THE RICE COAST
The impulse for the formal colonization of Carolina came from Barbados,
which by the time of the Restoration was both overcrowded and torn with
dissension. Sir John Colleton, one of the leading planters in that little
island, proposed to several of his powerful Cavalier friends in England
that they join him in applying for a proprietary charter to the vacant
region between Virginia and Florida, with a view of attracting Barbadians
and any others who might come. In 1663 accordingly the "Merry Monarch"
issued the desired charter to the eight applicants as Lords Proprietors.
They were the Duke of Albemarle, the Earl of Clarendon, Earl Craven, Lord
Ashley (afterward the Earl of Shaftesbury), Lord Berkeley, Sir George
Carteret, Sir William Berkeley, and Sir John Colleton. Most of these had no
acquaintance with America, and none of them had knowledge of Carolina or
purpose of going thither. They expected that the mere throwing open of the
region under their distinguished patronage would bring settlers in a rush;
and to this end they published proposals in England and Barbados offering
lands on liberal terms and providing for a large degree of popular
self-government. A group of Barbadians promptly made a tentative settlement
at the mouth of the Cape Fear River; but finding the soil exceedingly
barren, they almost as promptly scattered to the four winds. Meanwhile in
the more southerly region nothing was done beyond exploring the shore.
Finding their passive policy of no avail, the Lords Proprietors bestirred
themselves in 1669 to the extent of contributing several hundred pounds
each toward planting a colony on their southward coast. At the same time
they adopted the "fundamental constitutions" which John Locke had framed
for the province. These contemplated land grants in huge parcels to a
provincial nobility, and a cumbrous oligarchical government with a minimum
participation of popular representatives. The grandiloquent feudalism of
the scheme appealed so strongly to the aristocratic Lords Proprietors
that in spite of their usual acumen in politics they were blinded to its
conflicts with their charter and to its utter top-heaviness. They rewarded
Locke with the first patent of Carolina nobility, which carried with it
a grant of forty-eight thousand acres. For forty years they clung to the
fundamental constitutions, notwithstanding repeated rejections of them by
the colonists.
The fund of 1669 was used in planting what proved a permanent settlement of
English and Barbadians on the shores of Charleston Harbor. Thereafter the
Lords Proprietors relapsed into passiveness, commissioning a new governor
now and then and occasionally scolding the colonists for disobedience. The
progress of settlement was allowed to take what course it might.
The fundamental constitutions recognized the institution of negro slavery,
and some of the first Barbadians may have carried slaves with them
to Carolina. But in the early decades Indian trading, lumbering and
miscellaneous farming were the only means of livelihood, none of which gave
distinct occasion for employing negroes. The inhabitants, furthermore, had
no surplus income with which to buy slaves. The recruits who continued to
come from the West Indies doubtless brought some blacks for their service;
but the Huguenot exiles from France, who comprised the chief other
streamlet of immigration, had no slaves and little money. Most of the
people were earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. The Huguenots
in particular, settling mainly in the interior on the Cooper and Santee
Rivers, labored with extraordinary diligence and overcame the severest
handicaps. That many of the settlers whether from France or the West Indies
were of talented and sturdy stock is witnessed by the mention of the family
names of Legaré, Laurens, Marion and Ravenel among the Huguenots, Drayton,
Elliot, Gibbes and Middleton among the Barbadians, Lowndes and Rawlins
from St. Christopher's, and Pinckney from Jamaica. Some of the people were
sluggards, of course, but the rest, heterogeneous as they were, were living
and laboring as best they might, trying such new projects as they could,
building a free government in spite of the Lords Proprietors, and awaiting
the discovery of some staple resource from which prosperity might be won.
Among the crops tried was rice, introduced from Madagascar by Landgrave
Thomas Smith about 1694, which after some preliminary failures proved so
great a success that from about the end of the seventeenth century its
production became the absorbing concern. Now slaves began to be imported
rapidly. An official account of the colony in 1708[1] reckoned the
population at about 3500 whites, of whom 120 were indentured servants, 4100
negro slaves, and 1400 Indians captured in recent wars and held for the
time being in a sort of slavery. Within the preceding five years, while the
whites had been diminished by an epidemic, the negroes had increased by
about 1,100. The negroes were governed under laws modeled quite closely
upon the slave code of Barbados, with the striking exception that in this
period of danger from Spanish invasion most of the slave men were required
by law to be trained in the use of arms and listed as an auxiliary militia.
