About 1786 seed of several strains was imported from as many quarters by planters on the Georgia-Carolina coast.  Experiments with the Bourbon variety, which yielded the finest lint then in the market, showed that the growing season was too short for the ripening of its pods; but seed procured from the Bahama Islands, of the sort which has ever since been known as sea-island, not only made crops but yielded a finer fiber than they had in their previous home.  This introduction was accomplished by the simultaneous experiments of several planters on the Georgia coast.  Of these, Thomas Spaulding and Alexander Bissett planted the seed in 1786 but saw their plants fail to ripen any pods that year.  But the ensuing winter happened to be so mild that, although the cotton is not commonly a perennial outside the tropics, new shoots grew from the old roots in the following spring and yielded their crop in the fall.[3] Among those who promptly adopted the staple was Richard Leake, who wrote from Savannah at the end of 1788 to Tench Coxe:  “I have been this year an adventurer, and the first that has attempted on a large scale, in the article of cotton.  Several here as well as in Carolina have followed me and tried the experiment.  I shall raise about 5000 pounds in the seed from about eight acres of land, and the next year I expect to plant from fifty to one hundred acres."[4]

[Footnote 3:  Letter of Thomas Spaulding, Sapelo Island, Georgia, Jan. 20, 1844, to W.B.  Scabrook, in J.A.  Turner, ed., The Cotton Planter’s Manual (New York, 1857), pp. 280-286.]

[Footnote 4:  E.J.  Donnell, Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton (New York, 1872), p. 45.]

The first success in South Carolina appears to have been attained by William Elliott, on Hilton Head near Beaufort, in 1790.  He bought five and a half bushels of seed in Charleston at 14s per bushel, and sold his crop at 10-1/2d per pound.  In the next year John Screven of St. Luke’s parish planted thirty or forty acres, and sold his yield at from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. sterling per pound.  Many other planters on the islands and the adjacent mainland now joined the movement.  Some of them encountered failure, among them General Moultrie of Revolutionary fame who planted one hundred and fifty acres in St. John’s Berkeley in 1793 and reaped virtually nothing.[5]

[Footnote 5:  Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, Memoir on the Origin, Cultivation and Uses of Cotton (Charleston, 1844), pp. 19, 20.]

The English market came promptly to esteem the long, strong, silky sea-island fiber as the finest of all cottons; and the prices at Liverpool rose before the end of the century to as high as five shillings a pound.  This brought fortunes in South Carolina.  Captain James Sinkler from a crop of three hundred acres on his plantation, “Belvedere,” in 1794 gathered 216 pounds to the acre, which at prices ranging from fifty to seventy-five cents a pound brought him a