Both the North and the South lived and died by the market, by cash-crop farming. The form such agriculture took in the southern states, however, made the region ill equipped to fight a war, especially after the imposition of the Union’s naval blockade. As it turned out, the planters played a role in their own demise—King Cotton coming back to bite them in the end.
7
EXTRACTING THE NEW SOUTH
With the war at an end, one captain in the Confederate army returned home to his father’s plantation. He was in for a rude awakening. “Our negroes are living in great comfort,” he wrote. “They were delighted to see me with overflowing affection. They waited on me as before, gave me breakfast, splendid dinners, etc. But they firmly and respectfully informed me: ‘We own this land now. Put it out of your head that it will ever be yours again.’”1
As events unfolded, the captain had less to fear than he thought. The struggle over slavery had ended, only to be replaced by a new conflict over who would control the political and economic destiny of the South, a battle that the former masters and their descendants would decisively win. As far as the land itself was concerned, however, neither the freedmen nor the whites would be completely in charge of their fate.
It is no doubt one of history’s great ironies that a culture that once coerced an entire group of people into a state of severe dependency later found itself reduced to semicolonial status, its resources ravaged by outsiders. The South emerged from the war—its fields and livestock plundered, its forests cut down for firewood and barrack timber—as an economically crippled region and persisted that way for at least the next half century. The cotton monoculture, which had gained a strong foothold in the region during the antebellum period, advanced across the landscape at a pace that would have challenged even the most accomplished Confederate cavalryman. In its wake, it left the land scarred, its people, black and white farmers alike, destitute and more dependent on outside sources of food as well as capital. As the region descended into poverty, people from outside the region—northern capitalists, midwestern lumbermen, and British financiers—siphoned off its natural wealth, especially its forests and minerals. The ecological origins of the New South that grew up on the ashes of war centered squarely on the extraction of resources for the benefit of the greater national economy. Blacks were set free in a region enslaved.
FAST FOOD FARMING
King Cotton emerged from the war more imperious and despotic than ever before. As the single most important cash crop in the postbellum South, the staple soared in importance, turning autumn in the stretch from South Carolina to east Texas into a sea of white that drifted off toward the horizon. Like addicts unable to control themselves, Southern farmers grew so much cotton that they continued to undercut their ability to feed themselves. By 1880, per capita corn and hog production in the Deep South plummeted to nearly half of 1860 levels, forcing farmers to import food from the Midwest. Wisconsin flour, Chicago bacon, Indiana hay—all flowed in to shore up the region’s food deficit, when in fact, as one observer noted, these items could have been grown in Dixie “at nothing a ton.”2
COTTON PRODUCTION, 1859 AND 1899
Although cotton was a major crop in the pre–Civil War South, it was even more widely grown in the post-bellum period. (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Atlas of American Agriculture [Washington, DC: GPO, 1918])
At one level, the attraction of cotton is easy to understand. The economic profit from planting was simply far greater than for any other grain crop. With its acid soil conditions and heavy rainfall, the South, unlike the temperate northern states, was not well suited to raising grains and grasses. Add to this the animal parasites that dragged down livestock prospects, and the magnetism of cotton becomes easier to comprehend.
Of course favorable market conditions and this same ecological context had existed in the antebellum South. And yet, despite the extraordinary importance of cotton in the prewar South, it came nowhere near rivaling the crop’s incredible dominance in the postbellum era. What happened? Two main factors—the rise of sharecropping and the growing commercialization of farming—explain cotton’s eventual chokehold on the region.
Sharecropping developed as blacks were denied the right to own land in the aftermath of the Civil War. By 1868, the same white planter class that controlled the land in the antebellum period continued to retain its title to the region’s most valuable resource, only now the slaves had been set free and planters could no longer count on their labor. This proved especially problematic for those who raised cotton because the crop must be picked in a timely way or it can be seriously damaged by rainfall. Freed from their chains, blacks were known to leave planters in the lurch, moving on smack in the middle of the cotton-picking season. Sharecropping helped to resolve this problem by tying laborers to the land for a specified period of time. Planters divided their plantations into 30- to 50-acre farms and rented them out to freedmen, providing tenants with land, seed, and the necessary tools and, in return, taking half the share of the crop at harvest. The arrangement appealed to planters and also to freedmen who, unable to buy land on their own, found that sharecropping at least gave them an opportunity to get out from under the thumb of white supervision. Landlords, however, did reserve the right to dictate the crop mix to tenants; with their own personal fortunes tied to what the sharecropper raised, logic led them to choose cotton because it was more profitable per acre than any other crop.3
Sharecropping and the cotton monoculture went hand in hand with the increasing commercialization of farming, spurred by the spread of railroads and merchants. In the 1870s, railroads began laying track in the Georgia Up Country, tying this region more closely to markets in the North. With the railroads in place, merchants, who bought locally grown cotton and sold goods on credit, were not far behind. Under crop lien laws, passed in the 1870s, merchants loaned farmers money with a future crop as collateral. For obvious reasons, they insisted that farmers plant cotton. “If I say ‘plant cotton’ they plant cotton,” one merchant was reputed to have said. With the system stacked in cotton’s favor, sharecroppers tripped over each other as they trundled off to their fields to plant more. But the more they planted, the less food they produced on their own. Hence the more they had to turn to stores for supplies, drawing them into a vicious cycle of indebtedness.4
