All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  WHITE RICE, BLACK BODIES

  Considering the physical object itself, what it is made of, who has touched it, and who has in turn been touched by it is a fitting starting point for considering the journey of this sack. But Ruth’s record offers another way into the story. Her threaded annotation pins the pivotal event of Ashley’s sale to a location and a time period, placing a dramatic change in the circumstances of this family within a larger geographical and temporal context: the elite American Southeast prior to the Civil War. The scene of the crime—the sale of a child away from her mother—was shaped by the environmental, economic, political, and social conditions that precipitated it. That is, the history of a particular place spanning nearly two centuries made the trade of a small Black girl not only possible but probable. There is a prologue to Ruth’s family story that traces back to colonial South Carolina, the darling of coastal planters, and its bustling, bedazzling seaport city: Charleston.29 Restarting our story then and there grounds the unfolding drama of the sack and its carriers in the historical evolution of Lowcountry slave society.

  If the old cotton sack is a synecdoche for American slavery, Charleston represents the same for the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century South during the long reign of rice and the bright rise of cotton, staple crops dependent on rich, abundant land and cheap, plentiful labor. Over a few short decades, people rendered as things by law became fundamental to the establishment of this colony and metropolis. As Angelina Grimké, a pampered daughter of South Carolina, explained in her anti-slavery appeal to Christian women in 1836: “Slavery in America reduces a man to a thing, a ‘chattel personal,’ robs him of all his rights as a human being, fetters both his body and mind, and protects the master in the most unnatural and unreasonable power.”30 Here in Grimké’s homeland, the horror of this inhumane transfiguration was submerged and sequestered in local culture. Charleston, South Carolina, was a place of startling contrasts and distorted reality. A pre-twentieth-century twilight zone, it was also “the South.”31

  Carolina was one of the oldest colonial settlements in the southern American mainland, and by the early 1700s, it had become the Blackest, the richest, and the most unequal.32 The ancestors of the Middleton family, on whose estate Ruth Middleton’s sack would wind up, contributed to this transformation of what had been Indigenous territory. When Edward and Arthur Middleton arrived in Carolina in 1678 and 1679 (successively), they surfed at the leading edge of an immigration tsunami. Their family hailed from London by way of Barbados, a small, sun-drenched island in the English West Indies (now the Lesser Antilles) where planters had built the richest colonial society in the whole of North America, based on “sugar and slaves.”33 Two decades after Puritans shaped their imagined Christian haven in Massachusetts (in the 1620s) and the first enslaved Africans were traded for food on the coast of Virginia (in 1619), English colonists landed on Barbados, where they attempted to grow tobacco and cotton before seizing on sugar as a core crop. With the support of investors back in England, early-arriving families with means acquired land and cheap labor, including the English and Irish poor who were also arriving in the 1630s and 1640s. Slavery was an early feature of Barbadian life. The first Englishman to arrive on the island brought Indigenous American as well as African slaves along with him.34 As the decades passed and the wealth and authority of the planter class grew, Barbadians preferred readily available and easily replaceable African slaves to Indigenous slaves and time-limited European indentured servants, whose numbers in the fields began to fall. An increasingly African labor force grew cane and processed sugar, a luxury commodity in the west European market. By the 1680s, Barbadians had the largest, most comprehensive, most lucrative slave society in all of the English colonies, and their financial success in sugar depended wholly and “existentially” on the degradation of human beings. This was “the most systematically violent, brutal and racially inhumane society of modernity,” as a leading Barbadian historian has put it.35

  Among English slaving colonies in America, Barbados was first, and Barbados was ruthless.36 The system, practice, and logic of slavery seeped into the very bones of island residents. Wealthy and middle-class English Barbadians legalized and tightly controlled the theft of labor from people they deemed unworthy of better lives. Violence was a key tool to extract this labor from unwilling, unfree darker-skinned people. By the time of Barbados’s initial growth in the 1630s and 1640s, justification for the racial debasement of dark-skinned Africans was already present in English thought, stemming from associations between darkness and sin rooted in religious belief, and between darkness and ugliness stemming from ethnocentric ideals of beauty, as well as from cultural stereotypes about African barbarity.37 Anti-Black racism had not yet formed in whole cloth. The knot of associated negative meanings that was “Blackness,” a biological racial essence viewed as immutable, heritable, and determinative, would take two more centuries to tighten and fully mature into the zealous arguments of nineteenth-century scientific racism and the vehement policies of twentieth-century American Jim Crow. But the degraded racial categories called “Negro” or “Indian” had already developed enough by the mid-1600s to propel the targeting of darker and culturally different people for opportunistic, economically driven maltreatment. Through the production, sale, and expansion of sugar on the backs of the mostly colored unfree, the English elite in Barbados and their financial investors in London found the golden formula that would not only launch this island into new economic heights but also inspire the founding and phenomenon of Carolina.

