[Footnote 22:  Ibid., Feb. 7, 1797; Augusta Chronicle, June 10, 1797.]

[Footnote 23:  Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 1800.]

[Footnote 24:  Southern Sentinel, April 23, 1795.]

[Footnote 25:  Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 16, 1796.]

[Footnote 26:  Ibid., Sept. 9, 1809.]

The upland people of Georgia and the two Carolinas made prompt response to the new opportunity.  By 1800 even Tennessee had joined the movement, and a gin of such excellence was erected near Nashville that the proprietors exacted fees from visitors wishing to view it;[27] and by 1802 not only were consignments being shipped to New Orleans for the European market, but part of the crop was beginning to be peddled in wagons to Kentucky and in pole-boats on the Ohio as far as Pittsburg, for the domestic making of homespun.[28] In 1805 John Baird advertised at Nashville that, having received a commission from correspondents at Baltimore, he was ready to buy as much as one hundred thousand pounds of lint at fifteen cents a pound.[29] In the settlements about Vicksburg in the Mississippi Territory, cotton was not only the staple product by 1809, but was also for the time being the medium of exchange, while in Arkansas the squatters were debarred from the new venture only by the poverty which precluded them from getting gins.[30] In Virginia also, in such of the southerly counties as had summers long enough for the crop to ripen in moderate security, cotton growing became popular.  But for the time being these were merely an out-lying fringe of cotton’s principality.  The great rush to cotton growing prior to the war of 1812 occurred in the Carolina-Georgia Piedmont, with its trend of intensity soon pointing south-westward.

[Footnote 27:  Tennessee Gazette (Nashville, Tenn.), April 9, 1800.]

[Footnote 28:  F.A.  Michaux in Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, III, 252.]

[Footnote 29:  Tennessee Gazette, March 27, 1805.]

[Footnote 30:  F. Cuming, Tour to the Western Country (Pittsburg, 1810), in Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, IV, 272, 280, 298.]

A shrewd contemporary observer found special reason to rejoice that the new staple required no large capital and involved no exposure to disease.  Rice and indigo, said he, had offered the poorer whites, except the few employed as overseers, no livelihood “without the degradation of working with slaves”; but cotton, stimulating and elevating these people into the rank of substantial farmers, tended “to fill the country with an independent industrious yeomanry."[31] True as this was, it did not mean that producers on a plantation scale were at a disadvantage.  Settlers of every type, in fact, adopted the crop as rapidly as they could get seed and ginning facilities, and newcomers poured in apace to share the prosperity.

[Footnote 31:  David Ramsay, History of South Carolina (Charleston, 1808), II, 448-9.]