Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields: Letters of the Heyward Family, 1862-1871

Introduction

Peter A. Coclanis

The Heyward family is virtually synonymous with the history of South Carolina. The first of the Heywards arrived in South Carolina shortly after permanent settlement by Europeans and Africans—perhaps as early as 1672 but certainly by 1684—and members of the family have played prominent roles in South Carolina ever since. The family can claim among its many notables a signer of the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Heyward Jr.), the owner of the most slaves in the history of the American South (Nathaniel Heyward, 1766–1851), a beloved governor of South Carolina (Duncan Clinch Heyward), and a most distinguished novelist/playwright (DuBose Heyward). Like all great families, it included other less well-known but nonetheless fascinating members as well, including Edward Barnwell Heyward, whose papers form the basis of this book.¹

Although no European-style aristocracy ever existed in British North America, the Heyward family came close for a century and a half. Along with a small number of other large slaveholding families in the South, the Heywards not only came to possess the kind of wealth associated with aristocracy but also the kind of social, cultural, and political power needed to support and legitimate the same.² Edward Barnwell (Barney) Heyward was not a major figure in the Heyward line, but his short, sad life—lived in difficult times—is most revealing and helps to explain both the bases and the limits of the Heywards' claims to aristocracy. That such claims were intimately connected to plantation agriculture and racial slavery, the linchpins of South Carolina for much of its history, affords an opportunity to say something about these matters as well. In so doing, one can square the circle, as it were, and link the life of Edward Barnwell Heyward, indeed, the saga of the Heyward family, to a larger social narrative that affected not merely South Carolina—not merely the South for that matter—but the nation as a whole.

Edward Barnwell (Barney) Heyward was born on May 4, 1826, on the Rose Hill plantation in the Beaufort District of South Carolina. Barney's claims to aristocratic status in the Palmetto State were impeccable, for both of his parents—Charles Heyward (1802–1866) and Emma Barnwell Heyward (1808–1835)—came from elite, lowcountry families that had played powerful roles in South Carolina for generations. Charles Heyward—the son of the aforementioned Nathaniel Heyward, who owned somewhere in the vicinity of two thousand slaves at the time of his death in 1851—was born in Charleston and spent several years at Princeton (without graduating) before returning to South Carolina to help manage his father's vast plantation empire. Upon his return he took up residence at Rose Hill plantation on the Combahee River, which abutted his father's home plantation, the Bluff. Not long afterward, Charles, at the age of twenty-one, married Emma Barnwell, and the marriage produced three sons and four daughters (one daughter died in infancy) before Emma herself died prematurely in 1835 at the age of twenty-nine. After Emma's death, Charles was a widower for the remainder of his life.³

Charles, like his own father—and indeed, his grandfather Daniel Heyward (1720–1777)—was a serious and committed rice planter who devoted his entire working life to the Heyward family's agricultural operations. And like his father and grandfather, he proved quite successful in the business, continuing to produce rice profitably throughout the entire antebellum period, even after the rice industry in the lowcountry had begun, first, to stagnate, then to decline. Upon his father's death in 1851, Charles inherited four rice plantations on the Combahee River: Rose Hill, an adjacent tract known as Pleasant Hill, and two other units, Lewisburg and Amsterdam, located slightly downriver. It took a large labor force to operate these rice plantations, and at the time of the Civil War, Charles owned around five hundred slaves, which made him one of the largest rice planters and largest slaveholders in the entire South.⁴

Rice and slaves provided the economic platform upon which the Heyward fortune was built and enlarged from the 1740s to the 1860s; rice and freedpeople continued to sustain the family at least in part until Duncan Clinch Heyward, Barney's son, planted his last crop on the Combahee in 1913.⁵ The Heyward family's inextricable ties to rice and slaves were hardly unique in the lowcountry, for similar links bound other elite, lowcountry families as well. Indeed it would not be overstating things to say that rice and slaves created not just Heyward wealth but also that of the lowcountry itself, and once this platform was destroyed, the region, bluntly put, was left without an economic raison d'etre, condemning the inhabitants therein to generations of poverty—whether genteel or abysmal—and despair.

Both rice and slaves arrived in South Carolina in the late seventeenth century—permanent settlement of the colony began in 1670—and a good bit of scholarly effort and printer's ink have been spent trying to date the first appearance of each in the area. Such exercises are by no means unimportant. For some purposes it is useful to know just how early slaves arrived in South Carolina and just how soon the institution became prevalent in the colony. Similarly, knowing when rice arrived and under whose auspices—European or African—can help answer a range of questions relating to patterns of entrepreneurship, early strategies of economic development, technology transfer, markets for information, and the like. Such questions are not of great moment here, though, for by the early 1740s, when Daniel Heyward began planting rice on a large tract of land on Hazzard's Creek in Saint Helena's Parish, both racial slavery and rice cultivation in South Carolina were deeply entrenched.⁶

Rice cultivation was good to Daniel Heyward, if not to his labor force, and he soon became extremely successful. In 1771 the South-Carolina Gazette referred to him as the greatest Planter in this Province, which he may well have been. That he owned about one thousand slaves at the time of his death in 1777 certainly supports this point. Nonetheless however impressive Daniel Heyward's record of success as a planter—and from a purely economic perspective it was impressive indeed—his record seemed rather modest in comparison to that achieved by his son Nathaniel, who, as suggested above, became fabulously successful as a rice planter and the largest slaveholder in the history of the South. Building from a relatively modest inheritance, Nathaniel over time increased his holdings to almost unimaginable levels. In 1849, two years before his death, data compiled for the federal census indicate that he owned thirty-five thousand acres of land in the lowcountry, including enough rice land on his twenty-odd plantations (mainly in the Colleton and Beaufort districts) to produce almost 17 million pounds of rough rice in that year. Upon his death in 1851, his total estate, slaves included, was valued at just over $2 million, which figure is equivalent to an estate of over $818 million today.⁷ And while Nathaniel Heyward, like his father and like his son and, indeed, like his grandson (this book's protagonist, Barney), had diverse sources of income and wealth, the vast preponderance of both came from rice and slaves, the twin trajectories of which largely determined the economic fates of these Heywards.

