interesting though somewhat sombre picture of the conditions
prevailing on the rice plantations near Darien, Georgia.

Slavery, as an industrial institution, has flourished only in
countries with great natural resources, easy of access and affording
ready means of sustenance. The crops cultivated must be simple, such
as tobacco, rice or cotton, and hence admitting of easy mastery by the
slave as well as the efficient organization and direction of gangs of
laborers. The soil must be very fertile and unlimited in extent to
assure a profit on the unskilled routine labor of the slave, which
makes rotation of the crops impossible and soon exhausts the soil so
that the worn out lands must be abandoned for new. The industrial
cycle passed through by the great slave-estates of the West Indies
finds a parallel in the South, where the speedy exhaustion of a
fertile soil with the resulting necessity for a more scientific and
intensive agriculture, impossible under slavery, forced slaveholders
to open up new lands constantly. Hence the insatiable land hunger of
the slave power.[314]

There is evidence that at the end of the colonial period the older
lands of Virginia and Maryland, where slavery and the plantation
system had long existed, were approaching a period of decay. This was
the logical result of slavery. An industrial readjustment was taking
place involving the decline of the plantation system and with it the
decline of slavery. It was at this juncture that the fate of slavery,
and with it the destiny of the entire southwestern region, was
determined by a new factor, namely, the rise of the cotton culture.
But for the invention of the cotton-gin, and the improvements in
cotton manufacture that accompanied it, the economic forces already
militating against the patriarchal form of slavery in Virginia would
doubtless have brought about in time its peaceful abolition. As it
was, these discoveries created an industrial basis for the fostering
of slavery more dangerous than any pro-slavery legislation had been
and more sweeping and insidious than anti-slavery agitators could
possibly imagine. It opened up for the cultivation of the cotton
plant the vast fertile region extending from eastern North Carolina
through South Carolina, middle Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi,
Louisiana and Texas[315]. Here were found all the conditions mentioned
above as necessary to the success of slavery.

Within this vast region, however, there