Henry died in 1784 leaving Middleton Place and other plantations to Arthur, who in the postwar economic climate soon regained his former standard of living. Arthur and his family of nine children had lived at Middleton Place for some time before Henry’s demise, and several important economic changes took place under Arthur’s direction. In Henry’s early years at Middleton Place, rice had been cultivated in inland swamps irrigated with water from man-made reservoirs. By the late eighteenth century, soil exhaustion had begun to pose a problem, and many planters, including the Middletons, changed to tidal rice cultivation that involved impounding freshwater swamps along the rivers’ edges and allowing them to be flooded by the natural action of the river tides. Not only did the new soil and nutrients deposited by the floodwaters remove the threat of soil exhaustion, but the tidal system was more labor-efficient than inland cultivation, resulting in higher yield per acre. This new efficiency was compounded by another late eighteenth century innovation, the water-powered rice mill, installed at Middleton Place about the same time. Arthur’s eldest son Henry inherited Middleton Place at the age of 17, apparently while he was still in school in England. Henry devoted a great deal of attention to the gardens planted by his grandfather, enlarging them and introducing many new plants, some of them newly brought to America by the French botanist André Michaux. From 1801 to 1830 Henry was continuously in public office, first as a South Carolina legislator and governor, then as a member of the United States Congress, and from 1820 to 1830 as American ambassador to Russia. By the time he returned from his service abroad, South Carolinians had embarked upon the separatist agitation that would eventually lead to their third attempt in 150 years to overthrow a government. At issue were the 1828 and 1832 “tariffs of abomination,” designed by Congress to protect fledgling industries in the northern states. However, they were viewed by indignant Carolina planters, dependent on direct trade with England, as an assault on their agricultural economy. The South Carolina Nullification Convention of 1832 declared the tariff null and void on the basis of John C. Calhoun’s doctrine that a state had a right to vote to disregard onerous acts of Congress and, if other states found its action unacceptable, to secede. As a member of the opposing Union Party, Henry Middleton was perhaps the first of his family to take an active conservative role in a dispute pitting South Carolina against an outside governing body.