Colonel Daniel Heyward (1720–1777). Print Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina

Although rice is often viewed as a minor foodstuff in the West, it is arguably the world's greatest cereal grain. Only wheat and maize have credible counterclaims. Two species of rice were successfully domesticated over time: Oryza sativa, which was first domesticated seven thousand to ten thousand years ago in southern Asia, southeastern Asia, and southern China and Oryza glaberrima, which was first domesticated two or three thousand years ago in West Africa two or three thousand years ago. Of the two species, O. sativa, or Asian rice, has always been dominant, having spread—or, more properly, been spread—across vast reaches of Eurasia and Africa by the end of the first millennium C.E. Both species arrived in the Western Hemisphere along with Europeans and Africans as part of the so-called Columbian exchange of plants, animals, and germs that commenced in the last decade of the fifteenth century. O. sativa quickly became the most important by far in commercial terms in the Western Hemisphere, although small amounts of O. glaberrima were also grown for home consumption by some African and African American populations in the Western Hemisphere at various points in time. If rice accompanied early European and African migrants to the Western Hemisphere, the cereal did not become an important market staple anywhere in the Americas until the South Carolina rice complex was developed in the early eighteenth century. Small quantities of rice were grown much earlier in Brazil, around the Caribbean basin, and even in Virginia, but during this period the cereal was grown in these areas largely for home consumption rather than as a market crop. Both Europeans and Africans likely grew small quantities of rice in South Carolina from the time of initial settlement, but it was not until the 1710s or 1720s that sufficient stocks of labor, capital, entrepreneurship, and local knowledge were in place and infrastructure and marketing networks sufficiently developed to support and sustain significant commercial production.⁸

As suggested earlier, scholars in recent years have vigorously debated whether Europeans or Africans were primarily responsible for originating rice cultivation in early South Carolina. Suffice it to say here that although there were several plausible transmission routes from the Old World to the New, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Africans were likely the prime movers in the early days. Rice was commonly grown in several parts of West Africa whence slaves were drawn, and there is convincing evidence that some African risicultural technology was transferred across the Atlantic. That said, it is important to distinguish between the origins of rice cultivation and the creation of a rice industry. Regardless of which group first grew rice in South Carolina, it is beyond all doubt that Europeans and European Americans were primarily responsible for creating the rice industry (and attendant export complex) in the colony.⁹

As the scholarly battle mentioned above would imply, there is not a lot of extant documentation regarding early rice-production techniques or even production sites in South Carolina. For example, although it is likely that some wet or swamp rice was grown from early on, it is probable that for a time at least most of the rice grown in the colony was produced without irrigation on relatively high ground. To say that rice was being grown on high ground in South Carolina is not to suggest that it was produced in the interior, much less in the up-country. Researchers have recently demonstrated that surprising quantities of rice were grown in such areas at later points in South Carolina history, especially after the Civil War, and there is no doubt that rice production was always concentrated in the lowcountry. Here, too, though, one must qualify things a bit, for within the lowcountry, rice production came to be distributed quite unevenly. Such unevenness was already apparent by the 1720s when a discrete rice industry began to develop.¹⁰

The establishment of a rice industry in South Carolina entailed, almost by definition, a greater concern for system, method, and productive efficiency, factors that in the case of rice meant a virtually universal shift to irrigated cultivation. Irrigation facilities were quite rudimentary during the early days of the industry, with cultivation centering around inland freshwater swamps in the lowcountry, where water could readily be impounded to be drawn on and off of fields as needed. Rice cultivation in South Carolina remained centered in such inland swamp areas of the lowcountry for a half century or so. During the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the locus of production shifted again, this time from inland freshwater swamps to drained swamps located on, or adjacent to particular stretches of the major tidal rivers in the lowcountry. Once established, this tidal zone remained the center of rice cultivation in South Carolina until commercial production died out in the state in the early twentieth century. The tidal rice zone of South Carolina was quite delimited both in geographical and hydrological terms. First of all, prospective planters of rice had to find areas along the lowcountry's rivers and creeks where tidal action was sufficiently strong to allow water systematically to be drawn on and off diked rice fields once established adjacent to such rivers and creeks. Speaking broadly, under tidal-irrigation schemes, water could be harnessed in more predictable ways, leading to more sophisticated, routinized, and calibrated flooding and draining of fields, which at once created better growing conditions for rice and, when done properly, reduced the need for hoeing and weeding. Fair enough, then, but prospective tidal planters faced a second problem as well, that being to find areas where daily tidal action was sufficiently strong to make such schemes work without getting too close to estuaries or the coast where the water flooding the fields would be too brackish or salty for rice. Over time, such places were in fact found, and tidal cultivation became centered along narrow bands stretching from about ten miles inland to twenty miles inland on the five principal tidal rivers of the lowcountry: from north to south, the Santee, the Cooper, the Ashley, the Combahee, and the Savannah. Despite a modest resurgence of inland freshwater swamp production in parts of the lowcountry in the late antebellum period, production remained centered in the tidal zone. Indeed, as rice cultivation spread from South Carolina to other parts of the Southeast, tidal technology won out as well, and production became centered on similar bands of tidal rivers in North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, stretching north to south from Cape Fear River in southeastern North Carolina to Saint Johns River in northeastern Florida.¹¹

