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As the production of cotton increased,
the price fell, and the seaboard south, feeling the competition of
the virgin soils of the southwest, saw in the protective tariff for
the development of northern manufactures the real source of her
distress. The price of cotton was in these years a barometer of
southern prosperity and of southern discontent. [Footnote: See chap,
xix., below; M. B. Hammond, Cotton Industry, part i., App. i.;
Donnell, Hist. of Cotton; Watkins, Production and Prices of Cotton.]
Even more important than the effect of cotton production upon the
prosperity of the south was its effect upon her social system. This
economic transformation resuscitated slavery from a moribund
condition to a vigorous and aggressive life. Slowly Virginia and
North Carolina came to realize that the burden and expense of
slavery as the labor system for their outworn tobacco and corn
fields was partly counteracted by the demand for their surplus
Negroes in the cotton-fields of their more southern neighbors.


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