Part 13 (2/2)
This was in response, also, to the introduction of ribbon cane which matured earlier than the previously used Malabar and Otaheite varieties and could accordingly be grown in a somewhat higher lat.i.tude.
The territorial spread was mainly responsible for the sudden advance of the number of sugar estates from 308 operating in 1827, estimated as employing 21,000 able-bodied slaves and having a gross value of $34,000,000, to 691 plantations in 1830,[42] with some 36,000 working slaves and a gross value of $50,000,000. At this time the output was at the rate of about 75,000 hogsheads containing 1,000 pounds of sugar each, together with some forty or fifty gallons of mola.s.ses per hogshead as a by-product. Louisiana was at this time supplying about half of the whole country's consumption of sugar and bade fair to meet the whole demand ere long.[43] The reduction of protective tariff rates, coming simultaneously with a rise of cotton prices, then checked the spread of the sugar industry, and the subst.i.tution of steam engines for horse power in grinding the cane caused some consolidation of estates. In 1842 accordingly, when the slaves numbered 50,740 and the sugar crop filled 140,000 hogsheads, the plantations were but 668.[44] The raising of the tariff anew in that year increased the plantations to 762 in 1845 and they reached their maximum number of 1,536 in 1849, when more than half of their mills were driven by steam[45] and their slaves numbered probably somewhat more than a hundred thousand of all ages.[46] Thereafter the recovery of the cotton market from the severe depression of the early 'forties caused a strong advance in slave prices which again checked the sugar spread, while the introduction of vacuum pans and other improvements in apparatus[47] promoted further consolidations.
The number of estates accordingly diminished to 1,298 in 1859, on 987 of which the mills were steam driven, and on 52 of which the extraction and evaporation of the sugar was done by one sort or another of the newly invented devices. The gross number of slaves in the sugar parishes was nearly doubled between 1830 and 1850, but in the final ante-bellum decade it advanced only at about the rate of natural increase.[48] The sugar output advanced to 200,000 hogsheads in 1844 and to 450,000 in 1853. Bad seasons then reduced it to 74,000 in 1856; and the previous maximum was not equaled in the remaining ante-bellum years.[49] The liability of the crop to damage from drought and early frost, and to destruction from the outpouring of the Mississippi through creva.s.ses in the levees, explains the fluctuations in the yield. Outside of Louisiana the industry took no grip except on the Brazos River in Texas, where in 1858 thirty-seven plantations produced about six thousand hogsheads.[50]
[Footnote 42: _DeBow's Review_, I, 55.]
[Footnote 43: V. Debouchel, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (New Orleans, 1851), pp. 151 ff.]
[Footnote 44: E.J. Forstall, _Agricultural Productions of Louisiana_ (New Orleans, 1845).]
[Footnote 45: P.A. Champonier, _Statement of the Sugar Crop Made in Louisiana_ (New Orleans, annual, 1848-1859).]
[Footnote 46: DeBow, in the _Compendium of the Seventh Census_, p. 94, estimated the sugar plantation slaves at 150,000; but this is clearly an overestimate.]
[Footnote 47: Some of these are described by Judah P. Benjamin in _DeBow's Review_, II, 322-345.]
[Footnote 48: _I. e_. from 150,000 to 180,000.]
[Footnote 49: The crop of 1853, indeed, was not exceeded until near the close of the nineteenth century.]
[Footnote 50: P.A. Champonier, _Statement of the Sugar Crop ... in 1858-1859_, p. 40.]
In Louisiana in the banner year 1853, with perfect weather and no creva.s.ses, each of some 50,000 able-bodied field hands cultivated, besides the incidental food crops, about five acres of cane on the average and produced about nine hogsheads of sugar and three hundred gallons of mola.s.ses per head. On certain specially favored estates, indeed, the product reached as much as fifteen hogsheads per hand[51]. In the total of 1407 fully equipped plantations 103 made less than one hundred hogsheads each, while forty produced a thousand hogsheads or more. That year's output, however, was nearly twice the size of the average crop in the period. A dozen or more proprietors owned two or more estates each, some of which were on the largest scale, while at the other extreme several dozen farmers who had no mills of their own sent cane from their few acres to be worked up in the spare time of some obliging neighbor's mill. In general the bulk of the crop was made on plantations with cane fields ranging from rather more than a hundred to somewhat less than a thousand acres, and with each acre producing in an ordinary year somewhat more than a hogshead of sugar.
[Footnote 51: _DeBow's Review_, XIV, 199, 200.]
Until about 1850 the sugar district as well as the cotton belt was calling for labor from whatever source it might be had; but whereas the uplands had work for people of both races and all conditions, the demand of the delta lands, to which the sugar crop was confined, was almost wholly for negro slaves. The only notable increase in the rural white population of the district came through the fecundity of the small-farming Acadians who had little to do with sugar culture.
