This widespread phenomenon did not escape the notice of contemporaries.  Two members of the South Carolina legislature described it as early as 1805 in substance as follows:  “As one man grows wealthy and thereby increases his stock of negroes, he wants more land to employ them on; and being fully able, he bids a large price for his less opulent neighbor’s plantation, who by selling advantageously here can raise money enough to go into the back country, where he can be more on a level with the most forehanded, can get lands cheaper, and speculate or grow rich by industry as he pleases."[4] Some three decades afterward another South Carolinian spoke sadly “on the incompatibleness of large plantations with neighboring farms, and their uniform tendency to destroy the yeoman."[5] Similarly Dr. Basil Manly,[6] president of the University of Alabama, spoke in 1841 of the inveterate habit of Southern farmers to buy more land and slaves and plod on captive to the customs of their ancestors; and C.C.  Clay, Senator from Alabama, said in 1855 of his native county of Madison, which lay on the Tennessee border:  “I can show you ... the sad memorials of the artless and exhausting culture of cotton.  Our small planters, after taking the cream off their lands, unable to restore them by rest, manures or otherwise, are going further west and south in search of other virgin lands which they may and will despoil and impoverish in like manner.  Our wealthier planters, with greater means and no more skill, are buying out their poorer neighbors, extending their plantations and adding to their slave force.  The wealthy few, who are able to live on smaller profits and to give their blasted fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many who are merely independent....  In traversing that county one will discover numerous farm houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or tenantless, deserted and dilapidated; he will observe fields, once fertile, now unfenced, abandoned, and covered with those evil harbingers fox-tail and broomsedge; he will see the moss growing on the mouldering walls of once thrifty villages; and will find ’one only master grasps the whole domain’ that once furnished happy homes for a dozen white families.  Indeed, a country in its infancy, where fifty years ago scarce a forest tree had been felled by the axe of the pioneer, is already exhibiting the painful signs of senility and decay apparent in Virginia and the Carolinas; the freshness of its agricultural glory is gone, the vigor of its youth is extinct, and the spirit of desolation seems brooding over it."[7]

[Footnote 4:  “Diary of Edward Hooker,” in the American Historical Association Report for 1896, p. 878.]

[Footnote 5:  Quoted in Francis Lieber, Slavery, Plantations and the Yeomanry (Loyal Publication Society, no. 29, New York, 1863), p. 5.]

[Footnote 6:  Tuscaloosa Monitor, April 13, 1842.]