South

the prominent Carolinian industry since the time of the Landgrave Thomas Smith, under the

proprietary government. With the determination of the planters to make it the chief object of their care, came the necessity for importing great numbers of slaves, and the sacrifice of many hundreds of lives, in the arduous labors of clearing the ground and preparing the soil. The cypress forests gave place to the fields of waving green, and the rivers were diverted from their channels to flood the vast expanses in which the negroes had set the seeds.

In 1724, four hundred and thirty-nine African slaves were imported to South Carolina, together with a vast amount of other commodities, in exchange for which the citizens gave eighteen thousand barrels of rice and fifty-two thousand barrels of naval stores. Year by year the importations of negroes increased in numbers; year by year the planter became "more eager in the pursuit of large possessions of land," and "strenuously vied with his neighbor," says a chronicler, " for a superiority of fortune." The Carolinians were compelled to keep up fortifications on the borders of the Spanish domains, to prevent the negroes from escaping into foreign territory; but they had few other external cares. Their trade grew constantly with New England, New York and Pennsylvania; and in 1738, when there were fully forty thousand negroes in South Carolina, Spanish policy provoked a formidable insurrection on the part of the blacks. This brought on open hostilities between Spaniards and Carolinians, and the latter made unsuccessful expedition against St.

an

Augustine.*

An account of this singular expedition will be found in the forthcoming article on Florida.

CALHOUN'S GRAVE-CHARLESTON.

It should be borne in mind that the following statistics, showing how rapidly the exportation of rice increased in quantity, also shows how swiftly the slave population of the province grew. From 1720 to 1729, the export was 44,081 tons; from, 1730 to 1740, it was 99,905 tons; and in the single year of 1740, ninety thousand barrels were sent away, the gain upon which was estimated at two hundred and twenty thousand pounds. In 1771, the exports of the State amounted to £756,000 sterling. Shipping crowded the harbors; money was plenty; the planters commanded the best of everything from Great Britain and the West India Islands. There were at that period no taxes whatever upon real or personal estate; but the revenues were raised by duties on "spirituous liquors, sugar, molasses, flour, biscuit, negro slaves, etc.," and amounted to several thousand pounds per annum.

And so, for many generations, the rice culture and the slave system went hand in hand upon the fertile Carolina lowlands. Good authorities have assured me that they believe there were a million acres of rice lands in cultivation in South Carolina at the outbreak of the civil war. At the present time there is hardly one-fourth of that area cultivated, but there is a steady increase. The blows struck by immediate emancipation upon this once gigantic industry were crushing. Under the slave régime, the planters successfully competed with other producers in all the markets of the world. From 1850 to 1860, they exported 705,317, 600 pounds of rice, valued at $24,619,009. The total production of rice in the United States in 1850 was 215,313,497 pounds; in

Some of the rice plantations cover thousands of acres even now; and the employment of from five to eight hundred men, women and children by a single person, is not at all uncommon. I visited the celebrated plantation at Green Pond, in Colleton county, the property of Mr. Bissell, who has 3,5co acres under his control. He, in common with others, was broken by the war; and is struggling with the hundred ills which beset the planter in the changed condition of affairs. His broad fields lie seven miles from the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, at the rear of extensive pine forests, in which, now that the white man is so poorly represented in the legislature, the poacher wanders unreproved. The plantation extends across the Combahee river into Beaufort county, and at various points rice-pounding mills

and little villages, in which the workers live, are established. A morning ride in the soft and Italian-like autumn across this or similar plantations, is a delicious experience. Mounted on a stout mule or on a Kentucky horse, you gallop through the perfumed avenues of the forests until you reach the wide expanse of fields, cut into squares by long trenches, through which water from the river in the background is admitted to every part of the land. The breeze rustles musically in the tall cane along the banks, in whose sedgy recesses the alligator and the serpent hide. In the distance an antlered deer may break from his cover, and after one defiant glance, stamp his foot, and be gone! A white sail glides on the horizon's rim, as the little schooner from Charleston works her way around to the mill, where long processions of black boys and girls, with baskets on their heads, and their mouths filled with horrible jargon, are waiting to load the rice.

The injury done to all the plantations in these lowland counties, by the neglect consequent on the war, is incalculable. Most of these plantations have been reclaimed from the waters; have been diked, ditched, furnished with "trunks," by means of which the planter can inundate or drain his land at will.* A rice plantation is, in fact, a huge hydraulic machine, maintained by constant warring against the tides. The utmost attention and vigilance is necessary, and the labor must be ready at a moment's notice for the most exhaustive efforts. Alternate flooding and draining must take place several times during the season, and one part of the crop must be flooded, while the other adjacent to it is dry. Fields are divided into sections, and trunks or canals convey water from the river to each separately. river to each separately. "The whole apparatus of levels, flood-gates, trunks, canals, banks, ditches," says a prominent planter, "is of the most extensive kind, requiring skill and unity of purpose. The slightest leak in the banks or dikes may end in the ruin of the whole plantation. Freshets, too, commit frightful havoc from time to time. At one fell swoop the produce of a thousand acres on Mr. Bissell's plantation was swept away last year. The cost of reclaiming rice lands, and fitting them for culture, was about

*Speech of Hon. F. A. Sawyer, of South Carolina, in the U. S. Senate, in 1872.