Nothing was more critical to cotton growing under the sharecropping system than fertilizer. Landlords and renters alike had little incentive to invest in the long-term health of their land and thus little interest in crop rotation or manuring, practices designed to ward off soil depletion. Current yields were what mattered most to them, with the land simply a vehicle for raising cotton for cash. Such present-mindedness encouraged farmers to mine the soil for all that it was worth, using fertilizer to pump up yields in the short run.5
Beginning in 1867, with the establishment of large phosphate mines in South Carolina, commercial fertilizer use boomed. Much of the soil in Georgia and South Carolina suffered from a natural deficiency in phosphorous, a problem the fertilizer addressed with a great deal of initial success. Cotton yields soared as this powerful chemical input bolstered the fertility of the soil. Fertilizer also sped up crop growth, causing cotton to mature more quickly and uniformly. The speedup shortened the cotton harvest to as little as five weeks and lowered the threat posed by rain or frost. Given the virtues of fertilizer and its pivotal role in the cotton monoculture under the sharecropping system, it is perhaps not surprising to find that the South consumed a larger percentage of it (on a per acre basis) than any other region in the nation.6
SOIL EROSION
Increasing fertilizer use promoted the constant planting of cotton, which eventually took its toll on the land. The gullies shown here were on a farm in North Carolina. (Library of Congress)
A mix of inorganic chemicals was pumped into ecosystems across the South, ratcheting up what the soil would yield. No longer self-contained entities sustained by their own nutrient cycle, southern farm
s increasingly became receptacles for various outside inputs in the quest for more cotton. For a time, phosphorous-based fertilizer worked, but what the cotton crop needed most was nitrogen, a chemical not yet incorporated into plant food mixtures. Worse still, as sharecroppers fell further into debt, they bought greater amounts of commercial fertilizer from merchants on credit in an effort to boost output and generate the cash to pay off their loans—a self-defeating process that pushed the soil to its ultimate limit. “Who said fertilizer? Well, that’s just it. Every farmer says it, every tenant says it, every merchant says it, and even the bankers must speak of it at times,” one observer noted. “The trouble is that in times past the easy purchase and use of fertilizer has seemed to many of our Southern farmers a short cut to prosperity, a royal road to good crops of cotton year after year. The result has been that their lands have been cultivated clean year after year, their fertility has been exhausted.” While some areas turned to more ecologically stable crop rotation practices, much of Georgia and South Carolina, as well as portions of Alabama and Mississippi, fell prey to the fertilizer craze. The trend made the late nineteenth century the worst period for soil erosion in the South’s entire history.7
Single-crop farming is always a perilous enterprise, a point that became apparent when farmers found their soil woes compounded by the arrival of an insect with a taste for cotton. In 1892, the boll weevil, a small insect whose larva fed on the cotton boll, made its way out of Mexico into Texas. Eastward it marched, reaching Louisiana in 1904, crossing the Mississippi five years later, and arriving in South Carolina by 1917. The pest left destruction in its wake, dramatically reducing cotton yields just about everywhere it went. In Greene County, Georgia, farmers picked 11,854 bales of cotton in 1916, the year the boll weevil first arrived. Six years later, the county produced a minuscule 333 bales.8
The weevil may well have played a role in the great exodus of blacks to the North that began in 1910—one of the largest migrations in the history of the world. Between 1910 and 1920, it is estimated that as many as 500,000 African Americans left the South for northern cities. Many factors were at work to entice blacks to leave their rural homes, including the higher wages that came with the tightening of the labor market during World War I as well as the South’s failure to provide blacks with the social and political equality they deserved. But changes in the land also drove blacks North. In the early 1910s, one woman from Mississippi spoke of a “general belief [among blacks] that God had cursed the land.” The boll weevil was especially devastating for black tenant farmers. Under the thumb of creditors who demanded cotton, black tenants had little say over the mix of crops they planted. But more than just the weevil caused blacks to wonder whether God was speaking up. Devastating flooding along the lower Mississippi River in 1912, made worse by the policy of building levees, broke records on nearly all of the river gauges set up to measure water heights between Cairo, Illinois, and the Gulf of Mexico. It seems fair to say that the pull of higher northern wages combined then with various setbacks on the land and inequality to cause blacks to flee.9
Whatever the weevil’s role in African American history, it had at least two other consequences. First, it drove farmers to use even more fertilizer to help the cotton crop mature before the weevil attacked it, solidifying the shift away from organic farming. And second, the insect caused cotton yields to decline precipitously. The number of acres devoted to cotton in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) declined an average of 27 percent when figures are compiled for the four years immediately before and after the infestation. The weevil broke cotton’s grip on the region, heralding the move to a more diversified form of agriculture centered on corn, peanuts, and hogs. Some farmers even went so far as to thank the weevil for creating a way out of one-crop farming. Citizens in Enterprise, Alabama, actually erected a statue in honor of the bug, one of the more curious national monuments to dot the American landscape, a symbol for what it took—outright calamity—to force southerners to abandon their single-minded and ill-fated relationship with the land.10
Blacks too sometimes welcomed the weevil as a way of breaking the grip that cotton and financial dependence on merchants had on their lives. Blues singers immortalized the insect, most famously in this song by Huddie Ledbetter (Led-belly), who was born in 1888 in Shiloh, Louisiana.
