There are thus in the slave price diagram for the nineteenth century a
plateau, with a local peak rising from its level in the sugar district, and
three solid peaks--all of them separated by intervening valleys, and all
corresponding more or less to the elevations and depressions in the cotton
range. The plateau, 1803-1812, was prevented from producing a peak in the
eastern markets by the South Carolina repeal of the slave trade prohibition
and by the European imbroglio. The first common peak, 1818, and its ensuing
trough came promptly upon the establishment of the characteristic regime of
the ante-bellum period, in which the African reservoir could no longer
be drawn upon to mitigate labor shortages and restrain the speculative
enhancement of slave prices. The trough of the 'twenties was deeper and
broader in the upper and eastern South than elsewhere partly because the
panic of 1819 had brought a specially severe financial collapse there from
the wrecking of mushroom canal projects and the like.[21] It is remarkable
that so wide a spread of rates in the several districts prevailed for so
long a period as here appears. The statistics may of course be somewhat at
fault, but there is reason for confidence that their margin of error is not
great enough to vitiate them.

[Footnote 21: _E. g., The Papers of Archibald D. Murphey_ (North Carolina
Historical Commission _Publications_, Raleigh, 1914), I, 93ff]

The next peak, 1837-1839, was in most respects like the preceding one, and
the drop was quite as sudden and even more severe. The distresses of the
time in the district where they were the most intense were described in a
diary of 1840 by a North Carolinian, who had journeyed southwestward in the
hope of collecting payment for certain debts, but whose personal chagrin
was promptly eclipsed by the spectacle of general disaster. "Speculation,"
said he, "has been making poor men rich and rich men princes." But now "a
revulsion has taken place. Mississippi is ruined. Her rich men are poor,
and her poor men beggars.... We have seen hard times in North Carolina,
hard times in the east, hard times everywhere; but Mississippi exceeds them
all.... Lands ... that once commanded from thirty to fifty dollars per acre
may now be bought for three or five dollars, and that with considerable
improvements, while many have been sold at sheriff's sales at fifty cents
that were considered worth ten to twenty dollars. The people, too, are
r