w, who are able to live on smaller profits and to give their blasted
fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many who are merely
independent.... In traversing that county one will discover numerous farm
houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent freemen, now occupied
by slaves, or tenantless, deserted and dilapidated; he will observe
fields, once fertile, now unfenced, abandoned, and covered with those evil
harbingers fox-tail and broomsedge; he will see the moss growing on the
mouldering walls of once thrifty villages; and will find 'one only master
grasps the whole domain' that once furnished happy homes for a dozen white
families. Indeed, a country in its infancy, where fifty years ago scarce
a forest tree had been felled by the axe of the pioneer, is already
exhibiting the painful signs of senility and decay apparent in Virginia and
the Carolinas; the freshness of its agricultural glory is gone, the vigor
of its youth is extinct, and the spirit of desolation seems brooding over
it."[7]

[Footnote 4: "Diary of Edward Hooker," in the American Historical
Association _Report_ for 1896, p. 878.]

[Footnote 5: Quoted in Francis Lieber, _Slavery, Plantations and the
Yeomanry_ (Loyal Publication Society, no. 29, New York, 1863), p. 5.]

[Footnote 6: _Tuscaloosa Monitor_, April 13, 1842.]

[Footnote 7: _DeBow's Review_, XIX, 727.]

The census returns for Madison County show that in 1830 when the gross
population was at its maximum the whites and slaves were equally numerous,
and that by 1860 while the whites had diminished by a fourth the slaves had
increased only by a twentieth. This suggests that the farmers were drawn,
not driven, away.

The same trend may be better studied in the uplands of eastern Georgia
where earlier settlements gave a longer experience and where fuller
statistics permit a more adequate analysis. In the county of Oglethorpe,
typical of that area, the whites in the year 1800 were more than twice as
many as the slaves, the non-slaveholding families were to the slaveholders
in the ratio of 8 to 5, and slaveholders on the average had but 5
slaves each. In 1820 the county attained its maximum population for the
ante-bellum period, and competition between the industrial types was
already exerting its full effect. The whites were of the same number as
twenty years before, but the slaves now exceeded them; the slaveholding
families also slightly exceeded those who had none, and the scale of