n a
territorial progression. The regime was a broad billow moving irresistibly
westward and leaving a trough behind. At the middle of the nineteenth
century it was entering Texas, its last available province, whose cotton
area it would have duly filled had its career escaped its catastrophic
interruption. What would have occurred after that completion, without the
war, it is interesting to surmise. Probably the crest of the billow would
have subsided through the effect of an undertow setting eastward again.
Belated immigrants, finding the good lands all engrossed, would have
returned to their earlier homes, to hold their partially exhausted soils
in higher esteem than before and to remedy the depletion by reformed
cultivation. That the billow did not earlier give place to a level flood
was partly due to the shortage of slaves; for the African trade was closed
too soon for the stock to fill the country in these decades. To the same
shortage was owing such opportunity as the white yeomanry had in staple
production. The world offered a market, though not at high prices, for a
greater volume of the crops than the plantation slaves could furnish; the
farmers supplied the deficit.

Free workingmen in general, whether farmers, artisans or unskilled wage
earners, merely filled the interstices in and about the slave plantations.
One year in the eighteen-forties a planter near New Orleans, attempting to
dispense with slave labor, assembled a force of about a hundred Irish and
German immigrants for his crop routine. Things went smoothly until the
midst of the grinding season, when with one accord the gang struck for
double pay. Rejecting the demand the planter was unable to proceed with
his harvest and lost some ten thousand dollars worth of his crop.[9] The
generality of the planters realized, without such a demonstration, that
each year must bring its crop crisis during which an overindulgence by the
laborers in the privileges of liberty might bring ruin to the employers.
To secure immunity from this they were the more fully reconciled to the
limitations of their peculiar labor supply. Freemen white or black might
be convenient as auxiliaries, and were indeed employed in many instances
whether on annual contract as blacksmiths and the like or temporarily
as emergency helpers in the fields; but negro slaves were the standard
composition of the gangs. This brought it about that whithersoever the
planters went they carried with them