As opposed to the brightening signs which some have seen in the years just preceding the Civil War, it has been said, "yet with the line around slavery being drawn more closely ... the cotton South lagged in the industrial race, and the border States were hampered by the institution that they felt to be a burden, but which they could see no safe way to abolish. Compassed as it was by political compromises, slavery must ultimately have topped through its own overweight; but in 1860 it was so valuable for the plantation that it was not only not readily converted into the factory, but was an obstacle in the way of the employment of capital and of other labor in that direction."[84] The deterrent effect of slavery upon immigration of white laborers has been noticed above. In 1860 only 6 per cent of the white population of the South was foreign-born, but immigrants made up nearly 20 per cent of that in the North. In the decade from 1850 to 1860 the South's quota of foreign-born in the whole country dropped from 14 to 13 per cent.[85] The South was deprived of her share of foreign mechanics, so largely responsible for the industries in this country in the first half of the nineteenth century, not only by the fact that independent artizans avoided competition with slave labor, but because few of them had the means of acquiring slaves, and disapproved of the institution besides.[86] The increase in population in North Carolina in the single decade of 1870 to 1880 about equalled that of the four decades preceding. The comprehensive influence here upon immigration by the abolition of slavery is not greatly modified by the fact that in the period before 1870 fell the losses from the Civil War.[87] The tide of immigration to Mecklenburg County in this State dwindled from the introduction of slavery as a system until 1825, and thereafter set in the emigration of persons from the county, an even severer influence and stronger indication of the baleful labor system.[88]