Abstract
Following the American Civil War and the subsequent collapse of the southern plantation economy, the South underwent a transitional period of land use catalyzed by the discovery of vast phosphate reserves in the South Carolina Lowcountry. In the ensuing decades, the former planter strongholds of Charleston and Beaufort rapidly industrialized to capitalize on the fertilizer market growing at home and abroad. Highly specialized technologies were developed to mine and process phosphate rock, helmed by a newly emancipated Black labor force that sought to stake out their freedom through selective participation in the mining and manufacturing industries. Preying on the financial destitution of the Southern elite, industrialists leased huge swaths of land from many of South Carolina’s most prominent landholding families, permanently scarring their genteel country estates with extractive mining practices. The nearly bankrupt State government also found a way to profit from the phosphate boom, granting untested mining companies monopolistic privileges to dredge the “navigable waters” of the State in exchange for royalty payments. Between the land and water, nearly thirty companies operated throughout the Lowcountry during the peak of mining activity, but, by the turn of the century, the industry had almost completely vanished.
In hindsight, the volatile trajectory of the phosphate mining industry was an inevitable consequence of speculative attempts to introduce an extractive economic model to the predominantly agrarian society of South Carolina. Given that plantations were the preferred sites for mines and fertilizer manufacturing operations proliferating across the Lowcountry, it begs the question: How were these centuries-old properties, built using exploitative agriculture, ecological, and labor practices, so easily adapted to their new extractive function?
An illuminating case study examining two court cases that played out at Chisolm’s Island, South Carolina, helps to elucidate how plantation era perspectives of land, ownership, and spatial hierarchy not only primed plantations for an industrial turn, but also ensured the continuity of exploitative and extractive land use practices. Assembled between Coosaw v. Farmers’ and State v. Pacific is a rich catalog of primary sources tracing the history, ownership, and occupation of Chisolm’s Island through a diverse array of materials and formats, including property records, financial documents, pertinent legislation, and land surveys. By reading these documents in relation to textual analysis conducted with oral testimony taken from local landowners, neighbors, miner, homesteaders, and members of the formerly enslaved community, we may interpret the contours of daily life on Chisolm’s Island from this fertile archive of human experience and environmental knowledge amid the transition from plantation agriculture to phosphate mining.
Using the legal questions posed by these trials as a narrative scaffolding, this thesis attempts to determine how spatial frameworks of navigability, territory, and productive capacity were perceived and deployed by the three social groups inhabiting Chisolm’s Island: planters, miners, and Black homesteaders, to affect the environment around them and claim ownership of their landscape. This examination extends to the modes of land use associated with each group. Planters exploited the land and their enslaved labor force to control the productive output of their plantations. These tactics were adapted and amplified by the mining companies who extracted phosphate from the land, marsh, and waters, disrupting fragile ecological systems. Black homesteaders, however, sought an alternative future for the post-slavery South that prioritized rootedness, small landholdings, and sustentive land management practices. This thesis seeks to explore the counterfactual history of Black landownership and reparations to challenge the entrenched presence of extractive capitalism, which has spurred contemporary crises of climate change and sea level rise that threaten to erase Chisolm’s Island.
