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.