these geographies evolved over time in response to both an influx of African runaways and colonial aggression. In the early eighteenth century, colonial settlement invaded the blank spaces featured on maps of Jamaica. By this time, the Maroons had occupied and cultivated these lands for well over half a century in defiance of the colonial government and its forces. Their existence and persistence reveal how colonial maps inadvertently outlined geographies of resistance where indigeneity and Marronage found refuge, where Maroon identities coalesced, and where Maroons waged their war against the onslaught of European imperialism.

Between 1964 and 1973, Chile underwent a revolution that culminated with the overthrow and death of Salvador Allende, the world’s first democratically-elected socialist head of state. During that period, revolutionary Chileans imagined themselves as part of a radical democratization process that sought a legal road to socialism over armed struggle. They also imagined themselves as part of a larger, global anti-imperialist movement, and joined the rest of the world’s people in repudiation of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia. I explore revolutionary Chilean solidarity with the people of Vietnam by deeply analyzing various cultural forms produced by Chilean writers, musicians, and graphic artists, against a backdrop of national social and political developments. In doing so, I aim to capture the mood of revolutionary Chileans when solidarity with the people of Vietnam became increasingly entwined with Chilean interests as U.S. intervention in Chilean affairs became imminent. This study examines the role of poetry, musical lyrics and performances, and visual ephemera, as these cultural forms intersected with street demonstrations, student encounters, and political meetings to offer support to the Vietnamese people struggling for self-determination.

The study examines the formation and development of Chinese American populations in Augusta, Savannah, and Atlanta, Georgia from the beginnings of Chinese Exclusion period through the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. Although people of Chinese ancestry were in an ambiguous position upon their arrival in the 1880s within the black-white dyad that defined southern race relations, they were able to negotiate this system, transforming themselves from being perceived as “outsiders” before the 1940s to being treated as “honorary whites” by the late 1960s. To explore this transition, this project analyzes generational differences between immigrants and their children. Before the 1920s, the mostly Chinese immigrant male population concerned themselves with establishing viable businesses for sending remittances back to family in China and creating social institutions that helped the men cope with decades of separation from their families. The men avoided possible conflict with Jim Crow by having their businesses and residences in black or immigrant areas. Some men cultivated better relations with whites by attending Sunday schools that catered to Chinese immigrants. The mutation from “outsider” to “honorary white” status began when prosperous Chinese men started sending for wives to join them in the 1910s, thus ushering in a new pattern of planned long-term settlement in the state. Families successfully challenged the older perception by joining white churches, enrolling their children in white schools, and building social ties with white community leaders. Second generation Chinese Americans reaped the benefits of this strategy in the 1950s and 1960s by gaining access to housing in white neighborhoods, employment opportunities in white-collar occupations, and acceptance as partners in marriages with European Americans.

On 10 May2013, decades of grassroots activism culminated in the conviction of Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide, the first former head of state to be found guilty of this crime by his own country. Through the grassroots effort to see Ríos Montt held accountable for genocide, indigenous Guatemalans not only found justice, they also took control of their own historical memory. This dissertation examines how various constituencies used the law to facilitate genocide, then peace, and ultimately justice. A close reading of the varied legal arguments, decisions, dissents, and commentary produced as a result of the Guatemalan Maya and grassroots social movements’ steadfast pursuit of justice in Guatemala, the US, Spain, and the Inter-American system of human rights reveals gaps, defects, and contradictions in international law. By both resisting and deploying various aspects of the law, indigenous Guatemalans shaped the transnational legal order. Through dialogical and multifaceted processes of resistance and acquiescence, this dissertation argues, indigenous Guatemalans reframed the power dynamics between the Global South and the Global North—by forcing the world to recognize the acts of genocide committed against them by internationally-supported forces in the Guatemalan civil war—and redefined accepted truths on the law of genocide to include the possible prosecution of “ideological genocide.”

The histories of Presbyterian-related Agnes Scott, Baptist-related Shorter, and Methodist-controlled Wesleyan illustrate how white liberal arts, non-public schools in Georgia developed into accredited colleges during the Progressive Period. Northern Baptist-related Spelman's story tells how a black woman's seminary with a college level annex (associated with all-male Morehouse) was able to educate Negro women in the same time period, in the same state. The study briefly surveys the historical development of each school up to 1900 and compares and contrasts the relationships of the colleges and their respective "home towns" of Macon, Rome, Atlanta, and Decatur in 1900.

For the period 1900 to 1920 the study examines the four schools' characteristics and nature of their student bodies and faculties, their changing progressive curricula, their extracurricular activities (especially the YWGA and the Student Volunteer Movements), and the careers and achievements of alumnae in the 1900-1920 cohort. Eight women's biographies (two from each college) are sketched in full to illustrate the impact of their education on their lives. The study looks at the effects of the colleges' Christian goals and church connections and of their dependence on philanthropy.

