[Footnote 51:  DeBow’s Review, XIV, 199, 200.]

Until about 1850 the sugar district as well as the cotton belt was calling for labor from whatever source it might be had; but whereas the uplands had work for people of both races and all conditions, the demand of the delta lands, to which the sugar crop was confined, was almost wholly for negro slaves.  The only notable increase in the rural white population of the district came through the fecundity of the small-farming Acadians who had little to do with sugar culture.

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 2,689 persons, 1,333 horses, 766 cattle, 102 wagons and one 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 regime; 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.