[Footnote 2:  Boston, Mass, Chronicle, Aug. 1-7, 1768.]

[Footnote 3:  William Bartram, Travels (London, 1792), p. 441.]

[Footnote 4:  South Carolina Gazette, May 26, 1785.]

[Footnote 5:  C.F.  Emerick, “The Credit System and the Public Domain,” in the Vanderbilt University Southern History Publications, no. 3 (Nashville, Tenn., 1899).]

The Alabama-Mississippi population rose from 40,000 in round numbers in 1810 to 200,000 in 1820, 445,000 in 1830, 965,000 in 1840, 1,377,000 in 1850, and 1,660,000 in 1860, while the proportion of slaves advanced from forty to forty-seven per cent.  In the same period the tide flowed on into the cotton lands of Arkansas and Louisiana and eventually into Texas.  Florida alone of the newer southern areas was left in relative neglect by reason of the barrenness of her soil.  The states and territories from Alabama and Tennessee westward increased their proportion of the whole country’s cotton output from one-sixteenth in 1811 to one-third in 1820, one-half before 1830, nearly two-thirds in 1840, and quite three-fourths in 1860; and all this was in spite of continued and substantial enlargements of the eastern output.

In the western cotton belt the lands most highly esteemed in the ante-bellum period lay in two main areas, both of which had soils far more fertile and lasting than any in the interior of the Atlantic states.  One of these formed a crescent across south-central Alabama, with its western horn reaching up the Tombigbee River into northeastern Mississippi.  Its soil of loose black loam was partly forested, partly open, and densely matted with grass and weeds except where limestone cropped out on the hill crests and where prodigious cane brakes choked the valleys.  The area was locally known as the prairies or the black belt.[6] The process of opening it for settlement was begun by Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the Creeks in 1814 but was not completed until some twenty years afterward.  The other and greater tract extended along both sides of the Mississippi River from northern Tennessee and Arkansas to the mouth of the Red River.  It comprised the broad alluvial bottoms, together with occasional hill districts of rich loam, especially notable among the latter of which were those lying about Natchez and Vicksburg.  The southern end of this area was made available first, and the hills preceded the delta in popularity for cotton culture.  It was not until the middle thirties that the broadest expanse of the bottoms, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, began to receive its great influx.  The rest of the western cotton belt had soils varying through much the same range as those of Georgia and the Carolinas.  Except in the bottoms, where the planters themselves did most of the pioneering, the choicer lands of the whole district were entered by a pellmell throng of great planters, lesser planters and small farmers, with the farmers usually a little in the lead and the planters ready to buy them out of specially rich lands.  Farmers refusing to sell might by their own thrift shortly rise into the planter class; or if they sold their homesteads at high prices they might buy slaves with the proceeds and remove to become planters in still newer districts.