[Footnote 1: Text printed in Edward McCrady, _South Carolina under the
Proprietary Government_ (New York, 1897). pp. 477-481.]
During the rest of the colonial period the production of rice advanced at
an accelerating rate and the slave population increased in proportion,
while the whites multiplied somewhat more slowly. Thus in 1724 the whites
were estimated at 14,000, the slaves at 32,000, and the rice export was
about 4000 tons; in 1749 the whites were said to be nearly 25,000, the
slaves at least 39,000, and the rice export some 14,000 tons, valued at
nearly £100,000 sterling;[2] and in 1765 the whites were about 40,000, the
slaves about 90,000, and the rice export about 32,000 tons, worth some
£225,000.[3] Meanwhile the rule of the Lords Proprietors had been replaced
for the better by that of the crown, with South Carolina politically
separated from her northern sister; and indigo had been introduced as a
supplementary staple. The Charleston district was for several decades
perhaps the most prosperous area on the continent.
[Footnote 2: Governor Glen, in B.R. Carroll, _Historical Collections of
South Carolina_ (New York, 1836), II, 218, 234, 266.]
[Footnote 3: McCrady, _South Carolina under the Royal Government_ (New
York, 1899), pp. 389, 390, 807.]
While rice culture did not positively require inundation, it was
facilitated by the periodical flooding of the fields, a practice which was
introduced into the colony about 1724. The best lands for this purpose were
level bottoms with a readily controllable water supply adjacent. During
most of the colonial period the main recourse was to the inland swamps,
which could be flooded only from reservoirs of impounded rain or brooks.
The frequent shortage of water in this régime made the flooding irregular
and necessitated many hoeings of the crop. Furthermore, the dearth of
watersheds within reach of the great cypress swamps on the river borders
hampered the use of these which were the most fertile lands in the colony.
Beginning about 1783 there was accordingly a general replacement of the
reservoir system by the new one of tide-flowing.[4] For this method tracts
were chosen on the flood-plains of streams whose water was fresh but whose
height was controlled by the tide. The land lying between the levels of
high and low tide was cleared, banked along the river front and on the
sides, elaborately ditched for drainage, and equipped with "trunks" or
sluices piercing the front embankment. On a frame above either end of each
trunk a door was hung on a horizontal pivot and provided with a ratchet.
When the outer door was raised above the mouth of the trunk and the inner
door was lowered, the water in the stream at high tide would sluice through
and flood the field, whereas at low tide the water pressure from the land
side would shut the door and keep the flood in. But when the elevation of
the doors was reversed the tide would be kept out and at low tide any water
collected in the ditches from rain or seepage was automatically drained
into the river. Occasional cross embankments divided the fields for greater
convenience of control. The tide-flow system had its own limitations and
handicaps. Many of the available tracts were so narrow that the cost of
embankment was very high in proportion to the area secured; and hurricanes
from oceanward sometimes raised the streams until they over-topped the
banks and broke them. If these invading waters were briny the standing crop
would be killed and the soil perhaps made useless for several years until
fresh water had leached out the salt. At many places, in fact, the water
for the routine flowing of the crop had to be inspected and the time
awaited when the stream was not brackish.
[Footnote 4: David Ramsay, _History of South Carolina_ (Charleston, 1809),
II, 201-206.]
Economy of operation required cultivation in fairly large units. Governor
Glen wrote about 1760, "They reckon thirty slaves a proper number for a
rice plantation, and to be tended by one overseer."[5] Upon the resort to
tide-flowing the scale began to increase. For example, Sir James Wright,
governor of Georgia, had in 1771 eleven plantations on the Savannah,
Ogeechee and Canoochee Rivers, employing from 33 to 72 slaves each,
the great majority of whom were working hands.[6] At the middle of the
nineteenth century the single plantation of Governor Aiken on Jehossee
Island, South Carolina, of which more will be said in another chapter, had
some seven hundred slaves of all ages.
