15 15You ain’t got no supper in Beaufort unless you got some rice. You ain’t finished cookin’ yet, until you’ve cooked a pot of rice.1
Question. I see it hazardous for a man to give so much Money for a Slave, and that Slave may soon die, then all his Money is lost….
[Answer]. Is it not so here If a Man purchase Cattle or Horses, how can he be assur’d of their Lives? Yet we have a greater Encouragement to buy Slaves, for with good Management and Success, a Man’s Slave will, by his Labour, pay for his first Cost in about four Years at most, besides his Maintenance, so, the Remainder of his Life, you have his Labour as free Gain, we esteem their Eating and Wearing as little, for that rises on the Plantation, and is little cost out of Pocket.2
THE GROWING CONDITIONS OF Virginia and Carolina were as different as their topographies, necessitating different crops.
It took Virginia between sixty and a hundred years to become a slave society, but South Carolina began as one. “By the late seventeenth century,” writes Philip D. Morgan, “Virginia had a plantation economy in search of a labor force, whereas South Carolina had a labor force in search of a plantation economy.”3 Virginia had defined its staple crop for decades before massive importation of Africans began, staffing the fields mostly with indentured servants, whereas South Carolina, founded by slave traders, began as a slave society that had not yet found its staple crop.
A 1708 census of the Carolina colony, which did not count free Native Americans, gave the population as 9,580—with a distribution of 42.5 percent white, 42.5 percent black, and 15 percent enslaved Native Americans.4 Most of the captives brought to the colony in the late seventeenth century were “seasoned” slaves, brought up from the West Indies. But Carolina colonization began as England was beginning to get involved in the African trade on an industrial scale. The first known slave ship to travel from Africa to South Carolina arrived in 1696, about the same time quantities of African captives were beginning to come to Virginia and Maryland.
After that, the floodgates opened. “The first quarter of the eighteenth century saw the enactment of numerous laws laying import duties on the incoming slaves,” Elizabeth Donnan writes, “the reason offered being sometimes ‘the great importation of negroes,’ which threatened the safety of the province, and sometimes the need for a revenue, easily provided by a duty on slave importations…. Despite occasional outbursts of anxiety over the menace of a [‘]barbarous[’] population greatly outnumbering the planters themselves, the lure of profit which slave labor held out prevented the success of any consistent policy of limitation.”5
Sugar, chocolate, and coffee came from the warmer latitudes. Virginia and Maryland were growing tobacco. But what would Carolina produce? So far, it was an exporter of Native American slaves and deerskins. It took some decades of experimentation, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century Carolina had found its principal staple crop: rice. Tradition has it that the first crop was made with seed from Madagascar, brought in by a privateer.6
Investing in the Madagascar trade from East Africa—a striking exception to the flow of slaves from West and Central Africa—was a New York specialty, though others were in it too. During the Royal African Company’s monopoly (through 1698), wealthy New Yorkers made fortunes doing an end run around it, trading illegally in slaves and other African merchandise by opening a commercial corridor to Madagascar, where the RAC’s vessels did not go.
Scottish trader and Indian agent Thomas Nairne’s 1711 map, made for the lords proprietors, shows South Carolina’s territory as including present-day Georgia, Alabama, much of Florida, and part of Mississippi. The only named towns are Charles Town, Port Royal, and Augustine; the “South Bounds of Carolina” is shown as well south of Augustine. Native American locations are precisely described, with a count of the warriors: “Chicasa 600 Men,” etc.
