The first commercially successful [1] short-staple cotton crop was raised in 1799 by Wade Hampton. [2] He was typical of the Revolutionary War generation that discovered the value of land speculation: governments were paying veterans with land that often was purchased by speculators, and public lands were sold off to pay debts. The problem was much of South Carolina’s land was incapable of producing a commercial crop.
From the earliest years Hampton’s family had been merchants. His immigrant ancestor had arrived at Jamestown in 1620 to look after the interests of an uncle who was an investor in the Virginia Company. William acquired tidewater land and purchased wool from his neighbors for export to his brother in London. [3]
Wade’s father moved from place to place through North Carolina making a living trading with Indians. Anthony finally moved to western South Carolina where he was killed by Cherokee in 1766. [4] Wade also became a frontier trader, then led a regiment against the British in 1781.
By the end of the war, he owned land in the area where the state capital would be moved. [5] He bought more land there in 1788, [6] and became involved in speculation in Georgia land in 1795. [7]
Hampton’s first crop was not accidental. Prior to the War of 1812, farmers were filling in vacant piedmont land to grow cotton that then was selling at inflated prices. [8] He sent a spy into Eli Whitney’s shop to learn how to make a gin, then built one that used water power. [9] After buying slaves, he "carried his great gang from the seaboard." [10] He obtained the green-seed cotton variety [11] rather than the black-seeded species grown in the Sea Islands. At the time Jacob Lewis thought he got his seed from Florida. [12]
Walter Edgar said, after Hampton’s success, it was grown in Edgefield in 1802 and in Spartanburg in 1804. [13] William Capers’ father sold his land on the Wacamaw in 1805 to grow cotton on the inland coastal plain of Sumter County. [14] By 1808, cotton was the primary crop in two-thirds of South Carolina. [15]
The main problem with the new crop was that it exhausted soils that hadn’t been submerged during the Pleistocene. The Ultisol soils were created solely by "continuous weathering of minerals in a humid, temperate climate without new soil formation via glaciation." Wikipedia noted, "major nutrients, such as calcium and potassium, are typically deficient." The red color in the clays came from iron. [16]
When the thin layer of top soil disappeared, it left an acidic substrata that reduced yields. George Langdale and William Schrader noted that, on Ultisols, "crop yield reductions appear more permanent and difficult to restore." [17] Simple fertilization doesn’t work with Ultisols, and they don’t recover when left fallow. Farmers had no choice but to leave. In 1835, Joseph Holt Ingraham described the destruction around Natchez, the first area in Mississippi to grow cotton.
"The rich loam which forms the upland soil of this state is of a very slight depth–and after a few years is worn away by constant culture and the action of the winds and rain. The fields are then ‘thrown out’ as useless. Every plough-furrow becomes the bed of a rivulet after heavy rains— these uniting are increased into torrents, before which the impalpable soil dissolves like ice under a summer’s sun. By degrees, acre after acre, of what was a few years previous beautifully undulating ground, waving with the dark green, snow-crested cotton, presents a wild scene of frightful precipices, and yawning chasms, which are increased in depth and destructively enlarged after every rain. There are many thousand acres within twenty miles of the city of Natchez, being the earliest cultivated portions of the country, which are now lying in this condition, presenting an appearance of wild desolation, and not unfrequently, of sublimity." [18]
From Georgia, men moved west following the subtropical climate and band of soils that supported cotton. As suggested in the post for 23 January 2019, they followed the black belt of soil across Alabama. After the Civil War, they moved into the Mississippi Delta and Texas. [19]
Graphics
1. Magnus Manske. "Map of the United States showing what percentage of the soil in a given area is classified as an ultisol-type soil." Wikimedia Commons. 21 February 2011.
2. Distribution of cotton. In Daniel Coit Gilman, Harry Thurston Peck, and Frank Moore Colby. The New International Encyclopaedia. New York : Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902. 5:478.
End Notes
1. Many articles list earlier dates for the first cotton crop, but they were not on a commercial scale.
2. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 271.
3. Virginia Sanders-Mylius. "Hampton Family." Our Southern Cousins website. 2010.
4. Virginia Sanders-Mylius. "Family of Anthony Hampton." Our Southern Cousins website. 2010.
5. Thomas Adkins. "Wade Hampton." Adkins Family Genealogy, History and Heritage website.
6. Jeffrey W. Dennis and Spencer C. Tucker. "Hampton, Wade (1752–1835). 1:144–145 in U.S. Leadership in Wartime. Edited by Spencer Tucker. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009.
7. Sanders-Mylius, Anthony Hampton.
8. Statistics developed by Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta were quoted in the post for 26 May 2019.
9. Roger G. Kennedy. Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. No page numbers in online version.
10. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. American Negro Slavery. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929 edition. 160.
11. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode. "‘Wait a Cotton Pickin’ Minute!’ A New View of Slave Productivity." University of California, Davis, website. April 2007. 16.
12. Kennedy. Lewis was a privateer from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who was involved with Aaron Burr.
13. Edgar. 271.
14. William Capers. "Recollections of Myself." Reprinted by William M. Wrightman. Life of William Capers, D. D. Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1902. 45.
15. Edgar. 270.
16. Wikipedia. "Ultisol."
17. G. W. Langdale and W. D. Schrader. "Soil Erosion Effects on Soil Productivity of Cultivated Cropland. Chapter 4 in Determinants of Soil Loss Tolerance. Madison: American Society of Agronomy, 1982. Mollisols are found on the American prairies.
18. Joseph Holt Ingraham. The South-West By a Yankee. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835. Chapter 32; no page numbers in archived on-line version.
19. Cotton in Mississippi was discussed in the post for 30 January 2019.
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