In its industrial requirements cotton was much closer to tobacco than to rice or sugar.  There was no vital need for large units of production.  On soils of the same quality the farmer with a single plow, if his family did the hoeing and picking, was on a similar footing with the greatest planter as to the output per hand, and in similar case as to cost of production per bale.  The scale of cotton-belt slaveholdings rose not because free labor was unsuited to the industry but because slaveholders from the outside moved in to share the opportunity and because every prospering non-slaveholder and small slaveholder was eager to enlarge his personal scale of operations.  Those who could save generally bought slaves with their savings; those who could not, generally continued to raise cotton nevertheless.

The gross cotton output, in which the upland crop greatly and increasingly outweighed that of the sea-island staple, rapidly advanced from about forty-eight million pounds in 1801 to about eighty million in 1806; then it was kept stationary by the embargo and the war of 1812, until the return of peace and open trade sent it up by leaps and bounds again.  The price dropped abruptly from an average of forty-four cents in the New York market in 1801 to nineteen cents in 1802, but there was no further decline until the beginning of the war with Great Britain.[35]

[Footnote 35:  M.B.  Hammond, The Cotton Industry, table following p. 357.]

Cotton’s absorption of the people’s energies already tended to become excessive.  In 1790 South Carolina had sent abroad a surplus of corn from the back country measuring well over a hundred thousand bushels.  But by 1804 corn brought in brigs was being advertised in Savannah to meet the local deficit;[36] and in the spring of 1807 there seems to have been a dearth of grain in the Piedmont itself.  At that time an editorial in the Augusta Chronicle ran as follows:  “A correspondent would recommend to the planters of Georgia, now the season is opening, to raise more corn and less cotton ...  The dear bought experience of the present season should teach us to be more provident for the future.” [37] Under the conditions of the time this excess at the expense of grain was likely to correct itself at once, for men and their draught animals must eat to work, and in the prevailing lack of transportation facilities food could not be brought from a distance at a price within reach.  The systematic basis of industry was the production, whether by planters or farmers, of such food as was locally needed and such supplies of cloth together with such other outfit as it was economical to make at home, and the devotion of all further efforts to the making of cotton.

[Footnote 36:  Savannah Museum, April n, 1804.]

[Footnote 37:  Reprinted in the Farmer’s Gazette (Sparta, Ga.), April 11, 1807.]