Missouri tried also to exclude free blacks and mulattos from the state, but Congress would not permit such exclusions. Finally in 1821 Missouri abandoned its original plan and was admitted to the Union as a slave state.
The South, meanwhile, experienced success in agriculture. Cotton had replaced tobacco, rice, and indigo as its most profitable crop. By 1820 the United States had become the largest cotton producer in the world. Cotton would remain "king" from 1820 to 1860, with plantations springing up and spreading across the lower South through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In need of slaves for field labor, the new farms of the lower South looked to upper South areas such as Missouri as a source, and owners here were sometimes tempted to accept the high prices offered for their slaves. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, Miss Watson, a Missouri slaveholder, is offered the enticing sum of $800 for her slave Jim by a buyer down in Louisiana.
Yet there also was a small but growing movement to abolish slavery elsewhere in the nation during these decades. The movement began in the North with the publication of the newspaper The Liberator.
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