The font of this baronial lifestyle was the rice trade, "South Carolina gold." For a time, indigo complemented and even briefly outstripped rice as a source of riches for the planters, but rice was king. And the engine for both crops was slaves.
Several versions exist of how rice cultivation was introduced into South Carolina, the most ironic of which is that it was by the slaves themselves, whose experience with the crop in their native Africa was seized on by white planters. However it began, when rice was introduced in the 1690s, it provided a long-sought solution for assuring the prosperity of a colony whose terrain seemed unsuited for cultivating anything else.9
From the first, planters realized that no white person could be made to undertake the rigors of rice growing. Even Native Americans, who initially made up much of the slave population before the large-scale importation of Africans, and who were accustomed to the climate and the swamps, were not up to the task and died off too quickly to be cost-effective.* Rice only began to be profitable when an army of blacks was imported from Africa and the planters switched from dry land planting to damming the freshwater swamps that dotted the land near the coast. Rawlins Lowndes knew from whence he spoke when he declared, "Without negroes, this state is one of the most contemptible in the Union . . . that whilst there remained one acre of swamp-land in South Carolina, he should raise his voice against restricting the importation of negroes. Negroes were our wealth, our only natural resource."
Working a swamp into a rice field was killing work. Once the boundaries were laid out, slaves, working thigh deep in standing water infested with leeches, snakes, and mosquitoes, cut down trees and vegetation, and then hauled it up on dry land for burning. Trenches were dug through the mud that surrounded the cleared swamp, and floodgates were built to dram off excess water. Eventually, a grid of canals and banks was constructed and the rice could be planted in about six inches of water.
Cultivation was no easier. Seeds were required to be treated so that they would not simply wash away, after which they were pressed into the ooze. Growing season was late spring until early fall and fields required constant maintenance—weeding and hoeing—all done in the increasingly fetid marshland in midsummer. Finally, in early September, when the temperature still often exceeded ninety degrees, the stalks were cut with sickles, and then bound and stacked for curing. Chaff was separated with mortar and pestle and the rice was then placed in standard-sized barrels and sent to Charles Town for export.
In addition to its other dubious attributes, rice was heavy and hard to work, so slaves who toiled in the rice fields alternated bending for long periods and lifting heavy loads. Fatigue, standing water, humidity, and mosquitoes combined to make malaria and yellow fever constant companions.
Many historians—and not just those from the South—have since argued that because planters had invested an excessive proportion of their capital in slaves, they were unlikely to risk that investment through mistreatment. Most slaves, they argue, were well fed and housed, even given the same medical care as whites, all so as not to squander a planter's most important asset. In addition, many slaves enjoyed some small autonomy through the implementation of the "task system": A specific amount of work was required during the course of a day, after which the slaves' time was their own.
Actual witnesses saw things quite differently. A European visitor to a rice plantation wrote, "If ever a work could be imagined peculiarly unwholesome, and even fatal to health, it must be standing like the Negroes, ankle and even mid-leg deep in the water, which floats on oozy mud; and exposed all the time to a burning sun which makes the very air they breathe hotter than the human blood; and these poor wretches are then in a furnace of stinking, putrid effluvia; a more horrible employment can hardly be imagined."10 Life expectancy in such conditions was often less than three years. What's more, overseers, who were paid according to production, usually harbored aspirations of ownership. The only way to raise the capital to buy land was to raise the output of the plantations they managed, an unlikely incentive for humane treatment. It was more expedient and cheaper to work older slaves to death and replace them with younger, healthier imports, than to provide food, medicine, and shorter working hours.11.
