1 Canals Come to South Carolina

� Canals Come to South Carolina1

Few countries enjoy more favorable situations for inland navigation, thanSouth-Carolina; and few, considering the time of her existence, as a settle-ment, have received equal encouragement in that respect.

John Drayton, A View of South-Carolina (1802)

During the first third of the 1800s, canal mania created a waterway-building boom that spread across the United States. By 1835 more than thirty-fiveprojects had linked still-water canals with in-river waterways to create approxi-mately twenty-five hundred miles of canal transportation and thousands moremiles of improved river navigation. Some canals—such as the Erie Canal, openedin 1825—were eminently successful. Others were not.

South Carolinians were enthusiastic participants in the boom. While New Yorkwas building the Erie Canal and the Champlain Canals and Pennsylvania wasbuilding the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, South Carolina undertook a massiveprogram to construct canals and to improve waterways throughout the state. It issaid that South Carolina spent more money per capita on internal improvementsat this time than any other state. By the end of the 1820s, South Carolina wasboasting that it had opened twelve hundred miles of waterways for steamboatnavigation and another twelve hundred miles of canals and in-river waterways forsmall-boat navigation.

As a result of this ambitious program, most South Carolinians had water-transport access to Charleston, the commercial heart of the state and its principalseaport. Steamboats left Granby, near Columbia, for Charleston via the Congareeand Santee rivers. They also left Camden and Stateburg via the Wateree River andCheraw via the Great Pee Dee River to travel to Charleston. For a few years canalboats left for Charleston from Ware Shoals (then in Abbeville County) via theSaluda River, from Lockhart in Union County via the Broad River, and from aboveLandsford in Chester County via the Catawba and Wateree rivers. Once well known,South Carolina canals such as Drehr’s Canal, Bull Sluice Canal, Rocky Mount

2 Historic Canals and Waterways of South Carolina

Canal, Saluda Canal, Wateree Canal, and Lockhart’s Canal have been are long goneand almost totally forgotten (see color plate 1).

Transporting Cotton

The canal mania was based on sound economy. South Carolina built canals andimproved waterways because water transportation was faster, more reliable, andless expensive than road transportation. Most of the existing roads of the timewere small, dirt tracks through the wilderness. They were few in number and fre-quently impassable. The state’s chief commodity was cotton, which usually neededto be shipped in bales from the upcountry plantations to Charleston. These baleswere unwieldy, heavy, and diYcult to move by road. A typical cotton bale weighedfive hundred pounds and was almost six-feet long by four- to six-feet wide. Trans-porting heavy cotton bales on corduroyed roads (built from log planks laid on dirt)and across lowcountry swamps and creeks was expensive, requiring teams of fourhorses and multiple teamsters. Even for the single traveler unencumbered withcotton, overland travel was diYcult. Take, for example, the problems experiencedby a man who tried to travel from New York to Charleston by road in 1818:

Southern Patriot (Charleston, S.C.), March 21, 1818

Road travel was also dangerous. The mail stage frequently issued guns to their pas-sengers because of the danger of highwaymen and other predators along the route.

Canals Come to South Carolina 3

Water travel could also be treacherous. Boats sank fromhitting submerged sawyers (logs stuck in the river bottomand projecting upward). Or boats ran aground on shiftingsandbars in rivers. But water travel was seen as the more con-venient and safer choice. It was also the most inexpensivemeans of moving cotton to Charleston. In 1822 the SouthCarolina Board of Public Works provided an example of thecost eYciency of transporting cotton by water:

A Broad river boat with four hands, will bring down to Colum-bia, the distance of 60 miles, 40 bales of cotton in less thantwo days. The same quantity by waggon, will require at least 4hands, 16 horses and 4 waggons; and three days to perform thetrip: the boat will cost less than $100, and the 4 waggons and16 horses at least $2,000—the difference of capital employedwill be $1,900—the difference of current expense will be thesupport of 16 horses. If this capital and expenditure were em-ployed for agricultural purposes, it is evident that the farms ofthe upper country would be vastly improved, and the extent of crops encreased.1

South Carolina’s program for constructing of canals andimproving waterways was an extension of a water culture thatalready existed. Before the 1820s, even without the canals,South Carolina’s rivers were being used to carry cargo duringthe high waters of spring. Watercraft called Camden boats,Wateree boats, or Congaree-built boats were used for ship-ping. These boats were large, sixty to seventy feet long andseventeen or eighteen feet wide, with a shallow draft of fourto four and a half feet. Such boats could carry 100 to 120bales of cotton, fifteen to twenty-five cords of wood, or up tosixty hogsheads of tobacco. They sometimes carried sail butwere usually poled. In addition rafts and other sorts of boatswere found on South Carolina’s rivers. Almost always mannedby slaves, there riverboats typically required a crew of six toseven African Americans, sometimes more. Experienced crewswere valued for their understanding of river navigation andwere usually rented or sold as a team.

