POPULATION. 387 



ceptions. The variable element in each of these exceptions has been the 

 slave population, which, in 1820 and in 18G0, diminished, while the 

 white and free colored were augmenting their rate of increase. 



The variations are not great, and were, probably, due to the movement 

 of slaves in larger numbers, at these dates, to the fresh lands of the 

 Southwest. No such variations appear between the rate of increase of 

 the whites and the free colored. With the facts as they presented them- 

 selves in 1860, it is remarkable that, in view of the uniformly greater 

 rate of increase of the free colored population, that the Superintendent 

 of the seventh census should have ventured to predict the disappearance 

 of the negro race as the probable consequence of emancipation. It is 

 noteworthy, regarding these predictions of the census ofhce, made during 

 the war, that, while the white population of 1880 in the United States 

 falls fifteen per cent, short of the figure it was thought it would reach, 

 the colored population reaches within one-half of one per cent, of the 

 number it was estimated at. This prediction was based on the estimate 

 that the colored race would increase at the rate of 22.07 per cent, in each 

 decade, a rate of increase that is less that the least recorded at any date 

 for the aggregate population of the United States. In as much as the 

 increase of the colored race has fallen short, in the last two decades, of 

 even this moderate figure, the fears that have been expressed by certain 

 scientific writers, that their numbers would attain proportions threaten- 

 ing the suj)remacy of the white race, are evidently without foundation 

 in fact. 



The wonderful recuperation in the rate of increase of the population 

 of South Carolina within the last decade, after seventy years of steady 

 decline in that rate, and so immediately after the final and overwhelm- 

 ing catastrophe of the decade of 1860 to 1870, makes it plain that the 

 limit of the natural resources of the State for sustaining a large popula- 

 tion has not only not been reached, but that these resources may be said 

 to be almost untouched. If the drainage basin of the Santee river, the 

 river of Carolina, were peopled as thickly as the basin of the Hudson or 

 the Delaware, instead of a population of three hundred thousand, it 

 would hold one of more than two and one-half millions. In natural ad- 

 vantages, whether the amount of navigable highway be considered, or 

 the power its waters could furnish for stationary machinery, and the 

 facility with which it might be utilized, or the healthfulness of the cli- 

 mate, or the fertility of the soil and the diversified crops it can produce 

 —in any and all these regards the river of Carolina will compare favor- 

 ably with the others named. If the State were as thickly settled as 

 Rhode Islai 1 and Massachusetts, it would contain a population of seven 

 to eight millions, a number equal to the population of the entire United 



