THE INTRODUCTION OF COTTON AND SUGAR The decade following the peace of 1783 brought depression in all the plantation districts.

The tobacco industry, upon which half of the Southern people depended in greater or less degree, was entering upon a half century of such wellnigh constant low prices that the opening of each new tract for its culture was offset by the abandonment of an old one, and the export remained stationary at a little less than half a million hogsheads.

Indigo production was decadent; and rice culture was in painful transition to the new tide-flow system.

Slave prices everywhere, like those of most other investments, were declining in so disquieting a manner that as late as the end of 1794 George Washington advised a friend to convert his slaves into other forms of property, and said on his own account: "Were it not that I am principled against selling negroes, as you would cattle in a market, I would not in twelve months hence be possessed of a single one as a slave.
I shall be happily mistaken if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ere many years have passed over our heads."[1] But at that very time the addition of cotton and sugar to the American staples was on the point of transforming the slaveholders' prospects.
[Footnote 1: New York Public Library _Bulletin_, 1898, pp.

14, 15.] For centuries cotton had been among the world's materials for cloth, though the dearth of supply kept it in smaller use than wool or flax.