Rice cultivation in the lowcountry proved extremely arduous, particularly under wet conditions in the area's inland and tidal swamps. Of the major staples produced in the American South, only sugar was more physically demanding on workers, and, in the case of rice, arduous labor demands were compounded by the highly morbid- and mortal-disease environment wherein said demands were levied. To be more specific, once Europeans and Africans established the rice complex in the lowcountry, mosquito-borne diseases of one type or another—various strains of malaria, most notably—quickly became endemic in the area, to the great detriment of human health and yet-another manifestation of the Columbian exchange, then, however lamentable. In light of the above considerations—burdensome work in unhealthy conditions—it is not surprising that it proved difficult for prospective growers to attract, induce, or incent sufficient stocks of free labor to meet their needs. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which related to the facts that many West Africans had had previous experience in risiculture and that Africans and African Americans possessed greater degrees of inherited and acquired immunities to certain mosquito-borne diseases than did whites, the South Carolina rice industry quickly became dominated by black labor—whether enslaved or, in a titular sense, free—and remained so until the end of commercial production in the Palmetto State in the early twentieth century. Indeed, in many ways the swamplands were more like a negro country, the white presence therein marginal and/or seasonal for the better part of two hundred years.¹²

To say that the white presence in the rice swamps was marginal and/or seasonal is not to suggest that the role of whites in the industry was insignificant. For it was anything but. If whites, generally speaking, found it both rational and expedient to minimize their time in the rice fields, particularly during the sickly summer months, they nonetheless found means to ensure that a reasonable amount of work would be accomplished even in their absence, that such work would be reasonably efficient, and that that their own monitoring and supervisory costs would be reasonably low. Critical to this labor argument was the development of the task system of labor organization, according to which system a slave was responsible for a set amount of work per day rather than being required to labor a set number of hours (sunup to sundown). Indeed, according to scholars of slavery, the establishment or, better yet, enshrinement of the task system in the lowcountry rice industry became one of the industry's most salient features. Here, again a controversy exists regarding matters of origin, in which controversy this writer is a principal. Whether inaugurated by innovative, protoscientific agricultural management or the result of bargaining concessions forced upon a cowed, drastically outnumbered white minority by empowered, if enslaved African and African American laborers matters little in a functional sense for, explain the system as one will, at the end of the day management achieved an outcome it could live with, both figuratively and literally.¹³

Toiling in the rice fields of the South Carolina lowcountry under any conceivable system was bound to be taxing for a variety of reasons, ranging from cultivation requirements to climate to disease environment. Wet-rice cultivation has long been known for heavy-labor demands the world over. Not for nothing do the Italians refer to the grain as il riso amaro, the bitter rice.¹⁴ In this same regard note the thematic similarities in the following three songs on rice planting: one originating in a slave song from the lowcountry of South Carolina, an old song from the Philippines, and a traditional one from Vietnam, respectively:

Come listen, all you darkies, come listen to my song,

It am about ole Massa, who use me bery wrong;

In de cole, frosty mornin', it an't so bery nice,

Wid de water to de middle to hoe among de rice.

Planting rice is never fun;

Bent from morn till set of sun;

Cannot stand and cannot sit;

Cannot rest for a little bit.

Oh, my back is like to break,

Oh, my bones with dampness ache,

And my legs are numb and set

From the soaking in the wet.

In the heat of mid-day, I plough my field

My sweat falls drop by drop like rain on the ploughed earth

Oh, you who hold a rice-bowl in your hands

Remember how much burning bitterness there is

In each tender and fragrant grain in your mouth

In the case of the lowcountry, rice cultivation meant a yearlong work calendar, some parts of which were more grueling than others but no parts of which would be mistaken for rural gamboling. Winter meant the building and rebuilding of irrigation works—the mudwork so dreaded by the labor force—and the preparation of fields. Spring meant more field preparation, planting (and often transplanting) of the crop, while summer meant intervals of flooding and draining, weeding and hoeing, and, of course, emergency repairs of irrigation works (levees, ditches, culverts, floodgates, and the like) mandated by weather events such as storms and freshets. Fall meant it was harvest time, which, because of weather conditions and/or the chance of overripening, often meant bouts of furious, nearly nonstop activity for days at time. Then, after milling activities of one type or another came preparation of the crop for the market and getting the crop to a Charleston factor's wharf. Then, the annual cycle would begin all over again.¹⁵

As one can see, rice work was arduous, and, of course, many, if not most, laborers were involved to some degree at least in other economic activities as well, particularly in the winter. Rice work in the lowcountry was rendered more rigorous still by climatic and epidemiological factors. According to the most widely accepted climatic-classification scheme—the so-called Köppen scheme—the South Carolina lowcountry falls into the humid subtropical climatic subcategory of the humid, mild-winter, temperate climatic category. The subtropical subcategory is broken down even further, and the lowcountry falls into a subdivision reserved for humid subtropical areas without distinct dry and rainy seasons. To cut to the chase, the principal climatic characteristics of areas such as the lowcountry are hot, humid summers, abundant precipitation throughout the year but especially in the hotter months, and the relatively frequent occurrence of violent weather events such as hurricanes.¹⁶

Climate weighed even more heavily on those who lived and worked in the oozy microclimates of the lowcountry's rice swamps, particularly those that often labored wid de water to de middle. In such microclimates, replete as they were with disease vectors of one type or another, most notably, mosquitoes, maladies such as malaria took huge tolls, both in lives lost and in lives impaired or even ruined through debilitation. In brief this was the Carolina rice country, the epicenter of the American industry for well over 150 years.

