r scale; and the high cost of transportation caused them
generally to continue producing miscellaneous goods to meet their domestic
needs. The diversified regime is pictured in Michaux's description of a
North Carolina plantation in 1802: "In eight hundred acres of which it is
composed, a hundred and fifty are cultivated in cotton, Indian corn, wheat
and oats, and dunged annually, which is a great degree of perfection in the
present state of agriculture in this part of the country. Independent of
this [the proprietor] has built in his yard several machines that the same
current of water puts in motion; they consist of a corn mill, a saw mill,
another to separate the cotton seeds, a tan-house, a tan-mill, a distillery
to make peach brandy, and a small forge where the inhabitants of the
country go to have their horses shod. Seven or eight negro slaves are
employed in the different departments, some of which are only occupied at
certain periods of the year. Their wives are employed under the direction
of the mistress in manufacturing cotton and linen for the use of the
family."[34]

[Footnote 34: F.A. Michaux in Thwaites, ed., _Early Western Travels_, III,
292.]

The speed of the change to a general slaveholding regime in the uplands may
easily be exaggerated. In those counties of South Carolina which lay wholly
within the Piedmont the fifteen thousand slaves on hand in 1790 formed
slightly less than one-fifth of the gross population there. By 1800
the number of slaves increased by seventy per cent., and formed nearly
one-fourth of the gross; in the following decade they increased by ninety
per cent., until they comprised one-third of the whole; from 1810 to 1820
their number grew at the smaller rate of fifty per cent, and reached
two-fifths of the whole; and by 1830, with a further increase of forty per
cent., the number of slaves almost overtook that of the whites. The slaves
were then counted at 101,982, the whites at 115,318, and the free negroes
at 2,115. In Georgia the slave proportion grew more rapidly than this
because it was much smaller at the outset; in North Carolina, on the
other hand, the rise was less marked because cotton never throve there so
greatly.

In its industrial requirements cotton was much closer to tobacco than to
rice or sugar. There was no vital need for large units of production. On
soils of the same quality the farmer with a single plow, if his family did
the hoeing and picking, was on a si