The production and sale of the staple engrossed no less of the people’s thought than of their work.  A traveler who made a zig-zag journey from Charleston to St. Louis in the early months of 1827, found cotton “a plague.”  At Charleston, said he, the wharves were stacked and the stores and ships packed with the bales, and the four daily papers and all the patrons of the hotel were “teeming with cotton.”  At Augusta the thoroughfares were thronged with groaning wagons, the warehouses were glutted, the open places were stacked, and the steamboats and barges hidden by their loads.  On the road beyond, migrating planters and slaves bound for the west, “‘where the cotton land is not worn out,’” met cotton-laden wagons townward bound, whereupon the price of the staple was the chief theme of roadside conversation.  Occasionally a wag would have his jest.  The traveler reported a tilt between two wagoners:  “‘What’s cotton in Augusta?’ says the one with a load....  ‘It’s cotton,’ says the other.  ‘I know that,’ says the first, ‘but what is it?’ ‘Why,’ says the other, ’I tell you it’s cotton.  Cotton is cotton in Augusta and everywhere else that I ever heard of,’ ‘I know that as well as you,’ says the first, ’but what does cotton bring in Augusta?’ ’Why, it brings nothing there, but everybody brings cotton,’” Whereupon the baffled inquirer appropriately relieved his feelings and drove on.  At his crossing of the Oconee River the traveler saw pole-boats laden with bales twelve tiers high; at Milledgeville and Macon cotton was the absorbing theme; in the newly opened lands beyond he “found cotton land speculators thicker than locusts in Egypt”; in the neighborhood of Montgomery cotton fields adjoined one another in a solid stretch for fourteen miles along the road; Montgomery was congested beyond the capacity of the boats; and journeying thence to Mobile he “met and overtook nearly one hundred cotton waggons travelling over a road so bad that a state prisoner could hardly walk through it to make his escape.”  As to Mobile, it was “a receptacle monstrous for the article.  Look which way you will you see it, and see it moving; keel boats, steamboats, ships, brigs, schooners, wharves, stores, and press-houses, all appeared to be full; and I believe that in the three days I was there, boarding with about one hundred cotton factors, cotton merchants and cotton planters, I must have heard the word cotton pronounced more than three thousand times.”  New Orleans had a similar glut.

On the journey up the Mississippi the plaint heard by this traveler from fellow passengers who lived at Natchitoches, was that they could not get enough boats to bring the cotton down the Red.  The descending steamers and barges on the great river itself were half of them heavy laden with cotton and at the head of navigation on the Tennessee, in northwestern Alabama, bales enough were waiting to fill a dozen boats.  “The Tennesseeans,” said he, “think that no state is of any account but their own; Kentucky,