gross return of $509 per laborer employed.[6] Peter Gaillard of St. John’s Berkeley received for his crop of the same year an average of $340 per hand; and William Brisbane of St. Paul’s earned so much in the three years from 1796 to 1798 that he found himself rich enough to retire from work and spend several years in travel at the North and abroad.  He sold his plantation to William Seabrook at a price which the neighbors thought ruinously high, but Seabrook recouped the whole of it from the proceeds of two years’ crops.[7]

[Footnote 6:  Samuel DuBose, Address delivered before the Black Oak Agricultural Society, April 28, 1858, in T.G.  Thomas, The Huguenots of South Carolina (New York, 1887).]

[Footnote 7:  W.B.  Seabrook, Memoir on Cotton, p. 20.]

The methods of tillage were quickly systematized.  Instead of being planted, as at first, in separate holes, the seed came to be drilled and plants grown at intervals of one or two feet on ridges five or six feet apart; and the number of hoeings was increased.  But the thinner fruiting of this variety prevented the planters from attaining generally more than about half the output per acre which their upland colleagues came to reap from their crops of the shorter staple.  A hundred and fifty pounds to the acre and three or four acres to the hand was esteemed a reasonable crop on the seaboard.[8] The exports of the sea-island staple rose by 1805 to nearly nine million pounds, but no further expansion occurred until 1819 when an increase carried the exports for a decade to about eleven million pounds a year.  In the course of the twenties Kinsey Burden and Hugh Wilson, both of St. John’s Colleton, began breeding superfine fiber through seed selection, with such success that the latter sold two of his bales in 1828 at the unequaled price of two dollars a pound.  The practice of raising fancy grades became fairly common after 1830, with the result, however, that for the following decade the exports fell again to about eight million pounds a year.[9]

[Footnote 8:  John Drayton, View of South Carolina (Charleston, 1802), p. 132; J.A.  Turner, ed., Cotton Planter’s Manual, pp. 129, 131.]

[Footnote 9:  Seabrook, pp. 35-37, 53.]

Sea-island cotton, with its fibers often measuring more than two inches in length, had the advantages of easy detachment from its glossy black seed by squeezing it between a pair of simple rollers, and of a price for even its common grades ranging usually more than twice that of the upland staple.  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.