 | CHAPTER X
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT American negro slavery; |  |
CHAPTER X
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
THE flow of population into the distant interior followed
the lines of least resistance and greatest opportunity. In
the earlier decades these lay chiefly in the Virginia latitudes.
The Indians there were yielding, the mountains afforded
passes thither, and the climate permitted the familiar tobacco industry.
The Shenandoah Valley had been occupied mainly by
Scotch-Irish and German small farmers from Pennsylvania; but
the glowing reports, which the long hunters brought and the land
speculators spread from beyond the further mountains, made
Virginians to the manner born resolve to compete with the men
of the backwoods for a share of the Kentucky lands. During
and after the war for independence they threaded the gorges,
some with slaves but most without. Here and there one found
a mountain glade so fertile that he made it his permanent home,
while his fellows pushed on to the greater promised land. Some
of these emerging upon a country of low and uniform hills,
closely packed and rounded like the backs of well-fed pigs crowding
to the trough, staked out their claims, set up their cabins,
deadened their trees, and planted wheat. Others went on to the
gently rolling country about Lexington, let the luxuriant native
bluegrass wean them from thoughts of tobacco, and became
breeders of horses for evermore. A few, settling on the southerly
edge of the bluegrass, mainly in and about Garrard County,
raised hemp on a plantation scale. The rest, resisting all these
allurements, pressed on still further to the pennyroyal country
where tobacco would have no rival. While thousands made the
whole journey overland, still more made use of the Ohio River
for the later stages. The adjutant at Fort Harmar counted in
seven months of 1786–1787, 177 boats descending the Ohio, carrying
phaeton, while still others passed by night uncounted.[1] The family
establishments in Kentucky were always on a smaller scale,
on an average, than those in Virginia. Yet the people migrating
to the more fertile districts tended to maintain and even to
heighten the spirit of gentility and the pride of type which they
carried as part of their heritage. The laws erected by the community
were favorable to the slaveholding régime; but after the
first decades of the migration period, the superior attractions of
the more southerly latitudes for plantation industry checked
Kentucky's receipt of slaves.
The wilderness between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, meanwhile,
was attracting Virginia and Carolina emigrants as well as
those from the northerly states. The soil there was excellent,
and some districts were suited to tobacco culture. The Ordinance
of 1787, however, though it was not strictly enforced,
made slaveholdings north of the Ohio negligible from any but
an antiquarian point of view.
The settlement of Tennessee was parallel, though subsequent,
to that of the Shenandoah and Kentucky. The eastern intramontane
valley, broad and fertile but unsuited to the staple crops,
gave homes to thousands of small farmers, while the Nashville
basin drew planters of both tobacco and cotton, and the counties
along the western and southern borders of the state made cotton
their one staple. The scale of slaveholdings in middle and western
Tennessee, while superior to that in Kentucky, was never so
great as those which prevailed in Virginia and the lower South.
Missouri, whose adaptation to the southern staples was much
poorer, came to be colonized in due time partly by planters from
Kentucky but mostly by farmers from many quarters, including
after the first decades a large number of Germans, some of whom
entered through the eastern ports and others through New Orleans.
This great central region as a whole acquired an agricultural
régime blending the features of the two national extremes. The
staples were prominent but never quite paramount. Corn and
not on a mere home consumption basis, but for sale in the
cotton belt and abroad. This diversification caused the region
to wane in the esteem of the migrating planters as soon as the
Alabama-Mississippi country was opened for settlement.
Preliminaries of the movement into the Gulf region had begun
as early as 1768, when a resident of Pensacola noted that a group
of Virginians had been prospecting thereabouts with such favorable
results that five of them had applied for a large grant of
lands, pledging themselves to bring in a hundred slaves and a
large number of cattle.[2]
In 1777 William Bartram met a group
of migrants journeying from Georgia to settle on the lower
course of the Alabama River;[3]
and in 1785 a citizen of Augusta
wrote that "a vast number" of the upland settlers were removing
toward the Mississippi in consequence of the relinquishment of
Natchez by the Spaniards.[4]
But these were merely forerunners.
Alabama in particular, which comprises for the most part the
basin draining into Mobile Bay, could have no safe market for
its produce until Spain was dispossessed of the outlet. The taking
of Mobile by the United States as an episode of the war of
1812, and the simultaneous breaking of the Indian strength, removed
the obstacles. The influx then rose to immense proportions.
