Anita Wills  

Show Notes

• Archived Blog Post

  Date / Time: 7/11/2009 1:38 AM UTC

  South Carolina's Low Country and High Country Slaves
  

  Cultural Influences of the Sea Island and Rural Slaves in South Carolina

              As a child, I often heard the name Geechie and Gullah, in reference to my relatives. My father was born in Orangeburg South Carolina, as was his mother and father.  Many of the blacks in our community came from South Carolina. My Great-Great Grandmother, Leah Warner was part of the Gullah community in Beaufort District SC. Enslaved at the age of twelve from Guinea West Africa; she was sold to Robert Ruth. She was his property from 1830-1857. By the time he sold her, she had bore him several children. She was sold to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, while her mixed raced children were sold to Savannah Georgia as House Slaves. She was there when the 54^th Massachusetts came through, and confiscated the lands. By this time, she was married living with her husband, Jack Warner and their two children, Isabella and Georgy. Leah remained at Hilton Head until after the death of her husband and son. By that time her daughter Isabella was living in Savannah. It was then that her son, Samuel Ruth traveled from Pennsylvania, and moved her to his home.

              Leah lived to be ninety-seven years old, and recounted the brutality of slavery, to her grandchildren. She spoke of the whippings by the overseer, and the hard work. She also spoke fondly of her children, and husband, who she referred to as Mr. Warner. There were stories of her life in Guinea, with her father, who she described as a King. She stated that she and the other children were kidnapped when they were panning gold at the River. This was a task that only the Royal children were given, and one that required great skill. The Gold may have been what the Kidnappers were seeking, and selling the children was an after thought. The guards who wanted control of the Gold may have set them up. Leah took the voyage away from her family forever, and into a life of slavery.  

              During slavery, my Baxter ancestors were owned by a man named Robert Baxter. He owned many slaves, and appears to one of the large Plantation owners in Orangeburg County South Carolina. Robert Baxter owned a Cotton Plantation, which was a high country crop. I do not know if they or their ancestors, cultivated rice or cotton. Many of the slaves in the area of the Ogeechie River were experienced in Cultivating rice. By the mid eighteenth century, rice culture, slavery, malaria and yellow fever were an integral part of life in South Carolina.

              One of my favorite foods is Okra, fried with corn and tomatoes, sometimes a piece of bacon, or shrimp is used to spice it up. I recently learned that the Okra plant was a staple for slaves in South Carolina, and often boiled to make a tea or coffee substitute. Slave women also used okra to achieve abortions by using the slimy pods to lubricate the uterine passage.  I also use okra in gumbo, to the chagrin of some family members.

              A large plantation was not just cotton fields and a mansion, but many buildings. The smokehouse where meat was preserved, the henhouse where poultry was raised, stables where horses were tended, the barn where dairy cows and work animals were housed, and sheds and silos for tools, grain, and other farm necessities. In workshops scattered near the barnyard, slave artisans might craft barrels, horseshoes, furniture, and cloth for use on the plantation. Gardens were cultivated to supply herbs and vegetables.   More commonly, large plantations included slave infirmaries and nursery facilities where older slave women tended the children of women who worked in the fields. As a safety precaution, almost all plantations had kitchen structures separate from the "big house," the main mansion that housed the planter family.

  The name Geechie probably comes from the Ogeechie River, which runs through Columbia South Carolina and Savannah Georgia.

              “Descendants of the slaves that worked in South Carolina's rice plantations (many along the Ogeechie River); the Gullah people are a distinctive group of African Americans that live in the Coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. They speak an English based Creole language that retains many elements of African language and culture. At least 100,000 people continue to speak Gullah today.

              Through many generations, the Gullah (Geechee) people have held fast to their African cultural heritage more so than any other African-American group. This is due to their largely isolated community life as slaves. Seclusion between the Gullah slaves and their masters was promoted because of the highly contagious tropical diseases that existed in the slave community. A culmination of language, rituals, customs, music, and crafts from various African tribes is the foundation upon which the Gullah people thrive today. Although they are no longer an isolated group, they continue to view themselves as a divergent community. ”[1]

              The Plantation System in North and South America started in Brazil in the 1500’s, under the Portuguese.  They set up sugar plantations first using Indian labor, and then enslaved Africans. The Plantation System started in America in the 1700’s.  Under the Plantation System Europe’s’ Landless Peasants became Landed Gentry in the Americas’.  They used Native Lands, African Labor, and religion to set up a Hierarchy based on race.  In South Carolina, the White Planter Class became an aristocracy that controlled social and political life. At the bottom of the society were the slaves, who were distinguished by their color and identify as property.

