♪ ♪ ♪ My dearest Pegie, you have probably heard that all of the seacoast of this and the neighboring provinces is one continued dead plain, entirely covered with wood except small spots where plantations are settled.

I know of no hills less than 80 miles from the sea.

♪ One may say of this province without exaggeration that the highlands are the poorest, and the low, the richest in the world -- George Ogilvie.

♪ ♪ >> It's mostly just a ruin now of a mill, a field, a plantation slave street -- a memory of another time.

♪ It's been said that South Carolina's Lowcountry slaves moved more dirt than Egyptian slaves moved rock in building the pyramids.

♪ It's easy to believe, seeing what's left of their work, here in a land where rivers mingle with the sea in a confused tangle of streams, marshes, and swamps.

♪ >> By the time of the Revolutionary War, the Carolina Lowcountry had been transformed to grow a crop that made Charleston, South Carolina, the richest colonial town in America, with twice the wealth of Philadelphia and New York.

From Cape Fear to the St. Mary's River, 16 rivers had ocean tides of at least 4 feet.

So for nearly 200 years, this 300-mile coastline, centered in South Carolina, was a thriving kingdom built with money, sweat, and thousands of lives -- the kingdom of rice.

♪ ♪ >> Carolina gold, a short, thick-kerneled variety, was considered the world's best, praised by the royalty of Europe and Asia, it was the single crop which defined the Lowcountry economy for nearly two centuries.

Rice was the ideal food for many foreign armies, and their preference was for Carolina gold.

♪ The one-sided nature of the trade can still be seen in many tidal rivers.

Some Carolina-bound vessels from Europe brought little but these ballast stones.

♪ >> George Washington, on his 1791 southern tour, was so impressed with the perfection of rice culture on the Waccamaw River, near Georgetown, he told a Charleston hostess that he had seen nothing in all his travels so justly entitled to be called a fairyland as the rice fields of the Waccamaw in the genial month of May.

♪ I know of no crop which, in beauty, can be compared with a crop of rice.

in my dreams, I still see the crops I used to grow.

and when I am awake, I am conscious of the fact that my dreams failed to do them justice -- Duncan Clinch Heyward, last Heyward family planter.

♪ Raising rice with slave labor was a splendid way of becoming rich.

There were nearly 500 planter families in rice in the 1790s.

But the most successful expanded or rounded out their holdings, so by 1850, just 22 families controlled 40% of the entire crop, which was then worth about $150 million.

by then, the only two ways to break into the rice-planting elite were to have a fortune to spend on a plantation or marry someone who did.

[ bell tolls ] ♪ Our gentlemen, having large fortunes and being very little disposed by the climate to the drudgery of business or professions, have full leisure for the attainment of polite literature.

In his temper, the Carolinian is gay and fond of company, easily irritated, and quick to resent even the appearance of insult -- Joseph Allston, governor of South Carolina, 1812.

♪ >> Southern aristocracy is based on a certain manner of knowing how to live -- Stephen Vincent Benét.

♪ Many of Charleston's finest homes were planter homes.

in 1853, when the best lawyers in Charleston earned no more than $9,000 a year and the best merchants $16,000, one planter's rice crop sold for $43,000.

Charleston had several large rice mills by 1850. business agents for the planters, called rice factors, made a handsome living from the comfortable profits of the trade.

>> The price of rice fell badly, and that depresses the spirits of the majority of the people here, whose chief object is to make rice to buy Negroes and buy Negroes to make rice -- Adele Petigru Allston ♪ Gentlemen met at one house or another and talked and discussed one, and only one, subject, and that was rice, rice, rice.

do, do talk of something else!

I am so tired of rice, rice from morning till night and day after day -- Francis Butler Leigh, Plantersville.

♪ Rice was an exacting enterprise, demanding skilled specialists.

Dozens of slaves on large plantations were carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, or suboverseers called "drivers."

>> While the rice kingdom was making a planter aristocracy, it was also creating a unique environment for its slaves, enabling them to keep their Gullah culture alive and have at least a bit of control over their own time and labor.

♪ ♪ Beginning in early April, seeds were often clayed by the slave women, mashing seeds into clay with their feet so they wouldn't float away during the first flooding.

This first flooding was called the sprout flow, which was drained after the grain sprouted.

