Cooper and Santee Rivers, labored with extraordinary diligence and overcame the severest handicaps.  That many of the settlers whether from France or the West Indies were of talented and sturdy stock is witnessed by the mention of the family names of Legare, Laurens, Marion and Ravenel among the Huguenots, Drayton, Elliot, Gibbes and Middleton among the Barbadians, Lowndes and Rawlins from St. Christopher’s, and Pinckney from Jamaica.  Some of the people were sluggards, of course, but the rest, heterogeneous as they were, were living and laboring as best they might, trying such new projects as they could, building a free government in spite of the Lords Proprietors, and awaiting the discovery of some staple resource from which prosperity might be won.

Among the crops tried was rice, introduced from Madagascar by Landgrave Thomas Smith about 1694, which after some preliminary failures proved so great a success that from about the end of the seventeenth century its production became the absorbing concern.  Now slaves began to be imported rapidly.  An official account of the colony in 1708[1] reckoned the population at about 3500 whites, of whom 120 were indentured servants, 4100 negro slaves, and 1400 Indians captured in recent wars and held for the time being in a sort of slavery.  Within the preceding five years, while the whites had been diminished by an epidemic, the negroes had increased by about 1,100.  The negroes were governed under laws modeled quite closely upon the slave code of Barbados, with the striking exception that in this period of danger from Spanish invasion most of the slave men were required by law to be trained in the use of arms and listed as an auxiliary militia.

[Footnote 1:  Text printed in Edward McCrady, South Carolina under the Proprietary Government (New York, 1897). pp. 477-481.]

During the rest of the colonial period the production of rice advanced at an accelerating rate and the slave population increased in proportion, while the whites multiplied somewhat more slowly.  Thus in 1724 the whites were estimated at 14,000, the slaves at 32,000, and the rice export was about 4000 tons; in 1749 the whites were said to be nearly 25,000, the slaves at least 39,000, and the rice export some 14,000 tons, valued at nearly L100,000 sterling;[2] and in 1765 the whites were about 40,000, the slaves about 90,000, and the rice export about 32,000 tons, worth some L225,000.[3] Meanwhile the rule of the Lords Proprietors had been replaced for the better by that of the crown, with South Carolina politically separated from her northern sister; and indigo had been introduced as a supplementary staple.  The Charleston district was for several decades perhaps the most prosperous area on the continent.

[Footnote 2:  Governor Glen, in B.R.  Carroll, Historical Collections of South Carolina (New York, 1836), II, 218, 234, 266.]

[Footnote 3:  McCrady, South Carolina under the Royal Government (New York, 1899), pp. 389, 390, 807.]