Advertising the arrival of 152 "prime healthy young negroes" from the Gambia River on the ship Mentor, merchants Robert Hazlehurst & Co. appealed to a well-established preference in the South Carolina slave market: "The negroes from this part of the coast of Africa, are well acquianted with the cultivation of rice, and are naturally industrious." The Columbia Herald (Charleston), 30 May 1785.
What sugar was to the Caribbean, rice was to coastal South Carolina and Georgia.
For more on the preferences and sources of the South Carolina slave market, consult Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991 [1981]) and Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
What sugar was to the Caribbean, rice was to coastal South Carolina and Georgia.
For more on the preferences and sources of the South Carolina slave market, consult Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991 [1981]) and Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
