Planters also standardized many of the routines and tasks associated with cotton production. In the early years, slaves used their feet or a wooden tamper to stuff cotton into bags of different sizes. In 1779, a lever press was invented in Mississippi that produced neat, square bales. By the mid-nineteenth century, large plantations with the latest equipment packed anywhere from 40 to 50 bales per day.26
But the rise of the Cotton Belt—the name for the vast stretch of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana devoted to the crop—rested on more than simply climate and efficient production. By 1800, cotton had spread very little from its initial coastal confines, blocked in large part by the presence of 125,000 Indians who still occupied land east of the Mississippi. This fact led many of the South’s leading planters to push for their removal. European and American traders had since the late eighteenth century helped to weaken these southern tribes, introducing disease, liquor, and a market for deerskins—undermining their subsistence economies. In the quarter-century following 1814, Andrew Jackson delivered the finishing blow. Jackson, in his capacity first as military officer and later as president, masterminded a systematic removal campaign. The treaties he had written up between 1814 and 1824 alone aided the United States in acquiring three-fourths of Alabama, a third of Tennessee, and a fifth of Mississippi and Georgia.
“IN THE COTTON FIELD”
The early-nineteenth-century introduction of Mexican cotton, with its large bolls, vastly increased the amount of crop a slave could pick in a day. (Library of Congress)
Jackson succeeded in transforming the communally held lands of the southern tribes into private property available for sale. “No one will exert himself to procure the comforts of life,” Secretary of War William Crawford explained in 1816, “unless his right to enjoy them is exclusive.” By 1844, only a few thousand Indians remained east of the Mississippi and even they had, in large measure, been forced to accept life under a society based on private property. In the process, they abandoned the communal obligations toward the environment that once undergirded their culture. By the 1840s, the few remaining native people found themselves surrounded by profit-maximizing cotton growers. Unlike their Native American predecessors, the white planters were content to farm hillsides, a trend that over time led to an increase in soil erosion.27
Southern whites intent on growing cotton streamed into Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee in the 1820s and 1830s, but whether they were pushed or pulled westward defies an easy answer. Clearly, the superior soils available in parts of what was once the nation’s old Southwest attracted the attention of settlers. Some people may have abandoned perfectly adequate farmland in search of the greater returns to be found in the Black Belt, a land of dark, fertile soil extending from central Alabama northwest into Mississippi. But far more evidence suggests that between 1780 and 1840, many cotton planters were pushed into such regions by the growing problem of soil depletion.
Buoyed by sharply higher cotton prices, especially in the 1810s, planters in the eastern parts of Georgia and South Carolina became mired in a profit-driven cycle of clearing and land abandonment that left the landscape in a state of disarray. “Tens of thousands of acres of once productive lands are now reduced to the maximum of sterility,” wrote one resident of South Carolina’s Piedmont in the 1850s. “Water-worn, gullied old fields everywhere meet the eye.” In the Georgia Piedmont, some of the gullies on old cotton lands extended 150 feet in depth.28
Some abolitionists attributed the South’s problem with soil depletion to slavery, arguing that bondsmen had little motivation to sustain the fertility of the land. In the period leading up to 1860, the Piedmont’s slave population density correlated nicely with the worst areas of soil erosion. But the problem, according to geographer Stanley Trimble, stemmed not from slavery as much as from single-crop agriculture and the lack of a “land-ethic” among profit-driven southern planters.29
It seems unlikely that slavery alone was to blame for the depletion of southern soils, if for no other reason than that family farms in the North also severely depleted the soil. But slavery did create a context for soil exhaustion to take place. With slaves themselves (a form of personal property) constituting over half of the agricultural wealth of the cotton South, land took on secondary importance to planters. Slavery and soil erosion correlated: Planters had few incentives to maintain the fertility of the land when they could just as easily head off toward fresh soil, with their most valuable personal property (their slaves) in tow.30
Thus planters failed miserably when it came to maintaining the land’s fertility. Very little nutrient-rich manure made it back to the soil for two reasons. First, it required a significant amount of labor to stockpile and spread over the fields. One source summarized the dilemma confronting planters by noting that northern farmers “can well afford to fertilize their little spots of ten or a dozen acres; but a Southern plantation of 500 or 600 acres in cultivation would require all the manure in the parish and all the force to do it justice.”31
Second, there was not much manure to spread around in any case. As South Carolina state geologist Oscar Lieber put it in 1856, “no manure worth mentioning is saved under the present system.” The shortage resulted from a combination of climate, soil, and epidemiological conditions. Unlike the North, the South was not a good environment for growing grass. And without it, there was little feed for cattle, a major source of manure. Acidic soil, combined with the persistent threat of rain at precisely the point in time when fodder crops such as timothy and red clover needed to be cut, made raising grass difficult. Even worse, a parasitic animal infection (babesiosis) spread by ticks further dampened southern cattle-raising prospects. With labor dear and the supply of livestock limited, manure played a minimal role in antebellum southern agriculture.32
For a brief period, southern planters had high hopes for Peruvian guano, a fertilizer made up of bird droppings found in various coastal reaches of South America. In the 1850s, declining agricultural prospects and high guano prices caused southern farmers to clamor for federal intervention. It is hard to imagine a U.S. president being preoccupied with bird feces, but in 1850 Millard Fillmore made it a subject of his state of the union address. Six years later, Congress passed legislation allowing anyone who discovered the much-sought-after excrement on an unclaimed island or rock, anywhere in the world, to receive government protection of the claim. The legislation set off a veritable bird-droppings rush, with Americans laying claim to some 59 rocks and islands in the Caribbean and Pacific in the seven years following the act’s passage. But in the end, guano failed to rescue the South from soil degradation. Guano imports peaked in 1854 and then experienced a rapid decline due to the expense of the material combined with the massive quantities needed to revitalize exhausted cotton fields.33
Slavery, monoculture, climate—all these factors help explain why soil exhaustion threatened southern agriculture in the period before 1840. But to some extent, the focus on cotton at least is misplaced. Cotton was not particularly demanding of soil nutrients, certainly not when compared with corn. By the 1840s, as the North moved toward a more diversified diet (aided by an integrated transportation system), corn remained a mainstay of southern cuisine. Corn is a very versatile crop that can flourish in a variety of different settings. It meshed well with cotton, requiring little care during the season when the cash crop needed harvesting and making up as much as 40 to 50 percent of a plantation’s farm value. Its only drawback was that it made great demands on the soil, requiring as many as 13 nutrients to thrive. Planting so much of it thus only added to the South’s soil woes.
