old south produced one hundred and seventeen million pounds, and,
five years later, one hundred and eighty millions. But how rapidly
in these five years the recently settled southwest was overtaking
the older section cotton crop (in million pounds)[Footnote: Based on
MacGregor, Commercial Statistics, 462; cf. De Bow's Review, XVII.,
428; Von Halle, Baumwollproduktion, 169; Secretary of Treasury,
Report, 1855-1856, p. 116. There are discrepancies; the figures are
to be taken as illustrative rather than exact; e.g., De Bow gives
seventy million pounds for Mississippi in 1826.] [Table omitted] is
shown by its total of over one hundred and fifty millions. By 1834
the southwest had distanced the older section. What had occurred was
a repeated westward movement: the cotton-plant first spread from the
sea-coast to the uplands, and then, by the beginning of our period,
advanced to the Gulf plains, until that region achieved supremacy in
its production.

How deeply the section was interested in this crop, and how
influential it was in the commerce of the United States, appears
from the fact that, in 1820, the domestic exports of South Carolina
and Georgia amounted to $15,215,000, while the value of the whole
domestic exports for all the rest of the United States was
$36,468,000. [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (ed. of 1835), p.
57.] This, however, inadequately represents the value of the exports
from these two cotton states, because a large fraction of the cotton
was carried by the coastwise trade to northern ports and appeared in
their shipments. Senator William Smith, of South Carolina, estimated
that in 1818 the real exports of South Carolina and Georgia amounted
to "more than half as much as that of the other states of the Union,
including the vast and fertile valley of the Mississippi." The
average annual amount of the exports of cotton, tobacco, and rice