in red flannel jackets and straw hats with broad ‘‘ribands.’’ Elliott had been
a handsome man when Thomas Sully painted his portrait in . He was
ever stylish and—in light of his class, color, sex, and time—principled.^10
The random thoughts that conclude Elliott’s wonderful volume,Caro-
lina Sports by Land and Water, illustrate and define the attitudes of the
gentleman sportsman. All of history, he began, demonstrated that ‘‘man’’
required ‘‘amusement and recreation.’’ ‘‘Ascetic innovators, who would
make life as unjoyous as their own natures; who would reform society,
by denouncing dancing as a sin—the theatre as an abomination—and all
amusements, however innocent, as a waste of time unworthy of immortal
beings’’ live in a narrow ‘‘valley’’ without perspective, he declared. ‘‘Field
[and aquatic] sports are both innocent and manly’’ simply because they
are ‘‘amusements that employ the senses, are needful to restoretheirworn
bodies, and revive their wasted spirits’’—not to mention that sportsmen
‘‘are happier and better for the relaxation’’ (–). Men who endeavor
to become proficient in such sport actually become more virtuous, Elliott
averred: They tend to be punctual, considerate, resolute, and sagacious
(therefore excellent potential soldiers), and they become disinclined to
gamble. He did not mention the getting of food, much less hunting or fish-
ing to get money in markets.
Elliott’s lasting regret in old age was the retreat of habitat and the dimi-
nution of game. As planter as well as sportsman, he could not, he wrote,
‘‘regret the destruction of the forests,when the subsistence of man is the
purpose.’’ History had ordained ‘‘that the hunter should give place to the
husbandman.’’ What he abhorred in this context was ‘‘the wanton, the
uncalled-for destruction of forests and of game’’ (). Sportsmen such as
he were never wanton. Rather, ‘‘professional’’ market hunters and local
rabble (black and white)—fire hunters—who blinded game at night and
executed them without sport were hastening animals to extinction in the
Low Country. Here Elliott gave vent to a rage against the commons as fero-
cious as Edmund Ruffin’s. ‘‘The right to hunt wild animals is held by the
great body of the people, whether landholders or otherwise, as one of their
franchises, which they will indulge in at discretion; and to all limitations on
which, they submit with the worst possible grace!’’ (). Elliott wished for
all his estates to be private hunting preserves. But since he owned so much
and traveled so often, he could not police it all, and he often found ‘‘his’’
game killed off when he returned from an absence. ‘‘Hunter’s law,’’ Elliott
was unsurprised to hear in court from a fellow landowner, overruled prop-
erty rights when men and dogs pursued deer through another’s property,