Of these 3787 held slaves to the number of 19,934--an average of 5-1/4 slaves in each holding.

No more than five of these parcels comprised as many as one hundred slaves each, and only 156 masters, about four per cent, of the whole, had as many as twenty each.

These larger holdings, along with the 335 other parcels ranging from ten to nineteen slaves each, were of course grouped mainly in the river counties in the lower part of the Piedmont, while the smallest holdings were scattered far and wide.

That is to say, there was already discoverable a tendency toward a plantation regime in the localities most accessible to market, while among the farmers about one in four had one or more slaves to aid in the family's work.

The Georgia Piedmont, for which the returns of the early censuses have been lost, probably had a somewhat smaller proportion of slaves by reason of its closer proximity to the Indian frontier.
A sprinkling of slaves was enough to whet the community's appetite for opportunities to employ them with effect and to buy more slaves with the proceeds.