e County carried seventy slaves whose manifest,
though it bears no such asseveration, gives evidence that they likewise
were not a trader's lot; for some of the negroes were sixty years old, and
there were as many children as adults in the parcel. Lots of such sizes
as these were of course exceptional. In the packages of manifests now
preserved in the Library of Congress the lists of from one to a dozen
slaves outnumbered those of fifty or more by perhaps a hundred fold.

The western cotton belt not only had a greater expanse and richer lands
than the eastern, but its cotton tended to have a longer fiber, ranging,
particularly in the district of the "bends" of the Mississippi north of
Vicksburg, as much as an inch and a quarter in length and commanding a
premium in the market. Its far reaching waterways, furthermore, made
freighting easy and permitted the planters to devote themselves the more
fully to their staple. The people in the main made their own food supplies;
yet the market demand of the western cotton belt and the sugar bowl for
grain and meat contributed much toward the calling of the northwestern
settlements into prosperous existence.[23]

[Footnote 23: G.S. Callender in the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, XVII,
111-162.]

This thriving of the West, however, was largely at the expense of the older
plantation states.[24] In 1813 John Randolph wrote: "The whole country
watered by the rivers which fall into the Chesapeake is in a state of
paralysis...The distress is general and heavy, and I do not see how the
people can pay their taxes." And again: "In a few years more, those of us
who are alive will move off to Kaintuck or the Massissippi, where corn can
be had for sixpence a bushel and pork for a penny a pound. I do not wonder
at the rage for emigration. What do the bulk of the people get here that
they cannot have there for one fifth the labor in the western country?"
Next year, after a visit to his birthplace, he exclaimed: "What a spectacle
does our lower country present! Deserted and dismantled country-houses once
the seats of cheerfulness and plenty, and the temples of the Most High
ruinous and desolate, 'frowning in portentous silence upon the land,'" And
in 1819 he wrote from Richmond: "You have no conception of the gloom and
distress that pervade this place. There has been nothing like it since 1785
when from the same causes (paper money and a general peace) there was a
general depression of everyt