$100 per acre before the war, and so greatly had they been damaged by long neglect that more than half that sum has been expended in their rehabilitation. Once well prepared, the annual cost of cultivation is now about $30 as compared with $10 in former days, but it is steadily decreasing. We wandered over perhaps seven hundred acres, in Colleton and Beaufort counties. The men and women at work in the different sections were under the control of field-masters. The spectacle was lively. The women were dressed in gay colors, with handkerchiefs, uniting all the hues of the rainbow, around their temples. Their feet were bare, and their stout limbs encased in uncouth flannel wrappings. Most of them, while staggering out through the marshes with forty or fifty pounds of rice-stalks on their heads, kept up an incessant jargon with one another, and indulged in a running fire of invective against the field-master. The "trunkminders," the watchmen on whose vigilance the plantation's safety depends, promenaded briskly; the flat-boats, on which the field hands deposited their huge bundles of rice-stalks, were poled up to the mill where the grain was threshed and separated from the straw, winnowed, and carried in baskets to the schooners which transported it to Charleston, and the "pounding mills." During harvest time eight hundred hands are employed on this plantation. Harvest is hardly completed by March, when the sowing begins again. The trunks are opened in each section the day it is planted, and the fields are flooded.

The

The mules, that annually drag the plow through the marshes, are booted with leather contrivances, that they may not sink in up to their ears. To the negroes is given the rice that grows along the margins, and considerable profit is obtained from its sale. The fields in autumn are yellowish in hue, tinged here and there lightly with green, where young rice is upspringing from the shoots recently cut down. rice lies in ricks, but is ill protected from the swarms of birds, who carry away great quantities. While we were strolling afield, one stout negro came up and called "Mas'r Ben" to buy him a mule with $100 which he had saved. "Mas'r Ben" agreed to do it, and informed me that such a purchase was a sign of a negro's assured prosperity. The wages paid the rice field-hands ranged from 25 cents to $1.75 daily, but the manager on this, as on many other plantations, found great difficulty in keeping the labor organized and available. The men found that by two or three days' work they could procure money enough to support them in idleness the next week, and sometimes the overseers were at a loss what to do for help.

Beautiful were the broad and carefully cultivated acres, stretching miles away on either side of the placid, deep, and noble Combahee; picturesque were the granaries, almost bursting with the accumulated stores of the precious grain; and novel and inspiring the vistas of the long sedgebordered canals, through which the morning breezes lightly whistled. The seamyrtle was neighbor to the cane, and the tall grasses twined lovingly around them both. At the "store," around whose entrance were grouped packs of hounds, leaping and fawning about their masters, who were mounting their horses, we saw crowds of negresses, bare-footed and bare-limbed, bringing poultry or eggs to exchange for corn, or chattering frantically, or bursting into boisterous laughter which echoed over many a broad acre.

One could not help thinking that in due time a vast amount of labor-saving machinery must come to take the place of this rude and careless negro element upon the rice plantation. At present, the planters admit, there is an enormous waste, and the climate's character renders it impossible to introduce white labor and intelligence into the section. The negro men and women whom I saw, were certainly of a low and degraded type, distinctively, as a

Frenchman, with his quick instincts, said on seeing a group of these same lowland people, "a broken down race!" At the threshing-mill, at the winnowing-machine, among the great rice stacks where they were packing and sorting and unloading from barges,the women were coarse, brutish, and densely ignorant; the men, in the main, the same. There were types of face in which the savage still stood out in dusky splendor and abandon. Many

women of sixty or seventy years of age were at work in various places about the field. They had evidently been untouched by the spirit of the war. I doubt if they realized the change in their condition. Their conversation with me was confined to inquiries as to how much tobacco I would give them, and an appeal to me to tell Mas'r Ben that they "bin want" à new handkerchief, and hoped he would not forget them. The men as a rule were civil, but a little suspicious in demeanor, as if they did not intend to allow any advantage to be taken of them. If looked at sharply, they would wince, and finally, wreathing their lips with broad grins, would bow and shuffle away.

The planters throughout this section, where the Middletons and the Heywards once tilled so many acres, and whence they drew great incomes, admit that the labor question is the most serious one with them. The profits of rice planting are enormous, but the system of large plantations will have to be adhered to, and African or Chinese labor can alone sustain the trials of the summer climate. The production of the State, and the adjacent lowlands in other States, will doubtless again reach the figure attained before the war, although the present condition of South Carolina would not seem to justify prophecies of any prosperity within her limits, save in Charleston.

And why in Charleston? Mainly because the venerable city has united with the importance she has always maintained as a cotton port, a large number of manufacturing enterprises, for which her location is particularly advantageous; and because her business men have an elastic spirit and a remarkable courage, which reflects the highest credit upon them. A veritable Phoenix, always springing triumphantly from the ashes of terrible conflagrations, as well as from the ruins caused by hurricanes and bombardments, the South Carolinian metropolis is, in itself, a standing reproof to the too often repeated

assertion that the ancient commonwealth lacks enterprise. When the war closed therc was not a completed railroad ending in Charleston. Those now known as the North-Eastern, giving connection with the route to Wilmington, the South Carolina, running north-westward to Columbia, Aiken and Augusta, and the Savannah and Charleston, penetrating the lowlands, and reaching to the Georgian seaport, were worn down and almost completely wrecked. Costly bridges and trestles had been destroyed, depots burned, tracks torn up, and the amount of rolling stock was absurdly inadequate to immediate wants. The rebuilding and equipment were begun in 1866. All the old rail connections are now resuscitated, and Charleston is reaching out for a wider range of commerce than before the war she would have deemed possible. The South Carolina railroad, with its feeders, the Greenville and Columbia, and the Macon and Augusta, in Georgia, sends vast quantities of freight to the Carolinian metropolis, which heretofore went northward. The North-Eastern, and the Savannah and Charleston are important links in the shortest route from New York to Florida, and with the sea-board line, from New York to New Orleans. Many steamship companies were compelled to suspend communication with the city du