By the 1840s, the South may even have been shedding its commitment to the single-crop cultivation of cotton. Planters began to devote just two-thirds of their land to cotton and a third to corn and cowpeas, the latter a nitrogen-fixing leguminous plant used to maintain soil fertility. When the cotton lands declined after a couple of years, planters shifted the crop to the soil improved by the
peas. This seemingly mundane shift in crop choice, more than the Peruvian guano craze, may have briefly liberated the South from the vicious cycle of land abuse that prevailed for most of the period leading up to the Civil War.34
CONCLUSION
What is the relationship between slavery and the environment? One does not have to be a Confederate sympathizer to observe that, historically speaking, slavery has not flourished in very cold climates. There is nothing the least bit natural about slave labor, but in the antebellum South, at least, it owed its rise to a climate that favored the growth of short-staple cotton. The development of the Cotton Belt rested on a set of climatic conditions; without them it is hard to imagine slavery taking on the role that it did in southern political culture.
If nature shaped the evolution of slavery, the reverse proposition—that the slave system had significant environmental implications—seems even more persuasive. Land played a secondary role in a society in which so much wealth remained tied up in owning and trading slaves. It followed that little incentive existed for planters to maintain soil fertility, especially when an expanse of fertile land was always available further west. Thus the stage was set for the brutal cycle of clearing, ecological degradation, and eventual abandonment that characterized southern agriculture in the 60 years after 1780.
Slavery created favorable conditions for this abusive pattern of land use to emerge. But it was the market orientation of planters, especially the great profits that could be made by growing cotton, that drove them forth on a reckless tear through the land, leaving a trail of gullies to show for their efforts. In this respect, the South and the North were not all that dissimilar. In both regions, agriculture answered to a higher force, be it the price of wood, furs, tobacco, or cotton. Southern land and soil came to be looked upon less as a meal ticket and more as a resource organized around the profit motive, with the planter elite content, some exceptions aside, to mortgage Dixie’s ecological future.
In the end, however, the South’s ultimate ecological legacy rested on its path-breaking role in the emergence of specialized, one-crop agriculture. The commercial farming of staples split production off from consumption, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the end users of these commodities to grasp the enormous social and environmental costs involved in devoting vast areas to growing a single set of plants. Here the southern states did diverge from the northern ones. By focusing so intensively on producing tobacco, rice, and ultimately cotton, the region forged a new, more modern relationship with the land the consequences of which are still felt today.
6
THE GREAT FOOD FIGHT
Spring 1865 brought misery and death to the beleaguered Confederacy. All that remained of the formerly invincible Army of Northern Virginia was 55,000 desperate and starving troops, men battered by four years of war, their pride melting before thoughts of desertion. The indignities of war mounted. In April, the men trudged toward Amelia Courthouse, Virginia, driven on by the prospect of a rendezvous with rations arriving by train. But a snafu caused ammunition to be delivered mistakenly. As the men dragged themselves forward, they were reduced to eating horse feed—the corn on the cob commonly fed the animals. “Two ears were issued to each man,” one soldier wrote. “It was parched in the coals, mixed with salt, stored in the pockets, and eaten on the road. Chewing the corn was hard work. It made the jaws ache and the gums and teeth so sore as to cause unendurable pain.” Thus it was that one of the first things Gen. Ulysses S. Grant did after the South surrendered was send three days of rations to the former Confederate rebels, taking the edge off their hunger and welcoming them back into the United States.1
The Civil War interrupted many of the normal routines of daily existence. But one basic fact of life remained the same: The nation’s citizens, like all human beings, still had to figure out how to feed themselves and the animals on which they had come to depend. The eternal quest to survive biologically, to derive the requisite number of calories from food, was as relevant for soldiers on the battlefield as it was for plantation slaves and factory workers. Biological existence, in turn, depended on agriculture, on the land, soil, weather, and countless other natural factors that went into getting the earth to yield fruit. Even the fate of military actions sometimes hinged on forces beyond human control. Campaigns bogged down along mud roads made impassable by winter precipitation. In one case, rain led a Union commander to call off an assault altogether. Nature did not take a vacation when the nation—wrenched apart by two vastly different political frameworks, one based on free labor, the other on slavery—went to war.