For all its pluses, South Carolina water transport waslocalized because it required portages around river obstaclesand was reliable only during seasons of high water. With theeconomic boom following the War of 1812, there developed

Southern Patriot, March 1, 1822

Southern Patriot, November 11, 1822

Southern Patriot, March 18, 1818


an urgency in South Carolina to undertake a canal-construc-tion and waterway-improvement program. The price for cot-ton had increased, but Charleston’s share of the cotton-exportmarket seemed to be shrinking when compared to that of itsrival, Savannah. Savannah enjoyed a shipping advantage overCharleston because planters along the Savannah River couldeasily ship cotton down the river to Savannah for export.Although Charleston is situated on two tidal rivers, the Ash-ley and the Cooper, they do not penetrate far into the interiorof South Carolina. Charleston, unlike Savannah, did not havea natural water course allowing it easy access to upcountrycotton. The leading citizens of South Carolina decided thatsomething needed to be done. There were three means of im-proving the shipment of cotton from the upcountry to Charles-ton: more passable roads, a still-water canal, and a river/canalnavigation system using South Carolina’s rivers. Railroads,barely in their infancy in England, were not yet a viable alter-native.

Roads did not seem a reasonable option. The few rudimentary roads of SouthCarolina were usually corduroyed, built with local pine trees that rapidly decayedin the warm, moist climate of South Carolina’s lowcountry. Bridges were rare, usu-ally made of wood that also decayed rapidly in this era before chemical preserva-tives. Where there were bridges, they were frequently knocked out by floods.2 Thelevy imposed on slave owners required slaves to be provided to state authorities forthe construction and maintenance of roads and other public facilities. Roads con-structed by the levy were rarely well built.3 To improve existing roads would haverequired stone to replace the decaying corduroy. At that time South Caroliniansbelieved that there was no source of stone in the lowcountry. Transporting stonefrom the upcountry would be prohibitively expensive. Improving the existing roadsfrom the upcountry all the way to Charleston would also have required the con-struction of expensive causeways and large-span bridges to cross the lowcountry’snumerous boggy swamps and tidal streams (see fig. 1.1).

The second option was a still-water canal, an excavated ditch filled with waterfrom specially constructed reservoirs or from adjacent waterways dammed to divertwater into the canal. Changes in elevation of the canal were controlled by a seriesof locks. Although expensive to build, a still-water canal provided the most reli-able means of water transport. At the time when South Carolina was consideringa statewide canal-construction and waterway-improvement program, architect-engineer Robert Mills4 proposed a still-water canal from Columbia to Charleston.5

But the expense of such a still-water canal was an issue. Excavation of a canal from

City Gazette (Charleston, S.C.), August 31, 1791

City Gazette, January 11, 1793


Columbia to Charleston, equipped with expensive masonry locks, diversion dams,and other appurtenances would require large expenditures of funds (see fig. 1.2).

A navigation system that combined canals with South Carolina’s extensive riverswas less expensive than Mills’s proposed still-water canal and therefore very attrac-tive to South Carolinians. The central portion of South Carolina was drained by thelarge rivers of the Saluda-Broad-Congaree-Wateree-Santee river system.Immediatelyabove Charleston was the Santee River. Since 1800, boats from the Santee River

Fig. 1.1. Transporting cotton on a corduroyed road. Illustration by Edwin Forbes for Harper’s Weekly (May 12, 1866). Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Fig. 1.2. Languedoc Canal in France opened in 1681 and was the prototype for still-water canals throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America. First published in Denis Diderot’s 1751 Encyclopédie, this illustration shows the operation of two lift locks,

with lock gates, balance beams, and gate valves for raising (or lowering) boats.


had been reaching Charleston via the Santee Canal and the Cooper River. If clearedof obstructions, the Santee, Wateree, and Catawba rivers could provide access tothe center portion of the state. Further west, the Santee River also gave access tothe Congaree River, which in turn gave access to the Broad and Saluda rivers,which drained the central and western portions of the state. Obstructions in allthese rivers, it was thought, could be cleared at relatively little cost. Small bypasscanals could take boats around obstructions such as rapids and falls.