Comparisons are made between black and white women's education and between the southern women's colleges and the northeastern Seven Sisters. The whole study is set in the historical context of the Progressive Period, World War I, and womens' changing roles and attitudes. It describes the shift, during this period, in the roles of educated southern women from "the lady" associated with "true womanhood" and "the cult of domesticity" to the emerging "new woman" associated with careers and economic independence.

The history of women's education in the South has not been researched as much as female education in the northeast, and the story of Negro women's liberal arts education has not been factored into the overall story of women's education in America. Therefore this study offers new insights and data with significance for the whole story of American women's education.

The religious mind in medieval Latin Christianity was thoroughly preoccupied with heaven, not only as an afterlife destination but as a present reality just beyond the reach of physical senses. But material expressions of heaven could, in connecting with the senses, usher the soul into an experience of heaven’s realities, and many ecclesiastics, philosophers, architects, artists, musicians, city leaders, and utopian visionaries thought heaven’s realities had significant implications for life on earth. As a result, social hierarchies, the geometry of structures, the intervals of sacred music, the iconography of artists, the organization of sacred and civic space, and the words and rituals of the liturgy mimicked heavenly ideals in myriad ways. The question this project explores is to what extent late medieval and early modern European life was intentionally patterned after heaven’s template. The answer to this question helps us see medieval expression not simply in terms of theological and aesthetic preferences but as part of a complex, comprehensive worldview that would later face many challenges. This inquiry intersects with the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, art, and religion in helping us understand how views of the afterlife shape human activities, social structures, and expressions. Drawing from these disciplines, I explore beliefs about heaven within the larger medieval worldview and then examine material and social expressions of them in three case studies: Gothic France, Low Country pageantry and aesthetics, and northern Italian civic life.

Assumptions about the afterlife profoundly shaped first the expressions of the sacred within the church, then reached beyond church walls to affect creative expressions, hierarchical structures both “sacred” and “secular,” and the ideals of city leaders and utopian visionaries. These findings help explain the dynamics of conflict in the reform movements, discoveries, and creative trends of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 1899, Atlantans saw their city streets as multi-purpose open spaces, freely available to all persons and transit modes. By 1929, that understanding had changed. Streets became automobile conduits to rapidly and efficiently move motor vehicles around town. Other modes of transportation had disappeared or been marginalized. New government regulations tightly controlled or banished other street users and uses. Vast amounts of municipal space became the domain of automobiles, losing the democratic values which public roads formerly represented. This study will demonstrate that during the 1920s, Atlanta’s powerful elites brought about this transformation of society’s comprehension of the meaning and function of a city street. Seeing the automobile as the essential tool for city expansion, this pro-growth coalition directly intervened in state and municipal government to enact laws favoring motor vehicles. They sought and won the allocation of public funds to build the physical infrastructure and legislative superstructure to facilitate the presence of cars on city streets. The print media marketed the changed definition of street space, and promoted the automobile as a status symbol and a way to escape the always-contentious, multi-racial streetcars. Realtors and investors urged better roads for automobile access to their burgeoning suburban developments. While the transformative process took root and sprouted between 1900 and 1919, the twenties witnessed the bulk of the efforts of the growth alliance to remake Atlanta’s city streets. No longer a luxury vehicle for the very rich, by 1920, the car had emerged as a necessity for all but the poorest citizens. Utilizing modern marketing methods and innovative business strategies, automakers helped emplace a national culture of consumption. Advertisements urged Atlantans to go into debt to purchase the latest models, while the local government struggled to cope with traffic gridlock and outrageous numbers of auto-related fatalities. Blaming streetcars for the congestion, business and civic leaders also increasingly faulted pedestrians and children for their own injuries and deaths—they should not have strayed onto streets which no longer belonged to everyone. By 1929, Atlanta’s leadership had surrendered the city streets to the automobile; the car had “won” the road.

King James VI of Scotland took part in the prosecution of several witches between 1590 and 1592. As a result, the king composed and published a treatise on witchcraft that placed emphasis on popular European understandings of witchcraft, the Devil and Magic. This treatise subsequently had a profound influence on English and Scottish intellectual responses to witchcraft during the seventeenth century.

Seventeenth-century England witnessed a surge in the population and the movement of bodies in and out of the city of London, resulting in anxiety and distrust. This masculine social anxiety fixated on the female body as an unknowable space uncontrolled by patriarchal authority, despite efforts through legislation. Violent women in early modern England were used as public spectacle after being subjected to surveillance for their failure to perform to their gendered expectations, both revealing the male anxieties prevalent in society and allowing the maintenance of patriarchy. An examination of violent women through legislation, printed material, and court records reveals the ways in which early modern English society enacted a society of surveillance and thus difference. This dissertation examines the deeper social and cultural meanings of violence, its portrayals, and the social legitimization of violence.