The roads and rivers became thronged, and the federal
agents began to sell homesteads on a scale which made the "land
office business" proverbial.[5]
The Alabama-Mississippi population rose from 40,000 in round
numbers in 1810 to 200,000 in 1820, 445,000 in 1830, 965,000 in
1840, 1,377,000 in 1850, and 1,660,000 in 1860, while the proportion
of slaves advanced from forty to forty-seven per cent In
the same period the tide flowed on into the cotton lands of Arkansas
and Louisiana and eventually into Texas. Florida alone
of the newer southern areas was left in relative neglect by reason
of the barrenness of her soil. The states and territories
of the whole country's cotton output from one-sixteenth in
1811 to one-third in 1820, one-half before 1830, nearly two-thirds
in 1840, and quite three-fourths in 1860; and all this was in spite
of continued and substantial enlargements of the eastern output.
In the western cotton belt the lands most highly esteemed in
the ante-bellum period lay in two main areas, both of which had
soils far more fertile and lasting than any in the interior of the
Atlantic states. One of these formed a crescent across south-central
Alabama, with its western horn reaching up the Tombigbee
River into northeastern Mississippi. Its soil of loose black
loam was partly forested, partly open, and densely matted with
grass and weeds except where limestone cropped out on the hill
crests and where prodigious cane brakes choked the valleys. The
area was locally known as the prairies or the black belt.[6]
The
process of opening it for settlement was begun by Andrew Jackson's
defeat of the Creeks in 1814 but was not completed until
some twenty years afterward. The other and greater tract extended
along both sides of the Mississippi River from northern
Tennessee and Arkansas to the mouth of the Red River. It comprised
the broad alluvial bottoms, together with occasional hill
districts of rich loam, especially notable among the latter of which
were those lying about Natchez and Vicksburg. The southern end
of this area was made available first, and the hills preceded the
delta in popularity for cotton culture. It was not until the middle
thirties that the broadest expanse of the bottoms, the Yazoo-Mississippi
Delta, began to receive its great influx. The rest of
the western cotton belt had soils varying through much the same
range as those of Georgia and the Carolinas. Except in the
bottoms, where the planters themselves did most of the pioneering,
the choicer lands of the whole district were entered by a pell-mell
throng of great planters, lesser planters and small farmers,
with the farmers usually a little in the lead and the planters ready
to buy them out of specially rich lands. Farmers refusing to sell
if they sold their homesteads at high prices they might buy
slaves with the proceeds and remove to become planters in still
newer districts.
The process was that which had already been exemplified
abundantly in the eastern cotton belt. A family arriving perhaps
in the early spring with a few implements and a small supply
of food and seed, would build in a few days a cabin of rough
logs with an earthen floor and a roof of bark or of riven clapboards.
To clear a field they would girdle the larger trees and
clear away the underbrush. Corn planted in April would furnish
roasting ears in three months and ripe grain in six weeks
more. Game was plenty; lightwood was a substitute for candles;
and housewifely skill furnished homespun garments. Shelter,
food and clothing and possibly a small cotton crop or other
surplus were thus had the first year. Some rested with this;
but the more thrifty would soon replace their cabins with hewn
log or frame houses, plant kitchen gardens and watermelon
patches, set out orchards and increase the cotton acreage. The
further earnings of a year or two would supply window glass,
table ware, coffee, tea and sugar, a stock of poultry, a few hogs
and even perhaps a slave or two. The pioneer hardships decreased
and the homely comforts grew with every passing year of
thrift. But the orchard yield of stuff for the still, and the cotton
field's furnishing the wherewithal to buy more slaves, brought
temptations. Distilleries and slaves, a contemporary said, were
blessings or curses according as they were used or abused; for
drunkenness and idleness were the gates of the road to retrogression.[7]
The pathetic hardships which some of the poorer migrants underwent
in their labors to reach the western opportunity are exemplified
in a local item from an Augusta newspaper in 1819:
"Passed through this place from Greenville District [South Carolina]
bound for Chatahouchie, a man and his wife, his son and
his wife, with a cart but no horse. The man had a belt over his
shoulders and he drew in the shafts; the son worked by traces
cart; the son's wife rode in the cart, and the old woman was
walking, carrying a rifle, and driving a cow."[8] This example,
while extreme, was not unique.[9]
The call of the west was carried in promoters' publications,[10]
in
private letters, in newspaper reports, and by word of mouth.