In May, the sprouts were weeded and flooded again -- the point flow.

>> The cultivation of rice necessitated keeping the fields flooded with river water until it became stagnant.

And the whole atmosphere was polluted by the dreadful smell -- Elizabeth Allston Pringle.

>> Standing ankle- and even mid leg-deep in water which floats in oozy mud and exposed to a burning sun which makes the very air hotter than human blood, the poor wretches are in a furnace of stinking, putrid effluvia -- Arthur Young, British journalist.

>> Later, it was drained to half-cover the plants and remained there until the rice was strong enough to stand.

this was the long flow, after which the field was drained and hoed again.

♪ ♪ Then came the harvesting.

after drying on the stubble for a day or two, stalks were tied in sheaves and stacked in the field or barnyard in ricks about 7 feet wide, 20 feet long, and built as high as a man can pile -- J. Motte Allston, planter.

>> Getting the sheaves to the barnyard required loading them on flatboats.

Way down in the old tide river ♪ ♪ The old tide river is going to run tomorrow.

♪ ♪ Oh Lawd talking about the river.

♪ ♪ >> From early morn till late at night, the work went on -- J. Motte Allston.

>> Next was the threshing with flail sticks.

♪ >> T he use of the flail stick was slow work, especially as it could be carried on only during good weather.

When the grain was threshed off, it had to be gathered up and carried to what was known as a winnowing house.

In the floor of the winnowing house, a grating was placed through which the rice was dropped to the ground, so that if any breeze were stirring, it would blow away the light and unfilled grains and any short pieces of straw which were mixed with the rice -- Duncan Clinch Heyward.

>> The rice then had to be milled, from the late 1600s until the 1830s, millions of pounds of rice were grown and milled by hand.

Using a mortar and pestle, it took a slave an hour to pound one bushel of rice.

Finally, the crop was shipped out in barrels holding up to 20 bushels.

That's 700 pounds.

Just before the civil war, Carolina rice crops were averaging 11 million pounds a year.

Small coastal schooners came to river landings to ferry rice to the mills in Charleston, or they made their way to smaller plantation mills, up the mazes of rivers and creeks to others landings like this.

>> Rice fields had to be almost perfectly flat.

So when flooded, the water would be neither too deep, nor too shallow.

Dikes, canals, and smaller floodgates called "trunks" had to be created.

Trunks are square, wooden pipes.

ingeniously designed, and still used, their movable doors allow river water to flow into the fields at high tides and out at low tides.

(water trickles) ♪ ♪ Rice trunks constantly rotted, and the river constantly undermined embankments, usually with the help of alligators, muskrats, and snakes.

♪ ♪ [ hisses ] ♪ ♪ >> In the off-season, the dikes and ditches had to be drained, repaired, and maintained.

All this required that the men work in cold, chest-deep water and mud during the winter.

Using mud shovels, they dug canals up to 5 feet deep.

There was only one kind of labor which could do such harsh work in this disease-ridden country -- slave labor.

♪ >> Our own state is so thinly populated with Whites, and they are, from habit and the warm climate, so indolent and inert as to be entirely incapable of performing the necessary labor for the culture of our land, which is of the most laborious kind -- J. Motte Allston.

The possession of slaves renders South Carolina planters proud, impatient of restraint, and gives them a haughtiness of manner which, to those unaccustomed to them, is disagreeable -- Joseph Allston.

♪ ♪ The constitution of the imported African was generally wonderfully good, and he lived generally to a great age -- J. Motte Allston.

♪ No Johnny No Johnny No Johnny No ♪ ♪ I'm going to wait to see my Dinah.

♪ ♪ I'm going to wait to see my Lord.

♪ Slaves were a major investment.

In 1860, the average price for a slave in Charleston ranged between $600 and $1,200.

Today, that would be between $11,000 and $27,000.

>> There are complaints from all parts of the rice crops falling short, near Georgetown in particular.

Some of those big fellows there are coming out of the small end of the horn.

I shall be ready to make a dash at any sale of first-rate Negroes this winter and will go as far even as a purchase of $12,000 worth for Savannah River -- Charles Manigault, 1852.

>> Slave owners never used the word "slave."

It seemed rather vulgar, instead, "servant" or simply "the people" were the words planters used to describe their human property.

but the most preferred term was "Negro."

