they say, would be if it could grow cotton, but as it is, it is good for nothing.  They count on forty or fifty thousand bales going from Nashville this season; that is, if they can get boats to carry it all.”  The fleet on the Cumberland River was doing its utmost, to the discomfort of the passengers; and it was not until the traveler boarded a steamer for St. Louis at the middle of March, that he escaped the plague which had surrounded him for seventy days and seventy nights.  This boat, at last, “had not a bale of cotton on board, nor did I hear it named more than twice in thirty-six hours...I had a pretty tolerable night’s sleep, though I dreamed of cotton."[9]

[Footnote 9:  Georgia Courier (Augusta, Ga.), Oct. 11, 1827, reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, I, 283-289.]

This obsession was not without its undertone of disquiet.  Foresighted men were apprehensive lest the one-crop system bring distress to the cotton belt as it had to Virginia.  As early as 1818 a few newspaper editors[10] began to decry the regime; and one of them in 1821 rejoiced in a widespread prevalence of rot in the crop of the preceding year as a blessing, in that it staved off the rapidly nearing time when the staple’s price would fall below the cost of production.[11] A marked rise of the price to above twenty cents a pound at the middle of the decade, however, silenced these prophets until a severe decline in the later twenties prompted the sons of Jeremiah to raise their voices again, and the political crisis procured them a partial hearing.  Politicians were advocating the home production of cloth and foodstuffs as a demonstration against the protective tariff, while the economists pleaded for diversification for the sake of permanent prosperity, regardless of tariff rates.  One of them wrote in 1827:  “That we have cultivated cotton, cotton, cotton and bought everything else, has long been our opprobrium.  It is time that we should be aroused by some means or other to see that such a course of conduct will inevitably terminate in our ultimate poverty and ruin.  Let us manufacture, because it is our best policy.  Let us go more on provision crops and less on cotton, because we have had everything about us poor and impoverished long enough....  We have good land, unlimited water powers, capital in plenty, and a patriotism which is running over in some places.  If the tariff drives us to this, we say, let the name be sacred in all future generations."[12] Next year William Ellison of the South Carolina uplands welcomed even the low price of cotton as a lever[13] which might pry the planters out of the cotton rut and shift them into industries less exhausting to the soil.

[Footnote 10:  Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 23, 1818.]

[Footnote 11:  Georgia Journal (Milledgeville), June 5, 1821.]

[Footnote 12:  Georgia Courier (Augusta), June 21, 1827.]

[Footnote 13:  Southern Agriculturist, II, 13.]