A typical communication was sent home in 1817 by a Marylander
who had moved to Louisiana: "In your states a planter with
ten negroes with difficulty supports a family genteelly; here well
managed they would be a fortune to him. With you the seasons
are so irregular your crops often fail; here the crops are certain,
and want of the necessaries of life never for a moment causes the
heart to ache—abundance spreads the table of the poor man, and
contentment smiles on every countenance."[11]
Other accounts
told glowingly of quick fortunes made and to be made by getting
lands cheaply in the early stages of settlement and selling
them at greatly enhanced prices when the tide of migration arrived
in force.[12]
Such ebullient expressions were taken at face
value by thousands of the unwary; and other thousands of the
more cautious followed in the trek when personal inquiries had
reinforced the tug of the west. The larger planters generally
removed only after somewhat thorough investigation and after
procuring more or less acquiescence from their slaves; the
smaller planters and farmers, with lighter stake in their homes
and better opportunity to sell them, with lighter impedimenta for
the journey, with less to lose by misadventure, and with poorer
facilities for inquiry, responded more readily to the enticements.
The fever of migration produced in some of the people an unconquerable
restlessness. An extraordinary illustration of this
is given the career of Gideon Lincecum as written by himself.
In 1802, when Gideon was ten years old, his father, after farming
successfully for some years in the Georgia uplands was lured
by letters from relatives in Tennessee to sell out and remove
avoid the Cherokee country, he set forth with a wagon and four
horses to carry a bed, four chests, four white and four negro
children, and his mother who was eighty-eight years old. When
but a few days on the road an illness of the old woman caused a
halt, whereupon Lincecum rented a nearby farm and spent a year
on a cotton crop. The journey was then resumed, but barely
had the Savannah River been crossed when another farm was
rented and another crop begun. Next year they returned to
Georgia and worked a farm near Athens. Then they set out
again for Tennessee; but on the road in South Carolina the wreck
of the wagon and its ancient occupant gave abundant excuse for
the purchase of a farm there. After another crop, successful as
usual, the family moved back to Georgia and cropped still another
farm. Young Gideon now attended school until his father
moved again, this time southward, for a crop near Eatonton.
Gideon then left his father after a quarrel and spent several
years as a clerk in stores here and there, as a county tax collector
and as a farmer, and began to read medicine in odd moments.
He now married, about the beginning of the year 1815, and rejoined
his father who was about to cross the Indian country to
settle in Alabama. But they had barely begun this journey when
the father, while tipsy, bought a farm on the Georgia frontier,
where the two families settled and Gideon interspersed deer
hunting with his medical reading. Next spring the cavalcade
crossed the five hundred miles of wilderness in six weeks, and
reached the log cabin village of Tuscaloosa, where Gideon built
a house. But provisions were excessively dear, and his hospitality
to other land seekers from Georgia soon consumed his savings.
He began whipsawing lumber, but after disablement from
a gunpowder explosion he found lighter employment in keeping
a billiard room. He then set out westward again, breaking a
road for his wagon as he went. Upon reaching the Tombigbee
River he built a clapboard house in five days, cleared land from
its canebrake, planted corn with a sharpened stick, and in spite
of ravages from bears and raccoons gathered a hundred and fifty
bushels from six acres. When the town of Columbus, Mississippi,
house on speculation. From this he was diverted to the Indian
trade, bartering whiskey, cloth and miscellaneous goods for peltries.
He then became a justice of the peace and school commissioner
at Columbus, surveyed and sold town lots on public
account, and built two school houses with the proceeds. He then
moved up the river to engage anew in the Indian trade with a
partner who soon proved a drunkard. He and his wife there
took a fever which after baffling the physicians was cured by his
own prescription. He then moved to Cotton Gin Port to take
charge of a store, but was invalided for three years by a sunstroke.