The Scottish-born merchant Robert Livingston was one of a number of New York merchants who became rich investing in African trading expeditions. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister who had fled Charles II’s compulsory Anglicanism in 1663 for Rotterdam, he ultimately emigrated to America. After marrying the wealthy Albany Dutch widow Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer in 1679, Livingston became the head of a family that came to own about a million acres of land. With the disappearance of Dutch commerce from New York after the definitive English takeover in 1674, the established merchant families of the former Nieuw Amsterdam took greater control, consolidating commercial dynasties headed by the city’s old money, and by 1690, Livingston was a halfpartner in the Margriet, a ship that traded slaves, sugar, and tobacco on an illegal trading voyage to Madagascar, Barbados, and Virginia.7
The first rice seed may have come to Carolina from Madagascar, but the cereal grain was grown across a wide area of Africa. Rice was indigenous to Africa as well as to other places, and an African strain was domesticated there; Mande people had built the Malian empire in part on the technical achievement of cultivating it.8 The Europeans did not know how to produce rice, but West Africans were familiar with its complicated cultivation, and they brought their knowledge to Carolina. Virginia had unsuccessfully attempted to grow rice during Berkeley’s governorship, but its climate was not hot enough.9 Planters competed to buy slaves from a vaguely defined part of West Africa referred to in slave-sale advertisements as the Rice Coast—a name it received not because Africa exported rice, but because it exported kidnapped farmers who knew how to grow it.
The “Rice Coast” often meant the Windward Coast, but could mean anywhere from Senegal down to present-day Ghana. A slave-sale advertisement from the South Carolina Gazette of March 18, 1769, makes clear the involvement of Africans in rice culture:
TO BE SOLD
On Wednesday the 29th Instant
A CARGO of Two Hundred and Ninety
SLAVES
REMARKABLY HEALTHY
Just arrived in the Ship Sally, Capt. George Evans, from CAPE MOUNT A RICE COUNTRY on the WINDWARD COAST, after a SHORT Passage of Five Weeks.
That these captives were from “a rice country” (in present-day Liberia) was an incentive for rice farmers to purchase them.
Carolina quickly became the largest supplier of rice in the world. In his landmark study Black Majority, which called attention to the African genesis of the Carolina rice industry, Peter H. Wood observes that “during precisely those two decades after 1695 when rice production took permanent hold in South Carolina, the African portion of the population drew equal to, and then surpassed, the European portion.”10 As South Carolina out-imported Africans over any other territory, becoming a black majority society, the Sea Islands off its coast became not only black but diversely so, with people from disparate regions of Africa.
Both South Carolina rice and, a little later, indigo relied on African agricultural and processing knowledge. That was also the case in Louisiana, where the first slave ships brought rice seedlings and Senegambians who knew how to grow it, and where indigo was also grown and processed into dye.11
Imports of Africans increased dramatically as diversified farming gave way to a plantation society in South Carolina. Big operators gobbled up freeholds; as planters became wealthy, small farmers became impoverished, and the population became blacker. “Put simply,” write McCusker and Menard, “rice brought the demographic regime of the sugar islands to South Carolina…. In long-settled plantation districts spread along the tidewater in both directions from Charleston, the black share of the population approached 90 percent by 1740, roughly the proportion in the sugar islands.”12
Rice was a miserable crop to tend. It had to be weeded constantly, which meant bending over all day long while standing in mud. Disease thinned the laborers’ numbers constantly. The standing water of the rice plantations incubated mosquitos that bore maladies usually associated with more tropical climates, while the density of workers rendered rice plantation slaves especially vulnerable to epidemics.
Rice wasn’t for small family farms; it required an operation of at least thirty workers to be profitable.13 The fatality of the environment was a disincentive to voluntary immigration. Rice could only be produced on a commercial scale in the Lowcountry with slaves, who lived unspeakably miserable lives.
The enslaved population of the rice plantations exhibited characteristics seen in the sugar islands with mortality exceeding births as laborers were worked to death. Africans in South Carolina had a negative growth rate, and the burned-out laborers would have to be replenished by new arrivals. It took until the 1770s for African Americans to become the majority of the black enslaved in South Carolina, fifty years after it happened in Virginia and more than a century after black slaves had first been brought there.14
A boosterish book by John Norris, published in London in 1712 to stimulate emigration, contrasted the two ethnic slaveries that coexisted in South Carolina. Norris mentioned perpetual enslavement of Native American slaves’ descendants while pointing out their provenance from “French” (Louisiana) or “Spanish” (Florida) territories:
Those we call Slaves are a sort of Black People, here commonly call’d Blackmoors, some few kept here in England by Gentry for their Pleasure … but their proper Names are Negroes…. When these People are thus bought, their Masters or Owners, have then as good a Right and Title to them during their Lives as a Man has here to a Horse or Ox after he has bought them….
