The fact of constant emigration from slave states is also shown by such extracts from papers as the following, from the Raleigh (N. C.) Register, quoted in the columns of the National Era:
THEY WILL LEAVE NORTH CAROLINA.
Our attention was arrested, on Saturday last, by quite a long train of wagons, winding through our streets, which, upon inquiry, we found to belong to a party emigrating from Wayne county, in this state, to the “far West.” This is but a repetition of many similar scenes that we and others have witnessed during the past few years; and such spectacles will be still more frequently witnessed, unless something is done to retrieve our fallen fortunes at home.
If there be any one “consummation devoutly to be wished” in our policy, it is that our young men should remain at home, and not abandon their native state. From the early settlement of North Carolina, the great drain upon her prosperity has been the spirit of emigration, which has so prejudicially affected all the states of the South. Her sons, hitherto neglected (if we must say it) by an un-parental government, have wended their way, by hundreds upon hundreds, from the land of their fathers,—that land, too, to make it a paradise, wanting nothing but a market,—to bury their bones in the land of strangers. We firmly believe that this emigration is caused by the laggard policy of our people on the subject of internal improvement, for man is not prone by nature to desert the home of his affections.
The editor of the Era also quotes the following from the Greensboro (Ala.) Beacon:
“An unusually large number of movers have passed through this village, within the past two or three weeks. On one day of last week, upwards of thirty wagons and other vehicles belonging to emigrants, mostly from Georgia and South Carolina, passed through on their way, most of them bound to Texas and Arkansas.”
This tide of emigration does not emanate from an overflowing population. Very far from it. Rather it marks an abandonment of a soil which, exhausted by injudicious culture, will no longer repay the labor of tillage. The emigrant, turning his back upon the homes of his childhood, leaves a desolate region, it may be, and finds that he can indulge in his feelings of local attachment only at the risk of starvation.
How are the older states of the South to keep their population? We say nothing of an increase, but how are they to hold their own? It is useless to talk about strict construction, state rights, or Wilmot Provisos. Of what avail can such things be to a sterile desert, upon which people cannot subsist?
In the columns of the National Era, Oct. 2, 1851, also is the following article, by its editor:
STAND YOUR GROUND.