THE PIONEERS OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY 19 



region. Alabama and Mississippi did not contain more than 

 75,000 people in 1816. Only four years later their population 

 was 200,000, and it more than doubled during the next ten 

 years. Louisiana, which contained about 76,000 people in 

 1810, had 143,000 in 1820, and 215,000 in 1830. Certain parts 

 of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida, where cotton could be 

 raised, were settled with equal rapidity. New Orleans was 

 the great central market to which the cotton product of this 

 region was sent; and it received, as we have seen, only 37,000 

 bales in 1816. That amount rose to 161,000 bales in 1822, 

 428,000 bales in 1830, and reached 923,000 in 1840. The 

 cultivation of sugar in Louisiana was also increasing at this 

 time, and was equally profitable. 



The effect of this extension of cotton and sugar cultivation 

 into the southwest upon the southern states is well known. 

 It opened up a very profitable field for the employment of the 

 labor and capital of this section, and this economic advantage 

 went chiefly to the revival and extension of the slave system. 

 But its effect upon the northern states, especially the newer 

 states of the northwest, has hardly received the attention its 

 importance deserves. In reality, it was that movement which 

 gave to them their first important market, and thus supplied 

 the one remaining requisite to their economic development. 

 The use of slave labor on a large scale not only prevents the 

 rise of manufactures, but it alwaj^s causes a curious territorial 

 division of labor in agriculture as well. Slave labor, to be effi- 

 cient, must be carefully supervised ; and its maximum efficiency 

 is therefore obtained only in those branches of agriculture 

 which permit the close organization of labor. For this reason 

 every slave community devotes itself for the most part to the 

 production of a few staples, like cotton, sugar, tobacco, or rice, 

 and finds it cheaper to purchase its food and other agricultural 

 supplies, as well as its manufactured articles, from free labor 

 communities. This gives rise to a trade in agricultural com- 

 modities between the slave communities and other agricultural 

 communities. The important trade between the northern con- 

 tinental colonies in the eighteenth century and the West Indies 

 was a trade of this kind; and it was principally the develop- 

 ment of the sugar colonies of the West Indies by slave labor, 



