South Carolina - Land

Rice has specific demands that limit the land that can be used to cultivate it.

In the early years in South Carolina, rice was grown near the coast where rain irrigated the crop. In the 1720's, planters moved up the rivers into the inland swamps where they impounded water in ponds or reserves. However, they were only able to store enough to flood their fields when it was germinating; the rest of the season they depended on nature.

The land around Charleston had been developed first. Huguenots then settled north around what became Georgetown at the mouth of the Santee, Pee Dee, Waccamaw and Black rivers. Their descendants moved upstream.

Daniel Heyward introduced rice to the south at Beaufort in 1741, and planters moved up the Combahee. Farther movement across the Savannah was limited by the proprietors of Georgia who didn’t permit slavery. After much political maneuvering in London, slavery was allowed in 1751 and George II reorganized the colony in 1752. Jonathan Bryan was the first to move south with 66 slaves, followed by Miles Brewton and William Williamson.

By the time Hezekiah Maham acquired his rice land up the Santee near Pineville in 1771 people were developing marginal land plagued by floods they called freshets and younger sons like Nathaniel Heyward were inheriting poorer plantations. Heyward’s first crop on the Combahee was destroyed by too much water that flooded his fields.

He believed he was too far inland to adequately drain away the excess in 1787. Men had been considering planting the lands bordering the saline estuaries since the 1750's: Archibald Johstone used the tides at Estherville plantation on Winyah Bay in 1758. However, few could regulate the flow to allow the fresh and bar the salt water.

In 1788, when Heyward was 22, he experimented on his brother James’ tidal land and was so successful others followed his example. William Dusinberre says his primary contribution was determining when and how to let water flood the land. Others figured out how to build the embankments and canals, borrowing from the Dutch. Still others improved the sluice gates, sometimes adapting African techniques, and introduced European pumps.

The adoption of tidal irrigation took rice farming from the realm of the amateur planter and his African slaves to professionals able to invest large sums in building irrigation systems. The rewards were greater yields and less labor spent weeding because standing water suppressed their growth. The unexpected cost was the need to constantly maintain dykes and canals.

Scientific knowledge became important. Heyward told his future son-in-law, Charles Maginault, to spend the year before he married, 1824, abroad and to pay special attention to the reclamation efforts on the Humber river. Similarly, Robert Allston, the friend and distant cousin of John Joshua Ward, had gone to West Point in 1821, then applied his knowledge of port engineering to manage his rice lands.

Money or access to credit remained important because the new irrigation systems needed manual labor to build. After the revolutionary war, there was a dearth of both. The slave trade suffered during the war, but demand in the Caribbean remained. As part of their efforts to defeat the colony and finance the war, the British shipped slaves south and encouraged others to abandon plantations. Philip Morgan estimates a quarter were gone from the land when peace arrived.

Merchants were still pressing for payment of war-time debts under the Articles of Confederation, and pre-war slave traders like William Wragg were dead or in exile. The same year the constitution was ratified in 1787, the General Assembly passed laws that temporarily limited the slave trade.

Fortunately, Heyward had access to everything he needed, even though his education may have been left to chance. After his father died in 1777 when he was 11, he was left with his step-mother who had younger children. He apparently was raised in a frontier society on the Combahee that opened him to ridicule when he stayed with one of his older brothers in sophisticated Charleston. However, someone did send him to spend 18 months in Europe after the war.

He made the appropriate social contacts and, in February of 1788, married Henrietta Manigault, daughter of the richest man in Charleston. Peter Manigault had read law at the Inner Temple, then married the daughter of merchant Joseph Wragg. He preferred managing the assets of others to the courtroom. In 1763 he took over the management of his father-in-law, Ralph Izard’s rice and indigo plantations on Goose Creek.

After tidal irrigation was established, the prime land for rice shrank to a strip about 30 miles wide from Georgetown south into Florida. The inland swamps slowly reverted to nature. No one bothered to rebuild when Hezekiah Maham’s house burned. People who wanted to become rich turned to cotton.

From the 1820's until the civil war, ownership of tidal lands became concentrated in the hands of people who could make it work - a rationalization similar to that which occurs when any new industry matures. By 1850, 91 planters in northern Georgetown County each produced more than 100,000 pounds, 98% of the rice grown in the area.

