celebrated such enormous expansions of market hunting. Most men of
substance and influence, however—especially those who identified them-
selves as gentlemen sportsmen—were outraged. Market hunting of all
sorts, especially that of Back Bay scale, would surely cripple animal popu-
lations, depriving the gentlemen of their sport. The most enlightened of
late antebellum sportsmen—usually the most articulate, as well—under-
stood what would later be called ecology and game management. Habi-
tat must be protected, hunting and fishing regulated (including tempo-
rary prohibition, if warranted), if field and stream were forever to provide
healthful, character-building sport. Elite hunters and anglers, then, began
to champion conservation more than half a century before Gifford Pinchot,
Theodore Roosevelt, and others borrowed the word from the British and
made it a crusade in the United States. Roosevelt and others had founded a
national gentlemen’s hunting organization in —the Boone and Crock-
ett Club—to promote protection of forest and wetland habitat and regu-
lation of hunting. Ducks Unlimited came somewhat later. But earlier elite
men, fathers and grandfathers of the first conservationists, had all but
defined and organized a class war on subsistence pot-hunters, drunken
killing-bingers, and market hunters of all sorts.^9
The South had many gentlemen sportsmen, of course. Among them,
however, no one was more charmingly gifted as raconteur and writer, more
scholarly, more precocious in defining conservation, nor more spectacu-
larly accomplished as hunter and fisherman than William Elliott (–
). Elliott was scion of rice and sea-island cotton planters on Port Royal
Sound and Beaufort, South Carolina, below Charleston. A well-educated
cosmopolite, Elliott and his family moved several times every year, accord-
ing to season as well as business, among several agricultural estates, Beau-
fort, Charleston, and the Northeast. He read and wrote Latin and contrib-
uted to newspapers and literary journals. Elliott also served conscientiously
as a state legislator, resisting states’ rights extremism almost to the brink
of secession. In the meantime, he became a legendary sportsman well be-
fore middle age and, during the s and s, provided accounts of his
exploits to various periodicals. These and a philosophical addendum, ‘‘Ran-
dom Thoughts on Hunting,’’ were gathered and published as a book in .
At this late date, with Elliott in his early seventies, a visiting British jour-
nalist invited to fish with the old gentleman was agog at the planter’s fish-
ing vessel. Long, elegant, and equipped with masts and sails, the sporting
boat lay heavy in the water because it carried extra servants to attend the
party, bountiful provisions, and no fewer than six slave oarsmen dressed