5i8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it appeared to those who were accustomed to close tillage as shift- 

 less, was really well adjusted to the conditions. Not one fourth 

 of the land of the Southern States that was well fitted for the 

 work of slaves had been brought into use. The blacks who were 

 carefully managed in all that regarded their health and in their 

 morals, so far as might affect their breeding, were in admirable 

 physical condition, and rapidly increasing in numbers. It is doubt- 

 ful if ever a peasant class was so well cared for or so freed from 

 avoidable diseases. The growing protest against the institution, 

 so far as it operated in the South, was practically limited to the 

 border States, mainly to Kentucky, where alone did a considerable 

 number of well-born men set themselves against it. There is good 

 reason to believe that if the civil war had not occurred the end of 

 the nineteenth century would have seen a negro population in the 

 South much more numerous than we now have there. Experience 

 has shown that the American cotton crop is little affected by for- 

 eign competition, so that it would have maintained the success of 

 the institution. 



Although the system of slavery was by a chance of ISTature so 

 firmly planted on the cotton fields as to give it entire dominance in 

 the South, and something like control of the Federal Union, there 

 was one geographic condition that menaced its future, and in the 

 end did much to insure its downfall in the events of the civil war, 

 and most likely would have brought about its end even if the Con- 

 federacy had been established. This was the form and extent of 

 the Appalachian uplands between the Potomac and the Ohio on 

 the north and Alabama and Georgia in the South. In this area 

 of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand square miles in extent the 

 surface lies at an average height of some fifteen hundred feet above 

 the sea; the good arable land is found mostly in narrow valleys 

 suited only for household farms, totally unfit for the systematic agri- 

 culture in which alone negroes could be profitably employed as 

 slaves. Into this area drifted the class of small farmers who by one 

 chance and another had never been able to enter or to maintain 

 themselves in the aristocratic class of slaveholders. These moun- 

 taineers — they may better be termed the hill people of the South — 

 were an eminently peculiar people. Thej^ are not to be compared 

 with the " poor white trash " — i. e., the downfallen and dependent 

 whites, who were broken men in spirit, scarce above the slaves in 

 quality. These poor whites were often, if not generally, either 

 the weaker strains of the militant families or the descendants of the 

 people who had been imported into this country by the land com- 

 panies or sent out as peons. 



Partly because of their separation from the slaveholding class 