When he died in 1851, Nathaniel Heyward was the largest slaveholder in the south with 2,340 slaves and 17 plantations. When Joshua John Ward died in 1860, he was the largest slave owner. He had 1,130 chattel on nine plantations.

They expanded by buying existing plantations from others while adventurers like Heyward’s grandson-in-law, James Hamilton, were pushed west to open cotton land in Alabama, then Texas.

Each of the changes in farmland, from the early coastal cultivation to the inland swamps to the tide flooded land, not only changed who could succeed but brought changes in the variety of rice that prospered. However, slaves from the rice growing areas of Africa were still valued.

Notes:
Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.

Rogers, George C. Junior. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970.

Manigault, Edward Lining, Jr. The Manigault Family of South Carolina, Its Ancestors and Descendants.
Morgan, Philip D. "Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810," in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 1983 (cited by Rebecca Brannon and quoted by others without attribution)

Rowland, Lawrence Sanders, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861, 1996.

South Carolina - Labor

1738 was the year rice in South Carolina went from a reality to a dream. The price paid in London sterling per hundredweight reached a peak, 9.60, that would not be surpassed until 1772.

A few years before, in 1730, Charles Town exported 41,957 barrels and received 6.29 a hundred weight. A few years later, people believed the number of barrels doubled to 80,000 in 1740. It didn’t matter the price paid was 4.71.

Like the planters in Barbados who ignored their failures to succeed like James Drax, men believed a one-time achievement could become the norm. It had been demonstrated, rice could create a fortune. All that was needed was land, labor, seed rice and the credit to acquire them.

Attempts to produce more rice soon met with failure. Not only did the price fall when quantities increased, but crops failed between 1741 and 1746. Prices hit a low of 2.24 in the 1746.

England had joined Holland to support Austria against France, Saxony, Prussia and Bavaria in their dispute over the right of a woman, Maria Theresa, to assume the Hapsburg throne under Salic law in 1740. The War of Austrian Succession dragged on until 1748, and affected colonies on four continents, the Americas, Africa and southeast Asia.

Not only did shipping costs increase with war, but half the market for rice disappeared. Since 1730, Great Britain had allowed Charles Town to ship directly to traditionally neutral Portugal, defined as below Cape Finisterre, but not to its traditional rivals. About a quarter of the crop went there, and the rest to England, who re-exported two-thirds of what it received to Holland and northern Germany.

Labor was an equally serious problem. The Spanish, always looking for an opportunity to harm the British, were hinting any slaves who made it to Florida were welcome. Men, led by Portuguese-speaking Jemmy, started marching south towards the peninsula from the Stono river in September of 1739, after killing the storekeepers, where they got their arms, and nearby planters known to be harsh to their slaves.

The General Assembly rewrote the slave code and added a high import tax for three years, from 1741 to 1744, just as more people wanted to plant rice.

Towards the end of the war, a London syndicate of Scots born merchants bought Bence island, near modern Sierra Leone. It once had been a base for the Royal African Company, but had lapsed with the monopoly and been destroyed by Africans in 1738.

Henry Laurens became their agent in Charles Town in 1749, and grew especially close to Richard Oswald. He’d been apprenticed to a London merchant in 1744, and returned in 1747 when he was about 23. He received a 10% commission for advertising shipments of slaves, managing sales and buying rice to ship to the syndicate. By 1755, his company, Austen and Laurens, managed 25% of the city’s slave business.

Men ready to imitate the success of others are more vulnerable to advertising than those who experiment for themselves. Merchants played on their Stono Rebellion fears of Angolan or Kongo slaves and of slaves who spoke the same language to promote mixed populations from other parts of Africa. They insinuated all a planter needed was skilled labor to succeed, and advertised slaves came from rice growing areas. It hardly matters if any thing slave traders said was true: men were willing to believe.

These were the years, from 1738 to the revolution, when the argument can be made the knowledge of African slaves was critical to the success of the crop.

The demand for individuals who understood farming may have influenced how the slave trade developed on the western coast of Africa. A decade after the Austrian war ended, England took Sénégal and Gorée from France in 1758 and Bence Island developed as what Hugh Thomas called a "general rendezvous" for independent traders. In these years, nearly 60% of the slaves came from the western coast.

