energy led in turn to a search for more profitable market crops.  Flax and hemp were tried, and tobacco with some success.  Several new villages were founded, indeed, on the upper courses of the rivers to serve as stations for the inspection and shipment of tobacco; but their budding hopes of prosperity from that staple were promptly blighted.  The product was of inferior grade, the price was low, and the cost of freightage high.  The export from Charleston rose from 2680 hogsheads in 1784 to 9646 in 1799, but rapidly declined thereafter.  Tobacco, never more than a makeshift staple, was gladly abandoned for cotton at the first opportunity.[11]

[Footnote 11:  U.B.  Phillips, History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (New York, 1908), pp. 46-55.]

At the time of the federal census of 1790 there were in the main group of upland counties of South Carolina, comprised then in the two “districts” of Camden and Ninety-six, a total of 91,704 white inhabitants, divided into 15,652 families.  Of these 3787 held slaves to the number of 19,934—­an average of 5-1/4 slaves in each holding.  No more than five of these parcels comprised as many as one hundred slaves each, and only 156 masters, about four per cent, of the whole, had as many as twenty each.  These larger holdings, along with the 335 other parcels ranging from ten to nineteen slaves each, were of course grouped mainly in the river counties in the lower part of the Piedmont, while the smallest holdings were scattered far and wide.  That is to say, there was already discoverable a tendency toward a plantation regime in the localities most accessible to market, while among the farmers about one in four had one or more slaves to aid in the family’s work.  The Georgia Piedmont, for which the returns of the early censuses have been lost, probably had a somewhat smaller proportion of slaves by reason of its closer proximity to the Indian frontier.

A sprinkling of slaves was enough to whet the community’s appetite for opportunities to employ them with effect and to buy more slaves with the proceeds.  It is said that in 1792 some two or three million pounds of short-staple cotton was gathered in the Piedmont,[12] perhaps in anticipation of a practicable gin, and that the state of Georgia had appointed a commission to promote the desired invention.[13] It is certain that many of the citizens were discussing the problem when in the spring of 1793 young Eli Whitney, after graduating at Yale College, left his home in Massachusetts intending to teach school in the South.  While making a visit at the home of General Greene’s widow, near Savannah, he listened to a conversation on the subject by visitors from upland Georgia, and he was urged by Phineas Miller, the manager of the Greene estate, to apply his Yankee ingenuity to the solution.  When Miller offered to bear the expenses of the project, Whitney set to work, and within ten days made a model which met the essential requirements.