Gradually recovering, he lived in the woods on light diet
until the thought occurred to him of carrying a company of Choctaw
ball players on a tour of the United States. The tour was
made, but the receipts barely covered expenses. Then in 1830,
Lincecum set himself up as a physician at Columbus. No sooner
had he built up a practice, however, than he became dissatisfied
with allopathy and went to study herb remedies among the Indians;
and thereafter he practiced botanic medicine. In 1834
he went as surgeon with an exploring party to Texas and found
that country so attractive that after some years further at Columbus
he spent the rest of his long life in Texas as a planter,
physician and student of natural history. He died there in 1873
at the age of eighty years.[13]
The descriptions and advice which prospectors in the west sent
home are exemplified in a letter of F. X. Martin, written in New
Orleans in 1911, to a friend in eastern North Carolina. The
lands, he said, were the most remunerative in the whole country;
a planter near Natchez was earning $270 per hand each
year. The Opelousas and Attakapas districts for sugar, and the
Red River bottoms for cotton, he thought, offered the best opportunities
because of the cheapness of their lands. As to the
journey from North Carolina, he advised that the start be made
about the first of September and the course be laid through Knoxville
to Nashville. Traveling thence through the Indian country,
Speed would be greater on horseback, but the route was feasible
for vehicles, and a traveler would find a tent and a keg of water
conducive to his comfort. The Indians, who were generally short
of provisions in spring and summer, would have supplies to
spare in autumn; and the prevailing dryness of that season would
make the streams and swamps in the path less formidable. An
alternative route lay through Georgia; but its saving of distance
was offset by the greater expanse of Indian territory to be
crossed, the roughness of the road and the frequency of rivers.
The viewing of the delta country, he thought, would require three
or four months of inspection before a choice of location could
safely be made.[14]
The procedure of planters embarking upon long distance migration
may be gathered from the letters which General Leonard
Covington of Calvert County, Maryland, wrote to his brother
and friends who had preceded him to the Natchez district. In
August, 1808, finding a prospect of selling his Maryland lands,
he formed a project of carrying his sixty slaves to Mississippi
and hiring out some of them there until a new plantation should
be ready for routine operation. He further contemplated taking
with him ten or fifteen families of non-slaveholding whites
who were eager to migrate under his guidance and wished employment
by him for a season while they cast about for farms of
their own. Covington accordingly sent inquiries as to the prevailing
rates of hire and the customary feeding and treatment
of slaves. He asked whether they were commonly worked only
from "sun to sun," and explained his thought by saying, "It is
possible that so much labor may be required of hirelings and so
little regard may be had for their constitutions as to render them
in a few years not only unprofitable but expensive." He asked
further whether the slaves there were contented, whether they
as universally took wives and husbands and as easily reared
children as in Maryland, whether cotton was of more certain
yield and sale than tobacco, what was the cost of clearing land
fruit, and what the nature of the climate.
The replies he received were quite satisfactory, but a failure
to sell part of his Maryland lands caused him to leave twenty-six
of his slaves in the east. The rest he sent forward with a
neighbor's gang. Three white men were in charge, but one of
the negroes escaped at Pittsburg and was apparently not recaptured.
Covington after detention by the delicacy of his wife's
health and by duties in the military service of the United States,
set out at the beginning of October, 1809, with his wife and five
children, a neighbor named Waters and his family, several other
white persons, and eleven slaves. He described his outfit as "the
damnedest cavalcade that ever man was burdened with; not less
than seven horses compose my troop; they convey a close carriage
(Jersey stage), a gig and horse cart, so that my family are
transported with comfort and convenience, though at considerable
expense. All these odd matters and contrivances I design
to take with me to Mississippi if possible. Mr. Waters will also
take down his waggon and team." Upon learning that the Ohio
was in low water he contemplated journeying by land as
far as Louisville; but he embarked at Wheeling instead, and
after tedious dragging "through shoals, sandbars and ripples" he
reached Cincinnati late in November. When the last letter on
thef journey was written he was on the point of embarking afresh
on a boat so crowded, that in spite of his desire to carry a large
stock of provisions he could find room for but a few hundredweight
of pork and a few barrels of flour. He apparently
reached his destination at the end of the year and established a
plantation with part of his negroes, leaving the rest on hire. The
approach of the war of 1812 brought distress; cotton was low,
bacon was high, and the sale of a slave or two was required in
making ends meet. Covington himself was now ordered by the
Department of War to take the field in command of dragoons,
and in 1813 was killed in a battle beyond the Canadian border.
The fate of his family and plantation does not appear in the records.[15]
A more successful migration was that of Col. Thomas S.
