spirit of emigration is still rife in our community.  From this cause we have lost many, and we are destined, we fear, to lose more, of our worthiest citizens.”  Though efforts to check it were commonly thought futile, he addressed himself to suasion.  The movement, said he, is a mistaken one; South Carolina planters should let well enough alone.  The West is without doubt the place for wealth, but prosperity is a trial to character.  In the West money is everything.  Its pursuit, accompanied as it is by baneful speculation, lawlessness, gambling, sabbath-breaking, brawls and violence, prevents moral attainment and mental cultivation.  Substantial people should stay in South Carolina to preserve their pristine purity, hospitality, freedom of thought, fearlessness and nobility.[27]

[Footnote 26:  Sumterville, S.C., Whig, Jan. 5, 1833.]

[Footnote 27:  “The Spirit of Emigration,” signed “A South Carolinian,” in the Southern Literary Journal, II, 259-262 (June, 1836).]

An Alabama spokesman rejoiced in the manual industry of the white people in his state, and said if the negroes were only thinned off it would become a great and prosperous commonwealth.[28] But another Alabamian, A.B.  Meek, found reason to eulogize both emigration and slavery.  He said the roughness of manners prevalent in the haphazard western aggregation of New Englanders, Virginians, Carolinians and Georgians would prove but a temporary phase.  Slavery would be of benefit through its tendency to stratify society, ennoble the upper classes, and give even the poorer whites a stimulating pride of race.  “In a few years,” said he, “owing to the operation of this institution upon our unparalleled natural advantages, we shall be the richest people beneath the bend of the rainbow; and then the arts and the sciences, which always follow in the train of wealth, will flourish to an extent hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic.” [29]

[Footnote 28:  Portland, Ala., Evening Advertiser, April 12, 1833.]

[Footnote 29:  Southern Ladies’ Book (Macon, Ga.), April, 1840.]

As a practical measure to relieve the stress of the older districts a beginning was made in seed selection, manuring and crop rotation to enhance the harvests; horses were largely replaced by mules, whose earlier maturity, greater hardihood and longer lives made their use more economical for plow and wagon work;[30] the straight furrows of earlier times gave place in the Piedmont to curving ones which followed the hill contours and when supplemented with occasional grass balks and ditches checked the scouring of the rains and conserved in some degree the thin soils of the region; a few textile factories were built to better the local market for cotton and lower the cost of cloth as well as to yield profits to their proprietors; the home production of grain and meat supplies was in some measure increased; and river and highway improvements and railroad construction