Introduction to The Last Rice Planter By Jon Wongrey The Last Rice Planter begins as the cessation of hostilities between the North and South comes to its end at the McLean home in Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865 with General Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginias to General Grant's Union Army. There to witness the terminus of Southern Independence was now ex-confederate Sergeant Major Jasper Webb who, with a final salute to General Lee, begins his long journey to his home state of South Carolina to his family's generations old Webb's Bluff Plantation. A rice plantation on the South Santee River in a region along the coast known as the "Low Country" where for over 200 years rice was cultivated and became known as "Carolina Gold" with its pearl-colored grain dominating the world's rice market for as many years. This came to an end during the Union's blockade prohibiting the Low Country rice planters form shipping rice to their foreign markets. Then came the hordes of invading soldiers, and like locusts, they struck the land and its people with a vengeance in compliance with Abraham Lincoln's policy to punish those southern states in revolt to the Union. Yet amid war's destruction, mobocracy, Union law, deceit, and murder, Jasper is determined again to plant rice and re-establish "Carolina Gold" as a world market in a time when the lamp of day did not rise over a land once known as the Flower of the South.