Carolina's Golden Fields: Inland Rice Cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1860

Abstract

In Carolina's Golden Fields, Hayden Smith delivers a long overdue assessment of inland rice culture's importance to the South Carolina Lowcountry. Due to a dearth of primary sources and the fact that most inland rice fields have been lost to reforestation and development, historians have overlooked inland rice cultivation or have viewed it as a primitive stage of rice cultivation when compared to tidal cultivation. Rather, as Smith's work demonstrates, inland rice cultivation required planters and enslaved laborers to exercise precise knowledge of topography and hydrology to render their harvests profitable. The utilization of this knowledge began when free and enslaved Carolinians experimented with rice alongside other grains as a subsistence crop, first relying on the “providence” method and then realizing the advantages of impervious soils and water management. Using Pooshee, Newington, and Charleywood plantations as examples in chapter 2, Smith demonstrates how rice planters and enslaved laborers adapted to and manipulated varied microenvironments to make cultivation successful and ultimately create a foundation for South Carolina's colonial economy and the expansion of slavery. With the foundation set in the first decades of the eighteenth century, land acquisition and a stable market prompted rice planters to engage in ever more elaborate schemes for irrigation and drainage that mirrored new strategies being used for tidal cultivation. As Smith discusses in chapter 3, this intensive stage of development resulted in higher profits, increased demand for labor, and susceptibility to malaria, freshets, and declining soil fertility. Consequently, planters increasingly perceived the environment as unhealthy and downright hostile.Nevertheless, inland rice cultivation persisted throughout the antebellum period and contributed to the evolution of the Lowcountry's agricultural regime. Focusing on four Wando River plantations in chapter 4, Smith notes how rice planters expanded their landholdings in the post–Revolutionary War era in order to access water and have enslaved laborers construct reservoirs and canals. Smith's microanalysis of each plantation illuminates his earlier theme that this work required knowledge of topography and hydrology to make rice cultivation profitable. It also involved constant experimentation with planting strategies to maintain crop yields. For some planters, successful inland rice cultivation also provided a potential avenue into the Lowcountry aristocracy. Locked out of the more expensive tidal plantation market, social aspirants like Mathurin Gibbs and John Irving saw inland rice as a means to establish their status as planters. As chapter 5 makes clear, despite ambition and the knowledge of experienced overseers, their efforts were frustrated by environmental limitations and small labor forces. Indeed, Gibbs succumbed to malaria in 1849. Yet agricultural reformers espoused inland rice as a way to diversify their planting portfolio when the fertility of their cotton lands declined in the two decades preceding the Civil War. In chapter 6, Smith focuses on Middle Saint John's Berkeley Parish where the Black Oak Agricultural Society promoted scientific experimentation and planters had access to the numerous inland swamps and freshwater springs in Biggin Basin. These reform efforts never amounted to much, but the attempt to revive inland rice testified to its persistence as a symbol of economic salvation.With emancipation, large-scale rice cultivation collapsed and former inland rice lands returned to forest. Purchased by timber companies or converted to subdivisions in the twentieth century, little remains of the inland rice infrastructure that Smith describes throughout the book. However, drawing from plantation ledgers, manuscripts, agricultural journals, deeds and plats, geological and archaeological reports, and myriad other primary and secondary sources, Smith rescues inland rice cultivation from obscurity and gives it a central place in South Carolina's environmental history. Moreover, Hayden Smith has walked the land he describes, and Carolina's Golden Fields exemplifies his intimate knowledge of the Lowcountry, past and present, as well as his skill as a historian. His astute attention to the terrain of forest and history make this a readable, informed, and important contribution to the historiography of rice, slavery, and the environment.