lated journeying by land as far as Louisville; but he embarked at
Wheeling instead, and after tedious dragging "through shoals, sandbars and
ripples" he reached Cincinnati late in November. When the last letter on
the journey was written he was on the point of embarking afresh on a
boat so crowded, that in spite of his desire to carry a large stock of
provisions he could find room for but a few hundredweight of pork and a few
barrels of flour. He apparently reached his destination at the end of the
year and established a plantation with part of his negroes, leaving the
rest on hire. The approach of the war of 1812 brought distress; cotton was
low, bacon was high, and the sale of a slave or two was required in making
ends meet. Covington himself was now ordered by the Department of War to
take the field in command of dragoons, and in 1813 was killed in a battle
beyond the Canadian border. The fate of his family and plantation does not
appear in the records.[15]

[Footnote 15: _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 201-208.]

A more successful migration was that of Col. Thomas S. Dabney in 1835.
After spending the years of his early manhood on his ancestral tide-water
estate, Elmington, in Gloucester County, Virginia, he was prompted to
remove by the prospective needs of his rapidly growing family. The justice
of his anticipations appears from the fact that his second wife bore him
eventually sixteen children, ten of whom survived her. After a land-looking
tour through Alabama and Louisiana, Dabney chose a tract in Hinds County,
Mississippi, some forty miles east of Vicksburg, where he bought the
property of several farmers as the beginning of a plantation which finally
engrossed some four thousand acres. Returning to Virginia, he was given a
great farewell dinner at Richmond, at which Governor Tyler presided and
many speakers congratulated Mississippi upon her gain of such a citizen
at Virginia's expense.[16] Several relatives and neighbors resolved to
accompany him in the migration. His brother-in-law, Charles Hill, took
charge of the carriages and the white families, while Dabney himself had
the care of the wagons and the many scores of negroes. The journey was
accomplished without mishap in two months of perfect autumn weather. Upon
arriving at the new location most of the log houses were found in ruins
from a recent hurricane; but new shelters were quickly provided, and in a
few months the great plantation, with its force of