The blossoming of tidal rice cultivation in the years after the American Revolution is best understood as part of the larger national trend toward rationalizing agriculture. Just as the U.S. government employed the grid in the Midwest to divide up the land into tidy little boxes so it could be sold and converted into farmland, surveyors with the same rectangular logic in mind descended across the Low Country, parceling it out into quarter-acre squares. Slaves leveled the ground and built embankments around these squares as well as trunk lines to carry the water from the river to the fields. A staggering amount of work went into reshaping the land for tidal rice cultivation. By 1800, the rice banks on a plantation located on a branch of South Carolina’s Cooper River extended for some 55 miles and consisted of more than 6.4 million cubic feet of dirt. In other words, slaves with nothing but shovels and hoes hauled approximately the amount of earth it would take to fill the planet’s largest pyramid, Egypt’s Cheops, three times. The end result of the slaves’ efforts was a reengineered landscape designed to maximize rice production—a “huge hydraulic machine” in the words of one planter.13
RICE PLANTATION
Using the grid as their guide, planters and slaves carved out this tidal plantation along the lands adjacent to South Carolina’s Combahee River in the late eighteenth century. (South Carolina Historical Society Collections)
The impact of the hydraulic grid extended beyond the land into the realm of labor. Slaves on rice plantations worked under a code of conduct known as the task system. Unlike tobacco and sugar plantations, where gangs performed a specific job under the watchful eyes of an overseer, blacks who produced rice received a certain amount of work, a “task,” for each day. After completing the assigned job, slaves could do as they liked with their time. Why the task system emerged in the Low Country is not entirely clear, but the unique demands involved in growing rice may account for its rise. Tobacco required meticulous care, while rice, a hardier plant, demanded somewhat less attention. More important, much of the work in rice cultivation centered on the digging of ditches and embankments—discrete, easily measured tasks. And with the aid of the grid, which imposed geometric order on the landscape, plantation managers could assign slaves the job of weeding and hoeing in a self-contained area. A slave could generally perform any operation to completion on a quarter-acre piece of land. As one master put it in the late eighteenth century, “a Task was a quarter of an Acre to weed p. day.”14
The task system clearly predated the emergence of tidal irrigation. But the development of this new energy source spurred planters to impose even more order on the landscape, as they enlisted geometry to help them get the maximum work from slaves. Tidal energy relieved field hands from hoeing during the summer, but then planters turned around and raised the amount of land a slave was responsible for to half an acre. As the summer workload declined, winter chores increased, with slaves pressed into service maintaining ditches and canals. The surplus energy supplied by the tides did little to improve the quality of slave life, but instead went to fatten the profits of the already wealthy planter class. If anything, working conditions in the fields declined. “No work can be imagined more pernicious to health,” wrote South Carolina historian Alexander Hewit, “than for men to stand in water mid-leg high, and often above it, planting and weeding rice; which the scorching heat of the sun renders the air they breathe ten or twenty degrees hotter than the human blood.”15
If tidal irrigation offered less in the way of freedom for slaves, it also imposed strictures on the planters themselves, tying them more closely to a schedule not of their own making. Georgia planters, for example, had their slaves plant the rice seeds in March, just before the first full spring tide. Later plantings were timed to coincide with the new and full moon, when tides provided enough water to make the seed wet.16
As it was, even before the rise of tidal irrigation, rice planters felt compelled to organize their production schedule around the rhythms of nature. Like one-crop agriculture anywhere, rice remained susceptible to attack by predators. No animal presented more problems than the bobolink. These birds swarmed over the rice fields as they migrated north in the spring, returning south for yet another visit in August and September. Planters who were late in getting their rice in the ground used water to help the rice ripen more quickly, before the birds descended again in the summer. But this technique cost them by reducing yields.17
Reengineering the landscape to produce rice also spawned at least one unintended ecological consequence. Tidewater areas were already excellent breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Rice plantations, with their carefully designed systems for flooding and draining the land, made the habitat even better for mosquitoes, especially for the malaria-carrying Anopheles species. The connection between the cultivation of rice and the increase in malarial conditions did not escape notice among contemporary observers. “These exciting causes of disease lie dormant in the native state of new countries, while they are undisturbed by cultivation,” wrote one, “but when the ground is cleared and its surface broken they are put into immediate activity.” Although a substantial percentage of Africans were immune to one common strain of malaria, European Americans were not, a fact that compelled many masters to flee the plantations during the warm months.18
Despite some disadvantages, tidal cultivation proved enormously successful in boosting rice yields. In part, the surplus energy provided by the tides increased output by allowing slaves to tend to as much as five times the amount of rice they had customarily cultivated on inland plantations. But the success of tidal agriculture stemmed from more than simply an increase in energy. Low Country rice planters were also the secret ecological benefactors of changes afoot in the Up Country, shifts explaining why soil exhaustion was rarely an issue for those in the tidal zone. The settlement and clearing of forest from the steeply sloped Up Country sent fertile topsoil into rivers and eventually on to the rice plantations. As one South Carolina geologist put it in 1860, “the Up-country since its cultivation was first commenced, has been going steadily downstream.”19 Low Country planters, aware of the sediment-rich water being sent to their doorsteps, would use a full tide to flood their land, causing the river water from upstream to deposit its load of fresh soil on their fields.
