a meeting-place for the rural population. Here farmers exchanged
their goods, traded horses, often fought, and listened to the stump
speeches of the orators. [Footnote: Johnson, Robert Lewis Dabney,
14-24; Smedes, A Southern Planter, 34-37.]

Such were, in the main, the characteristics of that homespun
plantation aristocracy which, through the Virginia dynasty, had
ruled the nation in the days of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and
Monroe. As their lands declined in value, they naturally sought for
an explanation and a remedy. [Footnote: Randall, Jefferson, III.,
532.] The explanation was found most commonly in the charge that the
protective tariff was destroying the prosperity of the south; and in
reaction they turned to demand the old days of Jeffersonian rural
simplicity, under the guardianship of state rights and a strict
construction of the Constitution. Madison in vain laid the fall in
land values in Virginia to the uncertainty and low prices of the
crops, to the quantity of land thrown on the market, and the
attractions of the cheaper and better lands beyond the mountains.
[Footnote: Madison, Writings (ed. of 1865), III., 614.]

Others called attention to the fact that the semi-annual migration
towards the west and southwest, which swept off enterprising
portions of the people and much of the capital and movable property
of the state, also kept down the price of land by the great
quantities thereby thrown into the market. Instead of applying a
system of scientific farming and replenishment of the soil, there
was a tendency for the planters who remained to get into debt in
order to add to their possessions the farms which were offered for
sale by the movers. Thus there was a flow of wealth towards the west
to pay for these new purchases. The overgrown plantations soon began