Lowcountry Time and Tide
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Lowcountry Time and Tide

The Fall of the South Carolina Rice Kingdom

James H. Tuten

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eBook - ePub

Lowcountry Time and Tide

The Fall of the South Carolina Rice Kingdom

James H. Tuten

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About This Book

A thorough account of rice culture's final decades and of its modern legacy.

In mapping the slow decline of the rice kingdom across the half-century following the Civil War, James H. Tuten offers a provocative new vision of the forces—agricultural, environmental, economic, cultural, and climatic—stacked against planters, laborers, and millers struggling to perpetuate their once-lucrative industry through the challenging postbellum years and into the hardscrabble twentieth century.

Concentrating his study on the vast rice plantations of the Heyward, Middleton, and Elliott families of South Carolina, Tuten narrates the ways in which rice producers—both the former grandees of the antebellum period and their newly freed slaves—sought to revive rice production. Both groups had much invested in the economic recovery of rice culture during Reconstruction and the beginning decades of the twentieth century. Despite all disadvantages, rice planting retained a perceived cultural mystique that led many to struggle with its farming long after the profits withered away. Planters tried a host of innovations, including labor contracts with former slaves, experiments in mechanization, consolidation of rice fields, and marketing cooperatives in their efforts to rekindle profits, but these attempts were thwarted by the insurmountable challenges of the postwar economy and a series of hurricanes that destroyed crops and the infrastructure necessary to sustain planting. Taken together, these obstacles ultimately sounded the death knell for the rice kingdom.

The study opens with an overview of the history of rice culture in South Carolina through the Reconstruction era and then focuses on the industry's manifestations and decline from 1877 to 1930. Tuten offers a close study of changes in agricultural techniques and tools during the period and demonstrates how adaptive and progressive rice planters became despite their conservative reputations. He also explores the cultural history of rice both as a foodway and a symbol of wealth in the lowcountry, used on currency and bedposts. Tuten concludes with a thorough treatment of the lasting legacy of rice culture, especially in terms of the environment, the continuation of rice foodways and iconography, and the role of rice and rice plantations in the modern tourism industry.

