The disadvantages were the slowness of the harvesting, caused by the
failure of the bolls to open wide; the smallness of the yield; and the
necessity of careful handling at all stages in preparing the lint for
market. Climatic requirements, furthermore, confined its culture within
a strip thirty or forty miles wide along the coast of South Carolina and
Georgia. In the first flush of the movement some of the rice fields were
converted to cotton;[10] but experience taught the community ere long that
the labor expense in the new industry absorbed too much of the gross return
for it to displace rice from its primacy in the district.
[Footnote 10: F.A. Michaux, _Travels_, in R.G. Thwaites, ed., _Early
Western Travels_, III, 303.]
In the Carolina-Georgia uplands the industrial and social developments
of the eighteenth century had been in marked contrast with those on the
seaboard. These uplands, locally known as the Piedmont, were separated from
the tide-water tract by a flat and sandy region, the "pine barrens," a
hundred miles or more in breadth, where the soil was generally too light
for prosperous agriculture before the time when commercial fertilizers came
into use.
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