I began by wondering how Englishmen not known for any proclivity for hard work or innovation could have made their fortunes growing exotic plants like sugar cane and rice. I ended with no simple answer, but a combination of the usual factors: necessity, unusual individuals looking to solve critical problems, unique situations.
Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are probably as representative as any of the middling classes in South Carolina, and their fates are as symptomatic. Unlike men like Henry Laurens and John Joshua Ward, who have come to represent an idealized south of slave traders and rice planters, they have simply faded away.
In 1916, James Wood Johnson, of Johnson and Johnson, bought Mepkin, the plantation that had once been owned by Laurens, the slave trader who had criticized Champneys’ business practices. Unlike lowland planters who wanted land that was productive and the right size to be worked by a single slave crew, Johnson bought adjacent plantations to leave his daughter, Helen Rutgers, 10,000 contiguous acres in 1932. She sold to Henry Luce, and his wife Clare Booth Luce in 1936.
The playwright hired landscape architects to covert the once productive land into acres of gardens. They gave a large portion of the estate to the Trappist Order's Gethsemani Abbey in 1949. The grounds were opened to tourists in 2007.
The land where Ward once selected Carolina Gold from his great-uncle Maham’s rice has similarly been agglomerated with Plowden Weston’s Laurel Hill and other plantations once owned by the Allstons into Brookgreen Gardens by Archer Milton Huntington and his wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington, to display her sculpture. Today, visitors can examine their sculpture collection in a natural setting.
In contrast, the area where Maham lived, including the homes of Francis Marion and the Palmers, was flooded in 1941 by the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project to create Lake Moultrie and provide power to local rural residents. Maham’s land survived but is owned by someone who "is not interested in the history of this area, and as a result is allowing the cemetery and monument [erected by Ward] to be destroyed by overgrowth of briars, brush, and trees."
Champneys’ two plantations similarly disappeared as Charleston expanded; neither is mentioned in the South Carolina list of plantations. In 1995, people in Ravenel planted blueberries at the end of Rose Drive, off Champneys Drive, and in 2003 opened Champneys Blueberries to let the public bring their children to pick where the noisette rose was born.
On Postell Drive, the next road off the Savannah Highway, people built McMansions in Champneys Gardens in the 1990's. In the best Charleston tradition, a $425,000 "exquisite Mediterranean style home" featuring "old English brick," marble foyer and gourmet kitchen is awaiting foreclosure.
If Champneys’ plantations have been transformed into a brand name, so too has Ward’s rice. In 1999 Merle Shepard began crossing Carolina Gold with other varieties to introduce modern disease resistence, greater yields and better wind resistence. With help from Gurdev Khush and Anna McClug, he took the most promising hybrid with an indica basmati and put it through the rigorous selection process now used to establish hybrid purity. The USDA released Charleston Gold for "restaurants using historically authentic ingredients," a market created by Richard Schultz and Glen Roberts.
The desire to recover the past that was stimulated by the Bicentennial also affected rose growers, who were interested in saving older varieties. Noisettes had nearly disappeared because they couldn’t withstand the climate of much of this country. In the late 1970's, Léonie Bell and Doug Seidel began searching for Champneys Pink Cluster, based on herbarium samples preserved in Bermuda. Eventually, Carl Cato and Peggy Cornett discovered surviving bushes in Virginia. Bell sent cuttings from Cato’s find to Joseph Schraven’s Pickering Nursuries in Ontario, to propagate for public sale.
The reason Champneys’ rose could be restored and Maham’s rice needed to be recreated is partly the result of nature, and partly changing values. A woody perennial like a rose can be cloned by cuttings so that the original is reproduced over and over. Seeds for an annual like rice must be planted every year. No matter how careful the grower, variation will persist in hybrids that haven’t been stabilized and a special variety will disappear when it’s not grown and no viable seed survives.
A perennial can come to represent the enduring values of a society like the gentility and beauty of Charleston promoted by the Luces and Huntingtons. An annual, by necessity, is dependent on the perpetuation of those cultural values, year by year, generation after generation, by planters and slaves toiling in the mosquito infested swampy low country. The one can survive abandonment to be rediscovered as a relic; the other cannot endure without effort except in memory.
Notes: Information of plantations from South Carolina Plantations website, maintained by SCIWAY.com, LLC.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
South Carolina - Entrepreneurial Spirit
Capitalism, by definition, exists when people can make money from their efforts, and therefore assumes a monetary economy. The right for inventors to "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" was included in the constitution.
That expectation has been resisted by those who are expected to pay. Back in Barbados, one complaint against James Drax was that, when he had found a way to process his sugar cane, he hadn’t shared his knowledge with his neighbors, who were his competitors in the market.
One suspects one reason the slaves of Jonathan Lucas were investigated in the Denmark Vesey scare of 1823 is that Lucas not only had built mills, but opened a mill where he charged planters to process their rice. In 1810, his father’s first customer, John Bowman, still owed them $1,500.
Today Eliza Lucas is held as the ideal alternative, a woman who gave away her seed, possibly under the influence of her new husband, Charles Pinckney. Her gifts were probably less charitable than calculated. She had begun experimenting with crops on her grandfather’s plantation on the Wappo, because it was heavily mortgaged and they needed to raise money to save it. She was told she couldn’t get a bounty for her indigo until "you can in some measure supply the British Demand." The best way to reach that threshold was to give "small quantities to a great number of people," not a lot to a few who could influence the price.
