40 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



fluctuations in the relative price of their products." D To- 

 bacco, indigo, sugar, and cotton are all adapted to gang 

 labor working on time basis under an overseer. Rice, how- 

 ever, has been cultivated on a task-work basis with so 

 much assigned to each slave. All these staples fought a 

 losing battle with cotton. 



The scarcity and cost of white labor led by degrees to 

 the introduction of slaves. Convicts and indentured serv- 

 ants became more and more things of the past. Land was 

 easily acquired ; great plantations "often had a thousand 

 acres under actual tobacco cultivation," many were over 

 five thousand acres in size. "Fifty acres of arable land 

 per Negro were considered necessary for profitable culti- 

 vation, and an overseer was too expensive unless he had 

 twenty Negroes under him." ' Tobacco exhausted the 

 land in three years and forced the use of other crops. 



In the coastal Carolinas and the lower South the plan- 

 tation system grew up about rice and indigo culture. Rice 

 culture, introduced from Madagascar into the Carolina 

 swamp lands, did not prove profitable until Negroes were 

 introduced to work in the hot wet fields. Charleston be- 

 came the export point of a great rice area. Indigo was 

 introduced by Eliza Lucas, daughter of an English army 

 officer, on her father's plantation. A bounty aided in its 

 production, and in 1775 the value of indigo exported 

 was over one million pounds. 



In the decade beginning 1783 a widespread depression 

 in the plantation system prevailed. The production of 

 indigo was in its decadence, rice cultivation was changing 

 to the new tide-flow system, prices were low, and each new 

 tract opened to the plantation system meant an old one 



9 Ibid., p. 205. 10 Faulkner, op. cit., p. 67. 



