The question was largely an economic one with the Tennesseans of the Mississippi Valley. Cotton was coming into greater and greater importance every year. It could, they thought, be most profitably raised by large groups of workmen whose labor was cheap. The slave was the logical person, and they fastened on him the burden. Lest the impression has been made that the only portion of the State from which the sentiment of an anti-slavery nature came was East Tennessee, it will be well to refer to the vigorous speech of Kincaid, a delegate from Bedford County, who flung a parting reply to the friends and sympathizers of the Committee of Thirteen which had succeeded in thwarting any official action upon the matter proposed by the memorialists.[39] Bedford County, in the central portion of the State, represented both economically and socially a type of citizen different from that of the mountaineer stock. Yet Kincaid fearlessly defended the plain human rights of the colored population in his speech as much as Stephenson had done, and scathingly denounced the Committee of Thirteen for its attitude toward slavery. The pro-slavery faction, however, successfully contended that the emancipation party had no definite plan for emancipation, as those in Washington County and other districts were divided in their ideas on this subject. There were about thirty memorials besides the one from this county, one half of them asking that all children born in the State after 1835 should be free and that all slaves should be freed in 1855 and sent out of the State. The other half of the memorials favored making the slaves free in 1866 and having them colonized. As a matter of fact, Tennessee did emancipate its slaves three years earlier than this date. By the Committee of Thirteen these statements were given to show that there could be no virtue in acting in accord with the wishes of the memorialists, as they were hopelessly divided in their recommendations. The report of the committee was tabled, but the debate was by no means ended. Further detail is not of use to us here save to point out that there was no vote in the matter and that Stephenson bitterly upbraided the convention as a whole, stating that it had not made an effort to answer the prayer of the memorialists. The survey of this prolonged and unprofitable struggle shows how divided were the people of Tennessee on the question of abolishing slavery.[40]