ught in eastern North Carolina, and many planters cut their
immature corn for their cattle, while great numbers sold their property
and joined the emigrants.(286) Kentucky, still a favorite place for
settlement, was in the midst of a land boom which reached such proportions
as to cause a large volume of emigration to Illinois, Missouri, and the
southwest. The buyer of Kentucky land was often a neighbor who wished to
enlarge his farm and work on a larger scale, or some well-to-do immigrant
who preferred the location to a more remote region. Land sold on credit
and at fictitious prices, the seller in turn buying land for which he
frequently could make only the first payment. Retribution did not come,
however, until after 1820, and for some years it seemed as if Kentucky was
to become a source of population, for it was to Illinois and Missouri, and
to a lesser degree to Alabama, what New England was to Ohio.(287) Probably
chief among the reasons for migration from the South was the increase of
slavery, with the resulting changes in industrial and social conditions.
Early in the century the growing importance of the cotton crop began to
hasten a stratification of opinion which was determined by physiographic
areas. The western parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina,
the northern part of Georgia, and the eastern parts of Kentucky and
Tennessee, respectively, being hilly and less fertile than the coastal
plain, became the center of the southern anti-slavery sentiment. On the
plain settled the wealthy planters, and later the poorer Germans and
Quakers settled in the uplands. Only when cotton-raising became very
profitable was slavery to intrude upon the latter location.(288)

During the war the production of cotton in the United States had been
almost constant in amount and less than in preceding years, but 1815 saw
an increase of over forty-two per cent and 1816 an increase of twenty-four
per cent,(289) while in the latter year South Carolina, after an interval
of thirteen years, resumed its slavery legislation by passing the first of
a series of acts which show that the slavery problem was becoming
increasingly difficult. Similar legislation took place in Tennessee, and
to a lesser degree in Kentucky.(290) Increased production of cotton was
accompanied by an increase in price, middling upland cotton selling at New
York at 15 cents per pound in 1814, at 21 cents in 1815, at 29-1/2 cents in
1816, at 26-1/2 cents i