Captives were brought to these and other nearby islands where they were held until the season when winds made voyages west possible. During their time on the islands and in transit, they had to eat.

Judith Carney notes one trader bought 8 tons of rice in 1750 to feed 200 slaves in transit, and another believed 700 to 1,000 tons were needed for the 3,000 to 3,500 captives bought along the Sierra Leone coast. This demand stimulated the expansion of commodity agriculture in the areas near the coast, as demand by caravans had supported farming on the Niger earlier.

The Portuguese had pioneered using captives to grow their own food on Cape Verde islands in the late 1400's, and, Thomas says, the men who managed the captives at Bence island were Portuguese mulattos and Scots or other whites sent by the syndicate. They had the power to ignore the traditional division of labor that dictated women were the ones who tended and harvested the crop, while men did the hard labor of preparing fields. Both men and woman, even those from millet eating areas, arrived in the New World with some awareness of how to grow and mill rice.

The rice people grew in Africa had become more diversified when the Portuguese introduced higher yielding seed from Asian species. Both glaberrima and varieties of sativa were probably used for food in transit, and, Carney suggests, the surpluses of both infiltrated the areas being opened for rice growing in South Carolina where slaves still needed to feed themselves and new planters needed seed.

After rice was milled with mortars and pestles it was put through screens that separated the grains by size. In the 1780's, planter Timothy Ford noted the largest was sold, the middlings were eaten by the planters and the "small rice" given to slaves and livestock. The second was probably broken rice, and the third smaller pieces, Asian grains that hadn’t grown much, and possibly smaller glaberrima.

Back in 1768 when Henry Laurens was criticizing John Champneys for delivering poor quality rice, his complaint had been that, when asked, Champneys refused to have the rice resieved to verify its grade. It was probably broken rice delivered by a planter who had learned how to fool a broker, but hadn’t fully learned how to process rice or hadn’t developed a plantation where the slaves were willing to produce the most marketable product.

Notes: Bence island is also called Bunce island; the War of Austrian Succession is also known as King George’s War.

Barnwell, Joseph W. "Diary of Timothy Ford 1785-1786," South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 13 October 1912, quoted by Carney.

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001; details on quantities in transit from Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1998.

Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, 1989; prices.

Collinson, Peter. Letter to Gentleman’s Magazine, 26 May 1766, reprinted by Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, January 2007; export quantities.

Eltis, Davd, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas," The American Historical Review 112:Dec 2007; origins on slaves between 1750 and 1775.

Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade, 1997.

South Carolina - Tools

Settlers in Barbados and Charles Town learned to produce two tropical crops alien to English agriculture, sugar cane and rice. In each case, the first planters had problems when they used familiar methods to plant and harvest, and failed financially until they figured out how to prepare the cane and seed for market.

In the first case, James Drax apparently learned from the experience of Dutch growers from Pernambuco. In the second, scholars have taken Edward Randolph’s comment in 1700 that South Carolina had "now found the true way of raising and husking Rice" to suggest an important role for slaves from Africa in introducing the tall wooden mortar and pestle that resembles a butter churn.

At the time he was commenting on rice, Randolph was the Surveyor General of Customs keeping an eye on exports for the crown. The Charles Town economy was a satellite of the Caribbean, supplying it with cattle and meat. The islands, who shipped their cane to Bristol on England’s west coast, were the primary market for slaves.

Most of the South Carolina slaves came from the West Indies. The Portuguese had sent people from Angola who ate manioc and maize, while the Royal African Company worked the west coast of the continent from modern Sénégal to Togoland where people grew dry rice. The monopoly of the latter was not renewed by William III, who had deposed the Stuarts in 1680. The slave trade was opened in 1698 to the merchants of Bristol.

Statistically, the slave who introduced the mortar and pestle for milling rice would have come from the Caribbean and would have been a Konga, since island planters were more likely to reexport or refuse to buy such slaves. However, since the willingness to cooperate with a slave master was probably rare, the individual, probably a woman, may have been recently imported directly from an African area just being opened by the new slave traders where people grew rice.

The mortar and pestle is used for more than rice in Africa. On the east coast, where the pirates were active, women use the large wooden tool in Tanzania with millet, while it’s used with maize in modern Angola. The transfer of technology from one crop to another is the most conservative form of innovation.