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Information

I

Chronological View
of Rice Culture

CHAPTER 1

Image

A Brief History of Rice Culture
to the 1870s

. . . a factory truly a rice plantation is . . . for Nature—passionless step-mother that she is—exerts so slight and attentive art so complete and watchful a control over every process attending its production, that rice is substantially “manufactured” not cultivated.
Hugh N. Starnes, “The Rice-Fields of Carolina,”
Southern Bivouac 2 (November 1886): 329
From colonization until the arrival of large-scale industrialization during the Second World War, the distinctive identity of the American South stemmed primarily from plantation agriculture. In the nineteenth century, cotton claimed the title of king of the plantation staples, but several other crops held sway in particular regions of the South. Virginians and Marylanders grew tobacco, Louisianans raised sugarcane, and Carolinians and Georgians cultivated rice. Indeed these crops, not cotton, shaped the people, society, landscape, and historical development of the tidewater and other specific geographies.
The lowcountry of the Carolinas clung to the crop that produced the first generation of wealth, while creating at the same time a social order that differed from the remainder of the Southeast. While rice plantations shared much with plantation society elsewhere, they were distinctive because of the conditions peculiar to rice cultivation itself: the presence of malaria, slave communities of high density, the task system, and a wealthy planter class with pretensions to aristocracy.
We do not know exactly who brought the first rice to Carolina or under what particulars it arrived. The British backers of colonization, both financial and political, intended for Carolina, like other colonies, to fit into the mercantilist system. To that end they suggested that settlers try a range of crops, rice among them. Historians of South Carolina continue to argue over the introduction of Madagascar gold seed rice, which apocryphally came via Captain John Thurber’s ship in 1685. Scholars have all but definitively shown that Carolinians grew white rice in the seventeenth century with gold rice being introduced after the American Revolution. Regardless of the circumstances of rice’s introduction, colonists successfully grew small amounts of the grain in the Charlestown colony by 1690.1 By 1712 Carolinians not only produced rice for local consumption; they had begun exporting the excess to England. These early rice growers began to enjoy larger yields, and their labor and land demands kept pace with the spread of the crop.2 They satisfied their labor needs by importing increasing numbers of black slaves, some from the Caribbean and others directly from West Africa. By 1708 more black people lived in Carolina than did people of European descent, and, as Peter Wood and Daniel Littlefield have pointed out, the simultaneous rise of rice and slavery are not historical accidents. Indeed the emerging profitability of rice as a labor-intensive plantation crop created a ballooning of demand for slaves.3
Historians have only recently delved into the interrelation of rice cultivation and the demand for land in the lowcountry. Rice planters wanted more land, but not just any land. They sought the borders of swamps and tidal estuaries. Indians occupied much of the land deemed prime for rice and threatened the use of the large rivers for commerce. Planters undoubtedly felt great relief after the Yemassee War in 1715, which resulted in the relocation of Indians from the Ashepoo-Combahee-Edisto basin. Colonists in turn occupied those lands as the result of royal grants. In the 1720s and 1730s planters founded numerous rice plantations on these rivers, signaling the switch from reservoir rice culture to tidal irrigation.4
Even though rice planters recognized the potential of tidally irrigated land by 1740, they worked through a long period of experimentation and construction to develop tidal rice culture. Three factors—cost, labor, and knowledge—inhibited this transition. Planters incurred significant costs financing the improvement of agricultural acreage. Carolinians cleared and reclaimed some of the most formidable agricultural land in eastern North America. The effort required time and money from the planters and labor from slaves. Planters found that the investment in labor involved in swamp reclamation forced them to take a long-term approach to their drainage projects. To that end they looked to natural increase among their slaves to augment their labor force, but the lowcountry was a particularly deadly place because of malaria, yellow fever, cholera, and other diseases, so the trade in newly arrived slaves remained brisk in Charleston.5
Slaves grew other crops during rice season and during “lay-by times” and in the winter reclaimed more swamp land for cultivation. The work went slowly, in part because they engaged in a form of agriculture and on a landscape unfamiliar to Europeans and Africans. They did not know exactly what they needed to construct or what form the plantation would take. Thus they embarked on decades of experiments and research into hydrology and methods of rice cultivation. West African slaves, especially those from the Gambia River estuary, brought with them knowledge of tidal rice culture, and they were instrumental in technology transfer and adaptation in the lowcountry. It now appears that lowcountry rice culture involved some direct importation of West African skills, some European knowledge, and a good deal of local innovation.6
The white planters turned to African laborers in part because they believed that Europeans could not survive hard labor in the miasmic climate of the lowcountry. Peter Wood suggested that the partial immunity to malaria of some Africans resulting from the sickle cell trait provided the basis for this notion. More directly, planters bringing Africans out of a tropical environment assumed that one steamy wilderness was much like another. This assumption of Africans’ suitability for swamp work lasted as long as slavery and beyond. “To clear these rank, intricate wildernesses is a toilsome and costly labor,” opined an author in Harper’s Weekly. “The sturdy woodman of our Northern forests might well shrink from the task. . . . The negroes, however, . . . fear not the dangers of the fens, and their axes quickly open the labyrinths to the unwonted sunshine.”7 The argument over origins hinges in part on how and where Carolinians learned the wet cultivation of rice. Planters did investigate reports of Asiatic practices. They also employed some engineers from the Netherlands for their knowledge of dikes and drainage.8
