settled. It represented the movement of the backwoodsman, with axe
and rifle, advancing to the conquest of the forest. But closer to
the old settlements a more highly developed agriculture was to be
seen. Hodgson, in 1821, describes plantations in northern Alabama in
lands ceded by the Indians in 1818. Though settled less than two
years, there were within a few miles five schools and four places of
worship. One plantation had one hundred acres in cotton and one
hundred and ten in corn, although a year and a half before it was
wilderness. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 269; see
Riley (editor), "Autobiography of Lincecum," in Miss. Hist. Soc.,
Publications, VIII., 443, for the wanderings of a southern pioneer
in the recently opened Indian lands of Georgia and the southwest in
these years.]

But while this population of log-cabin pioneers was entering the
Gulf plains, caravans of slave-holding planters were advancing from
the seaboard to the occupation of the cotton-lands of the same
region. As the free farmers of the interior had been replaced in the
upland country of the south by the slaveholding planters, so now the
frontiersmen of the southwest were pushed back from the more fertile
lands into the pine hills and barrens. Not only was the pioneer
unable to refuse the higher price which was offered him for his
clearing, but, in the competitive bidding of the public land sales,
[Footnote: Northern Ala. (published by Smith & De Land), 249; Brown,
Hist. of Ala., 129-131; Brown, Lower South, 24-26.] the wealthier
planter secured the desirable soils. Social forces worked to the
same end. When the pioneer invited his slave-holding neighbor to a
"raising," it grated on his sense of the fitness of things to have
the guest appear with gloves, directing the gang of slaves which he
contributed to the function. [Footnote: Smedes, A Southern Planter,