Although the principal concern in the current volume is with large-volume rice planters such as the Heywards, it is important to keep in mind two facts overlooked by students of the lowcountry rice industry. First, as suggested earlier, rice production was distributed quite unevenly in the region. In 1859, for example, 4,126 farms of three acres or more were in the lowcountry; on only about 39 percent (1,608) of these farms was any rice grown at all. Secondly, among those where rice was grown, many were small operations, and many others, although large enough to be classified as plantations according to standard classification schemes, were not huge. Only a small number were owned and operated by grandees, such as the Heywards, who produced large quantities of rice, largely for extraregional markets, on large units of production, staffed by large numbers of laborers working in highly specialized tasks. To be sure, such large-scale producers exercised an outsized influence on the lowcountry rice industry, but in quantitative terms they constituted a distinct minority of growers.¹⁷

South Carolina was the center of rice production in North America for roughly two hundred years, that is to say, from the late seventeenth century until the 1880s when Louisiana surpassed the Palmetto State as a producing area. Although systematic data is lacking on total rice output in the colonial period or during the early national period for that matter (figures on U.S. rice output were not compiled for the U.S. census until 1839), reliable figures are available, courtesy of the British Customs Office, for rice exports on an annual basis from as early as 1698. The export figures of the customs office can give a good sense of the growth of overall rice output. Assuming this correlation, rice output in Carolina—South Carolina and North Carolina were included under one rubric by the customs office—grew rapidly over the course of the eighteenth century; exports grew from an average of 268,602 pounds annually between 1698 and 1702 to over 30 million pounds annually between 1738 and 1742 and over 66 million pounds annually on the eve of the American Revolution, from 1768 to 1772. Note that although the rice complex in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina began to register by the middle of the eighteenth century, rice exports from North Carolina never constituted more than a small share of total rice exports from Carolina.¹⁸

The vast majority of the rice grown in North America in the eighteenth century came from Carolina and neighboring Georgia. Small quantities of rice were also grown in Louisiana and Florida, but these areas were small potatoes, so to speak, in comparison to Carolina and Georgia. The dominance of these two producing areas continued in the early national period and in the antebellum era, even with the expansion of the industry. Census data for 1839, 1849, and 1859 reveal that U.S. rice production grew substantially over the course of this period: About 81 million pounds (clean rice) were produced in the United States in 1839, about 144 million pounds in 1849, and about 187 million pounds in 1859. South Carolina and Georgia combined accounted for over 90 percent of total U.S. rice production in each of these years, with South Carolina alone accounting for 75 percent in 1839, 74.3 percent in 1849, and 63.6 percent in 1859.¹⁹

If total rice output in the United States increased a great deal in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, rice exports did not. Indeed it is impossible to understand the history of the American rice industry without being cognizant of the fact that U.S. rice exports were basically stagnant between about 1800 and the Civil War. Moreover, if one takes a closer look at U.S. rice-export patterns during this sixty-year period, one finds that U.S. exporters were becoming increasingly marginalized in the biggest and best markets for rice in the West, namely, those in northern Europe.²⁰ Although few scholars fully appreciate this point even today, it is well worth elaborating upon, for once such appreciation is gained, one gets an entirely new sense of the crisis in the south Atlantic rice industry in the late antebellum period, the true impact of the Civil War on this industry, and, in the aftermath of war, the forces shaping Barney Heyward's world.

The first thing one needs to appreciate in this regard is the market for all of that rice produced in the South Carolina lowcountry and other parts of North America. Where was such rice destined? For what purposes? There are long answers, which are addressed at length by other writers, and there are short answers, which I pursue here. In the eighteenth century, a very high proportion of the rice produced in the lowcountry (and other parts of North America) was exported, particularly to northern Europe, to be used as a cheap and versatile source of complex carbohydrates—bulk calories, in other words—that could complement, supplement, or, in some cases, substitute for more familiar and desirable small grains. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, market conditions changed in such a way as to render the eighteenth-century pattern increasingly untrue.²¹

Until rice from North America began to appear in European markets at the end of the seventeenth century, continental demand for rice was met mainly by rice growers in the northern Italian states of Lombardy and Piedmont. By the middle of the eighteenth century, though, North American rice, almost all of which came from South Carolina, had supplanted Italian rice in the leading markets in northern Europe. Rice from South Carolina and neighboring Georgia dominated these markets for the rest of the century, and rice from this region was exported in smaller quantities to other places as well, southern Europe, the West Indies, and northeastern ports such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, most notably. The dominance of North American rice in European markets began to face challenges from the 1790s on, however. In that decade Brazil captured the Portuguese market, and in the first decades of the nineteenth century rice from South Asia and, slightly later, Southeast Asia began to make inroads in the much more important markets in northern Europe. Interestingly, or, better yet, ironically (or even dialectically), the same forces that gave rise to the rice-export complex along the southeast coast of the United States—the expansion and increasing integration of world markets—were now responsible for the growing competitive threat emanating from Asia. For centuries before then, of course, European merchant capital, working with merchants and commercial middlemen of various sorts in Asia had been engaged in a vigorous long-distance, transoceanic trade, but it was only in the early nineteenth century that rice began to figure prominently in the same. Once it did, though, the North American rice industry immediately faced a serious competitive threat, for rice from both South Asia and Southeast Asia was much cheaper than American rice, and in the northern European rice market, generally speaking, buyers sought low prices more than anything else. Carolina rice was widely considered to be of high quality, but given the principal uses to which the cereal was put—feeding workers, soldiers, sailors, and the poor (in addition to swine), as a brewing ingredient, and as a thickening agent in a variety of industries—price trumped quality most every time. And so, between about 1800 or 1810 and the coming of the American Civil War, Asian rice producers—first from Bengal, then from Java, and by the 1850s from Lower Burma—increasingly took market share in northern Europe from South Carolina and Georgia growers.²² Over the course of this half-century period, demand for rice in Europe grew significantly, with increases in population and income, as well as urbanization and industrialization all playing roles. Despite this growing demand, U.S. rice exports to Europe were far lower in the 1850s than they had been in the 1790s. Indeed, total U.S. rice exports in the 1850s were lower than they had been in the 1790s, another powerful indication that American rice was becoming less and less competitive as Asian rice penetrated the West. More and more, American rice exports were shipped instead to the West Indies, particularly to the late-developing Spanish sugar and slave colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico.²³

