hing."[25]

[Footnote 24: Edmund Quincy, _Life of Josiah Quincy_ (Boston, 1869), p.
336.]

[Footnote 25: H.A. Garland, _Life of John Randolph_ (Philadelphia, 1851),
II, 15; I, 2; II, 105.]

The extreme depression passed, but the conditions prompting emigration were
persistent and widespread. News items from here and there continued for
decades to tell of movement in large volume from Tide-water and Piedmont,
from the tobacco states and the eastern cotton-belt, and even from Alabama
in its turn, for destinations as distant and divergent as Michigan,
Missouri and Texas. The communities which suffered cast about for both
solace and remedy. An editor in the South Carolina uplands remarked at the
beginning of 1833 that if emigration should continue at the rate of the
past year the state would become a wilderness; but he noted with grim
satisfaction that it was chiefly the "fire-eaters" that were moving
out.[26] In 1836 another South Carolinian wrote: "The spirit of emigration
is still rife in our community. From this cause we have lost many, and we
are destined, we fear, to lose more, of our worthiest citizens." Though
efforts to check it were commonly thought futile, he addressed himself to
suasion. The movement, said he, is a mistaken one; South Carolina planters
should let well enough alone. The West is without doubt the place for
wealth, but prosperity is a trial to character. In the West money is
everything. Its pursuit, accompanied as it is by baneful speculation,
lawlessness, gambling, sabbath-breaking, brawls and violence, prevents
moral attainment and mental cultivation. Substantial people should stay in
South Carolina to preserve their pristine purity, hospitality, freedom of
thought, fearlessness and nobility.[27]

[Footnote 26: Sumterville, S.C., _Whig_, Jan. 5, 1833.]

[Footnote 27: "The Spirit of Emigration," signed "A South Carolinian," in
the _Southern Literary Journal_, II, 259-262 (June, 1836).]

An Alabama spokesman rejoiced in the manual industry of the white people in
his state, and said if the negroes were only thinned off it would become a
great and prosperous commonwealth.[28] But another Alabamian, A.B. Meek,
found reason to eulogize both emigration and slavery. He said the
roughness of manners prevalent in the haphazard western aggregation of
New Englanders, Virginians, Carolinians and Georgians would prove but
a temporary phase. Slavery would be of benefit through its tendency to
stratify soc