Rise of the New West, 1819-1829

and Georgia, with which this chapter will deal under the name of the south. Then it was that the south came to appreciate the effect of the westward spread of the cotton-plant upon slavery

rginia were attempting its cultivation; [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv., Debates (1829-1830), 333, 336; Martin, Gazetteer of Va. and D. C. (1836), 99.] interior counties of North Carolina were combining cotton-raising with their old industries; in South Carolina the area of cotton and slavery had extended up the rivers well beyond the middle of the state; [Footnote: Schaper, "Sectionalism and Representation in S. C.," in Am. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1900, I., 387- 393.] while in Georgia the cotton planters, so long restrained by the Indian line, broke through the barriers and spread over the newly ceded lands. [Footnote: Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights," in Ibid., 1901, II. 140 (map).] The accompanying table shows the progress of this crop: It is evident from the figures that tidewater South Carolina and Georgia produced practically all of the cotton crop in 1791, when the total was but two million pounds. By 1821 the old south produ

esents the value of the exports from these two cotton states, because a large fraction of the cotton was carried by the coastwise trade to northern ports and appeared in their shipments. Senator William Smith, of South Carolina, estimated that in 1818 the real exports of South Carolina and Georgia amounted to "more than half as much as that of the other states of the Union, including the vast and fertile valley of the

the virgin soils of the southwest, saw in the protective tariff for the development of northern manufactures the real source of her distress. The price of cotton was in these years a barometer of s

d grew fainter. The efforts to find some mode of removing the Negro from their midst gradually came to an end, and they adjusted themselves to slavery as a permanent system. Meanwhile, South Carolina and Georgia found in the institution the source of their economic well-being and hotly challenged the right of other sections to speak ill of it or meddle with it in any way, lest their domestic security be endangered. [Footnote: See Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.)] When the south became fully conscious that slavery set the section apart from the rest of the nation, when it saw in nationalizing legislation, such as protection to manufactures and the construction of a system of internal improvements, the efforts of other sections to deprive the cotton states of t

les from the coast, divided the region of tidewater planters of these states from the small farmers of the up-country. This population of the interior had entered the region in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century. Scotch-Irishmen and Germans passed down the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into Virginia, and through the gaps in the Blue Ridge out to the Piedmont region of the Carolinas, while contemporaneously other streams from Charleston advanced to meet them. [Footnote: Bassett, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1894, p. 141

efusing in most of these states to reapportion on the basis of numbers, they protected their slaves and their wealth against the dangers of a democracy interested in internal improvements and capable of imposing a tax upon slave property in order to promote their ends. In Virginia, in 1825, for example, the western men complained that twenty counties in the upper country, with over two hundred and twenty thousand free white inhab

Hist. Assoc., Report 1900, I., 434-437.] A similar course was followed by Virginia in the convention of 1829-1830, when, after a long struggle, a compromise was adopted, by which the balance of power in the state legislature was transferred to the counties of the Piedmont and the Valley. [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv., Debates (1829- 1830); Chandler, Representation in Va., in Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, XIV., 286-298.] Here slave-holding had progressed so far that the interest of those counties was affiliated rather with the coast than with the trans-Allegheny country. West Virginia remained a discontented area until her independent statehood in the days

actory market, was a hive from which pioneers earlier passed into Kentucky and Tennessee, until those states had become populous commonwealths. Now the exodus was increased by this later colonization.[Footnote: See chap. v. below.] The Ohio was crossed, the Mississippi-Missouri ascended, and the streams that flowed to the Gulf were followed by movers away from the regions that were undergoing this social and economic reconstruction. This industrial revolution was effective in different degrees in the different states. Comparatively few of Virginia's slaves, which by 1830 numbered nearly half a million, were found in her trans-Allegheny counties, but the Shenandoah Valley was receiving slaves and changing to the plantation type. In North Carolina the slave population of nearly two hundred and fifty thousand, at the same date, had spread well into the interior, but cotton did not achieve the position there which it held farther south. The interior farmers worked small farms of wheat and corn, laboring side by side with their Negro slaves in the fields. [Footnote: Bassett, Slavery in N. C., in Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, XVII., 324, 399.] South Carolina had over three hundred thousand slaves-more than a majority

