On the eve of the War Between the States, many Georgetown planters supported secession enthusiastically. On December 20, 1860, after the triumph of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party in the presidential election of 1860, six Georgetown rice growers met in Charleston with representatives from throughout the state and signed the Ordinance of Secession. Antebellum South Carolinians, like their colonial fathers, felt that their rights had been violated far too often and vowed to make a stand. In the same way that their fathers had helped to threw off the tyranny of King George III, during the American Revolution, South Carolinians justified their belligerence to the Union by declaring a Second American Revolution: the Planters' War for Southern Independence.
By December, 1861, a month after the fall of Port Royal, South Carolina, the United States Navy successfully blockaded Georgetown and cut off its trade with Europe. By mid-April of the following year, Union gunboats entered the mouths of the Santee River and Winyah Bay. They sailed up the intricate river system and disrupted the rice plantation system.
The frequency of federal raids occurred unabated and the gunboats soon became a common sight on many of Georgetown's rivers. With each consecutive incursion, the Union Navy burned fields, looted houses, destroyed property and carried away slaves. Unprotected, many of the planters decided to move inland. A few plantation owners remained, but many abandoned their homes and left their crops to overseers care. For the remainder of the war, most of Georgetown's rice fields lay fallow.
Until February, 1865, the Union influence over Georgetown and the surrounding countryside remained primarily confined to the rivers. On February 17, Sherman took Columbia, and General Quincy A. Gillmore accepted the surrender of Charleston. Next, Sherman headed North and Gillmore moved on Georgetown where he accepted the surrender of the town on February 25, 1865. A month and a half later, news arrived in Georgetown that General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox and that the Confederacy's President, Jefferson Davis, and the Confederate cabinet fled Richmond, the Confederate Capital. Two weeks later, news arrived that General Joseph E. Johnston had surrendered the Army of Tennessee to Sherman outside Durham, North Carolina, ending the war in the East. Soon, Georgetonians who had been fighting with Lee and Johnston began to straggle home.
Although the southern effort at nation building lay destroyed and Georgetown's plantations had been ravaged, some of the district's planters continued to produce rice. The war had disrupted the production of this agricultural staple and crippled the economy of the district, but it did not destroy the culture which stumbled along for another fifty-five years before it completely collapsed.
During the half century following the war, planters faced two very distinct problems in restoring the rice empire. The first pertained to their inability to come to terms with the newly freed slaves and secure a permanent work force. The other lay beyond the control of the rice growers. Techniques for mechanized planting which worked in the prairie states did not function properly in Georgetown's boggy soil. Evidently, the planters tried desperately to revive their old industry, but they refused to accept the new world order: the Antebellum age of magnificence was forever gone.
On February 25, 1865, after four short years of sovereignty, the Union soldiers forced Georgetonians to lower the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy and hoisted the flag of the Union over Georgetown. On March 1, Colonel Brown and several companies of "colored" occupation troops relieved the Union Army in the district. The occupation forces stationed in Georgetown consisted of the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, five companies of the 102nd U. S. Colored Troops and eight companies of the 32nd U. S. Colored Troops. These groups emancipated the last slaves in Georgetown.
On March 5 and 6, a month and a few days before the fall of the Confederate Government in Richmond, the Union Army struck the first and most crippling blow to the rice culture. Colored Union soldiers and the United States Navy sailed up Georgetown's rivers and announced the end of slavery. The troops informed the planters that they remained responsible for the mortgages that any bank held on their slaves, but that the slaves could leave. After receiving news of their freedom, some former slaves left the plantations, while others stayed and rioted.
During the following month, corruption and crime reached epidemic levels in the Georgetown countryside. Soldiers and bands of freedmen looted the manor homes and carried off the planting families' valuables. Robert Allston's widow Adele wrote to Colonel Brown, of the Union Army, explaining the actions of the freedmen, and asked to be escorted home to her plantation. When she and others of her social set returned home they quickly realized the magnitude of change that had taken place. She complained that her Chicora Wood house had "been robbed of every article of furniture and much defaced and injured also all my provisions of meat, lard, coffee and tea taken. That we are left without a bed or blanket and that all these necessary things are distributed among the Negroes."
