Two colonial-related offerings related to Maryland and South Carolina make up the #stampoftheday for Saturday, May 23.

The first is a 3-cent stamp, issued on this day in 1949 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the founding of Annapolis, Maryland. Established by Puritan settlers who were exiled from Virginia in 1649, the location was first named Providence. However, the stamp’s design, which pictures a map of the region, marks the city’s location with the words “First Settlement” since the term “Providence” was no longer used.

[Perhaps they also didn’t want people to think that the Post Office had mistakenly put the capital of Rhode Island in the middle of Maryland.].
The Puritans are represented on the stamp in the image of a boat headed to the new settlement. Also shown on the stamp is the coat of arms of Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore – the first proprietor of the Maryland colony.

The second offering is (loosely) connected to the fact that on May 23, 1788, South Carolina became the 8th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. While that milestone was commemorated in a 25-cent stamp issued in 1988, I’m marking it here with a 2-cent stamp issued in April 1930 to mark the 260th anniversary of the founding of the Province of Carolina and the 250th anniversary of the establishment of a settlement near what is now Charleston, which soon became a bustling port thatt was the wealthiest city south of Philadelphia.

The center of the stamp is an oval with a picture of a settler and a Native American in the center. Just outside the oval are small images of rice and indigo two of the main products produced by colony. That history is worth recounting (at least I think it’s worth recounting…)

Until relatively recently, historians generally gave Europeans primary credit for originating rice production in South Carolina. During the past few decades, however, scholars have amassed evidence indicating that slaves, who had grown rice in Africa, were the prime movers in the earliest days of rice cultivation in the colony.
Regardless, it is clear that rice cultivation relied on slaves and that rice cultivation, which is arduous under any circumstances is arduous, was particularly hard when it is cultivated under “wet” conditions, as was the norm in South Carolina by the early 17th century. Building the plantations required draining, clearing and leveling swamps, and building elaborate irrigation system needed to manage the tidal flows in the rivers that provided irrigation for the crop. The day-to-day farming was extremely arduous. And, of course, often fatal mosquito-borne diseases were common.

Not surprisingly, few “free” white laborers were willing to do the work. So plantation owners turned to slave labor.

Growers, who exported virtually all their rice, found a market for the crop in northern Europe where use of rice was growing because it was a cheap and versatile food source. By the early 1700s, the Carolinas (mainly South Carolina) were exporting about 268,000 pounds a year. By the start of the Revolutionary War, the Carolinas, which were shipping more than 66 million pounds to northern Europe, had displaced Italy as northern Europe’s primary source of rice. (Most of this came from South Carolina but a small share came from the Cape Fear region in North Carolina.)

While the American rice industry continued to expand in the early 1800s, it faced an increasingly competitive market because European merchants increasingly were importing large quantities of cheaper Asian rice, which by mid-century dominated European markets. South Carolina’s growers responded, in part, by increasing sales to Caribbean islands, such as Cuba, where most of the arable land was being used for sugar cane plantations, also worked by slaves. However, the Civil War, the collapse of the export trade, and, after the Civil War, increased competition from domestic growers, decimated South Carolina rice farmers. By the early 1900s, the state was producing about three percent of what it grown before the war.
The indigo trade, which also boomed before the Revolution, collapsed even faster than the rice trade. In the mid 1700s, planters began cultivating indigo, which was appealing both because it could be cultivated on land that wasn’t suitable for rice and also because, like rice, it could be grown on plantations worked by slaves. In 1747, the colony exported 138,300 pounds of indigo dye, worth £16,803 sterling to England, which previously had mainly relied on dyes produced in the West Indies. But by 1775 South Carolina was England’s primary source of the dye, shipped 1.1 million pounds, valued at £242,395 sterling. (Almost all of this went to England, but some went to northern colonies.)

The Revolutionary War disrupted this trade (although the Continental army used Carolina indigo to dye some of its uniforms.). While post-war indigo production initially rose to about three quarters of its pre-war levels, it declined sharply because England turned to its colony in India for indigo. In response, Carolina’s indigo planters shifted quickly to growing cotton. In fact, by 1802 indigo was no longer listed among Carolina’s exports.

…and there it is, more than you ever wanted to know about Providence, rice, and indigo.

Stay safe and be well!