rginia good lands sold for less
than the cost of the buildings on them. Jefferson's home, Monticello,
including two hundred acres of land, sold at public auction in 1829 for
$2500. Each autumn saw thousands of masters with their families and
slaves take up the march over the up-country road through Danville,
Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, to Georgia and Alabama, or over
the mountains to the valley of Virginia, whence they followed the great
highland trough southwestward to the Tennessee and Tombigbee Valleys.
The population of Alabama alone increased from 300,000 in 1830 to
600,000 ten years later. Unimproved lands in the cotton country sold at
prices ranging from $2 to $100 per acre, and plantations spread rapidly
over the better parts of the lower South. Men could afford to give away
or abandon their homes in the old South in order to establish
plantations in the Gulf States, for in ten years thrifty men became
rich, as riches went in those days. The cotton country was a magnet
which drew upon the Middle and Atlantic States for their best citizens
during a period of twenty years.

While the Jackson leadership "captured" both the conservatives of
Virginia and the Carolinas and the radicals of the Gulf region, the
cause of democracy made great gains in the Middle States. Half of
Maryland favored Jackson, and strangely enough the conservative half.
Pennsylvania, the head and front of popular government since the days of
Benjamin Franklin, gave every evidence of joining the standard of
Jackson early in the contest. New York had held a constitutional
convention in 1821 and opened the way for universal suffrage and the
popular election of most state and county officers. So radical had been
the sweep of reform that Chancellor Kent and other conservatives spent
their energies in protest and prophecy of dire results to come. But it
was probably the work of Van Buren, a conservative "boss" of New York,
and of Samuel D. Ingham, a wealthy manufacturer of Pennsylvania and an
ally of Calhoun, that made sure the votes of these great States; for men
of the old Federalist party and extreme protectionists of both New York
and Pennsylvania ranged themselves behind Jackson and his Western
democracy.

If we turn now to the chances of Clay and Adams, we must look to a part
of Maryland, to Delaware and New Jersey evenly divided, it seems,
between the "forward and the backward-looking" men, and to New England.
Connecticut abandon