[Footnote 8:  Atlantic Monthly, XXVI, 175.]

As to the yield, an adage was current, that cotton would promise more and do less and promise less and do more than any other green thing that grew.  The plants in the earlier stages were very delicate.  Rough stirring of the clods would kill them; excess of rain or drought would be likewise fatal; and a choking growth of grass would altogether devastate the field.  Improvement of conditions would bring quick recuperation to the surviving stalks, which upon attaining their full growth became quite hardy; but undue moisture would then cause a shedding of the bolls, and the first frost of autumn would stop the further fruiting.  The plants, furthermore, were liable to many diseases and insect ravages.  In infancy cut-worms might sever the stalks at the base, and lice might sap the vitality; in the full flush of blooming luxuriance, wilt and rust, the latter particularly on older lands, might blight the leaves, or caterpillars in huge armies reduce them to skeletons and blast the prospect; and even when the fruit was formed, boll-worms might consume the substance within, or dry-rot prevent the top crop from ripening.  The ante-bellum planters, however, were exempt from the Mexican boll-weevil, the great pest of the cotton belt in the twentieth century.

While every planter had his fat years and lean, and the yield of the belt as a whole alternated between bumper crops and short ones, the industry was in general of such profit as to maintain a continued expansion of its area and a never ending though sometimes hesitating increase of its product.  The crop rose from eighty-five million pounds in 1810 to twice as much in 1820; it doubled again by 1830 and more than doubled once more by 1840.  Extremely low prices for the staple in the early ’forties and again in 1849 prompted a campaign for crop reduction; and in that decade the increase was only from 830,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 pounds.  But the return of good prices in the ’fifties caused a fresh and huge enlargement to 2,300,000,000 pounds in the final census year of the ante-bellum period.  While this was little more than one fourth as great as the crops of sixteen million bales in 1912 and 1915, it was justly reckoned in its time, at home and abroad, a prodigious output.  All the rest of the world then produced barely one third as much.  The cotton sent abroad made up nearly two thirds of the value of the gross export trade of the United States, while the tobacco export had hardly a tenth of the cotton’s worth.  In competition with all the other staples, cotton engaged the services of some three fourths of all the country’s plantation labor, in addition to the labor of many thousands of white farmers and their families.