In the oldest districts of all, however, the lowlands about the Chesapeake, the process went on to a final stage in which the bulk of the planters, after exhausting the soil for staple purposes, departed westward and were succeeded in their turn by farmers, partly native whites and free negroes and partly Northerners trickling in, who raised melons, peanuts, potatoes, and garden truck for the Northern city markets.

Throughout the Southern staple areas the plantations waxed and waned in a territorial progression.  The regime was a broad billow moving irresistibly westward and leaving a trough behind.  At the middle of the nineteenth century it was entering Texas, its last available province, whose cotton area it would have duly filled had its career escaped its catastrophic interruption.  What would have occurred after that completion, without the war, it is interesting to surmise.  Probably the crest of the billow would have subsided through the effect of an undertow setting eastward again.  Belated immigrants, finding the good lands all engrossed, would have returned to their earlier homes, to hold their partially exhausted soils in higher esteem than before and to remedy the depletion by reformed cultivation.  That the billow did not earlier give place to a level flood was partly due to the shortage of slaves; for the African trade was closed too soon for the stock to fill the country in these decades.  To the same shortage was owing such opportunity as the white yeomanry had in staple production.  The world offered a market, though not at high prices, for a greater volume of the crops than the plantation slaves could furnish; the farmers supplied the deficit.

Free workingmen in general, whether farmers, artisans or unskilled wage earners, merely filled the interstices in and about the slave plantations.  One year in the eighteen-forties a planter near New Orleans, attempting to dispense with slave labor, assembled a force of about a hundred Irish and German immigrants for his crop routine.  Things went smoothly until the midst of the grinding season, when with one accord the gang struck for double pay.  Rejecting the demand the planter was unable to proceed with his harvest and lost some ten thousand dollars worth of his crop.[9] The generality of the planters realized, without such a demonstration, that each year must bring its crop crisis during which an overindulgence by the laborers in the privileges of liberty might bring ruin to the employers.  To secure immunity from this they were the more fully reconciled to the limitations of their peculiar labor supply.  Freemen white or black might be convenient as auxiliaries, and were indeed employed in many instances whether on annual contract as blacksmiths and the like or temporarily as emergency helpers in the fields; but negro slaves were the standard composition of the gangs.  This brought it about that whithersoever the planters went they carried with them crowds of negro slaves and all the problems and influences to which the presence of negroes and the prevalence of slavery gave rise.