In no part of the U.S. South is the historiography regarding slavery and emancipation as rich, deep, and impressive as in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. For decades, scholars have worked assiduously on this region, which comprises the outer coastal plain of these two South Atlantic states, along with numerous barrier islands adjacent to the coast. Although the region was more diverse than is sometimes believed, the standard depiction of the area during the time of slavery as a region dominated by large capitalistic plantation enterprises with large numbers of African and African-American slaves—producing sizable quantities of rice, supplemented early by indigo and later by Sea Island cotton, mainly for sale in foreign and extra-regional markets—is generally sound. So, too, is the view that after the demise of slavery, the area’s plantation sector declined dramatically before collapsing altogether.
What followed this collapse is more difficult to explain...