plantations thereon, and soon had enough accrued earnings to buy the several inland plantations of the Gibbes brothers, who had fallen into debt from luxurious living.  With the proceeds of his large crops at high prices during the great wars in Europe, he bought more slaves year after year, preferably fresh Africans as long as that cheap supply remained available, and he bought more land when occasion offered.  Joseph Manigault wrote of him in 1806:  “Mr. Heyward has lately made another purchase of land, consisting of 300 acres of tide swamp, joining one of his Combahee plantations and belonging to the estate of Mrs. Bell.  I believe he has made a good bargain.  It is uncleared and will cost him not quite L20 per acre.  I have very little doubt that he will be in a few years, if he lives, the richest, as he is the best planter in the state.  The Cooper River lands give him many a long ride.”  Heyward was venturesome in large things, conservative in small.  He long continued to have his crops threshed by hand, saying that if it were done by machines his darkies would have no winter work; but when eventually he instituted mechanical threshers, no one could discern an increase of leisure.  In the matter of pounding mills likewise, he clung for many years to those driven by the tides and operating slowly and crudely; but at length he built two new ones driven by steam and so novel and complete in their apparatus as to be the marvels of the countryside.  He necessarily depended much upon overseers; but his own frequent visits of inspection and the assistance rendered by his sons kept the scattered establishments in an efficient routine.  The natural increase of his slaves was reckoned by him to have ranged generally between one and five per cent. annually, though in one year it rose to seven per cent.  At his death in 1851 he owned fourteen rice plantations with fields ranging from seventy to six hundred acres in each, and comprising in all 4,390 acres in cultivation.  He had also a cotton plantation, much pine land and a sawmill, nine residences in Charleston, appraised with their furniture at $180,000; securities and cash to the amount of $200,000; $20,000 worth of horses, mules and cattle; $15,000 worth of plate; and $3000 worth of old wine.  His slaves, numbering 2,087 and appraised at an average of $550, made up the greater part of his two million dollar estate.  His heirs continued his policy.  In 1855, for example, they bought a Savannah River plantation called Fife, containing 500 acres of prime rice land at $150 per acre, together with its equipment and 120 slaves, at a gross price of $135,600.[27]

[Footnote 27:  MSS. in the possession of Mrs. Hawkins K. Jenkins, Pinopolis, S.C., including a “Memoir of Nathaniel Heyward,” written in 1895 by Gabriel E. Manigault.]