Long Green: The Rise and Fall of Tobacco in South Carolina

2. Years of the Locust, 1865–1885

Here is a country capable of supporting ten times the present population with lands in order . . . [yet] there is not now enough in this parish to give the people one dinner. daniel jordan, 1868 2Years of the Locust, 1865–1885 More than seventy-five years passed before tobacco was again cultivated as a cash crop in South Carolina. Over these eight decades, South Carolina deepened its commitment to rice, cotton, and slavery and marched in lockstep with world markets to the cadence of the overseer’s lash. In the 1820s, South Carolina’s preeminence in cotton production was supplanted by vast new areas of cultivation in Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. The state’s competitive edge was further dulled by tariffs that South Carolinians believed discriminated against them. In 1832, the tariff issue brought South Carolina and the national government faceto -face in the first great crisis of union. It would not be the last. 17 Alarmed by the mounting strength of the antislavery movement in the 1840s, South Carolinians countered abolitionist rhetoric with strident defenses of the peculiar institution. Again in 1850, the shrill cry of secession was heard in the Palmetto State. South Carolinians rushed to the brink in 1850 and drew back only because no other state would accompany them, and they were loath to make the leap alone. The famous compromise of that year was but a lull in the storm. During the last antebellum decade, voices of reason on both sides of the sectional conflict faded as the howl of extremism swelled. Finally, in 1860, South Carolina led ten sister states out of the Union and into catastrophe.1 On the Fourth of July 1881, a traveler passing through the Pee Dee region of South Carolina gazed upon scenes of grinding poverty. As he entered the region from North Carolina, the landscape presented ‘‘the dreariest picture of desolation and desertion imaginable.’’ Along the twenty-five-mile post road from the state line to Conway the traveler noticed only four residences that ‘‘bore any semblance of culture and refinement . The habitations of the populace were crude log cabins with mud chimneys as if gruesome sentinels placed there to challenge the entrance of improvement or progress.’’2 In other parts of the Pee Dee, railway passengers could cross miles of worn-out cotton fields where men and women toiled for fifty cents a day.3 In the decades following the Civil War, the Pee Dee region was afflicted with a host of deficiencies, which, like a virtual plague of locusts, ravaged the quality of life and stripped the land of everything but hope. Poverty in all its crippling manifestations beset the region: economic stagnation, lack of opportunity and capital, illiteracy, inadequate transportation and communication , all compounded by poor diet and health care.4 Lack of economic diversity underlay much of the region’s troubles. The remarkable industrial development that transformed South Carolina’s piedmont in the 1880s and 1890s largely bypassed the Pee Dee, and agriculture remained the bedrock of the region’s economy.5 The Pee Dee’s few industries were mostly lumber or grist mills engaged in low value-added processing of raw materials. In 1886, the Marion Star echoed a lament typical for the region: ‘‘Manufacturing in this county is, we are sorry to say, at a very low ebb. Along the Pee Dee River are some flouring mills, and here and there a saw mill, but aside from these trifling concerns . . . there is 18 : long green nothing in the line of manufacturers.’’6 Thus the scarcity of employment opportunities off the farm deepened the region’s dependence on agriculture and forced thousands to scratch a living from the land. To make matters worse, agriculture, on which the prosperity of the Pee Dee depended almost entirely, was in a miserable state. Indeed, the 1870s and 1880s were difficult years for most American farmers. Government policies favored industry over agriculture, capital over labor, creditors over debtors, and the Northeast over the rest of the nation. But in addition to these national issues, southern farmers faced a special set of problems stemming from the Civil War and its aftermath. The events of the 1860s wrought profound change in Pee Dee agriculture, affecting labor, land tenure, finance, and marketing. Traditional economic institutions and commercial linkages had to be modified or reinvented altogether, and transitions were not always smooth. Moreover...