>> Rice-growing slaves worked by the task system.

Unlike the work gangs used in sugar or cotton, the rice slaves had an assigned amount of labor.

♪ Peas and rice Gonna plant that rice ♪ ♪ Peas and rice ♪ ♪ Gonna plant that rice ♪ ♪ Peas and rice ♪ ♪ Gonna pound that rice ♪ ♪ Peas and rice ♪ ♪ Gonna pound that rice ♪ ♪ Peas and rice ♪ ♪ Gonna pound that rice ♪ ♪ Peas and rice ♪ ♪ Gonna pound that rice ♪ ♪ Peas and rice ♪ ♪ Done Done ♪ ♪ Peas and rice ♪ ♪ Well Lawd ♪ ♪ Peas and rice ♪ >> For every kind of work, there was a set task.

And so, according to ability, there were full-, half-, and quarter-task hands.

When two tasks were accomplished in one day by any hand, he was not expected to work the next, and their tasks were never increased -- J. Motte Allston.

>> This system drastically reduced the cost of supervising the slaves and allowed the planters to be absent most of the time.

By the 1750s, the working of one quarter-acre was one task unit.

when hand-milling rice, a day's task was seven full mortars.

When clearing fields, prime hands were expected to clear 1200 square feet a day.

Before threshing machinery, the daily task of a prime hand was to hand-thresh 600 sheaves of rice a day.

♪ Little Sally Walker sitting on a saucer ♪ ♪ Crying and a-weeping over all she had done.

♪ ♪ Rise Sally rise, wipe your weepy eyes ♪ >> During the rice harvest, there could be no set tasks.

From when the harvest began, about the end of August, till it was over, five to seven weeks later, there was continual work from sunrise till late in the evening -- J. Motte Allston.

♪ ♪ >> O nly the African race could have made it possible or profitable to clear the dense cypress swamps and cultivate them in rice by a system of flooding the fields from the river, by canals, ditches, and floodgates, drawing off the water when necessary, and leaving these wonderfully rich lands dry for cultivation -- Elizabeth Allston Pringle.

(upbeat drumming and chanting) >> Salt-water slaves brought directly from Africa's windward coast, quickly became the slaves of choice for rice planters, because many of these slaves were already rice farmers themselves, as they still are today.

In ETV's 1989 documentary "Family Across The Sea," Gullah-speaking descendants of sea-island slaves from South Carolina and Georgia made a pilgrimage to Sierra Leone, where their ancestors were enslaved and forced to endure the infamous middle passage to America.

Here, in the villages of Sierra Leone, they discovered their rice roots.

♪ Before White slave traders came to seize them, some Africans were already enslaved here and working rice fields for tribal chiefs.

♪ The whole industry came from Africa.

The technology, the tools, the seeds, the diseases.

Here, flail sticks were first used to thresh, and African rice trunks were literally that -- hollow logs.

>> In colonial Charleston, Henry Laurens, later president of the Continental Congress, and Miles Brewton were among Carolina's most active slave traders.

Before the Revolution, there was no stigma to the slave trade, and anyone who suggested it was looked upon as a weak-minded sentimentalist.

>> After the Revolution, with a growing awareness that slaves were, in fact, human beings worthy of respect, the social status of slave dealers declined, and no respectable planter family would ever have invited one to dinner.

(classical music) >> When he died in the 1850s, Nathaniel Heyward was the owner of the greatest number of plantations -- 17 -- and the most slaves -- 2,400 -- in the history of the United States.

His father, Daniel, was one of the first rice planters.

Like most early successful planters, Nathaniel Heyward inherited both inland plantations and slaves, but he was one of the first to successfully make the transition from inland-swamp rice-growing to tidal irrigation of the crop.

♪ >> Heyward Plantations were in the Combahee River Area, just north of Beaufort.

by trial and error, and by studying the techniques of Dutch dike builders, planters learned to build dikes strong enough to hold back the rivers to avoid disastrous breaks.

♪ >> Honoring Dutch and German engineering expertise, Heyward gave his plantations names like Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Antwerp.

Tidal planters dramatically increased their slaves' productivity, producing twice the yield of the older, inland-swamp fields and doing it with half as many slaves per acre in this rich, alluvial soil.