The tension between innovators, who expect to profit from their labors, and public benefactors, who give away the fruit of their efforts, has increased from colonial times when men lived under the protection of Lords Proprietors and kings. In the oldest versions of rice’s origin tales described in earlier posts, the word "give" was used to indicate rice was transferred from the possession of one person to another. In the first, published in 1731, Frayer Hall simply said "It was soon dispensed over the Province."
The transformation of "give" to "gift" occurred during the American revolution which began, in part, when New England merchants protested the Mercantilist policies of Britain which hampered their ability to make money. In 1779, a tory, Alexander Hewatt, said the royal governor, Thomas Smith divided his present of rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."
David Ramsay amplified the role of Smith in 1809 when he said Smith first proved the rice would grow, then distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends." Despite his view of what a good governor should do, Ramsay himself petitioned the first session of the House of Representatives for rights to his writings, an effort that stimulated Congress to pass the first patent law in 1790.
The same sort of transformation for indigo occurred in the years leading to the civil war. James Glen didn’t mention Eliza Lucas when he wrote about indigo in South Carolina in 1861. However, a few years earlier William Gilmore Simms had constantly referred to her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in his novel Woodcraft, as a rich benefactor who, one character tells his hero, "must save you from McKewn if possible. He can do so, if anybody can."
Pinckney had just died in 1825 when Simms returned to Charleston from whence his family had fled when his father failed as a merchant. His first attempt to attract the attention of the city’s elite was a poem dedicated to a man who, in a better world, might have saved his family from bankruptcy. Hezekiah Maham, on the other hand, always turned to his favorite commander, Francis Marion, for advice and help.
More recent writers emphasize the charitable motives for the gift. For instance, popular historian Rod Gragg says that Woodward "knowing the huge profits rice produced as an export to England, ... shared his discovery with his fellow colonists."
The same emphasis on giving away one’s labor characterizes some writing about John Champneys and his hybrid rose. Peggy Cornett, director of the Center for Historic Plants at Montecello, simply wanted to connect known facts when she said "Champneys shared rooted cuttings of his seedling with friends, including William Prince, Jr.," from whom he may have purchased the Parson’s Pink rose that contributed to his seedling, and that Champneys "shared another batch from his seedling with his neighbor, a Frenchman, named Philippe Noisette."
A Charleston website that promotes a romantic view of the city for tourists converts the words necessary to indicate the transfer of a plant into a act of cultural magnificence when it says Noisette gave "a local rice farmer" the China rose, and "as was the custom in the South among gardeners at the time, Champneys then presented seedlings of Champneys' pink cluster back to his friend, Philippe Noisette."
Rosarian Peter Harkness took the step from describing a gift to ascribing a motive when he wrote "The farmer was proud to own such a special rose and passed on cuttings to his friends, including Philippe Noisette."
Champneys was many things, but simple rice farmer he was not. Such a characterization is probably the result of a number of factors, not the least creative writing courses that warn would be writers to avoid the passive voice and use action words when possible. When there are no facts, or descriptions are conflicting and vague, they’re told to visualize how people would have acted in the past.
In addition to suggesting how people are taught to write, the eleemosynary versions also suggest a strong distrust of the motives of innovators, entrepreneurs and capitalists. Many prefer the John Rockefeller who gave away dimes and established a foundation to avoid taxes to the man who organized the Standard Oil cartel.
The transformation in our perceptions of innovators occurred in stages. The only first hand accounts we have are those of Eliza Lucas and Joshua John Ward. Both describe deliberate efforts over several years to develop viable plants and persistence in the face of failure, some caused by the malicious actions of others. For the gardener, both also provide insights into the ways of nature and how man has selected traits to improve it.
Their works were not commonly known in the past. Instead, writers like Hall and Cornett were forced to write narratives based on few facts. The older one left the introduction of rice to the impersonal passive voice, while the other tried to imagine human intervention in the spread of noisette roses.
Such neutral accounts were rejected in times of crises, like the revolution and the years before the civil war. Then royalists like Hewatt and federalists like Ramsey and Simms replaced traditional figures like pirates and the Swamp Fox with conservative heroes like Thomas Smith and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. More recently, slaves and a mulatto’s husband have been given the role of critical interveners in history.
Today’s writers, generally ignorant of the background of their sources, simply rewrite them to fit our current values. Gragg and Harkness describe men as unrealistic in their behavior as an earlier generations’s Lord Fauntleroy and Pollyanna. However, their popular audience is less interested in realistic tales of effort and perseverance, than in suggestions of an alternative to modern reality.
The new world colonies were founded to make money, and that’s what Drax and Eliza and Jonathan Lucas and Champneys wanted to do. That others also made fortunes imitating them may follow the logic of capitalism, but was not the primary motive for those who helped introduce sugar, indigo, rice and noisette roses.
Notes:
Campbell, Levin H. The Patent System of the United States So Far as it Relates to the Granting of Patents: A History, 1891.
Cornett, Peggy. "Champneys' Pink Cluster Comes to Monticello," Twinleaf Journal, January 1999.
Discover Charleston. "Secret Gardens: Charleston's Blooming Treasures," DiscoverCharleston website.
Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.
Gragg, Rod. Planters, Pirates, & Patriots: Historical Tales from South Carolina, 2006.
Harkness, Peter. The Rose: an Illustrated History, 2003.
Lucas, William Dollard. "Notes for Jonathon Lucas Sr.: A Lucas Memorandum," posted on-line, on the 1810 debt.
Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919, on Hall, Hewatt and Ramsay.
Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.
Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.
That expectation has been resisted by those who are expected to pay. Back in Barbados, one complaint against James Drax was that, when he had found a way to process his sugar cane, he hadn’t shared his knowledge with his neighbors, who were his competitors in the market.
