300 Percy Wells Bidwell 



straw hats, woodenware and, finally shoes which, as we have found, 

 had risen to the dignity of a manufacture.^ 



In this analysis we have seen the market included under that vague 

 term "the Southern states," shrinking in reality to the population of 

 a modern city of fair size, but spread over 250 miles of seacoast, and 

 distant over 800 miles from the ports of New England. And besides, 

 New England shared the privilege of feeding these 40,000 planters 

 and their 110,000 slaves with the back-country and the Middle 

 states. Only a few New England farmers, those in the seacoast 

 towns and in the towns behind such ports as New Haven and New 

 London, in Connecticut, could have had any access to this market. 

 The mere fact that some products were shipped from such towns to 

 a market so small and at such a distance is the best sort of evidence 

 of the lack of any market at all at home. It shows how strenuously 

 the farmers were trying to supply this lack and to break through the 

 bounds of their self-sufficient economy. 



(J) The West Indies. 



The third region outside of New England, in which its farmers 

 found a market for agricultural products, was the sugar-producing 

 islands of the West Indies. There were several circumstances which 

 made the demand for outside food supplies greater in these islands 

 than in the cotton plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. In 

 the first place, the raising of sugar on large plantations with slave 

 labor had long been established and had made great progress through 

 the eighteenth century.^ Large importations of negroes from Africa 

 followed, and a considerable increase in the white population. In 1810 

 there were probably about 2,000,000 persons in all the islands of the 

 archipelago, of whom only a few hundred thousand were whites.^ 

 The principal sugar producing islands were owned by England and 



' See Belknap, History of New Hampshire, III. 218; Gallatin, Report on Man- 

 ufactures, p. 439; Bond, Phineas. Letters (1787-1794). In Annual Report, 

 American Historical Association, 1896-1897. P. 651. 



- The value of the exports of the English islands to the home country had in- 

 creased from £629,533 in 1699 to £6,390,658 in 1798. Between the years 1699 

 and 1775 the amount of sugar exported to England from these islands increased 

 from 427,573 cwt. to 2,002,224 cwt. See Edwards, Bryan. History ... of 

 the British Colonies in the West Indies. 3 ed. London. 1801. II. 595-598. 



'The figures, based largely on estimates, in Morse's Gazetteer for 1817, Vol. 

 II., app., are 2,430,000. In Worcester, J. E. Universal Gazetteer, 2 ed. Boston. 

 1823. Vol. II., p. 944, the sum of the population of the islands owned by various 

 nations is put at 1,700,000. 



