Cotton found the plantation system on the decline ; it revived and pushed this system across the southern map. In 1793, the year Whitney invented the gin, the South produced 10,410 bales of cotton and exported 3,565 ; in 1810 production had risen to 177,824 bales and exports were 124,116. The Reverend William Winterbotham wrote in 1795: "Cotton has been lately adopted as an article of culture in the southern states ; and as the prices of rice, tobacco, and indigo decline, it must be very bene ficial." 13 "This economic transformation," says Frederick J. Turner, "resuscitated slavery from a moribund condi tion to a vigorous and aggressive life."' The production of cotton awaited a method of separat ing the lint from the seed. In the Carolina tidewater the problem was already solved as early as 1791 to 1794 by growing the two-inch lint of sea island cotton which could easily be separated from its smooth, black seeds by roll ers. Such cotton commanded fancy prices, increased the number of coastal plantations, and made their owners rich. But sea island cotton was limited to a definite area. By 1797 the cotton gin, invented in 1793 by young Mr. Eli Whitney, Yale graduate, was in operation in as many as thirty points in Georgia alone. The culture of short staple cotton soon spread over the Carolina-Georgia up lands. Lacking any staple crop, the uplands eagerly adopted the production of cotton and with it, to a fair extent, the plantation system. Phillips measures the ex tent of the planters' regime by the gain of the upland counties of South Carolina in Negro population from less than one-fifth of the white population in 1790 to almost fifty per cent in 1830.
The farmers with a slave or two greatly outnumbered the planters and one "shrewd contemporary observer ' found special reason to rejoice that the new staple re quired no large capital and involved no exposure to dis ease. Rice and indigo, he said, had offered the poorer whites except few employed as overseers, no livelihood without the degradation of working with slaves, but cot ton stimulating and elevating these people into the rank of substantial farmers tended to fill the country with an independent, industrious yeomanry." Such is the irony of historian turned prophet.
The westward movement of cotton and the plantation followed as a matter of course. "The Alabama-Mississippi population rose from 40,000 in round numbers in 1810 . . . to 1,660,000 in 1860, while the proportion of slaves increased from forty to forty-seven per cent." 18 During the same period the Delta lands of Arkansas and Louisi ana were filled with cotton planters. From 1815 to 1860 was the heyday of the plantation system. Indigo had seen its day, hemp was negligible, sugar culture was growing, tobacco while losing in the East was gaining in the West, but over and above all, in uplands and river bottom, from the Carolinas to Texas, Cotton was King! From 1791 to 1860 the average annual production had risen from in round numbers five million to 1,750,000,000 pounds ; the exports from 1,740,000 to 1,390,000,000 pounds ; and the per cent of the crop exported from 33.0 to 79.5. The
plantation system was truly a Cotton Kingdom.
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of the plan tation regime. The plantation was the basic feature in the economic life, the planters were the capstone of the social system. It has been maintained by a leading his torian of the South, that "nine-tenths of the South's landowners at any period in her history were small pro prietors." 19 The same authority estimates that "three or four thousand families . . . lived on the best lands and received three-fourths of the returns from the yearly ex ports. Two-thirds of the white people of the South had no connection with slavery and received only a very small part of the returns of the community output. A thousand families received over $50,000,000 a year, while all the remaining 660,000 families received only about $60, We know, however, that the small farmers outside the plantation system lived in the valleys of Virginia and the uplands and highlands of middle and western North Caro lina, north Georgia and Alabama, east Tennessee and Kentucky, and western Virginia. Under an economy more or less domestic and self-supporting they raised cereals, tobacco, cotton, and live stock. In the Eastern Belt their natural markets were Baltimore and Philadelphia. Their products were transported over the rough back-country highways, along which they brought their purchases. In the Western Belt the Mississippi River and its tribu taries were used as highways to market. The planters, although outnumbered, admittedly retained control in politics. Socially the two classes had much in common; their ideals were often southern to provincialism. Eco nomically the isolation of the two great classes was com plete. Sectional contests developed; the small farmers were more than willing to vote taxes upon the great planter to build roads and canals in and out of the up lands. The interior often received population renewals from the planter section of unpropertied southerners who had given up the unequal struggle with slave labor and struck out westward.
Even these people were to find themselves crowded by the plantation system for "the rapid growth of the short staple cotton industry was responsible for the spread of the planter regime over most of the fertile hill country of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Mid dle Tennessee, North Louisiana, and Lower Texas." 21 The new steam railways built before the Civil War gave cotton an outlet to the market and made its conquest of the regions permanent.