Clearing the Saluda-Broad-Congaree-Catawba-Wateree-Santee river system ofobstacles would provide downriver access to the upper end of the Santee Canaland through that canal to the Cooper River and Charleston. The Santee Canalbecame the critical link in South Carolina’s canal-construction and waterway-improvement program, one the most extensive of such programs yet undertakenin the United States.

The Canal Boom

South Carolina’s ambitious program to build canals and improve waterwaysthroughout the state was part of the canal boom that was sweeping America. Therewere two periods of extensive canal and waterway construction. The first canalconstruction period began at the end of the Revolutionary War, in 1783, and lasteduntil the beginning of the War of 1812, during which large construction projectswere not undertaken. The second took place after the end of the War of 1812 in1814 and lasted until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Most of South Caro-lina’s canals and water navigations were built during the second period.

During the first construction period, canals built in the United States tendedto be short and were not financially successful. The first canal constructed in Penn-sylvania, for example, was the Conewago Canal (built 1792–97), which was slightlyunder a mile long. In Maryland the longest canal from before the War of 1812 was the Potomac Canal, built in 1785–1802 by the Potomac Canal Company. Itextended 184 miles from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland. Through most ofits course, it was a river navigation where channels in the riverbed were improvedby in-river sluices and other devices. The only true canals built by the Potomac

Fig. 1.3. An 1881 depiction of Charleston in 1780.

From William Cullen Bryantand Sydney Howard Gay, A Popular History of theUnited States (1881–83)


Canal Company, those that contained lift locks, were at Great Falls (.68 mileslong) and at Little Falls (2.16 miles long). The financial success of Potomac Canalwas uneven. In Virginia the longest canal from before the War of 1812 was theJames River Canal. Like the Potomac River Canal, the James River Canal was animproved river-navigation system 220-miles long with still-water canals only at the upper falls of the James at Richmond (completed in 1789) and at the lowerfalls (completed in 1796). These were consolidated in 1810 with a canal aroundRichmond. Early canals that were excavated still-water canals and did not use theriverbed for navigation tended to be short. The Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts(built 1789–1809) was only 30 miles long. In South Carolina, the Santee Canal(built 1793–1800) was 22 miles long.

The canals constructed during the second canal period, after the end of the Warof 1812, were much longer and more often were excavated canals (also called still-water canals) equipped with locks. The Erie Canal (built 1817–25) was 363 mileslong; the Ohio and Erie Canal (built 1825–32) was 307 miles long; the Chesapeakeand Ohio Canal (built 1828–50), the successor to the Potomac Canal, was 184miles long (and was planned to be twice that length); and the James and KanawhaCanal (built 1830–51), the successor to the James River Canal, was 196 miles long.

During the first period canals were typically built by private organizationschartered or otherwise authorized by the state. In 1792 Governor Thomas MiZinof Pennsylvania authorized Robert Morris and his group to build the ConewagoCanal. The Potomac Canal Company, a private company, was authorized by theVirginia (1784) and Maryland (1785) legislatures. The James River Canal Company,another private company, was authorized by the Virginia legislature (1784). OnMarch 22, 1786, the South Carolina legislature passed “An Act to Establish a Com-pany for the Inland Navigation from Santee to Cooper River.” The oYcial name ofthe company was “The Company for the Inland Navigation from Santee to CooperRiver,” more popularly known as the Santee Canal Company.

During this first period states sometimes provided small amounts of money to help build canals. The State of Pennsylvania provided £5,250 (or $14,000) toRobert Morris and his group to build the Conewago Canal—a small fraction ofthe oYcially estimated total construction cost of $119,000. Usually funding forearly canals came from the shares purchased by proprietors or stockholders, some-times augmented with whatever could be raised by lotteries. In capital-starvedearly America canal construction was frequently halted by a lack of money, as hap-pened with the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in Delaware and Maryland andthe Susquehanna Canal in Maryland. The early canals of South Carolina, such asthe Santee Canal, were also state chartered and privately funded. And, as elsewherein America, lack of money caused some canals in South Carolina—such as thoseof the Catawba and Wateree Navigation Company, the Edisto Company, and theSampit and St. James Santee Canal Company—not to be completed.


