ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the changes wrought by the wave of expansion into the Back Country. As plans were made for extending rail lines into the Piedmont, the three terminals of Camden, Columbia, and Hamburg vied to become the Back Country hub of the system. The rise of cotton as the Piedmont cash crop and the disappearance of tobacco and indigo set the stage for the development of the antebellum landscape as South Carolina entered the nineteenth century. Outmigration from South Carolina by all groups intensified after 1830, and many planters and slaves moved westward into Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Whether Eli Whitney model was pirated or the cotton gin was developed independently by others, it spread rapidly among South Carolina planters during the last years of the eighteenth century. Routes were surveyed in 1830 for a railroad from Charleston to the town of Hamburg on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River across from Augusta.