♪ ♪ (water sloshing) (waves crash) >> The moon and its tides made it all possible.

♪ Salt water is heavier than fresh water, so its weight literally pushes a river's water upstream with every tide.

♪ Salt water kills rice, but beginning about 10 miles inland, every Lowcountry river had a salt point, beginning a stretch of about 20 miles of fresh-water tides.

Tens of thousands of acres were potential rice land if they could be cleared and the fresh water controlled.

But doing that was a Herculean task.

Much of the marsh in the Lowcountry today was once a rice field, and before that, a primordial cypress swamp.

♪ cypress trees 7 feet in diameter towered above the rich, alluvial soil.

The cane was 15 to 20 feet high, and the enormous cypress, gum, and ash trees were matted together with huge grapevines.

The work was slow and arduous, week by week, month by month, year by year, through fire and water, through felling and burning, the work goes on.

And when the sun goes down, it alone brings rest -- J. Motte Allston.

(playful classical music) >> By 1800, Georgetown was known as a land where the planters all made fortunes growing rice, if they worked hard and malaria didn't cut their lives short too soon.

♪ >> In Georgetown everything is fed on rice.

horses and cattle eat the straw and the bran.

Hogs, fowl, and chickens are sustained by the refuse, and man subsists upon the marrow of the grain -- Robert Mills, Charleston architect.

>> In 1839, Georgetown alone produced nearly half of America's rice -- over 36 million pounds.

♪ >> Four rivers converged into Winyah Bay at Georgetown -- the Waccamaw, Pee Dee, Black, and Sampit.

and just south of Georgetown lies the Santee delta.

This river system became the heart of the rice kingdom.

♪ >> Above Georgetown, on the Pee Dee River, lies Chicora Wood, Robert F.W.

Allston's home from his youth until his death in 1864.

Born into a fifth-generation Georgetown planter family, Robert Allston grew up amidst other planters heavily invested in thousands of acres of rice and hundreds of slaves.

He was, by all accounts, a controlling man.

One overseer didn't consider him a planter at all but believed his great success came from the power of his organization and the system of order he placed on everyone he controlled.

♪ >> Years after the Civil War, his daughter Elizabeth was able to regain control of Chicora Wood, and for several years at the turn of the century, she struggled to keep it a working rice plantation.

But by 1912, a series of devastating hurricanes and bad luck ended rice-growing here forever.

(music fades) >> There were two branches of the Allston family.

The single-l Alstons emerged after the Revolution, when Colonel William Alston, who fought under "The Swamp Fox," Francis Marion, dropped an "l" to differentiate himself from the other William Allstons in the family.

Both Alston branches were filled with rice planters.

♪ The flamboyant Colonel Alston, who dressed his coachmen in green velvet, was known as "King Billy."

He married Mary Brewton Motte in 1791 and moved into Charleston's Miles Brewton House.

♪ Old Caanan land is a happy land ♪ ♪ Old Caanan land is a happy... ♪ >> Joshua John Ward, owner of Brookgreen Plantation, was another king of the Georgetown rice planters.

In 1850, his 1,100 slaves on six plantations produced nearly four million pounds of rice.

>> A nd I need not remark that Georgetown and its neighboring rivers produce the best rice in the world.

we all look to them -- Charles Manigault, 1852.

(classical music) >> The descendants of Huguenot settler Gabriel Manigault have always been one of Charleston's most respected families.

Joseph Manigault had inherited slaves and fortune from his grandfather, Gabriel Manigault, but his nephew Charles didn't believe he was planter material.

>> Although highly educated and an accomplished scholar, he was little calculated to struggle with the clashing interests and rude realities of practical life -- Charles Manigault.

>> Marriage among the rice families was very common -- indeed, preferred.

>> In 1827, Charles Izard Manigault married his cousin Elizabeth, daughter of his other uncle, Nathaniel Heyward.

She was 16.

He was 30.

As a wedding present, Heyward gave them "silk hope," a plantation near Charleston.

With silk hope came its 126 slaves and $1,700 for a tour or Europe.

>> Three years later, while again touring Europe, Charles, Elizabeth, and their son posed for this portrait in Italy.

like many planter families, the Manigaults loved extended European travels.

Charles spent 14 years of his life there.

When in Charleston, French was the preferred language of the family.

