The Old Southwest attracted thousands of settlers in the 1820s and 1830s with its low land prices and suitability for cotton production. Many of the settlers migrated from a. Massachusetts to escape the dreary textile mills and the pollution of industrialization. b. Virginia and the Carolinas due to the exhaustion of the land from years of tobacco cultivation. c. Kentucky to escape the system of slavery and start anew as free blacks. d. Ohio and Pennsylvania as a downturn in steel manufacturing meant a massive loss of jobs. e. Tennessee to start large families on enormous tracts of land they had been granted for free.