There were equally famous public-spirited cotton planters of West Tennessee, Pope, Holmes, Poynor, and Bond, planters of Fayette County and Shelby County, at this same World’s Fair, who changed the classification and commercial character of American cottons. They were able to place Tennessee cotton next to the Georgia Sea Island, giving it the highest grade of upland cotton. This meant considerable wealth to Tennessee. Both Pope and Holmes received medals at the fair. These planters, in coöperation with David Park, a cotton factor of Memphis, distributed among several factories of the East a large amount of Tennessee cotton to be experimented with, in order to test its superior grade. This gave Tennessee cotton a great reputation, and made Memphis a joint distributing-point for the sale of cotton. Cotton began to come up the Mississippi to Memphis to be distributed over the entire world. This was the beginning of the movement that has finally made Memphis the greatest inland cotton market in the world. Comparing these cotton planters with the Middle Tennessee planter referred to above, James C. Coggesball, the author of this paper, says, “I must certainly be permitted to speak as to the circumstances of several whose success surpasses his in a four-fold extent.” “And just here,” he says, “permit me to add as my opinion that there is not to be found a location in the United States where a farming community, taking them as a body, is as independent and intelligent as they are in the western district. The public days at the county seats exhibit but few scenes of impropriety emanating from them, while the sheriff’s and constable’s advertisements seldom have reference to their estates.”[44] The planters of Tennessee realized that slavery was profitable, and were jealous of all forces that threatened its existence. They knew that the cotton system depended on slave labor. The slaveholding sections of the state were the strong supporters of colonization societies, not in the sense of anti-slavery, but as a protection to slavery. “The existence of colored freedom in the midst of a slave population,” said their petitions, “has a tendency to impair the value and utility of that description.” It will cause “those who might have considered bondage as one of the decrees of Fate, or provisions of superior power, imposed upon their sable race, where all were placed in a like condition ... to view with jealousy and discontent the elevation of some of their own family to a grade so far above their reach.”[45] This memorial suggested the expediency of abolishing colored freedom, which was actually attempted in the later fifties.