Slaves in a rice field
As the rice profits rolled in, more and more slaves were needed and, by 1730, two-thirds of South Carolina's population was black. In the 1750s, a system of "tidal flooding" was developed, which allowed the natural flow of tides to wash through the rivers near the coast, creating even greater economies of scale. The labor intensity of rice cultivation coupled with the truncated life expectancy of the slaves led to a further increase in imports. By 1775, South Carolina had brought in nearly sixty thousand additional slaves.12
Due to a series of wars in Europe, rice exports stagnated in the 1740s, so the introduction of indigo as a staple crop late in the decade provided a second profit base to South Carolina planters.* Indigo, the source of the brilliant blue dye then prized in Europe, also promised to vastly improve the working conditions for South Carolina slaves. The crop was grown on dry land, not in swamps, and producing cakes of dye from the plant leaves was specialized and meticulous work in contrast to the brute force of rice cultivation.
The process required a number of specific operations, and each needed to be performed at a precise time and in an exacting manner to ensure the best quality dyestuff. After harvesting, the plants were placed in a series of three adjoining vats. The plants were immersed in the first vat until they oxidized (the planters thought they had merely rotted). When the resulting liquid had reached the right consistency and odor, it was transferred to the second vat where it was aerated by being agitated with paddles. At this point, the liquid was still clear. Eventually, the solution turned blue, although that part of the process could be speeded up with the addition of limewater, again at precisely the right moment and in the correct amount. The blue liquid was drained into the third vat, where it sat until a muddy substance settled to the bottom. After the remaining liquid was drained off, the semisolid remainder was placed in linen bags to dram further, and then placed in boxes to form into cakes, which were dried in sheds away from any direct sunlight. When fully dried, the cakes were cut into cubes and packed into barrels for shipment. Failure in any of these steps would result in either an inferior product or none at all.
Unfortunately for the South Carolina planters, more than three hundred varieties of indigo existed, some yielding a richer dye than others. American indigo was inferior to the variety grown in India and the West Indies, and at first promoting demand was difficult. With the onset of the French and Indian War, however, West Indian indigo became much harder to come by and South Carolina indigo was used in its place. The British even put a bounty on the crop, thus increasing profits to the planters. When the war ended in 1763, demand for rice exploded, so in the decade leading up to the Revolution, South Carolina planters grew richer than ever before. Rice and indigo became such a source of wealth that almost every successful professional man in the low country supplemented his income by planting.
South Carolina indigo continued to sell until the onset of the Revolution, despite its inferior reputation. War, however, was indigo's rum. The bounty disappeared as did the British market. Other markets proved impossible to develop, and by the time the convention convened in Philadelphia, indigo production had virtually disappeared and rice had once again taken its place as the financial wellspring of the low country planters. Slaves who had cultivated indigo were sent back into the swamps to die.*
Andrew Rutledge died in 1755, when his nephew John was sixteen. Two years later, John Rutledge sailed for England and Oxford. When he returned in 1761, possessed of a law degree and acceptance at the London bar, the Hext fortune had nearly been squandered. Dr. John had made a series of disastrous business decisions, the full impact of which had not been felt until after his eldest son had begun his studies in England. Plantations had been leased or sold for a fraction of their worth, and others had been run into t
he ground by incompetent management. The family's expenses had been so inflated that their resources were inadequate to maintain the obligatory planter's lifestyle and the family had sunk into debt, so much so that the Rutledges' very survival lay in the hands of the great commodity and slave merchant Henry Laurens. Had Laurens refused to extend Sarah Rutledge more credit, their plight would have become public and the family ruined.
Rutledge persuaded Laurens to extend the family credit one more time, and then used the money to throw an enormous party for the first families. There, he announced that he intended to run for a seat in the General Assembly and unseat one of the current members, a shocking breach of etiquette. Still, after a furious house-to house campaign, John Rutledge was elected. The position didn't pay, but since South Carolina law stated that assembly members were immune from lawsuits, the family's precarious financial position was temporarily stabilized.
