This post consolidates several items published by Dataw Historic Foundation members about slavery on Dataw. This first summary is currently on exhibit in the History and Learning Center. Below it are links to other material published earlier.

Summary of Slavery on Datha Island

Section 0 – Orientation

This exhibit centers on the lives and labor of the hundreds of enslaved people who built, worked, and lived on Datha Island from 1783 to 1861.

For nearly 80 years, two Sea Island Cotton plantations operated on Datha Island under the ownership of the Sams family across three generations. As you walk here today, you are moving through a landscape shaped by their work and their courage. Every acre of the island’s prosperity depended on the forced labor of enslaved African and African American men, women, and children.

Census records show the Sams family held as many as 297 enslaved people across their properties in 1850, the peak of plantation operations. Most of them are nameless in the historical record. The panels that follow name those we can, tell what we know of their days, and acknowledge what records and time have obscured.

On the morning of November 7, 1861, a Union naval fleet entered Port Royal Sound and, in less than five hours, forced the Confederate forts to fall. Planters across the Sea Islands fled. Approximately 10,000 enslaved people, including those on Datha, were left behind. What happened next is the beginning of a different story. The island was called Datha during the period this exhibit covers; it is now known as Dataw.”

Plantations: Datha Point (north) and Datha Inlet (south), both on Datha Island

Years of Sams family ownership: 1783–1861 (78 years, three generations)

Enslaved at peak (1850 census): approximately 297 across Sams properties

“History is a story to be investigated and shared.”

Teresa Bridges, Sams family descendant

Attribution: We are grateful to the material drawn from Rowland, Moore, and Rogers, “The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Volume 1: 1514-1861” (University of South Carolina Press, 1996). We also drew on Jane Griffith’s study of the Sams family’s enslaved people, published by the Dataw Historic Foundation in March 2020; includes excerpts from Laura M. Towne’s and Charlotte Forten’s diaries (October-November 1862).

PANEL 1 – Lives Built on Enslaved Labor

Every historic structure you see here today was built by enslaved hands. The people who did that work were skilled, knowledgeable, and essential — yet they received nothing in return.

The African origins of some of Datha’s enslaved people may be tied to the arrival of the Ship Essex. It carried a load of enslaved Africans to Beaufort from Angola, Africa, in 1785, the first time since the 1730s. William Sams had bought and moved his family to Beaufort and Datha Island just two years earlier.

From 1783 until the Civil War drove the Sams family from the island in November 1861, enslaved men, women, and children were the labor force that made Datha’s Sea Island Cotton plantations function. They cleared the land, built the tabby plantation house and its outbuildings, constructed dikes and drainage systems, planted and harvested the long-staple cotton that made the Sams family wealthy, and cared for livestock, prepared food, and maintained every aspect of plantation life, from before sunrise until after dark.

Many brought deep expertise. Among Dr. B.B. Sams’ enslaved people were tailors, blacksmiths, and carpenters. Among those we know by name: Cicero served as coachman, gardener, and boatman. Solomon was the plantation carpenter. Aphe was a seamstress who taught her young daughter Hatta to sew alongside her. Jimmie cooked for the B.B. Sams household for 42 years. Brutus tended the hogs, and Cuffee worked as a farm hand. Together, people like Cicero, Solomon, Aphe, Jimmie, Brutus, and Cuffee made this isolated island into a working, profitable plantation.

Under the task system common on Sea Island Cotton plantations, field hands were assigned specific quarter-acre plots to cultivate each day. If they finished early, they might tend a small personal garden or raise a few chickens, a narrow margin of time they could call their own in lives that otherwise belonged entirely to others. They lived in one and two-room earthen-floor huts, sometimes without adequate clothing in winter, a detail teacher Charlotte Forten witnessed firsthand in 1862 at the neighboring plantation owned by a Sams. Oakland Plantation, Dr. Lewis Reeve Sams Jr.’s former property on Polawana Island.

Today, the tabby ruins, the paths, and the fields of this community stand on the same ground where these men, women, and children worked. Recognizing them is essential to understanding the full history of Datha Island and the ruins and vistas you see here today.

PANEL 2 – Work, Time, and Control

Enslaved people’s days were structured by owners and overseers from dawn to dark — yet even within those rigid hours, they found ways to sustain body, family, and spirit.

On Datha’s plantations, labor was directed by “drivers”, experienced enslaved men who assigned daily work, and by white overseers who reported to the owners. One Datha overseer, Mr. Cummings, was remembered in family accounts as “a severe man hated by the enslaved.” Another, Mr. Reynolds, was described as “decent and kindly.” The daily quality of life for hundreds of people could turn on such differences.

Field hands worked eight to ten hours a day in the intense heat and humidity of the Sea Island summer, planting, hoeing, and picking cotton. Children as young as five wore small harnesses to carry tools and supplies to the field hands. Domestic workers, cooks, maids, seamstresses, and valets were on call at all hours, their lives woven into the intimate rhythms of the plantation household.