Dabney in 1835. After spending the years of his early manhood
on his ancestral tide-water estate, Elmington, in Gloucester
County, Virginia, he was prompted to remove by the prospective
needs of his rapidly growing family. The justice of his anticipations
appears from the fact that his second wife bore him eventually
sixteen children, ten of whom survived her. After a land-looking
tour through Alabama and Louisiana, Dabney chose a
tract in Hinds County, Mississippi, some forty miles east of
Vicksburg, where he bought the property of several farmers as
the beginning of a plantation which finally engrossed some four
thousand acres. Returning to Virginia, he was given a great
farewell dinner at Richmond, at which Governor Tyler presided
and many speakers congratulated Mississippi upon her gain of
such a citizen at Virginia's expense.[16]
Several relatives and
neighbors resolved to accompany him in the migration. His
brother-in-law, Charles Hill, took charge of the carriages and the
white families, while Dabney himself had the care of the wagons
and the many scores of negroes. The journey was accomplished
without mishap in two months of perfect autumn weather. Upon
arriving at the new location most of the log houses were found
in ruins from a recent hurricane; but new shelters were quickly
provided, and in a few months the great plantation, with its force
of two hundred slaves, was in routine operation. In the following
years Dabney made it a practice to clear about a hundred
acres of new ground annually. The land, rich and rolling, was
so varied in its qualities and requirements that a general failure
of crops was never experienced—the bottoms would thrive
in dry seasons, the hill crops in wet, and moderation in rainfall
would prosper them all. The small farmers who continued to
dwell nearby included Dabney at first in their rustic social functions;
but when he carried twenty of his slaves to a house-raising
and kept his own hands gloved while directing their work, the
beneficiary and his fellows were less grateful for the service than
offended at the undemocratic manner of its rendering. When
restraint was increased. The rich might patronize the poor in
the stratified society of old Virginia; in young Mississippi such
patronage was an unpleasant suggestion that stratification was
beginning.[17] With the passage of years and the continued influx
of planters ready to buy their lands at good prices, such
farmers as did not thrive tended to vacate the richer soils. The
Natchez-Vicksburg district became largely consolidated into
great plantations,[18] and the tract extending thence to Tuscaloosa,
as likewise the district about Mongtomery, Alabama, became occupied
mostly by smaller plantations on a scale of a dozen or two
slaves each,[19] while the non-slaveholders drifted to the southward
pine-barrens or the western or northwestern frontiers.
The caravans of migrating planters were occasionally described
by travelers in the period. Basil Hall wrote of one which he
overtook in South Carolina in 1828: "It . . . did not consist of
above thirty persons in all, of whom five-and-twenty at least were
slaves. The women and children were stowed away in wagons,
moving slowly up a steep, sandy hill; but the curtains being
let down we could see nothing of them except an occasional glance
of an eye, or a row of teeth as white as snow. In the rear of all
came a light covered vehicle, with the master and mistress of the
party. Along the roadside, scattered at intervals, we observed the
male slaves trudging in front. At the top of all, against the sky
line, two men walked together, apparently hand in hand pacing
along very sociably. There was something, however, in their attitude,
which seemed unusual and constrained. When we came
nearer, accordingly, we discovered that this couple were bolted together
by a short chain or bar riveted to broad iron clasps secured
in like manner round the wrists. 'What have you been doing, my
boys,' said our coachman in passing, 'to entitle you to these
ruffles?' 'Oh, sir,' cried one of them quite gaily, 'they are the best
things in the world to travel with. The other man said nothing.
these men were chained, and how they came to take the matter so
differently. The answer explained the mystery. One of them, it
appeared, was married, but his wife belonged to a neighboring
planter, not to his master. When the general move was made the
proprieter of the female not choosing to part with her, she was
necessarily left behind. The wretched husband was therefore
shackled to a young unmarried man who having no such tie to
draw him back might be more safely trusted on the journey."[20]
Timothy Flint wrote after observing many of these caravans:
"The slaves generally seem fond of their masters, and as much
delighted and interested in their migration as their masters. It
is to me a very pleasing and patriarchal sight."[21]
But Edwin L.
