South Carolina - Profits

Economic historians have been arguing for years if slavery was profitable or, alternatively, would slavery have died from its own internal contradictions had there been no Emancipation Proclamation.

The irony is that the conditions that created the big fortunes in Barbados that set people’s expectations were fleeting. As soon as people saw the profits, they entered the business. Governments raised trade barriers which led to more sugar refineries, and less profit for the end-producers. They also restricted transportation, which drove up costs paid by farmers. At the same time, Brazil resumed production and new islands were brought into production, which drove commodity prices down.

Fernand Braudel believes the high profit point in the supply chain for refined sugar was at the point where the raw material was stored in wholesalers’ warehouses. For sugar producers in Brazil, he believes the annual profit was four to five percent, and their production costs were probably lower, over time, than those in Barbados because they could harvest their own fuel and produce some of their own food.

When Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647, he was told it was better to buy a fully operational plantation than it was to clear land himself. He joined Thomas Modyford and others taking over lands developed by William Hilliard. At the time, they got 500 acres, of which 200 were in sugar, 120 in wood to fuel the mills, 80 in pasture for the animals that worked the mills, 70 in provisions to feed the labor, and the rest in other cash crops.

By 1680, 80% of the land on Barbados was devoted to sugar cane, and planters had to pay for their wood and provisions that came from as far away as the Norfolk area of Virginia. Early settlers in South Carolina began as provisioners to the island.

Although the early planters probably didn’t know it, sugar cane is most profitable during its first years. The grass, like its corn cousin, needs a rich soil and quickly exhausts the available nutrients. After a few years, the farmer must either begin improving the soil, or clear new land.

While sugar cane is a perennial, the quality of the syrup that’s extracted from its saps degenerates with each cutting, so the crop must be replanted every few years anyway. One factor leading to the American civil war was the constant need of southern cotton farmers for new, unexhausted land.

Ligon himself didn’t do very well. He became sick in 1650 and returned to England, just as the confrontation between the Commonwealth and the followers of the deceased Charles I was beginning to affect trade. He hadn’t made enough to repay his English debts, which also had increased in the closing years of the English civil war. He wrote his promotional tract about Barbados in debtors prison.

He made the risks clear: a bad season, a fire, losses at sea, and a man could be ruined. However, he also described the large feasts hosted by James Drax and Humphrey Walrond that bespoke social success. He said Drax didn’t plan to return to England until he could "purchase an estate of ten thousand pound land yearly, which he hop’d in a few years to accomplish."

It was easy for Englishmen to ignore the risks mentioned by Ligon: agriculture had always subjected farmers to random success. What they paid attention to was the possibility that this time a man could "by his own Industry, and activity, (having youth and strength to friends,) raise his fortune, from a small beginning to a very great one."

And so men harnessed themselves to the slave plantation economy he described, oblivious to the fact that it was the land speculator who made his money from cotton, William Hilliard, who sold another plantation in 1654 and retired to England, not Drax. In 1657, some William Hilliard was living in Humphrey Walrond’s old home in Sea, Somerset.

Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce, 1982, pp193, 273, and The Perspective of the World, 1984, pp156-157.

Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.

Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.

Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile", Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.