Those who could save generally bought slaves with
their savings; those who could not, generally continued to raise cotton
nevertheless.
The gross cotton output, in which the upland crop greatly and increasingly
outweighed that of the sea-island staple, rapidly advanced from about
forty-eight million pounds in 1801 to about eighty million in 1806; then it
was kept stationary by the embargo and the war of 1812, until the return
of peace and open trade sent it up by leaps and bounds again. The price
dropped abruptly from an average of forty-four cents in the New York market
in 1801 to nineteen cents in 1802, but there was no further decline until
the beginning of the war with Great Britain.[35]
[Footnote 35: M.B. Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_, table following p. 357.]
Cotton's absorption of the people's energies already tended to become
excessive. In 1790 South Carolina had sent abroad a surplus of corn from
the back country measuring well over a hundred thousand bushels. But by
1804 corn brought in brigs was being advertised in Savannah to meet the
local deficit;[36] and in the spring of 1807 there seems to have been a
dearth of grain in the Piedmont itself.
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