Charles liked to boast that their butler had picked it up while listening to their table talk.

>> When he wasn't traveling, Charles Manigault was an avid planter who prided himself on his own systematic habits and his capacity to calculate results.

Wanting to take up the cheaper, fresher, and more productive lands in the Savannah River, he bought Gowrie Plantation, 8 miles from Savannah.

He rounded out Gowrie with two other plantations over the years, and, by 1854, had a full square mile of rich rice lands.

Then he made Louis, one of his six children, the manager of Gowrie.

This plantation has, in 14 years, paid for itself twice and is going to pay for itself a third time.

By placing only $20,000 down, I've been able to establish an annual income of, say, $15,000 -- Charles Manigault.

♪ >> From mid-May until the November frost, no White person could remain on the plantation without danger of the most virulent fever, always spoken of as "country fever."

This was the sickly season, when deadly diseases like malaria and cholera took a heavy toll of human life in the flooded fields and swamps of the Lowcountry.

♪ Black adults withstood the malaria and intestinal diseases better than the Whites, but they were far from immune, and their children were horribly affected.

♪ >> Child-mortality rates in 19th-century America were terrible.

28% of America's free children died by age 15, and the children of rice slaves died in even greater numbers.

Death especially stalked Gowrie's slaves.

forced to live on a Savannah River island with its muddy currents as their only source of drinking water, 300 children died during the 28 years before the Civil War -- a staggering 90% of Gowrie's child slaves.

The settlement has been very disagreeable, owing to the water oozing through the bank and keeping the ground under the Negro houses soft and wet, which emits an effluvia which is certainly poisonous -- Thomas Skinner, Gowrie overseer, 1851.

Some white overseers, raised in the neighboring Piney Woods, could also survive, but mainly the slaves were alone during most of the growing and harvest seasons, left to be managed by other slaves -- the suboverseers, the drivers.

(moaning) >> The environment was brutal -- extreme heat, humidity, insects, snakes, alligators, disease.

By the 1830s, planter families fled to higher ground, to summer communities they created, like Legareville on Johns Island near Charleston, painted here in the 1850s.

other summer places included Walterboro, near Combahee River, and Georgetown's Plantersville.

Still others went to barrier islands, where sea breezes kept them free of the unhealthy air of the swamps.

♪ ♪ >> W e always spoke of our summer home on Pawley's Island as "the beach," as though this were the only beach in world -- J. Motte Alston.

>> T he Alston cottage on Pawley's Island was only 4 miles to the east of Chicora as the crow flies but was only to be reached by going 7 miles in a rowboat and 4 miles by land.

To me, it has always been intoxicating -- that first view each year of the waves rolling and the smell of the sea and the brilliant blue expanse.

but I was born there, and it is like a renewal of birth -- Elizabeth Alston Pringle.

(waves crashing) >> House servants, of course, accompanied the planter families to the beach.

Here at the Labruce-Lemon cottage, their slave houses still stand.

♪ ♪ >> Plowden Weston was reputed to be one of the most educated and kindest slave masters on the Waccamaw neck.

This house, now an inn on Pawley's Island, was built in the late 1850s by Weston's finest carpenter -- a slave, Renty Tucker.

Several years earlier, Weston's sent him and a young apprentice to England to learn the fine points of their trade.

Renty Tucker was in high demand.

He was constantly contracted out to other planters.

He and his wagon were a common sight in Georgetown for decades.

>> Many privileged slaves like Renty did exist, but on a carefully calibrated scale of privileges, all designed to motivate them while keeping tight control over their lives.

>> An essay called "The Successful Planter," published in "The Southern Agriculturalist Journal" of 1832, described one planter's technique for establishing discipline.

>> He ordained that the cook should have breakfast at a suitable hour, to which the people were to be punctual in attendance.

The hour was declared by the sound of the horn, as it was for their evening meal.

It was so regulated that the workers always had ample space for completing their tasks before the call.

If anyone had not finished at the appointed hour, he was disgraced and went without his dinner for that day.

In the early 19th century, South Carolina had virtually no public schools, and private schools were centered in just a few cities and towns.

so children of planters were tutored, often by tutors imported from New England or Europe.

In the 1830s, state law forbade slave to be taught to read, although many planters' wives ignored it.

