Dixie Be Damned. Neal Shirley
common faith between its self and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies … we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former.… You will see this is not the condition of really freemen. You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island.… I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?81
Refusing to learn from the so-called experiments in freedom of the previous years, and still ignoring the clear words from the Sea Island people, in February 1866, Bureau officials attempted to bring former landowners back to the islands. The inhabitants armed themselves, drove off the bureaucrats and the planters, and barricaded themselves on the land, telling the capitalists, “You have better go back to Charleston, and go to work there, and if you can do nothing else, you can pick oysters and earn your living as the loyal people have done—by the sweat of their brows.”82 Accounts like this one are innumerable from the islands of Georgia and South Carolina in 1865 and 1866. These islands were geographically strategic to squat and defend, as many of the planters had abandoned them at the beginning of the war. The former workers, who knew the ecological and economic flows of the waterways between the islands and mainland, had no intention of leaving.
Snap, Crackle, Pop! Tensions Build in the Rice Fields
Across from the Sea Islands where squatters were defending their land, woven together by intercoastal waterways and tidal marshes, were the mainland rice fields surrounding the port towns of Charleston and Savannah. Second only to the Georgetown County rice kingdom in South Carolina, the Ogeechee Neck in Chatham County, Georgia, was the seat of the most profitable rice bounties in the country before the war. As on the islands, by the summer of 1865, planters were already returning to the Ogeechee River network with the help of Union officials and devising ways to reinvest in the rice crop. When planters returned to find their former lands claimed by multiple new owners, the Bureau worked with them to help them reoccupy their plantations. Planter John Cheves, who owned the 2,014 acres he called Grove Point Plantation, refused to recognize the thirty families who had gained possessory titles to 245 acres of his land in his absence. The Bureau followed his lead. In the true spirit of the capitalist debt economy, the Bureau helped him borrow $11,300 to pay back his debts and reinvest in his plantation. The planters who did not borrow money from the bank simply redivided their land and tried the scheme of the northern capitalists: selling their own plots to the people who already leased the land from the Bureau. Some planters, like the bosses of Wild Horn and Oriza, were so eager to get production up and running again that they simply leased the land to skilled workers in exchange for a portion of the crops.83
The workers who leased, bargained, and contracted with the Bureau and former masters for employment and housing were in the minority of the 4,200 Black people living in the Ogeechee district. Hundreds, if not thousands more were squatting in the pine woods around the swamps and surviving between subsistence hunting, fishing, and farming, and the informal economies that existed throughout slavery with other poor Blacks and whites. Frances Butler Leigh, a Sea Island cotton planter’s widow and mistress of three plantations after the war, attests to this lifestyle:
Our neighbors on Saint Simon’s are discouraged with the difficulties they encounter, having to lose two or three months every year while the Negroes are making up their minds whether they will work or not. There are about a dozen on Butler’s Island who do no work. They all raise a little corn and sweet potatoes and with their facilities for catching fish and oysters and shooting wild game they have as much to eat as they want.84
Most historians who recognize the phenomenon of these Black autonomous communities at the end of the Civil War describe them as solely the result of rice production conditions and the social relations specific to that labor, ignoring the fact that it was the active refusal of those conditions—through attacking and abandoning the plantation society—that secured the possibility of that freedom. It is necessary, however, to examine the history of southern rice cultivation in order to learn the full history of these maroons.
The plantation economy relied on the skilled knowledge of slave laborers, who brought with them a long history of highly developed rice cultivation practices from West Africa. Planters considered the tidal marshes and swamps of coastal South Carolina and Georgia to be perfect for rice production because cultivating these areas forced people to uproot the massive bald cypress and tupelo trees in the swamps, thus extending and controlling the tidal marshes while partly taming the swamps. Preparation began in January and lasted through February, during which time men would dig trenches and repair the irrigation systems. In March, women would create the rice seed balls and plant them. From April through July, the fields were flooded multiple times for sprouting and early growth, then weeded and protected against other flora and fauna. During the height of the late summer malaria season, the fields remained mostly flooded while men stood on constant watch protecting the crop from “rice birds” and other marshland creatures. Flatboats would arrive in the early fall to carry the harvest to the mills for processing and then off to the Charleston or Savannah markets.
[no image in epub file]
Entitled “Rice Cultivation on the Ogeechee River, near Savannah, Georgia,” this illustration shows the multitude of tasks that were required to propagate the rice crops, as well as the presence of both men and women doing work side by side. This representation of rice cultivation, however, creates the illusion of a peaceful, well-functioning economy at a time when strikes, work refusals, and land occupations dominated the coastal landscape. A.R. Waud, Harper’s Weekly, January 5, 1867
While some of the division of labor was gendered, the field work was organized as a task system. This meant that there were very few overseers to the operation and workers self-organized based on their knowledge of the tasks that had to be completed and who could best get those done. What emerged was an intensely cooperative production process, aided by the fact that the planters and managers could not stand to be in the swamps during the summer malaria months. Slaves were disciplined to the extent that they were rewarded for high yields by being allowed to stay with their families, but they also constantly manipulated the labor time so that they had free time to do other things. Rice required slave labor to profit; no one who had other options for survival would do this work. Increasingly throughout the nineteenth century those who refused this brutal labor came to include the rebels called maroons. By placing hundreds of laborers in a single area with little white oversight, the cooperative labor structure of low-country rice production more closely resembled the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean than most other plantations in the southern United States.
The low country in which this rice production occurred is a flat coastal plain that lies in Georgia and South Carolina. After the Civil War, the low country was made up of the lands that extended fifty miles inland from the Atlantic, about one-third of which consisted of immense swamps that interlocked with each other to form a long chain, stretching several hundred miles along the coast. The plantations often faced the larger rivers, backing up into stagnant swamp areas where slave quarters were erected. These so-called back swamps were stagnant water (unlike the tidal marshes where the rice grew) and were dominated by large cypress trees. As one historian of the maroons of the area states, they were liminal “places that planters owned, but slaves mastered,” where “white control was defined as loose at best.”85 Much as in the Great Dismal Swamp, the ecology of an undomesticated wilderness perfectly fit the needs of the bonded yet rebellious labor force.
Unlike the fugitive slaves who fled north and west, when maroons left their plantations they chose to make their homes in the nearby swamps. The survivalist skills and offensive tactics learned from over a hundred years of maroonage in the low country formed a collective knowledge base that people drew on during the Ogeechee Insurrection and throughout that larger period of revolt. Maroonage was not merely a lifestyle option for deserting enforced labor, but a specifically evolved method of attack on slave society. From the survival skills of hunting, fishing, tracking, and hiding to the conspiratorial skills of maneuvering within the swamps and plantation borders, navigating rivers, and setting up trusted networks for trading information and goods, the tactics of the maroons were just as essential to the attacks on the postwar plantations as in the antebellum period.
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