Sea Island Cotton: The Crop That Built and Broke the Island

After the American Revolution, planters on Hilton Head and the other South Carolina Sea Islands discovered that their climate and soil were ideal for a particular variety of long staple cotton. They called it Sea Island cotton, and it was among the most valuable varieties in the world. Its long silky fibers commanded premium prices in British textile mills.

By the early eighteen hundreds, Hilton Head was covered with plantations, and those plantations were worked entirely by enslaved people. The enslaved population of Hilton Head outnumbered the white population by a large margin. The island had roughly two dozen plantations before the Civil War, and the men, women, and children forced to work them were the people whose labor created the wealth that built the planter mansions, funded the churches, and filled the accounts of Charleston merchants.

Their African heritage, languages, music, and foodways were maintained partly because the Sea Islands were geographically isolated, accessible only by water. That isolation became the origin of the Gullah Geechee culture, one of the most distinctive African American traditions in the country. The people held on Hilton Head's plantations were the ancestors of the Gullah Geechee community that continued to live on the island long after emancipation.

The Sea Island cotton economy collapsed when Union forces seized the island in November of eighteen sixty one and the planters fled to the mainland. They left behind more than the cotton. They left behind the people whose labor had built everything, and those people did not leave.

What they built from that moment forward is a separate and long story.