1
Few countries enjoy more favorable situations for inland navigation, than
South-Carolina; and few, considering the time of her existence, as a settlement, 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 waterwaybuilding boom that spread across the United States. By 1835 more than thirty-five projects had linked still-water canals with in-river waterways to create approximately twenty-five hundred miles of canal transportation and thousands more miles of improved river navigation. Some canals—such as the Erie Canal, opened in 1825—were eminently successful. Others were not.
South Carolinians were enthusiastic participants in the boom. While New York was building the Erie Canal and the Champlain Canals and Pennsylvania was building the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, South Carolina undertook a massive program to construct canals and to improve waterways throughout the state. It is said that South Carolina spent more money per capita on internal improvements at this time than any other state. By the end of the 1820s, South Carolina was boasting that it had opened twelve hundred miles of waterways for steamboat navigation and another twelve hundred miles of canals and in-river waterways for small-boat navigation.
As a result of this ambitious program, most South Carolinians had watertransport access to Charleston, the commercial heart of the state and its principal seaport. Steamboats left Granby, near Columbia, for Charleston via the Congaree and Santee rivers. They also left Camden and Stateburg via the Wateree River and
Cheraw via the Great Pee Dee River to travel to Charleston. For a few years canal boats left for Charleston from Ware Shoals (then in Abbeville County) via the
Saluda River, from Lockhart in Union County via the Broad River, and from above
Landsford 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

Canal, Saluda Canal, Wateree Canal, and Lockhart’s Canal have been are long gone and almost totally forgotten (see color plate 1).
Transporting Cotton
The canal mania was based on sound economy. South Carolina built canals and improved waterways because water transportation was faster, more reliable, and less expensive than road transportation. Most of the existing roads of the time were small, dirt tracks through the wilderness. They were few in number and frequently impassable. The state’s chief commodity was cotton, which usually needed to be shipped in bales from the upcountry plantations to Charleston. These bales were unwieldy, heavy, and di Y cult to move by road. A typical cotton bale weighed five hundred pounds and was almost six-feet long by four- to six-feet wide. Transporting heavy cotton bales on corduroyed roads (built from log planks laid on dirt) and across lowcountry swamps and creeks was expensive, requiring teams of four horses and multiple teamsters. Even for the single traveler unencumbered with cotton, overland travel was di Y cult. Take, for example, the problems experienced by 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 passengers because of the danger of highwaymen and other predators along the route.
2
Historic Canals and Waterways of South Carolina

Water travel could also be treacherous. Boats sank from hitting submerged sawyers (logs stuck in the river bottom and projecting upward). Or boats ran aground on shifting sandbars in rivers. But water travel was seen as the more convenient and safer choice. It was also the most inexpensive means of moving cotton to Charleston. In 1822 the South
Carolina Board of Public Works provided an example of the cost e Y ciency of transporting cotton by water:
A Broad river boat with four hands, will bring down to Columbia, the distance of 60 miles, 40 bales of cotton in less than two days. The same quantity by waggon, will require at least 4 hands, 16 horses and 4 waggons; and three days to perform the trip: the boat will cost less than $100, and the 4 waggons and
16 horses at least $2,000—the difference of capital employed will be $1,900—the difference of current expense will be the support of 16 horses. If this capital and expenditure were employed for agricultural purposes, it is evident that the farms of the upper country would be vastly improved, and the extent of crops encreased.
1
South Carolina’s program for constructing of canals and improving waterways was an extension of a water culture that already existed. Before the 1820s, even without the canals,
South Carolina’s rivers were being used to carry cargo during the high waters of spring. Watercraft called Camden boats,
Wateree boats, or Congaree-built boats were used for shipping. These boats were large, sixty to seventy feet long and seventeen or eighteen feet wide, with a shallow draft of four to four and a half feet. Such boats could carry 100 to 120 bales of cotton, fifteen to twenty-five cords of wood, or up to sixty hogsheads of tobacco. They sometimes carried sail but were usually poled. In addition rafts and other sorts of boats were found on South Carolina’s rivers. Almost always manned by slaves, there riverboats typically required a crew of six to seven African Americans, sometimes more. Experienced crews were valued for their understanding of river navigation and were usually rented or sold as a team.
