now joined the movement. Some of them encountered failure, among
them General Moultrie of Revolutionary fame who planted one hundred and
fifty acres in St. John's Berkeley in 1793 and reaped virtually nothing.[5]

[Footnote 5: Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, _Memoir on the Origin, Cultivation and
Uses of Cotton_ (Charleston, 1844), pp. 19, 20.]

The English market came promptly to esteem the long, strong, silky
sea-island fiber as the finest of all cottons; and the prices at Liverpool
rose before the end of the century to as high as five shillings a pound.
This brought fortunes in South Carolina. Captain James Sinkler from a crop
of three hundred acres on his plantation, "Belvedere," in 1794 gathered
216 pounds to the acre, which at prices ranging from fifty to seventy-five
cents a pound brought him a gross return of $509 per laborer employed.[6]
Peter Gaillard of St. John's Berkeley received for his crop of the same
year an average of $340 per hand; and William Brisbane of St. Paul's earned
so much in the three years from 1796 to 1798 that he found himself rich
enough to retire from work and spend several years in travel at the North
and abroad. He sold his plantation to William Seabrook at a price which the
neighbors thought ruinously high, but Seabrook recouped the whole of it
from the proceeds of two years' crops.[7]

[Footnote 6: Samuel DuBose, _Address delivered before the Black Oak
Agricultural Society, April 28, 1858_, in T.G. Thomas, _The Huguenots of
South Carolina_ (New York, 1887).]

[Footnote 7: W.B. Seabrook, _Memoir on Cotton_, p. 20.]

The methods of tillage were quickly systematized. Instead of being planted,
as at first, in separate holes, the seed came to be drilled and plants
grown at intervals of one or two feet on ridges five or six feet apart;
and the number of hoeings was increased. But the thinner fruiting of this
variety prevented the planters from attaining generally more than about
half the output per acre which their upland colleagues came to reap from
their crops of the shorter staple. A hundred and fifty pounds to the acre
and three or four acres to the hand was esteemed a reasonable crop on the
seaboard.[8] The exports of the sea-island staple rose by 1805 to nearly
nine million pounds, but no further expansion occurred until 1819 when an
increase carried the exports for a decade to about eleven million pounds a
year. In the course of the twenties Kinsey Burden and Hugh Wilson, both of
St. Joh