hern Banner_( Athens, Ga.), Sept. 20, 1839.]

[Footnote 33: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 98-128.]

In the sea-island branch of the cotton industry the methods differed
considerably from those in producing the shorter staple. Seed selection was
much more commonly practiced, and extraordinary care was taken in ginning
and packing the harvest. The earliest and favorite lands for this crop
were those of exceedingly light soil on the islands fringing the coast of
Georgia and South Carolina. At first the tangle of live-oak and palmetto
roots discouraged the use of the plow; and afterward the need of heavy
fertilization with swamp mud and seaweed kept the acreage so small in
proportion to the laborers that hoes continued to be the prevalent means of
tillage. Operations were commonly on the basis of six or seven acres to the
hand, half in cotton and the rest in corn and sweet potatoes. In the swamps
on the mainland into which this crop was afterwards extended, the use of
the plow permitted the doubling of the area per hand; but the product of
the swamp lands was apparently never of the first grade.

The fields were furrowed at five-foot intervals during the winter, bedded
in early spring, planted in late April or early May, cultivated until the
end of July, and harvested from September to December. The bolls opened but
narrowly and the fields had to be reaped frequently to save the precious
lint from damage by the weather. Accordingly the pickers are said to have
averaged no more than twenty-five pounds a day. The preparation for market
required the greatest painstaking of all. First the seed cotton was dried
on a scaffold; next it was whipped for the removal of trash and sand; then
it was carefully sorted into grades by color and fineness; then it went to
the roller gins, whence the lint was spread upon tables where women picked
out every stained or matted bit of the fiber; and finally when gently
packed into sewn bags it was ready for market. A few gin houses were
equipped in the later decades with steam power; but most planters retained
the system of a treadle for each pair of rollers as the surest safeguard
of the delicate filaments. A plantation gin house was accordingly a simple
barn with perhaps a dozen or two foot-power gins, a separate room for the
whipping, a number of tables for the sorting and moting, and a round hole
in the floor to hold open the mouth of the long bag suspended for the
packing.[3