John Wright Stanly: At the Threshold of North and South

The Stanly House, a landmark of New Bern, North Carolina, is an icon of Georgian architecture that memorializes American patriot and merchant, John Wright Stanley. The house clearly reflects the wealth and renown of Stanly and his family, who served as merchants, politicians, and lawyers. It is neither situated in an urban nor rural environment: this to an extent reflects how the North Carolinian merchant was neither wholly tied to a Northern urban mercantilist culture nor a Southern plantation culture. It is also simply designed, not ostentatious.

This is a miniature portrait of a young John Wright Stanly, hanging in the Stanly House. It is simple, and Stanly dresses in modest attire, reflecting his standing as a merchant, and not an aristocrat. That Stanly was able to finance a portrait of himself suggests the extent of his wealth, passed on to his six children.

The Cover Page and Inventory of John Wright Stanly's last will and testament reveal the name of Stanly's business, some of the items his business traded in, and the nature of domestic items held within the Stanly House. The will also points towards posterity and underlines the wealth and high-standing of the Stanly family in North Carolina, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution.

http://dighist.fas.harvard.edu/courses/2017/hist1002/files/original/1b7ba2f00b29aa6cb89b072729066c10.pdf

This June 1775 page from the North Carolina Gazette contextualizes Philip Dawe's satirical critique of the October 1774 Edenton Tea Party. It shows explicit references to slavery—underlining the continued importance of the practice to the North Carolinian economy—attached to speeches regarding the state of "liberty in the American colonies," both supportive and skeptical of the Patriots. This contrast highlights a refinement-barbarism duality within the North Carolinian Patriot movement. The slave advertisement also suggests Stanly, although a prominent businessmen with ties to Northern metropolises, was not divorced from the slave-culture of the South. Although the Gazette was also distributed across the North American colonies, and published international news from Britain, explicit references to slavery tie the newspaper directly back to North Carolina and its largely provincial, agrarian economy. The Gazette was also North Carolina's only newspaper between 1768 and 1776, and yet very few issues survive, further creating a chasm between North Carolinian Patriotism and Patriotism in New England.

Visitors to New Bern, North Carolina are almost certainly directed to its principal relic of revolutionary-era Georgian architecture, the John W. Stanly house. Situated at the center of New Bern, the Stanly house is fairly contained and symmetrical: painted white, with black shutters, a black tiled roof, and a black door buttressed by two columns and a decorated archway.[1] Although visitors likely marvel at the Stanly House’s stately exterior and grand interior staircase, they likely know little about the first occupant it memorializes, John Wright Stanly. Stanly was a prominent North Carolina merchant, active beginning in the early 1760s and ending in his early death in 1789.[2] Born in Charles City County, Virginia in 1742, Stanly moved throughout Virginia and Jamaica as a merchant trading in ship material and commodity shipments[3] before settling in New Bern in 1772. Promptly after his arrival in New Bern, Stanly joined the town’s Committee on Safety and became the first to send raiders from the New Bern port. He aided the Patriot Cause throughout the war by sending food and provisions along supply lines and using merchant ships to raid British vessels, before returning to New Bern to run a coast-wide shipping operation in 1782.[4] A powerful businessman, Stanly is emblematic of the revolutionary working upper class. His house, commissioned portrait, and last will and testament attest to his success as a merchant, and exude and aura of refinement. Yet, just as with the Edenton Tea Party, this outward refinement is marred for modern viewers by Stanly’s ownership of slaves, reflected in his published slave advertisements in the North Carolina Gazette. This extends outwards to reflect the economic underpinnings of North Carolina, including elements of both the mercantile culture of the Northern colonies and the larger slave-culture of the Southern colonies.