The basic scenario outlined above continued in intensified form in the decades after 1860. The period between roughly 1860 or 1870 and World War I is often seen as the apogee of European imperial penetration in South and Southeast Asia, and one manifestation of such penetration was the huge flow of primary commodities (including rice) from this part of Asia to the West. This flow was facilitated by a variety of technological innovations in transportation and communications—the advent of steam shipping, the opening of the Suez Canal, and the laying of the transmarine underwater cable between Europe and Asia, most notably—which, in cutting transport and communications costs, extended the comparative advantage of Asian rice over rice produced in the West. Indeed, in the case of the United States, the gradual antebellum drop-off in rice exports was just the beginning: During the Civil War and for the entire half century thereafter, the United States not only failed as a rice exporter but itself became a significant importer of Asian rice.²⁴

This, then, was the broad market context within which Barney Heyward had to operate when he began his rice-planting operations in 1866. The loss of comparative advantage, declining export markets, and falling profits. Regarding the last of these considerations, the profit picture, according to Dale E. Swan's econometric study, the average rate of return for South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations and farms in 1859 was not positive at all but an astounding -28.3 percent. A far cry, certainly, from the bonanza years of the pre-Revolutionary era when net rates of return on investment of 25 percent were pretty much standard for South Carolina and Georgia planters. To be sure, large planters such as the Heywards may still have been able to operate profitably in the 1850s, but on the eve of the Civil War, the future did not look good for the lowcountry rice industry. And then the war came.²⁵

NOTES

1. On the Heyward family, see James B. Heyward, Heyward Family (n.p.: privately printed, 1931?); James B. Heyward, comp., The Heyward Family of South Carolina, South Carolina Historical Magazine 59 (July 1958): 143–58 and 59 (October 1958): 206–23; Peter A. Coclanis, introduction, in Duncan Clinch Heyward, Seed from Madagascar, Southern Classics Series (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), ix–l. Note that Seed from Madagascar was originally published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1937.

2. See Coclanis, introduction, esp. ix–xxii. On the South Carolina aristocracy, see Chalmers G. Davidson, The Last Foray: The South Carolina Planters of 1860: A Sociological Study (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 1–17 and passim; William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), esp. appendixes C and D, 439–84. On the concept of aristocracy, see, for example, Jonathan Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). On aristocracies and elites more generally, see T. B. Bottomore, Elites and Society, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1993).

3. Coclanis, introduction, xxiii–xxv.

4. Heyward, Seed from Madagascar, 90–106; Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 476. Suzanne Cameron Linder, Historical Atlas of the Rice Plantations of the ACE River Basin—1860 (Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History for the Archives and History Foundation, 1995), 7–14, 315–19, 519–27.

5. See Coclanis, introduction.

6. On the establishment of an economy based on rice and slaves in South Carolina, see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974); Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. 48–110; Phillip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1998); S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

7. Coclanis, introduction, xxiii. Using the calculation for nominal GDP per capita, generally used to compare the fortunes of the rich, the $2 million in 1851 was in 2008 equivalent to $838.55 million; see Six Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present, Measuring Worth, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/.

8. See, for example, Peter A. Coclanis, Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformations It Wrought, American Historical Review 98 (October 1993): 1050–78; Peter A. Coclanis, Rice, Encyclopedia of World Trade Since 1450, 2 vols., ed. John J. McCusker (Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan, 2006), 2:628–32; Peter A. Coclanis, Rice, The South Carolina Encyclopedia, ed. Walter B. Edgar (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 791–94; Peter A. Coclanis, ReOrienting Atlantic History: The Global Dimensions of the ‘Western’ Rice Trade, in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2006), 111–27.

9. See Coclanis, Rice, South Carolina Encyclopedia, 792. Also see my review of Judith A. Carney's book, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), in Journal of Economic History 62 (March 2002): 247–48; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, 53–125 esp.; David Eltis, Philip D. Morgan, and David Richardson, Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas, American Historical Review 112 (December 2007): 1329–58.

10. See Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (1933; Gloucester, Mass.: Smith, 1958), 1:279–80; Coclanis, Rice, South Carolina Encyclopedia, 792–93; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, 53–125. On rice production in the interior of South Carolina (and other inland areas in the South Atlantic states), see Peter A. Coclanis and John C. Marlow, Inland Rice Production in the South Atlantic States: A Picture in Black and White, Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 197–212.

11. See note 10. See also Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 227–76; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 155–59 esp.

12. See Wood, Black Majority, 35–91; Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 38–47; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 147–59; Coclanis, How the Low Country Was Taken to Task: Slave-Labor Organization in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia, in Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, ed. Robert Louis Paquette and Louis Ferleger (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 59–78; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, 53–125; qtd. in Wood, Black Majority, 132.

13. Coclanis, How the Low Country Was Taken to Task. Also see Philip D. Morgan, Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700 to 1880, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 39 (October 1982): 563–99; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, 81–89 esp.

14. On this point, see Coclanis, Distant Thunder.

15. See Gray, History of Agriculture, 2:721–31; Morgan, Work and Culture; Mart A. Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 98–114; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 147–59.

16. Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 27–47.

17. Coclanis, Rice, South Carolina Encyclopedia, 792–93. See also Dale Evans Swan, The Structure and Profitability of the Antebellum Rice Industry 1859 (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 15.

18. Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 82–83.

19. Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 133–43; Coclanis, Distant Thunder; Coclanis, Rice, in Encyclopedia of World Trade, 2:628–32; Coclanis, Rice, in South Carolina Encyclopedia, 792–93.

