The limited amount became a prize to be contended for.  Land in the interior offered itself at less than one dollar an acre.  Land on the seaboard had been raised to fifty dollars per acre, and labor, forced to elect between them, took the cheaper.  The heirs who came to an estate, or the men of capital who retired from business, sought a location in the West.  Lands on the seaboard were forced to seek for purchasers; purchasers came to the seaboard to seek for slaves.  Their prices were elevated to their value not upon the seaboard where lands were capital but in the interior where the interest upon the cost of labor was the only charge upon production.  Labor therefore ceased to be profitable in the one place as it became profitable in the other.  Estates which were wealth to their original proprietors became a charge to the descendants who endeavored to maintain them.  Neglect soon came to the relief of unprofitable care; decay followed neglect.  Mansions became tenantless and roofless.  Trees spring in their deserted halls and wave their branches through dismantled windows.  Drains filled up; the swamps returned.  Parish churches in imposing styles of architecture and once attended by a goodly company in costly equipages, are now abandoned.  Lands which had ready sale at fifty dollars per acre now sell for less than five dollars; and over all these structures of wealth, with their offices of art, and over these scenes of festivity and devotion, there now hangs the pall of an unalterable gloom."[79] In a later essay the same writer dealt with developments in the ’fifties in more sober phrases which are corroborated by the census returns.  Within the decade, he said, as many as ten thousand slaves had been drawn from Charleston by the attractive prices of the west, and the towns of the interior had suffered losses in the same way.  The slaves had been taken in large numbers from all manufacturing employments, and were now being sold by thousands each year from the rice fields.  “They are as yet retained by cotton and the culture incident to cotton; but as almost every negro offered in our markets is bid for by the West, the drain is likely to continue.”  In the towns alone was the loss offset in any degree by an inflow of immigration.[80]

[Footnote 79:  L.W.  Spratt, The Foreign Slave Trade, the source of political power, of material progress, of social integrity and of social emancipation to the South (Charleston, 1858), pp. 7, 8.]

[Footnote 80:  L.W.  Spratt, “Letter to John Perkins of Louisiana,” in the Charleston Mercury, Feb. 13, 1861.]

A similar trend as to slaves but with a sharply contrasting effect upon prosperity was described by Gratz Brown as prevailing in Missouri.  The slave population, said he, is in process of rapid decline except in a dozen central counties along the Missouri River.  “Hemp is the only staple here left that will pay for investment in negroes,” and that can hardly hold them against the call of the cotton belt.