Lowcountry Time and Tide: The Fall of the South Carolina Rice Kingdom

Lowcountry Time and Tide

Lowcountry

Time and Tide

The Fall of the South Carolina Rice Kingdom

James H. Tuten

© 2010 University of South Carolina

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina,

by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013

www.sc.edu/uscpress

22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Tuten, James H.

Lowcountry time and tide : the fall of the South Carolina rice kingdom

/ James H. Tuten.

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-57003-926-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Rice trade—South Carolina—History—19th century. 2. Rice—South Carolina—History—19th century. 3. Plantations—South Carolina—

History—19th century. 4. South Carolina—Social life and customs—19th

century. 5. Rice trade—South Carolina—History—20th century. 6. Rice—

South Carolina—History—20th century. 7. Plantations—South Carolina—

History—20th century. 8. South Carolina—Social life and customs—20th

century. I. Title.

 HD9066.U46S725 2010

 338.1'73180 9757—dc22

2010005645

Portions of chapter 3 appeared in Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux and Cary J. Mock, eds., Historical Climate Variability and Impacts in North American (New York: Springer, 2009).

They appear here with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.

ISBN 978-1-61117-216-4 (ebook)

For Belle

For you I know I’d even try to turn the tide

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I: Chronological View of Rice Culture

1. A Brief History of Rice Culture to the 1870s

2. The Planter Imperative, 1872–1893

3. The Collapse of the Rice Culture, 1893–1929

PART II: Themes in Postbellum Rice Culture

4. Changes in Agricultural Practice

5. Rice as Symbol and Foodway

Epilogue—The Legacies of Lowcountry Rice Culture

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Maps

Ace Basin map

A. T. S. Stoney map

Figures

1.1 Rice trunk diagram

1.2 African Americans hoeing rice

1.3 Trunk Minder at flooded rice fields

2.1 O. M. Read on horseback at Hobonny House

2.2 Photograph of E. W. A. Pringle and Unnamed Man

2.3 Portrait of D. C. Heyward

3.1 The Battery after the 1893 hurricane

3.2 Maria and Cesarina after 1893 hurricane

3.3 1911 hurricane photograph

3.4 Charleston Ferry Wharf, 1911 hurricane

3.5 Black women on barge laden with rice

4.1 Bobolink illustration

4.2 Men carrying rice bags, 1879

4.3 Chisolm Rice Mill, Charleston

4.4 West Point Mill engraving

6.1 Geffchen on Hobonny 1924

6.2 Seckenger on Hobonny 1923

Tables

1.1 Annual rice cultivation cycle

1.2 Civil War agricultural losses in South Carolina

1.3 Effect of Civil War on rice production

1.4 Effect of Civil War on farm values

2.1 S.C. rice production in census years 1849–1919

2.2 State percentages of U.S. rice production, 1859–1919

3.1 Rice prices, 1899–1915

3.2 Lowcountry storms, 1893–1911

3.3 Last commercial rice planters

3.4 O. M. Read’s profits

Acknowledgments

I never knew my grandmother Myrtle V. Tuten to fail to supply rice at either lunch or dinner. A table without rice could not be a proper meal to her. Culture can function in such a way as to prevent us from asking such apparently absurd questions as Why do we always have rice? In college I came to see that not every family ate this way.

A second formative experience led me to this research. For much of the 1980s my father managed Hobonny Plantation on the Combahee River. The sense of place that I always have when on that or any other rice plantation is visceral. To look at the changes wrought on the coastal marshes and swamps over time is for me akin to marveling at the statue in Shelley’s Ozymandias. I paddled in the canals, helped cultivate crops in the rice fields and highlands, explored the derelict tabby houses and the late nineteenth century big house. It seems no matter how long I ponder all that work, all those mosquitoes, all the water, lives and history that ebbed and flooded I am still moved by it.

I am indebted to a host of excellent mentors, family members, friends and colleagues in producing this study. I have been told that the historian’s work is very solitary, but happily I have not found that to be true. My adviser Dr. James L. Roark has remained a patient mentor through graduate school and continues to offer guidance. He has taught me about the craft of history, the art of teaching and some important lessons in humanity.

Librarians and archivists from a number of institutions have assisted me throughout my work. John Brunet, Justin Robertson and Kathy Torrente of Emory University provided expertise and friendship. Lynn Jones, Andy Dudash, Mary Murray, and Rob Bleil of the Juniata College library also proved indispensable. Steve Hoffius pointed me toward wonderful collections at the South Carolina Historical Society over a number of years. I owe all the staff there, especially Matthew Lockhart and Michael Coker, a debt. Beth Bilderback at South Caroliniana library assisted me with illustrations.