20. Ibid.

21. Coclanis, Distant Thunder; Coclanis, Rice, in Encyclopedia of World Trade, 2:628–32.

22. Ibid. Also see Coclanis, The Poetics of American Agriculture: The U.S. Rice Industry in International Perspective, Agricultural History 69 (Spring 1995): 140–62' Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 133–43.

23. Coclanis, Distant Thunder, 1062–78; Coclanis, Southeast Asia's Incorporation into the World Rice Market: A Revisionist View, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 24 (September 1993): 251–67.

24. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream, 133–43, esp. table 4.24. Also see Swan, The Structure and Profitability of the Antebellum Rice Industry 1859, preface, 75–84.

1862

From R[obert] E. Lee to [Catherine Maria] Tattie [Clinch]

Savannah, [Georgia,] 19 Feb. 1862

My dear Miss Tattie, I have no way of thanking you for the beautiful blanket you have sent me. I stand in need of nothing to remind me of you & if it will bring half the warmth & lightness to my tent which the recollection of you gives, I will want nothing else. Very truly yours, R. E. Lee.

From E[dward] B. [Barnwell Barney] Heyward to [Charles Heyward*]

Greenville, S.C. 27th Octob[e]r 1862

My dear Father, [Maria] Henrietta [Magruder Heyward] wrote last home and I am not sure what account she gave of Joseph's [Manigault Heyward] condition. I am quite sure that I try to look on the best side of the case but for the last two or three days I have been made very anxious.

The Doctor is beginning to fear he cannot recover tho' he has'nt told me so exactly. He now has very decidedly dropsy and in spite of all the remedies it continues & the strength is failing. His liver is as healthy as can be but the swelling of the stomach continues the same and today I begin to feel very miserable about him. His appetite is good but he can hardly now sit up in bed and he evidently gets weaker every day. He is emaciated to the last degree and I am very much afraid Dr. [Charles Pinckney] Woodruff was right when he said he did not have vitality enough to recover. It is a sad sight indeed to see so much beauty & manhood gradually decaying before our eyes, but disease seems to have left him to die from exhaustion. For the last four days he has continual pains in the stomach such as he had at first after coming up here and we are obliged to give him morphine which makes everything quiet for a while, but all the time he gets weaker and weaker and I am afraid will soon loose his appetite & then he is gone.

I will write every day for a while & give you accounts of his condition.

I think him in a worse condition today than I have seen him ever before. With more strength it seems as if he could be easily cured but I think his blood is like water and I am very much afraid of the brain now in a day or two. He is perfectly himself at present but terribly nervous and dejected. I shall ask the Dr. more particularly about the case tomorrow & write home. Hoping you are well I remain Yr affec Son, E. B. Heyward.

*Charles Heyward is Edward Barnwell Barney Heyward's father. In November 1861 a large Union fleet and twelve thousand troops captured Beaufort and the islands around Port Royal Sound, just south of Charles Heyward's four plantations on the Combahee River. Slaves from the surrounding area soon fled to safety and relative freedom behind Union lines. In March 1862 fifteen of Charles Heyward's slaves, including three women and a child, ran away. In June, Charles Heyward moved with approximately 150 slaves to his son's plantation, Goodwill, in Richland District in the center of the state. Initially only a watchman and a few elderly slaves remained on the Combahee plantations.

From Barney to Tattie

Friday 7th day—31th Oct. [18]62

My own darling, Your absence has been a sore trial to me this even'g, tho' I have enjoyed your companionship today so sweetly that I am more patient at loosing you this eveng after tea.

I have spent my little half hour with my Cousin, a very dear friend of mine, & Izards [Walter Izard Heyward's] God Father. I wish I could have introduced him to my little comfort. He has a most affectionate heart, and has been so kind to me & my family that I can never forget it. Just such a sad event from the same cause as this loss in yr brother's family gave Cousin Izard an opportunity of showing his love for me at Flatrock many years ago. He has had his trials too and very hard to bear. I did more for his daughter than I dared to tell him of as I found he would not talk of her. Now is'nt there something [more] terrible than death, only think of what affliction disgrace can bring in a family. Poor Cousin I am truly sorry for him but I can do nothing to soothe him.

Your recent loss allows me to remind you that while it seems hard for parents to part with their little loved ones still we must never forget that like all other gifts they come from God alone. He has a right to claim them again and in his mercy he teaches us to feel that he cherishes them as his own for ever. I am sure no one ever looking at a childs face in death has ever doubted its being happy.

And dearest ought not such sad news from home bear some good fruit in our own hearts. As God has seen fit to bring us together thus closely and while our hearts are full of happiness & love for each other let us not forget that it is only by taking up our Saviour's cross lovingly that we can be truly happy & never be separated.

Let us always have Jesus in our home as our constant Companion & friend & let us conform our life to his example and then can we fully enjoy his gifts and if we do come back to the old rocks may it be with increased love for him & not only for ourselves. Love in this world is but the fore shadow of that in eternity, its purity, sincerity & consolations come from God alone and to him should we always pray that our lives linked together here below may be sanctified by his grace.

Hoping to see my darling well tomorrow I say good night with my blessings on your head. Most fondly yrs, Barney.

From [Barney] to [Tattie]

Sat. 8th day Nov. 1st [18]62

Good night my little darling my pen is broken I am sleepy and I can only say I love you.

Sleep my dearest and live to make me happy by your sweet smile. It is a shame I should be so hard worked as I should like [word illegible] time for my little comfort and not be weary with watchings. I want my darling to find me all that delights her and I wish her to be always proud of me.

I love to do my duty. I like you to know when I do it. Sweet blessings on yr innocent head. Ever most true yrs, Veldt.

From [Barney] to [Tattie]

9th day—Sunday morn'g 2 Nov[embe]r [18]62

I am stealing no ones time dearest, to write this morning. Mrs. Heyward is yet abed and I have been by her husband's bedside five times during the past night and have my little half hour to myself and I pinch off just a little piece to say to my Tattie that [I] hope she has risen this Sabbath morng happy & well and also to tell her that she is the sweetest little comfort any man ever won in this world.

