the time being these were merely an
out-lying fringe of cotton's principality. The great rush to cotton growing
prior to the war of 1812 occurred in the Carolina-Georgia Piedmont, with
its trend of intensity soon pointing south-westward.

[Footnote 27: _Tennessee Gazette_ (Nashville, Tenn.), April 9, 1800.]

[Footnote 28: F.A. Michaux in Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, III,
252.]

[Footnote 29: _Tennessee Gazette_, March 27, 1805.]

[Footnote 30: F. Cuming, _Tour to the Western Country_ (Pittsburg, 1810),
in Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, IV, 272, 280, 298.]

A shrewd contemporary observer found special reason to rejoice that the new
staple required no large capital and involved no exposure to disease. Rice
and indigo, said he, had offered the poorer whites, except the few employed
as overseers, no livelihood "without the degradation of working with
slaves"; but cotton, stimulating and elevating these people into the rank
of substantial farmers, tended "to fill the country with an independent
industrious yeomanry."[31] True as this was, it did not mean that producers
on a plantation scale were at a disadvantage. Settlers of every type,
in fact, adopted the crop as rapidly as they could get seed and ginning
facilities, and newcomers poured in apace to share the prosperity.

[Footnote 31: David Ramsay, _History of South Carolina_ (Charleston, 1808),
II, 448-9.]

The exports mounted swiftly, but the world's market readily absorbed them
at rising prices until 1801 when the short-staple output was about forty
million pounds and the price at the ports about forty-four cents a pound.
A trade in slaves promptly arose to meet the eager demand for labor; and
migrants coming from the northward and the rice coast brought additional
slaves in their train. General Wade Hampton was the first conspicuous one
of these. With the masterful resolution which always characterized him, he
carried his great gang from the seaboard to the neighborhood of Columbia
and there in 1799 raised six hundred of the relatively light weight bales
of that day on as many acres.[32] His crop was reckoned to have a value of
some ninety thousand dollars.[33]

[Footnote 32: Seabrook, pp. 16, 17.]

[Footnote 33: Note made by L. C Draper from the Louisville, Ga., _Gazette_,
Draper MSS., series VV, vol. XVI, p. 84, Wisconsin Historical Society.]

The general run of the upland cultivators, however, continued as always to
operate on a mino