Peter H. Wood’s Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974) remains underrated for its time. Published contemporaneously alongside Fogel and Engerman’s controversial Time on the Cross and within a few years of groundbreaking works by historians Eugene Genovese, John Blassingame, Phillip Curtin, and Herbert Gutman, it breaks the mold that had, for decades, confined historians to cotton belt plantation studies in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Wood appears to have anticipated noted slavery scholar Ira Berlin’s celebrated article, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America” (1980) by several years. Berlin, surveying the body of scholarship on slavery, called for a shift from thinking of slavery as a singular, static phenomenon. Instead, he cited the importance of considering when and where as essential components of any slavery study. The explosion of slavery studies following Berlin’s prescriptions remains undeniable. However, Berlin appears to have alighted on an already developing trend. Wood’s prescient work not only connected to a nascent school of Atlantic history but also dominated its niche topic of rice production in the Carolinas for decades. He remains complemented and strengthened, but unsurpassed by Daniel Littlefield and Judith Carney, two historians who researched rice in South Carolina and West Africa.[1]
Relying heavily on demographics, studies of contemporary Gullah speech, newspapers, wills, letters, and other plantation records found across a number of archives, Wood argues convincingly that an often-skilled, independent, malaria-resistant, enslaved Black majority in South Carolina brought with them the technical knowhow for rice production. Mortality and morbidity still high due to the brutal conditions of slavery on rice plantations, enslavers shipped increasing numbers of West Africans to work. Large numbers of skilled Black people stoked fears among whites, provoking a mix of repression and “calculated benevolence.” (loc 7416) Wood’s steady accension to the ultimately unsuccessful Stono Rebellion and other false starts along the way buoy his exploration of white repression and Black resistance.
Wood’s work is prophetic. For example, as he explores Gullah speech as an example of cultural retention, he notes, “It was an outgrowth of [enslaved people’s] ingenuity, not of their ignorance, and it served its function well.” (loc 4265) Language scholars widely accept the premise that all languages perform the basic function of communicating meaning. Furthermore, maintaining multiple linguistic registers, such as code switching between African American Vernacular and so-called “Standard” English requires more, not less mental acuity. Wood’s examination of enslaved people’s rice production thus affirms Black people’s ingenuity long after colonial slavery and enters a modern linguistic debate long before its time.
The Black majority in South Carolina felled trees for masts, planted and produced rice, and lent their martial talents against the Yamasee Confederacy, without which, according to Wood, South Carolina may never have existed. (loc 2884) While Black people contributed to the success of South Carolina and, by extension, to the subsequent development of the U.S., this is not a contributionist history.[2] Enslaved people labored under duress, and Wood demonstrates the circumstances leading to a unique Black majority culture of survival and resistance.
[1] Littlefield’s argument that slave-owning rice planters were not only aware of, but actively pursued enslaved people of particular ethnic identities (based on their own conceptions of ethnicity, however poorly informed) and Judith Carney’s exploration of “agrarian genealogy” and gender do not substantially challenge Wood’s assertions. See: Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slave: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991 and Carney, Judith A. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. For excellent work on comparative historical linguistics and rice cultivation, see Fields-Black, Edda L. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. She argues, in addition to Wood’s thesis, that Luso-African traders provide researchers a window into previously unexplored stateless societies.
[2] Historian Robert Harris defines contributionist history as dealing mostly with individuals and less so with group action. In African American historiography, this led to an unfortunate focus on a few token individuals. See: Harris, Robert L. “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography.” The Journal of Negro HIstory 67 (1982): 115.