If a field hand finished an assigned task early, they might tend a personal garden or rest. Evenings and Sundays offered brief windows for sharing food, exchanging news, and maintaining the bonds the law sought to deny. It was in these narrow margins of the day that Datha’s enslaved people taught children skills, passed on stories, and kept their communities alive.

Across the Lowcountry, archaeologists and physical anthropologists have studied the skeletons of the enslaved. Results show evidence of severe physical stress. Studies also reveal dietary deficiencies, chronic infections, anemia, and lead exposure from homemade, unglazed cookware. The average male enslaved person lived to approximately 35; the average female to 40.

“When horn blow and morning star rise, slave have for get up and cook.

When day clean, they gone to field.”

Former enslaved man, St. Helena Island area (oral history, early 20th century)

PANEL 3 – Power, Fear, and Defiance

Enslavers used laws, violence, and the constant threat of sale to maintain control. The people of Datha resisted — in ways both quiet and bold — whenever they could.

Control over Datha’s plantations was enforced through rules, physical punishment, and surveillance. Yet on Datha and nearby islands, enslaved people made choices, sometimes at great personal risk, that asserted their own humanity. Enslaved people were required to carry passes to move between properties, even to visit a spouse on a neighboring plantation. The “Market Bell” rang in nearby Beaufort at 9 o’clock; no enslaved person could walk those streets without a written pass from their owner. Dr. B.B. Sams permitted his enslaved to visit only his own plantations and no one else’s, keeping tight control over who could speak with whom.

In May 1797, a man named July, described in a Charleston newspaper notice as belonging to “Mr. William Sams, living on Dattah (sic) Island”, was caught in Charleston after running away. He risked the brutal punishments of the city’s Work House. It would be three generations before the beginning of the end of slavery would arrive.

When a large Union fleet arrived on November 7, 1861, and the Dr. Lewis Reeve Sams, Jr. family fled Polawana Island, an enslaved man named Cupid led the people around him into the woods rather than board the evacuation boats as their owner ordered. Aphe, a seamstress taken to Virginia, ran away at the war’s end. Two young, enslaved girls, forcibly taken by their fleeing owner, escaped through swamps and creeks for more than two days, making their way back to their parents on Datha Island. Not just Cupid, but about 10,000 people across roughly 200 plantations, now contraband of war, made active choices in the hours after the planters fled.

Laura M. Towne recorded what the Sams family’s departure looked like from the inside. A formerly enslaved woman named Tina, from Polawana Island, described the scene: “Tina of Polawana Island was telling us today how her master’s family were sitting down to dinner in their far-off, lovely island, when the news came that everyone was flying. They sprang up, left the silver on the table, the dinner untasted, packed a few clothes for the children, and were gone, never to come back.“

These actions, running, hiding, learning, and refusing, were not small things. They were acts of courage by people who risked everything to insist, in whatever way they could, that they were human beings and not property.

PANEL 4 – Families, Faith, and What Remains

Families, Faith, and Freedom Shaped What Remained.

Enslaved people on Datha sustained kinship despite separation by sale, pass laws, and distance. Aphe taught her young daughter Hatta to sew alongside her. Oral histories were kept alive for generations by people like Ma Lilly. Even historian Lawrence Rowland’s mother, Elizabeth Sanders Rowland, who owned the island from 1933 until her death in 1965, told the story of Ma Lilly, who she described as a loving ‘second mother’ to both the black and white youngsters on the island.

The enslaved people’s own spiritual lives ran deeper than what owners prescribed. They blended African traditions with Christian teaching to create worship practices that were truly their own. Among those we know by name, Mingo, described as “a genuine African” who spoke both English and Gullah, was one of Dr. B.B. Sams’ enslaved. The Gullah language he carried is a living legacy of the people who labored on these islands.

After the planters fled in 1861, Datha’s formerly enslaved people remained on the island. Datha was subsequently foreclosed on by the Federal government in 1863 as abandoned rebel property. It was eventually purchased by a New Yorker, William Irwin. The formerly enslaved people who had stayed did not disappear; they remained as tenant workers.

The Port Royal Experiment took shape across these islands beginning in 1862. One key site was next door on St. Helena Island, less than a year after the planters fled. Laura Towne and Ellen Murray founded the Penn School (the future Penn Center) on St. Helena Island in April 1862, widely recognized as one of the first schools established specifically for formerly enslaved people in American history. Soon, twenty-five-year-old Charlotte “Lottie” Forten, a Philadelphia free Black abolitionist and teacher, arrived at Oakland Plantation, Dr. Lewis Reeve Sams Jr.’s former property, to teach the newly freed people.

After emancipation, the formerly enslaved and their descendants founded communities, schools, and churches throughout this region. They kept alive the language and traditions developed from living on these islands. Today, a cemetery for enslaved people on Cotton Dike Road holds the remains of those who lived and died on this island in bondage, and their descendants. Among those remembered is Ma Lilly, whose care for children on this island is still recalled in family stories and in the name of Malilly Run Road. The history of Datha did not end in 1861 or 1865; it continues in the lives, memories, and landscape of the Dataw Island community today.

Slavery on Datha Island