One suspects one reason the slaves of Jonathan Lucas were investigated in the Denmark Vesey scare of 1823 is that Lucas not only had built mills, but opened a mill where he charged planters to process their rice. In 1810, his father’s first customer, John Bowman, still owed them $1,500.
Today Eliza Lucas is held as the ideal alternative, a woman who gave away her seed, possibly under the influence of her new husband, Charles Pinckney. Her gifts were probably less charitable than calculated. She had begun experimenting with crops on her grandfather’s plantation on the Wappo, because it was heavily mortgaged and they needed to raise money to save it. She was told she couldn’t get a bounty for her indigo until "you can in some measure supply the British Demand." The best way to reach that threshold was to give "small quantities to a great number of people," not a lot to a few who could influence the price.
The tension between innovators, who expect to profit from their labors, and public benefactors, who give away the fruit of their efforts, has increased from colonial times when men lived under the protection of Lords Proprietors and kings. In the oldest versions of rice’s origin tales described in earlier posts, the word "give" was used to indicate rice was transferred from the possession of one person to another. In the first, published in 1731, Frayer Hall simply said "It was soon dispensed over the Province."
The transformation of "give" to "gift" occurred during the American revolution which began, in part, when New England merchants protested the Mercantilist policies of Britain which hampered their ability to make money. In 1779, a tory, Alexander Hewatt, said the royal governor, Thomas Smith divided his present of rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."
David Ramsay amplified the role of Smith in 1809 when he said Smith first proved the rice would grow, then distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends." Despite his view of what a good governor should do, Ramsay himself petitioned the first session of the House of Representatives for rights to his writings, an effort that stimulated Congress to pass the first patent law in 1790.
The same sort of transformation for indigo occurred in the years leading to the civil war. James Glen didn’t mention Eliza Lucas when he wrote about indigo in South Carolina in 1861. However, a few years earlier William Gilmore Simms had constantly referred to her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in his novel Woodcraft, as a rich benefactor who, one character tells his hero, "must save you from McKewn if possible. He can do so, if anybody can."
Pinckney had just died in 1825 when Simms returned to Charleston from whence his family had fled when his father failed as a merchant. His first attempt to attract the attention of the city’s elite was a poem dedicated to a man who, in a better world, might have saved his family from bankruptcy. Hezekiah Maham, on the other hand, always turned to his favorite commander, Francis Marion, for advice and help.
More recent writers emphasize the charitable motives for the gift. For instance, popular historian Rod Gragg says that Woodward "knowing the huge profits rice produced as an export to England, ... shared his discovery with his fellow colonists."
The same emphasis on giving away one’s labor characterizes some writing about John Champneys and his hybrid rose. Peggy Cornett, director of the Center for Historic Plants at Montecello, simply wanted to connect known facts when she said "Champneys shared rooted cuttings of his seedling with friends, including William Prince, Jr.," from whom he may have purchased the Parson’s Pink rose that contributed to his seedling, and that Champneys "shared another batch from his seedling with his neighbor, a Frenchman, named Philippe Noisette."
A Charleston website that promotes a romantic view of the city for tourists converts the words necessary to indicate the transfer of a plant into a act of cultural magnificence when it says Noisette gave "a local rice farmer" the China rose, and "as was the custom in the South among gardeners at the time, Champneys then presented seedlings of Champneys' pink cluster back to his friend, Philippe Noisette."
Rosarian Peter Harkness took the step from describing a gift to ascribing a motive when he wrote "The farmer was proud to own such a special rose and passed on cuttings to his friends, including Philippe Noisette."
Champneys was many things, but simple rice farmer he was not. Such a characterization is probably the result of a number of factors, not the least creative writing courses that warn would be writers to avoid the passive voice and use action words when possible. When there are no facts, or descriptions are conflicting and vague, they’re told to visualize how people would have acted in the past.
In addition to suggesting how people are taught to write, the eleemosynary versions also suggest a strong distrust of the motives of innovators, entrepreneurs and capitalists. Many prefer the John Rockefeller who gave away dimes and established a foundation to avoid taxes to the man who organized the Standard Oil cartel.
The transformation in our perceptions of innovators occurred in stages. The only first hand accounts we have are those of Eliza Lucas and Joshua John Ward. Both describe deliberate efforts over several years to develop viable plants and persistence in the face of failure, some caused by the malicious actions of others. For the gardener, both also provide insights into the ways of nature and how man has selected traits to improve it.
Their works were not commonly known in the past. Instead, writers like Hall and Cornett were forced to write narratives based on few facts. The older one left the introduction of rice to the impersonal passive voice, while the other tried to imagine human intervention in the spread of noisette roses.
Such neutral accounts were rejected in times of crises, like the revolution and the years before the civil war. Then royalists like Hewatt and federalists like Ramsey and Simms replaced traditional figures like pirates and the Swamp Fox with conservative heroes like Thomas Smith and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. More recently, slaves and a mulatto’s husband have been given the role of critical interveners in history.
Today’s writers, generally ignorant of the background of their sources, simply rewrite them to fit our current values. Gragg and Harkness describe men as unrealistic in their behavior as an earlier generations’s Lord Fauntleroy and Pollyanna. However, their popular audience is less interested in realistic tales of effort and perseverance, than in suggestions of an alternative to modern reality.
The new world colonies were founded to make money, and that’s what Drax and Eliza and Jonathan Lucas and Champneys wanted to do. That others also made fortunes imitating them may follow the logic of capitalism, but was not the primary motive for those who helped introduce sugar, indigo, rice and noisette roses.
