South Carolina - Irrigated Rice

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
The American Revolution slowed the slave trade. English ships could not supply planters, and Michael Gomez suggested the traders were forced into the Bight of Biafra were the Guinea current was more treacherous. [1] David Eltis’ team reported a total 14,174 captives imported between 1776 and 1800, compared to 61,476 during the previous twenty-five years. [2]

The British, who occupied Charleston in 1780, encouraged bondsmen to defect to them. Some were sent to Nova Scotia where Moja Makani was revitalizing African-American traditions in 2015. [3] Others were conscripted into the Caribbean military unit mentioned in the post for 29 April 2018. Philip Morgan estimated a quarter of the slaves disappeared from Georgia and South Carolina. [4]

When Southerners began rebuilding after the Revolution they used different methods to grow rice. The swamp lands had developed freshets that destroyed crops. DuBose Heyward’s great-grandfather attributed the change to clearing the land. He remembered twenty years before the American Revolution:

"The upper country being then but partially cleared and cultivated, the greater part of its surface was covered with leaves, the limbs and trunks of decaying trees, and various other impediments to the quick discharge of the rains which fall upon it, into the creeks and ravines leading into the river; consequently much of the water was absorbed by the earth or evaporated before it could be received into its channels, and even when there so many obstacles yet awaited its progress, that heavy contributions were still levied upon it. The river, too, had time to extend along its course the first influx of water before that from more remote tributary sources would reach it. Owing to these and other causes, the Santee was comparatively exempt from those freshets which have since blighted the prosperity of what was once a second Egypt." [5]

Near Beaufort, Nathaniel Heyward realized, in 1787, his swamp land was "too far inland to adequately drain away the excess" water. [6] He was the younger son of Daniel Heyward by his second wife, [7] and thus had inherited less desirable plantation land. Since his older brothers weren’t interested in managing their estates, he volunteered. His experiments on their land with using the tides for irrigation produced a bigger rice crop with less labor. [8]

William Dusinberre said Heyward’s primary contribution was determining when and how to let water flood the land. Others figured out how to build the embankments and canals, borrowing from the Dutch. Still others improved the sluice gates, sometimes adapting African techniques, and introduced European pumps. [9] Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for a Santee river plantation in 1787. [10]

The adoption of flood irrigation narrowed the amount of available land to a thirty mile strip along the coast, and limited the planters to those with capital to invest in irrigation ditches and machinery. Josephine Pinckney’s great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Motte, sold her inland plantations to buy land in 1784 on the Santee River suitable for flood irrigation. [11]

The change favored those men like Nathaniel Heyward and Motte’s son-in-law, Thomas Pinckney, who were willing to apprentice themselves to their plantations. Men, like Pierce Butler, mentioned in the post for 4 October 2018, became dependent on the skills of their overseers.

The post for 13 January 2019 suggested white overseers had become more important before the Revolution, especially in areas with deaths caused by mosquito-born diseases. William Scarborough analyzed the backgrounds of men working on rice, tobacco, sugar, and cotton plantations. He found 92% of the overseers on rice plantations were born in South Carolina. The remaining 8% came from North Carolina or Ireland. [12]

Scarborough found those working on rice lands were "superior in ability and character" to overseers elsewhere. They were more likely to be educated, to be married, and to have accumulated some property, including their own slaves. Fourteen of the 23 he studied were the sons of farmers. [13]

He didn’t comment on nationality or religion, probably because such information did not exist in the historical records he was using. We know from other sources many Scots-Irish migrated to South Carolina, [14] but so had Huguenots and Englishmen. Irish immigrants could have meant Irish, Scots Irish, or Huguenot Irish. Scots-Irish Presbyterians were the ones who stressed education and literacy.

Tidal irrigation didn’t just require plantation owners learn new skills; it changed the nature of the labor force. While people who understood how to cultivate and harvest rice still were needed, men able to maintain the irrigation systems also were required. They did not have to come from the Southern Rivers area. Eltis noted the percentage of slaves imported from Senegambia after 1800 dropped to 31.6%. [15]

One reason for the differing origins was the slave trade was only legal in South Carolina between 1804 and 1808. [16] In the idealism following the Revolution, the state assembly had banned the trade, and plantation owners brought slaves raised or imported by other states.

When a national ban on the Atlantic trade was set to take effect, the legislature opened the trade for a few years. Dusinberre said this led to a short period of very high demand. He noted, "during these years Heyward bought scores, perhaps hundreds of Africans at lower prices than would have prevailed had his supply been confined to slaves imported from Virginia." [17]

More slaves came from the Guinea coast and Angola. They not only were the ones then available to smugglers, but, as mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019, some had an inherited ability to build up immunities to ague, as malaria then was called.

End Notes
1. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 30.

2. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112:1329-1358:Dec 2007. Calculated from figures in Table 1.

3. Moja Makani was discussed in the post for 10 November 2017.

4. Philip D. Morgan."Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810." 83-141 in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution. Edited by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983. Cited by Morgan. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 66.

5. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 37-38. The map with the post for 10 January 2019 shows the location of these places. The Santee River was the one that flowed through the long, narrow reservoir of Lake Marion to Charleston. Lakes Marion and Moultrie flooded the Huguenot lands when the Santee was dammed in the 1940s to generate electric power.

6. William Dusinberre. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 32.

7. DuBose Heyward descended from Daniel Heyward’s first wife. His membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

8. Dusinberre. 32.
9. Dusinberre. 32.

10. James Jonathan Lucas. Letter dated 20 April 1904. Reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.

11. "Eldorado Plantation – McClellanville – Charleston County." South Carolina Plantations website. Her will stipulated the plantation pass through the female line. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

12. William Kauffman Scarborough. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984 edition. 57.

13. Scarborough. 56.

14. James G. Leyburn recorded Scots-Irish farmers began settling in upland South Carolina after George II purchased the rights of the proprietors in 1729 [page 219]. Others went to Charleston in response to a 1763 bounty [page 252]. Many who entered the port were indentured servants. The American Revolution stopped immigration. (The Scotch-Irish. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.)

15. Eltis. Table 1.
16. Dusinberre. 33.
17. Dusinberre. 33.