milar footing with the greatest planter
as to the output per hand, and in similar case as to cost of production per
bale. The scale of cotton-belt slaveholdings rose not because free labor
was unsuited to the industry but because slaveholders from the outside
moved in to share the opportunity and because every prospering
non-slaveholder and small slaveholder was eager to enlarge his personal
scale of operations. Those who could save generally bought slaves with
their savings; those who could not, generally continued to raise cotton
nevertheless.

The gross cotton output, in which the upland crop greatly and increasingly
outweighed that of the sea-island staple, rapidly advanced from about
forty-eight million pounds in 1801 to about eighty million in 1806; then it
was kept stationary by the embargo and the war of 1812, until the return
of peace and open trade sent it up by leaps and bounds again. The price
dropped abruptly from an average of forty-four cents in the New York market
in 1801 to nineteen cents in 1802, but there was no further decline until
the beginning of the war with Great Britain.[35]

[Footnote 35: M.B. Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_, table following p. 357.]

Cotton's absorption of the people's energies already tended to become
excessive. In 1790 South Carolina had sent abroad a surplus of corn from
the back country measuring well over a hundred thousand bushels. But by
1804 corn brought in brigs was being advertised in Savannah to meet the
local deficit;[36] and in the spring of 1807 there seems to have been a
dearth of grain in the Piedmont itself. At that time an editorial in the
_Augusta Chronicle_ ran as follows: "A correspondent would recommend to the
planters of Georgia, now the season is opening, to raise more corn and less
cotton ... The dear bought experience of the present season should teach us
to be more provident for the future." [37] Under the conditions of the time
this excess at the expense of grain was likely to correct itself at once,
for men and their draught animals must eat to work, and in the prevailing
lack of transportation facilities food could not be brought from a
distance at a price within reach. The systematic basis of industry was the
production, whether by planters or farmers, of such food as was locally
needed and such supplies of cloth together with such other outfit as it was
economical to make at home, and the devotion of all further efforts to the
making of cotton.