Randolph gave no clue, and the adoption of the technology is not recorded in popular or folk history. Fayrer Hall simply said Henry Woodward "was ignorant for some Years how to clean it. It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection."

Any inferences about the first mortar and pestle drawn from material culture would probably use examples dated much later. The only suggestive thing about Randolph’s comment is the phrase "the true way." He either was using a rhetorical flourish to say "one that works," which he had been known to do, or had seen or heard about the tool elsewhere.

Randolph was a younger son who used his wife’s connections with the grandson of the first proprietor of New Hampshire, Robert Mason, to ingratiate himself with the government of Charles II after the restoration of 1660. Before he went to New Hampshire in 1676, he had read law at Gray’s Inn during the English civil war and bought lumber for the Commissioners of the Royal Navy. The last took him to Scotland for the Duke of Richmond.

Since he had been sent to New England, where he and his brothers became customs collectors, he would have been in a position to see anything on any ship in the harbor and talk with people informally who could make comments, remembered but not recorded, on customs in Africa. At the time he made his comments, he was shuttling between Charles Town and Bermuda.

We’ll probably never know more than the technology was introduced by a slave woman.

Notes:
Anonymous. "Crude and Curious Inventions at the Centennial Exhibition," The Atlantic Monthly 40:420-430:October 1877; drawings of mortars and pestles from Angola and Madagascar.

Hall, Fayrer. The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom, 1731, quoted by A. S. Salley Jr., "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina , no 6, 1919.

Mosha, A. C. "Sorghum and Millet Processing and Utilisation in the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference Area," available on-line with a photograph of a women using a wooden mortar and pestle in northeast Tanzania.

Urquhart, Alvin W. Patterns of Settlement and Subsistence in Southwestern Angola, 1963; picture of mortar and pestle used to make flour from maize.

South Carolina - Drainage and Irrigation

Agricultural economies are forever driven to increase production when trade and improved birth rates lead to larger urban populations. Farmers are continually confronted with managing water, and men (and women) discover and rediscover techniques for adding or removing it.

The methods developed by the Romans were lost, but when textile centers and the great trade fairs began developing in Bruges and Ghent by 1000, demand for wool brought sheep raising parts of England and Scotland into their economic sphere. Severe storms beginning in 1216 destroyed coastal communities, forcing counts in Flanders and Holland to begin protecting their existing land, then reclaiming more.

Wind driven mills appeared in the early 1200's, which D. G. Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen think may have been introduced by men returning from the Crusades against the Arabs in the near east. However, they say they didn’t become important drainage pumps until larger populations and increased storm problems led to technological innovations in 1570.

Skilled Dutchmen were lured by their neighbors to Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, then Rochefort and LaRochelle in France. Charles I encouraged Francis, the Duke of Bedford, to drain the fens of southeast England in 1630's, a project continued by Cromwell and Francis’ son William under the direction of Cornelius Vermuyden with Dutch laborers. More projects were undertaken after William of Orange was crowned in 1680.

When Flanders was the center of the textile industry, Dinis of Portugal, who ruled between 1279 and 1325, encouraged trade with the area to create an alternative to the markets of Castile and the Moors. To secure his borders, he introduced new patterns of land ownership and encouraged men to drain the marshes and swamps, where rice was eventually grown. He also cemented a naval alliance with Genoa, who was revolutionizing trade in Bruges.

In northern Italy, landowners of the Po valley began building canals in 1127 that fostered drainage and irrigation schemes. In 1475, the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, sent the first recorded rice from the area to Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara.

According to Fernand Braudel, the crop was encouraged in Lombardy in the 1500's. They were exporting their surplus to Genoa by 1570.

In 1517, the Ottomans of Turkey had conquered Egypt and demanded rice be sent to Constantinople as part of their annual tribute. It was adopted by the elite, and used by the military on campaigns. In 1600, Venice was eating rice, which they probably bought from the Turks, along with the more traditional wheat, millet and rye.

It takes little for farmers to extrapolate solutions from fragments of information. Portugal introduced reclamation after contact with Flanders. Italy introduced rice after contacts with the levant. In Africa and Madagascar, new varieties of rice were tried, new processing technologies adopted, and new methods for dealing with water created.

