in a position to supply the demand. By 1803, cotton became the leading product in the South.
As slavery had thrived on tobacco in the early days of the colonial period, it now thrived on cotton in the early days of the national existence. Undoubtedly slavery would have died a natural death but for this development of the cotton growing industry. And yet, slavery stifled the South by preventing immigration into that region. Free labor cannot exist comfortably alongside the slave, because it is called upon to help bear the stigma that is cast upon labor by the fact of slavery.
Slavery also contributed to continue the custom of "land killing" so common to the Americans—that is, the cropping of a field until it is exhausted and then moving on to a new one; it increased the tendency away from small farms to great plantations, and prevented the early adoption of more efficient tools and methods because the slave could not be trusted to use them.
The spread of the cotton industry was the only change the agricultural South experienced during this period. Tobacco spread Westward into Kentucky and Tennessee and the cattle industry thrived in the same region. Virginia and Kentucky began the breeding of mules from a stock of jacks that had been sent to this country from France and Spain by Lafayette and the King of Spain as presents to General Washington.
If slavery stopped the gap to immigration in the South, there was no such obstacle in the North, and from 1785 until almost the close of the nineteenth century the great exodus of the peoples poured Westward—the most wonderful and inspiring fact in all
