[Footnote 7:  DeBow’s Review, XIX, 727.]

The census returns for Madison County show that in 1830 when the gross population was at its maximum the whites and slaves were equally numerous, and that by 1860 while the whites had diminished by a fourth the slaves had increased only by a twentieth.  This suggests that the farmers were drawn, not driven, away.

The same trend may be better studied in the uplands of eastern Georgia where earlier settlements gave a longer experience and where fuller statistics permit a more adequate analysis.  In the county of Oglethorpe, typical of that area, the whites in the year 1800 were more than twice as many as the slaves, the non-slaveholding families were to the slaveholders in the ratio of 8 to 5, and slaveholders on the average had but 5 slaves each.  In 1820 the county attained its maximum population for the ante-bellum period, and competition between the industrial types was already exerting its full effect.  The whites were of the same number as twenty years before, but the slaves now exceeded them; the slaveholding families also slightly exceeded those who had none, and the scale of the average slaveholding had risen to 8.5.  Then in the following forty years while the whites diminished and the number of slaves remained virtually constant, the scale of the average slaveholding rose to 12.2; the number of slaveholders shrank by a third and the non-slaveholders by two thirds.[8] The smaller slaveholders, those we will say with less than ten slaves each, ought of course to be classed among the farmers.  When this is done the farmers of Oglethorpe appear to have been twice as many as the planters even in 1860.  But this is properly offset by rating the average plantation there at four or five times the industrial scale of the average farm, which makes it clear that the plantation regime had grown dominant.

[Footnote 8:  U.B.  Phillips, “The Origin and Growth of the Southern Black Belts,” in the American Historical Review, XI, 810-813 (July, 1906).]

In such a district virtually everyone was growing cotton to the top of his ability.  When the price of the staple was high, both planters and farmers prospered in proportion to their scales.  Those whose earnings were greatest would be eager to enlarge their fields, and would make offers for adjoining lands too tempting for some farmers to withstand.  These would sell out and move west to resume cotton culture to better advantage than before.  When cotton prices were low, however, the farmers, feeling the stress most keenly, would be inclined to forsake staple production.  But in such case there was no occasion for them to continue cultivating lands best fit for cotton.  The obvious policy would be to sell their homesteads to neighboring planters and move to cheaper fields beyond the range of planters’ competition.  Thus the farmers were constantly pioneering in districts of all sorts, while the plantation regime, whether by the prosperity and enlargement of the farms or by the immigration of planters, or both, was constantly replacing the farming scale in most of the staple areas.