The descending steamers and barges on the great river itself were half of them heavy laden with cotton and at the head of navigation on the Tennessee, in northwestern Alabama, bales enough were waiting to fill a dozen boats.

"The Tennesseeans," said he, "think that no state is of any account but their own; Kentucky, they say, would be if it could grow cotton, but as it is, it is good for nothing.

They count on forty or fifty thousand bales going from Nashville this season; that is, if they can get boats to carry it all." The fleet on the Cumberland River was doing its utmost, to the discomfort of the passengers; and it was not until the traveler boarded a steamer for St.Louis at the middle of March, that he escaped the plague which had surrounded him for seventy days and seventy nights.

This boat, at last, "had not a bale of cotton on board, nor did I hear it named more than twice in thirty-six hours...I had a pretty tolerable night's sleep, though I dreamed of cotton."[9] [Footnote 9: _Georgia Courier_ (Augusta, Ga.), Oct.

11, 1827, reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 283-289.] This obsession was not without its undertone of disquiet.