This dissertation is a biography of a text, Fasciculus Chemicus (1631). The seventeenth-century life of this text, from its inception to its vernacularization, sheds light on broader natural philosophical and textual issues inherent to alchemical knowledge-making. The first chapter of this case-study is a survey of all available biographical information of its author, Arthur Dee, supplemented and contextualized with original primary source discoveries. This provides a setting for the creation of Fasciculus Chemicus as well as juxtaposes political issues of authority, patronage, and medical practice of a seventeenth-century courtly physician. The second chapter addresses the hand-press production and subsequent intentional anomalies found in the printed Fasciculus Chemicus, of which there are two editions (1631, 1650). Then, a bibliographical description and analysis is provided for the three issues of the first edition, which leads into investigations of ghost editions and a special dedicatory Rosicrucian issue. The third chapter examines the possibility of an alchemical scribal culture through the lens of scribal copies of Fasciculus Chemicus and other seventeenth-century alchemical manuscripts copies from print. This presents the reciprocal nature of material reuse and recycling between manuscript and hand-press texts. The fourth chapter deals with material evidence of alchemical speculation in the margins of seventeenth-century alchemical texts such as drawings and doodles, creative cross-referencing, and ciphers and pseudonomia. The epilogue to the story of the seventeenth-century life of Fasciculus Chemicus responds to issues of English vernacularization and curation of knowledge through the scope of ‘chymical collections’ such as Theatrum Chemicum (1602-1661) and Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652). This allows for broader questions to be posed regarding Baroque science and alchemical knowledge-making practices.

This study explores the twentieth-century Christian indigenization movement in East Asia through a case study of Jiang Wenhan of China and Takeda Kiyoko of Japan, two leading scholars and Christian activists in their respective countries. Drawing primarily on their own writings and recorded activities, both published and unpublished, my narratives include their interactions with Christian leaders and public intellectuals in six aspects – theological, missiological, political, ethical, sinological, and ecumenical – to pinpoint what social-political actions Asian Christians took in response to the unsettling changes and the ecumenical movements of their times.

This study also highlights the historical encounters with Christianity in China and Japan to uncover the roles of Asian Christians in the reconstruction of Christianity in East Asia after World War II. It focuses on how Christianity, as a centerpiece of Western civilization, was perceived and received in China and Japan, each with its own distinctive culture, and how this “foreign” religion took root in Asia through confrontational encounters, including the global and the local process of cross-cultural transmission between the “universal” and the “particular” in confrontation, adaptation, competition, coexistence, and mutual influence.

As part of globalization, Christian indigenization in East Asia sharpened the churches’ awareness of standing in a dynamic interaction within a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. The profound impact of state-religion hegemony in China and Japan not only created the unique characteristics of local churches and Christian communities but also made two important bases for Christianity: a non-denominational Three-Self church in China and the multi-denominational churches in Japan. From this point of view, Christianity, after repeated endeavors, has finally integrated into East Asian nations. In helping to transform Christianity into an indigenized Asian religion, Jiang Wenhan and Takeda Kiyoko, each in their own way, have made Christian faith more accessible to the common people and Christian churches more acceptable in society. Their interactions with each other and their practices in the indigenization movement, with their Sino-Japanese Christian solidarity crossing a broad terrain from Shanghai to Tokyo, stood as one of the most significant achievements of Asian Christianity in the twentieth century.

In 1675, Thomas Drayton Sr. undertook a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to the colony of Barbados in search of land and opportunities. He did not find either in Barbados, but his eldest son, Thomas Drayton Jr. immigrated to the new colony of Carolina. Drayton Jr. accumulated a large amount of capital and invested his money in rice cultivation and the importation of slaves.

Drayton Jr. married Ann Fox, the daughter of his friend and mentor, Stephen Fox. Their marriage laid the foundation for the Drayton Dynasty in Carolina. Upon the death of Thomas Drayton Sr., his widow Ann became the executrix of his estate and legally became a “feme sole.” Ann Fox Drayton established tight kinship ties to several powerful planter families, who resided on the Ashley River. She taught her son youngest, John Drayton business skills, financial management, and agricultural methods.

John Drayton would become one of the wealthiest and powerful planters in the South Carolina Lowcountry. He would construct the most exceptional Georgian-Palladian mansion in British North America. Drayton Hall would come to signify his elevated position in the Charleston plantocracy. Drayton identified with all things English, which he reflected in matters of taste and style.

In 1784, Charles Drayton, the second son of John Drayton, assumed ownership of Drayton Hall, when he purchased the plantation from his father’s widow, Rebecca Perry Drayton. Litigation amongst the children and grandchildren over John Drayton’s will would leave him in reduced circumstances. He would redesign Drayton Hall as a “ferme ornee” or ornamental farm, which would grow provisions and livestock and cultivate rice at two outlying plantations on the peripheries of the Lowcountry. When died in 1820, Drayton Hall was his one remaining asset, which he left to his son, Charles II.

After 1820, Drayton Hall entered an eclipse. The attempts of the Draytons to cultivate rice in southern Georgia were a failure. The Civil War did not destroy Drayton Hall, but the family was penniless. Phosphate mining at Drayton Hall returned the family to prosperity. In 1973, unable to maintain Drayton Hall, the Drayton family sold it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.