In 1860 Louis Manigault listed
the forty-one rice plantations on the Savannah River and scheduled their
acreage in the crop. Only one of them had as little as one hundred acres
in rice, and it seems to have been an appendage of a larger one across the
river. On the other hand, two of them had crops of eleven hundred, and two
more of twelve hundred acres each. The average was about 425 acres per
plantation, expected to yield about 1200 pounds of rice per acre each
year.[37] A census tabulation in 1850, ignoring any smaller units, numbered
the plantations which produced annually upwards of 20,000 pounds of rice at
446 in South Carolina, 80 in Georgia, and 25 in North Carolina.[38]
[Footnote 37: MS. in the possession of Mrs. H.K. Jenkins, Pinopolis, S.C.]
[Footnote 38: _Compendium of the Seventh U.S. Census_, p. 178.]
Indigo and sea-island cotton fields had no ditches dividing them
permanently into task units; but the fact that each of these in its day was
often combined with rice on the same plantations, and that the separate
estates devoted to them respectively lay in the region dominated by the
rice regime, led to the prevalence of the task system in their culture
also.
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