♪ >> On the seashore in 1839, there was a school kept by a German, and I engaged a room and board there.

when the professor would have one or two spare hours, he would come to my room, where he would smoke his pipe and I would renew my acquaintance with Virgil, Horace, and such ancients as I thought would be pleasing, by way of rounding up the education of a rice planter.

♪ >> I built a canoe out of a cypress log and, with a tiny sail and awning, fished during the morning in north inlet.

On my return one day, my father said to me, "I watched you as you sailed along on the rough water through the telescope."

This telescope was the same one General Beauregard used to watch the bombardment of Fort Sumter from my Uncle Charles' residence on the east battery in April 1861 -- J. Motte Alston.

>> Charles Alston's house still has the telescope.

besides war, other destructive calamities have been seen through its lens -- hurricanes.

(rain and wind hitting the window pane) >> Hurricanes from the sea and floods from the mountains, called "freshets," were always the wild cards of rice-planting.

the damage they caused ranged from minor to total devastation.

♪ In 1813, swollen rivers in Georgetown swept away one-third of the rice crop.

In the hurricane of September 1822...

The courthouse sustained serious injury.

The sheriff's office had every window and door blown in.

many tiles had been blown from the roof of the bank.

120 Negroes and 5 whites drowned on the Santee delta's north island alone.

the total loss of life was nearly 300 people -- editor, the Winyah Intelligencer.

(wind whistling) rice weevils, worms, and grubs were always problems in the growing season.

and though blackbirds and crows ate insects, their fondness for grain usually outweighed their help.

And ducks -- even though they often caused trouble, too, nipping at newly planted rice -- at least provided planters with tasty meals.

the English duck came in such great flocks that a single shot has been known to kill 60 on the wing -- Elizabeth Alston Pringle.

but it was the ricebird -- the bobolink -- which came to the rice fields during their spring and fall migrations... in flocks so dense as to cast a shadow on the green and golden fields just bending with the long ears of grain -- J. Motte Alston.

About the end of August, the ricebirds began to swarm over the rice, sucking out all the grain when in the milk stage.

this necessitated the putting out of bird minders in great numbers, who shot them as they rose in clouds from the rice at the least noise -- Elizabeth Alston Pringle.

Some planters thought that putting bird minders in their fields and keeping the birds moving by constant musket firing would decrease the damage.

but I have observed that the ricebirds' little craws were just as full when the sun set as they would have been had they not been molested -- Duncan Clinch Heyward.

♪ Rice-growing was always complex and risky.

Wanting to get his sons in the business, Charles Manigault more than doubled Gowrie's size.

Then a series of epidemics, measles, dysentery, and cholera -- swept the plantation in five of the next seven years, killing 144 slaves.

With 800 to 1,000 Negroes, the care of so many was far more arduous than you would imagine.

There were houses where children were cared for during the day when their mothers were at work and a hospital for the sick.

Both were usually supervised by the mistress of the plantation.

Slavery furnished the most reliable labor, but the responsibilities were burdensome -- J. Motte Allston.

It's the slaves who own me -- morning, noon, and night.

I'm obliged to look after them, to doctor them, and attend to them in every way -- planter's wife.

Masters expected more than obedience -- they expected faithfulness, which meant duty, respect, and love.

In an age where White men and women could be whipped for their crimes, lashings were a part of slave discipline, too.

When Charles Manigault felt that a slave needed to be whipped, he preferred to have it done by another slave, or in black holes, like the Charleston workhouse, or the Savannah jail.

In January, you can put big hector and short jack in the savannah dark hole for a month.

This should put them in a proper state of mind to resume their plantation duties in February -- Louis Manigault.

The New Orleans slave market was the ultimate sanction.

the threat of banishment there usually struck fear into the most belligerent slave.

Yet the problem of slave discipline was always a paradox.

Planters knew they profited from having strong, healthy slaves, but neither the carrot nor the stick could create the loyalty they craved.

The protection which slavery gives to the Negro is the most humane provision that can be made for him, at least for the present -- Edward Pringle.

Slaves developed their own system of resistance through theft or petty vandalism and by working inefficiently whenever possible.

Negroes are cunning enough to remember that while they are harvesting, they will have to thresh and will tie the smallest sheaves they can.