After the War of 1812, canals were frequently financed and constructed by theindividual states, as occurred in New York (the Erie Canal and the ChamplainCanal), Pennsylvania (the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal and its divisions),Virginia (the James and Kanawha Canal) and in South Carolina. During this sec-ond period, even when canals were privately funded, states frequently boughtshares of the canal company, as happened with the Chesapeake and Ohio CanalCompany.

The history of South Carolina’s canals and waterways begins with its first com-pleted canal, the Santee Canal, chartered in 1786 and opened in 1800. This canal’ssuccess was thwarted because the Santee, Congaree, and Wateree rivers above theentrance to the Santee Canal were frequently blocked with obstructions and sand-bars, thereby limiting the number of boats that could descend these rivers and usethe Santee Canal. South Carolina’s decade-long program (1818–28) to build canalsand clear its rivers of obstacles to navigation resulted in large increases in shippingon the Santee Canal. These new canals and navigable waterways also decreasedshipping costs while increasing both the volume of agricultural produce (espe-cially cotton) shipped and the wealth of the state. But these canals and waterwaystended to be short lived. By the end of the 1820s, a new transportation systembased on the railroad and turnpike had begun to be developed in South Carolinaand elsewhere in the United States. This system replaced and led to the decline ofcanals and waterways throughout the country.

Transporting Cotton from the Upcountry

The impetus for building canals and improving rivers for navigation originatedwith the geography of South Carolina. Like many of the original thirteen states,South Carolina is a coastal state located between the Appalachian Mountains tothe west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Initial settlement was along the coast.As long as South Carolina settlement was limited to a narrow coastal strip of low-country approximately one hundred miles wide, transportation was easy. Tide-water streams and rivers reached most lowcountry plantations, each of whichmaintained its own dock and communicated with other plantations and coastalcities by water. Plantations had their own boats and boat crews, typically with fourto six oarsmen. In addition shipping along the South Carolina coast, the coastingtrade, was reliable and well established.

The focal point of South Carolina’s coastal region was the port city of Charles-ton. Produce grown in the lowcountry was shipped to Charleston. Situated on twotidal rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, Charleston had an excellent harbor. Itslocation in the south of the United States made it well suited for trade with theCaribbean, as well as with Europe and with the other Atlantic coast colonies.

After the Revolutionary War, the economy of South Carolina started to changeradically with expansion of cotton production, which began in the 1790s and grew


Table 1.1. “Statement of exports from the Port of Charleston,and their total annual amount, from 1790 to 1800”

Total annual of exports,

Casks of including Rice, Period of Barrels of Indigo & lbs Hbds. of Pounds wt Indigo, TobaccoExport. Rice. weight. Tobacco. of cotton. & Cotton.

From Aug. 31, Dollars.to Dec. 31, 1789,being 4 months. 9,157 289 1,172 5,670 313,674

1790 87,179 1,649 6,820 9,840 2,104,677

1791 98,044 2,245 6,033 54,075 2,411,771

1792 102,235 2,495 5,285 76,710 2,341,777

1793 94,055 1,819 3,324 93,540 3,112,525

1794 69,717 2,154 4,908 159,040 3,869,019

1795 85,670 1,217 4,288 1,109,653 5,984,196

1796 84,540 490 5,328 912,600 7,600,387

1797 80,837 96,121 lbs. 3,961 1,008,511 6,459,524

1798 74,277 19,838 lbs. 4,638 2,476,431 6,946,924

1799 70,426 6,892 lbs. 9,640 2,801,936 8,729,015

1800 75,788 3,400 lbs. 7,927 6,425,862 10,554,802

The years comprise periods from October 1 in one year to September 30 in the next.

Source: John Drayton, A View of South-Carolina (1802), 168.

rapidly after the introduction of the cotton gin in 1802 (see figs. 1.4 and 1.5). Mostof the new cotton production took place in the upcountry of South Carolina withits inexpensive lands and optimal growing conditions. Upcountry cotton planta-tions, however, were usually one hundred miles or more from the coast, creatingthe urgent need to develop economical means of transporting cotton to Charles-ton for shipment overseas and, to a lesser extent, to northern American ports.

After the Revolutionary War exports of cotton exploded. Exports of indigowithered, and those of rice remained stable. This can be seen in the statistics com-plied by John Drayton for A View of South-Carolina, As Respects Her Natural andCivil Concerns, published in 1802 (see tables 1.1 and 1.2).