[Footnote 5: Carroll, _Historical Collections of South Carolina_, II, 202.]
[Footnote 6: American Historical Association _Report_ for 1903, p. 445.]
In spite of many variations in the details of cultivation, the tide-flow
system led to a fairly general standard of routine. After perhaps a
preliminary breaking of the soil in the preceding fall, operations began in
the early spring with smoothing the fields and trenching them with narrow
hoes into shallow drills about three inches wide at the bottom and twelve
or fourteen inches apart. In these between March and May the seed rice was
carefully strewn and the water at once let on for the "sprout flow." About
a week later the land was drained and kept so until the plants appeared
plentifully above ground. Then a week of "point flow" was followed by a
fortnight of dry culture in which the spaces between the rows were lightly
hoed and the weeds amidst the rice pulled up. Then came the "long flow"
for two or three weeks, followed by more vigorous hoeing, and finally
the "lay-by flow" extending for two or three months until the crop, then
standing shoulder high and thick with bending heads, was ready for harvest.
The flowings served a triple purpose in checking the weeds and grass,
stimulating the rice, and saving the delicate stalks from breakage and
matting by storms.
A curious item in the routine just before the grain was ripe was the
guarding of the crop from destruction by rice birds. These bobolinks timed
their southward migration so as to descend upon the fields in myriads when
the grain was "in the milk." At that stage the birds, clinging to the
stalks, could squeeze the substance from within each husk by pressure of
the beak. Negroes armed with guns were stationed about the fields with
instructions to fire whenever a drove of the birds alighted nearby. This
fusillade checked but could not wholly prevent the bobolink ravages. To
keep the gunners from shattering the crop itself they were generally given
charges of powder only; but sufficient shot was issued to enable the guards
to kill enough birds for the daily consumption of the plantation. When
dressed and broiled they were such fat and toothsome morsels that in their
season other sorts of meat were little used.
For the rice harvest, beginning early in September, as soon as a field was
drained the negroes would be turned in with sickles, each laborer cutting
a swath of three or four rows, leaving the stubble about a foot high to
sustain the cut stalks carefully laid upon it in handfuls for a day's
drying. Next day the crop would be bound in sheaves and stacked for a brief
curing. When the reaping was done the threshing began, and then followed
the tedious labor of separating the grain from its tightly adhering husk.
In colonial times the work was mostly done by hand, first the flail for
threshing, then the heavy fat-pine pestle and mortar for breaking off the
husk. Finally the rice was winnowed of its chaff, screened of the "rice
flour" and broken grain, and barreled for market.[7]
[Footnote 7: The best descriptions of the rice industry are Edmund Ruffin,
_Agricultural Survey of South Carolina_ (Columbia, S.C. 1843); and R.F.W.
Allston, _Essay on Sea Coast Crops_ (Charleston, 1854), which latter is
printed also in _DeBow's Review_, XVI, 589-615.]
The ditches and pools in and about the fields of course bred swarms of
mosquitoes which carried malaria to all people subject. Most of the whites
were afflicted by that disease in the warmer half of the year, but the
Africans were generally immune. Negro labor was therefore at such a premium
that whites were virtually never employed on the plantations except as
overseers and occasionally as artisans. In colonial times the planters,
except the few quite wealthy ones who had town houses in Charleston, lived
on their places the year round; but at the close of the eighteenth century
they began to resort in summer to "pine land" villages within an hour or
two's riding distance from their plantations. In any case the intercourse
between the whites and blacks was notably less than in the tobacco region,
and the progress of the negroes in civilization correspondingly
slighter. The plantations were less of homesteads and more of business
establishments; the race relations, while often cordial, were seldom
intimate.
