erted
from the Father of Waters a very large proportion of the exports of the
West, but the steamers and flat-boats which floated down the Mississippi
literally fed the Cotton States. Laden with corn, flour, and lard, with
ploughs, glass, and nails, with horses and mules, and live stock of
every description, they distributed their cargoes from Memphis to New
Orleans, and came back freighted with sugar and cotton.

At length this great commerce has been interrupted, and the South, cut
off from this almost indispensable supply of the necessaries of life, is
now struggling for existence, and diverts its negroes from the
remunerative culture of sugar and cotton to the cultivation of grain and
corn.

There are few at the North who appreciate the sacrifice which attends
this diversion, or the extent of the pressure which led to this
disastrous change.

In Illinois, Iowa, or Indiana, the farmer can grow rich while selling
his corn for ten cents per bushel, and it is now common for a man and a
boy to cultivate a hundred acres and to gather five thousand bushels in
a single season. The South does not possess the rich and exhaustless
soil of the prairies, which for half a century will yield without return
successive and luxuriant crops of corn. Its soil is generally light and
easily exhausted, and is tilled by the rude and unwilling labor of the
slave. The census apprises us that its average crop of corn is but
fifteen bushels to the acre, in place of fifty to sixty in Illinois, and
even this depends in part on guano or artificial stimulants. The average
yield of wheat south of Tennessee is but six bushels to the acre, in
place of twenty to forty in Ohio. The Southern planters, who can sell
cotton with profit at ten cents per pound, cannot produce corn for less
than one dollar per bushel, or tenfold the cost in the West, and in past
years a dollar has been the customary price from North Carolina to
Texas.

Before the war, the cotton-crop of the South had risen to five millions
of bales; but now four-fifths of the land in cultivation is devoted to
corn and grain. In place of five millions of bales, worth at former
prices two hundred millions of dollars, and at present rates at least
eight hundred millions, the South, in its folly, to the injury of the
world, and the ruin of most of its planters, is now producing, in place
of its cotton, less corn than could be furnished in Illinois in ordinary
seasons for twenty millions of d