The most striking characteristic of the Stanly House in New Bern, shown in images provided by Tryon Palace, the old seat of North Carolina’s governor, is its spare elegance. The house is meticulously symmetrical and appears carefully constructed. It is grand in contrast with the town of New Bern it is situated in, but not ostentatious or gaudy. In that regard, it seems perfectly to fit the lifestyle of a fairly prominent North Carolinian merchant: it is neither urban nor matching the scale of plantation houses owned by Southern aristocracy. The interior of the house includes a large, yet also simply designed staircase, in the same black and white as the house’s exterior. Alan Taylor, in his American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, situates North Carolina at the threshold between the North and the South in its economy and layout, describing that it was “too far north for sugarcane cultivation, [so] the mainland planters instead forced slaves to grow rice and indigo in the low country near the coast.” He also notes “Carolinians also profited by trading guns and ammunition.”[5] Stanly, a merchant and lawyer, did not participate in North Carolinian planting tradition, but appeared to prefer the smaller-town environment of New Bern to Philadelphia and Charleston.[6] Tyron Palace mentions that Stanly considered moving his family to Philadelphia for work reasons, but reconsidered in the aftermath of the war, when he established his shipping organization. A sign outside the house also identifies the house as the “home of Revolutionary War leader and his son John, Congressman and state legislator.”[7] The Stanly’s were likely the most prominent merchant family in New Bern, yet were not wholly integrated within Northern urban mercantile cultures—their house embodies a meeting point of Northern urban and Southern rural.

The outward refinement of J.W. Stanley, reflected in the Stanley house is significantly qualified by his involvement in the practice of slavery. It in turn suggests how the society of North Carolina participated both in trading commodities such as rice, tobacco, and ship material and in the practice of slavery. In June 1775, prior to his rise to prominence as a “Revolutionary War leader,” Stanley advertised “a valuable Negro Man seasoned to the County” in the North Carolina Gazette, alongside a series of speeches and editorials praising the rising Patriot cause. The slave advertisement appears in passing, barely distinguishable from the content surrounding it on either side, but clearly ties the advertisement to Stanly, whose name is one of the largest names on the page of the Gazette. According to the information Tyron provides on Stanly and the Stanly house, Stanly was actively running his shipping business out of New Bern in 1775.[8] This indicates that slaves might have played a role in a mercantile business with connections in Charleston, Jamaica, and further North in Philadelphia, belying the extent to which such a business was trans-regional. As the slave Stanly advertises was “seasoned to the country,” he likely worked around New Bern, and was not shipped overseas (perhaps to work on sugar mills in Jamaica). Although the Tyron company, pandering to New Bern tourists and visitors presently, makes no mention of the Stanly family’s ties to slavery, it is an important means of distinguishing Stanly as a merchant from prominent Northern merchants, who, though they participated in the slave trade, were unlikely to have directly incorporated slave labor in their businesses.[9]

            A portrait of a young J.W. Stanly that hangs in the Stanly House, and a business inventory of Stanly’s, included in his 1789 last will and testament, further solidify the impression of the Stanlys as a prominent North Carolinian mercantile family in a town and colony straddling the North and South. The Will and Testament fails, however, to situate slavery within Stanly’s work and domestic life. Stanly appears to have been a person sufficiently wealthy and socially established to commission a portrait of himself. He is modestly dressed in the portrait: the very existence of portrait in itself quietly suggests the extent of Stanly’s wealth and business acumen, but it is not ostentatious. Stanly’s lengthy will and testament, which includes provisions for his wife and six children, is as concerned with the details of his business as it is with passing on family wealth. A business inventory for “Stanly and Turner’s” incorporated within Stanly’s will includes both household items—“fourteen iron squares,” “four mottled rugs,” and “nine narrow axes,” for instance—it also references sugar and coffee, items more directly related to his merchant work in Jamaica and the Northern colonies. Stanly passed his house and business on to his son, yet the will and testament at no point references slavery or suggests the role of slaves in Stanly’s business initiatives. An explicit reference to slaves outside of the context of the Gazette advertisement, might suggest Stanly participated as a merchant in the slave trade, although secondary scholarship on New Bern mentioning Stanly limit his business to overseeing sugar, tobacco, and alcohol shipments. The dual domestic and outward outlook of Stanly’s will extends outward to reflect the tendencies of the North Carolina Gazette, which published global content, but also focused specifically on events within New Bern and North Carolina. Explicit references to slavery in these newspapers from prominent “refined” businessmen rendered societal customs of revolutionary North Carolina inherently dichotomous and contradictory.

Word Count: 1215

Works Cited:

Dill, Alonzo T. "Eighteenth-Century New Bern," North Carolina Historical Review 22 (1945): 327-360.

“John Wright Stanly.” Last modified 2014, http://www.ncpedia.org/biography/stanly-john-wright.

“Stanly House.” Last modified 2016, http://www.tryonpalace.org/stanly-house.

Taylor, Alan. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2016.