"; Judge Gaston, one of the purest and
best men of North Carolina, declared that the cry, "let the people
rule," was fallacious, and asked with great concern, "What is then to
become of our system of checks and balances?" While the radical
spokesmen of the South Carolina aristocracy declared that they would
never submit to that "dangerous principle of majority rule."

The growth of the cotton industry between 1800 and 1830 had done much to
retard the growth of democracy, so urgently advocated by Jefferson;
while the interests of the cotton planters and the fears of the tobacco
growers had served to "swing the leaders" of the aristocratic South into
the Jackson columns. Though the price of raw cotton had declined from
forty-four cents per pound in the former year to ten cents in the
latter, the annual increase in the value of the total output between
1820 and 1830 was $1,000,000 and from 1830 to 1840 the value of this
staple crop increased from $29,000,000 to $63,000,000, while all other
items of the national export amounted only to $50,000,000 per year.
Cotton was grown in a comparatively narrow belt of country extending
from lower North Carolina to the Red River counties of Louisiana and
Arkansas, with a total population in 1830 of little more than 1,500,000
people, of whom 500,000 were negro slaves. Yet their annual output was
worth in 1830, $29,000,000 and in 1840, $63,000,000.

In the older South the tobacco crop was not appreciably greater in 1830
than it had been in 1800, though in the succeeding decade the value of
the annual harvest rose from $5,000,000 to $9,000,000, and the
manufacturing of tobacco became an important industry in many
localities. Rice culture was at a standstill during these years, and
sugar was only making a beginning; but the total of these staples,
including cotton, reaches almost to two thirds of the national exports.
The annual _per capita_ income of the lower South ranged during the
Jacksonian era from thirty to forty dollars, while that of the older
Southern States like Virginia and Maryland was not half so great, and
the average for the country as a whole fell much below that of the
South. There was thus a marked contrast between the fortune of the
average Middle States man and that of the cotton planters.

The result was an extraordinary movement southwestward, especially from
the older South and Kentucky, where population was almost stationary
during a period of twenty years. In Vi