There is also another sort of People we buy for Slaves, call’d Indians, bred on the Continent, but far distant from us, belonging to the French and Spanish Territories in America. They are a sort of Red Dun, or Tan’d Skin’d People, who are also Sold us by Merchants or Traders that deal with several Nations of our Native Indians, from whom they first buy these People, whom we then make Slaves of, as of the Negroes … they are never Free-Men or Women during their Life, nor their Children after them, who are under the same Circumstances of Servitude as their Parents are, during their Lives also.15
Norris described how a hypothetical £1,500 investment should be spent to yield a plantation producing £400 annually. His first item of expense was “Fifteen good Negro Men at £45 each,” followed by “Fifteen Indian Women to work in the Field at £18 each,” “Three Indian Women as Cooks for the Slaves, and other Household-Business,” and “Three Negro Women at £37 each, to be employ’d either for the Dairy, to attend the Hogs, Washing, or any other Employment.”16
The many twists and turns of the conflict between slave-raiding South Carolina and the shifting alliances of Native Americans with the French and Spanish are beyond the scope of this volume. Suffice it to say that Carolina’s slave trade in Native Americans was ended by a full-scale war between the Carolinians and an alliance of native tribes that lasted for two years, an enormously long campaign in the context of indigenous struggles against the Europeans.
On the morning of April 15, 1715, the Yamasee, in alliance with the Creeks, struck in a coordinated attack and massacred the frontier traders. Thomas Nairne, the Scottish trader who had led an expedition to the Mississippi and was the most capable frontiersman in South Carolina, was captured and slowly roasted to death by means of burning splinters stuck into his body over a period of days.17 The Indians did not attack Charles Town, which became a citadel for frightened people from the countryside.
Remembered by the Carolinians as the Yamasee War, the uprising changed direction with the entry of the Cherokees as South Carolina’s allies against the Creeks, and it was over by 1717. The remaining Yamasee fled to Florida; the Creeks, the most powerful of the confederations, migrated west and retained their status as a crucial regional power while nursing a special hatred of the Cherokees.
“This war,” writes Alan Gallay, “marked the birth of the Old South, just as Appomattox later marked its death.”18 The turning point in the consolidation of the rice-plantation economy, it led to the end of the proprietorship and the reversion of Carolina to royal colony status.
It is worth underscoring that the end of trading in native slaves came about as the direct result of a focused attack by Native American alliances, and also that this native rebellion was a black rebellion as well. Black soldiers fought together with Native Americans in the Yamasee War; the Carolinians, meanwhile, were so desperate that they armed some of their slaves.
South Carolina’s war with Native Americans underscored how exposed the English were on their southern flank. With the flight of the remaining Yamasee to Florida and the Creeks’ move west, the southern frontier was depopulated, even of Native Americans, which represented a grave security issue. And the land that the Yamasee had abandoned was prime rice-growing land.
The lords proprietors’ claims to own the land to the southwest had foreclosed on the possibility of settlers there, but now, under the pressure of the Spanish threat from Florida, a convention of colonists (with the militia’s support, expressed by flying colors) rose against the lords proprietors. After fifty years of proprietary government, what South Carolina remembered as the Revolution of 1719 led ten years later to the final return of the colony to crown status. After the Carolinians successfully petitioned to change the colony’s status in 1729, the lords proprietors took a lowball buyout.