Notes:
Campbell, Levin H. The Patent System of the United States So Far as it Relates to the Granting of Patents: A History, 1891.
Cornett, Peggy. "Champneys' Pink Cluster Comes to Monticello," Twinleaf Journal, January 1999.
Discover Charleston. "Secret Gardens: Charleston's Blooming Treasures," DiscoverCharleston website.
Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.
Gragg, Rod. Planters, Pirates, & Patriots: Historical Tales from South Carolina, 2006.
Harkness, Peter. The Rose: an Illustrated History, 2003.
Lucas, William Dollard. "Notes for Jonathon Lucas Sr.: A Lucas Memorandum," posted on-line, on the 1810 debt.
Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919, on Hall, Hewatt and Ramsay.
Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.
Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
South Carolina - Mercantilism
No one wonders today about the market for sugar cane or tobacco. It may be the knowledge of who were the rice eaters was as obvious to planters at the time, and so wasn’t recorded. Its absence from the historic record now may be less an omission of ignorance than proof the commonplace is often too common to write down.
However, it may also be that in the mercantile economy that dominated South Carolina before the revolution, a producer didn’t need to know anything more than which products were being promoted by the government.
South Carolina was born as a grant to supporters of Charles II who expected to profit from their land with commercial crops. Increasingly, Charles saw the colonies as existing to support his goal of economic independence from countries like Holland whose merchants dominated shipping.
In 1660, he reinstituted the measures adopted by Oliver Cromwell that required all goods coming to England or its colonies be carried by British ships. He added requirements that goods like sugar, tobacco and indigo could only be shipped to England and that exporters pay a tax before exporting them to the continent.
South Carolina’s early years were spent by entrepreneurs trying to find a sellable commodity. Settlers like John Yeamans first raised cattle and hogs for the Caribbean, while Henry Woodward opened trade relations with the natives that led to the export of deerskins. In 1695, the General Assembly ruled quit rents could be paid to the proprietors in desirable products - "Indigo, Cotton, Silke, Rice, Beef or Porke" - an act that favored cattlemen over Indian traders.
In 1705, England under Anne made two changes: it added rice to the list of enumerated goods and started paying a bounty for pitch and tar to develop an alternative source to the Swedes. According to Walter Edgar, local men discovered it was more productive to use already fallen trees that they knew were rich in resin, than chopping down live trees. The navy complained the quality wasn’t the same, and in 1724, changed the law to require green trees. South Carolinians abandoned the effort.
Parliament became more powerful under George II, who acceded in 1727. In 1730 the Navigation Acts were modified to allow colonies to ship rice directly to Portugal without paying the export tax. Rice production increased, but prices were so unpredictable, some planters began looking for an alternative crop.
Eliza Lucas managed her grandfather’s three plantations in the 1730's, after her father George was forced to return to Antigua. She tried growing indigo in 1740, only to see the crop killed by frost before it was dry. She planted seed she saved, but only 100 plants grew in 1741. The following year, she planted her saved seed and more sent by her father; only her seed grew. The crop failed in 1743. She finally produced a good crop in 1744 from her selected seed.
Developing seed that would grow in South Carolina was only part of the challenge. Indigo requires processing to convert its chemicals into dye. Her father sent Nicholas Cromwell from Montserrat who, she believed, sabotaged the lot with lime. He then sent Cromwell’s brother who was no more useful. Her descendant, Harriott Horry Ravenel, says he also sent an "unidentified negro" from some French island.
George Lucas was governor of Antigua, with all the government contacts that implies. As soon as she had a good crop in 1844, she sent samples to London and published the results in the Charleston newspaper. She was told that when she could produce enough to meet British requirements, she could expect a duty to be laid on French indigo "on proper Application to Parliament."
The duty of sixpence a pound was duly offered in 1749, the same year George II adopted white trousers and dark blue jackets for the British naval uniform. Planters adopted the crop, after they realized the work schedules of the rice and indigo complemented each other and they could get more production from their existing slaves.
However, many never learned all the steps required to ferment the dye from the plant. The governor at the time, John Glen, wrote
"I am afraid that the limewater which some use to make the particles subside, contrary as I have been informed to the practice of the French, is prejudicial to it by precipitating different kinds of particles, and consequently incorporating them with the indigo."
According to Jennifer Payne, the best Carolina indigo sold for 5s 9d a pound in 1773, while dye from the French West Indies sold for a minimum of 9s and that from Guatemala fetched 13s 9d a pound.
Once planters and merchants began growing crops that depended on governmental favors, they, like Eliza Lucas, became adept at influencing Parliament. When George III needed to raise money to pay for troops stationed in the colonies, the Sugar Act was passed in 1764 to tax luxuries. Rice was exempt, but not indigo.
When the first Continental Congress met in 1774 to coordinate the colonial response to the Stamp Act, South Carolina’s representatives threatened to leave when men wanted an organized refusal to ship goods to Britain. To maintain unity, the Congress exempted rice from the boycott, but not indigo.
The bounty on indigo ended with the Treaty of Paris, as did the protected Mercantile economy. Planters were thrown into the world of nascent capitalism. The generation after the war responded with innovations in rice production or turned to cotton. The one depended, in part, on institutional buyers, the other on manufacturers.
The decline of Carolina rice after Napoléon might possibly be traced to the very success of South Carolina as a mercantile economy. When the government guaranteed the profitability of certain, strategic products, planters had no reason to learn anything about the destination for their crops. When competition appeared, as it had with tar and indigo, they changed products.