Jane Pringle, who owned White House Plantation on the Pee Dee River, wrote to Mrs. Allston explaining what she knew about the missing Allston property: "All your furniture has been taken not only by your own Negroes but by troops and hordes of blacks who like vultures hung around the plantations here and by their numbers overawed the negroes and got the lion's share of the booty." In the same letter Pringle also described how the freedmen celebrated their emancipation, "The blacks had a large dinner party on Dr. Sparkman's place last Sunday and got drunk and have invitations out for a picnic."
In Georgetown and throughout the countryside, the presence of the colored occupation troops gave the ex-slaves a strong sense of impunity. Joel Williamson points out in his book After Slavery that it was always more difficult to maintain law and order in areas that colored troops occupied. The freed slaves in these situations often did what they pleased and disregarded laws because they did not expect to be punished for any of their actions. The use of colored occupation troops was not confined to Georgetown, nor was their presence rare in the Low Country. In fact, the Union Army stationed colored troops in every district of the Low Country from Georgetown to Savannah, Georgia.
After losing their slaves, the planters knew that their only chance to rebuild their fortunes rested with continued ownership of their lands. On March 3, 1865, the Freedmen's Bureau Act enacted Sherman's field order which gave each freed slave 40 acres and a mule. The Union Army distributed confiscated land south of Charleston to the freedmen. This action led Georgetown's planters to fear that the same fate might befall their property. Many of the planters who had earlier moved inland to escape the war, moved back to their plantations to claim their holdings.
On April 25, under orders, the planters of Georgetown and Charleston districts took oaths of allegiance to the United States. Afterwards, the Union Army instructed the planters to assemble the freedmen and draw up formal labor contracts and to provide for the freedmen as they had before emancipation and divide the harvest with them. The occupation forces warned the planters that if they decided not to grow crops on their land, they would still be held responsible for providing for their own and possibly other ex-slaves on their land.
Rice was planted shortly thereafter, but because the fields had lain fallow for four years and because of the shortage of laborers, the yield was very small. The Freedmen's Bureau planted and managed several plantations. The ex-slaves worked hard until after the crop was harvested. Afterwards, they refused to repair broken trunks and work at ditching. After deliberating over the crisis, the United States Army used force to make the freedmen perform the tasks that they usually performed during the "lay by time."
The war and the years immediately following had an enormous psychological effect on the Georgetown planters and on Southerners in general. White Southern males had been beaten militarily and the flower of their generation had been killed or maimed. With Georgetown under Union occupation, white Georgetonians felt helpless and feared that the freedmen might rise up and take revenge for their servitude. James Sparkman wrote to Benjamin Allston informing him of a rumored uprising of which "three of the most respectable citizens" informed him. Sparkman wrote, "white male adults and children were to be massacred, on a given night between this and Jan[uar]y. All the aged white women were also to be destroyed, but females between certain ages, to be reserved for servile and licentious purposes."
Though unwarranted in this respect, the planters had many fears and trials to face. The following years brought crop failures and by 1867, many faced bankruptcy. The struggle to retain authority over the work force, exorbitant interest rates and the lack of capital (due to crop failures) caused their problems and it appeared that the rice industry could not be revived. In 1867 planters only cultivated 12,000 acres of rice land compared to the 46,000 acres cultivated just before the war began. By 1870, planters harvested over 15,000 acres of rice in Georgetown which produced an average yield of 540 pounds per acre. South Carolina still produced the vast majority of rice produced in the United States, dwarfing the production of both Georgia and Louisiana combined. Although she still led in production, South Carolina's dominance quickly waned.
Concerning the status of Georgetown's social and economic structure, Francis Withers Pickens wrote to Mrs. Allston in 1867: "All society stands now like a cone on its apex, with base up. The least jostle is liable to make a total overthrow of the whole structure. Such a state of things cannot stand, for it never has in any age or in any country as a permanent structure."
