leaps and bounds.  In 1791 only thirty-eight bales of standard size were exported from the United States; in 1816, however, the cotton sent out of the country was worth $24,106,000 and was by far the most valuable article of export.  The current price was 28 cents a pound.  Thus at the very time that the Northern states were abolishing slavery, an industry that had slumbered became supreme, and the fate of hundreds of thousands of Negroes was sealed.

Meanwhile the opening of the West went forward, and from Maine and Massachusetts, Carolina and Georgia journeyed the pioneers to lay the foundations of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and Alabama and Mississippi.  It was an eager, restless caravan that moved, and sometimes more than a hundred persons in a score of wagons were to be seen going from a single town in the East—­“Baptists and Methodists and Democrats.”  The careers of Boone and Sevier and those who went with them, and the story of their fights with the Indians, are now a part of the romance of American history.  In 1790 a cluster of log huts on the Ohio River was named in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati.  In 1792 Kentucky was admitted to the Union, the article on slavery in her constitution encouraging the system and discouraging emancipation, and Tennessee also entered as a slave state in 1796.

Of tremendous import to the Negro were the questions relating to the Mississippi Territory.  After the Revolution Georgia laid claim to great tracts of land now comprising the states of Alabama and Mississippi, with the exception of the strip along the coast claimed by Spain in connection with Florida.  This territory became a rich field for speculation, and its history in its entirety makes a complicated story.  A series of sales to what were known as the Yazoo Companies, especially in that part of the present states whose northern boundary would be a line drawn from the mouth of the Yazoo to the Chattahoochee, resulted in conflicting claims, the last grant sale being made in 1795 by a corrupt legislature at the price of a cent and a half an acre.  James Jackson now raised the cry of bribery and corruption, resigned from the United States Senate, secured a seat in the state legislature, and on February 13, 1796, carried through a bill rescinding the action of the previous year,[1] and the legislature burned the documents concerned with the Yazoo sale in token of its complete repudiation of them.  The purchasers to whom the companies had sold lands now began to bombard Congress with petitions and President Adams helped to arrive at a settlement by which Georgia transferred the lands in question to the Federal Government, which undertook to form of them the Mississippi Territory and to pay any damages involved.  In 1802 Georgia threw the whole burden upon the central government by transferring to it all of her land beyond her present boundaries, though for this she exacted an article favorable to slavery.  All was now