The introduction of indigo culture was achieved by one of America's
greatest women, Eliza Lucas, afterward the wife of Charles Pinckney
(chief-justice of the province) and mother of the two patriot statesmen
Thomas and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Her father, the governor of the
British island of Antigua, had been prompted by his wife's ill health
to settle his family in South Carolina, where the three plantations he
acquired near Charleston were for several years under his daughter's
management. This girl while attending her father's business found time to
keep up her music and her social activities, to teach a class of young
negroes to read, and to carry on various undertakings in economic botany.
In 1741 her experiments with cotton, guinea-corn and ginger were defeated
by frost, and alfalfa proved unsuited to her soil; but in spite of two
preliminary failures that year she raised some indigo plants with success.
Next year her father sent a West Indian expert named Cromwell to manage her
indigo crop and prepare its commercial product. But Cromwell, in fear of
injuring the prosperity of his own community, purposely mishandled the
manufacturing. With the aid of a neighbor, nevertheless, Eliza not only
detected Cromwell's treachery but in the next year worked out the true
process. She and her father now distributed indigo seed to a number of
planters; and from 1744 the crop began to reach the rank of a staple.[8]
The arrival of Carolina indigo at London was welcomed so warmly that in
1748 Parliament established a bounty of sixpence a pound on indigo produced
in the British dominions. The Carolina output remained of mediocre quality
until in 1756 Moses Lindo, after a career in the indigo trade in London,
emigrated to Charleston and began to teach the planters to distinguish the
grades and manufacture the best.[9] At excellent prices, ranging generally
from four to six shillings a pound, the indigo crop during the rest of the
colonial period, reaching a maximum output of somewhat more than a million
pounds from some twenty thousand acres in the crop, yielded the community
about half as much gross income as did its rice. The net earnings of the
planters were increased in a still greater proportion than this, for the
work-seasons in the two crops could be so dovetailed that a single gang
might cultivate both staples.
[Footnote 8: _Journal and Letters of Eliza Lucas_ (Wormesloe, Ga., 1850);
Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, _Eliza Pinckney_ (New York, 1896); _Plantation and
Frontier_, I, 265, 266.]
[Footnote 9: B.A. Elzas, _The Jews of South Carolina_ (Philadelphia, 1905),
chap. 3.]
Indigo grew best in the light, dry soil so common on the coastal plain.
From seed sown in the early spring the plant would reach its full growth,
from three to six feet high, and begin to bloom in June or early July. At
that stage the plants were cut off near the ground and laid under water in
a shallow vat for a fermentation which in the course of some twelve hours
took the dye-stuff out of the leaves. The solution then drawn into another
vat was vigorously beaten with paddles for several hours to renew and
complete the foaming fermentation. Samples were taken at frequent intervals
during the latter part of this process, and so soon as a blue tinge became
apparent lime water, in carefully determined proportions, was gently
stirred in to stop all further action and precipitate the "blueing." When
this had settled, the water was drawn off, the paste on the floor was
collected, drained in bags, kneaded, pressed, cut into cubes, dried in the
shade and packed for market.[10] A second crop usually sprang from the
roots of the first and was harvested in August or September.
[Footnote 10: B.R. Carroll, _Historical Collections of South Carolina_, II,
532-535.]
Indigo production was troublesome and uncertain of results. Not only did
the furrows have to be carefully weeded and the caterpillars kept off the
plants, but when the stalks were being cut and carried to the vats great
pains were necessary to keep the bluish bloom on the leaves from being
rubbed off and lost, and the fermentation required precise control for
the sake of quality in the product.[11] The production of the blue staple
virtually ended with the colonial period. The War of Independence not only
cut off the market for the time being but ended permanently, of course, the
receipt of the British bounty. When peace returned the culture was revived
in a struggling way; but its vexations and vicissitudes made it promptly
give place to sea-island cotton.[12]
[Footnote 11: Johann David Schoepf, _Travels in the Confederation,
1783-1784_, A.J. Morrison tr. (Philadelphia, 1911), pp. 187-189.]
[Footnote 12: David Ramsay, _History of South Carolina_, II, 212; D.D.
Wallace, _Life of Henry Laurens_, p. 132.]