For all its pluses, South Carolina water transport was localized because it required portages around river obstacles and was reliable only during seasons of high water. With the economic boom following the War of 1812, there developed
Southern Patriot, March 1, 1822
Southern Patriot, November 11, 1822
Southern Patriot, March 18, 1818
Canals Come to South Carolina
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City Gazette (Charleston, S.C.), August 31, 1791 an urgency in South Carolina to undertake a canal-construction and waterway-improvement program. The price for cotton had increased, but Charleston’s share of the cotton-export market seemed to be shrinking when compared to that of its rival, Savannah. Savannah enjoyed a shipping advantage over
Charleston because planters along the Savannah River could easily ship cotton down the river to Savannah for export.
Although Charleston is situated on two tidal rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, they do not penetrate far into the interior of South Carolina. Charleston, unlike Savannah, did not have a natural water course allowing it easy access to upcountry cotton. The leading citizens of South Carolina decided that something needed to be done. There were three means of improving the shipment of cotton from the upcountry to Charleston: more passable roads, a still-water canal, and a river/canal navigation system using South Carolina’s rivers. Railroads,
City Gazette, January 11, 1793 barely in their infancy in England, were not yet a viable alternative.
Roads did not seem a reasonable option. The few rudimentary roads of South
Carolina were usually corduroyed, built with local pine trees that rapidly decayed in the warm, moist climate of South Carolina’s lowcountry. Bridges were rare, usually made of wood that also decayed rapidly in this era before chemical preservatives. Where there were bridges, they were frequently knocked out by floods.
2 The levy imposed on slave owners required slaves to be provided to state authorities for the construction and maintenance of roads and other public facilities. Roads constructed by the levy were rarely well built.
3 To improve existing roads would have required stone to replace the decaying corduroy. At that time South Carolinians believed that there was no source of stone in the lowcountry. Transporting stone from the upcountry would be prohibitively expensive. Improving the existing roads from the upcountry all the way to Charleston would also have required the construction of expensive causeways and large-span bridges to cross the lowcountry’s numerous boggy swamps and tidal streams (see fig. 1.1).
The second option was a still-water canal, an excavated ditch filled with water from specially constructed reservoirs or from adjacent waterways dammed to divert water into the canal. Changes in elevation of the canal were controlled by a series of locks. Although expensive to build, a still-water canal provided the most reliable means of water transport. At the time when South Carolina was considering a statewide canal-construction and waterway-improvement program, architectengineer Robert Mills 4 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
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Historic Canals and Waterways of South Carolina

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.
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 rivers was less expensive than Mills’s proposed still-water canal and therefore very attractive to South Carolinians. The central portion of South Carolina was drained by the large rivers of the Saluda-Broad-Congaree-Wateree-Santee river system.Immediately
above Charleston was the Santee River. Since 1800, boats from the Santee River
Canals Come to South Carolina
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Fig. 1.3. An 1881 depiction of Charleston in 1780.
From William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay,
A Popular History of the
United States (1881–83) had been reaching Charleston via the Santee Canal and the Cooper River. If cleared of obstructions, the Santee, Wateree, and Catawba rivers could provide access to the center portion of the state. Further west, the Santee River also gave access to the 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 all these rivers, it was thought, could be cleared at relatively little cost. Small bypass canals could take boats around obstructions such as rapids and falls.
Clearing the Saluda-Broad-Congaree-Catawba-Wateree-Santee river system of obstacles would provide downriver access to the upper end of the Santee Canal and through that canal to the Cooper River and Charleston. The Santee Canal became the critical link in South Carolina’s canal-construction and waterwayimprovement program, one the most extensive of such programs yet undertaken in the United States.
The Canal Boom
South Carolina’s ambitious program to build canals and improve waterways throughout the state was part of the canal boom that was sweeping America. There were two periods of extensive canal and waterway construction. The first canal construction period began at the end of the Revolutionary War, in 1783, and lasted until the beginning of the War of 1812, during which large construction projects were not undertaken. The second took place after the end of the War of 1812 in
1814 and lasted until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Most of South Carolina’s canals and water navigations were built during the second period.
