This constitutional extension of the slave traffic closed all possibility of the question ever being settled amicably. Short-sightedness can scarcely be charged to those responsible, for at that time there was no thought of an acquisition of territory on the south and southwest, and the cultivation of cotton was still in its infancy. Before another decade Eli Whitney had invented the cotton-gin; this gave an impetus to the growing of cotton; agriculture in the South was revolutionized. To make way for the industry Georgia ceded her western territory to the United States and a tide of Southern immigration from the older centers of Virginia and the Carolinas rapidly flowed into Alabama and Mississippi. The wanderlust of a hardy, pioneer ancestry was in these men’s veins. Accompanied often by gentle families, their household goods, and their negroes they started overland. By long and tedious journeyings, across mountain, stream, and swamp--through seemingly boundless stretches of majestic pines--sometimes encountering hostile Indians and again exchanging friendly courtesies with the friendly Choctaws and Chickasaws, they reached the new frontier, and established themselves along the river courses. Others came by sailing vessels, and passing through the French and Spanish cities of Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans, followed the river courses into the interior. The log cabins which sprang up in the wilderness, were soon supplanted by comfortable, substantial homes frequently built of brick made upon the plantations or of hand-hewn lumber; each became a nucleus of activities around which all things necessary for the maintenance of life were produced. On the well-ordered plantations the African was not only field laborer and faithful domestic, but became cobbler, mason, carpenter, and a spinner and weaver of cotton and wool. In this virgin region, far removed from the life and influences of the older States, there grew up a vital and mutual dependence between master and slave; as such, each was necessary to the other; but it was not a combination out of which sentiments for the ultimate freedom of the negro were apt to grow; and it was these who were farthest removed from the later machinations of the Abolitionists, who were most bitter and strenuous in their opposition. In this close relation which in all but rare exceptions was a kindly one, the Southerner came to know the negro as the negro then could not know himself, realized his limitations, directed him along useful lines, and knew how rapidly he would revert were the civilizing and humanizing influence of slavery as it existed in the South removed. In later years when Southerners stood before a questioning world, there was no sophistry in the protests of those who declared that slavery was beneficial, and it was an argument resting upon truth that the Southern negro’s condition was happier than that of the laboring classes in other parts of the world.