What do the bulk of the people get here that they cannot have there for one fifth the labor in the western country ?" Next year, after a visit to his birthplace, he exclaimed: "What a spectacle does our lower country present! Deserted and dismantled country-houses once the seats of cheerfulness and plenty, and the temples of the Most High ruinous and desolate, 'frowning in portentous silence upon the land,'" And in 1819 he wrote from Richmond: "You have no conception of the gloom and distress that pervade this place.

There has been nothing like it since 1785 when from the same causes (paper money and a general peace) there was a general depression of everything."[25] [Footnote 24: Edmund Quincy, _Life of Josiah Quincy_ (Boston, 1869), p.
336.] [Footnote 25: H.A.Garland, _Life of John Randolph_ (Philadelphia, 1851), II, 15; I, 2; II, 105.] The extreme depression passed, but the conditions prompting emigration were persistent and widespread.

News items from here and there continued for decades to tell of movement in large volume from Tide-water and Piedmont, from the tobacco states and the eastern cotton-belt, and even from Alabama in its turn, for destinations as distant and divergent as Michigan, Missouri and Texas.

The communities which suffered cast about for both solace and remedy.

An editor in the South Carolina uplands remarked at the beginning of 1833 that if emigration should continue at the rate of the past year the state would become a wilderness; but he noted with grim satisfaction that it was chiefly the "fire-eaters" that were moving out.[26] In 1836 another South Carolinian wrote: "The spirit of emigration is still rife in our community.