cation was sent home in 1817 by a Marylander who had moved to
Louisiana: "In your states a planter with ten negroes with difficulty
supports a family genteelly; here well managed they would be a fortune to
him. With you the seasons are so irregular your crops often fail; here the
crops are certain, and want of the necessaries of life never for a moment
causes the heart to ache--abundance spreads the table of the poor man, and
contentment smiles on every countenance."[11] Other accounts told glowingly
of quick fortunes made and to be made by getting lands cheaply in the early
stages of settlement and selling them at greatly enhanced prices when the
tide of migration arrived in force.[12] Such ebullient expressions were
taken at face value by thousands of the unwary; and other thousands of the
more cautious followed in the trek when personal inquiries had reinforced
the tug of the west. The larger planters generally removed only after
somewhat thorough investigation and after procuring more or less
acquiescence from their slaves; the smaller planters and farmers, with
lighter stake in their homes and better opportunity to sell them, with
lighter impedimenta for the journey, with less to lose by misadventure,
and with poorer facilities for inquiry, responded more readily to the
enticements.

[Footnote 10: _E. g_., the Washington, Ky., _Mirror_, Sept. 30, 1797.]

[Footnote 11: _Niles' Register_, XIII, 38.]

[Footnote 12: _E. g., Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), March 11, 1836.]

The fever of migration produced in some of the people an unconquerable
restlessness. An extraordinary illustration of this is given in the career
of Gideon Lincecum as written by himself. In 1802, when Gideon was ten
years old, his father, after farming successfully for some years in the
Georgia uplands was lured by letters from relatives in Tennessee to sell
out and remove thither. Taking the roundabout road through the Carolinas to
avoid the Cherokee country, he set forth with a wagon and four horses to
carry a bed, four chests, four white and four negro children, and his
mother who was eighty-eight years old. When but a few days on the road an
illness of the old woman caused a halt, whereupon Lincecum rented a nearby
farm and spent a year on a cotton crop. The journey was then resumed, but
barely had the Savannah River been crossed when another farm was rented and
another crop begun. Next year they returned to Georgia and worked a farm
near