MUD WRESTLING
“After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.”2 Those were the words of Gen. Robert E. Lee, summing up the reasons behind the South’s defeat. With 22 million people to the Confederacy’s nine million, with 70 percent of the nation’s railroad mileage, plus 110,000 factories (to the South’s 18,000) producing nearly all of the firearms available in the country, it may well have seemed predestined that the North, with moral reason on its side to boot, won the war. But in 1861, as the first shots went off, the outcome seemed far less certain.
At the start, the South had a number of advantages over the North. It was no secret that the Confederate troops retained a significant edge during the early years of the war in terms of horsemanship, a benefit bestowed on them at least in part by climate, specifically the mild winters that allowed them to spend nearly the entire year outside practicing their skills while their adversaries kept warm by the fire. One British observer went so far as to reckon that the Yankee soldiers could “scarcely sit their horses even when trotting.”3
The South, it must also be remembered, had the home-field advantage. Confederate troops fought a defensive war on their own territory, a land where many soldiers had been born and raised. Fighting on their home turf also allowed the southern forces to conduct maneuvers in places within easy reach of ration and ammunition stockpiles. Union soldiers, in contrast, were forced to carry what they needed with them. Imagine, for a moment, the logistical problems faced by the northern forces. Every 100,000 troops required each day no less than 600 tons of supplies, 2,500 supply wagons, and some 35,000 draft animals, horses and mules that themselves, it bears noting, required feed and forage if they were not to be starved and worn down by the effort of hauling all that matériel.4
As the North was soon to learn, the southern rebels also had a secret weapon in store: the environmental conditions that made travel arduous, especially in the winter. Unlike in the North, the ground froze to only a shallow depth south of the Mason-Dixon line. Poorly drained and consisting of soil composed largely of red clay (at least in Virginia, where much of the fighting went on), southern roads turned into quagmires when it rained, leaving Union supply trains to slog through muck that at times buried mules up to their ears.
No one knew better the problems involved in transporting all that Union food and equipment over roads of such questionable integrity than Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, whose failures are legendary among Civil War buffs. In January 1863, still smarting from the slaughter his troops took at Fredericksburg late the year before, Burnside drew up a plan to cross Virginia’s Rappahannock River in an attempt to outflank Lee’s army. Dry weather, unusual for that time of year, gave Burnside reason to feel hopeful. On January 20, 1863, Burnside and his men moved out. By dusk, however, it was raining. For the next 30 hours rain pummeled the region, turning the roads to mush. “The mud is not simply on the surface, but penetrates the ground to a great depth,” wrote the Union officer Regis de Trobriand. “It appears as though the water, after passing through a first bed of clay, soaked into some kind of earth without any consistency. As soon as the hardened crust on the surface is softened, everything is buried in a sticky paste mixed with liquid mud, in which, with my own eyes, I have seen teams of mules buried.” As de Trobriand concluded: “Th
e powers of heaven and earth were against us.”5
Muck became public enemy number one for the Union forces, causing some to discourse on the particular perils of the mire found in Thomas Jefferson’s home state. “Virginia mud,” a northern officer pointed out, “is a clay of reddish color and sticky consistency which does not appear to soak water, or mingle with it, but simply to hold it, becoming softer and softer.” As they watched the northern forces struggle through the slop that winter day in 1863, Confederate soldiers smirked and held up signs that read “Burnside Stuck in the Mud” and “This Way to Richmond.”6
Calling attention to the poor weather and soil conditions in the upper reaches of the South, the New York Evening Post opined that “operations in a country and climate like Virginia are more destructive and wasteful than advantageous to an invading force.”7 The disaster along the Rappahannock would eventually be dubbed the so-called Mud March. The North had learned a lesson: Never again would the Union launch a major military campaign in Virginia during the wintertime.
UNION WAGON TRAIN
The massive supply trains required by northern forces often fell prey to the South’s bad roads and inclement weather conditions. (Chicago Historical Society)
Burnside’s miscalculation in the Mud March led President Lincoln to remove him from his post. His replacement, Gen. Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker, however, proved even less capable of leading the North to victory. In May 1863, Hooker went down to defeat in Chancellorsville, Virginia, giving the Confederacy one of its greatest victories. But the South’s military fortunes would soon change. No longer able to feed his army positioned on the Rappahannock—his men reduced that spring to collecting wild onions and sassafras buds to survive—Lee decided to invade Pennsylvania, where he hoped to find more abundant provisions while delivering a major blow to the Union. On July 3, 1863, however, Lee lost the battle of Gettysburg. The very next day, news spread that Grant and his troops had held out and snatched a victory at Vicksburg, Mississippi.
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