84 to 9646 in
1799, but rapidly declined thereafter. Tobacco, never more than a makeshift
staple, was gladly abandoned for cotton at the first opportunity.[11]

[Footnote 11: U.B. Phillips, _History of Transportation in the Eastern
Cotton Belt to 1860_ (New York, 1908), pp. 46-55.]

At the time of the federal census of 1790 there were in the main group of
upland counties of South Carolina, comprised then in the two "districts" of
Camden and Ninety-six, a total of 91,704 white inhabitants, divided into
15,652 families. Of these 3787 held slaves to the number of 19,934--an
average of 5-1/4 slaves in each holding. No more than five of these parcels
comprised as many as one hundred slaves each, and only 156 masters, about
four per cent, of the whole, had as many as twenty each. These larger
holdings, along with the 335 other parcels ranging from ten to nineteen
slaves each, were of course grouped mainly in the river counties in the
lower part of the Piedmont, while the smallest holdings were scattered far
and wide. That is to say, there was already discoverable a tendency toward
a plantation regime in the localities most accessible to market, while
among the farmers about one in four had one or more slaves to aid in the
family's work. The Georgia Piedmont, for which the returns of the early
censuses have been lost, probably had a somewhat smaller proportion of
slaves by reason of its closer proximity to the Indian frontier.

A sprinkling of slaves was enough to whet the community's appetite for
opportunities to employ them with effect and to buy more slaves with the
proceeds. It is said that in 1792 some two or three million pounds
of short-staple cotton was gathered in the Piedmont,[12] perhaps in
anticipation of a practicable gin, and that the state of Georgia had
appointed a commission to promote the desired invention.[13] It is certain
that many of the citizens were discussing the problem when in the spring of
1793 young Eli Whitney, after graduating at Yale College, left his home in
Massachusetts intending to teach school in the South. While making a visit
at the home of General Greene's widow, near Savannah, he listened to a
conversation on the subject by visitors from upland Georgia, and he was
urged by Phineas Miller, the manager of the Greene estate, to apply his
Yankee ingenuity to the solution. When Miller offered to bear the expenses
of the project, Whitney set to work, and within ten days made a model which
me