1-7, 1768.] [Footnote 3: William Bartram, _Travels_ (London, 1792), p.

441.] [Footnote 4: _South Carolina Gazette_, May 26, 1785.] [Footnote 5: C.F.Emerick, "The Credit System and the Public Domain," in the Vanderbilt University _Southern History Publications_, no.

3 (Nashville, Tenn., 1899).] The Alabama-Mississippi population rose from 40,000 in round numbers in 1810 to 200,000 in 1820, 445,000 in 1830, 965,000 in 1840, 1,377,000 in 1850, and 1,660,000 in 1860, while the proportion of slaves advanced from forty to forty-seven per cent.

In the same period the tide flowed on into the cotton lands of Arkansas and Louisiana and eventually into Texas.
Florida alone of the newer southern areas was left in relative neglect by reason of the barrenness of her soil.

The states and territories from Alabama and Tennessee westward increased their proportion of the whole country's cotton output from one-sixteenth in 1811 to one-third in 1820, one-half before 1830, nearly two-thirds in 1840, and quite three-fourths in 1860; and all this was in spite of continued and substantial enlargements of the eastern output.
In the western cotton belt the lands most highly esteemed in the ante-bellum period lay in two main areas, both of which had soils far more fertile and lasting than any in the interior of the Atlantic states.