Against planter ingenuity: a case study of two antebellum plantations and their Senegambian foremen

From the end of the 18th century to the antebellum period, agricultural knowledge moved between enslaved and planter communities in the coastal south of Georgia and South Carolina creating dizzying fortunes for the region’s rice and cotton barons. Scholars have shown the Senegambian antecedents of South Carolina’s agricultural methods but have not established how this knowledge moved. Considered model farms in their day, a case study of two closely connected barrier island plantations roughly 10 km off the Georgia coast indicates the figure of the Black Foreman as an important conduit for such knowledge. 

Bilali Mohammed and Salih Bilali remembered their capture into slavery from polities in the Western Sahel (Senegambia) in the late 1700s. As Foremen enslaved on large, mechanized plantations on Sapelo and St Simon's Islands in Georgia, each man directed the work of hundreds of slaves, a managerial role more often performed by Blacks in the lower south than historians have acknowledged. Bilali and Salih lead self-sustaining slave communities  whose survival depended on the marine, aquatic and terrestrial ecologies in which they worked and lived. Known as engines of innovation, Sapelo and St Simon’s  attracted visitors such as Charles Lylle, Richard Olmstead, and Fanny Kemble. By reading the colonial archive against histories of enslavement, STS, archaeology and oral history, this paper tells a story of agency in spaces of captivity and asks: can the planter be made to testify against his own professed ingenuity and reveal the African sources of his knowledge?