Southern Memorial

A CAROLINA RICE PLANTATION OF THE FIFTIES--Herbert Ravenel Sass--Morrow ($10).

The Rice Coast of South Carolina is fed by eleven rivers whose names read like one of the patriotic catalogs in Whitman's poems. From north to south they are the Waccamaw, the Pee Dee, the Black, the Sampit, the Santee, the Cooper, the Ashley, the Edisto, the Ashepoo, the Combahee, the Savannah. Near the mouths of these slow streams, in a region 150 miles long and about 50 miles wide, were the great rice plantations that before the Civil War made the South Carolina Low Country "the most prosperous area on the continent." In 1850 it had 446 plantations, each producing more than 20,000 Ib.

of rice annually (the total Carolina yield now being 159,930,613 Ib.), with each plantation surrounded by low flooded fields, serpentine embankments, miles of "translucent grain." Life on the Rice Coast was an amiable, well-fed, leisurely affair, with planters' incomes ranging from $5,000 to $70,000 a year, with "factors"' in the cities taking care of all buying and selling and regular crops requiring careful but not arduous attention. Even the many slaves had an easier time of it than elsewhere in the South, since their labor was usually finished between one and four o'clock in the afternoon.

A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties celebrates the glories of this vanished life with 30 water color paintings by Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, a 52-page discussion of the Rice Coast by Dr. Herbert Ravenel Sass, a 38-page memoir of boyhood on a rice plantation by the late Daniel Elliott Huger Smith. The result is a handsome gift book in which Alice Huger Smith's paintings of lagoons, salt creeks, rice fields in winter, threshing and harvesting scenes, easily carry off all honors. Dr. Sass's discussion is about evenly divided between interesting facts on the Rice Coast and dull arguments about slavery, the main point of which is that a true Athenian democracy was developing on the Rice Coast before the Abolitionists spoiled it. A Plantation Boyhood tells of the life at Smithfield, rich, well-run 715-acre plantation on the Combahee, two days' ride from Charleston.

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