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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.Social historians interested in the slave South have made much of a set of social, economic, and cultural distinctions between the lowcountry coastal region and the interior sections of South Carolina and Georgia. The basis for these distinctions lies in the recognition that, although both areas featured the use of slaves in large-scale plantation agriculture, the slave-labor system on low-country plantations was organized very differently from that on plantations located within the interior. Specifically, the task system predominated in the long-staple cotton and rice plantations of coastal South Carolina and Georgia; the gang labor system was the norm on short-staple cotton plantations, as well as on tobacco, grain, and sugar plantations. Although the immediate consequences of these different labor systems on slaves' lives have been widely recognized, some historians have suggested that these differences also had more far-reaching repercussions that influenced the social and economic experiences of African-Americans long after emancipation. For example, the consensus is that, because of prior involvement and experiences with the task system of agricultural production, low-country blacks were able to acquire property earlier, had more economic opportunities, were more attached to the land, and were more effective in shaping their postbellum labor arrangements than their counterparts from gang-labor plantation systems.1