America has never had an aristocracy, only pretenders and strivers.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 22.

This is our vision of the city-state created in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by men and women who for the most part came to America seeking opportunity. They quite frankly wanted to get rich, and some did and very quickly, which puts them squarely in the American mainstream—but with a peculiar twist. Within the lifetimes of the Revolutionary War generation, those who got rich because of brains, ability, drive, luck, the accident of birth, canny marriages, or combinations thereof came to be called aristocrats, and historians and writers of every political persuasion have commonly referred to the Low Country aristocracy. Let us, however, put this myth to rest. America has never had an aristocracy, only pretenders and strivers.

The Low Country establishment, however, believed the fiction, and this led to a wrenching crisis between them and the mother country they loved and whose aristocracy they aped. For them rebellion made no economic sense. Their incredible prosperity was closely tied to the British mercantile system, and those ties went beyond the snug economic link. Many sons were sent to England at an early age for their education. Arthur Middleton (1742–1787), heir to a great Low Country fortune, spent nine years away attending Westminster School, Cambridge, and for his law studies Middle Temple. His friend William Henry Drayton — Charles Lee’s “damned bad engineer” — his background interchangeable with Arthur Middleton’s, his ancestry impeccable, his fortune assured, went to England when he was eleven to be educated at Westminster School and Balliol College, Oxford. While there he was looked after by another Rice King, Charles Pinckney and his wife Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who were living in Surrey supervising the English education of their own sons, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and his brother Thomas. The brothers spent over sixteen years in England, yet returned home to serve steadfastly the cause of independence from Great Britain.