              “South Carolina is about the same size as Sierra Leone and has a roughly similar geography and climate. There is the "Low Country" which consists of the Sea Islands, the swampy southern coastline, and a wide and fertile arc of coastal plain stretching up to a hundred miles in the interior. Beyond that is the "Upcountry," a region of rolling hills rising gradually to mountains three thousand feet high in the far northwest. Much of the state is humid and semitropical with long, hot summers, mild winters, and abundant rainfall reaching seventy inches in some areas. Three-fifths of the state is covered in forest, and a series of rivers flows down in Parallel lines to the Atlantic Coast."^[2]

              The main crops in Colonial South Carolina were Rice, Indigo, and Cotton.  Slaves cleared the snake and alligator infested swamps, and built the plantations from the ground up. Yet, they were not to build grand houses for themselves, instead their quarters were little more than out houses. A place to rest for a few hours before it was time to plant, cultivate, or pick the crop. There was no minimum age for the slaves in the field, only a height requirement. As soon as they were, tall enough the children were sent into the fields.

              The color indigo, often associated with political power or religious ritual, has held a significant place in many world civilizations for thousands of years.[3] In the excavation of Thebes, an indigo garment dating from around 2500 B.C. was found; furthermore, the Hindu god Krishna is most often depicted in blue.[4]  Europeans favored the indigo grown by slaves, cultivated and processed in South Carolina.

              "Indigo is of several sorts. What we have gone mostly upon is the sort generally cultivated in the Sugar Islands, which requires a high loose soil, tolerably rich, and is an annual plant; but the wild sort, which is common in this country, is much more hardy and luxuriant, and is perennial. Its stalk dies every year, but it shoots up again next spring. The indigo made from it is of as good a quality as the other, and it will grow on very indifferent land, provided it be dry and loose.

              "An acre of good land may produce about eighty pounds weight of good indigo, and one slave may manage two acres and upwards, and raise provisions besides, and have all the winter months to saw lumber and be otherwise employed in.  However, as much of the land hitherto used for indigo is improper, I am persuaded that not above thirty pounds weight of good indigo per acre can be expected from the land at present cultivated. Perhaps we are not conversant enough in this commodity, either in the culture of the plant or in the method of managing or manufacturing it, to write with certainty.

              "But I cannot leave this subject without observing how conveniently and profitably, as to the charge of labour, both indigo and rice may be managed by the same persons [emphasis added]; for the labour attending indigo being over in the summer months, those who were employed in it may afterward manufacture rice in the ensuing part of the year, when it becomes most laborious; and after doing all this they will have some time to spare for sawing lumber, and making hogshead and other staves to supply the Sugar Colonies." [5]

               The slaves brought from the West Coast of Africa brought their techniques to the rice fields. Their labor and expertise made rice take hold as a primary and lucrative source of income in the last decade of the seventeenth century.  The first rice seeds used in rice farming may have been imported directly from the Island of Madagascar in 1685.  By 1750, some of the largest slave owners in the South cultivated rice in the coastal regions of the Carolina s in ways similar to how it was grown by Africans.

              "They reckon thirty slaves a proper number for a rice plantation, and to be tended with one overseer. These in favourable seasons and on good land will produce a surprising quantity of rice; but that I may not be blamed by those who being induced to come here upon such favourable accounts and may not reap so great a harvest; and that I may not mislead any person whatever, I choose rather to mention the common computation throughout the province, Communibus Annis; which is, that each good working hand employed in a rice plantation makes four barrels and a half of rice, each barrel weighing five hundred pounds weight, neat; besides a sufficient quantity of provisions of all kinds, for the slaves, horses, cattle, and poultry of the plantation, for the ensuing year.”

  
  

   

  
  

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  [1] Charleston Black Heritage – Gullah Geechie Culture, http://www.charlestonblackheritage.com/gullah.html, June 10, 2009

  [2] Littlefield, Daniel C., Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina, University of Illinois Press: 1991

  [3]      Gösta Sandberg, Indigo Textiles: Technique and History (London: A & C Black, 1989), 14.

  [4]  Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America. A Socioeconomic History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1973), 176

  [5] -Glen, James, "A Description of South Carolina,"
  in Chapman J. Milling (ed.), Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston (South Carolina Sesquicentennial Series, No. I [Columbia, S.C.: 1951])

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  • Gullah
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