Godkin, who in his transit of a Mississippi swamp in 1856 saw
a company in distress, used the episode as a peg on which to hang
an anti-slavery sentiment: "I fell in with an emigrant party on
their way to Texas. Their mules had sunk in the mud, . . .
the wagons were already embedded as far as the axles. The
women of the party, lightly clad in cotton, had walked for miles,
knee-deep in water, through the brake, exposed to the pitiless
pelting of the storm, and were now crouching forlorn and woebegone
under the shelter of a tree. . . . The men were making
feeble attempts to light a fire. . . . 'Colonel,' said one of them
as I rode past, 'this is the gate of hell, ain't it?'. . . The hardships
the negroes go through who are attached to one of these
emigrant parties baffle description. . . . They trudge on foot all
day through mud and thicket without rest or respite. . . . Thousands
of miles are traversed by these weary wayfarers without
their knowing or caring why, urged on by the whip arid in the
full assurance that no change of place can bring any change to
them. . . . Hard work, coarse food, merciless floggings, are all
that await them, and all that they can look to. I have never
passed them, staggering along in the rear of the wagons at the
the strongest already utterly spent, without wondering how
Christendom, which eight centuries ago rose in arms for a sentiment,
can look so calmly on at so foul and monstrous a wrong as
this American slavery."[22] If instead of crossing the Mississippi
bottoms and ascribing to slavery the hardships he observed,
Godkin had been crossing the Nevada desert that year
and had come upon, as many others did, a train of emigrants
with its oxen dead, its women and children perishing of thirst,
and its men with despairing eyes turned still toward the goldfields
of California, would he have inveighed against freedom as
the cause? Between Flint's impression of pleasure and Godkin's
of gloom no choice need be made, for either description was
often exemplified. In general the slaves took the fatigues and
the diversions of the route merely as the day's work and the
day's play.
Many planters whose points of departure and of destination
were accessible to deep water made their transit by sea. Thus
on the brig Calypso sailing from Norfolk to New Orleans in
April, 1819, Benjamin Ballard and Samuel T. Barnes, both of
Halifax County, North Carolina, carrying 30 and 196 slaves respectively,
wrote on the margins of their manifests, the one
"The owner of these slaves is moving to the parish of St. Landry
near Opelousas where he has purchased land and intends settling,
and is not a dealer in human flesh," the other, "The owner of
these slaves is moving to Louisiana to settle, and is not a dealer
in human flesh." On the same voyage Augustin Pugh of the
adjoining Bertie County carried seventy slaves whose manifest,
though it bears no such asseveration, gives evidence that they
likewise were not a trader's lot; for some of the negroes were
sixty years old, and there were as many children as adults in the
parcel. Lots of such sizes as these were of course exceptional.
In the packages of manifests now preserved in the Library of
Congress the lists of from one to a dozen slaves outnumbered
those of fifty or more by perhaps a hundred fold.
The western cotton belt not only had a greater expanse and
richer lands than the eastern, but its cotton tended to have a
longer fiber, ranging, particularly in the district of the "bends"
of the Mississippi north of Vicksburg, as much as an inch and a
quarter in length and commanding a premium in the market.
Its far reaching waterways, furthermore, made freighting easy
and permitted the planters to devote themselves the more fully
to their staple. The people in the main made their own food
supplies; yet the market demand of the western cotton belt and
the sugar bowl for grain and meat contributed much toward
the calling of the northwestern settlements into prosperous
existence.[23]
This thriving of the West, however, was largley at the expense
of the older plantation stages.[24]
In 1813 John Randolph wrote:
"The whole country watered by the rivers which fall into the
Chesapeake is in a state of paralysis. . . . The distress is general
and heavy, and I do not see how the people can pay their taxes."
