The sense of loss was in general the product not of actual depletion but of disappointment in the expectation of increase.
[Footnote 30: H.T.Cook, _The Life and Legacy of David R.Williams_ (New York, 1916), pp.

166-168.] [Footnote 31: U.B.Phillips, _History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860_.] The non-slaveholding backwoodsmen formed the vanguard of settlement on each frontier in turn; the small slaveholders followed on their heels and crowded each fertile district until the men who lived by hunting as well as by farming had to push further westward; finally the larger planters with their crowded carriages, their lumbering wagons and their trudging slaves arrived to consolidate the fields of such earlier settlers as would sell.
It often seemed to the wayfarer that all the world was on the move.

But in the districts of durable soil thousands of men, clinging to their homes, repelled every attack of the western fever..