Kiss your hands darling and press them with my love on those jewel Eyes before you go down to breakfast and I shall be with you, close by, you all day, and should you go to the Communion table today that—but never mind I leave it to Gods wise & merciful spirit to teach you.

My brother [Joseph Manigault Heyward] is no better—in fact I think him worse today. I cannot do more than leave him for one hour while I go myself to the Sac[ra]m[en]t.

I shall look into your jewel eyes for one minute this even'g in a place where my darling looks sweetest and hold that dear hand where it is most trusting, and my little comfort must interest herself with all around her, and mind & be happy.

I suppose yr Sister Mary is delighted now that I am shut up here. I declare it is too mean, never mind. I shall count the days & crossmark them to be compensated for one of these days. Goodbye precious Tattie believe me yours forever, Veldt.

From Barney to Tattie

Wateree, S.C.* Tuesday 11th inst. [November] 1862

Dearest Tattie, Safe at home once more darling and find all well. Our journey from Greenville was not mark'd with any important events except we came very near missing the connexion at Cola. I wonder how my poor little darling got through all that crowd of horrid people. I really do feel I should have been there to take care of you.

And where are you now, in Savannah; or Augusta? I know who loves you with all his heart, and I know just exactly where he is, and I will tell you, in his sister Lizzie's Chamber at her desk writing on her paper with his own pen to his dearest little comfort. And let me tell you something else that the mail boy leaves in a few minutes and what have I been doing all morning for it is now nearly mid-day. I will tell you. I have been with my Father alone talking over my poor brother's affairs and you have seen enough to know that some very painful subjects have been introduced & I have not left him till I was prepared to tell the widow sister some little delicate matters. And now dearest you know exactly why my letter has'nt yet been written. Darling I am now getting well. I sleep so sweetly and the children talk so funnily, and I feel I am of so much service to all around and I feel so happy in feeling my being loved & esteemed by such a sensitive, noble, girl as my little Tattie and I wont omit my feeling gratified at the esteem of your Mother & your sister Mary.

But darling now that I am at home & feeling happy & sleeping soundly you dont know how cheerful the feeling is that I am loved. I almost feel gay. I am busy as possible or rather shall be so after this is gone to the mail. I am soon going to Charleston. I dont know how soon to Richmond and when am I to come to See you my little pet. I really want to come very much indeed but if I must speak my mind fairly I should say that what I most want is to have you here with me, where I can really make you happy. I want to see you here. Thinking how proud I will be isn't enough. I want to feel proud actually.

I wish to tell you a little secret. I am coming to Sav. or Augusta sooner than you think & you shant know anything about it. And now comes the horrid post boy & I havn't written a word to your Mother.

Goodbye dearest, I hope I shall hear from yr Mother this even'g but I warn you the correspondence cant stay concealed long. I shall have to write through a friend in Cola., a male friend.

And Tattie are not you going to say something to me in your Mothers letter? Is our relation to be simply what you hear from me? but never mind it makes me happy, more than I deserve to feel I am loved. You can say nothing if you can till I come to see you. Very little satisfies me, when the kind of love is such as my Tattie alone in this world can impart to her own, dearest Barney.

P.S. Dont think I use the word feeling too often, it is, exactly just my condition now and what is just what I want. Feel, feel, feel, love, love, love, Tattie.

*In 1858 Edward Barnwell Heyward purchased the Goodwill plantation on the Wateree River, twenty-two miles south of Columbia, Richland District, South Carolina, hoping that moving from the coast would improve the failing health of his first wife, Lucy Green Izard Heyward, who died June 20, 1858.

From Barney to Tattie

Wateree, S.C., 17th Nov. 1862

Dearest Tattie, This I drop at Camden, the last was left in Cola. and this is also sent to Augusta where I hope you will be on Tuesday. I hope in a day or two I shall hear from yr Mother again and be furnished with the name of your hotel in Augusta which I am too provoked with myself for loosing.

And dearest how have you found Savannah? and how are your servants? have they proved faithful and do they look as if they had been behaving themselves well while their mistress was in Greenville, or as the cold weather came on have they like others I know been getting themselves into little scrapes. Darling you dont know how much good coming home has done me. I now really feel well, tho still sleeping badly, but I am so happy in my loving you. When busy I forget you entirely and yet when I am at leisure I go back and find you just in the same old place, and there I commune with you. It has a supporting wholesome effect upon me and you have really already done me a great deal of good. And it is so delicious to wake up every now & then to the reality that I have someone to love me, and I feel so relieved to think that you are such a fine woman. Darling since yesterday I have become more than ever satisfied of the importance of the woman I make my wife being what you and I call a fine woman. I drove up to Columbia yesterday & took Izard and for four hours in the buggy he talked to me both going and coming, and I must confess I was very much amused and exceedingly gratified to get at the little fellows character. He really must occupy more of my attention and he well deserves it, his disposition is excellent, very tender hearted & very clever. I asked him if he ever read books and he said Oh yes ‘that the other day he read Beulah’ half through. Now only to think of the little wretch reading Beulah. But it was when coming home that we had a very curious talk. We got singing hymn tunes together they being the only airs we can sing and I told him that at Greenville when his Uncle Joe's coffin was brought in and placed in the chancel that the choir with the organ sang Home Sweet Home and I tried to tell him how it sounded. The little fellow seemed quite touched & sniffled a little and said Papa you think Aunt Henrietta cared much about Uncle Joe?[] I said Oh yes. And then he said Papa dont you think she will get married again? and before I could answer he went on to say And Papa are you going to get married again. I know these people about here said you were going to be married to Miss Mills[] (one of the extraordinary ideas of these country people, rather a low person), and here Izard blubbered out, []I always said I did'nt care but I would never call her Ma because I didnt like her enough. So I relieved his mind by telling him that I would marry if I could find a lady who would love him & me and that he mustnt mind what people said[,] that I would take care of him and he seemed comforted & soon after fell asleep on my shoulder.

