Geographically considered it was apparent that the black belt had slipped a little lower down upon the body politic. The total colored population of the Union was 1,771,856, more than half of whom were to be found in the three States of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. In Virginia, 402,031; in South Carolina, 265,301; in North Carolina, 219,629; a total of 886,961. Southwest of this section and south of the Ohio River, the Negro population amounted to 529,856; but in no State in the Union had the increase since 1800 been so enormous as in South Carolina; for with an area and white population only two-fifths of Virginia, the increase of the Negro population of the two States had practically been the same, viz.: 156,538 for Virginia, 156,457 for South Carolina. Nor could any comforting reassurance have been drawn from the fact that the percentage of increase of the same species of population in the States of Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky had been greater; for such had been accompanied, in these newer States, with an even greater increase of their white population, and was based upon an original Negro population very small indeed, when compared to that of South Carolina in 1800. When comparison was made with Maryland, on the other hand, where the number of Negroes had originally been greater than in South Carolina, with the increase of the whites in the three decades not so great, small as had been the increase of the whites, it was yet greater than that of the colored, and originally the proportion of whites had been greater. From all these causes South Carolina was becoming in place of Virginia the State most identified with the Negro question, in a section where it was becoming a larger and more important property interest.