Peter Manigault’s letters to his parents during some of his travels are important pieces of history for several reasons. For one, they display the financial differences of the time – the rich in England were far more extravagant than those in America, even after colonization had begun. Second, we are offered a look into cultural life of the time, and we see Peter as a young man, before he began his career in politics of the time.
Peter Manigault, at his death in 1773, was listed as one of the wealthiest men Carolina – “his net worth was about $1,653,924 in 1977 dollars.” This, however, doesn’t rank with today’s elite that hold majority of our country’s economy in their bank accounts. What Peter’s letter provides us in terms of Carolina economic standards is a comparison with that of the English. Peter’s complaints to his mother on how much he has had to spend during his visit and how they dress up for church give us a look into the simplicity of early Carolinian life.
The relationship between Peter and his parents is notable, as well. His letters to each are vastly different – to his father, Peter writes a simple, one-page note of his arrival up North en route to England; to his mother, we have a many-paged document entailing all of his latest encounters and trials across the pond. This behavior may stem from the fact that “while in England as a young man [Peter] Manigault himself revealed a more typical artistic interest.” It’s clear that Peter here relates to his mother on a more aristocratic level, hence the longer letter; he relates to his father in the political sphere in which he participated in Carolina.
These letters, especially the correspondence between Peter and his mother, are particularly important as they are a glimpse into the new American ideology that was created post-immigration. Peter Manigault is an Carolina-born Huguenot visiting England, thus his views and mindset are part of the first generation of our nation’s ideology today. These letters are his attempts to make sense of the rest of the world in terms of Carolina, versus the previous notion of the world attempting to make sense of Carolina from the outside.
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