and fifty slaves each, and where except for plantation overseers
and their families there were virtually no non-slaveholders present. The
Alabama prairies, furthermore, showed a plantation predominance almost as
complete. In the six counties of Dallas, Greene, Lowndes, Macon, Perry,
Sumter and Wilcox, for example, the average slaveholdings ranged from
seventeen to twenty-one each, and the slaveholding families were from twice
to six times as numerous as the non-slaveholding ones. Even in the more
rugged parts of the cotton belt and in the tobacco zone as well, the same
tendency toward the engrossment of estates prevailed, though in milder
degree and with lesser effects.

[Footnote 3 F.V. Emerson, "Geographical Influences in American Slavery," in
the American Geographical Society _Bulletin_, XLIII (1911), 13-26, 106-118,
170-181.]

This widespread phenomenon did not escape the notice of contemporaries. Two
members of the South Carolina legislature described it as early as 1805 in
substance as follows: "As one man grows wealthy and thereby increases his
stock of negroes, he wants more land to employ them on; and being fully
able, he bids a large price for his less opulent neighbor's plantation, who
by selling advantageously here can raise money enough to go into the back
country, where he can be more on a level with the most forehanded, can get
lands cheaper, and speculate or grow rich by industry as he pleases."[4]
Some three decades afterward another South Carolinian spoke sadly "on the
incompatibleness of large plantations with neighboring farms, and their
uniform tendency to destroy the yeoman."[5] Similarly Dr. Basil Manly,[6]
president of the University of Alabama, spoke in 1841 of the inveterate
habit of Southern farmers to buy more land and slaves and plod on captive
to the customs of their ancestors; and C.C. Clay, Senator from Alabama,
said in 1855 of his native county of Madison, which lay on the Tennessee
border: "I can show you ... the sad memorials of the artless and exhausting
culture of cotton. Our small planters, after taking the cream off their
lands, unable to restore them by rest, manures or otherwise, are going
further west and south in search of other virgin lands which they may and
will despoil and impoverish in like manner. Our wealthier planters, with
greater means and no more skill, are buying out their poorer neighbors,
extending their plantations and adding to their slave force. The wealthy
fe