The explosive growth of upcountry cotton after the Revolutionary War wasparalleled by the decline of one of South Carolina’s traditional cash crops, indigo,and the transformation of the other, rice. After the war the British bounty (bonus)on indigo was eliminated. Competition increased from the West Indies and India.By 1800 almost no indigo was being exported from South Carolina. Former indigoplanters in the lowcountry turned to rice production; those in the upcountryturned to cotton.

Fig. 1.5. “Scenes of a Cotton Plantation” (right and facing),

by Alfred Rudolph Waud(Harper’s Weekly, February 2,

1867). Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Fig. 1.4. Section drawing of acotton gin. From Edward H.Knight, Knight’s MechanicalDictionary (1877). Placed in

the hopper (F), cotton is sub-jected to the rotating action

of the picker roll (A). The rotating saw blades (D) force the cotton through a grid (E). This action sepa-rates the fiber lint from the remainder of the plant. The rotating saw blades are brushed with rotatingbrushes (B). The heavier debris falls to the board labeled (K). The lighter lint and dust are passed tochamber on the left (R). The dust passes through the wire-mesh surface of a rotating cylinder (P)

and out of the machine. The lint is passed on to the doffing and compacting cylinders.


Rice production in the postwar years was greatly changed. Tidal cultivation ofrice replaced the traditional lowcountry swamp plantations. Tidal cultivationcould produce five to six times the slave yield compared to the inland swamp plan-tations. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, many of the tradi-tional rice plantations of the lowcountry became abandoned.6 In 1825 AbramBlanding,7 superintendent of public works for South Carolina, reported on thedecline of rice production and the depopulation of the lowcountry of the EdistoRiver valley south of Charleston:

The inland rice swamps of Stono and Cacaw thirty years ago, were generally undercultivation. There were one hundred and nineteen settled plantations there, con-taining together twenty-four thousand acres of highly improved rice lands, usuallyproducing two barrels or one thousand four hundred pounds of rice to the acre, ofa quality superior even to that made in the tide swamps. At present there are about

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twelve of these plantations cultivated only in part; the rest are now entirely aban-doned. Their banks, the work of more than a century, are broken and washing down,and their canals and drains are filling up. The great public drains which lead throughthese swamps, opened formerly by the combined labor of these plantations, are nowchoaking up, and are already unfit for the purposes for which they were constructed.8

Blanding’s report provides a melancholy description of the effect of depopulation:“Ruins are every where to be seen. Splendid buildings once the residence of indus-try, wealth and unbounded hospitality, are now deserted and crumbling to thedust, or have already reached that period of decay, which has left nothing but a fewmouldering ruins to mark their former site.”9

Blanding provided five reasons for the depopulation of the lowcountry:

1st. The abolition of the rights of primogeniture.10

2nd. The high price and consequently profitable culture of cotton, when it was firstintroduced.

3rd. The uncertainty of the rice crop in consequence of the failure of the reservoirs in dry years, and the imperfect drainage which in wet years subjected the crops to floods.

4th. The deterioration of the soil from long unskillful and uninterrupted cultiva-tion.

Lastly—The unhealthiness of the country occasioned by the stagnant water and vegetable decomposition of abandoned rice fields.11

There were two types of cotton grown in South Carolina: Sea Island (also calledblack-seed or long-staple) cotton and short-staple (also called upland or green-seed) cotton. Sea Island cotton grew well in the coastal areas, and it was relativelyeasy to separate seeds from the fiber by hand. In contrast short-staple cottonproved diYcult to separate lint from the seed. Only with Eli Whitney’s inventionof the cotton gin in 1793 (see fig. 1.4) did cotton production become economicallyprofitable. And cotton proved very lucrative. Lowcountry plantation owners con-verted to cotton production and developed upcountry cotton plantations.Upcountry farmers increasingly grew cotton as a cash crop and became wealthy asa result. Inexpensive land prices in the upcountry were also a major factor in theexpansion of cotton production in that region (see table 1.3). South Carolinaentered its first cotton boom (1794–1819).

As cotton replaced rice as South Carolina’s principal cash crop, the geographiccenter of agricultural production of the state moved westward. This changedSouth Carolina’s transportation needs. When rice was the predominant crop, thelowcountry’s rice plantations, particularly the tidal plantations, were close to navi-gable streams and water transport to Charleston was readily available. With cottonincreasingly being grown in the central and western portions of the state, easywater navigation to transport agricultural produce to Charleston was no longer

1 Canals Come to South Carolina

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