ilable.

In the second half of the eighteenth century this region had come to
be occupied in scattered homesteads by migrants moving overland from
Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, extending their regime of frontier
farms until the stubborn Creek and Cherokee Indian tribes barred further
progress. Later comers from the same northeastward sources, some of them
bringing a few slaves, had gradually thickened the settlement without
changing materially its primitive system of life. Not many recruits had
entered from the rice coast in colonial times, for the regime there was not
such as to produce pioneers for the interior. The planters, unlike those of
Maryland and Virginia, had never imported appreciable numbers of indentured
servants to become in after years yeomen and fathers of yeomen; the slaves
begat slaves alone to continue at their masters' bidding; and the planters
themselves had for the time being little inducement to forsake the
lowlands. The coast and the Piedmont were unassociated except by a trickle
of trade by wagon and primitive river-boat across the barrens. The capture
of Savannah and Charleston by the British during the War for Independence,
however, doubtless caused a number of the nearby inhabitants to move into
the Piedmont as refugees, carrying their slaves with them.

The commercial demands of the early settlers embraced hardly anything
beyond salt, ammunition and a little hardware. The forest and their
half-cleared fields furnished meat and bread; workers in the households
provided rude furniture and homespun; and luxuries, except home-made
liquors, were unknown. But the time soon came when zealous industry yielded
more grain and cattle than each family needed for its own supply. The
surplus required a market, which the seaboard was glad to furnish. The road
and river traffic increased, and the procurement of miscellaneous goods
from the ports removed the need of extreme diversity in each family's work.
This treeing of energy led in turn to a search for more profitable market
crops. Flax and hemp were tried, and tobacco with some success. Several new
villages were founded, indeed, on the upper courses of the rivers to serve
as stations for the inspection and shipment of tobacco; but their budding
hopes of prosperity from that staple were promptly blighted. The product
was of inferior grade, the price was low, and the cost of freightage high.
The export from Charleston rose from 2680 hogsheads in 17