The exports mounted swiftly, but the world’s market readily absorbed them at rising prices until 1801 when the short-staple output was about forty million pounds and the price at the ports about forty-four cents a pound.  A trade in slaves promptly arose to meet the eager demand for labor; and migrants coming from the northward and the rice coast brought additional slaves in their train.  General Wade Hampton was the first conspicuous one of these.  With the masterful resolution which always characterized him, he carried his great gang from the seaboard to the neighborhood of Columbia and there in 1799 raised six hundred of the relatively light weight bales of that day on as many acres.[32] His crop was reckoned to have a value of some ninety thousand dollars.[33]

[Footnote 32:  Seabrook, pp. 16, 17.]

[Footnote 33:  Note made by L. C Draper from the Louisville, Ga., Gazette, Draper MSS., series VV, vol.  XVI, p. 84, Wisconsin Historical Society.]

The general run of the upland cultivators, however, continued as always to operate on a minor scale; and the high cost of transportation caused them generally to continue producing miscellaneous goods to meet their domestic needs.  The diversified regime is pictured in Michaux’s description of a North Carolina plantation in 1802:  “In eight hundred acres of which it is composed, a hundred and fifty are cultivated in cotton, Indian corn, wheat and oats, and dunged annually, which is a great degree of perfection in the present state of agriculture in this part of the country.  Independent of this [the proprietor] has built in his yard several machines that the same current of water puts in motion; they consist of a corn mill, a saw mill, another to separate the cotton seeds, a tan-house, a tan-mill, a distillery to make peach brandy, and a small forge where the inhabitants of the country go to have their horses shod.  Seven or eight negro slaves are employed in the different departments, some of which are only occupied at certain periods of the year.  Their wives are employed under the direction of the mistress in manufacturing cotton and linen for the use of the family."[34]

[Footnote 34:  F.A.  Michaux in Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, III, 292.]

The speed of the change to a general slaveholding regime in the uplands may easily be exaggerated.  In those counties of South Carolina which lay wholly within the Piedmont the fifteen thousand slaves on hand in 1790 formed slightly less than one-fifth of the gross population there.  By 1800 the number of slaves increased by seventy per cent., and formed nearly one-fourth of the gross; in the following decade they increased by ninety per cent., until they comprised one-third of the whole; from 1810 to 1820 their number grew at the smaller rate of fifty per cent, and reached two-fifths of the whole; and by 1830, with a further increase of forty per cent., the number of slaves almost overtook that of the whites.  The slaves were then counted at 101,982, the whites at 115,318, and the free negroes at 2,115.  In Georgia the slave proportion grew more rapidly than this because it was much smaller at the outset; in North Carolina, on the other hand, the rise was less marked because cotton never throve there so greatly.