First page of a Petition signed by residents of Tomotley, South Carolina, 1894, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“The white farmers is pregeded agence the poor colored people & do not want any society to help us,” wrote Black farmworkers from Tomotley, South Carolina, to Clara Barton, on April 3rd, 1894. In a blistering epistle, penned by Cornelius Simon Green and signed by twenty-four other male and female heads of households, they excoriated the working conditions that white landowners foisted upon them. They adopted six “resolutions” that clarified how white landowners were attempting to use the deprivations of the hurricane to force them into increasingly exploitative labor arrangements. This striking document was one of seven petitions that African Americans living on the rice plantations south of the bustling railroad junction of Yemassee sent to the Red Cross appealing for continued and additional assistance. The petitioners urged the Red Cross to consider the implications of disaster relief: not only could rations stave off hunger, but they could also grant rural African Americans a greater degree of control over their labor conditions.

The first order of business of the petitions was to dispel the white landowners’ claims that African Americans were unwilling to work. “We was informed that the contrey Farmers had Reported to you saying that we wont not work for them even when they offered Wagers that we are to lazy to work for our living,” Black riceworkers from Pocotaligo wrote on March 24th. Another petition, signed by twenty-five heads of household from Coosawhatchie on March 28th, repeated a similar refrain: “we lernt that Parties have sent in report that we will not work for No Price on account of Being seplied by the Red Cross that statement sir we denie.” The petitioners clamored in defense of themselves and their work ethic, and they turned the high beam of scrutiny against the white landowners. The landowners had lied to maintain their power, but they had miscalculated how Black farmworkers would respond.

An article with suggestions regarding aid distribution for hurricane survivors, Abbeville Press and Banner; Abbeville, South Carolina, September 20, 1893, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Less than a month after the hurricane struck, white South Carolina newspapers published articles about the storm, including advising the state legislature to limit aid distribution to only those who would work for the aid.

First, the landowners were apparently not offering work at the volume that they claimed. The petitioners from Coosawhatchie argued that “There is very little work going on in our Neighbourhood not enough to seply one forth of the People.” Multiple people wrote explaining that they had directly requested work from Gregorie and other white landowners and had been turned away. “The little work tha thte planters does on this plantation is so smoll that the do not give employment to not more than 12 person in one week,” the Tomotley petitioners explained. 

When the white landowners did hire farmworkers, the pay was abysmal. The Coosawhatchie contingent informed the Red Cross that the planters “agree to pay the labourers only 40 cts per day and not all cash”—a far cry from the seventy-five cents to a dollar per day that the white landowners had claimed they paid. One planter, John Frampton, did offer fifty cents each day, but that was the exception, and he “dose not furnish but very little labor.” Eleven petitioners from Mazine Hill observed that women were paid less than men, earning only thirty cents a day to the forty or fifty cents that men made, arguing that landowners had “willfully exaggerated” wages. The Tomotley petitioners declared that “There is nothing for the mass of the por people to do,” and what work did exist was underpaid. They accused landowners of paying workers not in cash but in “white paper” that could only be exchanged at a single planter-owned store that “charges so high for there goods” that it doubled items’ usual market prices.

(Top) Sea Islanders harvesting sweet potatoes, and (bottom) Sea Islanders preparing rations for Lady's Island, from Scribner Magazine's "The Sea Island Hurricane: The Devastation, 1894," drawing by Daniel Smith, Sea Islands, South Carolina, circa 1893, courtesy of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. 

The petitions painted a grim portrait of conditions on the rice coast. Masses of Black agricultural workers were either unable to find gainful employment or underpaid when work was available. The Red Cross’s rations kept them from teetering over the precipice of starvation, but if white landowners were successful in halting aid, they would be pushed yet closer to that edge. 

However, the petitioners were not hopeless or helpless. They knew what they needed and how to obtain it. The Pocotaligo petitioners requested that the Red Cross “will prolong there time and stay 2 months longer,” and those from Mazine Hill and Tomotley echoed this ask. The people from Coosawhatchie agreed. “We Beg that you will contrive to help us a little longer,” they wrote,” so that we may be able to make our crop as we are making every effort to do so.” That was key: the petitioners wanted rations so that they could plant their own crop, instead of hunger driving them into white-owned fields for the cash to purchase food. Tomotley’s petitioners stated this case forcefully. “The know if we can git a little helpe that we can stay on our own place and plant our crops and work there,” they wrote, for “The depend on us to make there crops. And as longe as there can make falce statement to the world agence the Black man to git you to withdraw from us the Beter the gits a longe.” They wanted to nurture a harvest on their own properties. “We are eager to plant and do all we can for our self,” they affirmed. The Pocotaligo petitioners likewise pointed to the fields as evidence of their eagerness to reinforce their autonomy and self-sufficiency against the dependence and exploitation that the white landowners had in store for them. They “can Prove it by the vegetable that Is growing in the garden and By the cultivation of soil in the Field that what is not planted is Ready for the seed,” declaring that they had been working hard: not on white-owned land, but their own.

The petitions all contained frank expressions of gratitude to the Red Cross for the assistance that they had already sent and affirmed the importance of these rations in sustaining not only their lives but their livelihoods as well. “No matter what is said by the southern white people,” the Pocotaligo petitioners declared, “we Belive that god sent you here & that god will take care of you while you are here.”

Clara Barton must have trusted the petitioners over the white landowners, because sometimes after the petitions arrived, William Grant wrote a letter acknowledging receipt of an abundance of rations. At Yemassee, he met with seven wagons containing “17 sacks of provisions 8 sacks of corn 9 sacks of grist 8 sacks of seed,” which were then divided among over 500 people. The Red Cross could be a lifeline, not only from the deprivation of the hurricane but from the ruinous labor conditions that had come to dominate large swaths of the South by the late nineteenth century. Black farmworkers organized to assert their needs and to protect their communities, engaging in a form of collective action through mass meetings and petitions signed by hundreds of people. 

A final petition, sent on June 22nd, 1894 from Pocotaligo, was signed by eighty-six heads of households. The petitioners emphasized that even as the Red Cross prepared to depart, the situation for Black farmworkers was still tenuous. While the Red Cross had provided rations, the “Rice Planters” had “closed up.” Help until the harvest would help them “to finish make our crops and secure provisions for the future.” This episode closed the distance between the immediate harm done by the hurricane and the ongoing damage of the racialized system of labor that characterized the Lowcountry’s status quo.