[Footnote 7:  The best descriptions of the rice industry are Edmund Ruffin, Agricultural Survey of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C. 1843); and R.F.W.  Allston, Essay on Sea Coast Crops (Charleston, 1854), which latter is printed also in DeBow’s Review, XVI, 589-615.]

The ditches and pools in and about the fields of course bred swarms of mosquitoes which carried malaria to all people subject.  Most of the whites were afflicted by that disease in the warmer half of the year, but the Africans were generally immune.  Negro labor was therefore at such a premium that whites were virtually never employed on the plantations except as overseers and occasionally as artisans.  In colonial times the planters, except the few quite wealthy ones who had town houses in Charleston, lived on their places the year round; but at the close of the eighteenth century they began to resort in summer to “pine land” villages within an hour or two’s riding distance from their plantations.  In any case the intercourse between the whites and blacks was notably less than in the tobacco region, and the progress of the negroes in civilization correspondingly slighter.  The plantations were less of homesteads and more of business establishments; the race relations, while often cordial, were seldom intimate.

The introduction of indigo culture was achieved by one of America’s greatest women, Eliza Lucas, afterward the wife of Charles Pinckney (chief-justice of the province) and mother of the two patriot statesmen Thomas and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.  Her father, the governor of the British island of Antigua, had been prompted by his wife’s ill health to settle his family in South Carolina, where the three plantations he acquired near Charleston were for several years under his daughter’s management.  This girl while attending her father’s business found time to keep up her music and her social activities, to teach a class of young negroes to read, and to carry on various undertakings in economic botany.  In 1741 her experiments with cotton, guinea-corn and ginger were defeated by frost, and alfalfa proved unsuited to her soil; but in spite of two preliminary failures that year she raised some indigo plants with success.  Next year her father sent a West Indian expert named Cromwell to manage her indigo crop and prepare its commercial product.  But Cromwell, in fear of injuring the prosperity of his own community, purposely mishandled the manufacturing.  With the aid of a neighbor, nevertheless, Eliza not only detected Cromwell’s treachery but in the next year worked out the true process.  She and her father now distributed indigo seed to a number of planters; and from 1744 the crop began to reach the rank of a staple.[8] The arrival of Carolina indigo at London was welcomed so warmly that in 1748 Parliament established a bounty of sixpence a pound on indigo produced in the British dominions.  The Carolina output remained of mediocre