But the same forces at work redistributing the Up Country’s soil wealth—the clear-cutting and settlement of the forest—also increased the threat of floods. Indeed, Georgia rice planters lamented the increasingly severe deluges that damaged their bank and canal systems—and of course their crops—in the years after 1830, especially the devastating inundations of 1833, 1840, 1841, and 1852. On balance, however, the settlement of the Up Country was a nice bonus to the downstream planters, providing a new source of soil wealth to accompany the infusion of energy they received courtesy of the earth’s relative position in the solar system.
THE OTHER SOUTH
The steady disappearance of the Up Country’s soil into the account books of the Low Country is perhaps an apt metaphor for the divergent economic courses these two regions took in the antebellum period. Although large-scale plantation agriculture was a major component of the Low Country economy, as of 1850 such plantations made up barely a fifth of all the farmsteads in the South. While rice and tobacco planters were engaged in single-crop agriculture for market, small farmers in the Georgia and Carolina highlands practiced a more diversified form of agriculture centered on family survival. Yeoman farmers, who had few if any slaves, worked hilly and sandy soils and often had little choice but to put the safety of their family ahead of exporting products for market. The yeomen and planters thus had two entirely different goals and approaches for relating to the land, a situation that at times brought them into conflict. Although there were many fewer planters than yeomen, the former had far more power and political muscle. As a result, more than just soil disappeared from the Up Country landscape.
Consider what happened to the fish that once swarmed upstream in southern rivers. Although the use of
water to power mills occurred on nowhere near the scale that it did in the North, in the period leading up to the Civil War, the South flirted with industrial transformation. Traditional sawmills and gristmills, in existence since the colonial period, became better capitalized and began producing for more distant markets. Rice planters used some of their newfound wealth to build rice mills. Even textile mills, that staple of northern factory production, showed signs of expanding throughout the South beginning in the 1810s. Much as had happened in New England, conflict broke out as mill owners, many of them serving the needs of the slave-based plantation economy, dammed rivers for power, blocking the fish and cutting off upstream farmers from an important food source.
Shad and herring, the main species taken by farmers, normally spend most of their lives at sea, returning in the spring to freshwater rivers to deposit and fertilize their eggs. When they returned, they became easy prey for farmers throughout the southern Piedmont. Reaching at points hundreds of miles upstream from the ocean, the fish, once salted down, composed a major component of the southern diet, especially for the poor. During the eighteenth century, the fish were readily available, easy to catch, and, according to one source, “cheaper than bacon.”20
Farmers in the Up Country turned to the annual spring shad and herring runs to round out a diet based mainly on corn, deer, rabbit, and squirrels. But in the period after the American Revolution, the intrusion of market relations undermined the pioneer’s subsistence as the damming of rivers to aid transportation and industry cut off fish from spawning grounds and led their populations to decline. In Virginia, for instance, tobacco planters in the Roanoke valley petitioned the state legislature for help in making rivers into a means for transporting crops to market. In South Carolina, defenders of a mill along the Tyger River complained of the lack of streams for grinding grain to meet local needs, “much less to manufacture Flour for market.”21 In both these cases, fishing interests came second to commerce and industry.
As market relations made further inroads, those who depended on the fish cried out. In 1787, a group of South Carolina yeoman farmers opposed a milldam across the Edisto River that left them “totally cut off from availing themselves of the common Rights of Mankind.” The mill, which cut lumber for sale to Sea Island plantations, blocked the passage of fish, depriving people upstream “of a necessary of Life, which their fellow citizens living upon other water courses 200 miles above the said Mills enjoy in the Greatest plenty.”22 Such rhetoric resonated among citizens across the nation in the supercharged atmosphere of the revolutionary era. Up Country yeomen readily employed it to protest the market forces, propelled by slavery, that were slowly coming to the fore.