When allusions and imagination weren’t enough, men took steps to import knowledge. The Abbasids went from absorbing what the Persians knew to actively saving everything they could from the ancient world. Portugal exploited its contact with Genoa to explore Africa and the world. Everyone hired Dutch engineers and laborers.

Population growth, both natural and from new market towns, created necessity. Trade simplified finding solutions because it revitalized cultures grown comfortable in isolation. Rice and the techniques to grow it expanded when dynamic responses to life replaced static ones.

Notes:
Adshead, Samuel Adrian Miles. Material Culture in Europe and China, 1400-1800: The Rise of Consumerism, 1997.

Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerrane et le Monde Méditerranéan à l’Euopque de Philippe II, 1966 edition, translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Sian Reynolds, 1972.

Dutra, Francis A. "Dinis, King of Portugal" in E. Michael Gerli and Samuel G. Armistead, Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, 2003.

Kirby, D. G. and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen. The Baltic and the North Seas, 2000. The major innovation was the movable cap that allowed the mill’s sails to follow changes in the direction of the wind.

Pregill, Philip and Nancy Volkma. Landscapes in History: Design and Planning in the Eastern and Western Traditions, 1999.

South Carolina - Trade

Trade, historically, has fostered economic growth and then expanded to feed the needs it generated.

Africa was apparently a world of small communities who traded among themselves before Arab conquerors fanned out after the Sunni Umayyads deposed the established Moslem powers in 661. The Damascan caliphate spread to Egypt in 670 and across northern Africa to Spain in 711, then down to Mauritania in 734.

The Umayyads were deposed by the Shia Abbasids in 750, who moved the Moslem capital to Baghdad and eventually established a trade network that spread from the Umayyad retreat in Spain across northern Africa and the middle east through northern India to the Tarim basin of western China.

Bernard Lewis has found the earliest reference to rice comes from the conquest of the Basra area on the Persian frontier by Moslem tribesmen in the 600's. They tested the unknown grain as food after a horse that had eaten some didn’t die.

It probably became more common as a luxury among the elite after the Abbasids developed Basra as an intellectual center. At some time it was introduced to Egypt, then Spain. The Ishmali Fatimids, who deposed the Abbasids in Egypt in 909, spread north to Sicily, taking rice with them.

Arab traders began moving down the east African coast to Manda island off Kenya in the 800's. Soon after items carved from chlorite schist quarried on the northwest coast of Madagascar appeared in east Africa. The success of a Yemeni clan at Mogadishu in the middle 1100's, brought traders from Shiraz to Kilwa island off Tanzania in the late 1100's.

In the early 1300's, the Mahdali, an Ishmali clan from southern Aden, took over Kilwa and then the east African gold trade. Arab traders weren’t as interested in developing new markets as they were in redirecting the existing trade in gold; urban centers emerged as a consequence, abetted by the availability of surplus food to support urban populations and supply travelers.

Madagascar was drawn into the web of trade. Iharana, where Chinese export China was found in graves from the late 1300's, developed in the northeast as another source for three-legged bowls made from metamorphic rock. The growing port of Aden, with its community of Indian merchants from Gujarat, imported rice from Kilwa, which Richard Gray believes could only have come from Madagascar.

Mande speakers near the headwaters of the western branch of the Niger in west Africa grew glaberrima rice, which Judith Carney believes made possible the earliest sub-Saharan kingdom of Ghana.

Desert caravans, guided by the Sanhaja, linked the peoples of the Mediterranean with the savannah of the Mande, each of whom seems to have remained isolated from one another. The revitalizing Sunni Almoravids from Mauritania attacked Ghana’s main city, Awdaghost, in 1055, before they took Córdova in 1102, setting off the reconquest.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the southern Mande, the Malinke, moved along the Niger to establish the towns of Mali along the bend of the river. Timbukto became a center of learning for the Songhai empire to the northeast in the 1300's.

The exposure to Islam and the requisite trips to Mecca through Egypt, at least among the elite, provided the opportunity for people from the Sahel and savannah to travel to areas with different irrigation systems and different varieties of rice.

Notes:
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001.

Garlake, Peter. The Kingdoms of Africa, 1978.

Gray, Richard. "Southern Africa and Madagascar" in The Cambridge History of Africa: From c.1600 to c.1790, volume 4, 1975, edited by Richard Gray.

Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, 1995.