The product
was of inferior grade, the price was low, and the cost of freightage high.
The export from Charleston rose from 2680 hogsheads in 1784 to 9646 in
1799, but rapidly declined thereafter. Tobacco, never more than a makeshift
staple, was gladly abandoned for cotton at the first opportunity.[11]
[Footnote 11: U.B. Phillips, _History of Transportation in the Eastern
Cotton Belt to 1860_ (New York, 1908), pp. 46-55.]
At the time of the federal census of 1790 there were in the main group of
upland counties of South Carolina, comprised then in the two "districts" of
Camden and Ninety-six, a total of 91,704 white inhabitants, divided into
15,652 families. Of these 3787 held slaves to the number of 19,934--an
average of 5-1/4 slaves in each holding. No more than five of these parcels
comprised as many as one hundred slaves each, and only 156 masters, about
four per cent, of the whole, had as many as twenty each. These larger
holdings, along with the 335 other parcels ranging from ten to nineteen
slaves each, were of course grouped mainly in the river counties in the
lower part of the Piedmont, while the smallest holdings were scattered far
and wide. That is to say, there was already discoverable a tendency toward
a plantation regime in the localities most accessible to market, while
among the farmers about one in four had one or more slaves to aid in the
family's work.
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