(Slave Row, Boone Hall Plantation, Mt Pleasant SC)
It is easier to learn and write about Charleston's Colonial and Revolutionary history than it is about the Plantation culture and the Civil War. But that is a big part of the history of South Carolina -- and our country -- and we wanted to try to learn a little bit more about it. Rice, indigo, and then cotton (especially after the invention of the Cotton Gin) were the main crops here. Plantations, such as Boone Hall, relied heavily on slave labor. Slaves were also the primary labor force within the city of Charleston, working as domestics, artisans, market workers or laborers. The population in 1820 was 23,000, with a black majority. In the early 1820s, the activities of slaves and even freed blacks were severely restricted because a massive slave revolt was discovered before it could be carried out.
We chose to visit Boone Hall mostly because we read about Joe McGill, a South Carolina historian with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Mr McGill, a descendent of slaves, is working to preserve still-existing slave cabins. Not as much attention has been paid to their preservation as to preserving the Plantation Homes.
Ten years ago, he slept in one of these cabins for part of a History Channel program. Since then he has sought out cabins and by sleeping in them called attention to his goal to encourage people to save the ones that are left. Some of these cabins, like the ones we visited, have been preserved or restored, but he has found others than have been completely neglected.
Mr McGill said "when it comes to slave cabins, you are talking about a part of history that some folks would rather forget. I come from a chain of thought that it is better to know than to forget." He believes that the cabins tell as much of a story as the plantation houses do.
We agreed and so we went to see Boone Hall. We skipped visiting the Plantation House (we have seen others during earlier trips) and spent most of our time visiting Slave Street. This is one of the only such streets still existing in America. These cabins are just a few yards away from the plantation house and would have been home to the house slaves or those who knew a special craft. Field workers would have lived in wooden cabins closer to where the crops grew. None of those have survived on this plantation.
These cabins have survived mostly because they are made of brick. Boone Hall Plantation had a thriving brickyard. Many of the homes we saw in downtown Charleston were built with bricks from here. These cabins were made with the rejects.
They're very small, one room cabins, about 10X20. They would have started out being home for single families, but as the plantation grew, they could have housed more than one family, up to two dozen people. In some of the cabins you could see how they had built lofts almost all the way across the house. It was such a hot day when we were there and easy to imagine how terribly hot it would have been to sleep there.
The Cabin row is a self-guided tour. Some are preserved so that you can see what they would have looked like in use. Others are made into mini-museums showing the history of Black people over the years (up through the Civil War, Reconstruction, sharecropping, the right to vote, the Jim Crow era, and the presesnt.)
Most people who served at Boone Hall were taken from West Africa, because rice was grown there and at first that was the primary crop for SC plantations. The Gullah people who live in South Carolina and Georgia are descendents of those slaves. The origin of the name is uncertain, but some think it is a corruption of the word "Angola" which is one African country in that area. Gullah people have a distinct culture which they have maintained for generations. It is based on fishing and basket-making, skills that have been handed down over the years. It is remarkable that they have been able to preserve family history and traditions for so long!
Gullah Joe, whose family has lived in the area for generations, gave a live presentation about the culture. By the time his presentation ended, we felt like we could almost speak in the patois. (For us, that ability lasted about 10 minutes.) But his stories of growing up in a Gullah community and the traditional stories and songs of his ancestors will stay with us. He sang some of the songs that were used to spread news among the slaves. (Singing was encouraged, conversations while working were not.) Some few escaped through directions given in the songs.
We agree that it is important to learn and remember this sad chapter of history, even though it might be easier to ignore it. We hope Mr McGill, the historian, finds and saves many more cabins so that moe people will be able to see what they are like. And we hope that Gullah Joe and others continue to pass their stories down to succeeding generations.
We felt honored that we were able to see and learn a little bit about this part of our Country's history.