[Footnote 10:  F.A.  Michaux, Travels, in R.G.  Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, III, 303.]

In the Carolina-Georgia uplands the industrial and social developments of the eighteenth century had been in marked contrast with those on the seaboard.  These uplands, locally known as the Piedmont, were separated from the tide-water tract by a flat and sandy region, the “pine barrens,” a hundred miles or more in breadth, where the soil was generally too light for prosperous agriculture before the time when commercial fertilizers came into use.  The Piedmont itself is a rolling country, extending without a break from Virginia to Alabama and from the mountains of the Blue Ridge to the line of the lowest falls on the rivers.  The soil of mingled clay and sand was originally covered with rich forest mold.  The climate was moderately suited to a great variety of crops; but nothing was found for which it had a marked superiority until short-staple cotton was made available.

In the second half of the eighteenth century this region had come to be occupied in scattered homesteads by migrants moving overland from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, extending their regime of frontier farms until the stubborn Creek and Cherokee Indian tribes barred further progress.  Later comers from the same northeastward sources, some of them bringing a few slaves, had gradually thickened the settlement without changing materially its primitive system of life.  Not many recruits had entered from the rice coast in colonial times, for the regime there was not such as to produce pioneers for the interior.  The planters, unlike those of Maryland and Virginia, had never imported appreciable numbers of indentured servants to become in after years yeomen and fathers of yeomen; the slaves begat slaves alone to continue at their masters’ bidding; and the planters themselves had for the time being little inducement to forsake the lowlands.  The coast and the Piedmont were unassociated except by a trickle of trade by wagon and primitive river-boat across the barrens.  The capture of Savannah and Charleston by the British during the War for Independence, however, doubtless caused a number of the nearby inhabitants to move into the Piedmont as refugees, carrying their slaves with them.

The commercial demands of the early settlers embraced hardly anything beyond salt, ammunition and a little hardware.  The forest and their half-cleared fields furnished meat and bread; workers in the households provided rude furniture and homespun; and luxuries, except home-made liquors, were unknown.  But the time soon came when zealous industry yielded more grain and cattle than each family needed for its own supply.  The surplus required a market, which the seaboard was glad to furnish.  The road and river traffic increased, and the procurement of miscellaneous goods from the ports removed the need of extreme diversity in each family’s work.  This treeing of