A man making repairs to a woman's cabin, St. Helena, South Carolina, 1905, courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Through these labor reports, portraits of Black communities in the Lowcountry after a disaster emerge. Work crews prioritized the most vulnerable in their communities first: they tended to the homes and gardens of “widows and the infirm” before their own. They also worked for the collective good in how they cleared ditches. Committeemen consulted with adjoining plantations and farms to ensure that “the ditching of one piece of land should not flood his neighbor.” Indeed, this infrastructure improvement drew upon areas of expertise particular to the Lowcountry. Men who had experience in engineering rice fields along tidal rivers designed the ditches, dams, and gates to be as effective as possible in draining farmland.

Black communities also advocated for themselves by negotiating with the Red Cross when they needed more rations or equipment. Lewis Roza, a Haitian-American living on Port Royal Island, headed a crew of twelve men. In just two weeks during March 1894, his crew cleared 12,723 feet of ditches on Otaheite Place. Roza’s impressive work stood out to Hubbell, who noted to the Red Cross headquarters that Roza “has good ideas of farming” and also acknowledged that Roza needed more tools and more time. Roza followed up with a letter of his own to the Red Cross. “of the labourers in the ditch begs to give them a Hoe a piece,” Roza wrote, because “they can’t realize money to buy any” and yet had more ditching to complete. The Sea Island men needed and wanted to rebuild their homes and fields, and they saw the Red Cross as their lifeline to access the tools that the storm had washed away.

Rice field worker ditching at Mulberry Plantation, Berkeley County, South Carolina, 1916, courtesy of Historic Charleston Foundation. 

Friday Smalls, the committeeman from Kean’s Neck on the mainland, similarly made requests of the Red Cross. He and his men had completed three ditches, one of which was 13,230 feet long. Those were, he wrote to Barton, “great help to the crop,” but more ditches needed clearing. Ditches, after all, would help prevent the fields from flooding again. His men needed more tools, more time, and more clothes, because “they have to work in mud an water.” Joseph Mcnight of Port Royal Island called the Red Cross to account. The Red Cross, he said, owed his crew rations for a canal they built and had yet to send rations for “four days work sometimes ago for 7 hands.” After all, “all they have to depend upon is what they work for you.” No other aid was forthcoming: not from the state or federal governments, not from local employers, and not from white landowners.

Using rations and tools from the Red Cross, African Americans completed work that had long-lasting effects on their ability to make a living and produce bountiful harvests. Before the hurricane, few Black sea islanders, whether they owned land, could spare the time to engage in the laborious, communal work needed to clear ditches. “The people through whose land these ditches run, consider that they are of more value to them than if they had received $100 cash,” P. W. Washington from the Retreat plantation on Port Royal Island told Hubbell. The Reverend D. C. Washington of St. Helena Island headed up a crew that dug a mile-long ditch near the small town of Frogmore: “Never was so splendid dug before nor since the war,” he commented, suggesting that labor done by and for Black communities of their own volition produced results superior to those extracted under the force of slavery. Ditches, as humble as they may seem, were in fact the basis of all successful agricultural efforts in the Lowcountry. The time and resources to keep them clear and to dig new ones was about as valuable as anything else that the Red Cross provided to the storm sufferers. 

The work crews continued well into the summer, fixing homes, digging ditches, and planting crops. On Eustis Plantation on Ladies Island that operated as a farm after the Civil War ended, George Barnwell oversaw a work crew through June 1894. There, the crew cleared eight ditches, which ranged in length from ten to forty-eight acres long and were around three feet wide and two feet deep. They cleaned up a three-mile-long road, presumably the main avenue into and out of Eustis, and built a fifty-foot-long dam. The crew rebuilt the homes of Tom Drayton, Nat Simons, Levi Holmes, and Lincoln Washington and repaired the houses of ten others, including several owned by women including Clarissa Haywood, Rachel Bell, Vilot Armstrong, and Daphne Right. Barnwell approvingly recorded what he and his crew had done. “The improvement of the land that was redeem and put in good order,” he wrote in fluid cursive, was “worth about three thousand dollars $3000 including the houses.”

The Red Cross’s aid could provide more than just a recovery from the destruction of the hurricane, but potential protection from future storms of political and economic oppression. The material assistance they provided gave African Americans an opportunity to restore their property and communities to as good a condition as they had ever been in, not just as they had been before the storm hit. This was a serious responsibility for the Red Cross, and African Americans urged the Red Cross to grasp the gravity of the moment through their requests, thanks, and recordkeeping of their labor. For African Americans on the coast, the Red Cross recovery effort meant not just relief from the hurricane but also relief from the unremitting assault on their autonomy from white landowners, bosses, and politicians. 

But white landowners’ reaction to the Red Cross’s support of Black communities would, as Barton and her Red Cross volunteers soon found, demonstrate just how serious the racial divisions were in the Lowcountry.