EVOLUTION OF THE COTTON SYSTEM 41 



abandoned. 11 Only sugar had succeeded both with the 

 plantation and the market. 



Successful sugar culture first began in the Mississippi 

 Delta below New Orleans when "Etiene de Bore, a promi- 

 nent Creole whose estate lay just above the town, bought 

 a supply of seed cane from Silis (who was making sugar 

 with indifferent success as early as 1791), planted a 

 large field with it, engaged a professional sugar maker" 

 and sold his 1796 crop for some $12,000. 12 The tri- 

 angular district created by the confluence of the Red and 

 Mississippi rivers became, in time, the scene of great 

 sugar plantations stretching out along behind the levees. 

 At the greatest height of the sugar industry in 1849 the 

 plantations numbered 1,536, their slaves over a hundred 

 thousand, and in 1853 they produced 450,000 hogsheads 



e 13 



of sugar. 



A backward glance over southern industrial history 

 serves to convince the student that the South awaited 

 only the advent of cotton to extend the plantation sys- 

 tem far and wide. Cotton found the beginnings of the 

 plantation regime established but waning. Tobacco was 

 proving too exhausting to unfertilized soils. Jefferson 

 wrote in 1781 that the culture of tobacco "was fast de- 

 clining at the commencement of this war" and "it must 

 continue to decline on the return of peace." * The cul- 

 ture of indigo and rice were both on the decline. The 

 South itself was lukewarm on the subject of slavery; all 

 the states except one had abolished the slavery trade; 

 and except for the sugar interest the plantation system 

 was stagnant. It has been suggested by many historians 



11 Phillips, op. cit., p. 150. 12 Ibid., pp. 163-68. 13 Loc. tit. 

 14 Cited by J. A. B. Scherer, in Cotton at a World Power, p. 147 