Rutledge had returned from England with a reputation as a spellbinding orator with a penetrating legal mind, so he assumed he could recoup the family's wealth simply by nailing up his shingle. But, like just about everything else in Charles Town, the law was a private club, and none of the highly suecessful attorneys, men like Charles Pinckney,* were about to cede any of their business to a young upstart. Henry Laurens threw Rutledge a crumb or two, but these cases paid next to nothing.13 Even Rutledge's great optimism had begun to erode when a young woman named Mary Cooke walked into his office with a breach of promise case. It was the first unsolicited business that Rutledge had attracted, although such cases were considered unseemly and were generally settled privately and quietly.
But Rutledge saw an opportunity. The prospective defendant was one William Lennox, who, with his brother, had opened a retail emporium in Charles Town. Their establishment sold not just one commodity, like everyone else's, but a variety of goods, "America's first department store."14 As a result, the Lennox brothers had begun to take business away from Henry Laurens and the other more specialized merchants.
So, instead of burying the case, Rutledge brought it to court, with the young plaintiff testifying against her alleged betrothed, the sort of testimony never before heard in a Charles Town courtroom. The jury members, all prominent citizens, including Henry Laurens, listened transfixed. When Rutledge forced Lennox to admit during cross-examination that he had, indeed, proposed to the young woman, the verdict was assured.
Not only did Rutledge garner a hefty fee, but the case made him a celebrity and catapulted him into the top tier of Charles Town lawyers. Within two years, still just twenty-four years old, he was the most active, the most successful, and the highest-paid lawyer in South Carolina. Rutledge began to amass a personal fortune, buying thousands of acres of land and hundreds of slaves. His political influence increased with his landholdings. In 1765, when Massachusetts proposed a meeting of all the states in response to the Stamp Act, South Carolina was the only state south of Maryland to agree and the twenty-five-year-old Rutledge was chosen as one of its three delegates. In New York, the "foreign country," Rutledge headed the committee of the Stamp Act Congress that drafted a letter to the House of Lords requesting repeal. Rutledge did not especially enjoy working with Yankees, but the experience would serve him well throughout his career.
Rutledge returned to South Carolina a respected man of national politics. He resumed his law practice and his investments, took charge of his brothers' education, and managed the family interests. He served as a member of the South Carolina assembly and briefly as the state's attorney general. Then, in 1774, both he and his younger brother Edward were appointed to the Continental Congress.
Rutledge traveled to Philadelphia confident that he could wield the same influence nationally as he had done m his home state. But not all his new colleagues were taken with the young lawyer from South Carolina. John Adams, for example, noted that "his Appearance is not very promising. There is no Keenness in his Eye. No Depth in his Countenance. Nothing of the profound, sagacious, brilliant, or sparkling in his first Appearance."15 As to Rutledge's luminescence as an orater, Adams noted that "he dodges his head too [referring also to Edward] rather disagreeably, and both of them Spout out their Language in a rough and rapid Torrent, but without much Force or Effect."16 Patrick Henry, Adams noted later, had a "horrid opinion" of Rutledge, whose ideas "would rum the Cause of America."17
Part of this antipathy certainly stemmed from the fact that, like Benjamin Franklin, Rutledge was a reluctant revolutionary. Feeling almost English himself, he constantly sought a middle ground, some means to attain the autonomy the more radical colonists sought with in the existing system. As the crisis deepened, Rutledge, like Franklin, was pulled along in its wake, hoping all the while that some accommodation could be reached.
During Rutledge's tenure in Congress, when compromise clearly was not going to be possible, Rutledge still did not abandon hope. He seconded the nomination of Washington to head the army, and then met with him privately to express the hope that, even in the face of military action, the colonies could somehow reconcile with Britain. During the latter half of 1775, Rutledge shuttled back and forth between home and Congress, until in early 1776 he came home to stay. Reluctantly, he accepted an appointment to chair a committee that would draft a state constitution to enact provisions for self-rule. The constitution was adopted in March and soon afterward, John Rutledge was elected as the first president of South Carolina.
