January 1745

Beginning around 1740 and reaching full commercial force by 1745, indigo cultivation became South Carolina's second most valuable export after rice, producing roughly one-third of the colony's total export value before the Revolutionary War. The commercial success is conventionally attributed to Eliza Lucas (later Pinckney), who at age 18 began experimenting with Caribbean indigo strains on her family's Wappoo Plantation outside Charleston. But the actual cultivation, harvest, and processing knowledge was held by enslaved workers — many of them from regions of West Africa where indigo had long been cultivated and used as dye. Enslaved people performed every labor-intensive step: planting, weeding, harvesting, steeping the plants in fermentation vats, beating the liquid to oxidize it, drawing off the water, pressing and drying the blue dye cakes. The toxic fermentation process exposed enslaved workers to noxious fumes. The indigo boom accelerated slave imports into South Carolina through the 1740s and 1750s.

Between 1745 and 1775, the Virginia Gazette published hundreds of advertisements from enslavers seeking the return of enslaved people who had fled. These advertisements constitute an inadvertent archive of slavery's violence. Physical descriptions routinely catalogued whipping scars ('has scars on his back from whipping'), branding marks, iron collar abrasions around the neck, missing fingers from cotton gin accidents, and cut marks from axes. Advertisements describe enslaved people 'easily frightened by the whip,' indicating conditioned trauma responses. Many describe African-born enslaved people with ritual scarification — facial markings from specific ethnic groups in West and Central Africa — providing evidence of the ongoing importation of Africans through the mid-18th century. The ads also reveal resistance: enslaved people who spoke multiple languages, who claimed to be free, who had trades enabling them to pass as free workers, and who had relatives in other colonies or towns whom enslavers guessed they were seeking.

Between 1745 and 1775, the Virginia Gazette published hundreds of advertisements from enslavers seeking the return of enslaved people who had fled. These advertisements constitute an inadvertent archive of slavery's violence. Physical descriptions routinely catalogued whipping scars, branding marks, iron collar abrasions around the neck, missing fingers from cotton gin accidents, and cut marks from axes. Advertisements describe enslaved people 'easily frightened by the whip,' indicating conditioned trauma responses. Many describe African-born enslaved people with ritual facial scarification from specific West African ethnic groups, providing evidence of the ongoing importation of Africans. The ads also reveal resistance: enslaved people who spoke multiple languages, who claimed to be free, who had trades enabling them to pass as free workers, and who had relatives in other towns whom enslavers guessed they were seeking.