(Top) A newly freed man's fine converted to labor sentence being sold to the highest bidder, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, sketch by James E. Taylor, Florida, 1867, courtesy of the Library of Congress. (Bottom) A list of men on a chain gang from the Colleton County Highway Commission ledger, 1911, courtesy of Colleton County Memorial Library. In the late 1890s, South Carolina’s Black codes, judicial system, and county operations used convict leasing and chain gangs to target and control Black labor. White leaders designed the system to maintain their authority over Black labor as it existed during slavery. Likewise, control of Black labor underpinned white landowners’ disdain for the Red Cross.

Racial tensions around labor predated the hurricane, and those tensions would become yet more apparent in the storm’s wake. After the Civil War, the United States Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery but left citizenship and political equality undefined. In this legal vacuum, wealthy white South Carolinians acted quickly to attempt to replicate the slave system through new state laws known as Black Codes. Black Codes were a series of laws passed in the state that demanded, for example, that all Black people who made labor contracts must be called "Servant" and the landowner "Master." The laws were also designed to control Black people's ability to make money and even their movement. In response to these inegalitarian state laws, federal legislators advocated for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which established birthright citizenship, affirmed equal protection under the law, and codified Black men's right to vote.

While these Reconstruction-era measures provided more protection for Black civil and political rights, economic justice and labor rights, especially how African Americans worked and who they worked for continued to be points of conflict between white South Carolinians accustomed to slavery and Black South Carolinians eager to gain autonomy over their labor. The hurricane did not create these tensions. Instead, it revealed their painful depths.

In late March, a white farmer named Eugene Gregorie living in the Pocotaligo community wrote to the influential politician and Beaufortonian William Elliott. “Will you as a favor to me personally and to the planters in general,” Gregorie wrote, and “call the attention of Miss Clara Barton to the wrong she is doing the planters by her indiscriminate issue of rations to the lazy negroes of this section (Pocotaligo and Coosawhatchie.).” These supplies, Gregorie argued, inculcated a reluctance to work on white-owned lands. “My foreman tells me that the negroes of Pocotaligo boast that they are not going to work as long as the Red Cross issues rations and clothing,” Gregorie complained, the aid precipitating a crisis so severe that “unless it is all stopped by before May we had just as well not plant.” In a few curt, typed lines, Gregorie laid out how the Red Cross’s assistance undermined white landed interests in the Lowcountry.

This letter and the resulting petitions suggested deep-rooted conflict in the marshy ricelands just north of the confluence of the Broad and Coosaw Rivers. Rice plantations, situated alongside tidal rivers to harness their flow to flood fields at strategic points in a rice plant’s growth cycle, had flooded badly from Savannah to Georgetown during the hurricane. Their floodplain locations left African Americans vulnerable to the storm surge and heavy rains from hurricanes. This had been true during slavery, and it was true after. Many formerly enslaved rice workers remained on the same properties or purchased land nearby, working as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Those who stayed on white-owned land negotiated according to the “two days’ system,” in which they gave white landowners their labor in the rice fields for two days of the week. This was enough to produce a viable crop but slowed the punishing pace of labor that had been so damaging to enslaved workers’ health. African Americans who lived nearby on their own properties, usually five to twenty acres, often contracted with white landowners for a cash wage to work in the rice fields, which provided them with a valuable supplemental income.

"Talking about the Storm," Sea Island survivors gathered together, "Sea Island Hurricane: The Devastation, 1894," from Scribner Magazine, drawing by Daniel Smith, Sea Islands, South Carolina, 1894, courtesy of the Avery Research Center.

But the hurricane and the subsequent arrival of the Red Cross had broken down the normalized yet uneasy relationships between Black rice workers and white landowners. Disgruntled white landowners inspired a remarkable burst of protest. Despite the white landowners’ insistence, African Americans felt that there could be no business as usual under the current conditions of grief, deprivation, and environmental upheaval. In Pocotaligo, African Americans had elected William Grant, a Black landowner, as their representative and had begun to receive aid from the Red Cross. It is unclear how exactly the conflict between Black farmworkers and white landowners began. But by early spring 1894, as planting season began, it simmered to the surface. 

Though it is equally unclear how Black farmworkers learned that white landowners were demanding a cession to the Red Cross’s aid, both sides brought their case to the Red Cross. Did a white landowner, in a heated moment, let it slip that they would take action? Did William Grant, as the emissary between his community and the Red Cross, receive a report about white complaints from someone at the Red Cross? Did this spur Black farmworkers to organize their “mass meetings” and compose their resolutions? Was it simply that white landowners saw no reason to hide their exertion of power from Black workers? These are only possibilities. And however uncertain their specific origins, the petitions written up by Black communities across the sea islands were decided in their analysis.