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]

[Footnote 23:  G.S.  Callender in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, XVII, 111-162.]

This thriving of the West, however, was largely at the expense of the older plantation states.[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]

[Footnote 24:  Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy (Boston, 1869), p. 336.]

[Footnote 25:  H.A.  Garland, Life of John Randolph (Philadelphia, 1851), II, 15; I, 2; II, 105.]

The extreme depression passed, but the conditions prompting emigration were persistent and widespread.  News items from here and there continued for decades to tell of movement in 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