Politically, great changes took place in the south as a result of the Reconstruction Act of 1867. Possibly the most upheaval came when ex-slaves gained the right to vote and hold office, privileges now withheld from white men of pre-war prominence. The act also divided the old Confederacy, except Tennessee, into five occupied zones and established military rule. Additionally, it empowered the newly elected Congress to write new state constitutions and passed the Habeas Corpus Act which greatly expanded the right of citizens' to remove cases to federal courts. The Reconstruction Acts transferred political power throughout the South from whites to freedmen and their allies. It was during that time that Georgetown planters began to seriously consider an alternative to their labor force.
After more and more of the freedmen left the district in search of work elsewhere, the Georgetown Agricultural and Mechanical Club endorsed a resolution to import Chinese laborers to work the rice fields. William M. Lawton, chairman of the committee on immigration, wrote a letter to James Sparkman expressing his intentions to, "bring in a race of People of a higher type of civilization, ingenuety, and indefatigable industry, to substitute that description, which where brought & sold to our Forefathers, through Puritan, Yankee, & British cupidity, and then destroyed by their hypocrisy & folly." Although unsuccessful, the plan and Lawton's proposal are of considerable interest.
William Lawton was not the only outsider who had plans for reviving the rice industry. Oliver Hudson Kelley, founder of the Patrons of Husbandry, wrote a letter to Benjamin Allston urging him to help set up a chapter of the organization in Georgetown. Kelley said he would be able to encourage immigration to the south using the same techniques that his organization used to attract immigrants to the West. Kelley claimed, "Our association will give as much attention to one portion of the country as to another." The Patrons of Husbandry never formed a chapter in Georgetown, but theirs was not the last attempt in promoting immigration to the district.
Ex-slaves who remained in the Low Country vowed to make a difference in the 1868 elections. As a result of their determination and superior numbers, they won many of the Georgetown's county elections. In addition, with backing from the Federal Government, blacks took over many local federal office positions. This pattern continued throughout Reconstruction.
With ex-slaves in control of the local government, the Freedmen's Bureau began to end its work in Georgetown County. It had provided the freedmen with education, clothing, food and medical facilities, but after 1869 local bureaucracy administered those welfare programs, along with efforts to develop a free labor system. During the same year, United States occupation forces withdrew from the county and the blacks created a local militia to ensure their authority.
During the second half of Reconstruction, Georgetown continued to fumble with its labor problems. Although there were many problems with the industry, Georgetown rice, referred to as "Northern Rice" because it came from north of Charleston, was still considered the finest quality rice produced in the United States. It sold in the Charleston market for seven or eight cents per pound, double its pre-war price.
In an attempt to keep their workers happy and productive, many of the plantation owners changed their payment policies. Some began to pay their workers weekly and some increased salaries to an average of six dollars a month, plus rations. Those workers that did not receive rations usually made about thirteen dollars a month. Due to the lack of currency, some planters issued promissory notes that looked like currency, and promised to redeem them in the future.
In 1873, planters and merchants of Georgetown combined their efforts in an attempt to restore the rice culture and formed the South Carolina Rice Plantations Trust. The group's main goal was to attract foreign aid. The trust issued a pamphlet that included statistics on rice and estimates of cost and production for a standard sized plantation. They addressed several other topics concerning the rice culture; however, they misinformed the reader concerning the black population. The pamphlet claimed that a free-holder would have no difficulty, "procuring an ample supply of efficient and instructed labour from the negroes upon the spot. These people, warmly attached to the localities where they were born and reared, are peaceful, orderly and willing to work when honestly and fairly treated."
The author continued, "Let the capitalists come and offer a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, and abundant labour, skilled in agricultural work, will respond to his call."
The trust failed to draw foreign investors to Georgetown and the economy continued to decline. Some potential investors backed out because the soft muddy soil prevented the use of new machinery. In fact, machinery delivered the next major blow to the Georgetown rice industry. While new technology developed and planters began to use new machinery in the Southwest, Georgetown held onto the "task system." By 1876, Louisiana began to reap more than South Carolina by a considerable margin, and Georgia's production steadily increased as well. Meanwhile, South Carolina's production of rice remained stagnate.
