The Second Introduction of Rice

Topic: Gullah History - Early Legends
The American Revolution disrupted South Carolina’s economy.  Because of the Navigation Acts, it only had one market for its crops, and one pool of creditors and shippers.  During hostilities, England found other sources for its indigo and rice.  The East India Company’s indigo producers monopolized the market after the war. [1]

Planters, who previously had grown rice, or had continued to do so on a small scale, returned to it.  However, freshets often destroyed the crops between 1784 and 1796. [2]  These floods inspired Nathaniel Heyward to experiment with methods to control the tides that daily flowed over coastal lands in 1788.  Once he proved the effectiveness of flood irrigation around Beaufort in southern South Carolina, planters moved from the inland swamps in the northern part of the state to the narrow band of land influenced by the tides. [3]

Inland, farmers converted their indigo lands to cotton after Wade Hampton proved it would grow around Columbia, South Carolina, in 1799. [4]  In the interim, in the period immediately after the war, farmers did what they could to survive.

One problem was finding rice seeds to plant.  The war had affected different parts of the colony at different times.  In 1778, British troops took Savannah, Georgia, and advanced north toward Charles Town.  Planters were given the choice of submitting or having their lands destroyed. [5]  After that, those who had not been plundered were able to resume some form of normal operations.

The British succeeded in taking Charles Town in May 1780.  Again, people were given the option of accepting parole as prisoners of war, or risk being looted. [6]  Francis Marion rallied dispirited rebels, who harassed the British troops as they tried to pacify the country from Charles Town to the far west. [7]  Planters still were being plundered when the war ended. [8]

Growers, like Heyward, in the southern part of the new state resumed their old ways. [9]  They still had their stores of rice with white seed-heads.  Nathaniel Greene surprised the British near Dorchester, and forced them toward Charles Town in late 1781.  David Ramsay remembered “by this means all the rice between Edisto and the Ashely rivers was saved.” [10]

Those in the north, who moved from the inland swamps to the coast, adopted new ways.  Not only did they adopt flood irrigation, but they also built rice mills powered by animals or water. [11]

Robert Allston, who became one of the most prominent planters in the Winyah Bay area, believed Hezekiah Maham was the man who introduced the particular variety of gold-hulled rice in 1785 that soon became the primary crop. [12]

No one asks where Maham obtained his rice.  Instead, the question has become what made it special.  Anna McClung and Robert Fjellstrom analyzed contemporary seeds to determine one section of one gene was unique.  This particular one affected the amount of starch in grain. [13]  In 1983, researchers for the Carnegie Institution discovered the Wx or waxy gene controlled amylose content in maize pollen and kernels. [14]  The gene since has been found in wheat, barley, millet and rice.  In rice, the Wxa allele is associated with dryland indica and Wxb is found with wetland japonica. [15]

McClung and Fjellstrom searched for the Carolina gold allele in the National Plant Germplasm System, and found it appeared in less than 1% of the samples. [16]  When they scanned the data base for the closest match, they found one grown in Ghana.  However, that did not mean the rice came from Africa.  It well could have come from South Carolina through trade. [17]

The one with a golden panicle is a subspecies of the Asian Oryza sativa not the African Oryza glaberrima.  That subspecies, Indica, developed in India, [18] and was spread west by Arab traders. [19]  Portuguese traders may then have spread Indica.  It eventually was found in Madagascar, replacing the Javonica brought there centuries before from Malaysia.  It also displaced the African Glaberrima wherever the Portuguese introduced it. [20]

The rules of genetics did not stop some from proclaiming the single DNA match as proof Carolina Gold was introduced by slaves. [21]  However, the mere fact that the variety has not been found anywhere else suggests it was the result of a rare mutation, much like the more common one that produces the weedy, red rice. [22]

McClung’s team since has attempted to recreate gold seed from the white that is known to have been common in South Carolina, and continued to be grown around Beaufort.  Glenn Roberts says it took “a 36 month subtropical and tropical year round program.  They increased this seed to breeder, then to foundation seed, then passed it to experienced [. . .] growers to move the pure [seed] into first year production only to discover a red out-cross in the subsequent pure Carolina Gold production rice harvest.” [23]

The random, but constant, appearance of the red-skinned rice may be less the result of genetics than environment.  A group of Japanese scientists found both the Wxa and Wxb existed in both Indica and Japonica, and that the distinction between the two occurs during the encoding process when a nucleotide that follows the pattern AGGT mutates to AGTT. [24]

The purity of the gold rice in the northern part of South Carolina probably occurred because planters did not save their own rice for the next year’s crop.  The red seeds still were produced as probability theories would insist. [25]  They were removed from seed intended for market by the mills that husked the grain.  However, seed corn was not husked because the rice deteriorates after the protective shell is removed. [26]

In 1911, the United States Department of Agriculture noted that farmers who could not use flood irrigation became the ones who provided the seed.  The red rice and weeds were removed when it was husked with older methods. [27]  One suspects they also trained the men who were hired as overseers. [28]

End Notes
1.  G. Terry Sharrer.  “Indigo in Carolina, 1671-1796.”  The South Carolina Historical Magazine 72(2):94-103:April 1971.  102.  He argues England’s wars produced more incentives for planters than the subsidy that existed from 1848 to 1777.

