Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields: Letters of the Heyward Family, 1862–1871 by Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen H. Stokes (review)

In Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields, Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen Stokes have made accessible the correspondence of the Heywards, one of South Carolina’s founding families and one of the South’s richest in the mid-nineteenth century. This particular collection, the latest installment in the University of South Carolina’s ongoing effort to make its large documentary collections available for wider public use, helps to advance the work of scholars exploring the social and economic consequences of emancipation and Confederate defeat for white southerners.

Thus, the focus of this book is not Daniel Heyward and Nathaniel Heyward, the immensely successful rice planters in the revolutionary and early antebellum period, but their descendant Edward Barnwell (Barney) Heyward, who presided over the family’s low-country rice plantations in their decline rather than at their zenith. Born in 1826, Barney Heyward was a rice planter in the late antebellum period and during the first two years of the war. Late in 1863, he traveled to Richmond to secure a commission in the Confederate engineer corps and returned as a lieutenant to his native low country to fulfill his military service. For the duration of the conflict, he was never far—in mind or body—from his family’s plantations along the Combahee River, and he returned to planting there after the war ended.

This collection of letters begins in 1862, with Barney’s courtship letters to his second wife, Catherine Maria (Tattie) Clinch, whom he married in February 1863. Roughly half of the collection includes their letters to each other and to other relatives during the war, mostly about the comings and goings of family members, the movement of supplies from plantation to town, and news about the war. Barney’s letters from Richmond in early 1864 detail entertaining encounters with notable Confederate women such as Mary Chestnut and Varina Davis and later that year his complaints about the inadequacy of his commanding officer in the engineer corps. Letters from Barney’s father’s overseer provide informative reports about harvesting the rice crop, military impressment of Heyward plantation property, concerns about the movement of slaves, and the difficulty of getting crops to market.

Letters from the end of the war to 1870, which make up roughly the second half of the book, provide an interesting and unconventional perspective on life as a postwar planter. Like so many other men who were rich in land and slaves, Barney Heyward did not have an easy time making planting profitable after emancipation. He clung to traditional notions of white supremacy and complained often about the brutish behavior of African Americans in general, but over the course of a year or so he began to see a difference in the former slaves whom he employed. Whereas other, older planters seemed stuck in their ways, intent on squeezing work from freedpeople without pay, Barney expressed a different vision of working with former slaves. He prided himself on his willingness to adapt to the free labor system, paying his workers what even they considered a fair wage and selling commercial products to them through a commissary on his property. Sacrificing time with his wife and young children living in Charleston, Barney closely supervised his field-workers and earned their trust. Among the freedpeople, he quickly became known as the planter to work for along the Combahee River. Despite the effectiveness of his workforce, Barney was dogged by weather troubles and conflicts with neighboring kinsmen. He often reported feeling on the verge of success with his planting operations, but he never quite triumphed over the challenges of postwar agriculture.

Barney’s life ended abruptly in 1871, as did his wife’s a year earlier, and their chronicle ends abruptly too. Hollis and Stokes provide no explanation as to why...