country, too distant from the sea-shore to permit a satisfactory
market, was a hive from which pioneers earlier passed into Kentucky
and Tennessee, until those states had become populous commonwealths.
Now the exodus was increased by this later colonization.[Footnote:
See chap. v. below.] The Ohio was crossed, the Mississippi-Missouri
ascended, and the streams that flowed to the Gulf were followed by
movers away from the regions that were undergoing this social and
economic reconstruction. This industrial revolution was effective in
different degrees in the different states. Comparatively few of
Virginia's slaves, which by 1830 numbered nearly half a million,
were found in her trans-Allegheny counties, but the Shenandoah
Valley was receiving slaves and changing to the plantation type. In
North Carolina the slave population of nearly two hundred and fifty
thousand, at the same date, had spread well into the interior, but
cotton did not achieve the position there which it held farther
south. The interior farmers worked small farms of wheat and corn,
laboring side by side with their Negro slaves in the fields.
[Footnote: Bassett, Slavery in N. C., in Johns Hopkins Univ.
Studies, XVII., 324, 399.] South Carolina had over three hundred
thousand slaves-more than a majority of her population--and the
black belt extended to the interior. Georgia's slaves, amounting to
over two hundred thousand, somewhat less than half her population,
steadily advanced from the coast and the Savannah River towards the
cotton-lands of the interior, pushing before them the less
prosperous farmers, who found new homes to the north or south of the
cotton-belt or migrated to the southwestern frontier.[Footnote:
Phillips, Georgia and State Rights, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report
1901, II., 106.] Here, as in North Carolina, the planters in the
interior of the state frequently followed the plough or encouraged
their slaves by wielding the hoe. [Footnote: Phillips, Georgia and