use of the Ohio River for
the later stages. The adjutant at Fort Harmar counted in seven months of
1786-1787, 177 boats descending the Ohio, carrying 2,689 persons, 1,333
horses, 766 cattle, 102 wagons and one phaeton, while still others passed
by night uncounted.[1] The family establishments in Kentucky were always
on a smaller scale, on an average, than those in Virginia. Yet the people
migrating to the more fertile districts tended to maintain and even to
heighten the spirit of gentility and the pride of type which they carried
as part of their heritage. The laws erected by the community were favorable
to the slaveholding regime; but after the first decades of the migration
period, the superior attractions of the more southerly latitudes for
plantation industry checked Kentucky's receipt of slaves.

[Footnote 1: _Massachusetts Centinel_ (Boston), July 21, 1787.]

The wilderness between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, meanwhile, was
attracting Virginia and Carolina emigrants as well as those from the
northerly states. The soil there was excellent, and some districts were
suited to tobacco culture. The Ordinance of 1787, however, though it was
not strictly enforced, made slaveholdings north of the Ohio negligible from
any but an antiquarian point of view.

The settlement of Tennessee was parallel, though subsequent, to that of the
Shenandoah and Kentucky. The eastern intramontane valley, broad and fertile
but unsuited to the staple crops, gave homes to thousands of small farmers,
while the Nashville basin drew planters of both tobacco and cotton, and the
counties along the western and southern borders of the state made cotton
their one staple. The scale of slaveholdings in middle and western
Tennessee, while superior to that in Kentucky, was never so great as those
which prevailed in Virginia and the lower South.

Missouri, whose adaptation to the southern staples was much poorer, came
to be colonized in due time partly by planters from Kentucky but mostly
by farmers from many quarters, including after the first decades a large
number of Germans, some of whom entered through the eastern ports and
others through New Orleans.

This great central region as a whole acquired an agricultural regime
blending the features of the two national extremes. The staples were
prominent but never quite paramount. Corn and wheat, cattle and hogs were
produced regularly nearly everywhere, not on a mere home consumption basis,
but for