University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER V
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 1794, 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.

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.

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. H 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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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]

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 Geogia
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 nonslaveholders
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.

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
self-government. But in a consolidated nation of diverse
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.