About 10% of Gowrie's milled rice seemed to be disappearing.

It took Stephen, the slave miller, 22 or 23 bushels of threshed rice to fill a barrel.

which, in my judgment, is too much.

It ought not to take even 20 bushels per barrel, and frequently less.

I can never think that Stephen and the other millhands act perfect honest with the rice in the mill -- Charles Manigault.

♪ The Negroes were a most contented people.

They were well cared for, bountifully clothed and fed, and housed in frame buildings with ample brick chimneys -- J. Motte Alston.

When they became too old to work, they were practically pensioned, being fed and clothed just as they had always been.

They continued to live in the houses they had occupied all their lives -- Duncan Clinch Heyward.

The hard reality of slavery had little to do with kindness and benevolence.

Master and slave lived in different worlds.

The paternalist myth grew out of the need to morally justify this system of exploitation.

♪ Adam in the garden picking up leaves.

(8x) ♪ ♪ ♪ After Charleston's Denmark Vessey, a free African-American, was hanged for leading his failed slave rebellion, this menacing ironwork, known as a cheval-de-frise, appeared as a permanent fixture on the Miles Brewton House fence -- a monument to White Charleston's antebellum insecurities.

♪ Mary Motte Allston was born here in 1803 and, in 1822, married William Bull Pringle.

over the next 60 years, they lived here and raised 13 children.

In 1860, the Pringle family of six living here had a household staff of 32.

11 men, 8 women, and 13 slave children maintained the house and served the family.

The Pringles weren't the only planters with more servants than work for them to do, but the status of an entourage of house servants was a pleasure few planters could deny their families.

one cotton planter on Edisto Island kept a fire boy, whose main job was to bring live coals to the master whenever he wanted to light his pipe.

♪ Ain't got time...(5x) ♪ ♪ Ain't got time...(5x) ♪ >> It was considered rather uncivilized for servants and masters' families to sleep under the same roof, so separate slave quarters were built on the Charleston properties.

The Aiken-Rhett House has the largest ones left, where generations of slaves and their freed descendants lived while constantly attending to wants, needs, and whims of planter families.

Slave badges, like these, were worn by hundreds of Charleston's skilled slaves contracted out by their owners.

the size of these badges shrank over the years, perhaps as awareness grew that slavery's time was shrinking as well.

Planter families, like the Pringles, often were in debt -- not from earning too little, but by spending too much.

Besides extended tours of Europe and summering on the barrier islands or in the mountains of Carolinas and Virginia, Newport, Rhode Island, was a popular destination.

>> There is to be a great fete this afternoon at Newport, given by Mr. Tweemore.

He has issued 3,000 or 4,000 invitations.

The ice cream is in the form of the statues of General Jackson and General Washington, each on horseback as large as life -- Mary Alston Pringle.

South Carolina planters had been enjoying Newport since before the Revolution.

By the 1830s, Newport's southern colony had become a fixture in Newport's social life.

It was the wealthy southern planters who first began to transform Newport from a shabby new England intellectual retreat to the playground of the truly rich.

Henry Middleton, former U.S. Minister to Russia, known in Newport as "Russian Henry," owned large tracts of land in the city.

♪ >> Middleton Plantation, on the Ashley River, south of Charleston, now a museum, remains today as one of the most elegant examples of rice-plantation life.

The landscaped gardens, adjacent to its small rice mill, inspired other planters to create gardens of their own.

♪ For six months in the year, this country would be hell upon Earth, especially at night, were it not for pavilions of gauze, which only differ from curtains in having no divisions -- being all of one piece and long enough to trail on the ground to prevent mosquitoes from getting under, which they frequently do, withstanding all our precautions to prevent them.

And then, like Macbeth, "they murder sleep" -- George Ogilvie.

♪ ♪ During much of the Civil War, rice production continued unabated on many plantations, especially in the Georgetown area.

but the demise of the confederacy doomed the rice kingdom.

rice had enriched Charleston, and with its passing, the city descended into a long economic slumber.

♪ ♪ After Emancipation, planters couldn't pay people to do all the agonizing work the fields demanded.

Growing and harvesting was hard enough for sharecroppers, but the hard winter work of maintaining the ditches and dikes was simply too much.

There were other reasons, too -- The appearance of larger, mechanized operations thriving in Texas and Louisiana, and a run of devastating hurricanes at the turn of the century.

