With a name as prestigious as his, one might have expected Charles Elliott Rowand Drayton to be an aristocratic planter or politician like his forebears, not a common merchant and auctioneer. But by 1860 money counted as much in Charleston as blue blood, and Drayton's status derived first from bourgeois standing and respectable connections. The city was full of such convoluted, contentious identities. On September 11, his name headed four advertisements in the Courier, marking him as one of the most active and successful traders in the city. Three notices were new and promised quick returns: the “very likely” slave Moses, age thirteen; the small farm on the Charleston Neck, waiting to be split into building lots; the steam boiler, fire brick, and wrought iron at the Railroad Accommodation Wharf, ready to rear another foundry above Calhoun Street. Wealth and trade of all sorts flowed through Drayton's lightly grasping fingers.

Merchants were foxy, pliant fellows, many thought, forever marginal and mediating. In Charleston, slaves, lands, and machines served admirably both to focus and to disguise the warring relations between men in the marketplace. Karl Marx called that exchange- based displacement of social power the “fetishism of commodities.” But there were other ways Charlestonians used to triangulate personal standing through object relations. There was, for example, chess.

Or, at least, there had been. The fourth item Drayton offered that day seemed vexingly trivial, less an ad than an admission of failure. Ten “sets of CHESS- MEN, with TABLES and BOARDS attached,” plus two oil paintings, were not easy to sell, not any more. These were the “remainder of those used by the Charleston Chess Club,” his notice explained. With that group's sudden demise, its equipment “of the most approved pattern” went on the block, to be “disposed of at a very low price.” Drayton had no choice: the value of things rested finally on the political and social relations of men, and those were in desperate flux. Had local interest in chess remained strong, the club he served as secretary would not have folded. But who could bother with games when the country was breaking up?