First time I seen the boll weevil, he was sitting on a square.
Next time I seen a boll weevil, he had his whole family there.
He’s a looking for a home.
He’s a looking for a home.
The old lady said to the old man, “I’ve been trying my level best
Keep these boll weevils out of my brand new cotton dress.
It’s full of holes.
And it’s full of holes.”
The old man said to the old lady, “What do you think of that?
I got one of the boll weevils out of my brand new Stetson hat,
And it’s full of holes.
And it’s full of holes.”
Now the farmer said to the merchant, “I never made but one bale.
Before I let you have that last one, I will suffer and die in jail.
And I will have a home.
And I will have a home.”11
OPEN AND SHUT RANGE
If cotton’s stranglehold impoverished the ecology of the South, it also helped to drive many people deeper into poverty as well. In the postbellum period, rural population densities, backed by relatively high fertility rates, rose to the point where in 1930 the region was twice as thickly settled as the North. Farm size, meanwhile, continued a relentless downward trend. Rural southerners sunk deeper into poverty as small farm size combined with low production levels to push them to the edge of financial calamity. In 1880, federal census takers described black farmers as “sometimes without bread for their families.” “Many are in a worse [economic] condition than they were during slavery.” As their diet declined, poor southerners, both black and white, did what they had long been accustomed to doing: They turned to the region’s common lands—unenclosed woods and pastures—taking game, fishing, and turning out whatever few hogs and cattle they had to find forage. Only now with pressure on the South’s common resources more intense than ever—the product of increased sport and market hunting—many white landlords, merchants, and planters, with the law as their weapon, sought to prohibit the free taking of game by sealing off the range.12
In the antebellum period, slaves, especially those on tidewater plantations, headed for rivers and forests to procure food and supplement their rations. “My old daddy,” Louisa Adams of North Carolina recollected, “partly raised his chilluns on game. He caught rabbits, coons an’ possums. He would work all day and hunt at night.” Slaves also hunted and fished for the sport of it, these being among the few recreational activities afforded them. In the woods of the South Carolina Low Country, slaves hunted deer, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, bears, ducks, turkeys, pigeons, and other animals. “Possum and squirrel all we could get,” recalled one slave. “Wild turkey, possum. Don’t bother with no coon much.” In 1831, a visitor from the North observed, “The blacks are never better pleased than when they are hunting in the woods; and it is seldom that they have not in the larder the flesh of a raccoon or opossum.” In the Georgia Low Country almost half of the slaves’ meat, it is estimated, came from game and fish.13
Slaves also counted on the woods as a source of fodder for their livestock. Curious as it may sound, although themselves owned by others, slaves possessed property, including animals like cattle and hogs. One slave, described by a white planter as “more like a free man than any slave,” claimed in the mid-nineteenth century to have had 26 pigs, 16 sheep, and 8 cows.14
It was to the pine forests and patches of cane commonly found along streams that slaves and whites alike went to run their hogs and cattle. “We raise our hogs by allowing them to range in our woods, where they get fat in the autumn on acorns,” exp
lained one resident of the South Carolina Piedmont. Cattle were raised “with so little care, that it would be a shame to charge anything for their keep up to three years old.” The open range thrived in the South in large part because the mild winters allowed herders to leave their stock on the range all year round (in the North, farmers had to bring in the animals to prevent them from freezing to death and thus barn size limited the number of animals that could be left free to roam the common lands).15
“The citizens of this county have and always have had the legal, moral, and Bible right to let their stock … run at large,” declared one Georgia Piedmont farmer in the 1880s. Private property in land existed of course in the South from the colonial period forward. But the customary right to use unimproved land for hunting and grazing coexisted with private landownership. The law itself sanctioned the customary practice of grazing livestock in unfenced areas, regardless of who the “owner” of the land might be. So-called fence laws dating from the colonial period put the burden on farmers to enclose their crops with adequate fences, or risk bearing responsibility for any damage roving livestock caused. Early laws prescribing a death sentence for livestock theft were later reduced in severity when lawmakers realized that the customary practice of running cattle and other animals on the commons made it very hard to determine who owned a particular animal. The customary right to use the commons for a variety of subsistence activities persisted in the South until shortly after the Civil War. As the Virginia legislature put it: “Many poor persons have derived advantage from grazing their stock on the commons and unenclosed lands, and to whom the obligation to confine them, or a liability to damages if not confined, would operate as a great hardship.”16
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