Judith Carney argued in Black Rice that slaves were responsible for the successful introduction of rice as a commercial crop in South Carolina. She believed they imported the agrarian complex of ideas, methods, and technology from western Africa. [1] One example was the tall wooden mortar and pestle that resembled a butter churn. [2] She thought it was the innovation in rice threshing alluded to by Edward Randolph in the post for 10 January 2019.
Even with crop production problems solved, marketing imbalances like the one Alexander Salley noted in 1700 plagued the rice trade. [3] The demand for slaves led to more rebellions along the Sénégal and Gambia rivers. Muslims established a theocratic state on the Futa Jallon between the Gambia and Sierra Leone rivers in 1725 that decreed no Muslim could be sold. [4] José Lopez de Moura led a different group that destroyed the slave-trade center on Bunce Island in 1728. [5]
Bourbacar Barry showed the Futa Jallon leaders established a society that depended on non-Muslim slaves kept in special villages where they grew rice to feed the community and for export. The theocrats organized man hunts to supply slaves to trade for the guns they needed to continue the hunts. The warfare led to famines like that observed by Louis Moreau de Chambonneau in 1676.[6] Each famine led to more demand for rice from other suppliers.
Starting in the 1720s, South Carolinas expanded production from the coastal regions into the inland swamps around Charleston. Daniel Heyward introduced rice to Beaufort in 1741 and planters spread along the rivers there. [7] Each territorial expansion generated a demand for slaves to work the new plantations to grow the rice needed for the middle passage to bring new slaves.
At this point, David Eltis and his colleagues claimed that, despite Carney’s arguments, slaves didn’t just come from rice growing areas. Shipping manifests suggested only 21.9% of the slaves arriving in South Carolina and Georgia before 1750 came from the combined ports along the west African coast from the Sénégal to modern-day Liberia. [8]
Their statistics matched the experience of the leading slave trader in the early 1750s. Henry Laurens said "Gambia slaves were the favorites. Gold Coast negroes were highly valued" [9] in Charleston and "Angola slaves brought very good prices" [10] in 1755.
The diversity in demands probably came from the variety in crops. Josephine Pinckney’s great-grandmother, Eliza Lucas, had proven indigo could be processed in South Carolina in 1744. Five years later, Charleston’s agent in London persuaded Parliament to subsidize the crop. [11]
DuBose Heyward’s great-grandfather remembered after the bounty was offered, "one after another" of the Huguenot "planters moved" to Saint Stephen’s Parish "as opportunity offered for the purchase of land" and slaves. [12]
Rice grown inland was irrigated by water impounded in stagnant pools that bred disease carrying mosquitoes. In the twenty-five years before the American Revolution, Walter Edgar found "deserving poor" in Charleston changed from the "elderly and infirm" to "women and small children." One assumes many of their menfolk had died from yellow fever or complications of malaria. [13]
DuBose noted "residents along the swamp suffered severely from agues and fever," the common term for malaria. He said they also "observed with surprise, and it still remains a mystery, that overseers and negroes and others who lived entirely in the swamp enjoyed more health than those who lived on the uplands." [14]
Microbiologists since have found individuals were born with their mothers’ immunities against malaria, then lost them in the first months after birth when infant mortality was high. Resistence took years to redevelop through childhood and adolescence. Thereafter, people who were infected by bites didn’t feel the effects. [15]
White men who lived in wetlands, if they survived, were more likely to have acquired immunities than those who did not. Stuart Edelstein noted some African populations had developed genetic mutations that helped protect the young during the period when natural immunities were weak. Three forms of sickle cells appeared in Africa, one in Sénégal, one in Benin, and one in the Congo. [16]
The slave trade changed in the years between 1751 to 1775, when the percentage of slaves from Senegambia increased to 58.2%. More important, the absolute number of slaves increased dramatically. Eltis showed 4,856 slaves from the western African region before 1750 and 35,774 between then and the American Revolution.
