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 the 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]

[Footnote 15:  Plantation and Frontier, II, 201-208.]

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