Now my sweetest little darling that little boy will love you just as I do. I know he will. He watches closely, and he has been always fearing I would marry and that it would be somebody he wouldn't love, and am I not blessed in my choice. I am ready and anxious to show my [Tattie] to him, or to anyone, and that drive together yesterday has united us closer than ever and made me feel my responsibilities greater than before. That boy is really an member of the family, there will be three of us & he will amuse you too. But let me ask how you are my little comfort. Has the photograph got smashed yet and how does it look across the Sav. river. Does it look as if it loves you. If it [doesn't,] dont give it to your Mother. Tattie do you know one week is gone, and you dont know how happy I feel, only wanting to see you so much. I do not attempt to ask after your feeling my loved one since you have decided to be silent[.] I do not complain but I only say I feel happy doubting nothing. Sleep on my little blessing. I will watch till you wake and gladden my heart with your voice. Those jewel eyes are closed but I can wait by and look into them again. I do not fear their being ever dim to[o], Yr ever dear, Barney.

Edward Barnwell Barney Heyward. From Margaret Belser Hollis, My Mother Was a Heyward

1863

From Barney to Miss C[atherine] M. Clinch

Wateree, S.C., Saturday 14th Feb[rua]ry [18]63*

Dearest Tattie, I reached home from Columbia, late last Eveng, and must write my last letter, before the mail Boy leaves at twelve o'clock.

My business detained me, till dinner time, yesterday in Cola, and Izard and I, had to travel down pretty much all the way after dark, with Izard all the while, whenever in a rather dark place on the road, crying out mind your other Eye Papa—if that gets hit you will look magnificent. I am happy to say however, that my Eye is nearly well.

I am sure, if I had followed all the different remedies, proposed, at home and in Cola., my Eye would have been lost to us. I have only used cold water, and followed my own natural way, and it is well, only a little discolored but believe your Barney, I am not in the least disfigured, so if I send a picture to your Sister Mary, of a man with a patch over his eye, you must'nt mind it. I am only in fun. And remember, darling, the bruise, was on the outside, the Eye itself escaped, but the lid got the blow, and a pretty sharp one too!

With my love to your Sister Mary tell her I think I shall [have] thirteen of my family, at the Church, unless there is some row, on the coast, when, perhaps Izard, and I, alone can come, but I wont suppose such a state of things.

I enclose a note which I would thank your Mother to have sent to the Silver-smiths, under your Hotel, and beg she will excuse, the liberty, I take, but I must make use of my friends, at these times.

Now my own dearest Tattie, you will not think it strange, if, in this my last letter, (you will get it Sunday), your Barney has'nt much to say.

Darling, I cant, collect my thoughts, or rather my feelings cant exactly be expressed, I am coming dearest to take you to myself, proud, happy, [& canceled] but calm, and perfectly myself.

I give below, a few lines, upon an old subject. Take them dearest, and you will by the sentiment of these, and all others, ever written for you, and for you alone, [have interlined] the evidence, of the love, & esteem, of a man, whose heart, and character, you are happy in feeling, will be devoted to you. And I hope your family, as well as yourself, will also feel satisfied, that your choice has fallen, upon one, fully worthy, such a blessing as you must prove, to the man you honour, with your hand. Time will prove all, in the mean time, read my lines, and if you like them, put them in your Book, sacred to Barney, and Tattie's love.

     The Boys Bird

Say not t'is useless, T'is a gift,

     Which God, most kind, and wise,

     Sent down to cheer, a lonely man,

     When placed in, Paradise.

     ————————

Doubt not its' spirit. Pure as that,

     Which floats, in realms above,

     Doubt not it's strength. Man must rely

     Upon, a Woman's Love.

     ————————

So smile not at, our Boy, in verse;

     The Bird is, his Heart's Toy,

     And represents, that richest gift,

     Which man, can e'er enjoy.

     ————————

Now Tattie I am done. I will retire now, and my Muse shall be laid aside till taken out, dusted and, started again, by the tender pipings of my Bird which will sit to sing, & nod, on the finger of Your ever dearest, Barney.

*Edward Barnwell Heyward and Catherine Maria Clinch were married on February 17, 1863, at the Church of the Atonement, Augusta, Georgia, by the Right Reverend Stephen Elliott, the Episcopal bishop of Georgia.

Portrait of Catherine Maria Clinch Heyward. By Daniel Huntington, ca. 1862. Courtesy of Margaret Belser Hollis

From Tattie to [Sophia Gibbs Couper Clinch (Tat's stepmother)

and Mary Lamont Clinch (Tat's sister)]

[Wateree, S.C., ca. February 1863]

Dear Hearties, I wont date from any place my darlings for I [am] with you at this very moment. Poor Miss Mary, little woman how are you getting on, without one ray of sun to cheer you. Barney wrote yesterday. I was so worn out. We did not arrive until half past six, and of course I could not sleep, never do, as you know, in the day time, and in a strange place, but thanks to a strong cup of coffee, I had no headache. And slept well last night being utterly tired out, and Barney is so good, to me. You would love him just as much as I do, if you knew all that he has done for me—so considerate so watchful—the whole family so genteel so quiet, so naturally kind. Old Mr. [Charles] Heyward just right, dear hearties (only he did not kiss me) but warm and repeated shakes of the hand. I tried to sleep until near dinner time, then took a bath and dressed in my purple—and the presentation was over in a moment, and I soon felt quite at my ease. The two little [ones] are ‘sweet little things,’ and are highly excited about Aunt Tattie. One is sick