Whatever else the radicals of that period might wish to reform or abolish, the slave trade was held either as a matter of course or as a positive benefit to the people who constituted its merchandise.
The narrow limits of the rice and indigo regime in the two colonies made the plantation system the more dominant in its own area.

Detailed statistics are lacking until the first federal census, when indigo was rapidly giving place to sea-island cotton; but the requirements of the new staple differed so little from those of the old that the plantations near the end of the century were without doubt on much the same scale as before the Revolution.

In the four South Carolina parishes of St.Andrew's, St.
John's Colleton, St.Paul's and St.Stephen's the census-takers of 1790 found 393 slaveholders with an average of 33.7 slaves each, as compared with a total of 28 non-slaveholding families.

In these and seven more parishes, comprising together the rural portion of the area known politically as the 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.