CHAPTER X
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
The flow of population into the distant interior followed the lines of least resistance and greatest opportunity. In the earlier decades these lay chiefly in the Virginia lat.i.tudes. The Indians there were yielding, the mountains afforded pa.s.ses thither, and the climate permitted the familiar tobacco industry. The Shenandoah Valley had been occupied mainly by Scotch-Irish and German small farmers from Pennsylvania; but the glowing reports, which the long hunters brought and the land speculators spread from beyond the further mountains, made Virginians to the manner born resolve to compete with the men of the backwoods for a share of the Kentucky lands. During and after the war for independence they threaded the gorges, some with slaves but most without. Here and there one found a mountain glade so fertile that he made it his permanent home, while his fellows pushed on to the greater promised land. Some of these emerging upon a country of low and uniform hills, closely packed and rounded like the backs of well-fed pigs crowding to the trough, staked out their claims, set up their cabins, deadened their trees, and planted wheat. Others went on to the gently rolling country about Lexington, let the luxuriant native bluegra.s.s wean them from thoughts of tobacco, and became breeders of horses for evermore. A few, settling on the southerly edge of the bluegra.s.s, mainly in and about Garrard County, raised hemp on a plantation scale. The rest, resisting all these allurements, pressed on still further to the pennyroyal country where tobacco would have no rival. While thousands made the whole journey overland, still more made use of the Ohio River for the later stages. The adjutant at Fort Harmar counted in seven months of 1786-1787, 177 boats descending the Ohio, carrying 2,689 persons, 1,333 horses, 766 cattle, 102 wagons and one phaeton, while still others pa.s.sed by night uncounted.[1] The family establishments in Kentucky were always on a smaller scale, on an average, than those in Virginia. Yet the people migrating to the more fertile districts tended to maintain and even to heighten the spirit of gentility and the pride of type which they carried as part of their heritage. The laws erected by the community were favorable to the slaveholding regime; but after the first decades of the migration period, the superior attractions of the more southerly lat.i.tudes for plantation industry checked Kentucky's receipt of slaves.
[Footnote 1: _Ma.s.sachusetts Centinel_ (Boston), July 21, 1787.]
The wilderness between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, meanwhile, was attracting Virginia and Carolina emigrants as well as those from the northerly states. The soil there was excellent, and some districts were suited to tobacco culture. The Ordinance of 1787, however, though it was not strictly enforced, made slaveholdings north of the Ohio negligible from any but an antiquarian point of view.
The settlement of Tennessee was parallel, though subsequent, to that of the Shenandoah and Kentucky. The eastern intramontane valley, broad and fertile but unsuited to the staple crops, gave homes to thousands of small farmers, while the Nashville basin drew planters of both tobacco and cotton, and the counties along the western and southern borders of the state made cotton their one staple. The scale of slaveholdings in middle and western Tennessee, while superior to that in Kentucky, was never so great as those which prevailed in Virginia and the lower South.
Missouri, whose adaptation to the southern staples was much poorer, came to be colonized in due time partly by planters from Kentucky but mostly by farmers from many quarters, including after the first decades a large number of Germans, some of whom entered through the eastern ports and others through New Orleans.
This great central region as a whole acquired an agricultural regime blending the features of the two national extremes. The staples were prominent but never quite paramount. Corn and wheat, cattle and hogs were produced regularly nearly everywhere, not on a mere home consumption basis, but for sale in the cotton belt and abroad. This diversification caused the region to wane in the esteem of the migrating planters as soon as the Alabama-Mississippi country was opened for settlement.
Preliminaries of the movement into the Gulf region had begun as early as 1768, when a resident of Pensacola noted that a group of Virginians had been prospecting thereabouts with such favorable results that five of them had applied for a large grant of lands, pledging themselves to bring in a hundred slaves and a large number of cattle.[2] In 1777 William Bartram met a group of migrants journeying from Georgia to settle on the lower course of the Alabama River;[3] and in 1785 a citizen of Augusta wrote that ”a vast number” of the upland settlers were removing toward the Mississippi in consequence of the relinquishment of Natchez by the Spaniards.[4] But these were merely forerunners. Alabama in particular, which comprises for the most part the basin draining into Mobile Bay, could have no safe market for its produce until Spain was dispossessed of the outlet. The taking of Mobile by the United States as an episode of the war of 1812, and the simultaneous breaking of the Indian strength, removed the obstacles. The influx then rose to immense proportions. The roads and rivers became thronged, and the federal agents began to sell homesteads on a scale which made the ”land office business” proverbial.[5]
[Footnote 2: Boston, Ma.s.s, _Chronicle_, Aug. 1-7, 1768.]
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