2.  David Ramsay.  The History of South-Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: David Longworth, 1809.  Reprinted as Ramsay’s History of South Carolina.  Newberry, South Carolina: W. J. Duffie, 1858.  1:293.  For more on freshets, see the post 16 January 2019.

3.  Heyward is discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.
4.  The introduction of upland cotton is discussed in the post for 25 August 2019.
5.  Ramsay.  1:182.

6.  Walter Edgar.  South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  233.

7.  Edgar.  235.  Marion now is known as the Swamp Fox.
8.  Edgar.  238, 243.
9.  Heyward’s reaction to mills is mentioned in the post for 16 January 2019.
10.  Ramsay.  1:249.
11.  See the post for 16 January 2019 for more on the introduction of mills.

12.  Robert F. W. Allston.  “The Rice Plant.”  De Bow’s Commercial Review of the South and West 1:320-357:1846.  326.

13.  Anna McClung and Bob Fjellstrom.  “America’s Golden Treasure.”  Texas Rice 5(6):5-6:August/September 2005.  Summary of a paper given at a symposium in Charleston, South Carolina, sponsored by the Carolina Gold Foundation in August 2005.

14.  M. Shure, S. R. Wessler, and N. Federoff.  “Molecular Identification and Isolation of the Waxy Locus in Maize.”  Cell 35:225-233:1983.

15.  Shinsuke Yamanaka, Ikuo Nakamura, Kazuo N. Watanabe, and Yo-Ichiro Sato.  “Identification of SNPs in the Waxy Gene among Glutinous Rice Cultivars and Their Evolutionary Significance during the Domestication Process.”  Theoretical and Applied Genetics 108:1200-124:2004.  In a simple understanding of genetics, the specific color of an eye, blue or brown, is called an allele of the gene that controls color.

16.  McClung and Fjellstrom.

17.  Erik Stokstad.  “American Rice: Out of Africa.”  Science website, 16 November 2007.  Report of paper by Anna McClung given at the American Society of Agronomy 2007 meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

18.  T. T. Chang. “Domestication and Spread of the Cultivated Rices.”  408-417 in Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation.  Edited by David R. Harris and Gordon C. Hillman.  London: Routledge, 2016.  The obvious difference between Indica and Japonica is that the grains of the latter stick together when cooked, while they remain separate in the first.

19.  Andrew M. Watson.  Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.  17.  Cited by Richard Dwight Porcher, Jr., and William Robert Judd.  The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice.  Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2014.  10.

20.  Porcher.  11.

21.  Stokstad.  “Judith Carney of the University of California, Los Angeles, says a Ghanaian origin of Carolina Gold fits with the idea that Carolina Gold arrived in the colony as food on slave ships and was then planted by the slaves.”  Carney is discussed in the post for 13 January 2019.

22.  Early attempts to explain the appearance of red rice are mentioned in the posts for 18 September 2022 and 25 September 2022.

23.  Glenn Roberts.  “Carolina Gold Rice: Pure Seed, Fame, Fourtune & Hurricane Rita.”  Carolina Gold Rice Foundation Newsletter, January 2007.  Ellipsis were CGR for Carolina Gold Rice.

24.  M. Umeda, H. Ohtsubo, and E. Ohtsubo.  “Diversification of the Rice Waxy Gene by Insertion of Mobile DNA Elements into Introns.”  The Japanese Journal of Genetics 66:569-86:1991.

25.  Allston said that sometimes rice fields became “contaminated with either grass-seed or red-rice, as not to reward sufficiently the labor bestowed on its culture.”  Instead of abandoning them, he argued planters should introduce a regime of leaving a field fallow every four years.  Then, he reported “all the rusty, red grains of rice, which have been lying dormant in the mud for years, were thrown out and exposed to the fructifying influence of the sun, vegetate, and are utterly destroyed by the frost before the time for planting the next crop.” [29]

26.  J. H. Easterby.  “Introduction.”  1-49 in  The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston.  Chicago: University of Chicago, 1945; reprinted by University of South Carolina of Columbia in 2004.  40.

27.  W. E. McLendon, G. A. Crabb, Earl Carr, and F. S. Welsh.  “Soil Survey of Georgetown County, South Carolina.”  513-562 in Field Operations of the Bureau of Soils, 1911.  Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1914.  520.

28.  The post for 16 January 2019 summarized a study on the characteristics of overseers.  The census data that was used could only identify men by state of birth.

29.  R. F. W. Allston.  “On the Cultivation of Rice.”  The Southern Agriculturist 3(7):241-246:July 1843.  244-245.