Sixty citizens residing along the Ashepoo and Pon Pon rivers seek the repeal of a 1779 law that established a thirty-foot "cut" between the two rivers and required all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty to maintain the cut or pay an assessment or fine. They reveal that the cut "is now about two feet wide and in places not so deep and is seldom if ever used but by Runaways and Negroes unlawfully trading from River to River." Surrounded by "an immense Swamp of impregnable and uninhabited Marsh and Ti-Ti," they report this "harbour for Runaways" fed, during the War of 1812, a great number of "depredations on Plantations and Rivers [by] Runaways and Outlaws," forcing Governor D. R. Williams to call out the militia. They state that said militiamen captured and executed two of the leaders, Mowby and Dunmore, and hanged several of their associates. The petitioners complain that the cut "prevents the irrigation of a large extent of Land which must ever remain a loss to the State ... as it can never be reclaimed by Fresh water Irrigation and consequently become then the Residence of a white Population." They therefore pray that this law, "haveing become obsolete and a nuisance," be repealed.
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Repository: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina
