Rice and Tobacco in the Other South

Similar to Brazil, the thirteen colonies of North America encompassed many Indigenous nations settled along the coast, even though they were not comparable in size and development to the Indigenous empires and civilizations such as the Inca and the Aztec empires and the Maya civilization that occupied Mexico, Central America, and the Andean territory in South America—regions conquered by Spain.

In these three areas, slavery developed at different paces. But despite their particularities, they all shared plantation economies. Indigenous populations, including the Cherokee and Catawba nations, predominated in the area that later became known as South Carolina, where the first Africans set foot accompanying the Spanish explorers as early as in the 1520s. After unsuccessful attempts, starting in 1670, English colonists as well as their servants, mainly from Barbados, settled in South Carolina as well. According to reports from that period, 30 percent of the individuals accompanying these English settlers were Black persons, who were either indentured servants or enslaved people.⁶¹ At the end of the seventeenth century, as Ira Berlin reminds us, two-thirds of the population of South Carolina was composed by “Europeans and European-Americans...

While white indentured servants were also part of the workforce in South Carolina during the seventeenth century, English colonists began to increasingly introduce enslaved African workers in the colony during this period. Starting in 1695, rice production emerged in the region, and as the industry expanded in the next two decades, the enslaved Black population, including slaves born in Africa, gradually outnumbered white settlers.⁶³ As pointed out by historian Peter H. Wood, because enslaved Africans were outsiders, the use of their labor in South Carolina avoided the diplomatic problems of employing local Indigenous peoples. Nonetheless, there were initial obstacles. The price of enslaved Africans was higher than that of European indentured workers with limited-term contracts. Moreover, with the rise of other English colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, the demand for enslaved laborers increased. As a result, purchasing African captives became even more expensive. Despite these hindrances, the use of African labor also offered long-term advantages. Captive Africans transported through the West Indies and from West Africa were already familiar with the climate and the environment of the plantation. Moreover, their period of servitude was unlimited.⁶⁴

During the eighteenth century, as rice cultivation expanded along the Lowcountry, the South Carolina coastal area, slavery became a central institution in the colony. Most of the enslaved Africans transported to South Carolina during the eighteenth century to work in rice plantations came from the Upper Guinea region (see map 1 at the front of the book), which corresponded to the region of present-day Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the western part of Côte d’Ivoire. These bondspeople brought to the Americas great knowledge of rice cultivation techniques.

As they did in West Africa, African women and their descendants played a crucial role in the Low Country rice culture. In large rice plantations, as historian Leslie A. Schwalm reminds us, enslaved Black women composed most of the workforce laboring the rice fields.⁶⁶ Slave owners also relied on bondswomen to give birth to enslaved children and increase their slaveholdings. Whereas gradual abolition of slavery emerged in the North of the United States following the American War of Independence, as examples of capitalist ventures, Southern rice plantations continued to generate profits on the backs of enslaved people until the eve of the American Civil War.⁶⁷

The growth of the tobacco plantation economy led to a rising demand for an enslaved African workforce in the Chesapeake region in the early eighteenth century.⁶⁸ Virginia’s enslaved population also increased, a tendency that continued in other southern colonies over the next decades. At the end of the eighteenth century, on the eve of the American War of Independence, both Virginia and Maryland had approximately one-third of the total population and half of the enslaved population of the thirteen British colonies in North America. Starting in the late eighteenth century, the gains of the tobacco industry started to decline, but the use of slave labor continued to be a lucrative choice and boosted other farming activities, including the cultivation of corn and grains.