When capitalism’s quest for the cheapest supplier overtook rice planters in the 1830's, most had no idea how to find new markets and many had taken ideological stances that prevented them from adopting methods developed by northerners. They asked the government for support in foreign markets, then, in 1846, asked Congress to impose a tariff on cheaper rice coming from Java.
At the same time, a man in Virginia, Cyrus McCormick, was developing a reaper. In 1848, he left the south for Chicago to be closer to people who would buy his machines. In the 1890's, midwesterners would adapt it for rice in Louisiana.
Notes:
After the bounty was dropped on tar, some in the colony did continue supplying naval stores. For instance, John Pamor, the great uncle of Hezekiah Maham’s second wife, Mary Palmer, made his fortune from turpentine Likewise, some indigo growers produced dye that surpassed the quality of the French West Indies.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998; on tar, Sugar Act, Continental Congress.
Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.
Payne, Jennifer. "Rice, Indigo, and Fever in Colonial South Carolina," 1998, available on-line.
Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.
Ravenel, Harriott Horry. Eliza Pinckney, 1896.
However, it may also be that in the mercantile economy that dominated South Carolina before the revolution, a producer didn’t need to know anything more than which products were being promoted by the government.
South Carolina was born as a grant to supporters of Charles II who expected to profit from their land with commercial crops. Increasingly, Charles saw the colonies as existing to support his goal of economic independence from countries like Holland whose merchants dominated shipping.
In 1660, he reinstituted the measures adopted by Oliver Cromwell that required all goods coming to England or its colonies be carried by British ships. He added requirements that goods like sugar, tobacco and indigo could only be shipped to England and that exporters pay a tax before exporting them to the continent.
South Carolina’s early years were spent by entrepreneurs trying to find a sellable commodity. Settlers like John Yeamans first raised cattle and hogs for the Caribbean, while Henry Woodward opened trade relations with the natives that led to the export of deerskins. In 1695, the General Assembly ruled quit rents could be paid to the proprietors in desirable products - "Indigo, Cotton, Silke, Rice, Beef or Porke" - an act that favored cattlemen over Indian traders.
In 1705, England under Anne made two changes: it added rice to the list of enumerated goods and started paying a bounty for pitch and tar to develop an alternative source to the Swedes. According to Walter Edgar, local men discovered it was more productive to use already fallen trees that they knew were rich in resin, than chopping down live trees. The navy complained the quality wasn’t the same, and in 1724, changed the law to require green trees. South Carolinians abandoned the effort.
Parliament became more powerful under George II, who acceded in 1727. In 1730 the Navigation Acts were modified to allow colonies to ship rice directly to Portugal without paying the export tax. Rice production increased, but prices were so unpredictable, some planters began looking for an alternative crop.
Eliza Lucas managed her grandfather’s three plantations in the 1730's, after her father George was forced to return to Antigua. She tried growing indigo in 1740, only to see the crop killed by frost before it was dry. She planted seed she saved, but only 100 plants grew in 1741. The following year, she planted her saved seed and more sent by her father; only her seed grew. The crop failed in 1743. She finally produced a good crop in 1744 from her selected seed.
Developing seed that would grow in South Carolina was only part of the challenge. Indigo requires processing to convert its chemicals into dye. Her father sent Nicholas Cromwell from Montserrat who, she believed, sabotaged the lot with lime. He then sent Cromwell’s brother who was no more useful. Her descendant, Harriott Horry Ravenel, says he also sent an "unidentified negro" from some French island.
George Lucas was governor of Antigua, with all the government contacts that implies. As soon as she had a good crop in 1844, she sent samples to London and published the results in the Charleston newspaper. She was told that when she could produce enough to meet British requirements, she could expect a duty to be laid on French indigo "on proper Application to Parliament."
The duty of sixpence a pound was duly offered in 1749, the same year George II adopted white trousers and dark blue jackets for the British naval uniform. Planters adopted the crop, after they realized the work schedules of the rice and indigo complemented each other and they could get more production from their existing slaves.
However, many never learned all the steps required to ferment the dye from the plant. The governor at the time, John Glen, wrote
"I am afraid that the limewater which some use to make the particles subside, contrary as I have been informed to the practice of the French, is prejudicial to it by precipitating different kinds of particles, and consequently incorporating them with the indigo."
According to Jennifer Payne, the best Carolina indigo sold for 5s 9d a pound in 1773, while dye from the French West Indies sold for a minimum of 9s and that from Guatemala fetched 13s 9d a pound.
Once planters and merchants began growing crops that depended on governmental favors, they, like Eliza Lucas, became adept at influencing Parliament. When George III needed to raise money to pay for troops stationed in the colonies, the Sugar Act was passed in 1764 to tax luxuries. Rice was exempt, but not indigo.
When the first Continental Congress met in 1774 to coordinate the colonial response to the Stamp Act, South Carolina’s representatives threatened to leave when men wanted an organized refusal to ship goods to Britain. To maintain unity, the Congress exempted rice from the boycott, but not indigo.
The bounty on indigo ended with the Treaty of Paris, as did the protected Mercantile economy. Planters were thrown into the world of nascent capitalism. The generation after the war responded with innovations in rice production or turned to cotton. The one depended, in part, on institutional buyers, the other on manufacturers.
The decline of Carolina rice after Napoléon might possibly be traced to the very success of South Carolina as a mercantile economy. When the government guaranteed the profitability of certain, strategic products, planters had no reason to learn anything about the destination for their crops. When competition appeared, as it had with tar and indigo, they changed products.
