Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold: Phosphate, Fertilizer, and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina

3. Land Miners and Hand Mining, 1867–1884

· 66 · 3 Land Miners and Hand Mining, 1867–1884 Assumptions of mastery died slowly along the Ashley River. In the turbulent wake of emancipation, former slave owners such as Francis S. Holmes had to adapt to a world without a reliable, malleable, and abundant labor supply. Many of“their people”had fled the plantations, and former masters could not compel new arrivals or remaining laborers to work. The lowcountry rice industry had all but collapsed by 1865. Attempting to evolve from rice planter to phosphate-mining manager, Holmes complained that “laborers were scarce, and the negro, unaccustomed to such work, accomplished very little towards a day’s task.” He continued,“Where the Company expected to keep employed one thousand laborers,thirty could not be placed.” For black laborers, the “new and untried field” of land-phosphate mining was too similar to rice work in the same fields under the same masters . Most refused to cultivate rice, and they were hesitant to dig phosphate . An incomplete revolution, emancipation nevertheless empowered former slaves to demand new labor and social relations. The newly freed coerced white elites into negotiating rather than dictating. Unwavering in their desire for land and autonomy, lowcountry blacks used mining to advance their goals, but in doing so, they built up the industry and helped to liberate at least some of their former masters from the financial disaster of emancipation. Freedpeople in the lowcountry shared with their brethren across the South common experiences after emancipation. Primarily, the ex-slaves wanted to replace planters’ intrusiveness and control with their own autonomy and independence. To achieve these objectives, they resisted the restoration of overseers and gang labor, embraced education, and created land miners and hand mining, 1867–1884 · 67 their own churches. Black families struggled against whites apprenticing their children, withdrew their women from the fields, moved around the lowcountry, and worked less. Throughout the Deep South, the postwar labor scarcity, together with favorable political winds, added to freedpeople’s optimistic view that they could buy land and become independent farmers. With the failure of land redistribution, many reluctantly negotiated sharecropping agreements with white landowners. Bargaining from a position of relative strength with former paternalists, freedpeople, now able to leave Map 2. Land-mining territories. Map created by author. 68 · stinking stones and rocks of gold or threaten to leave obstinate employers, gained greater control over their lives. When land-phosphate mining began in 1867, the balance of power began to shift toward the men who did the physical work, the freedmen miners , and away from the factors, gentlemen-scientists, and entrepreneurs who did not. Although white owners and newspaper reporters seemed to take labor for granted,describing it as a cost or problem,like overburden or drainage, mining was hard work in an inhospitable environment. Laborers did not regard mining as a profession but, rather, as part-time work, and, like other post-emancipation occupations, a subordinate concern to enjoying their freedom. For managers like Holmes, the question in this new era was not “Who will dig?”—that the labor pool consisted of freedmen had never been in doubt—but, rather,“How will we get them to dig?” As with almost everything else in the postbellum South,the labor struggle took place within the context of the past. South Carolina was Europe’s Figure 5. Paired hand miners, near Charleston, 1877. By permission of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia. land miners and hand mining, 1867–1884 · 69 leading supplier of rice in the eighteenth century, but its rice industry lost its primacy in the antebellum period, slightly recovered after the Civil War, and died early in the next century. The region remained, however, uniquely stamped by the rice culture, especially its task labor system. Task dominated the language of work throughout the region, even for those who had never set foot in a rice field. Former slaves blended beneficial elements of the task system with the new privileges of freedom to create a work culture for mining, farming, and living in the lowcountry, and they forced former masters to accept it. Elements of continuity and discontinuity were fundamental to the working relationships of black miner and white manager, freedman and former slave owner.The struggle between laborer and supervisor over work time, pace, and conditions persisted after slavery, as did the basic power relationship between whites and blacks. But freedom created a more level...