Pierce Butler - Fourth and Later Generations

Fourth and Later Generations

After (Mease) Butler's death, his second daughter Frances Butler Leigh and her husband James Leigh, a minister, tried to restore to productivity and operate the combined plantations, but were also unsuccessful in generating a profit. They left Georgia in 1877 and moved permanently to England, where Leigh had been born. Frances Butler Leigh defended her father's actions as a slaveholder in her book, Ten Years on a Georgian Plantation since the War (1883), intended as a rebuttal to her mother's critique of slavery twenty years before.

Butler's eldest daughter, Sarah Butler Wister, had married a wealthy doctor, Owen Jones Wister of the Germantown area of Philadelphia. They had a son, Owen Wister, who became a popular American novelist and author of the 1902 western novel, 'The Virginian, now considered a classic of the western migration. Wister was the last Butler descendant to inherit the plantations acquired by Major Butler. He wrote about the post-Civil War South in his novel, Lady Baltimore (1906). It glorified "the lost aristocrats of antebellum Charleston" and, as the historian Marian McKenna notes, was strongly criticized by his friend Theodore Roosevelt for making nearly all the devils Northerners and the angels Southerners.