cation
or the founding of hospitals, which has been a distinctive feature of
the social history of the last thirty years.

[Illustration: The Black Belt of 1860]

The planters, on the other hand, had spread their system over the lower
South in a remarkable manner since 1830. From eastern Virginia their
patriarchal establishments had been pushed westward and southwestward
until in 1860 the black belt reached to the Rio Grande. Tobacco, cotton,
and sugar were still their great staples, and the annual returns from
these were not less than $300,000,000; while the growth of their output
between 1850 and 1860 was more than one hundred per cent. The number of
slaves who worked the plantations had increased between 1830 and 1860
from 2,000,000 to nearly 4,000,000 souls, thus suggesting the comparison
with the workers in the mills of the East. The exports of the black belt
composed more than two thirds of the total exports of the country; but
they were largely billed through Eastern ports, and most of the imports
of the South came through New York, where a second toll was taken from
the products of the plantation.

But the ratio of annual returns to the total investments was very unlike
that of the East. In the South the assessed value of real estate and
personal property, including slaves, in 1860 was $5,370,000,000, while
the returns for the best years were somewhat over $300,000,000: that is,
their investment was $1,000,000,000 greater than that of the East and
their income not more than a third as great. Perhaps the banking
statistics of the planter section will enable us to get a better view of
their dependence upon the East. The South had in 1860 a banking capital
of $89,131,000, a bank-note circulation of $68,344,000, and money on
deposit, $56,342,000. Thus an annual return of $300,000,000 brought
deposits of only $56,000,000; and the _per capita_ circulation was only
$10. New York City alone had twice as much money on deposit as all the
Southern States, though the personal property valuation of the whole
State of New York, with a population four times as great, was only
$320,000,000 as against $240,000,000 for Virginia.

Although the system of agriculture in the South had not greatly improved
since 1830, the annual crops sold for about four times as much as they
had brought when Jackson was President. In spite of the "red gullies"
and the waste lands, the owners of plantations were the wealthy men of
the time. The Ha