With his brother Edward back in Philadelphia, preparing to become the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rutledge faced an immediate crisis. The British under Henry Clinton had a flotilla just outside Charles Town harbor, poised to invade the city. Ignoring General Charles Lee's advice that the still unfinished fort on Sullivan's Island at the mouth of the harbor be abandoned to prevent British ships from slaughtering its defenders, on June 28, 1776, Rutledge wrote a note to General William Moultrie, who had command on the island. "General Lee wishes you to evacuate the fort. You will not do it without an order from me. I would sooner cut off my hand than write one. JOHN RUTLEDGE."18
John Rutledg
Moultrie held, the British withdrew, and Charles Town and South Carolina were saved. This was, however, only a temporary reprieve: South Carolina would be ravaged during the later years of the war.
In December 1779, Henry Clinton once again sailed for South Carolina. In early February of the next year, the General Assembly passed a resolution "herewith delegating to John Rutledge . . . power to do everything that to him . . . appears necessary to the public good."19 Excepting summary execution, Rutledge, by then Dictator John, had unquestioned authority.
His initial reign would be short. Clinton, and his deputy, Charles, Lord Cornwallis, arrived on February 11, 1780, this time opposed by the hapless Benjamin Lincoln. Clinton soon outflanked Lincoln and imposed a full blockade of the city. Hobbling around with gout, Lincoln allowed his army to be cut off, and then on May 8 rebuffed Clinton's demand for surrender. Clinton opened fire on the town the next day, destroying much of the waterfront. After three days of bombardment, Lincoln surrendered anyway, losing his entire army in the process, the largest single loss of men and materiel in the entire war. Rutledge did not wait around for the final act, rushing out of town in late April.
With Charles Town in their hands, the British proceeded to confiscate virtually all of Rutledge's property, as well as that of the Pinckneys and the rest of the planter aristocracy. During the next year, until Cornwallis began his futile chase of Nathanael Greene's army that would culminate in defeat at Yorktown, the British occupiers looted, burned, and destroyed almost everything they could not use or steal. Slaves were a particularly inviting target. At the end of the war, there were thirty thousand fewer slaves in South Carolina than at the beginning.20 Rutledge never recouped the fortune that he lost to the British army.
Carolinians had begun the war in debt and ended it in even greater debt. To make matters worse, much of the money was owed to the same British merchants they had d
ealt with extensively before the Revolution. After the war, in a fever to rebuild, many of the planters borrowed heavily to buy slaves.
By early 1787, rice exports had recovered sufficiently to give the planters some hope that they might regain their former wealth, but not enough to create the kind of profits that could get them out of debt. This was perhaps the worst position of all. Not quite rich and not quite poor, South Carolina planters became obsessed with hanging on to what they had left, all the while hoping that rice and slavery would return them to past glory. Had their staple crop collapsed entirely, they might have been forced to examine alternatives to the agrarian slave economy. As it was, they came to Philadelphia thinking not of the possibilities of the future, but dwelling on the splendor of the past.
*"Charles Town" did not officially become "Charleston" until after the Revolution.
*Captured members of Native American tribes also knew the terrain well enough to success fully escape at the first opportunity. Africans, completely disoriented in a new continent, could be kept in line much more easily.
*The development of indigo as a cash crop was largely enabled by General Pmckney's mother, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, one of the most remarkable women in colonial America. Left m charge of three plantations and her ailing mother when she was just sixteen, she succeeded not only in keeping the properties afloat, but also in perfecting a method of cultivating indigo m the swampy Carolina tidewater. By the time she married the general's father, yet another Charles Pinckney, she was the best-known woman in the Carolmas, and when she died m 1793, George Washington himself asked to be one of her pallbearers.
*South Carolina planters constantly sought a second crop but could not grow anything cheaply enough and m sufficient quantity m the lowlands until the 1790s, when a Yankee named Eli Whitney figured out how to separate cotton seeds from cotton fiber and the continuation of both prosperity and slavery was assured.
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