There set in, on the Ashley and Cooper rivers, a fair urban life that yet persists.
South Carolina was trying tobacco and wheat.

But in the last years of the seventeenth century a ship touching at Charleston left there a bag of Madagascar rice.

Planted, it gave increase that was planted again.
Suddenly it was found that this was the crop for low-lying Carolina.
Rice became her staple, as was tobacco of Virginia.
For the rice-fields South Carolina soon wanted African slaves, and they were consequently brought in numbers, in English ships.

There began, in this part of the world, even more than in Virginia, the system of large plantations and the accompanying aristocratic structure of society.

But in Virginia the planter families lived broadcast over the land, each upon its own plantation.