Throughout the Southern staple areas the plantations waxed and waned in a
territorial progression. The regime was a broad billow moving irresistibly
westward and leaving a trough behind. At the middle of the nineteenth
century it was entering Texas, its last available province, whose cotton
area it would have duly filled had its career escaped its catastrophic
interruption. What would have occurred after that completion, without the
war, it is interesting to surmise. Probably the crest of the billow would
have subsided through the effect of an undertow setting eastward again.
Belated immigrants, finding the good lands all engrossed, would have
returned to their earlier homes, to hold their partially exhausted soils
in higher esteem than before and to remedy the depletion by reformed
cultivation. That the billow did not earlier give place to a level flood
was partly due to the shortage of slaves; for the African trade was closed
too soon for the stock to fill the country in these decades. To the same
shortage was owing such opportunity as the white yeomanry had in staple
production. The world offered a market, though not at high prices, for a
greater volume of the crops than the plantation slaves could furnish; the
farmers supplied the deficit.
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