The Lowcountry

Abstract

Abstract This chapter provides a reconstruction of the Lowcountry as it was before the hurricane struck. Lowcountry African Americans, motivated to maintain independence and sustain their families, constructed an economy centered on the sustenance of themselves and their loved ones, rather than around the enrichment of the white southerners who had so frequently profited at their expense. They eschewed a single form of employment for a wide array of subsistence activities, farm labor in rice and sea island cotton, and industrial employment in the post-war phosphate mines that proliferated around Charleston and Beaufort. By 1893, the balance of power in Charleston had largely returned to the hands of wealthy whites descended from the planter class, while further down the coast in Beaufort, an African American middle class flourished alongside white merchants. However, this nexus of Black landownership and political participation drew the ire of whites around the state, whether traditional Democrats or Democrats of a populist bent. A menace of a different sort lurked on the horizon, poised to strike: the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893.