EVOLUTION OF THE COTTON SYSTEM 43 



less than one-fifth of the white population in 1790 to 

 almost fifty per cent in 1830. 



The farmers with a slave or two greatly outnumbered 

 the planters and one "shrewd contemporary observer 17 

 found special reason to rejoice that the new staple re- 

 quired no large capital and involved no exposure to dis- 

 ease. Rice and indigo, he said, had offered the poorer 

 whites except few employed as overseers, no livelihood 

 without the degradation of working with slaves, but cot- 

 ton stimulating and elevating these people into the rank 

 of substantial farmers tended to fill the country with an 

 independent, industrious yeomanry." Such is the irony 

 of historian turned prophet. 



The westward movement of cotton and the plantation 

 followed as a matter of course. "The Alabama-Mississippi 

 population rose from 40,000 in round numbers in 1810 

 ... to 1,660,000 in 1860, while the proportion of slaves 

 increased from forty to forty-seven per cent." L8 During 

 the same period the Delta lands of Arkansas and Louisi- 

 ana were filled with cotton planters. From 1815 to 1860 

 was the heyday of the plantation system. Indigo had seen 

 its day, hemp was negligible, sugar culture was growing, 

 tobacco while losing in the East was gaining in the West, 

 but over and above all, in uplands and river bottom, from 

 the Carolinas to Texas, Cotton was King! From 1791 to 

 1860 the average annual production had risen from in 

 round numbers five million to 1,750,000,000 pounds; the 

 exports from 1,740,000 to 1,390,000,000 pounds; and the 

 per cent of the crop exported from 33.0 to 79.5. The 

 plantation system was truly a Cotton Kingdom. 



17 David Ramsey, whose History of South Carolina, II, 448-49, 

 is cited by Phillips in American Negro Slavery, p. 160. 



18 Phillips, op. cit. t p. 171. 



