Rice: Carolina’s swamp crop

When did Carolina start growing rice?

Rice reached Carolina in the late 1600s. At first people grew small amounts to eat, and historians think enslaved Africans were among the first to grow it. These early crops were planted “dry” on higher ground, watered only by rain.

Growing rice to sell overseas took land, money and a large forced workforce, and those were not in place until the 1710s and 1720s. Before about 1720 Carolina earned more from tar and pitch and from selling captured Native Americans into slavery (see Charles Town). Then rice took off. Exports roughly trebled during the 1720s, and by about 1740 the colony shipped more than 30 million pounds a year.

What was inland swamp rice?

By the 1720s planters had moved rice into inland freshwater swamps. Workers built earth banks to hold water in a pond or reservoir, then let it out over the fields when the young plants needed flooding. This was the system in the game’s years. The better-known tidal fields, which used gates to let river tides flood and drain the fields, spread mainly after about 1750, along rivers such as the Cooper, Ashley, Santee and Combahee.

What was the work like for enslaved people?

Making a rice field out of a swamp meant cutting down trees and thick undergrowth, draining and levelling the ground, and digging ditches and banks by hand, often standing in mud and water. Then came planting and flooding, and each time the fields were drained the weeds had to be hoed again, all through the summer heat.

The swamps bred mosquitoes, and with them deadly fevers. Deaths were high, and planters relied almost entirely on enslaved Africans. Around 1710 fewer than about 300 captives a year were brought to Charles Town; by 1720 the number was over 1,000 a year. In the Lowcountry more enslaved people died than were born until the 1760s, and children died especially often.

By 1708 Black people already outnumbered white people in the colony. By about 1730 Africans outnumbered Europeans roughly two to one.

What was the task system?

Rice planters came to organise work by the “task”. Instead of working in a gang from dawn to dark, each person was given a set job for the day, such as hoeing a measured patch of field. When it was done, the rest of the day was theirs.

People used that time to grow food, keep animals, fish, hunt and sell what they could spare, though planters kept passing laws to limit this trading. The task system gave enslaved people a little more control over their time than in most of the slave South, but the tasks were heavy, the punishments harsh, and the system was still slavery.

How was rice husked and packed?

After the harvest the stalks were threshed to knock the grain loose. Each grain still wore a tough husk.

• Pounding. The grain went into a tall wooden mortar and was beaten with a heavy wooden pestle, loosening the husks without smashing the grain. Most of this work was done by women. One historian estimates a woman pounded about 44 pounds of clean rice a day.
• Winnowing. The pounded rice was tossed in wide, flat “fanner” baskets so the wind carried off the chaff. Researchers trace their weaving style to West Africa.
• Packing. Clean rice was packed into wooden barrels. Enslaved men made the staves and worked as coopers, or barrel-makers.

Did African knowledge build Carolina rice?

Peter Wood, Daniel Littlefield and the geographer Judith Carney argue that West Africans, from lands from Senegambia to Sierra Leone where rice had been grown for many centuries, brought the skills that made Carolina rice work: planting, controlling water, pounding and winnowing. Carney’s 2001 book Black Rice argued that racism had hidden Africans’ part in the story.

In 2007 the historians David Eltis, Philip Morgan and David Richardson challenged it. They pointed out that in the crucial early decades most captives reaching Carolina did not come from rice-growing regions. Records show that many came by way of Barbados and other English islands, and in the early colonial years people from Angola and Central Africa were the largest group. They argued that trade routes, not planters’ wishes, mostly decided who arrived, and that planters and markets shaped the industry.

Most historians today see a blend: real and important African skills, especially at the start, combined with planters’ money and markets, all resting on forced labour.

Where did Carolina rice go?

From 1704 rice was an “enumerated” good under the Navigation Acts, Britain’s trade laws: it had to be shipped to Britain first. In the 1720s most rice went to British ports, such as Cowes and Poole on the south coast, and much of it was then sold on to Holland, Germany and Portugal. Some went to the sugar islands, such as Barbados, where it fed enslaved workers.

The detour cost money and time: Portugal and Spain wanted rice most during Lent, a Catholic fasting season, and rice routed through Britain arrived too late. In 1715 British merchants living in Oporto, in Portugal, told the Board of Trade, the government’s advisers on colonial trade, that Portugal could take about 6,000 barrels a year if rice could come direct. After years of lobbying, the Rice Act of 1730 let rice sail straight to European ports south of Cape Finisterre, in north-west Spain, which meant mainly the ports of Spain and Portugal. Across the 1700s as a whole, most Carolina rice was eaten in northern Europe.

What happened next?

By about 1770 Carolina was shipping more than 66 million pounds of rice a year, all of it built on the labour of enslaved people. Some fought back. In September 1739, after the game’s era, up to 100 people rose up near the Stono River, close to Charles Town, and marched toward freedom in Spanish St. Augustine. Around 40 white people died, and probably a similar number of Black people. The colony answered with harsher laws in 1740.

The descendants of the people who grew Carolina’s rice are the Gullah Geechee people of the coast and Sea Islands, from North Carolina to Florida. Their language, Gullah, is still spoken today.