The fertility of the soil gradually lessened after years of planting with little or no fertilizer, and the level of the field sank slightly from year to year.

It's been estimated that through a period of a century and a half, the rice fields of South Carolina and Georgia sank fully a foot, and perhaps more -- Duncan Clinch Heyward.

When the Union army permanently took Beaufort and Port Royal away from the confederacy early in the war, many slaves escaped to freedom.

♪ In June of 1862, when Hector, his most trusted slave, went with the Yankees, Charles Manigault wrote... this war has taught us the perfect impossibility of placing the least confidence in the Negro.

In too numerous instances, those we esteemed the most have been the first to desert us.

It has now been proven that those planters who were the most indulgent to their Negroes when we were at peace have, since the commencement of the war, encountered the greatest trouble in the management of this species of property.

In the war's final months, rice plantations from Savannah to Charleston suffered heavily at the hands of the Union army, led by General William Tecumseh Sherman.

♪ Here, his 17th Corps is crossing the South Edisto River on pontoons.

We must all turn amphibious, for the country is half underwater -- William Tecumseh Sherman.

Sherman never went to Georgetown, so planters there fared far better.

for those plantations which did survive, the period of reconstruction after the war turned their world upside down.

♪ The conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were laboring under a delusion.

I believed these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters.

but if that were so, why did they desert him in the moment of his need and flock to an enemy whom they did not know?

-- Augustin Taveau, planter.

After their slaves ransacked Chicora Wood in 1864, R.F.W.

Alston's wife, Adele wrote... the conduct of the Negroes in robbing our house, store room, meat house, et cetera, and refusing to restore anything shows you they think it right to steal from us, to spoil us, as the Israelites did the Egyptians.

>> The Freedman's Bureau, established by the occupying union army, mediated between planters and their laborers, the freed slaves.

♪ By the laws of the state, you can't dismiss from your plantation this intolerable nuisance -- a laborer who will not work -- after he has made a contract with you.

If you take him to a trial justice, it costs you $5 to $10, and the delinquent is ordered to do better, which he never does -- Planter, 1872.

♪ Under the laws of most of the southern states, ample protection is afforded to tenants and very little to landlords -- "The Southern Agriculturalist Journal."

♪ Most planters finally won legal claim to their lands, but without sustainable rice crops, taxes could not be paid, and many plantations were eventually lost to banks and other creditors.

♪ In the 1880s, the Santee Gun Club was created, an exclusive 15,000-acre preserve whose membership was limited to a maximum of 30 men.

♪ President Grover Cleveland was a frequent guest here.

It was a sign of the future.

By the 1920s, when virtually all of the rice kingdom lay fallow, it was reinvaded by a new wave of Yankees -- rich ones.

♪ By the eve of World War II, this reoccupation was complete, with dozens of northern industrialists with names like DuPont, Ford, Vanderbilt, Guggenheim, and E.F. Hutton.

♪ They came to hunt.

The old rice fields had become wonderful habitat for waterfowl.

♪ The log of one hunting trip in 1921 recorded that 15 hunters killed 305 duck of 13 different species.

♪ Within a few decades, the rice kingdom had been transformed into private wildlife reserves and exclusive hunting clubs.

♪ (shot gun firing twice) Many of the vast pine forests adjoining the rice fields were bought by timber companies.

several private plantations have replanted stands of longleaf pine, the valuable, majestic, but slow-growing tree that once covered 22 million acres of the southeast.

Coastal development has exploded in the past few decades.

The metropolitan Charleston area has grown at this pace not in a century or two, but just in the last 25 years.

♪ This hyper pace of urban growth is a serious threat to the survival of the Lowcountry's character, and a coalition of conservation and hunting groups have combined with private and public landowners to form land-preservation coalitions to save what remains of the rice kingdom's legacy.

A great deal of the rice kingdom is still a wetland today, and much of it has become public land, to be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone.

♪ The Ace Basin, the estuary of the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers, which lies between Beaufort and Charleston, is a model of successful preservation efforts.

Similar efforts are underway in the Georgetown and Charleston wetlands.

♪ This land, once a kingdom of rice, is a natural treasure.

With vigilance, its beauty and its history may remain our legacy.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