The rich expanses of the Southwest, he thought, could meet the whole world's demand at a cost of less than five cents a pound, for the planters there could produce two thousand pounds of lint per hand while those in the Piedmont could not exceed an average of twelve hundred pounds.

This margin of difference would deprive the slaves of their value in South Carolina and cause their owners to send them West, unless the local system of industry should be successfully revolutionized.
The remedies he proposed were the fertilization of the soil, the diversification of crops, the promotion of commerce, and the large development of cotton manufacturing.[21] [Footnote 16: Described in 1846 in the _American Agriculturist_, VI, 113, 114.] [Footnote 17: MS.

diary, April 13 to May 14, 1838, in Hammond papers, Library of Congress.] [Footnote 18: Letters of Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, Jan.

27 and Mch.
9, 1841.

Hammond's MS.