The southern farmers, much like their counterparts in New England, argued that their common rights were being trampled in the rush to preserve the economic interests of mill owners. Fish, the farmers declared, derived from either God or nature and by right existed to serve the public good. Shad and herring were central to what the historian E. P. Thompson has labeled a “moral economy.” By this he meant an economic regime where people had reciprocal rights and responsibilities toward one another, where the self-regulating market based on money did not as yet rule material life, where a code of behavior existed that preserved the welfare of a larger community, even if this proved unprofitable to an individual. In such a moral economy, fish amounted to sacred necessities of life that no one would possibly even dream of destroying.23
In fact, the fish did not owe their existence to the abstractions of nature or God. Ecological factors, more than religion, determined whether the fish would lay eggs, as well as whether a river system remained healthy enough to support such reproductive efforts. Changes were occurring in the ecosystem at large, some of which could have affected the ability of shad and herring to reproduce. Ironically, the yeoman farmers themselves may have played a role in causing their own troubles, undermining the fish that formed the basis of their moral economy by chopping down the forest and settling more of the Piedmont. Extensive deforestation took place in the South between the American Revolution and the Civil War, especially in the decade of the 1850s. Erosion increased, as did the sediment load of rivers, benefiting tidal rice plantations, but also burying fish spawning grounds.
The final blow to the fish runs came during the mid-nineteenth century. Commercial fishermen threw huge seines across rivers, systematically exploiting the catch to where it could no longer reproduce. As far as migrating fish were concerned, both the North and South wound up with rivers that were, for all intents and purposes, dead. The moral economy of water had given way to a far more market-oriented calculus, as rivers became biologically impoverished power and navigation canals. Those who had formerly depended on water for food turned to new ways of earning a living from the land. In New England, the possibility of factory employment provided farmers with one way out of this dilemma. But few such opportunities existed for their southern counterparts. There the rise of a market culture meant further expansion of slavery, not more wage work in factories.24
SOIL MINING
In the late eighteenth century, when Britain entered its industrial revolution, Low Country planters began searching for a variety of cotton to meet the needs of British textile mills. Georgia planters eventually discovered a kind of long-staple cotton (perhaps brought to the United States from the Bahamas) that flourished along the coast in an area known as the Sea Islands. Extending from South Carolina all the way to northern Florida, the islands proved an ideal cotton environment. The long-staple variety required an exceptionally long growing season, in excess of 250 days without frost, and grew best when nurtured by moist ocean breezes. In both these respects the Sea Island environment cooperated. Between 1785 and 1795, island planters saw their profits from long-staple cotton rise dramatically.
In an effort to cash in on the burgeoning cotton market, planters further inland tried to plant the crop but found that only the short-staple variety grew away from the coast. Short-staple cotton, however, had one serious drawback: The cotton seeds had an annoying habit of clinging to the lint, requiring as much as an entire day to clean a pound of the crop by hand. In 1793, however, Eli Whitney invented the famed cotton gin for separating the cotton fibers from the seeds. From this point forward, the South’s fortunes remained tied to the textile-driven industrial transformation that eventually spread from Britain to America.
While northerners moved toward abolition in the 1790s, southerners headed in precisely the reverse direction: a marked expansion in slavery, fueled by the booming cotton economy. Short-staple cotton could be successfully grown in nearly all of the South located below the 77-degree summer isotherm (a line drawn on weather maps to connect places with the same temperature). That fact allowed the slave system to emerge from its coastal confines and spread throughout the Piedmont and eventually as far west as eastern Texas. Cotton could be grown at some distance from the rivers required to transport the crop to market because it was a nonperishable item and relative to, say, grain, far more valuable per unit of weight. It was also a crop perfectly suited to single-crop plantation agriculture with its slave laborers, who carried out the necessary planting, hoeing, and picking under the supervision of an overseer.
Apart from having the requisite number of frost-free days (roughly 200), the South also possessed enough rainfall (approximately 20 inches) and the right precipitation pattern for growing cotton. Too much spring rain and the crop’s root system might not take properly in the soil; too much rain at harvest time and the boll might fall off before being picked. With their gentle spring rains, increasing through the middle of the summer and then tailing off, the southern states made for perfect cotton country. Climate helped to forge the cotton South, as the region rose to become the world’s leading supplier of the fiber, bolstering the industrial transformation of the North and Europe in the process. By 1860, the United States accounted for two-thirds of the world’s supply.
Cotton planters, like their counterp
arts who grew rice, tried as much as possible to streamline the production process. One of the greatest advances involved a shift in the species of cotton grown. By the early nineteenth century, planters moved from black- and green-seed varieties to Mexican cotton. Unlike these earlier types, the Mexican cotton had large bolls, allowing slaves to pick as much as five times more per day than with the inferior black-seed kind. Economically speaking, this development nearly rivaled the invention of the cotton gin.25
MAP OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH
The region south of the 77-degree summer isotherm is the part of the eastern United States best suited climatically for growing cotton. Within that region, The Black Belt—an area noted for its dark and especially rich soil—led the nation in cotton growing during the antebellum period.
Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History Page 11