During the first construction period, canals built in the United States tended to be short and were not financially successful. The first canal constructed in Pennsylvania, for example, was the Conewago Canal (built 1792–97), which was slightly under 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. It extended 184 miles from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland. Through most of its course, it was a river navigation where channels in the riverbed were improved by in-river sluices and other devices. The only true canals built by the Potomac
6
Historic Canals and Waterways of South Carolina

Canal Company, those that contained lift locks, were at Great Falls (.68 miles long) and at Little Falls (2.16 miles long). The financial success of Potomac Canal was uneven. In Virginia the longest canal from before the War of 1812 was the
James River Canal. Like the Potomac River Canal, the James River Canal was an improved 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 lower falls (completed in 1796). These were consolidated in 1810 with a canal around
Richmond. Early canals that were excavated still-water canals and did not use the riverbed 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 War of 1812, were much longer and more often were excavated canals (also called stillwater canals) equipped with locks. The Erie Canal (built 1817–25) was 363 miles long; the Ohio and Erie Canal (built 1825–32) was 307 miles long; the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (built 1828–50), the successor to the Potomac Canal, was 184 miles long (and was planned to be twice that length); and the James and Kanawha
Canal (built 1830–51), the successor to the James River Canal, was 196 miles long.
During the first period canals were typically built by private organizations chartered or otherwise authorized by the state. In 1792 Governor Thomas Mi Z in of Pennsylvania authorized Robert Morris and his group to build the Conewago
Canal. The Potomac Canal Company, a private company, was authorized by the
Virginia (1784) and Maryland (1785) legislatures. The James River Canal Company, another private company, was authorized by the Virginia legislature (1784). On
March 22, 1786, the South Carolina legislature passed “An Act to Establish a Company for the Inland Navigation from Santee to Cooper River .
” The o Y cial name of the company was “The Company for the Inland Navigation from Santee to Cooper
River,” 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) to
Robert Morris and his group to build the Conewago Canal—a small fraction of the o Y cially estimated total construction cost of $119,000. Usually funding for early canals came from the shares purchased by proprietors or stockholders, sometimes augmented with whatever could be raised by lotteries. In capital-starved early America canal construction was frequently halted by a lack of money, as happened with the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in Delaware and Maryland and the Susquehanna Canal in Maryland. The early canals of South Carolina, such as the Santee Canal, were also state chartered and privately funded. And, as elsewhere in America, lack of money caused some canals in South Carolina—such as those of the Catawba and Wateree Navigation Company, the Edisto Company, and the
Sampit and St. James Santee Canal Company—not to be completed.
Canals Come to South Carolina
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After the War of 1812, canals were frequently financed and constructed by the individual states, as occurred in New York (the Erie Canal and the Champlain
Canal), Pennsylvania (the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal and its divisions),
Virginia (the James and Kanawha Canal) and in South Carolina. During this second period, even when canals were privately funded, states frequently bought shares of the canal company, as happened with the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
Company.
The history of South Carolina’s canals and waterways begins with its first completed canal, the Santee Canal, chartered in 1786 and opened in 1800. This canal’s success was thwarted because the Santee, Congaree, and Wateree rivers above the entrance to the Santee Canal were frequently blocked with obstructions and sandbars, thereby limiting the number of boats that could descend these rivers and use the Santee Canal. South Carolina’s decade-long program (1818–28) to build canals and clear its rivers of obstacles to navigation resulted in large increases in shipping on the Santee Canal. These new canals and navigable waterways also decreased shipping costs while increasing both the volume of agricultural produce (especially cotton) shipped and the wealth of the state. But these canals and waterways tended to be short lived. By the end of the 1820s, a new transportation system based on the railroad and turnpike had begun to be developed in South Carolina and elsewhere in the United States. This system replaced and led to the decline of canals and waterways throughout the country.
Transporting Cotton from the Upcountry
The impetus for building canals and improving rivers for navigation originated with the geography of South Carolina. Like many of the original thirteen states,
South Carolina is a coastal state located between the Appalachian Mountains to the 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 lowcountry approximately one hundred miles wide, transportation was easy. Tidewater streams and rivers reached most lowcountry plantations, each of which maintained its own dock and communicated with other plantations and coastal cities by water. Plantations had their own boats and boat crews, typically with four to six oarsmen. In addition shipping along the South Carolina coast, the coasting trade, was reliable and well established.
The focal point of South Carolina’s coastal region was the port city of Charleston. Produce grown in the lowcountry was shipped to Charleston. Situated on two tidal rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, Charleston had an excellent harbor. Its location in the south of the United States made it well suited for trade with the
Caribbean, as well as with Europe and with the other Atlantic coast colonies.
After the Revolutionary War, the economy of South Carolina started to change radically with expansion of cotton production, which began in the 1790s and grew
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Historic Canals and Waterways of South Carolina

rapidly after the introduction of the cotton gin in 1802 (see figs. 1.4 and 1.5). Most of the new cotton production took place in the upcountry of South Carolina with its inexpensive lands and optimal growing conditions. Upcountry cotton plantations, however, were usually one hundred miles or more from the coast, creating the urgent need to develop economical means of transporting cotton to Charleston for shipment overseas and, to a lesser extent, to northern American ports.
