f this colonization of the Southwest form a
vital chapter in the economic history of the country. In the year before
the war, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia produced 75,000,000 pounds
of cotton; the only other cotton-raising States, Tennessee and
Louisiana, produced 5,000,000 pounds. Ten years later, the Seaboard
States raised 117,000,000 pounds; the Southwest, 60,000,000. In another
decade the States of the Southwest had outstripped the Old South. This
comparison throws a flood of light upon Southern history. The invention
of the cotton gin had made possible the cultivation of the short-staple
cotton plant, which was the only variety that could be raised profitably
in the uplands. Occurring just at the moment when the use of the power
loom in factories was giving an unprecedented stimulus to the
manufacture of cotton, the cotton gin worked a revolution in Southern
life and industry. From the tidewater, with its large plantations
worked by African slaves, the cultivation of cotton passed into the
region above the fall-line of the rivers, where the small farmer
practiced a diversified agriculture. Socially and politically the two
regions had always been distinct. The gentlemen planters of the
tidewater, with much the same outlook as the English gentry of the same
period, regarded the democratic yeomen of the Piedmont with distrust not
unmixed with contempt. By excluding them from their proportionate
representation in the state legislatures, the aristocratic planters
maintained an ascendency which was at once political and social. But as
cotton-growing became more profitable and advanced into the interior,
the farmer of the uplands found himself pushed to the wall. Either he
must adopt the plantation system and purchase slaves, or sell his land
and move on. For want of capital large numbers chose the latter
alternative and swelled the numbers of those who had already set their
faces westward.

The communities which within six years after the Treaty of Ghent were
admitted into the Union as the States of Mississippi and Alabama, did
not at first differ materially from Indiana and Illinois, which became
Commonwealths at the same time. Much the same obstacles confronted the
pioneer in the pine forests of Mississippi as in the hard woods of the
Northwest. Either as squatter or _bona fide_ purchaser he had with the
aid of his neighbors hewed out a clearing, or single-handed girdled the
trees, and laid the sills of his log