and the profits were enormous, if we
except one or two years for the woolen interests.

So that while the total annual crop value of Southern plantations
amounted to $40,000,000, and the _per capita_ wealth of the white people
of the so-called black belt was very large, the returns from three
industries located in a much narrower industrial belt of the East were
more than a third greater. The taxable value of the slaves who produced
most of the cotton and tobacco was not less than $1,000,000,000; the
total investments of the East in manufactures of all kinds was certainly
not more than a fourth as great as that in slaves. And what made this
development the more significant was the fact that nearly all that the
black belt produced was sold in Europe, while nearly all that the
industrial belt produced was sold to the people of the United States,
mostly to States which were not engaged in manufacturing at all.

A portentous revolution was taking place. Before 1820 nearly all the
wool of the country had been made into cloth by hand in the homes of the
people, and the ratio of home manufactures to population was about the
same in most of the States. Now the sheep-raisers sold their wool to
the mill men, who sold the country the finished product and whose
factories were concentrated in a small district. The cotton mills had
been a negligible economic factor in 1812; now their owners employed a
capital of $30,000,000 to $35,000,000 and supplied work for 70,000
laborers. From the farms of the interior, where life was in the open,
the poorer and less ambitious elements of the population, who were not
attracted to the West, were drawn to the growing industrial towns, where
they lived, a family in a room, worked twelve to fourteen hours a day,
amidst unsanitary and even immoral surroundings, for wages which ranged
from one dollar to six dollars per week. The cost of living was, to be
sure, correspondingly low; but when the year of toil for men, women, and
children of all ages was told, there was usually an unpaid account at
the company's store, and the chance of bettering one's worldly fortunes
appeared almost hopeless. Emigration to the West was the only escape,
and the difficulties of such an escape, the cost of sustenance for the
long journey, on foot, the greater cost of building a cabin in the
forest and maintaining one's family till a crop could be harvested, and
the necessity of buying the land on which the cabin was to be