Every day people drive across the Santee Delta unaware of the bountiful natural resources and complex history surrounding them. “The Santee Delta: Waters and Voices” is a portrait of an area rich in natural and human history.
The waters of the Santee River have been the source for the rich and diverse ecosystems and associated wildlife of the Santee Delta. The unique characteristics of this estuary were the fertile grounds for the development of tidal rice culture and the utilization of an enslaved labor force to carry out the brutal and often fatal work.
As in his previous books, Raynor utilized his personal investigations on the water – via sailboat, canoe, outboard – and on the ground on foot. He expanded on the interview process utilized in past works to a wide-ranging and diverse oral history project.
Excerpts
Terror and Death in the Delta, Chapter 4.
It was an eventful night of May 27, 1821 on South Island in the northeastern corner of the Santee Delta. Several runaway slaves were stealing livestock from the plantation of George Ford. They had been in the neighborhood for some time, perhaps months, living in a secluded camp. Though they had local allies, on this night other slaves alerted Ford to the robbery. With the support of others Ford set out to stop the robbery, but in the confrontation he was shot and killed. His death initiated a period of terror and revenge in the Delta and beyond. An ongoing hunt for the leader and identified killer, the infamous runaway Joe also known as Forest, would take place over two years and cover a hundred miles along the Santee River.
Who were these runaways? The evidence is seen mainly through the lens of government documents and newspaper reports covering Ford’s murder and the hunt for Joe. At times false reports of his capture circulated. A proclamation issued by Governor Thomas Bennett outlining a reward for the capture of the two leaders provides a detailed description of the two men.
Jack, a short thick set, athletic man, black, projecting forehead, dark, heavy and lowering eyebrows. A terrible expression of countenance, about 5 feet 7 inches high; is a Virginian by birth, was brought to this State by a Mr. Sibley and is owned by a Mr. Fonberg of Lancaster district, who lives about fifteen miles from the village. Joe, is of an Indian complexion, has a scar on one of his cheeks, (believed to be the right) occasioned by the bite of a negro in a fight; a scar from the cut of a sabre, believed to be on his right arm; has shot marks in both of his legs, is in the prime of life, a very stout and athletic man, at least six feet high.
It is likely that these descriptions were partially obtained from another slave named Jack, who was owned by “Mrs. Horry” and who had been captured that night on South Island. This same Jack described an episode when Joe reportedly shot at “Mr. McClenan of Santee” (probably Archibald McClennan, Jr.) Jack disputed a report that the gun had snapped; instead McClennan’s horse had turned and took off.
Tale of the two great canoeists, Chapter 6.
One sailed north, the other rowed south, traveling on opposing journeys. The craft were likewise different, though both voyagers called their vessels “canoe”: one propelled by oars, the other by sails. One was “factory” built on the Hudson River, the other crafted from remains of a wooden ship and native woods of the Brazilian coast. The fourteen-foot paper canoe Maria Theresa carried only Nathaniel Holmes Bishop; the thirty-five-foot Liberdade was temporary home to Joshua Slocum, his wife and two children. Fourteen years separated these epic voyages by Bishop and Slocum, and their courses finally crossed on the South Carolina coast as they sought shelter overnight on Murphy Island.
Murphy Island has always been off the beaten path. This isolation prevails despite its incredible natural beauty: unspoiled beaches, ridges of maritime forest, vast wetlands, and the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the South Santee River, and numerous tidal creeks. It is a watery world – less than 10% of its 7,927 acres are upland – a reality contributing to the deaths of many enslaved people during the Great Gale of 1822 when the entire island was inundated by the hurricane’s storm surge. Looking beyond the island’s natural splendor lies man’s substantial impact: the transformation of the island’s abundant marshland through the construction of dikes, water control devices, and canals into the fields and hydraulic works required for rice cultivation, an immense feat carried out by the enslaved labor force. Even at the zenith of the Rice Kingdom, the island was still incredibly isolated; the South Santee River’s shallow outlet to the ocean was ill suited for commerce. Murphy Island during Reconstruction and afterward regressed even further into a backwater, and was a most unlikely place for visits from travelers, nevertheless two men on epic voyages.
The Commander of water, Chapter 2.
All of this enterprise was the result of marshaling the labor of a large enslaved work force. The requirements of rice culture development and the need for slave labor stimulated the increased importation of enslaved West Africans to the Lowcountry. The work was brutal, dangerous, and often fatal for the enslaved laborers. It is difficult to comprehend the extent of the exertion required to accomplish the tasks described above. I have dropped small trees with an ax, and grubbed out small stumps with hand tools. Yet from my efforts I only have a meager sense of the historic ordeal. Add into the rice swamps the heat and humidity of a Lowcountry summer day, the presence of biting insects filling the air and water moccasins under foot, and the lack of suitable clothing and footwear, and you may distantly imagine the deadly difficulties of the labor. Alston’s observation about “The work is slow and arduous, week by week, etc”, if considered over the long term by the enslaved, could easily have resulted in despair. How did people cope with this enslavement? How did they survive the deadly ordeal of transportation across the horrible Middle Passage? According to some historians, the foundation of African religious and cultural beliefs enabled the survival and transition to the rice plantations for many Africans.
They changed the river, Chapter 8.
It was a remarkable event late in 1941, when the final spillway gates of the massive dam on the Santee were closed, and the lakes began filling. This taming of a major river of the East was the culmination of a two and a half-year New Deal project employing a huge budget and an immense work force, and it would have significant impacts, intended and unintended, in South Carolina. The impoundment of the Santee would throttle the high level of freshwater discharge of the river, and would be felt in the Santee Delta. As one Delta landowner expressed, “They changed the river.”
The damming of rivers in the Santee watershed began long before the large hydroelectric projects of the 1930s and 1940s. These earlier projects were small-scale dams on Santee tributaries mostly used to power gristmills, some built as early as the late eighteenth century. The textile industry and its mills triggered another wave of dams. Mill builders constructed a dam and impoundment on the Enoree River in Greenville County to power a mill in 1820, and in the 1870s a more substantial rock dam replaced the original. These and other small dams would have had little influence on the Santee Delta.
