he ante-bellum period. While this was little more
than one fourth as great as the crops of sixteen million bales in 1912 and
1915, it was justly reckoned in its time, at home and abroad, a prodigious
output. All the rest of the world then produced barely one third as much.
The cotton sent abroad made up nearly two thirds of the value of the gross
export trade of the United States, while the tobacco export had hardly a
tenth of the cotton's worth. In competition with all the other staples,
cotton engaged the services of some three fourths of all the country's
plantation labor, in addition to the labor of many thousands of white
farmers and their families.

The production and sale of the staple engrossed no less of the people's
thought than of their work. A traveler who made a zig-zag journey from
Charleston to St. Louis in the early months of 1827, found cotton "a
plague." At Charleston, said he, the wharves were stacked and the stores
and ships packed with the bales, and the four daily papers and all
the patrons of the hotel were "teeming with cotton." At Augusta the
thoroughfares were thronged with groaning wagons, the warehouses were
glutted, the open places were stacked, and the steamboats and barges hidden
by their loads. On the road beyond, migrating planters and slaves bound
for the west, "'where the cotton land is not worn out,'" met cotton-laden
wagons townward bound, whereupon the price of the staple was the chief
theme of roadside conversation. Occasionally a wag would have his jest. The
traveler reported a tilt between two wagoners: "'What's cotton in Augusta?'
says the one with a load.... 'It's cotton,' says the other. 'I know that,'
says the first, 'but what is it?' 'Why,' says the other, 'I tell you it's
cotton. Cotton is cotton in Augusta and everywhere else that I ever heard
of,' 'I know that as well as you,' says the first, 'but what does cotton
bring in Augusta?' 'Why, it brings nothing there, but everybody brings
cotton,'" Whereupon the baffled inquirer appropriately relieved his
feelings and drove on. At his crossing of the Oconee River the traveler saw
pole-boats laden with bales twelve tiers high; at Milledgeville and Macon
cotton was the absorbing theme; in the newly opened lands beyond he "found
cotton land speculators thicker than locusts in Egypt"; in the neighborhood
of Montgomery cotton fields adjoined one another in a solid stretch for
fourteen miles along the road; Montgomery was congested be