ISSUE 71, PEANUTS, Part 2: The African Peanut & the Formation of the American Peanut Market
The African Peanut and the Formation of the American Peanut Market.
There were two African peanuts that came into American consumers’ hands in the last half of the nineteenth century. When demand ignited for peanuts in the 1870s and domestic production could not service supply, merchants imported peanuts from South Africa—100,000 bushels according to reports in 1871 [Portland Maine Daily Press (March 6, 1871), 3]. A 1872 printed conversation with a New York peanut broker indicated that, while these African peanuts contained much oil, they were not greatly esteemed for snacking: “They are mean little black ones, which come from the Cape of Good Hope. My customers is fastidious, and they never use them” [Dubuque Daily Times (February 17, 1872), 2]. The two nuts in the pod were sheathed in a paper black skin. Some cultivators grew these imported nuts rather than eating them. They gave rise to the heirloom “Carolina Black Peanut.” These were post-Civil War introductions into a North Carolina landscape that was growing another kind of African peanut, the Carolina African Runner Peanut that came from the Slave Coast and Gold Coast of West Africa during the colonial era. Called the African or Carolina ground nut by the first non-Africans who grew them in North America, this was a small nut, of good culinary quality, producing fine oil. It had tan-red skins. This peanut variety was collected in 161 by Sir Hans Sloan in Jamaica on a newly landed slave ship and remains in his botanical specimen collection in London. They survived into the 21st century in North Carolina preserved in the breeding collection kept at North Carolina State University. It would be revived by Dr. Brian Ward of Clemson University.
Wilmington NC was the first center of commercial peanut production in the United States. Farmers occupying tracts along the coast, up to four miles into the interior, benefited from the most fertile and readily cultivated land in North Carolina. “From a strip of land like this, extending some forty miles northerly from Wilmington, and lying east of the old Newbern Road comes nearly the entire quantity of ground nuts (Yankee peanuts) grown in the United States market” [“Manufacture of Tar,” The Charleston Courier (August 5, 1846). Productivity per acre varied from thirty to eighty bushels. “There are some planters who raise from one thousand to fifteen hundred bushels in a year.” When commercial production began in North and South Carolina is difficult to pin down. In 1809 a Philadelphia agronomist, A. Boucherie, reported securing peanuts from the Philadelphia market, observed that they were so familiar they didn’t require description, and identified North and South Carolina, and the West Indies as the sites where they were grown [“An Essay on the Ground Nut,” Philadelphia Gazette (August 14, 1809), 2]. The first newspaper advertisement for peanuts for sale as a commodity appeared in an ad by poet, merchant, and sometime resident of the Carolinas, Philip Freneau, in the New York Daily Advertiser of March 24, 1788, page 3. His vessel, the Columbia, cycled between New York and Charleston.
Northern cities developed a taste for roasted peanuts in the 1790s. Loomis & Tillinghast, merchants at 96 Wall Street, supplied Manhattan throughout the decade, though some of their casks of peanuts may have been imported from the West Indies. The one locale associated with their consumption in the northern cities was the theater.
The U. S. Embargo Act of 1807, a law intended to resist the British and French impressment of neutral American sailors on ships trading the Atlantic had the unintended result of killing the cotton market. Planters in North and South Carolina began turning to the cultivation of peanuts as a profitable alternative. This is when Wilmington and Santee SC became hubs of peanut activity. They trafficked in the original peanut introduced into the region, the Carolina African Runner.
The enslaved Africans who transported the peanut from West Africa to the Carolinas boiled the nuts in the pods and consumed them. In Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities, they were roasted street side and salted. Some, having read scientific reports about the chemical composition of Arachis hypogeia pressed oil from the kernels, touting it as an American alternative to olive oil, noting the many failures at growing olive trees in North America.
The market built steadily, with Georgia joining the Carolinas in cultivation of the nuts in the 1830s. In the early 1840s Dr. Matthew Harris began his campaign to make Virginia a peanut-growing region. Few were initially convinced by his prosletyzing.