The South Carolina Lowcountry encompasses the state’s southern coast, from the city of Charleston southward to the Savannah River on the Georgia border. It is a vast marshland of cordgrass, pine, and live oak cut through by winding creeks and rivers on their way to the ocean. African Americans have lived in the region for centuries, notably on its sea islands, where, until the 1920s, they vastly outnumbered the white population. Black sea islanders used their superior numbers and relative isolation from their former enslavers to carve out a significant degree of autonomy after the Civil War, which they were able to maintain during Jim Crow. African Americans were most commonly stuck working as dependent sharecroppers elsewhere in the South. Sea Island residents, however, often owned their own small plots of land on which they grew sweet potatoes, corn, and rice, as well as cash crops such as cotton. Those who did not own land rented from white landlords, typically on decidedly better terms than those offered by sharecropping. African Americans in the late nineteenth-century Lowcountry, in other words, generally escaped labor arrangements that reminded them too closely of slavery.
As Caroline Grego writes in her compelling opening chapter of Hurricane Jim Crow, “What African Americans had built in the Lowcountry was too resilient and too embedded for the white elite to destroy alone” (12). In the summer of 1893, a devastating hurricane swept through coastal Carolina. The Great Sea Island Storm killed as many as five thousand people, almost all of whom were Black. The storm’s high death toll and accompanying environmental destruction offered the white elite an opportunity to reassert their dominance. If they could highjack the relief and recovery efforts, perhaps they could cajole African Americans back into exploitive labor relations or otherwise force Black residents to leave the region altogether. In Grego’s telling, disaster relief for hurricane victims was never simply a neutral humanitarian effort but a political battleground upon which Black southerners and their former enslavers fought to realize their competing visions of a New South.
Grego describes the work of three main relief organizations: the white-dominated Charleston Relief Committee, the interracial alliance of the Sea Island Relief Committee, and the American Red Cross. The first two groups formed in the hurricane’s wake to provide immediate relief, primarily food, to desperate survivors. Confederate veteran and prominent state Democrat Joseph Barnwell chaired the Charleston Committee. He strove to prevent the “abuse” of charity, whenever possible, by requiring Black men to work for their food rations, helping, he said, “the destitute to help themselves” (84, 88). The Sea Island Relief Committee, based in the town of Beaufort, rejected the paternalism of its Charleston rival. It was a mixed group of African American politicians and middle-class professionals alongside white Republican allies. The Sea Island Relief Committee refused to require work as a prerequisite for food, presuming that African Americans were already “respectable” and “industrious,” and therefore not needing to be taught such values (85).
Local efforts were supplemented at the national level by the American Red Cross. Its founder, northerner Clara Barton, knew the Lowcountry well, having served as a nurse during the famous Civil War Battle of Fort Wagner on Hilton Head Island. Black Union veterans still remembered her decades later, and she instantly won the community’s trust.
Though the Red Cross, too, required work in return for aid, it did so for the larger purpose of rebuilding the Black community and remaking the sea islands into a “healthful, fruitful agrarian landscape” (123). Early on, Barton and three local Black women (Betty Middleton, May Chaplin, and a Mrs. Brown) developed the idea for sewing circles that would repair clothing and distribute it to survivors. Nineteen circles were active and several of them wrote their own constitutions establishing the terms of work. While women handled the sewing, men focused on the environment and on infrastructure, digging drainage ditches and rebuilding homes and bridges. Although both the Charleston Relief Committee and the Red Cross misunderstood the history of Black labor in the Lowcountry, the Red Cross overcame this limitation by relying on its core humanist beliefs. It never doubted, as did white Democrats, that Black Americans were fully human and worthy of independence. An effective partnership followed and bolstered Black autonomy, albeit temporarily, against an encroaching Jim Crow.
The army of Red Cross volunteers encamped in the Lowcountry reminded white Democrats of the wave of northerners who entered the region after the Civil War to help the formerly enslaved Black southerners transition to freedom. Desperate to stave off a second Reconstruction, poor and elite white South Carolinians sought to undermine Barton’s group by leveling charges of reverse discrimination against it, claiming (inaccurately) that hurricane relief favored Black coastal residents over mainland whites. Grego expertly traces the decades long “white backlash” to black autonomy and inter-racial cooperation that such charges sparked (126). Slowly but surely, the white population, aided by a new series of hurricanes, chipped away at Black gains, pushing thousands to leave the sea islands during the Great Migration.
In addition to being an important work on the history of post-Reconstruction South Carolina, Grego’s book is part of a growing body of scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century disaster relief by authors such as Jacob Remes and Michael Landis Dauber. Grego situates the efforts of the Red Cross alongside classic progressive movements for industrial and urban reform, which similarly sought “to change a fractured world in crisis” (107). As she demonstrates, this approach to disaster relief productively opens up new terrain on which to explore issues of race, class, labor, power, and the environment during the Progressive Era.
