Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850

4: In an Ocean of Blue

87 4 In an Ocean of Blue West African Indigo Workers in the Atlantic World to 1800 The forests gave way before them, and extensive verdant fields, richly clothed with produce, rose up as by magic before these hardy sons [and daughters] of toil. . . . Being farmers, mechanics, laborers and traders in their own country, they required little or no instruction in these various pursuits. —Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) Between 1740 and 1770, colonial South Carolina emerged as one of Great Britain’s principal suppliers of indigo, used foremost as a blue textile dye. In 1750, South Carolina exported approximately eightyseven thousand pounds of indigo, which soon gained a reputation as a middle-grade commodity, next in quality to the highest grade produced in Guatemala and the French Caribbean. Between midcentury and the American Revolution, a period that coincided with an increased importation of enslaved workers from West Africa, the colony’s indigo exports expanded more than tenfold to over one million pounds per year.1 How did this transformation happen? What factors shaped the development of indigo production in colonial South Carolina? In what ways did indigo shape colonial South Carolina? What were the legacies of indigo production in South Carolina? This chapter will address these questions by viewing South Carolina indigo plantations within the contexts of British commercial expansion and the larger Atlantic World, examining the role that West African indigo workers played in their development, and considering their historical legacies, including material and ideological ones. 88 In an Ocean of Blue Among the ideological consequences of the development of South Carolina indigo plantations has been the depiction of Eliza Lucas Pinckney as the principal agent of indigo production in South Carolina. For instance, according to the agricultural historian Lewis Cecil Gray, whom many later researchers have followed, “The credit for initiating the [indigo ] industry is due Eliza Lucas, who had recently come from the West Indies to South Carolina, where she resided on an estate belonging to her father, then governor of Antigua.”2 One colonial historian has written, “Eliza Lucas (later Pinckney) especially labored to introduce West Indian indigo cultivation.” Furthermore, this scholar argues that Lucas was one of many innovators “within a wider network that included Carolinians, West Indians, and Britons.”3 As the mother of American revolutionary heroes Thomas Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Eliza Lucas has been the subject of biographies, children’s books, and a novel for her reputation as an innovator in indigo and a mother of the American Revolution.4 Such depictions make the slave labor force invisible, leading one prominent authority on American slavery to state, “Unlike the Africans who had grown rice prior to their capture, the slaves assigned to indigo production brought no knowledge of the task with them to the New World and often had to be directed by white artisans; still their on the job training gave them a special expertise in the intricacies of making the blue dye.”5 These interpretations obscure a number of important factors that led to the development of indigo in South Carolina, a process related to rice production. While the colony struggled for decades to find a viable export comparable to Caribbean sugar, it found a saving grace in rice, a crop that African workers transplanted into the colony’s soil.6 As rice took off, colonial planters had the means to buy even more slaves. With increasing flows of labor from Central and West Africa and expanding exports of rice, coastal South Carolina attracted planters and prospective planters, and the Lucas family entered the colony in this spirit. By 1713, John Lucas of Antigua owned in absentia a number of Carolina rice plantations. In 1738, John Lucas’s son George left Antigua to live in South Carolina. His political aspirations soon called George Lucas back to Antigua, where he served as its governor, leaving his daughter Eliza with the authority to manage his property for him. She managed three plantation sites: one at Wappoo, where the family lived; one at Garden Hill on the Combahee River, a fifteen-hundred acre property that produced pitch, salt pork, tar, and other commodities; and one, a three-thousand acre rice plantation, In an Ocean of Blue 89 on the Waccamaw River.7 As noted earlier, a number of sources credit Eliza Lucas with developing indigo into a...