of his methods. He wrote in 1841: “I
have tried almost all systems, and unlike most planters
do not like what is old. I hardly know anything
old in corn or cotton planting but what is wrong.”
His particular enthusiasm now was for plow cultivation
as against the hoe. The best planter within his
acquaintance, he said, was Major Twiggs, on the opposite
bank of the Savannah, who ran thirty-four plows with
but fourteen hoes. Hammond’s own plowmen
were now nearly as numerous as his full hoe hands,
and his crops were on a scale of twenty acres of cotton,
ten of corn and two of oats to the plow. He was
fertilizing each year a third of his corn acreage with
cotton seed, and a twentieth of his cotton with barnyard
manure; and he was making a surplus of thirty or forty
bushels of corn per hand for sale.[18] This would
perhaps have contented him in normal times, but the
severe depression of cotton prices drove him to new
prognostications and plans. His confidence in
the staple was destroyed, he said, and he expected
the next crop to break the market forever and force
virtually everyone east of the Chattahoochee to abandon
the culture. “Here and there,” he
continued, “a plantation may be found; but to
plant an acre that will not yield three hundred pounds
net will be folly. I cannot make more than sixty
dollars clear to the hand on my whole plantation at
seven cents...The western plantations have got fairly
under way; Texas is coming in, and the game is up
with us.” He intended to change his own
activities in the main to the raising of cattle and
hogs; and he thought also of sending part of his slaves
to Louisiana or Texas, with a view to removing thither
himself after a few years if the project should prove
successful.[19] In an address of the same year before
the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, he advised
those to emigrate who intended to continue producing
cotton, and recommended for those who would stay in
the Piedmont a diversified husbandry including tobacco
but with main emphasis upon cereals and livestock.[20]
Again at the end of 1849, he voiced similar views at
the first annual fair of the South Carolina Institute.
The first phase of the cotton industry, said he, had
now passed; and the price henceforward would be fixed
by the cost of production, and would yield no great
profits even in the most fertile areas. The rich
expanses of the Southwest, he thought, could meet
the whole world’s demand at a cost of less than
five cents a pound, for the planters there could produce
two thousand pounds of lint per hand while those in
the Piedmont could not exceed an average of twelve
hundred pounds. This margin of difference would
deprive the slaves of their value in South Carolina
and cause their owners to send them West, unless the
local system of industry should be successfully revolutionized.
The remedies he proposed were the fertilization of
the soil, the diversification of crops, the promotion
of commerce, and the large development of cotton manufacturing.[21]