The political ecology of slavery: Edmund Ruffin and the simbi of South Carolina

ABSTRACT

In the early months of 1843, Edmund Ruffin began a geological tour of South Carolina to survey the landscape and the current state of plantation farming across the region. Commissioned by governor James Hammond, Ruffin’s survey aimed to diagnose the decline in plantation productivity in the state. In the diary that he kept during his tour, Ruffin describes stories of nature spirits called “simbi,” whom enslaved and indigenous inhabitants believed guarded limestone springs in the south-east of the state. This paper argues that in the accounts of simbi, which are embedded in a geological survey that aims to increase the efficiency of resource extraction, Ruffin’s reader glimpses a competing geology composed of stratified historical, environmental, and phenomenological meanings. The paper recontextualizes simbi in order to suggest how truly destabilizing a simbi metaphysics is to Ruffin’s own ecological project. By drawing on a rich body of recent religious studies of the African diaspora, the paper suggests possible ecological claims being made in these simbi stories, and that these claims are deeply rooted in knowledge about land use, sustainability, inheritance, and privatization that unsettle the plantation system. The paper aims, in other words, to more thoroughly perceive the network of relationships between enslaved persons, the fountains, spirits, the dead, and the African continent co-present with Ruffin’s geology. It also examines the interpenetration of Ruffin’s political and geo-agricultural writings in order to illustrate how he grounds his racial politics in his understanding of ecology.

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Notes

1 Recent ecological histories of the antebellum South, particularly the work of Steven Stoll and Erin Stewart Mauldin, explore how the depletion of Southern soils played a vital role as a propellant for the westward expansion of enslavement. See also Eugene Genovese’s early account of the relationship between soil depletion and the westward expansion of slavery in his book that borrows Ruffin’s title, The Political Economy of Slavery (1989, 26–28, 85–99).

2 A vast body of writing has taken various approaches to disproving the notion that African culture is primitive, making use of academic, artistic, experimental, and scientific methods, and likely beginning at the theory’s inception. On the diversity of African American cultural life and experience, see Martin R. Delaney’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (2014). On the roles British colonial natural histories and ethnographies played in casting non-white cultures as primitive, see Robert Lawrence Gunn’s Ethnology and Empire (2015) and Susan Scott Parish, American Curiosity (2006). For a general intellectual history of the idea that American slavery civilized the enslaved, see Eugene Genovese’s The Political Economy of Slavery (1989, 70–81) and William M. Mathew’s introduction to Ruffin’s diary (2012, 24). On the ways paternalism made use of slave owners’ proximity to their enslaved laborers to discipline and to surveil, see Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997, especially 17–48). Hartman also looks at the central role that Southern agricultural journals in particular played in disseminating the idea that slave entertainment was an important component of plantation management (42–46). On the social construction of race and the consequences this construction has on everyday life, see Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2014).

3 I am thinking primarily here of Marx’s analysis of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism and its consequences for his understanding of democracy (1965, 122–143).

4 A key difference between Kongo simbi of the time and the simbi of South Carolina, which Brown notes, is that simbi in Kongo inhabited more diverse natural features like mountains and caves.

5 For example, Young examines the cross-cultural resonances enslaved persons likely interpreted in Christian baptism and the symbol of the cross, comparing their shared emphasis, in Central West African religious practice, on the meeting place between the realm of the dead and the world of the living.

6 As Young explains of the potential overlay of the Christian cross and the crossroads in the Kingdom of Kongo, “[t]he cross represented a variously marked point where different geographies, iconographies, and belief systems merged,” leading Young to “[suggest] a notion of culture that is collective, a social dynamic that is, at any given point, larger than the individuals who come together to create it.”

7 In this sense, simbi worship may have provided enslaved persons a similar opportunity to imagine the possibility of different political configurations other than slavery, which Saidiya Hartman sees in praise meetings. Held at night in swamps, woods, or sometimes in slave quarters, praise meetings allowed enslaved persons to worship God without being under the surveillance of their master. Slave owners interpreted praise meetings as a threat and usually punished slaves found worshiping because “the threat embodied in serving God was that the recognition of divine authority superseded, if not negated, the mastery of the slave owner” (Hartman 1997, 66).

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Amanda Lowe

Amanda Lowe is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She researches the influence of geologic theory on the writings of Emily Dickinson, Charles Chesnutt, and the scientific illustrator Orra White Hitchcock, as well as on the political and agricultural writings of the antebellum soil scientist Edmund Ruffin. She is the Program Coordinator for the Freedom & Citizenship Program at Columbia, which provides low-income, first-generation high school juniors summer seminars in political philosophy, college application support during their senior year, and opportunities for civic engagement. She was also a 2020–2021 Public Humanities Fellow at the Heyman Center at Columbia.