State Rights, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1901, II., 107.] Thus this
process of economic transformation passed from the coast towards the
mountain barrier, gradually eliminating the inharmonious elements
and steadily tending to produce a solidarity of interests. The south
as a whole was becoming, for the first time since colonial days, a
staple-producing region; and, as diversified farming declined, the
region tended to become dependent for its supplies of meat products,
horses, and mules, and even hay and cereals, upon the north and
west.

The westward migration of its people checked the growth of the
south. It had colonized the new west at the same time that the
middle region had been rapidly growing in population, and the result
was that the proud states of the southern seaboard were reduced to
numerical inferiority. Like New England, it was an almost stationary
section. Prom 1820 to 1830 the states of this group gained little
more than half a million souls, hardly more than the increase of the
single state of New York. Virginia, with a population of over a
million, increased but 13.7 per cent., and the Carolinas only 15.5
per cent. In the next decade these tendencies were even more clearly
shown, for Virginia and the Carolinas then gained but little more
than 2 per cent.

Georgia alone showed rapid increase. At the beginning of the decade
the Indians still held all of the territory west of Macon, at the
center of the state, with the exception of two tiers of counties
along the southern border; and, when these lands were opened towards
the close of the decade, they were occupied by a rush of settlement
similar to the occupation of Oklahoma and Indian Territory in our
own day. What Maine was to New England, that Georgia was to the