The plantation economy relied on the skilled knowledge of slave laborers, who brought with them a long history of highly developed rice cultivation practices from West Africa. Planters considered the tidal marshes and swamps of coastal South Carolina and Georgia to be perfect for rice production because cultivating these areas forced people to uproot the massive bald cypress and tupelo trees in the swamps, thus extending and controlling the tidal marshes while partly taming the swamps. Preparation began in January and lasted through February, during which time men would dig trenches and repair the irrigation systems. In March, women would create the rice seed balls and plant them. From April through July, the fields were flooded multiple times for sprouting and early growth, then weeded and protected against other flora and fauna. During the height of the late summer malaria season, the fields remained mostly flooded while men stood on constant watch protecting the crop from “rice birds” and other marshland creatures. Flatboats would arrive in the early fall to carry the harvest to the mills for processing and then off to the Charleston or Savannah markets.
[no image in epub file]
Entitled “Rice Cultivation on the Ogeechee River, near Savannah, Georgia,” this illustration shows the multitude of tasks that were required to propagate the rice crops, as well as the presence of both men and women doing work side by side. This representation of rice cultivation, however, creates the illusion of a peaceful, well-functioning economy at a time when strikes, work refusals, and land occupations dominated the coastal landscape. A.R. Waud, Harper’s Weekly, January 5, 1867
While some of the division of labor was gendered, the field work was organized as a task system. This meant that there were very few overseers to the operation and workers self-organized based on their knowledge of the tasks that had to be completed and who could best get those done. What emerged was an intensely cooperative production process, aided by the fact that the planters and managers could not stand to be in the swamps during the summer malaria months. Slaves were disciplined to the extent that they were rewarded for high yields by being allowed to stay with their families, but they also constantly manipulated the labor time so that they had free time to do other things. Rice required slave labor to profit; no one who had other options for survival would do this work. Increasingly throughout the nineteenth century those who refused this brutal labor came to include the rebels called maroons. By placing hundreds of laborers in a single area with little white oversight, the cooperative labor structure of low-country rice production more closely resembled the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean than most other plantations in the southern United States.
The low country in which this rice production occurred is a flat coastal plain that lies in Georgia and South Carolina. After the Civil War, the low country was made up of the lands that extended fifty miles inland from the Atlantic, about one-third of which consisted of immense swamps that interlocked with each other to form a long chain, stretching several hundred miles along the coast. The plantations often faced the larger rivers, backing up into stagnant swamp areas where slave quarters were erected. These so-called back swamps were stagnant water (unlike the tidal marshes where the rice grew) and were dominated by large cypress trees. As one historian of the maroons of the area states, they were liminal “places that planters owned, but slaves mastered,” where “white control was defined as loose at best.”85 Much as in the Great Dismal Swamp, the ecology of an undomesticated wilderness perfectly fit the needs of the bonded yet rebellious labor force.
Unlike the fugitive slaves who fled north and west, when maroons left their plantations they chose to make their homes in the nearby swamps. The survivalist skills and offensive tactics learned from over a hundred years of maroonage in the low country formed a collective knowledge base that people drew on during the Ogeechee Insurrection and throughout that larger period of revolt. Maroonage was not merely a lifestyle option for deserting enforced labor, but a specifically evolved method of attack on slave society. From the survival skills of hunting, fishing, tracking, and hiding to the conspiratorial skills of maneuvering within the swamps and plantation borders, navigating rivers, and setting up trusted networks for trading information and goods, the tactics of the maroons were just as essential to the attacks on the postwar plantations as in the antebellum period.
After the Civil War—with the power vacuum created between the planter class and the northern industrial class, backed by their respective political parties, and with the total destruction of the slave-based economy—these revolts took on new forms. A high-intensity class warfare emerged out of two hundred years of lower-intensity activities. The desires and demands of Black workers became total and generalized. When rebels organized the attacks and seized territory along the Ogeechee River plantations in 1868 they were continuing this maroon history, but with the new awareness that they didn’t have to live at the margins of the rice empire: they could destroy it.
The Insurrection of 1868–1869
We had a small excitement in November, 1868, owing to a report which went the round of the plantations that there was to be a general Negro insurrection on the first of the year. The Negroes this year and the following seemed to reach the climax of lawless independence, and I never slept without a loaded pistol by my bed.”
—Ella Thomas, daughter of a prosperous farmer in Augusta, Georgia86
By 1867, the rice plantation owners in the Ogeechee Neck had become more organized and effective in revamping the cash crop system of their former society through the labor contract system introduced by northern interests. The close-knit nature of the planter class allowed them to reorganize ownership and management of their lands without compromising their economic power. Three of the prominent plantations in the Ogeechee Neck hired Confederate officers Major Middleton and Captain Tucker to run operations, and one of the first acts of these new managers was to evict everyone who refused to sign labor contracts. Those evicted and other sympathetic workers immediately began organizing around this hostility through the local Union League.87
Unrelated to the Union Army, the Union Leagues were a massively attended, decentralized, cross-racial political organizing body of southerners active during the Reconstruction era. Varying wildly in composition, style, strategy, and tactics, the local context of the League took precedent over any national doctrine that Radical Republicans might have been pushing at the time. Whether or not the Union League in the Ogeechee District began with the intention of becoming an insurrectionary force, leaders from the League moved beyond the marches, parades, strikes, and voter organizing that dominated other region’s Leagues.88 It can be gathered that in Ogeechee, those in the Union League were primarily concerned with getting land, and advocated for the direct action of setting up homesteads for themselves in the face of the government’s inaction toward that end.
1863 map of the rivers and railroads between the Savannah and Ogeechee rivers. Illustrated London News, January 1863
One historian of the Ogeechee rebellion, Karen Bell, asserts that—as tensions rose with laborers’ refusal to sign contracts—it was the leaders of the Union League who initially rallied the Union Home Guard, a protective militia of and for formerly enslaved Blacks, which was created in 1866 to support those who refused to work. It is also entirely possible that affiliation with the Union League was merely a strategic choice, enabling those in Ogeechee to organize aboveground meetings. In February 1868, however, Major Middleton made it illegal for the League to meet on any of the plantations he controlled, which effectively sent the organizing body underground. From there, the conspiring that would lead to the rebellion the following winter began.89
Accounts vary as to how hostilities specifically manifested in the last week of December 1868, but it seems that for at least a year, hundreds of workers and refugees of the Ogeechee Neck (and probably throughout Chatham, Bryan, and Liberty counties) conspired about the actions that followed. These included setting up communication networks, accumulating weapons and materials,