At Juniata College I have had the help of several wonderful student assistants in the History Department: Earl Rogers, Emily O’Donnell, Bridget Hughes, and Amy Hunt. I appreciate their enthusiasm and work.

The travels of a graduate student on limited funds can be a burden on his family and friends. Mark Burckhalter, John and Lisa Thomson, Allan and Kathy Melton, David and Rhonda Cook, and Cal and Cathy Robertson all generously made their homes available. I am blessed with a great mother-in-law, Belle Stoddard, who has bestowed her interest, knowledge, and many out-of-print books on me. My brother, Tim Tuten, and my parents, Henry and Annette Tuten, gave unfailing support and never criticized me for making a career out of graduate school.

A number of friends and colleagues offered suggestions, and encouraged me. In particular I wish to thank David Atwill, Mary Cain, Bill Carrigan, Robert Cuthburt, Naomi Nelson, Richard Porcher, Sam Dennis, and Randy Sparks.

Michael Fitzgerald, Belle S. Tuten, Steve Knepper, and Steve Goodson provided valuable comments on the entire manuscript. The directors of the Lowcountry and Atlantic World program, especially Simon K. Lewis, also gave direction on shaping the manuscript.

I owe deep gratitude to my superb colleagues Dave Hsiung and David Sowell for reading chapters, providing mentorship through this long process, and being the most collegial colleagues one could hope to have.

Several institutions provided help with my research. Emory University supplied summer research grants and other forms of assistance. Juniata College, to put it plainly, invested in me. For this I owe special appreciation to Provost James Lakso and to Joanne Krugh, who have supported me in ways both subtle and obvious.

It has been a pleasure to work with the University of South Carolina Press, especially with Alex Moore.

The greatest source of assistance, support, advice and intellectual example has been my wife, Belle S. Tuten. I can do nothing short of dedicating this to her.

I would like to thank Elizabeth Donovan for her inventive and intrepid work on creating this book’s companion Web site, ricekingdom.com.

Introduction

This is a haunted region, for there is no earthly loneliness like that created by man’s abandonment of what he once loved, enjoyed and considered secure and permanent.

Archibald Rutledge, Home by the River, p. 20

The closest I have come to knowing rice plantation mud work was in July 1988 on Hobonny Plantation. Hobonny, a good example of the typical lowcountry rice plantation, totaled around a thousand acres on the south bank of the Combahee River in the southeastern corner of South Carolina. Slaves started carving Hobonny into being 250 years before I set foot on that land. Like most plantations it had wet rice fields abutting the river and wooded acreage and dry fields further from the creeks and canals. The plantation big house, rebuilt in the late nineteenth century, though handsome in its way, would put no one in mind of Tara. The ruins of several tabby houses and barns bore testimony to the long human experience and the slaves who first lived there. July temperatures in Beaufort County, where Hobonny sits, average a high of ninety degrees with the humidity hovering near ninety percent in the mornings. You can work up a sweat standing still in one of those rice fields. The land at first appears to be flat, but the rice fields themselves are set lower than the surrounding earthen dikes, or banks, as rice people called them. The old rice fields are too wet for most trees, so the vista, even today, remains open, and you can see for a mile, mostly to other plantations’ abandoned rice fields.

My father, Henry Tuten, managed Hobonny at that time for its owner, Savannah businessman T. W. Ericson, who, like many of his plantation-owning contemporaries, had a passion for duck hunting. On that sunbaked July day, my father and I planned to go through one of the few still-arable rice fields to rid it of sesbania, a tall-growing invasive shrub that thrives in wet terrain like old rice fields. In 1988, as in 1888 or 1788, merely walking through a rice field in that climate would leave you gasping for breath, for the soil there—distinct enough to be named Hobonny soil by soil scientists—is at best soft and at a worst a shoe-sucking mire.¹ To eradicate the sesbania, we took turns wearing a backpack sprayer full of Roundup herbicide and walking to the next clump of grass to be poisoned. Taking turns was essential because a full sprayer weighs a bit more than fifty pounds. Adding to the challenge of the situation, mosquitoes and deerflies strafed us all day, disregarding our liberal coat of insect repellent. Readel Murray, the last full-time resident of Hobonny, captured the emotional impact of those swarms, if perhaps underestimating the breadth of their domain: Ain’t no skeeters like Hobonny skeeters.² We also kept alert for the presence of moccasins and alligators, both of which thrive in that environment.

