On Black Majority

While I think that most of us who read a lot of US history recognize that South Carolina was majority black until after the Civil War (as were Mississippi and Louisiana), I don’t think many of us take the time to think about what this means.

Although not a comprehensive text, Peter Wood guides us through some aspects of black South Carolina before the American Revolution (while simultaneously making some bold, yet convincing arguments). He starts the book with a discussion of the settlement of South Carolina by Africans. Because of his view that the Middle Passage deserves a separate, in-depth treatment, that isn’t covered here. Instead, Wood begins in 1670 with Sullivan’s Island, which he frames as sort of a coercive, early modern Ellis Island. I think he’s right to do so—the bulk of African Americans will find that their ancestors arrived in North America through Sullivan’s Island. In fact, 40% of all African slaves brought to mainland British America came through it. In early days, the primary economic rationale for the existence of South Carolina was to feed planters and slaves on Britain’s Caribbean islands.

After talking about first settlements, Wood dives into the big question of “Why did South Carolina have such a large population?” He has a multifaceted argument here. First, African slaves had pre-existing experience with cultivating rice, which was then beginning to take off as South Carolina’s primary cash crop (also interestingly, it’s possible that rice was first inadvertently introduced in South Carolina by African slaves—although small quantities of wild rice existed in the region, indigenous peoples did not cultivate it). Moreover, West Africans were far less likely to die of disease, due largely to their high incidence of sickle cell anemia. While sickle cell anemia causes serious problems, it offers a trade off by making those who have it more resistant to malaria.

In section 2, Wood spends some time on discussions of black life in the state. The most interesting chapter here was on the development of Gullah language and the fact that South Carolina was an even greater “Babel” than New York or Pennsylvania, thanks in large part to how many African languages were spoken. In section 3, Wood talks about increasing white fear of their African slaves, given their demographic growth (in some counties, they made up 70% of the population) as well as forms of black resistance—which was sometimes violent, but far more often manifested itself through talking trash about slaveholders in African languages or what we might call “direct action” (slowing down labor to destroy the rate of production).

Finally, in the last section, Wood discusses the increasingly alientating systems of coercion that white Carolinians put in place to prevent slave rebellion and maintain their system of domination. Given the escalation of repression and brutality, it is little wonder that enslaved peoples became increasingly desperate under these circumstances. The book concludes with an account of the Stono Rebellion, the biggest slave rebellion in the American South which led to dozens of dead, and further escalation still of white repression of their black slaves. It was only by complete chance that the Stono Rebellion wasn’t more successful, and it makes me ask a lot of questions about how North America would differ from the present had it succeeded. Would South Carolina and Haiti be referred to in the same sentence? Would the United States have expanded into the Gulf? It’s really difficult to say.

This is a great introductory book on the history of colonial South Carolina, especially for the way in that it emphasizes the experiences of the majority of its population (before the publication of this book, every history of South Carolina had been based around the eyes of a minority). I’m sure that this book was groundbreaking when it was published, but a lot of the thinking here is echoed in later works on colonial slavery—so most of this wasn’t new information to me, but it was nice to see it presented in this way.