67.] Little by little, therefore, the old pioneer life tended to
retreat to the less desirable lands, leaving the slave-holder in
possession of the rich "buck-shot" soils that spread over central
Alabama and Mississippi and the fat alluvium that lined the eastern
bank of the Mississippi. Even to-day the counties of dense Negro
population reveal the results of this movement of segregation.

By the side of the picture of the advance of the pioneer farmer,
bearing his household goods in his canvas-covered wagon to his new
home across the Ohio, must therefore be placed the picture of the
southern planter crossing through the forests of western Georgia,
Alabama, and Mississippi, or passing over the free state of Illinois
to the Missouri Valley, in his family carriage, with servants, packs
of hunting-dogs, and a train of slaves, their nightly camp-fires
lighting up the wilderness where so recently the Indian hunter had
held possession. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I.,
138; Niles' Register, XLIV., 222; Smedes, A Southern Planter, 52-54;
Flint, Geography and History of the Western States, II., 350, 379;
Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Travels, II., chaps. xvi., xvii.]

But this new society had a characteristic western flavor. The old
patriarchal type of slavery along the seaboard was modified by the
western conditions in the midst of which the slave-holding interest
was now lodged. Planters, as well as pioneer farmers, were
exploiting the wilderness and building a new society under
characteristic western influences. Rude strength, a certain
coarseness of life, and aggressiveness characterized this society,
as it did the whole of the Mississippi Valley. [Footnote: Baldwin,
Flush Times in Ala.; cf. Gilmer, Sketches of Georgia, etc.] Slavery
furnished a new ingredient for western forces to act upon. The