, while all territory to the north and west were considered the "Piedmont" Historically the region was dominated by the Lowcountry
gentry, a
planter aristocracy that dominated most economic activities in the region through extensive plantations. These gentry quickly imported most of the early slaves to South Carolina, and made a concerted effort to outlaw further imports, especially into the hinterland, in an effort to preserve their economic dominance. Timothy Ford, a lawyer born in
Trenton, New Jersey, moved to the Lowcountry in 1760 and criticized the gentry as having an "effeminate spirit of luxury and dissipation" and seemingly only cared about amusement, gambling, accumulation of wealth, and vanity. At the outbreak of the
American Revolutionary War, a subgroup of Lowcountry gentry emerged to prominence, the "Rice Pharaohs" who would create generational wealth with them and their descendants dominating South Carolinian politics in an effort to preserve
slavery at all costs. The center of the rice industry was based around the confluence of the
Waccamaw, the
Great Peedee and
Black Rivers due to the abundance of sediment deposits, a region that was compared to the
Nile river in
Egypt. Due to the harsh climate and labor intensive work required to harvest rice, planters at the time deemed it "impossible" to cultivate the region. The vast majority of slaves sent to South Carolina were imported for the rice plantations, and as such the rice pharaohs also become dominate players in the
slave trade. Due to this
Charleston rapidly grew to facilitate rice exports and slave imports. The rice pharaohs quickly surpassed and replaced other gentry, such as those who grew sugar, due to the sugar industry's reliance on British trade with the
Caribbean, making most of them
loyalists during the war. By 1787 the Lowcountry gentry argued in favor of abolishing the import of any new slaves to the United States, as their own plantations were self sufficient, and their slaves reproducing. However, with
Eli Whitney's invention of the
cotton gin, South Carolina permitted the import of slaves from 1803 to 1808, almost exclusively to new inland cotton plantations, which saw the rise of the "Piedmont gentry" who began to erode the economic dominance of the rice pharaohs and Lowcounty gentry as a whole and advocated for further expansions to slavery. In order to compete with inland plantations, the Lowcountry gentry began buying land from Alabama to Texas and advocating for the reopening of the slave trade. By the election of
Abraham Lincoln in 1860 the Lowcountry gentry sided with the Piedmont gentry in the cause for
secession. Following the
Confederacy's defeat in the
American Civil War, many of the Lowcountry estates had been destroyed by the
Union army, with the slaves on the remaining plantations being emancipated, which finally broke the power of the Lowcountry gentry. Soon timber and phosphate mining became the primary economic power in the Lowcountry, as the remaining rice plantations struggled to compete with those in Texas. The deathblow to the rice plantations would be a series of hurricanes from 1893 to 1911 which destroyed most of the remaining estates, with their owners being unable to afford to rebuild. Their lands were mostly bought by Northerners to turn into hunting preserves, with only 70,000 acres of rice impoundments existing by 1999. == Tourism ==