  Barbados was a small island with an economy based on agriculture and the stolen muscle power necessary to fuel it. Eventually, and especially as the wealthiest planters consolidated landholdings, arable land hit its natural limits. Anxieties about a shrinking land base and recent changes in colonial governance pushed many of the island’s planter elites to retire to England in the 1680s. Meanwhile, in London, a group of eight noblemen, most of whom had no Barbadian ties, obtained a charter from King Charles II for a massive tract of land on the southeastern coast of mainland North America. The “True and Absolute Lords Proprietors of Carolina,” as King Charles II loftily deemed them in 1663, held a royal decree that gave them total control over a vast territory that would later be divided into North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. As capitalist investors, the lords proprietors aimed to generate wealth out of this new domain. The majority of the proprietors would never personally set foot on American soil, but they could attract industrious colonists who would. Barbadians, a pretested set of settlers who knew how to build wealth and desired more land for their plantations, were a proprietor’s dream population.38

  From the bounty granted by King Charles (Carolina’s namesake), the lords proprietors apportioned, sold, and rented lands fanning far out from the coastline. Among the early takers were men who envisioned a familiar model of Caribbean plantation society that employed extreme brutality (whippings, mutilations, caging, executions) to keep an enslaved labor force in the fields.39 Joining them were artisans and indentured servants hoping to make new beginnings. Numbered among the lords proprietors, Barbadian planter Sir John Colleton organized the first mass-immigration wave from the island to the mainland. In 1670, two hundred Barbadians sailed across the Caribbean Sea and then farther north, to the coast of Carolina. Some 150 of these were Anglo elites with a “desire to resemble genteel landowners in the Old World, perhaps those from a lost age of paternal relations between lord and retainer.”40 The wealthy among the immigrants towed along their lifeblood of unfree labor: European indentured servants bound to them and captive African people owned by them. Even some farmers of middling means and a few working-class Englishmen arrived in Carolina with one or two enslaved Blacks in these early years.41

  By relocating to Carolina from Barbados, as well as Bermuda and England, in the late 1600s, the original English immigrants scored economically not once but thrice. Through a practice kno
wn as “headright,” initiated by the proprietors to settle the colony more quickly, land assigned to a recipient increased by 150 acres a “head,” or per family member, which for these calculations included any servant or slave the grantee imported.42 Unfree people in Carolina made their masters richer in land just by virtue of being forcibly transported there. Planters and farmers who attained land began with a foundation of wealth that rocketed once their servants and slaves began to work the lush soil to produce crops. The lords proprietors achieved their aim of attracting colonists to Carolina with lures of land and the promise that “every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro Slaves, of what opinion or religion soever,” as professed in the Fundamental Constitutions of the colony, penned by philosopher John Locke and Lord Proprietor Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury.43

  A map of the province of South Carolina showing all the rivers, creeks, bays, inlets, islands, roads, marshes, ferries, bridges, swamps, parishes, churches, towns, townships, and county, parish, district, and provincial lines, as well as inland navigation, soundings, and time of high water on the seacoast. Note the enslaved, partially clothed African figure carrying a burden, and the nobly rendered, feather-bedecked Indigenous man grasping a weapon. Native and Black people were integral to economic development in the colony of Carolina, and later the colony and then the state of South Carolina. The placement of these figures on either side of two hearty white male colonists suggests, further, that actual American Indian and African-descended populations, as well as racialized ideological notions about them, framed the existence and persistence of the settlement. Drawn and published in 1773, London. Library of Congress.

  The founding lords and their sponsored planter elites envisioned an agricultural treasure land, and the settlement in Carolina was set on a course to mirror Barbados, England’s most lucrative colony in the 1600s.44 By the late 1670s, Edward and Arthur Middleton and other younger sons of Barbados planters set out for Carolina to tap new fortunes in a place where the climate was similarly tropical and land was seemingly plentiful. The wealthy arrivals from Barbados brought along their sensibility of race- and class-based human subjection, of quick riches, aristocratic affectations, and English gentry mannerisms bent to the excesses of fantasy-island culture.45 Like their owners, many of the first enslaved people in Carolina were Caribbean, having been transported from the islands with colonists or purchased later through a thriving English intercolonial trade in people of African descent.46

  The Middleton family succeeded royally in South Carolina, along the lines of the Barbadian model. Edward Middleton’s son, Arthur Middleton, would later become a prominent political leader. In the 1720s, Arthur Middleton was among Carolina’s several Barbadian-born governors. Arthur’s son Henry Middleton would join another influential Carolina planter family when he wed Mary Williams, whose dowry included the house and land that became Middleton Place, the present-day national landmark. Henry Middleton was a South Carolina rice magnate whose lands totaled fifty thousand acres worked by eight hundred enslaved Blacks.47 With the founding of Carolina, “slavery, Barbados style,” had come to mainland North America.48

  Back on Barbados, English colonists had not been compelled to deal much with local Indigenous people. The Carib Indians of the region tended to populate the westerly islands of the Lesser Antilles, like St. Christopher, where in 1629 the English had banded with the French to attack and kill Carib residents seeking to defend their home.49 The lack of a large Native population on Barbados meant less resistance to European settlement, which was partly why the English had selected the island as their first major West Indian enterprise. The Indigenous enslaved whom Anglo-Barbadians (and Anglo-Bermudians) acquired tended to come from other places, including Virginia, New England, and later Carolina, following colonial wars for territory that led to the death and capture of thousands of Pequots, Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and many more.50 In contrast to Barbados, Carolina was widely populated and regularly traversed by scores of small Indigenous nations, which would prove to be both a problem and an opportunity for the English.