Near the end of Reconstruction, Georgetonians revived one element of antebellum life. Whites began to organize clubs; however, these new organizations bore little resemblance to the societies of the wealthy planters. On August 20, 1874, in desperation or in response to the black militia, the whites formed the Georgetown Rifle Guards. At their first meeting, held at the Winyah Indigo Society Hall, the organization claimed that it had formed "a club for self defense" whose belief was "the promotion of Social intercourse and the enjoyment of the members by means of target shooting and such other amusement as they may determine." By 1874, Georgetown also had the Santee Gun Club and a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
Hagar Brown, and ex-slave at the Oaks Plantation remembered having problems with the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction:
Klu Klux...Have you run way, you go church. Going to come in to ketch you or do any mischieveous thing-come carry you place they going beat you - in suit of white. Old white man to Wilderness Plantation. Parish old man name...Come to house, ain't crack. Come right in suit of white. Drag him out-right to Woodstock there where Mr. Dan get shoot...Come in. Grab you and go. Put a beaten on you till you can't see. Know they got a good grub to lick you wid. They git done you can't sit down. Ain't going carry you just for play with.
While the freedmen thought the Klan brutal and unnecessary, the white people of Georgetown, considered the Klan a necessary organization. According to Richard Lathers, the Georgetown chapter of the Ku Klux Klan formed because local magistrates refused to protect the property of whites. Lathers claimed that the freedmen frequently stole cattle, hogs and portions of crops while they waited for hand-outs from the Freedmen's Bureau and, later, from the town. He justified the Klan by saying, "There is not a case on record of hostility to the Union, or any evidence of robbery or desire for personal profit in the Ku-Klux outrages: they were simply crimes of resentment against other crimes."
In 1877, Reconstruction ended in South Carolina with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as President. On October 31, 1876, when Hampton spoke in Georgetown, he urged the freedmen to move to the front of the crowd so that they could hear his plan. He spoke of interracial unity in an attempt to revive the economy and promised the ex-slaves that he would protect their rights and restore peace and prosperity.
With home rule restored, the planters looked forward to a revived economy. Contrary to their expectations, the end of Reconstruction had a paradoxical effect on the rice industry of the South Carolina Low Country. New competition from other ex-Confederate States forced the continued decline of the culture. More than the effects of the failed revolution or the labor problems of the Reconstruction era, mechanized competition proved to be the crippling blow to the industry that would lead to its utter demise.
Georgetown's "New South" industries steadily expanded their influence and grew to command the economy. During this period, land owners lost their political power and their property lost its value as the economy diversified. Railroad companies, public utilities, banks, lumber companies and rice mills became the new foundation of the economy. The Georgetown rice industry had met challenges from rice production in other states during Reconstruction, but in the post-Reconstruction world, other industries challenged the dominance of the rice planters at home and steadily gained influence over them throughout the Low Country.
The rice planters' wealth and influence passed on to rice millers who eventually built mills on all of Georgetown's major rivers. P. R. Lachicotte and Sons built a rice mill at Waverly Plantation on the Waccamaw River. The company took a new and unique approach: incorporation. In 1879, the Georgetown Rice Milling Company, a joint stock company, built its mill in the town itself. During the late 1890s, the Guendalos Company worked the Pee Dee plantations, and the S. M. Ward Company milled the Santee River crops.
The Georgetown Rice Milling Company, the largest of the lot, combined the efforts of local merchants and planters to solve labor problem. Built in town on Wood Street, it faced the Sampit River for easy access to the port. In 1879, the company earned immediate respect when it received the highest price awarded for its sample of rice at the Charleston market. The following year, the Company distributed a pamphlet to the local planters advertising its method of milling which resulted "less breakage of the rice in pounding."
