The Rice Planters
To say that the rice planters were wealthy is an understatement. Their lifestyle was matched by few in America. Many hours of leisure time, summer vacations, and enormous profits were the way of life for the rice planters. Often, planters owned many plantations and hundreds of slaves all over the area. These men had figured out how to make an enormous profit by producing rice, and it allowed their lifestyle to persist until after the Civil War.
Prominent families often rose to high levels by inheriting plantations and slaves. An example of this process is found by examining the most famous of the Georgetown planters, Robert F. W. Allston. The Allston family had been prominent in the area and owned many plantations. Allston's father died and willed his sons a plantation on the Pee Dee River of about 915 acres named Chicora Wood. One brother died, and Allston bought out the other one. He gave the plantation his full attention and produced small amounts of rice for fourteen years. When his aunt died in 1840, Allston was given two plantations near Georgetown. He sold one of these and bought another plantation, Exchange, a short distance upriver from Chicora Wood. After making large profits on this plantation for three years, he sold it and acquired two plantations downriver from totaling about 1600 acres in addition to 500 acres of oceanfront property. Through the rest of his life, Allston bought five additional plantations. Overall, he owned over 300 square miles with part of his property stretching from the Pee Dee River to the Atlantic Ocean. He was becoming one of the wealthiest planters in the area. Allston's method of acquiring slaves was similar to his the way he acquired land. His father left him half interest in two carpenters and a share of a boy. He received nine more slaves when his brother died and seven upon the death of his mother. He then bought sixty-four additional slaves to clear the land at Chicora Wood. As he purchased more plantations, he continued to buy slaves until he had around 590 by his death in 1864. His added wealth also gave him added prominence, and he became governor of South Carolina in the late 1850s. Allston's method of acquiring land and slaves was common among rice planters. While his kind of wealth may seem extreme, Allston was only the seventh richest man in Georgetown County in 1850, and the value of his landholdings was $130,000. This was small in comparison to the $527,050 value of the land of Joshua John Ward, the richest man in the county and owner of 1100 slaves, most in the United States.
This wealth was accumulated through the enormous profits made on rice grown in the area. Prices per pound ranged from 2.9 to 4.3 cents during the 1850s, and selling expenses were small. On the sale of 69 barrels in 1837, Allston netted 1,391.01, or 81.5% of what he sold. The largest expense was the milling of rice, and larger plantations could do this cheaply themselves, making a gross profit of 88% of sales. It was not surprising that many professionals turned into rice planters.
The lifestyle of the planters reflected this vast amount of wealth. Children were tutored privately at home by European or northern tutors instead of being sent to schools in the area. Sons usually went to military colleges, Ivy League universities, or colleges in Europe while daughters went to finishing schools in Charleston or Savannah. Families traveled abroad extensively, though this diminished as the nineteenth century dawned and tending to the plantation became more important. During the summer, when disease carrying mosquitoes were at their peak, families would take all of their belongings and servants and go to houses that were either on the seashore sides of their plantations, seaside resorts like Pawleys Island on the Waccamaw Neck, pineland resorts like Plantersville, or to homes in Charleston. In many of these places, planters formed elite clubs among themselves and through lavish dinners and parties often. This was truly a society for the elite and powerful.
Robert F.W. Allston
Joshua John Ward
Source of information is http://www.the-strand.com/rice, Rogers, pg. 269-339, Easterby's book, pg. 20-43, and Gragg, pg.55-66. Pictures from Rogers.
Front Gates / Table of Contents / Introduction of Rice / Rise of the Rice Plantations / Planters / Slaves / Georgetown County / Geography of Georgetown County / Examples of Plantation Homes / Demise of the Rice Plantations / Gallery of the Abandoned Rice Fields / Explanation of Certain Terms / Links to other sites / Bibliography