e Charleston 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 sentime