e reduced to numerical inferiority. Like New England, it was an almost stationary section. Prom 1820 to 1830 the states of this group gained little more than half a million souls, hardly more than the increase of the single state of New York. Virgin

similar to the occupation of Oklahoma and Indian Territory in our own day. What Maine was to New England, that Georgia was to the southern seaboard, with the difference that it was deeply touched by influences characteristically western. Because of the traits of her leaders, and the rude, aggressive policy of her people, Georgia belon

n value. Even the corn and wheat lands were exhausted by unscientific farming. [Footnote: Gooch, Prize Essay on Agriculture in Va., in Lynchburg Virginian, July 4, 1833; Martin, Gazetteer of Va., 99, 100.] Writing in 1814 to Josiah Quincy, [Footnote: E Quincy, Josiah Quincy, 353.] John Randolph of Roanoke lamented the decline of the seaboard planters. He declared that the region was now sunk in obscurity: what enterprise or capital there was in the country had retired westward; deer and wild turkeys wer

eighty or ninety years before, when it contained not one-sixth of the population. In his judgment, the greater proportion of the larger plantations, with from fifty to one hundred slaves, brought the proprietors into debt, and rarely did a plantation yield one and

s distress. [Footnote: Randall, Jefferson, III., 527, 561.] At the same time, Madison, having vainly tried to get a loan from the United States Bank, was forced to dispose of some of his lands and stocks; [Footnote: Hunt, Madison, 380.] and Monroe, at the clo

vast cultivated estates and pretentious homes, were in the minority. For the most part, the houses were moderate frame structures, set

re carried on, often under the direction of white mechanics. The planter and his wife commonly had the care of the black families whom they possessed, looked after them when they were sick, saw to their daily rat

e justices of the peace recommended by the court, and the court itself appointed the county clerk. Thus the county government of Virginia was distinctly aristocratic. County-court day served as an opportunity for bringing together the freeholders, who included not only the larger planters, but the small farmers and the poor whites-hangers-on of t

ndall, Jefferson, III., 532.] The explanation was found most commonly in the charge that the protective tariff was destroying the prosperity of the south; and in reaction they turned to demand the old days of Jeffersonian rural simplicity, under the guardianship of state rights and a strict constructio

s there was a flow of wealth towards the west to pay for these new purchases. The overgrown plantations soon began to look tattered and almost desolate. "Galled and gullied hill-sides and sedgy, briary fields" [Footnote: Lynchburg Virginian, July 4, 1833.] showed themselves in every direction. Finally the planter found himself obliged to part with some of his slaves, in response to the demand from the new cotton-fields; or to migrate himself, with his caravan of Negroes, to open a new home in the Gulf region. During the period of this s

s embarrassed. With the fall in cotton prices, already mentioned, it became increasingly necessary to possess the advantages of large estates and unexhausted soils, in order to extract a profit from this cultivation. From Sout

vied with one another in engaging the attention of the planters. Returning to their plantations in the early spring, they remained until June, when considerations of health compelled them either again to return to the city, to visit the mountains, or to go to such watering-places as Saratoga in New York. Here again they talked politics and mingled with politic

said he, "we fly from the city to the country, what do we there behold? Fields abandoned; the hospitable mansions of our fathers deserted; agriculture drooping; our slaves, like their masters, working harder, and faring worse; the planter striving with unavailing efforts to avert the ruin which is before him." He drew a sad picture of the once thriving planter, reduced to despair, gathering up the smal

ce of leaders bold in political initiative and masterful in their ability to use the talents of their northern allies. When the Missouri question was debated, John Quincy Adams remarked "that if instit

deralist ideals; John Randolph, his old eccentricities increased by disease and intemperance, remained to proclaim the extreme doctrines of southern dissent and to impale his adversaries with javelins of flashing wit. A maker of phrases which stung and festered, he was still capable of influencing public opinion somewhat in the same way as are the cartoonists of modern times. But "his course thro

them reluctant to tread. Nor must it be forgotten that early in the decade the south lost two of her greatest statesmen, the wise and moderate Lowndes, of South Carolina, and Pinkney, the brilliant Maryland orator. In the course of the ten years which we are to sketch, the influence of economic change within this section transformed the South Carolinians from warm supporters of a liberal