The difficulty with reconciling presentations by Eltis and Carney was his periods were broad and didn’t coincide with critical historic events. The early period would have included the time before 1700 when rice was not a commercial crop. It also merged the years mentioned in the post for 10 January 2019 when the Royal African Company had a monopoly and the years after William took the throne of England in 1688. [17]
Several events in the late 1740s contributed to the changes. Barry said an extended drought along the Sénégal began in 1747 that intensified the war and famine cycle. [18] Perhaps to take advantage of the surplus of slaves, a Scots syndicate bought Bunce Island. [19]
Laurens was sent to England where he apprenticed with Richard Oswald. [20] When the Huguenot returned to Charleston in 1747, he used his inheritance to buy a partnership with a local trader, George Austin. [21] Joseph Opala wrote:
"Oswald’s agents at Bance island dispatched several ships a year to Charlestown, each containing between 250 and 350 slaves and goods such as ivory and camwood (a red dyewood). Laurens advertised the slaves, then sold them at auction to local rice planters for a ten percent commission. He used the substantial earnings from the sale to buy locally produced Carolina rice which he sent to Oswald in London, together with the ivory and camwood, and often in the same ship that brought the slaves from Africa." [22]
Demand for slaves increased again in 1751 when trustees for the colony of Georgia agreed to allow slavery. [23] Rice planters from South Carolina opened new lands below the Savannah River. Betty Wood said, "in the mid-1760s, Georgia began to import slaves directly from Africa—mainly from Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia." [24]
During the Seven Years War fought between 1756 and 1763, the English gained control of the French slave trade at Saint-Louis on the Sénégal and Gorée on the Gambia, and acquired three more Caribbean islands, Dominica, Tobago, and Saint Vincent. [25] Barry suggested the new commander at Saint-Louis employed methods used by the British during what was also called the French and Indian War: Charles O’Hara "supplied arms to Moors, who reduced the entire Senegal valley to a killing field." [26]
Slave owners with the most capital could be more particular about the slaves they purchased, and those growing rice may, indeed, have chosen those offered by Laurens, especially if they were dependent on him for credit. Smaller buyers, including those growing rice or indigo on smaller inland holdings, may have been the ones who purchased the majority of the other slaves. As the map at the bottom shows, these parts of Africa, by chance, were the very areas with the greatest incidence of the sickle cell.
Graphics
Muntuwandi. "Distribution of the sickle cell trait, shown in pink and purple." Wikimedia Commons. 10 May 2007.
End Notes
1. Judith A. Carney. Black Rice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
2. Lydia Parrish showed the similarities in husking techniques in photographs of women "Pounding Corn in West Africa" and "Beating Rice in Darien," Georgia. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Between 48 and 49.
3. For more on Salley, see the post for 10 January 2019.
4. Boubacar Barry. La Sénégambie du xve au xuxe siècle. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988. Translated by Ayi Kwei Armah as Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Section on "Muslim revolutions in the eighteenth century."
5. A. Boahen. "The States and Cultures of the Lower Guiñean Coast." 399-433 in Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Edited by B. A. Ogot. Paris: UNESCO, 1992. 397. Bunce Island was discussed in the post for 10 January 2019.
6. Chambonneau was quoted in the post for 10 January 2019.
7. Lawrence Sanders Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 178. See the map in the post for 10 January 2019 for these locations in South Carolina.
8. 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. Table 1.
9. Henry Laurens. Letter to Wragg, 6 September 1755. Quoted by David Duncan Wallace. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915. 76.
10. Laurens, quoted by Wallace without citation. 76.
11. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 146. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
12. 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. 40. DuBose Heyward’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.
13. Edgar. 153.
14. DuBose. 81.
15. Denise L. Doolan, Carlota Dobaño, and J. Kevin Baird. "Acquired Immunity to Malaria." Clinical Microbiology Reviews 22:13-36:2009.
16. Stuart J. Edelstein. The Sickled Cell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. On multiple inventions, 147-148, 150; on effects of sickle cell, 48.
17. William III’s attitude toward free trade was discussed in the post for 10 January 2019. Eltis’ team did stress the important of indigo as a commercial crop.
18. Barry. 110.
19. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 342.
20. Wallace. 15.
21. Wallace. On Lauren’s father’s death, 16; on Austin, 17-18.
22. Joseph A. Opala. "The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection." Website of The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. This was very similar to Thomas. 268.
23. Betty Wood. "Slavery in Colonial Georgia." Georgia Encyclopedia. 19 September 2002; last updated 24 September 2014.
24. Wood.
25. Wikipedia. "Seven Years’ War."
26. Barry. 87. In North America, the French and English armed their native allies. They not only attacked colonists, but each other.
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