There are few at the North who appreciate the sacrifice which attends
this diversion, or the extent of the pressure which led to this
disastrous change.
In Illinois, Iowa, or Indiana, the farmer can grow rich while selling
his corn for ten cents per bushel, and it is now common for a man and a
boy to cultivate a hundred acres and to gather five thousand bushels in
a single season. The South does not possess the rich and exhaustless
soil of the prairies, which for half a century will yield without return
successive and luxuriant crops of corn. Its soil is generally light and
easily exhausted, and is tilled by the rude and unwilling labor of the
slave. The census apprises us that its average crop of corn is but
fifteen bushels to the acre, in place of fifty to sixty in Illinois, and
even this depends in part on guano or artificial stimulants. The average
yield of wheat south of Tennessee is but six bushels to the acre, in
place of twenty to forty in Ohio. The Southern planters, who can sell
cotton with profit at ten cents per pound, cannot produce corn for less
than one dollar per bushel, or tenfold the cost in the West, and in past
years a dollar has been the customary price from North Carolina to
Texas.
Before the war, the cotton-crop of the South had risen to five millions
of bales; but now four-fifths of the land in cultivation is devoted to
corn and grain.
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