Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina by S. Max Edelson (review)

Conceiving colonial South Carolina plantations as enterprises rather than as communities, Max Edelson, in this prize-winning work, traces the development of plantation culture and agriculture over the first century of British settlement in the South Carolina low country. Colonists, he argues, initially brought to the colony English or Barbadian perceptions about the land and its uses. Consequently, they valued high ground over what struck them as the watery wastes of swamps and marshes. Then the colonists discovered that those wetlands supported unfamiliar but successful crops, especially rice.

To rice cultivation the English brought some knowledge of rice growing from Italy to India. They knew as well the practices and technologies deployed in wetland farming in England's fen country. Further, they brought with them habits of scientific, agricultural experimentation. The enslaved Africans and African Carribeans, who did the work, brought habits of reading the land and planting and working crops, including rice. They refined these capacities with knowledge gained from Native Americans. The result was not just a new plantation commodity, but a new cuisine, economy, and culture.

The success of rice and, later, indigo cultivation pushed planters to seek holdings in increasingly remote areas. They also multiplied their slave purchases and refined agricultural practices and technology in an urgent push for aggrandizement and improvement. The beautification of home plantations within a fifty-mile radius of Charlestown and the building of ever more elegant town homes in the colony's one substantial town provided indexes of success, standing, and sociability. At the same time, these ornaments of wealth and taste disguised that wealth's creation and operation. Not pastoralism and patriarchalism, but colonial imperialism and merchant acquisitiveness and management principles directed the dramatic growth of plantation agriculture in the low country.

From a core area around Charlestown that growth spread toward the Edisto and Santee rivers and, then, beyond. Even on the eve of the Revolution the farther reaches of the low country were still in a frontier state. Many large plantations closer to Charlestown also had "internal frontiers"—that is, large, unimproved tracts. The well tended fields and copses of English imagination and expectations were overwhelmed by the rank vegetation encroaching everywhere. The new world could not be made to resemble the old but required, instead, the recalibration of expectations and understandings, the adaptation of old and pursuit of new crops, and the refashioning of identities. In their success, planters became a self-confident class in the face of the insufferable superiority of the English.

Nevertheless, Henry Laurens, one of the greatest of the planters, sought European educations for several of his children and claimed in 1774 to want "nothing more than to 'plant & Cultivate [his] vine & [his] Fig Tree' and 'sit quietly under them'" (1). Edelson's judgment is that Laurens "packed a good measure of self-delusion into this pious sentiment" that was so at odds with his experience (1). One might rather conclude that Laurens used cultural commonplaces to explain to his son John how he was changing his priorities in the wake of his wife's death in 1770, his retirement from his merchant business the next year, his joining the discussions of the American Philosophical Society the year after that, his focus on his sons' educations, and his efforts to tamp down pre-revolutionary agitation in South Carolina during the Stamp Act crisis. In fact, his life had undergone momentous change between 1770 and 1774. The desire for peace and retirement in the face of all that was not only culturally programmed and predictable, but psychologically acute. Pace Edelson, it did not necessarily mean that Laurens was "Disowning a life's work" (1), at least not then.

In the drive to tell and analyze the story of planters' development of the low country, Edelson writes clearly, effectively, and commonsensically but with the occasional loss of such nuances. His preference for crisp, even stark statements militates against shades of subtlety and certain kinds of complexity. [End...