The climate was moderately suited to a great variety of crops; but nothing was found for which it had a marked superiority until short-staple cotton was made available.
In the second half of the eighteenth century this region had come to be occupied in scattered homesteads by migrants moving overland from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, extending their regime of frontier farms until the stubborn Creek and Cherokee Indian tribes barred further progress.

Later comers from the same northeastward sources, some of them bringing a few slaves, had gradually thickened the settlement without changing materially its primitive system of life.

Not many recruits had entered from the rice coast in colonial times, for the regime there was not such as to produce pioneers for the interior.

The planters, unlike those of Maryland and Virginia, had never imported appreciable numbers of indentured servants to become in after years yeomen and fathers of yeomen; the slaves begat slaves alone to continue at their masters' bidding; and the planters themselves had for the time being little inducement to forsake the lowlands.

The coast and the Piedmont were unassociated except by a trickle of trade by wagon and primitive river-boat across the barrens.