The plantation of the rice-coast type had clearly shown its tendency to
spread into all the suitable areas from Winyah Bay to St. John's River,
when its southward progress was halted for a time by the erection of
the peculiar province of Georgia. The launching of this colony was the
beginning of modern philanthropy. Upon procuring a charter in 1732
constituting them trustees of Georgia, James Oglethorpe and his colleagues
began to raise funds from private donations and parliamentary grants for
use in colonizing English debtor-prisoners and other unfortunates. The
beneficiaries, chosen because of their indigence, were transported at the
expense of the trust and given fifty-acre homesteads with equipment and
supplies. Instruction in agriculture was provided for them at Savannah, and
various regulations were established for making them soberly industrious on
a small-farming basis. The land could not be alienated, and neither slaves
nor rum could be imported. Persons immigrating at their own expense might
procure larger land grants, but no one could own more than five hundred
acres; and all settlers must plant specified numbers of grape vines and
mulberry trees with a view to establishing wine and silk as the staples of
the colony.
In the first few years, while Oglethorpe was in personal charge at Savannah
and supplies from England were abundant, there was an appearance of
success, which soon proved illusory. Not only were the conditions unfit
for silk and wine, but the fertile tracts were malarial and the healthy
districts barren, and every industry suited to the climate had to meet the
competition of the South Carolinians with their slave labor and plantation
system. The ne'er-do-weels from England proved ne'er-do-weels again. They
complained of the soil, the climate, and the paternalistic regulations
under which they lived. They protested against the requirements of silk and
wine culture; they begged for the removal of all peculiar restrictions and
for the institution of self-government They bombarded the trustees with
petitions saying "rum punch is very wholesome in this climate," asking
fee-simple title to their lands, and demanding most vigorously the right of
importing slaves. But the trustees were deaf to complaints. They maintained
that the one thing lacking for prosperity from silk and wine was
perseverance, that the restriction on land tenure was necessary on the one
hand to keep an arms-bearing population in the colony and on the other
hand to prevent the settlers from contracting debts by mortgage, that the
prohibitions of rum and slaves were essential safeguards of sobriety and
industry, and that discontent under the benevolent care of the trustees
evidenced a perversity on the part of the complainants which would
disqualify them for self-government. Affairs thus reached an impasse.
Contributions stopped; Parliament gave merely enough money for routine
expenses; the trustees lost their zeal but not their crotchets; the colony
went from bad to worse. Out of perhaps five thousand souls in Georgia about
1737 so many departed to South Carolina and other free settlements that in
1741 there were barely more than five hundred left. This extreme depression
at length forced even the staunchest of the trustees to relax. First the
exclusion of rum was repealed, then the introduction of slaves on lease
was winked at, then in 1749 and 1750 the overt importation of slaves was
authorized and all restrictions on land tenure were canceled. Finally the
stoppage of the parliamentary subvention in 1751 forced the trustees in the
following year to resign their charter.
Slaveholders had already crossed the Savannah River in appreciable
numbers to erect plantations on favorable tracts. The lapse of a few
more transition years brought Georgia to the status on the one hand of a
self-governing royal province and on the other of a plantation community
prospering, modestly for the time being, in the production of rice and
indigo. Her peculiarities under the trustee régime were gone but not
forgotten. The rigidity of paternalism, well meant though it had been, was
a lesson against future submission to outward control in any form; and
their failure as a peasantry in competition with planters across the river
persuaded the Georgians and their neighbors that slave labor was essential
for prosperity.
It is curious, by the way, that the tender-hearted, philanthropic
Oglethorpe at the very time of his founding Georgia was the manager of the
great slave-trading corporation, the Royal African Company. The conflict of
the two functions cannot be relieved except by one of the greatest of all
reconciling considerations, the spirit of the time. Whatever else the
radicals of that period might wish to reform or abolish, the slave trade
was held either as a matter of course or as a positive benefit to the
people who constituted its merchandise.
