District, there were among the 1643 heads of families 1318 slaveholders owning 42,949 slaves.  William Blake had 695; Ralph Izard had 594 distributed on eight plantations in three parishes, and ten more at his Charleston house; Nathaniel Heyward had 420 on his plantations and 13 in Charleston; William Washington had 380 in the country and 13 in town; and three members of the Horry family had 340, 229 and 222 respectively in a single neighborhood.  Altogether there were 79 separate parcels of a hundred slaves or more, 156 of between fifty and ninety-nine, 318 of between twenty and forty-nine, 251 of between ten and nineteen, 206 of from five to nine, and 209 of from two to four, 96 of one slave each, and 3 whose returns in the slave column are illegible.[13] The statistics of the Georgetown and Beaufort districts, which comprised the rest of the South Carolina coast, show a like analysis except for a somewhat larger proportion of non-slaveholders and very small slaveholders, who were, of course, located mostly in the towns and on the sandy stretches of pine-barren.  The detailed returns for Georgia in that census have been lost.  Were those for her coastal area available they would surely show a similar tendency toward slaveholding concentration.

[Footnote 13:  Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States, 1790:  State of South Carolina (Washington, 1908); A Century of Population Growth (Washington, 1909), pp. 190, 191, 197, 198.]

Avenues of transportation abundantly penetrated the whole district in the form of rivers, inlets and meandering tidal creeks.  Navigation on them was so easy that watermen to the manner born could float rafts or barges for scores of miles in any desired direction, without either sails or oars, by catching the strong ebb and flow of the tides at the proper points.  But unlike the Chesapeake estuaries, the waterways of the rice coast were generally too shallow for ocean-going vessels.  This caused a notable growth of seaports on the available harbors.  Of those in South Carolina, Charleston stood alone in the first rank, flanked by Georgetown and Beaufort.  In the lesser province of Georgia, Savannah found supplement in Darien and Sunbury.  The two leading ports were also the seats of government in their respective colonies.  Charleston was in fact so complete a focus of commerce, politics and society that South Carolina was in a sense a city-state.

The towns were in sentiment and interest virtually a part of the plantation community.  The merchants were plantation factors; the lawyers and doctors had country patrons; the wealthiest planters were town residents from time to time; and many prospering townsmen looked toward plantation retirement, carrying as it did in some degree the badge of gentility, as the crown of their careers.  Furthermore the urban negroes, more numerous proportionately than anywhere else on the continent, kept the citizens as keenly alive as the planters to the intricacies of racial adjustments.  For example Charleston, which in 1790 had 8089 whites, 7864 slaves and 586 free negroes, felt as great anxiety as did the rural parishes at rumors of slave conspiracies, and on the other hand she had a like interest in the improvement of negro efficiency, morality and good will.