John Porter Sr. ¹

  Noted events in his life were:

1. Moved: Abt 1775, , Georgetown, SC. ²

2. Book: Autobiography of grandson Anthony Toomer Porter. Complete book online at http://books.google.com/books/about/Led_on.html?id=08cEAAAAYAAJ, 1898. ³
IN compliance with the frequent suggestion of my friend, the late Rev. Charles Frederick Hoffman, D.D., LL.D., D.C.L., of New York, I began, Oct. 5, 1896, to write some reminiscences of my life. All of the older members of my family having died while I was very young, my knowledge of my progenitors I derived from my mother, and from an aged grand-aunt on my mother's side. The following is my family tree, as far as known :

My grandfather, John Porter, was born in 1759, in Connecticut, and was descended from John Porter of England, the founder of the American family, who settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, sometime in the seventeenth century. To him is to be traced the ancestry of A. A. Low, Bishop Huntington, of Western New York, and other men of note.

When quite a youth, fifteen or sixteen years old, my grandfather, with two brothers, took horse and travelled South. There is a tradition, for which I cannot vouch, that on their journey the three young men came across the persons' who had begun the Dismal Swamp Canal. My grandfather, after watching the methods of the constructors, remarked that it could not be dug in that way. He was approached to know if he had a better plan to suggest. An agreement was entered into, and he undertook the work. He remained long enough to make twenty thousand dollars. He then resumed his journey South, and settled in Georgetown District, South Carolina.

Be this as it may, he had sufficient money when he reached Georgetown to purchase a quantity of land, and began the cultivation of indigo. He continued at this until rice was introduced, and he then undertook the cultivation of rice. He purchased two plantations on Sampit River and was successful, amassing what was a fortune in those days.

He died in April, 1829, aged seventy, just six months after the death of my father. He left, by will, his estate to my brother, three sisters, and myself; my father having bequeathed his estate to my mother at the request of my grandfather, who had told my father that he would provide for his children.

The estate consisted of rice plantations and negro slaves, some of whom he purchased from slave-ships, which were owned in Newport, Rhode Island.
In 1849, I came into possession of five of these Africans, then very old. They had been, in fact, supported for many years on the plantation without earning a dollar. The five were tattooed, and I never could understand their language, and could only communicate with them through some of their race who had become familiar with their speech. They were all dead by the year 1851. The bill of sale of some of these people was in my possession, and was lost with other valuable papers at the burning of Columbia by General Sherman's army, in 1865.

Sometime in 1866, I told Mr. Peter Cooper of New York of these facts, and suggested that our Northern friends should not hold up their hands in holy horror on the slavery question. If we got the slaves those who owned the ships received the money and incurred by far the least trouble in the matter.
When I was a boy I often heard that my grandfather was a Tory, and this charge was a source of great annoyance to me. For those days were not so far from the Revolutionary War that the hatred of England had all passed away. As, however, grandfather was only seventeen years old in 1776, he could not have been a very dangerous Tory, though I remember one of the stories told about him was that he had set fire to Georgetown; and a certain corner where a house belonging to one of the Alstons had been burned, was tauntingly pointed out to me as the house he had fired.

I was too young then to put two and two together. It did not occur to me that as he was then only a boy there could have been no truth in these fables. Nevertheless, I had many a good cry over my grandfather's supposed iniquity.

John married.