When capitalism’s quest for the cheapest supplier overtook rice planters in the 1830's, most had no idea how to find new markets and many had taken ideological stances that prevented them from adopting methods developed by northerners. They asked the government for support in foreign markets, then, in 1846, asked Congress to impose a tariff on cheaper rice coming from Java.
At the same time, a man in Virginia, Cyrus McCormick, was developing a reaper. In 1848, he left the south for Chicago to be closer to people who would buy his machines. In the 1890's, midwesterners would adapt it for rice in Louisiana.
Notes:
After the bounty was dropped on tar, some in the colony did continue supplying naval stores. For instance, John Pamor, the great uncle of Hezekiah Maham’s second wife, Mary Palmer, made his fortune from turpentine Likewise, some indigo growers produced dye that surpassed the quality of the French West Indies.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998; on tar, Sugar Act, Continental Congress.
Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.
Payne, Jennifer. "Rice, Indigo, and Fever in Colonial South Carolina," 1998, available on-line.
Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.
Ravenel, Harriott Horry. Eliza Pinckney, 1896.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
South Carolina - Rice Eaters
When I was a child, the clear channel radio stations broadcast farm prices at noon. I was never sure if farmers were expected to load their animals and head for Chicago if they heard good news. However, as I ate bologna or hot dogs for lunch, I never questioned why the animals would be slaughtered. Without being told, I understood the general supply chain.
When I read about rice growing in South Carolina, I wonder who actually ate the grain. I can’t think of a single popular English or northern European rice dish, except the rice pudding and stuffed green peppers I was fed at summer camp.
Historians have traced in great detail changes in marketing between the planters and the European wholesalers, but only repeat Lewis Gray’s general information that 12% of the rice was exported to Portugal and the rest to England who kept 15% and re-exported the rest to Holland, Hamburg, Bremen, Sweden, and Denmark. The identity of the end users is left to anecdotes.
The Portuguese and Italians had adopted rice in their diets. The first were growing it in Brazil by 1587 and introduced better yielding varieties wherever they had contact in east and west Africa. Italians grew their own, or imported it from elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
In the age of sails, it may be trade itself was the biggest consumer of rice. Judith Carney has noted slave ships bought tons of rice to feed their human cargo. In the 1840's, the British defined minimum provision levels for passenger ships, which would have included those carrying Irish immigrants. Ship masters were ordered to issue to every passenger every week.
"two and a half pounds of bread or biscuit, not inferior in quality to what is usually called navy biscuit, one pound of wheaten flour, five pounds of oatmeal, two pounds of rice, two ounces of tea, half a pound of sugar and half a pound of molasses."
On ships leaving Liverpool, Ireland or Scotland ships masters could substitute oatmeal, and five pounds of potatoes could replace a pound of oatmeal or rice.
There are hints rice was used as an institutional food. Ruth Pike has found slave and convict oarsmen on Spanish galleys in the 1600's were fed moldy biscuits and stews filled with vermin. Later in the century, authorities substituted rice for beans which increased dietary deficiencies: rice and beans need to be eaten together to release the proteins in both.
In 1752 the naval arsenal at Cartagena recommend a daily ration of 24 ounces of biscuit and 7 ounces of beans or chickpeas. In 1777 a third meal was added and the daily ration changed to 24 ounces of biscuit, 11 ounces of beans and 3 ounces of rice. At La Carraca in 1777, men were still fed two meals: beans filled with worms and vermin at noon and a stew of rice and undercooked chickpeas at night.
Leander Stillwell notes Fourreau de Beauregard said Napoléon thought "rice is the best food for the soldier." He used rice in Egypt and stockpiled it when he prepared to invade Russia. During his exile at Elba, Napoléon ordered a brig be furnished with "biscuit, rice, vegetables, cheese, brandy, wine, and water, for 120 men for three months" and that the garrison at nearby Pianosa be given the same rations as sailors: "meat, biscuit, rice, and either brandy or wine."
Fernand Braudel says in France it was used in hospitals, military barracks, and on ships, and that tons were imported from Alexandria to feed the poor in 1694 and 1709. He found the French used rice as an extender to make millet bread, and that Venice mixed it with other flours to make cheap breads for the poor. Lou Edens of Rice Hope Plantation Inn believes the rice sent to northern Europe was eaten by people and livestock "during the winter when peas were scarce and barley was unavailable."
None of these uses would have endeared rice to the poor. Indeed, Stiltwell said rice was issued to his Illinois infantry unit in the civil war, and no one knew how to cook it. "The horrible messes we would make of that defy description. I know that one consequence with me was I contracted such aversion to rice that for many years afterwards, while in civil life I just couldn’t eat it in any form, no matter how temptingly it was prepared."
The upper classes in Amsterdam and London, who had some contact with the East India trade, treated rice as a luxury that didn’t spread to the rising middle classes. That failure left planters prey to a market that could change. Charleston knew demand dropped after the fall of Napoléon. As suggested by the British regulations, the introduction of the potato would easily have displaced it in northern Europe. Steam powered ships that shortened voyages would also have decreased demand.
One reason rice plantations didn’t recover after Reconstruction is that they had lost their market to cheaper rice from southeast Asia. Charleston’s response that they produced a superior grade was futile. Elite taste has always been fickle, and the poor eat what’s cheap.
Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. Les Structures du quotidien: le possible et l’impossible, 1979, translated as The Structures of Everyday Life, vol 1, 1979, translated by Sian Reynolds, 1981.
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001.
Dodge, Theodore Ayrault. Napoleon; A History of the Art of War, volume 1, 1904; on rice in Egypt.