It was a miserable day doing miserable work. In the late twentieth century a shower and an air-conditioned bedroom awaited me, but such luxuries as those remained in the future for those working the fields when the last rice was grown on Hobonny in the middle 1920s. We cannot truly know the experience of life on a rice plantation for masters or slaves in the 1840s or for the last rice field laborers or planters in the 1920s, but days like that one certainly helped me appreciate a few of the material realities of their work and world and, though we can tread the same sodden fields they did, how far removed we are from them.

This book tells the story of how the rice culture on lowcountry plantations such as Hobonny fell apart, very slowly, between 1877 and 1930. It also strives to explain why planters stuck to rice culture even when it made little economic sense and why a late-twentieth-century duck hunter would want a near derelict, mosquito-ridden swampland such as Hobonny. For much of the antebellum era, lowcountry rice planters enjoyed what economists call a comparative advantage in their industry, but changes in the labor force, increased national and international competition, and natural disasters eroded that advantage like so many rice field banks in a hurricane.

To explain the challenges facing rice culture and the dynamic responses to it, it is helpful to focus on several planters in particular: Oliver Middleton Read of Hobonny Plantation, Elizabeth Allston Pringle of Chicora Wood, the Cheves brothers of Newport, Delta, and Weehaw plantations, and Duncan Clinch Heyward of Myrtle Grove and several other plantations. They make a useful group in part because they all left behind substantial written records, but they make sense for other reasons also. Their plantations represent a range of soil types and sit on different rivers: Read’s and Heyward’s on the Combahee River; Pringle’s on Waccamaw Neck; and the Cheves brother’s interests in both those areas and on the Savannah River. Thus they bring into this study’s scope some of the microclimate elements of rice culture. As a group these people also represent different levels of agricultural skill, differing scopes of ambition but a common identity as rice planters.

When I began this research, I hoped to be able to say as much about the African Americans who lived and worked on rice plantations, even managed or owned a few of them, as I could about white planters. While I do have claims to make here about African Americans’ engagement, even commitment, to rice culture and its foodways, limits in sources mean that this regrettably became a secondary focus of my work. Some future scholar will, I hope, complement my work by conducting a thorough study of rural African Americans in the lowcountry from 1877 to 1930.

After 1900 historians, antiquarians, and even former planters took up their pens to eulogize lowcountry rice culture. Their narratives tell and retell the Old South myth of rags to riches and back to rags. The planters who commanded vast scenic acreages and hundreds of slaves styled themselves as classical tragic figures. Today, however, we know about the less romantic and often brutal truths of the slave regime, about black culture under that vile system, and about how the planter class perceived and ultimately fought to preserve that system. The period between Reconstruction and the Great Depression is far less shrouded in moonlight and magnolias, but we should remember that, at the same time authors began penning their odes to rice culture, Jim Crow had just been put firmly in place.

The lowcountry’s extensive archival treasures are so deep and numerous that historian James L. Roark called it an embarrassment of riches.³ These sources are overwhelmingly the products of the plantation and business class. Historians have used that legacy not only to learn about the distinctive forms of slavery, the master-slave relationship, and the planter class, but also about common white people, the coming of the Revolution, and the tumult that resulted in the Civil War. In addition, because the lowcountry planters owned so many slaves, the region has been carefully studied during the early part of Reconstruction in an attempt to assess the effects of sudden freedom on the large black population.⁴

Significant gaps, however, remain in our understanding of rice culture. We know a great deal about rice culture from its beginnings on the Atlantic coast around 1685 through the more than two centuries during which it was the center of economic, environmental, and social life in the lowcountry. Historians know when colonists planted those first seeds. We know a great deal about the rice industries evolution in the colonial and antebellum periods. Yet three centuries later we cannot agree on when the culture died.

I attribute this to two factors. First, historians have not been as interested in the end of rice culture as in the beginning, because the origins and growth of the industry were fundamental to the shaping of lowcountry society, while the slow collapse of the industry amid the countervailing modernizing of the South has been largely outside the scholar’s gaze. Second, for the postbellum period, historians have viewed rice culture rather narrowly, as an agricultural-commercial enterprise. This view is too limited because rice culture—that is, the social and cultural relations supporting rice agriculture—was an absolutely central part of lowcountry society, with no heir to take its place.⁵

Although you can find the year of rice culture’s death given as anything from 1910 to 1930, commercial rice production, or rice grown for the world market, ended in the late 1920s when the last rice planter, Theodore Ravenel, harvested his final crop. Scholars have generally agreed that several factors forced the end of rice culture. Peter Coclanis, as part of his superb macroeconomic analysis The Shadow of a Dream, explains the collapse of the industry in quantitative terms.⁶ Coclanis’s study concludes that powerful economic forces swept planters along and made failure inevitable. Recent studies of postbellum rice culture tend to reiterate the factors Coclanis described.⁷ These scholars have constructed a historical narrative of rice’s failure that drives, rather teleologically, to the conclusion that rice culture was doomed.

