Few foreigners found their way to the Southern states. Here the opportunity for wage earning employment was forestalled by slavery, and there was little free land except in the pine barrens. Moreover the small farmer had no chance in competition with the large-scale producer. The average size of holdings was two and three times greater in the Southern states than in the Northern.

The foreign element of the Southern states was derived from Africa, and the presence of these alien laborers debarred European immigration. There were in the Southern states on the eve of the Civil War 3,954,000 slaves and 262,000 free negroes, making together fully one third of the total population. The foreign born were then 542,000, but one twenty-fourth of the total. The proportion of slaves was declining in the border states, but increasing farther south where climate and staple crops combined to render this a highly profitable form of labor. Some three hundred and fifty thousand planters made up the slave-holding class. They represented but from five to six per cent of the white population, but they exercised a dominating influence in the politics of the South and of the nation. The non-slaveholders of the slave states were the small farmers of the hill country and the poor whites, crackers, and sand lappers of the plains. For these there was no place in the industrial order. work for hire was to lose caste, and the opportunities for self-employed labor were few and precarious. The poor whites managed to live off the produce of their inferior lands, or earned a comfortable salary as slave-overseers.

To

The expansion of the South was determined by the spread of cotton culture. The denser population areas coincided with the "black belt" of rich calcareous loam that clothed the foothills of the Appalachians from Virginia south to the Gulf states and thence west across the bottom lands of the Mississippi into eastern Texas. As the plantations of the older states degenerated, new lands were claimed and cleared. The region cultivated to cotton gradually extended westward to the confines of the Louisiana Purchase. The Mexican boundary and the Missouri compromise line imposed an arbitrary limit to the domain of King Cotton, but the great staple in its onward march showed small respect for political barriers. Cotton planters from the Gulf states began carrying their slaves across the border to the valley lands along the Sabine, Brazos, and Colorado rivers long before the annexa

tion of Texas. The Mexican treaties of 1848 added New Donaldson, Mexico, Arizona, and California to our national domain, 120-138. but the greater part of this acquisition was mountainous

and arid, not susceptible of cotton culture.

De Bow,

Ind. Re

Cotton and Slavery. The cotton plantations offered Hammond, ideal conditions for slave labor. The hands could be Ch. II, III. massed under the eye of the overseer to a degree quite impracticable in the growing of corn or wheat or hay. Moreover at several stages in the development of the plant, all the laborers on the place could be utilized. In hoeing, picking, and chopping seasons, women and children and white-haired "uncles" were as efficient as ablebodied men. The cost of maintenance was low, since the slave rations, corn and pork and sweet potatoes, might be grown on the place, and the slave quarters were usually built by slave carpenters out of lumber from the freshly cleared land. The actual money expenditure need not average more than fifteen dollars per year for each man, woman, or child on the plantation. On the "dead lands" of Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, slave labor had ceased to be profitable, but the cotton belt furnished a ready market for the surplus negroes of the border states. Prices rose as the 1, 175.

sources of Southern and

Western

States,

I, 150.

Olmstead,
The Cotton

Kingdom,
1, Ch. IV.

De Bow,

Hammond,

51.

Du Bois,
Suppression

of the Slave
Trade,
Ch. X, XI.

Twentieth
Rept. Am.
Anti-Slavery
Society,
13-30.

demand increased. In 1790 the best field hand brought but $200. In 1815 the price of an average hand was $250. The price rose to $500 in 1840, $1000 in 1850, and from $1400 to $2000 in 1860.

When negroes brought such prices, the temptation to import in defiance of law was too great to be withstood. Slavers, fitted out in New York and New Orleans, Boston and Portland, were engaged in carrying kidnaped Africans to Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba, whence numbers were smuggled into the United States. In the last decade before the Civil War this nefarious traffic grew bolder. Shiploads were landed in the secluded bayous of the Gulf coast and Florida, even at the port of Mobile. These fresh importations of African blood added to the numbers but degraded the quality of the slave population of the South during the very period in which the North was receiving large accessions of laborers from the most civilized races of Europe.