n 1817, and at 34 cents in 1818, while South Carolina
sea-island cotton sold at Charleston in 1816 at 55 cents a pound.(291) An
increase in cotton production meant an increase of the plantation system
with its slaves, this meant an increased demand for large farms, and also
a strengthening of the antagonism between pro-slavery and anti-slavery
parties. Even in 1812, a man who wished to sell, lease, or rent his
manufacturing establishment in the northwestern part of Virginia,
Frederick county, lamented in his advertisement that "some good men of
strict moral or religious principles should object against forming settled
abodes in Virginia" or other slave states.(292) Census reports show that
the proportion of negroes to whites increased in the western counties of
North Carolina during the decade 1810 to 1820 over the proportion in 1800
to 1810. Conditions above described naturally led to the emigration of at
least four classes of people: those who were anti-slavery, those who did
not wish to change from small farming to the plantation system, the poor
whites who found themselves increasingly disgraced and who at the same
time found that their land was in demand, the slave-holder who wished a
large tract of virgin soil. It is very important to note that these forces
were merely beginning to operate in the time from 1814 to 1818, and that
they did not reach their maximum of influence until after 1830, yet as the
population of Illinois increased less than twenty-eight thousand from 1810
to 1818, it is altogether probable that a considerable proportion were
influenced by the causes suggested. It is also true that some pioneers
moved merely from habit, without any well-defined cause.

Although it is true that the first steamboat that passed down the Ohio and
Mississippi made its trip in the winter of 1811-12, and by 1816 an
enterprising captain had made a successful experiment of running a
steamboat with coal for fuel, also that the speed of steamboats in eastern
waters was a matter for enthusiastic comment, yet it is also true that
immigrants to Illinois did not usually arrive by steamer.(293) The
development of steamboat navigation in western waters was slow, the first
steamboat reaching St. Louis on August 2, 1817.(294) Peter Cartwright
wrote of his trip from the West to the General Conference in Baltimore, in
1816: "We had no steamboats, railroad cars, or comfortable stages in those
days. We had to travel from the extreme We