swamp mud and seaweed kept the acreage so small in proportion to the laborers that hoes continued to be the prevalent means of tillage.  Operations were commonly on the basis of six or seven acres to the hand, half in cotton and the rest in corn and sweet potatoes.  In the swamps on the mainland into which this crop was afterwards extended, the use of the plow permitted the doubling of the area per hand; but the product of the swamp lands was apparently never of the first grade.

The fields were furrowed at five-foot intervals during the winter, bedded in early spring, planted in late April or early May, cultivated until the end of July, and harvested from September to December.  The bolls opened but narrowly and the fields had to be reaped frequently to save the precious lint from damage by the weather.  Accordingly the pickers are said to have averaged no more than twenty-five pounds a day.  The preparation for market required the greatest painstaking of all.  First the seed cotton was dried on a scaffold; next it was whipped for the removal of trash and sand; then it was carefully sorted into grades by color and fineness; then it went to the roller gins, whence the lint was spread upon tables where women picked out every stained or matted bit of the fiber; and finally when gently packed into sewn bags it was ready for market.  A few gin houses were equipped in the later decades with steam power; but most planters retained the system of a treadle for each pair of rollers as the surest safeguard of the delicate filaments.  A plantation gin house was accordingly a simple barn with perhaps a dozen or two foot-power gins, a separate room for the whipping, a number of tables for the sorting and moting, and a round hole in the floor to hold open the mouth of the long bag suspended for the packing.[34] In preparing a standard bale of three hundred pounds, it was reckoned that the work required of the laborers at the gin house was as follows:  the dryer, one day; the whipper, two days; the sorters, at fifty pounds of seed cotton per day for each, thirty days; the ginners, each taking 125 pounds in the seed per day and delivering therefrom 25 pounds of lint, twelve days; the moters, at 43 pounds, seven days; the inspector and packer, two days; total fifty-four days.

[Footnote 34:  The culture and apparatus are described by W.B.  Seabrook, Memoir on Cotton, pp. 23-25; Thomas Spaulding in the American Agriculturist, III, 244-246; R.F.W.  Allston, Essay on Sea Coast Crops (Charleston, 1854), reprinted in DeBow’s Review, XVI, 589-615; J.A.  Turner, ed., Cotton Planter’s Manual, pp. 131-136.  The routine of operations is illustrated in the diary of Thomas P. Ravenel, of Woodboo plantation, 1847-1850, printed in Plantation and Frontier, I, 195-208.]