Water from the Rock

Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age

Sylvia R. Frey

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691216225
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The era of the American Revolution was one of violent and unpredictable social, economic, and political change, and the dislocations of the period were most severely felt in the South. Sylvia Frey contends that the military struggle there involved a triangle--two sets of white belligerents and approximately 400, 000 slaves. She reveals the dialectical relationships between slave resistance and Britain's Southern Strategy and between slave resistance and the white independence movement among Southerners, and shows how how these relationships transformed religion, law, and the economy during the postwar years.

ONE

THE PREREVOLUTIONARY SOUTH:
FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE AND COMMUNITY

BY THE EVE of the American Revolution a triad of plantation economies based on the production of plantation staples with bound labor had emerged throughout the South. The development of staple crop agriculture was not, however, uniform, but was a complex matrix of systems, each exhibiting characteristics peculiar to the staples it exported.

One hundred and fifty years after English settlement began, the Chesapeake Bay region of British North America seemed to a foreign traveler “an immense forest, extended on a flat plain, almost without bounds.”¹ Bounded by the Patapsco River on the north, the Blue Ridge Mountains on the west, and the Dismal Swamp on the south, the region was divided into two shores by the great Chesapeake Bay. From north to south the country was broken into a series of necks by six deep rivers: the Susquehanna, Patuxent, Potomac, Rappahannock, York, and the James. Some one hundred and fifty miles inland, waterfalls separated the country into two distinct areas, tidewater and piedmont. The face of the tidewater was generally low, flat, and densely wooded, much spread with marshes and swamps. Along the river banks the soil was rich and deep, although by the eve of the American Revolution there were extensive tracts of wasteland, worn out by the cultivation of tobacco.² As the land receded from the coast, it gradually rose, swelling into the hills of the piedmont. Beyond were the mountains, severed by rivers that raged in torrents through rugged chasms or glided silently along deep valleys and into rich meadows.

Although not visible from the coast, small towns, farmsteads, and plantations were interspersed throughout the Chesapeake interior, linked by a system of public roads.³ In 1773 the total population of the region was at least 646,300, most of whom were in one capacity or another involved with tobacco production.⁴ Despite the expansion of tobacco culture up to the Revolution, tobacco was a volatile economy. Recurring depressions during the first half of the eighteenth century led farmers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to begin shifting to wheat as early as the 1740s and 1750s.⁵ Severe food shortages caused by rapid population growth and a series of bad harvests created an enormous European demand for wheat, which encouraged debt-burdened planters in the lower James Valley of Virginia and in the sandy low-lying Northern Neck to begin experimenting with the cultivation of wheat in the middle 1760s. By the 1770s, the Chesapeake colonies were exporting approximately 2.3 million bushels of grain or grain-equivalent.⁶ On the eve of the Revolution, wheat was Virginia’s second staple. Much of it either was consumed locally or was traded in the developing coastal and overland trade.

A very different plantation economy developed in the coastal region of the lower South. On the narrow band of land extending from the Cape Fear River in North Carolina to the Saint Johns River in Florida, the economy centered largely around the production of rice. The Lower Coastal Plain, where early colonial settlement concentrated, was ideally suited to the peculiar requirements of rice. A wet culture, rice demands systematic irrigation and a large labor force. From the northernmost point to the southernmost tip, South Carolina stretched some two hundred miles, with approximately one hundred and twenty miles of coastline. Protected from the sea by sandbanks alternately cast up only to be swallowed again by the sea, most of the coast consisted of low-lying islands and marshes cut by rivers and by innumerable creeks and narrow, muddy channels. Some fifteen or twenty miles inland, the sandy coastal soil began to give way to clay and to rich loams, covered in many places by dense forests of oak, cedar, and cypress, often interspersed with tracts of pine. The pine yielded most of the tar, turpentine, pitch, and rosin for Carolina’s commercially significant naval stores industry. Rice was, however, the main crop.

Because of its adaptiveness to the coastal environment and because of the availability of West African slaves already familiar with the cultivation of the crop, rice agriculture developed quickly in the low-lying, swampy areas enriched by regular washings from the uplands.⁷ Carolina’s first rice crops were harvested late in the seventeenth century. By the eve of the Revolution, rice production reached 140,000 barrels in some years. The production of rice concentrated in the vicinity of Charleston, the capital and leading seaport, and around Georgetown, seventy miles to the north of Charleston, and Beaufort on Port Royal Island in the Broad River. Both towns served mainly as collection points for agricultural commodities shipped to Charleston. Lowland planters also cultivated indigo, first produced successfully in the 1740s by enslaved workers on Eliza Lucas’s Wapoo Creek plantation; by 1770 indigo production had reached 500,000 pounds a year.⁸ During slack periods in the rice-growing season, planters produced naval stores and, in the estuarine regions, planted cotton to supplement the rice.