The first era of wet rice cultivation in the lowcountry utilized fingers of salt marsh on lands near Charlestown. A wider practice of planters involved damming low-lying bays and swamps. These approaches dominated cultivation from the 1730s until tidal cultivation supplanted it in the Revolutionary period. Early rice planters typically utilized rain water runoff by planting the crop in the lowest areas on the property. Plantation owners built an earthen dam on high land above the field and created reserves of freshwater that they let onto the field by using a simple sluice gate. The field in turn possessed an earthen dam at its lowest end to hold the water on the crop. When desired, the planter could drain the field by opening another sluice gate in the lower dam. However, some plantations took advantage of natural limestone springs to assure their water supply. The move to inland swamps from upland cultivation resulted as much from a need to control weeds and the swamps’ rich alluvial soil as from the water needs of the rice plant. Common practice required rice planters to flood inland swamp fields twice during the growing season.9
In the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War, a few planters began to experiment with using the diurnal freshwater floods of the tide along lowcountry rivers. They pursued this method because it promised to flood and drain a much larger acreage. In addition the new pattern of multiple floods of the rice enabled individual slaves to cultivate as much as five or six acres due to reduced hoeing requirements. As tidal rice cultivation spread through the lowcountry, the acreage of rice planting grew, as did the number of bushels produced per acre and per cultivator.10 Within tidal rice culture, growers practiced many small variations from river to river and plantation to plantation, but the wet method of cultivation came to dominate, and a consistent schedule for cultivation emerged during the early 1800s.
Planters, and particularly slaves, found that reclaiming the cypress swamps from the river for tidal cultivation involved frightful labor and perilous working conditions. Slaves worked much of the time with axe, shovel, and hoe, digging ditches, making banks, or cutting down trees and removing roots. Slaves often worked in winter and summer in water to their waists. The softness of the soil meant standing in mire as high as the knees while trying to dig or chop, then clawing one’s way out of the sucking pluff mud (the vernacular name for the always-wet, dense soil present in lowcountry marshes and tidal swamps). In the warm months the nearly tropical heat and humidity took a toll on even the youngest and fittest bodies. For much of the year, malaria-bearing mosquitoes, gnats, and other biting insects plagued those that ventured into the swamps. While the alligators, snakes, and poisonous plants posed a smaller threat than disease, their presence had a chilling effect on the human imagination, as seen in folk wisdom. Despite these obstacles, year after year slaves and masters slowly changed the landscape and carved plantations out of lowcountry estuaries.11
As they constructed the banks, slaves buried wooden “trunks” at strategic locations. The trunk as a technology cannot be overemphasized, for it was the device that allowed for the regimentation of tidal rice culture. Trunks ran twenty or more feet in length so that the gated ends protruded from the bank. Carpenters designed them as rectangular water pipes from two to four feet in width and height. Their heavy lumber gave them a good deal of weight, and it was common to float them into place and hold them there until the ebb of the tide before securing them under bank. On each end the trunks held up two attached posts of six or more feet in height. A pivoting rod ran through the post near their top. Upon the rod and inside of the posts hung the gate. The gate itself contained two pieces, a door suspended from crosspieces and the fixed hanging frame consisting of the crosspieces and the long planks connecting the structure to the posts. Thus the gate as a unit could swivel from a position against the trunk, effectively closing it, to an open position leaving a gap of several feet. In addition trunk minders could raise or lower the door itself by using pegs and the crosspieces. The carpenters’ handiwork allowed for the manipulation of tide within the plantation. When either gate was down, the force of water on it sealed the water out of the trunk and could keep water in the rice field or prevent the river’s tide from rushing inside the bank. Planters could control to within inches the depth of water on a field at any given stage of the rice plant’s growth.12
Image
1.1. Rice trunk cross-section with earthen dike road on top. By Belle Tuten. Courtesy of the artist
Decades and even generations of reclamation and cultivation by the slaves left every floodable acre of the plantation behind a bank, with the land irrigated by the use of trunks, canals, and cross ditches. Planters designed the plantation to have squares of between fifteen and twenty acres. From their view these smallest units served dual purposes. They created small sections for flooding and lent themselves to a practical organization of labor. The squares took on identities as slaves, planters, or overseers gave them names. Some squares took their names from a particular slave or driver such as “Ned’s Field” and some from their location, such as “Catfish Creek”; others took their names from an animal seen there such as a turtle or alligator. Through...

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