Edens, Lou. "History of Rice in Charleston & Georgetown," Rice Hope Plantation Inn website.
Gray, Lewis C. History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 1933.
Greene, Robert. The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, on rice for Russian campaign.
Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review. "British Law Regulating the Carriage of Passengers in Merchant Vessels", volume 26, 1852.
Stillwell, Leander. The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865, 1920; I could find no source for the quotation from Beauregard.
Pike, Ruth. Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain, 1983.
Young, Norwood. Napoleon in Exile: Elba, 1914; on rice on Elba and Pianoso.
When I read about rice growing in South Carolina, I wonder who actually ate the grain. I can’t think of a single popular English or northern European rice dish, except the rice pudding and stuffed green peppers I was fed at summer camp.
Historians have traced in great detail changes in marketing between the planters and the European wholesalers, but only repeat Lewis Gray’s general information that 12% of the rice was exported to Portugal and the rest to England who kept 15% and re-exported the rest to Holland, Hamburg, Bremen, Sweden, and Denmark. The identity of the end users is left to anecdotes.
The Portuguese and Italians had adopted rice in their diets. The first were growing it in Brazil by 1587 and introduced better yielding varieties wherever they had contact in east and west Africa. Italians grew their own, or imported it from elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
In the age of sails, it may be trade itself was the biggest consumer of rice. Judith Carney has noted slave ships bought tons of rice to feed their human cargo. In the 1840's, the British defined minimum provision levels for passenger ships, which would have included those carrying Irish immigrants. Ship masters were ordered to issue to every passenger every week.
"two and a half pounds of bread or biscuit, not inferior in quality to what is usually called navy biscuit, one pound of wheaten flour, five pounds of oatmeal, two pounds of rice, two ounces of tea, half a pound of sugar and half a pound of molasses."
On ships leaving Liverpool, Ireland or Scotland ships masters could substitute oatmeal, and five pounds of potatoes could replace a pound of oatmeal or rice.
There are hints rice was used as an institutional food. Ruth Pike has found slave and convict oarsmen on Spanish galleys in the 1600's were fed moldy biscuits and stews filled with vermin. Later in the century, authorities substituted rice for beans which increased dietary deficiencies: rice and beans need to be eaten together to release the proteins in both.
In 1752 the naval arsenal at Cartagena recommend a daily ration of 24 ounces of biscuit and 7 ounces of beans or chickpeas. In 1777 a third meal was added and the daily ration changed to 24 ounces of biscuit, 11 ounces of beans and 3 ounces of rice. At La Carraca in 1777, men were still fed two meals: beans filled with worms and vermin at noon and a stew of rice and undercooked chickpeas at night.
Leander Stillwell notes Fourreau de Beauregard said Napoléon thought "rice is the best food for the soldier." He used rice in Egypt and stockpiled it when he prepared to invade Russia. During his exile at Elba, Napoléon ordered a brig be furnished with "biscuit, rice, vegetables, cheese, brandy, wine, and water, for 120 men for three months" and that the garrison at nearby Pianosa be given the same rations as sailors: "meat, biscuit, rice, and either brandy or wine."
Fernand Braudel says in France it was used in hospitals, military barracks, and on ships, and that tons were imported from Alexandria to feed the poor in 1694 and 1709. He found the French used rice as an extender to make millet bread, and that Venice mixed it with other flours to make cheap breads for the poor. Lou Edens of Rice Hope Plantation Inn believes the rice sent to northern Europe was eaten by people and livestock "during the winter when peas were scarce and barley was unavailable."
None of these uses would have endeared rice to the poor. Indeed, Stiltwell said rice was issued to his Illinois infantry unit in the civil war, and no one knew how to cook it. "The horrible messes we would make of that defy description. I know that one consequence with me was I contracted such aversion to rice that for many years afterwards, while in civil life I just couldn’t eat it in any form, no matter how temptingly it was prepared."
The upper classes in Amsterdam and London, who had some contact with the East India trade, treated rice as a luxury that didn’t spread to the rising middle classes. That failure left planters prey to a market that could change. Charleston knew demand dropped after the fall of Napoléon. As suggested by the British regulations, the introduction of the potato would easily have displaced it in northern Europe. Steam powered ships that shortened voyages would also have decreased demand.
One reason rice plantations didn’t recover after Reconstruction is that they had lost their market to cheaper rice from southeast Asia. Charleston’s response that they produced a superior grade was futile. Elite taste has always been fickle, and the poor eat what’s cheap.
Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. Les Structures du quotidien: le possible et l’impossible, 1979, translated as The Structures of Everyday Life, vol 1, 1979, translated by Sian Reynolds, 1981.
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001.
Dodge, Theodore Ayrault. Napoleon; A History of the Art of War, volume 1, 1904; on rice in Egypt.
Edens, Lou. "History of Rice in Charleston & Georgetown," Rice Hope Plantation Inn website.
Gray, Lewis C. History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 1933.
Greene, Robert. The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, on rice for Russian campaign.
Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review. "British Law Regulating the Carriage of Passengers in Merchant Vessels", volume 26, 1852.
Stillwell, Leander. The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865, 1920; I could find no source for the quotation from Beauregard.
Pike, Ruth. Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain, 1983.
Young, Norwood. Napoleon in Exile: Elba, 1914; on rice on Elba and Pianoso.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
South Carolina - After the War
War’s hard on farmers. Invading armies take what they need to eat and destroy what’s left to starve their enemies.