To the south of Carolina lay the province of Georgia, its low, flat coastal lands gradually rising to hilly country some one hundred and fifty miles inland. Like the Carolina lowlands, Georgia’s fertile black soil was interspersed with pine barrens. But the similarity was more than physical. In many ways Georgia was an extension of South Carolina’s low-country plantation society. From the beginning of its settlement in 1733, the rich lands south of the Savannah River had attracted migrants from South Carolina. Although other groups, including Germans and Scots-Irish, settled in Georgia after 1750, the lure of comparatively cheap rice land continued to draw Carolina migrants, some of them with a few slaves. After slavery was legalized in 1751, they poured into the colony, bringing with them an estimated one thousand slaves in the year 1752 alone. During the 1750s and 1760s, the now-dominant Carolina migrants forged a plantation economy that closely resembled that of South Carolina: a biracial planting society based upon autonomous, self-contained plantation units whose prosperity was derived from staples produced by slave labor and marketed by factorage houses in Charleston.⁹ A lively trade in timber and timber products and in barreled beef and pork produced in lower Georgia was also carried on from Savannah and its commercial rival Sunbury.¹⁰

North Carolina was both similar to and different from the adjacent colonies of Virginia and South Carolina. The eastern section of its coastal plain was formed by sandbanks and shallow sounds, into which a series of necks of land protruded. Flat and poorly drained, it contained large areas of swamps and tidal marshes. To the west the land rose gradually, merging in the north with the rolling upland of the piedmont, in the south joining the region of sand ridges known as the Sandhills. Much of the piedmont and a small part of the coastal plain were covered with oak-pine forest. The Cape Fear River and its tributaries flowed through the heart of the longleaf pine country and served as conduits for the forest products that were shipped out of the colony through Wilmington and Brunswick.¹¹

Between 1750 and 1770 the population of North Carolina increased very dramatically, primarily as a result of immigration. A heterogeneous group, including Scots-Irish, Scottish Highlanders, and Germans, the newcomers entered North Carolina from the north through Virginia and from the south via Charleston. Most of them headed for the westernmost parts of the colony. The highest densities were concentrated, however, in the northeast, north of Albemarle Sound, which received a heavy influx of migrants from Virginia, and in the lower Cape Fear region, which was settled by men of wealth and substance, many from South Carolina. Although most immigrants did not bring slaves with them, migrants from Virginia and South Carolina probably did, with the result that slaveholding was much more widespread in areas such as Albemarle and Cape Fear. By contrast, comparatively few slaves were in the western portions of the colony, where the antislavery Moravians had settled in large, compact blocks.

Like her northern neighbor, Virginia, North Carolina grew tobacco, mainly in the northern part of the colony, but in quantities substantially smaller than in Virginia and Maryland. For environmental reasons, rice cultivation was confined to a small area within the Cape Fear Valley. North Carolina’s most distinctive contribution to colonial commerce was, however, forest products. A wide range of wood products, principally shingles, staves, and sawn lumber, were produced commercially in the region around Albemarle Sound. The mainstay of the colonial economy was naval stores, most of which were produced in the southern part of the colony where longleaf pine was native to the Sandhills and the coastal plain. Access to the longleaf pine forests, rivers and streams that provided routeways to Wilmington and Brunswick for thousands of barrels of pitch, tar, and turpentine, and most importandy, the availability of slave labor, contributed to the growth and eventual localization of the large-scale production of naval stores in the Cape Fear region.¹²

Large slaveholding provided the bedrock upon which each plantation system was built. Over 270,000 slaves lived in the area bounded by the tossing waters of Chesapeake Bay and the rocky falls that divide the tidewater from the piedmont regions of Virginia and Maryland. Although the geographical balance of the black population had begun to shift around midcentury, in 1775 more than half of Virginia’s slaves still lived in the counties between the Rappahannock and the James rivers. In parts of the tidewater, blacks constituted a majority of the population. In the Northern Neck and in counties adjacent to the piedmont, they made up between 40 and 50 percent of the population. Although some households owned no slaves, slave distribution was becoming more widespread in the tidewater due to outmigration of poor people and because slaveholders customarily divided their slaves among all of their children. By the Revolution an estimated two-thirds of the planters in nine tidewater counties and approximately 40 percent of piedmont families held slaves.¹³

The slave population of the South Carolina and Georgia low country shared some characteristics with that of the Chesapeake. Although the low country’s slave population was beginning to grow by natural increase, it continued to be dominated by young and predominantly male, African-born slaves, many of whom still carried ritual scars and spoke the distinctive dialects of West Africa.¹⁴ Heavily concentrated in the low-country parishes, blacks increasingly outnumbered whites, particularly in the plantation parishes surrounding Charleston, the center of the lowland slave trade.¹⁵ In 1775 South Carolina’s white population was an estimated 70,000, the slave population approximately 100,000. Of these, 14,302 whites and 72,743 blacks clustered in the three low-country districts of Beaufort, Charleston, and Georgetown; 55,689 whites and 27,253 blacks lived in the backcountry districts of Camden, Cheraw, Ninety Six, and Orangeburg¹⁶ Because the interior regions were unsuitable for the cultivation of either rice or indigo, Georgia’s population of 33,000, roughly 15,000 of whom were black, was heavily concentrated in the low country. Ten years after slavery was legalized in Georgia perhaps one-quarter of all households had at least one slave and the average size of slaveholdings was over twenty-three slaves.¹⁷

A large labor force was essential to staple crop agriculture, whether tobacco or rice was the product grown for export, but the time and labor requirements were different. Tobacco growing was a specialized occupation that required close supervision of all phases of production.¹⁸ The kinds of activities involved in tobacco cultivation—hoeing, raking, plowing, planting, transplanting, weeding, worming, and cutting—were best carried out by small work gangs supervised by an owner or overseer. Perhaps half of all tidewater slaves lived on farms of more than twenty slaves, while another 25 percent labored on units of eleven to twenty slaves. On smaller farms, masters worked side by side with their slaves on every step of the production cycle. On larger units, gangs were often divided according to skills, e.g., plowman or mower. After 1750 larger quarters began to employ slave drivers and foremen; by the 1770s between one-third and one-half of all slaves in the tidewat...