Rice to Ruin: The Jonathan Lucas Family in South Carolina, 1783–1929 by Roy Williams III, Alexander Lucas Lofton (review)

The rice planters of South Carolina do not suffer from lack of study. As a distinctive subset of southern planters, who had some of the highest ownership rates of enslaved people and who boasted some of the most luxurious lifestyles in the antebellum era, rice planters remain a source of interest for many. Even now, new collections of privately held papers become public and reveal even more about this group who influenced the lives of many. Rice to Ruin: The Jonathan Lucas Family in South Carolina, 1783–1929 adds to the library of work on the rice planter class by focusing on five generations of the Lucas family. The family built rice mills and eventually owned some of the most famous rice plantations in the Lowcountry, several of Charleston’s premier mansions, and upland homes, where they escaped malaria.

The family’s rise to prominence came by chance, when a vessel carrying English millwright Jonathan Lucas wrecked on the South Carolina coast. He recognized that the area needed his mill-building knowledge. Growing rice can be challenging and has been historically difficult, but dehulling or milling rice can also be a slow and tedious process to perform at scale. Lucas innovated and designed a new water-powered mill for dehulling rice in the 1780s, making him “the Eli Whitney of the rice culture” (p. 6). Lucas’s designs removed the major bottleneck to rice production, and his mill construction company, which employed his sons and grandson, constructed mills on numerous plantations and in Europe. They built a toll mill near Charleston, and Jonathan Lucas II built and operated the largest steam-powered rice mill in the old rice kingdom. The family used the profits from mill construction to buy rice plantations, securing its place in the insular rice baron society.

The family engineered its own reversals by supporting secession and the Civil War, in which many members fought. Like their fellow planters, the Lucas family suffered losses due to emancipation, property destruction, lost opportunity costs of the war years, and the resulting steep decline in the value of their land.

In the decades after Reconstruction, the family dispersed to towns around South Carolina, to California, and to New York. Those who remained on rice plantations hoped for capital infusions that proved illusory, such as investments driven by phosphate discoveries, which benefited some of their neighbors during that industry’s boom. The family members found themselves at sea economically, unable to comprehend in the last decades of the nineteenth century “why they were all so poor and yet so capable” (p. 260). Instead, they managed decline and joined another widespread trend: selling land to northern waterfowl hunters.

The authors know Lowcountry history well. One is a descendant of the Lucas family and the caretaker of the rich and clearly voluminous family papers, which recently went to the South Carolina Historical Society. The letters provide clues about the mentality of the planter class, the rise and fall of rice culture, and the daily family life of the planter elite. The authors rely heavily on lengthy transcriptions of this cache of letters. The book draws on an antiquarian approach that pays close attention to the voices of the past. At times it reads like an edited collection of letters. In that vein, the book offers no overarching argument and provides context more than analysis. This characteristic is most glaring when the book presents the white male planter-class point of view without considering the perspectives of women, poor white people, or enslaved people. The authors offer no support for the Lost Cause, but the work rarely challenges or gives context for rice planters’ blinkered understanding of the world.