\u201cMost people outside of the lowcountry or just South Carolina in general don’t realize that rice was the central cash crop which defined this area, just as cotton defined \u2026 other parts of the South,\u201d Smith said. \u201cIt brought a tremendous amount of wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/news.furman.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/Book-Cover.jpg\")
The cover of the book \u201cCarolina\u2019s Golden Fields: Inland Rice Cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1860.”<\/p><\/div>\n
In \u201cCarolina\u2019s Golden Fields,\u201d Smith, an adjunct history professor at the College of Charleston, explores the rise and fall of inland rice plantations, which were built with profits derived from a crop Europeans had little idea how to grow until the Africans they had enslaved showed them how.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe story of rice owes a lot to the enslaved people, not only for their labor but also the culture that they brought,\u201d Smith said. \u201cPeople in Africa were growing rice centuries before Europeans even understood the process \u2026 European colonists began to observe their practices and took those practices and capitalized on them on a much greater scale in a plantation setting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith\u2019s research dives into the complexity of successful inland rice cultivation and how dramatically the landscape had to be altered to accommodate it.<\/p>\n
Unlike tidal rice cultivation, which uses ocean tides to push and pull fresh water from the fields, inland rice cultivation relied on a system of damming streams and small rivers and then strategically releasing water. The method made far more area available for growing the crop by essentially removing all of the vegetation across vast swaths of land and digging miles of canals, which was a labor-intensive process, to say the least, without electricity or machinery.<\/p>\n
\u201cEnslaved people were forced to clear all the woodlands, the cypress swamps. They cleared whatever vegetation was in the way. Then they had to dig the land, reshape the land to create dams, embankments and canals, and were forced to work the land in a series of tasks year-round,\u201d Smith said. \u201cAnd on top of that, they’re battling disease, any sort of deficiencies in their diets that they may have, exposure to the weather. It was quite a monumental task to be able to create these rice fields.\u201d<\/p>\n
After graduating with a degree in history from Furman, Smith, who grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, went on to earn a master\u2019s from College of Charleston and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. In addition to Huff, he credits Walter Kenneth Mattison Professor of History Lloyd Benson and Professor of History Steve O\u2019Neill \u201984 for having a \u201chuge influence\u201d on his appreciation for history.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a great department,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
Rice cultivation has been almost completely absent from South Carolina since the 1920s, but its effects on the state linger in the architecture and culture of the lowcountry. Asked if growing rice would have been sustainable without enslaved labor, Smith said, \u201cProbably not.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut that’s the ongoing discussion in Southern history. Were the cash crops sustainable without slavery? You could argue to some degree yes,\u201d he said. \u201cThe cotton industry and the tobacco industry continued after the Civil War and emancipation, but the labor that was used was still exploited in a variety of different ways, whether was through wages or through control in general.\u201d<\/p>\n