  When Carolina’s first Europeans settled west of the Ashley River in 1670, they squatted in an area occupied by the Kiawahs, Santees, Sewees, and several other communities of Indigenous people. The colonists then moved slightly southward and westward to the slipper of a peninsula tucked between the Ashley and Cooper rivers (named for Anthony Ashley Cooper). The colonists called this peninsula Charles Towne in honor of their king. But to secure the land beyond the writ of a distant monarch, they would have to contend with the more than twenty Native societies in the general vicinity—including the Cheraws, Cherokees, Congarees, Catawbas, Kussoes, Muskogees, Pedees, Santees, Savannahs (also known as Shawnees), Stonos, Sugerees, Waccamaws, Waterees, Waxhaws, and Yamasees, whose villages spanned the coast as well as the interior.51

  Seeing the advantage of commercial engagement, some among the English newcomers quickly commenced a brisk trade with Native people along the coast and inland. This trade, in which settlers exchanged finished English goods (like metal pots, guns, blankets, and beads) for animal hides (especially deerskins) that would be shipped back to England, as well as for Indian captives (taken by Native people from other tribes), helped to stabilize the colony in its infancy.52 It also eventually weakened Native groups who were drawn more tightly into the colonial orbit and came to rely on trade goods and the political and territorial advantage that being well positioned in the trade could afford them in relation to other Native nations. Taking advantage of this disruption, Carolina Indian traders would supply a precious “commodity” planters desired: human beings.

  As Indigenous groups did business with the English, they had shifting degrees of power in trade largely dictated by their location on the landscape, the size of their population, and the strength or weakness of their alliance with the English. The Catawbas, for instance, were a sizable community settled in the riverine interior where piedmont plains and hillsides converged. By the early 1700s they had become influential middlemen between South Carolina and Virginia traders and other Native groups, due to their large size and their strategic location on a geographical and cultural border.53 But the Catawbas were drawn into the center of a volatile trade that they could not control. Doing business with the English (who, it is important to remember, stockpiled and distributed firearms) became a means of political and economic survival for Native groups, yet it was not a reliable enterprise. The English shifted allegiances, sometimes subjecting peoples with whom they had once traded, like the Westos and the Yamasees, to personal attacks and military assaults. Those who traded heavily with the English became more subject to the colony’s demands, such as capturing and returning fugitive African slaves and providing higher numbers of Indigenous captives taken in intertribal raids. In 1719, local elites in the Carolina assembly, including convention president Arthur Middleton, the son of Edward Middleton, a member of a wealthy mercantile family who arrived from London by way of Barbados, revolted against proprietor rule by gaining control of the militia, choosing their own governor, and then petitioning for the Crown’s approval. As the proprietors’ authority gave way to a colony run by planters, efforts on the part of government officials to rein in English traders diminished.54

  In addition to trading with Native people, Carolina settlers increasingly traded for them, purchasing American Indians captured in conflicts between Native groups that the English themselves often spurred in order to produce slaves.55 The settlers’ appetite for cheap and plentiful labor was reinforced by Native people’s growing desire for English goods. Carolina men accepted slaves from any quarter, and Native men captured Indigenous people from other communities to acquire goods or in payment of debts accrued in trade. In 1675, just five years after the colony had been established, colonists were purchasing Native captives from the Sewees and other proximal tribes. Local colonial officials functioned in cahoo
ts with the Indigenous traders turned slavers, who sponsored attacks on Native groups, such as the Kussoes, who refused to vow allegiance to the colony, and looked the other way as English slave hunters surged into the Gulf Coast and parts of Spanish Florida in order to capture hundreds of Native people living in Catholic mission communities. Native bands who had once been trading partners of the English or who had no relations at all with the English could find themselves the victims of slave raids carried out by armed Englishmen or armed Indigenous enemies who had themselves become slave hunters to enter or sustain a trade relationship with the English.56

  Such was this whirlwind of multidirectional atrocities that approximately thirty to fifty thousand Indigenous people (poor documentation means the numbers cannot be exact) were captured or purchased by English colonists and their Native allies in the North American South before 1720. In Carolina during the lords proprietors’ era, 25 percent of enslaved people were Indigenous. By the second decade of the eighteenth century, Carolina had surpassed New England as the largest Indian slaving area, and many of the Native nations that had been present upon the arrival of the English were depleted, enslaved, or on the run. The Catawbas became a culturally composite community in part composed of survivors from smaller nations. Native men of fighting age captured in this storm of slaving were most often killed; women and, especially, children remained, consigned to generations of suffering. Snatched from their villages of origin and circles of kin, these women and youngsters (often orphaned) were cast onto rice and indigo fields alongside Africans collared from West and central Africa and the Caribbean islands.57