During the American revolution, the British in South Carolina sold the rice and slaves they couldn’t use, destroyed the crops they couldn’t sell and encouraged the remaining slaves to flee. Battles, occupation and neglect damaged plantation reservoirs.
During the civil war, Sherman arrived at Savannah with orders to march towards Richmond. After months of battle, his men were angry at South Carolina for precipitating the war and remaining isolated by geography from the consequences. Abolitionists demanded he handle the freedmen who flocked to his army for protection.
Sherman couldn’t pursue the war effort without dealing with the more immediate problems. On January 16, 1865, he signed Special Field Order 15 which turned the coastal land the army controlled from "the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida" over to freemen to farm. Andrew Johnson rescinded the order in the fall after Appomattox and returned confiscated lands to the antebellum owners.
Sherman allowed his men to rampage as he moved north towards Columbia from Savannah. From there, he restored military discipline and primarily destroyed strategic targets as he moved toward Virginia. Newly freed slaves raided abandoned plantations where they’d once been forced to work.
Rice planters recovered from the revolution; they did not from the civil war. Many reasons are given: the loss of slave labor, the lack of credit, the death of so many able young men. What’s rarely mentioned is that after the revolution, there was, to quote Henry Laurens, a spirit to recover "their former State of happiness and Prosperity" that led men to cover "as fast as they can the marks of British cruelty, by new Buildings, Inclosures, and other Improvements."
After the civil war, planters had to confront the problem their ancestors hadn’t been able to solve in Barbados: how to motivate men with free will to work for them. Earlier, they’d abandoned the effort with indentured servants and hired help for slaves. After the civil war, planters turned sharecropping into debt peonage to serve the same purpose, maintain a cheap, subdued, available labor supply.
Slaves, like the white overseer in Charles Gilmore Simms’ Woodcraft, only accepted the need to plant and harvest crops, the steps necessary to feed themselves. They refused to help maintain or rebuild the dykes. In one case described by Robert Preston Brooks, the army intervened to force freedmen to do off-season work.
In the west the railroads used immigrants, including ones from China, to do the kind of hard manual labor freed slaves were refusing in South Carolina. For whatever reason - a surplus of hungry men, a lack of capital, a lack of willingness - the south didn’t recruit immigrants. Instead, the rice plantations south of Charleston reverted to swamps, while those untouched by the army to the north limped along.
When planters after the revolution realized they had more work than their labor could do, they turned to machinery. While Cyrus McCormick was revolutionizing farming in the west after the civil war, nothing was marketed for the south. The earth movers and levelers used today to build roads are a fairly recent invention, developed only when immigrant labor was no longer available to dig ditches and haul dirt.
Notes:
Brooks, Robert Preston. An Elementary History of Georgia, 1918.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998; includes quotation from Henry Laurens, letter to Edward Bridgen, 23 September 1784.
During the American revolution, the British in South Carolina sold the rice and slaves they couldn’t use, destroyed the crops they couldn’t sell and encouraged the remaining slaves to flee. Battles, occupation and neglect damaged plantation reservoirs.
During the civil war, Sherman arrived at Savannah with orders to march towards Richmond. After months of battle, his men were angry at South Carolina for precipitating the war and remaining isolated by geography from the consequences. Abolitionists demanded he handle the freedmen who flocked to his army for protection.
Sherman couldn’t pursue the war effort without dealing with the more immediate problems. On January 16, 1865, he signed Special Field Order 15 which turned the coastal land the army controlled from "the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida" over to freemen to farm. Andrew Johnson rescinded the order in the fall after Appomattox and returned confiscated lands to the antebellum owners.
Sherman allowed his men to rampage as he moved north towards Columbia from Savannah. From there, he restored military discipline and primarily destroyed strategic targets as he moved toward Virginia. Newly freed slaves raided abandoned plantations where they’d once been forced to work.
Rice planters recovered from the revolution; they did not from the civil war. Many reasons are given: the loss of slave labor, the lack of credit, the death of so many able young men. What’s rarely mentioned is that after the revolution, there was, to quote Henry Laurens, a spirit to recover "their former State of happiness and Prosperity" that led men to cover "as fast as they can the marks of British cruelty, by new Buildings, Inclosures, and other Improvements."
After the civil war, planters had to confront the problem their ancestors hadn’t been able to solve in Barbados: how to motivate men with free will to work for them. Earlier, they’d abandoned the effort with indentured servants and hired help for slaves. After the civil war, planters turned sharecropping into debt peonage to serve the same purpose, maintain a cheap, subdued, available labor supply.
Slaves, like the white overseer in Charles Gilmore Simms’ Woodcraft, only accepted the need to plant and harvest crops, the steps necessary to feed themselves. They refused to help maintain or rebuild the dykes. In one case described by Robert Preston Brooks, the army intervened to force freedmen to do off-season work.
In the west the railroads used immigrants, including ones from China, to do the kind of hard manual labor freed slaves were refusing in South Carolina. For whatever reason - a surplus of hungry men, a lack of capital, a lack of willingness - the south didn’t recruit immigrants. Instead, the rice plantations south of Charleston reverted to swamps, while those untouched by the army to the north limped along.
When planters after the revolution realized they had more work than their labor could do, they turned to machinery. While Cyrus McCormick was revolutionizing farming in the west after the civil war, nothing was marketed for the south. The earth movers and levelers used today to build roads are a fairly recent invention, developed only when immigrant labor was no longer available to dig ditches and haul dirt.
Notes:
Brooks, Robert Preston. An Elementary History of Georgia, 1918.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998; includes quotation from Henry Laurens, letter to Edward Bridgen, 23 September 1784.
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