And again: "In a few years more, those of us who are alive will
move off to Kaintuck or the Massissippi, where corn can be had
for sixpence a bushel and pork for a penny a pound. I do not
wonder at the rage for emigration. What do the bulk of the
people get here that they cannot have there for one fifth the
labor in the western country?" Next year, after a visit to his
birthplace, he exclaimed: "What a spectacle does our lower
country present! Deserted and dismantled country-houses once
the seats of cheerfulness and plenty, and the temples of the
Most High ruinous and desolate, 'frowning in portentous silence
upon the land.'" And in 1819 he wrote from Richmond: "You
have no conception of the gloom and distress that pervade this
place. There has been nothing like it since 1785 when from the
same causes (paper money and a general peace) there was a
general depression of everything."[25]
The extreme depression passed, but the conditions prompting
emigration were persistent and widespread. News items from
large volume from Tide-water and Piedmont, from the tobacco
states and the eastern cotton-belt, and even from Alabama in
its turn, for destinations as distant and divergent as Michigan,
Missouri and Texas. The communities which suffered cast
about for both solace and remedy. An editor in the South Carolina
uplands remarked at the beginning of 1833 that if emigration
should continue at the rate of the past year the state would
become a wilderness; but he noted with grim satisfaction that
it was chiefly the "fire-eaters" that were moving out.[26] In 1836
another South Carolinian wrote: "The spirit of emigration is
still rife in our community. From this cause we have lost many,
and we are destined, we fear, to lose more, of our worthiest
citizens." Though efforts to check it were commonly thought
futile, he addressed himself to suasion. The movement, said
he, is a mistaken one; South Carolina planters should let well
enough alone. The West is without doubt the place for wealth,
but prosperity is a trial to character. In the West money is
everything. Its pursuit, accompanied as it is by baneful speculation,
lawlessness, gambling, sabbath-breaking, brawls and violence,
prevents moral attainment and mental cultivation. Substantial
people should stay in South Carolina to preserve their
pristine purity, hospitality, freedom of thought, fearlessness and
nobility.[27]
An Alabama spokesman rejoiced in the manual industry of the
white people in his state, and said if the negroes were only
thinned off it would become a great and prosperous commonwealth.[28]
But another Alabamian, A. B. Meek, found reason to
eulogize both emigration and slavery. He said the roughness of
manners prevalent in the haphazard western aggregation of New
Englanders, Virginians, Carolinians and Georgians would prove
but a temporary phase. Slavery would be of benefit through its
tendency to stratify society, ennoble the upper classes, and give
even the poorer whites a stimulating pride of race. "In a few
our unparalleled natural advantages, we shall be the richest people
beneath the bend of the rainbow; and then the arts and the
sciences, which always follow in the train of wealth, will flourish
to an extent hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic."[29]
As a practical measure to relieve the stress of the older districts
a beginning was made in seed selection, manuring and crop
rotation to enhance the harvests; horses were largely replaced by
mules, whose earlier maturity, greater hardihood and longer lives
made their use more economical for plow and wagon work;[30]
the
straight furrows of earlier times gave place in the Piedmont
to curving ones which followed the hill contours and when supplemented
with occasional grass balks and ditches checked the
scouring of the rains and conserved in some degree the thin
soils of the region; a few textile factories were built to better the
local market for cotton and lower the cost of cloth as well as to
yield profits to their proprietors; the home production of grain
and meat supplies was in some measure increased; and river
and highway improvements and railroad construction were undertaken
to lessen the expenses of distant marketing.[31]
Some
of these recourses were promptly adopted in the newer settlements
also; and others proved of little avail for the time being.
The net effect of the betterments, however, was an appreciable
offsetting of the western advantage; and this, when added to
the love of home, the disrelish of primitive travel and pioneer
life, and the dread of the costs and risks involved in removal,
dissuaded multitudes from the project of migration. The actual
depopulation of the Atlantic states was less than the plaints, of
the time would suggest. The volume of emigration was undoubtedly
great, and few newcomers came in to fill the gaps.
But the birth rate alone in those generations of ample families
more than replaced the losses year by year in most localities.
but of disappointment in the expectation of increase.
The non-slaveholding backwoodsmen formed the vanguard of
settlement on each frontier in turn; the small slaveholders followed
on their heels and crowded each fertile district until the
men who lived by hunting as well as by farming had to push
father westward; finally the larger planters with their crowded
carriages, their lumbering wagons and their trudging slaves
arrived to consolidate the fields of such earlier settlers as would
sell. It often seemed to the wayfarer that all the world was on the
move. But in the districts of durable soil thousands of men, clinging
to their homes, repelled every attack of the western fever.
C. F. Emerick, "The Credit System and the Public Domain," in the
Vanderbilt University Southern History Publications, no. 3 (Nashville, Tenn., 1899).
This use of the term "black belt" is not to be confused with the other
and more general application of it to such areas in the South at large
as have a majority of negroes in their population.
F. L. Riley, ed., "The Autobiography of Gideon Lincecum," in the
Mississipi Historical Society Publications, VIII, 443–519.
Richmond Enquirer, Sept. 22, 1835, reprinted in Susan D. Smedes, Memorials
of a Southern Planter (2d. ed., Baltimore, 1888), pp. 43–47.
Basil Hall, Travels in North America (Edinburgh, 1829), III, 128, 129.
See also for similar scenes, Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America
(London, 1854), I, 113.
Letter of E. L. Godkin to the London News, reprinted in the North
American Review, CLXXXV (1907), 46, 47.
| CHAPTER X
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT American negro slavery; | |