the nearest water post, loaded on sloops and sent to Charles Town.

Indigo. As early as 1682 Samuel Wilson in his account of Carolina wrote: "Indigo thrives well here, and very good hath been made." Not till 1742, however, was real progress made in the cultivation of indigo. The credit of its success is due to Miss Eliza Lucas. By 1747 a considerable quantity was sent to England, and a year later Parliament granted a bounty of six pence a pound on indigo raised in the British colonies. "Ten years after the general distribution of seed in 1744 the export of indigo from Charles Town amounted to 216,924 pounds and shortly before the Revolutionary War the export had risen to 1,107,660 pounds." Its value was about $1.50 a pound. After the Revolution, the bounty being lost, the export shows a steady decline, and its abandonment as a leading crop is foreshadowed by the statement that between the years 1770 and 1794 patches of cotton were grown in the Carolinas.

Silk Culture.-The successful cultivation of silk in South Carolina was one of the ambitions of the Lords Proprietors. Governor Archdale reported that some families made forty or fifty pounds of silk a year. Sir Nathaniel Johnson was a promoter of the cultivation of both silk and the vine. He called his Carolina plantation "Silk Hope." There seemed to be an infatuation for silk culture everywhere. For a century and a half these efforts to produce silk were continued, not only in Carolina but in all the colonies.

Corn.-Indian corn, the grain that "next to rice supplies food to the largest number of the human race . the most valuable gift of the new world to the old," as a plant unknown to European culture and in ill repute as the food of the ever hostile red man, received little attention from early settlers. Nevertheless with a steadiness that marks true merit, it worked its way to the front rank among the crops grown in the State. As early as 1739 it had become an important article of export and continued such until after 1792, in which year 99,985 bushels were exported. About this time, in consequence of the absorption by cotton of all surplus energy, it disappeared from the list of exports and shortly after it entered that of imports, on which today -taken in all its forms-it stands the largest. But its culture was by no means abandoned; on the contrary the crop grew in size with the increase of population. In 1860 more than 16,000,000 bushels were produced. In 1857 Dr. Parker made near Columbia 200 bushels and twelve quarts on one acre, which led the world's record till Mr. Drake in Marlboro County made 2561 bushels. Corn is gradually reasserting itself as one of our most valuable food crops, but in this State it has not yet reached the attention that it deserves.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE INVENTION OF THE COTTON GIN

Influence of Natural Conditions.-Buckle, the historian, says that the Gulf Stream made possible, not only England's material wealth, but Shakespeare and NewtonHamlet and the Principia-and that if this warm current had turned to the coast of Labrador, England would be a barren waste, the home of the polar bear and the seal, and Labrador the home of scientists and poets. Thinkers are paying more and more attention to geographic influences upon history, because their potency is becoming more and more apparent as a deeper insight into the causes of man's movements and achievements is attained. Social conditions are largely the result of physiographic conditions. So, too, we are looking more and more into economic conditions to account for political policies.

When we examine more thoroughly the causes that led to the great sectional conflict in the United States, we cannot help seeing the tremendous influence of the cotton gin on all that has happened in senate chamber and on battlefield. Had not the cotton gin been invented when it was, cotton production at the South could not have advanced so rapidly, and cotton manufacturing at the North was possible on a large scale only when cotton was produced at the South on a large scale. The gin made it practicable to place large quantities of cot

ton, in merchantable shape, on the market. This stimulated its production, production called for labor, and slavery supplied the labor; hence slavery and the multipication of slaves moved in equal pace with cotton production; and manufacturing, also, where conditions were favorable as in the North, advanced as swiftly. So

the South very soon became the planting and slaveholding section, and the North the manufacturing and freelabor section.

Whitney's Cotton Gin.-The two sections very naturally began a struggle for supremacy and to use the powers of the government to aid their own industrial life. The manufacturers, being in infancy, sought protection and national aid, and the planting section thought it wisdom to grant it. The burden soon became too great for the planting interests to sustain, and disputes arose, and finally an imperative demand for relief -and war. So Whitney's cotton gin is very largely responsible for the controversy in the Senate Chamber between Webster and Hayne, and for the long conflict in

arms, for the final surrender at Appomattox, and for the many years of travail in the South.

This matter can only be hinted at here. It will be enlarged upon in the final volume of this series. This much may be safely asserted, however, that the cotton gin, like many other inventions, while seeming to affect only material interests, profoundly and permanently influenced political and social conditions.

If the invention of the cotton gin made planting, with slavery, a definite policy in the South and brought on the conflict of arms between the sections, it may be reasonably predicted that the invention of a cotton picker will do much toward solving the race question in the South, by scattering the negroes over a wider area. The "solid South" is the result of the large proportion of negro population. Cotton-picking is one of the chief things that keep the negro in the South. Gather cotton by machinery, and great numbers of the negroes must seek employment and homes elsewhere.