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.