However, the rice laborers, planters, and rice brokers who actually lived the story did not necessarily perceive the decline of the industry and culture as inevitable. They did not have the advantage of hindsight, and most expected to succeed in their efforts to sustain the industry. Indeed they persisted in adverse conditions for decades or, using a different measure, for whole careers.

The basic question about the planters may therefore have been asked incorrectly. Instead of researching why planters and laborers failed to perpetuate rice, I will ask: how did they succeed in planting for over fifty years in a free labor context, and why, if this was economically unviable, did they persist? I contend that social, intellectual and cultural factors compelled many planters and laborers to continue planting after the Civil War even when rice was at best only marginally profitable.

This work employs certain assumptions and definitions that should be clarified at the start. Just what is lowcountry culture? The term culture is sometimes a problematic one. I am employing the word in two separate senses. In the nineteenth century, culture usually meant the practice of agriculture or producing crops, as in the phrase rice culture. The term also has an anthropological meaning. In this regard I prefer the definition used by Clifford Geertz: that of an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.⁸ These two understandings, I find, constantly interacted with one another. Agriculture is always a cultural activity. Those engaged in the rice business, or culture, also had their culture shaped by a historically derived practice and identity associated with growing rice in the lowcountry.

Finally, I have found Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural and social capital very useful in understanding both rice planters and black rice growers. Bourdieu’s cultural capital includes a range of conditions, but most important here are what is often thought of as taste. The style of the plantation big house or a long straight avenue of live oaks leading to the front piazza demonstrated one’s taste and represented cultural capital. Additionally, cultural capital involved knowledge systems, for example, the knowledge system of rice production. Planters certainly held valuable social capital—a person’s network of connections and acquaintances. Such networks were sustained and enshrined through agricultural societies, for example, that brought together social equals with a common economic interest and thus a shared social capital. Social capital has tangible results such as easier access to credit, shipping, and milling or more attention from government agencies. Last, Bourdieu describes symbolic capital as something that confers legitimacy or honor on a person and that appears disconnected from the accumulation of material or power. An example of this is the maintenance of a plantation big house by a family that has given up rice culture and now lives in town. The plantation is an expensive, largely unproductive liability, but owning it is symbolic of pedigree, taste, and knowledge.⁹

To be sure, both black and white people wanted and needed the economic capital derived from rice production for their survival. They hoped, as farmers do, that the next year’s crop would afford some luxuries in addition to paying the bills. More than that, though, rice represented cultural capital for both groups. Rice cultivation was highly specialized, and both black and white cultivators derived a sense of identity and superiority over what they viewed as more mundane agrarian pursuits. It is rice culture as cultural capital that explains the many paeans to the industry penned by former planters. It also explains why some persevered despite the economic cost or strained the definition of rice planter to maintain a semblance of rice cultivation.

This study examines the period between 1877 and 1930. The Civil War itself, with emancipation, wartime destruction, and financial collapse brought rice cultivation to a standstill. After the war the rice industry recovered substantially, although never to its previous high levels of profitability. Rice production reached its postbellum peak in the 1880s. The year 1893 was pivotal, as rice production and profits then began a prolonged decline. By 1920 little rice grew for shipment from the lowcountry. Historians often cite 1920 as the end date for Atlantic rice culture. However, a judgment based solely on levels of commercial rice production ignores the broader transformation that rice culture brought about in the lowcountry. The cultivation of rice intertwined with agricultural practices, cultural symbols, and foodways, as did immigration and the evolution of African American culture. The rice culture did not simply vanish in 1920. Indeed a visible vestige of the culture continues as long as lowcountry residents sit and eat their daily serving of rice.

The postbellum rice economy compared unfavorably with the breathtaking financial success of colonial and antebellum rice. But economic decline is only part of the story. Historians would do well to avoid the narrowness of economism. A fuller picture of rice culture in the Carolina low-country from 1865 until its collapse around 1929 explores the scope of cultural continuities and previously ignored developments as well as the more familiar story of economic decline.