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Carolina Gold

The richest British colony on the American mainland ran on rice. Enslaved people grew all of it.

By the early 1720s rice was South Carolina's principal crop, with roughly six million pounds shipped to England annually. Tidewater exports rose from 17 million pounds in 1730 to 66 million by 1774. By the mid-nineteenth century more than 75,000 Lowcountry acres produced around 160 million pounds, and by 1860 South Carolina grew approximately 70% of American rice.

Enslaved workers cleared tidal swamp. They built the dikes, sluices, floodgates and canals that made tidal irrigation possible at all. They planted by hand, managed the flooding cycle through the season, harvested, and made the winnowing baskets and mortars used to hull the grain. The wealth rice generated is inseparable from that labour. It is not background to the story. It is the story.

Historians continue to debate a narrower question: how much of the technique came from West Africa. Judith Carney's Black Rice argues for a substantial transfer of agricultural knowledge from the rice-growing regions of Upper Guinea — that the expertise, not only the labour, was African. David Eltis, Philip Morgan and David Richardson argued in the American Historical Review that too few captives came from those regions for that account to hold as stated. Carney, Edda Fields-Black and others replied in the same forum.

None of them dispute the dependence on enslaved labour. The technology-transfer claim is contested, and we are not going to present a live scholarly argument as settled in either direction.

Commercial Carolina Gold production ended after floods, silt washing down from upstream cotton land, and hurricanes between 1893 and 1911. The last commercial crop was 1927. The variety exists today because it was revived from a USDA seed collection in the 1980s — the grain outlasted the industry in a government freezer.

Sources

  1. South Carolina Encyclopedia, "Carolina gold rice."
  2. Carney JA. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Harvard University Press, 2001.
  3. Wood PH. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Knopf, 1974.
  4. Fields-Black EL. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Indiana University Press, 2008.
  5. Eltis D, Morgan P, Richardson D. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." American Historical Review 2007;112(5):1329–1358.