[Footnote 6:  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.]

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]

[Footnote 7:  David Ramsay History of South Carolina, II, pp. 246 ff.]

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 tied to the end of the shafts and assisted his father to draw the 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]

[Footnote 8:  Augusta, Ga., Chronicle, Sept. 24, 1819, reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 196.]

[Footnote 9:  Niles’ Register, XX, 320.]