After the Revolutionary War exports of cotton exploded. Exports of indigo withered, and those of rice remained stable. This can be seen in the statistics complied by John Drayton for A View of South-Carolina, As Respects Her Natural and
Civil Concerns , published in 1802 (see tables 1.1 and 1.2).
The explosive growth of upcountry cotton after the Revolutionary War was paralleled 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 indigo planters in the lowcountry turned to rice production; those in the upcountry turned to cotton.
Table 1.1. “
Statement of exports from the Port of Charleston, and their total annual amount, from 1790 to 1800”
Casks of
Period of Barrels of Indigo & lbs
Export.
Rice.
weight.
Hbds. of
Tobacco.
Total annual of exports, including Rice,
Pounds wt Indigo, Tobacco of cotton.
& Cotton.
Dollars.
From Aug.
31 , to Dec.
31, 1789 , being 4 months.
9,157
1790 87,179
289
1,649
1,172
6,820
5,670
9,840
313,674
2,104,677
1791 98,044
1792 102,235
1793
1794
94,055
69,717
1795
1796
1797
1798
1799
1800
2,245
2,495
1,819
2,154
6,033
5,285
3,324
4,908
54,075
76,710
93,540
159,040
2,411,771
2,341,777
3,112,525
3,869,019
85,670
84,540
1,217
490
4,288
5,328
1,109,653
912,600
5,984,196
7,600,387
80,837 96,121 lbs.
3,961 1,008,511
74,277 19,838 lbs.
4,638 2,476,431
70,426
75,788
6,892 lbs.
9,640 2,801,936
6,459,524
6,946,924
8,729,015
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.
Canals Come to South Carolina
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Fig. 1.4. Section drawing of a cotton gin. From Edward H.
Knight, Knight’s Mechanical
Dictionary (1877). Placed in the hopper (F), cotton is subjected to the rotating action of the picker roll (A). The rotating saw blades (D) force the cotton through a grid (E). This action separates the fiber lint from the remainder of the plant. The rotating saw blades are brushed with rotating brushes (B). The heavier debris falls to the board labeled (K). The lighter lint and dust are passed to chamber 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.
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

Rice production in the postwar years was greatly changed. Tidal cultivation of rice replaced the traditional lowcountry swamp plantations. Tidal cultivation could produce five to six times the slave yield compared to the inland swamp plantations. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, many of the traditional rice plantations of the lowcountry became abandoned.
Blanding, 7
6 In 1825 Abram superintendent of public works for South Carolina, reported on the decline of rice production and the depopulation of the lowcountry of the Edisto
River valley south of Charleston:
The inland rice swamps of Stono and Cacaw thirty years ago, were generally under cultivation. There were one hundred and nineteen settled plantations there, containing together twenty-four thousand acres of highly improved rice lands, usually producing two barrels or one thousand four hundred pounds of rice to the acre, of a 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 abandoned. 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 through these swamps, opened formerly by the combined labor of these plantations, are now choaking 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 industry, wealth and unbounded hospitality, are now deserted and crumbling to the dust, or have already reached that period of decay, which has left nothing but a few mouldering 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 first introduced.
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 cultivation.
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 called black-seed or long-staple) cotton and short-staple (also called upland or greenseed) cotton. Sea Island cotton grew well in the coastal areas, and it was relatively easy to separate seeds from the fiber by hand. In contrast short-staple cotton proved di Y cult to separate lint from the seed. Only with Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 (see fig. 1.4) did cotton production become economically profitable. And cotton proved very lucrative. Lowcountry plantation owners converted to cotton production and developed upcountry cotton plantations.
Upcountry farmers increasingly grew cotton as a cash crop and became wealthy as a result. Inexpensive land prices in the upcountry were also a major factor in the expansion of cotton production in that region (see table 1.3). South Carolina entered its first cotton boom (1794–1819).
As cotton replaced rice as South Carolina’s principal cash crop, the geographic center of agricultural production of the state moved westward. This changed
South Carolina’s transportation needs. When rice was the predominant crop, the lowcountry’s rice plantations, particularly the tidal plantations, were close to navigable streams and water transport to Charleston was readily available. With cotton increasingly being grown in the central and western portions of the state, easy water navigation to transport agricultural produce to Charleston was no longer
Canals Come to South Carolina
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