The narrow limits of the rice and indigo régime in the two colonies
made the plantation system the more dominant in its own area. Detailed
statistics are lacking until the first federal census, when indigo was
rapidly giving place to sea-island cotton; but the requirements of the new
staple differed so little from those of the old that the plantations near
the end of the century were without doubt on much the same scale as before
the Revolution. In the four South Carolina parishes of St. Andrew's, St.
John's Colleton, St. Paul's and St. Stephen's the census-takers of 1790
found 393 slaveholders with an average of 33.7 slaves each, as compared
with a total of 28 non-slaveholding families. In these and seven more
parishes, comprising together the rural portion of the area known
politically as the Charleston District, there were among the 1643 heads of
families 1318 slaveholders owning 42,949 slaves. William Blake had 695;
Ralph Izard had 594 distributed on eight plantations in three parishes,
and ten more at his Charleston house; Nathaniel Heyward had 420 on his
plantations and 13 in Charleston; William Washington had 380 in the country
and 13 in town; and three members of the Horry family had 340, 229 and 222
respectively in a single neighborhood. Altogether there were 79 separate
parcels of a hundred slaves or more, 156 of between fifty and ninety-nine,
318 of between twenty and forty-nine, 251 of between ten and nineteen, 206
of from five to nine, and 209 of from two to four, 96 of one slave each,
and 3 whose returns in the slave column are illegible.[13] The statistics
of the Georgetown and Beaufort districts, which comprised the rest of the
South Carolina coast, show a like analysis except for a somewhat larger
proportion of non-slaveholders and very small slaveholders, who were,
of course, located mostly in the towns and on the sandy stretches of
pine-barren. The detailed returns for Georgia in that census have been
lost. Were those for her coastal area available they would surely show a
similar tendency toward slaveholding concentration.
[Footnote 13: _Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States,
1790: State of South Carolina_ (Washington, 1908); _A Century of Population
Growth_ (Washington, 1909), pp. 190, 191, 197, 198.]
Avenues of transportation abundantly penetrated the whole district in the
form of rivers, inlets and meandering tidal creeks. Navigation on them was
so easy that watermen to the manner born could float rafts or barges for
scores of miles in any desired direction, without either sails or oars, by
catching the strong ebb and flow of the tides at the proper points. But
unlike the Chesapeake estuaries, the waterways of the rice coast were
generally too shallow for ocean-going vessels. This caused a notable
growth of seaports on the available harbors. Of those in South Carolina,
Charleston stood alone in the first rank, flanked by Georgetown and
Beaufort. In the lesser province of Georgia, Savannah found supplement in
Darien and Sunbury. The two leading ports were also the seats of government
in their respective colonies. Charleston was in fact so complete a focus
of commerce, politics and society that South Carolina was in a sense a
city-state.
The towns were in sentiment and interest virtually a part of the plantation
community. The merchants were plantation factors; the lawyers and doctors
had country patrons; the wealthiest planters were town residents from time
to time; and many prospering townsmen looked toward plantation retirement,
carrying as it did in some degree the badge of gentility, as the crown of
their careers. Furthermore the urban negroes, more numerous proportionately
than anywhere else on the continent, kept the citizens as keenly alive
as the planters to the intricacies of racial adjustments. For example
Charleston, which in 1790 had 8089 whites, 7864 slaves and 586 free
negroes, felt as great anxiety as did the rural parishes at rumors of
slave conspiracies, and on the other hand she had a like interest in the
improvement of negro efficiency, morality and good will.
The rice coast community was a small one. Even as measured in its number
of slaves it bulked only one-fourth as large, say in 1790, as the group of
tobacco commonwealths or the single sugar island of Jamaica. Nevertheless
it was a community to be reckoned with. Its people were awake to their
peculiar conditions and problems; it had plenty of talented citizens to
formulate policies; and it had excellent machinery for uniting public
opinion. In colonial times, plying its trade mainly with England and the
West Indies, it was in little touch with its continental neighbors, and it
developed a sense of separateness. As part of a loosely administered
empire its people were content in prosperity and self-government. But in a
consolidated nation of diverse and conflicting interests it would be likely
on occasion to assert its own will and resist unitedly anything savoring of
coercion. In a double sense it was of the _southern_ South.