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You say that you had rather plant your crop with them than take a dollar a pint.... Let us alone, friend, we are doing pretty well we might do worse." In the sea-island branch of the cotton industry the methods differed considerably from those in producing the shorter staple. Seed selection was much more commonly practiced, and extraordinary care was taken in ginning and packing the harvest.
We saw large tracts of this rich brackish soil both in the Shire and Zambesi valleys, and hence, probably, sea-island cotton would do well; a single plant of it, reared by Major Sicard, flourished and produced the long staple and peculiar tinge of this celebrated variety, though planted only in the street at Tette; and there also a salt efflorescence appears, probably from decomposition of the rock, off which the people scrape it for use.
Cotton was, to some little extent, cultivated near the seaboard in Georgia and South Carolina, and cleaned of the seeds by a machine similar to that used at the present day for preparing the sea-island cotton for market. This was a tedious and troublesome method, and was incapable of doing the work to any very great extent.
The famous "sea-island cotton" comes from the islands along the coast, where large numbers of the freed negroes of South Carolina have been recently located. South Carolina can produce, side by side, the corn, wheat, and tobacco of the North, and the cotton, rice, and sugar-cane of the South, though the latter article is not profitably cultivated.
Charles Mott Lide of South Carolina, having inherited a fortune, went to Virginia early in 1802 to buy slaves, and began to establish a sea-island cotton plantation in Georgia. But misfortune in other investments forced him next year to sell his land, slaves and crops to two immigrants from the Bahama Islands.
Looking down the bay on the right, was James Island, an irregular triangle of about seven miles, the whole island in cultivation with sea-island cotton. At the lower end was Fort Johnson, then simply the station of Captain Bowman, United States Engineers, engaged in building Fort Sumter. As the rock reached the surface it was levelled, and made the foundation of Fort Sumter.
Fitzgerald was always very polite to me," replied Mrs. Bright; "and personally I had no occasion to find fault with Mr. Fitzgerald, though I think the Yankee schoolma'am was rather a bore to him. The South is a beautiful part of the country. I used to think the sea-island, where they spent most of the summer, was as beautiful as Paradise before the fall; but I never felt at home there.
The purchases of woolen clothing and waterproof hats tell of adequate provision against inclement weather; but the scale of the doctor's bills suggest either epidemics or serious occasional illnesses. The crops from 1845 to 1854 ranged between seventeen and eighty barrels of rice; and for the three remaining years of the record they included both rice and sea-island cotton.
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