Far to the Southwest lay the competition that, during the period, well surpassed the production of Georgetown and South Carolina on the whole. Louisiana surpassed South Carolina first in the rice market. In 1881, when the railroad arrived and connected New Orleans to Houston, land speculators and Midwestern farmers moved into Louisiana and used the methods of wheat agriculture to produce rice. They employed harvesting machinery, improved Japanese seed, steam engines, gang plows, seeders, discs and twine binders to achieve dominance. The Agricultural Revolution finally came to rice production; however, because of its soil, Georgetown planters could not follow the lead of mechanized farming.
By the late 1880s, Texas and Arkansas, stimulated by the Southern Pacific Railroad and aided by machinery, developed the "Prairie Rice Culture." By employing advancements made in Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas boasted that for each tractor they employed, they could break fifty acres of land per day. Although production in these states did not offer a threat to the consistent Georgetown rice culture of the 1880s, by the early 1900s their production dwarfed that of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana combined. In 1903, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana produced 99% of America's rice crop. By 1909, Texas alone irrigated 286,847 acres of rice, while South Carolina's contribution to the production for export ceased to bear significance.
Other than labor problems and competition from mechanization, a series of environmental catastrophes sped along the decline of Georgetown's rice culture. In 1893, two destructive hurricanes hit the region. Violent storms continued the following year and again in 1898, 1906, 1910 and 1911. During the spring thaw of 1906, 1907 and 1908, severe freshets developed, destroying crops and taking their toll on the land. Between 1893 - 1913, Georgetown's rice culture completely collapsed.
Many in the area committed the county to "New South" industries and, for the most part, gave up on farming, as extractive industries such as lumber companies, turpentine and phosphate miners ravaged the land. The Atlantic Coast Lumber Company became the most profitable of these extractive industries. Originally founded in 1899 with a capital base of $1 million, the company built a complex including four sawmills and all necessary operations for the production of lumber by 1903. Capable of sawing 300,000 feet of wood per day, it attempted to buy or at least rent many of the plantations. By 1905, the company exported 300,845 tons of lumber for a value of $2,645,537, or more than 25% of all exports from Georgetown.
At the turn of the century, rice continued to lose influence throughout the Low Country as South Carolinians only planted 35,041 acres in 1901. This land loving, but ever shrinking group resented and often complained about the mills, the loggers and others involved in extractive industries who stripped the land of its resources. Unfortunately for the environment, Georgetonians refused to listen to the arguments mistakenly interpreting the immediate cash return of the extractive industries as progress.
By 1913, the Georgetown Rice Culture ceased to be profitable. Some planters continued to plant rice for personal consumption and local sales, but not for national export. The name "Carolina Rice" continued to be placed on the staple crop; however, the center of crop production shifted Southwest to Arkansas and Texas and to a lesser degree to Louisiana and later California.
The following spring, fields lay fallow; damaged floodgates and canal banks lay ignored; and farm tools began to rust. Docks and rice barges stood vacant and winnowing houses remained locked. The work songs of the slaves, once heard throughout the countryside, ceased and there was nothing to break the stillness of the boggy Low Country.
Over time, the rivers and swamps began to reclaim the rice fields. Cypress trees sprouted out of the once nurtured fields and alligators and snakes returned to the abandoned fields. In the spring, the rice birds made their annual visit but paused for only a short time before flying north. The empire built on rice had fallen.
A visitor to the Low Country of South Carolina today might find it easy to overlook the historic significance of the area. Georgetown is now known for its paper and steel mills, its many golf courses and its beautifully manicured highway that connects Myrtle Beach to Charleston. The countryside of Georgetown is now heavily populated and is becoming ever more developed each year.
Remnants of the defunct Georgetown rice culture are hard to see unless you look for them. Along Highways 17 and 701, there are old roads that lead to the rivers. Down those roads, some still unpaved, are long avenues of mature live oaks planted ages ago for future generations. Those avenues pass old slave, and later tenant, housing which lead to the back of the manor house, the seat of the planter's personal empire.
Visible from boats on the slow moving rivers is the wreckage of
the rice industry: rice barges half submerged and the remains
of broken docks. At All Saints, Prince George Winyah and Prince
Frederick Churches there are tombstones and family plots bearing
the surnames of Georgetonians whose names, affluence and influence
have slipped into history.
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