The Yamasee War made the Native Americans more powerful relative to the South Carolina colonists than they had previously been and diminished England’s influence against the Spanish and French in the region. But the French colony had arrived at its own crisis with the Native Americans. On November 28, 1729, Natchez Indians attacked Fort Rosalie, the nucleus of the later town of Natchez and the hub of the fledgling French agricultural effort, worked by enslaved natives and Africans. They killed much of the town’s population—between 230 and 240 settlers, mostly men—and kidnapped 62 more, mostly women and children, and 106 slaves, and they destroyed all the crops. On April 10, according to Marc-Antoine Caillot, a clerk for the Company of the Indies, “a Natchez Indian woman whom the Tunicas had captured” was slow-tortured, dismembered, and burned to death by the Tunicas in New Orleans, Indian-style, with the permission of the French, in reprisal for the Natchez torture of their captives.19 The destruction of the colony’s agriculture signaled the end of the active French colonization effort in Louisiana, as that colony reverted to crown status in 1731, two years after South Carolina had done so.
The Carolina economy had to be rebuilt after the Yamasee War, something that took most of the 1720s to accomplish, during which time the transition to a rice-plantation economy based on African labor was consolidated. Once again, the importation of Africans increased the threat of slave rebellion, both real and imagined. An “anonymous letter addressed to a Mr. Boone in London, and dated ‘Carolina June 24, 1720’” mentions a purported slave conspiracy:
I am now to acquaint you that very lately we have had a very wicked and barbarous plott of the designe of the negroes rising with a designe to destroy all the white people in the country and then to take the town [Charles Town] in full body but it pleased God it was discovered and many of them taken prisoners and some burnt some hang’d and some banish’d.20
Records from the period are scanty, but there is reason to believe that this slaughter of “negroes” was far from the only one in South Carolina. A letter from Charles Town dated August 20, 1730, describes a purported plan for an uprising much like the purported 1674 Barbados conspiracy and not unlike the one successfully executed sixty-one years later in Saint-Domingue, the future Haiti. This one was organized around a dance:
a bloody Tragedy which was to have been executed here last Saturday night (the 15th Inst.) by the Negroes … some of them propos’d that the Negroes of every Plantation should destroy their own Masters; but others were for Rising in a Body, and giving the blow at once on surprise; and thus they differ’d. They soon made a great Body at the back of the Town, and had a great Dance, and expected the Country Negroes to come & join them; and had not an overruling Providence discovered their Intrigues, we had been all in blood.21
By this time, more than two thousand Africans a year were coming into Charles Town. Samuel Wragg testified before the board of trade in 1726 that he
had been a Trader to Carolina Seventeen or Eighteen years. That that Country formerly had but very few Negroes, but that now they employd near 40,000. That they now usually import 1,000 per Ann: whereas they formerly imported none, and sometimes 2 or 300. At the same time Mr. Platt, also of Carolina, reported that the colony imported about 1000 negroes per annum, at prices ranging from £30 to £35 sterling.22
“Even though Wragg were greatly exaggerating both the yearly importation and the number of slaves in Carolina,” writes Elizabeth Donnan, “it is evident that by this decade the trade had become of sufficient importance to merit the fostering care of the home government and the constant solicitude of British and Carolina merchants, foremost among whom were the Wraggs, Joseph and Samuel.”*23
The frontier between Carolina and Florida had never been agreed on, much less defined. Carolina’s colonists, who were influential in London, pressed for a new boundary colony that would buffer them against the Spanish, the French, and the Native Americans. Promotional literature began circulating in London in favor of a new colony below South Carolina. The first one to circulate, in 1717, continued the feudal fantasy of the still extant proprietorship, proposing a colony that would be headed by a hereditary official called a margrave. The name of the new colony was to be the Margravate of Azilia.
It took fifteen more years for a colony to be planted there. When it was, it was named for King George II: Georgia.
There was to be no slavery in Georgia.
*When Joseph Wragg died in 1751, the obituary in the South Carolina Gazette called him “an eminent Merchant of this Town, who formerly dealt pretty largely in the Slave Trade.”