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 Andrew Johnson rescinded the order in the fall after Appomattox and returned confiscated lands to the antebellum owners.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.