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Rice Culture, Plantations, and Slavery

The development of the rice culture defined the area around the Cooper River from the second quarter of the eighteenth century through most of the nineteenth century. First grown in inland swamps, the seed was probably brought in from Madagascar in the late seventeenth century.  Only 10,000 pounds of rice were exported in 1698. Within two years, however, the colony exported 394,000 pounds; by 1709, more than a million pounds; and by 1775, more than 80 million pounds.  England’s decision to allow Carolina rice to be directly exported to Southern Europe rather than through Great Britain played a significant role in this economic expansion.28

By the 1730s, rice planters discovered the potential for using the flow from tidal rivers to flood and drain their rice crops and saw it as potentially preferable to the excessive weeding and possible overflooding associated with inland fields. Within twenty years the tidal rice culture was surpassing the inland rice culture in the lowcountry, though the capital and labor output required to convert plantations to the tidal system was such that the shift was a gradual one.29

The rapid growth of slavery corresponded with this trend. Shortly after 1700, South Carolina already had a black majority population. By 1740, in the rice-growing districts around Charleston, as much as 90 percent of the population consisted of African slaves, many of them from rice-growing areas of Africa and familiar with its cultivation.30 By 1778, Elias Ball’s field slaves at Comingtee were equally divided between native-born and African slaves, the latter coming from Angola or Gambia.31 The retention of African ways on the plantations were aided by the linkage of settlements along the Cooper River and the growth of the task system as the preferred means of division of labor, meaning that once slaves completed their assigned task for a particular day, their time was essentially their own. This system permitted slaves to cultivate their own small crops and raise limited numbers of livestock as well. By the 1750s, the task system was fully widespread throughout the Cooper River region, with a typical task set at a quarter of an acre.32 As early as 1728, the Ball family paid slaves for fowls and hogs on their Cooper River holdings. Slaves also dominated the river borne traffic of the Eastern branch operating ferries and various vessels.33

 The archaeological remains of slave houses, slave streets, and other elements of slave settlements at Middleburg, Limerick and other Cooper River plantations document and illustrate that significant cultural landscape, and the remnants of agricultural fields and of paths and trails leading from the settlements to the fields and back are also important resources as well. Clay-walled or rammed-earth houses with planking or thatched roofs such as those seen in a view of Mulberry by Thomas Coram in the 1790s and located through archaeological investigations at various sites in the region were reminiscent of African building practices, as were occasional site arrangements of houses in a horseshoe or circle.34 Archaeological investigations at Cooper River plantations have yielded valuable information about the architecture of slave settlements, about the everyday lives and material culture of slaves on these plantations, and many examples of the slavemade pottery called Colonoware.35

 The handful of elites who controlled the Cooper River plantations constructed substantial houses and enjoyed the pleasures of wealth. These planters were extensively connected and intermarried by the mid-eighteenth century and produced some of the most powerful leaders of the colony. Families such as the Harlestons, Balls, Hugers, and Simonses mixed with the descendants of the first of these families—the Colletons, Broughtons, and Johnsons. The initial wave of great houses were built at Goose Creek and on the Cooper with Fairlawn, Exeter, and Mulberry chief among them.

 By the 1740s, however, the Ashley River seems to have been the preferred venue for such showplace estates, and simpler houses generally prevailed on the Cooper River. Nonetheless, many planters who kept townhouses in Charleston stayed on their Cooper River plantations during the winter months. Landscaped portions of surviving plantations still illustrate planters' interest in gardening and in such pastimes as horseracing. Racetracks were cleared at Childsbury and Strawberry Plantation and planters often focused on the breeding of blooded horses.36 The copy book kept at the Bluff by the young scions of the Harleston family attests to the education of the master’s children on Cooper River plantations by private tutors.37

 Only a small number of yeoman farmers and poor whites lived among the planters of the Cooper River region, and their numbers decreased throughout the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1749, however, white planters were uneasy over a supposed plot of sixteen poorer whites and one hundred slaves to stage an insurrection, perhaps the only such biracial plan ever discovered in the colonial or antebellum South.38

Home Page for the Historic Resources of the Cooper River, ca. 1670-ca. 1950

Historic Resources of the Cooper River, ca. 1670-ca. 1950
Name of Multiple Property Listing Berkeley County, South Carolina
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet