The large development of the cotton industry in this country came after the importation of negroes from Africa had ceased to be as completely unrestricted as it was at first. The prohibition of the traffic came indeed before the needs of laborers in the more Southern and Western slave States had been met. For a while there was some surreptitious importation, which in a small way continued down to the middle of this century, but this smuggling was quite insufficient to supply the market of the new States with slaves. The result was that the border slaveholding States became to a considerable extent the breeding grounds for men and women who were to be at maturity exported to the great plantations of Alabama and Mississippi, there to be herded by overseers in gangs of hundreds, with no hope of ever returning to their kindred. With this interdiction of the foreign slave trade the evils of the former situation became magnified into horrors. The folk who were brought from Africa came from a state of savagery to one of relative comfort. When once adjusted to their new conditions, their lot was on the whole greatly bettered. But their descendants, who had become attached to the places where they were born with the peculiar affection the better of them had for their homes, being accustomed to masters who on the whole were gentle, were now to undergo a worse deportation than that which made them slaves. It is not too much to say that the deeper evils of the system to the slaves themselves, as well as to their masters, began with this miserable slave trade that went on within the limits of this country, and was about at its height when the civil war began.