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Chapter 7 POST-CIVIL WAR SOUTHERN AGRICULTURE

       Jeannie Whayne

      The survival of the plantation system and the emergence of sharecropping are the most important economic factors effecting the South’s agricultural sector in the post-Civil War period. Not only did the continuance of plantation agriculture impact African American freedmen, but it also proved detrimental to the economic future of South as a whole. As the national Republican Party turned its attention away from the process of Reconstruction in the South and toward its second industrial revolution, they left freedmen at the mercy of the very southern elite that had taken the South into rebellion and controlled the region’s Democratic Party apparatus. It also failed to promote the interests of non-plantation sector white farmers and hobbled planters with an institution—the plantation—that remained locked in the past. Three important and consistent themes run through the history of southern agriculture after the Civil War: race and the transformation of the labor system, from slavery to sharecropping to wage labor; environmental concerns, some of them of the South’s own making; and the growing role of the federal government, especially through the activities of the Cooperative Extension Service.

      The return of the Confederate elite to power and the restoration of plantation agriculture had their origins in federal policies implemented in captured southern territory during the Civil War. Federal policies were designed to accomplish two things: put self-freed people to work and salvage the cotton economy. Although the idea of furnishing freedmen with “40 acres and a mule” resonated with a few abolitionists and military commanders, northern financiers with an interest in the cotton market feared that an independent yeomanry of freed African Americans would not sustain the cotton economy, and the federal government balked at the notion that property could be seized from citizens. Thus, the federal government sponsored a contract labor system during and immediately following the war, and a new agency created in 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau—attempted to represent their interests by monitoring contracts. But Freedmen’s Bureau officials represented the interests of freedmen at their own peril, and many were complicit in practices that returned freedmen to another kind of slavery (Rose 1964; Daniel 1972; Foner 1988 ; Hahn 2003).

However, neither planters nor freedmen were satisfied with the contract labor system. After a spike in the market price of cotton right after the war, the prices declined, leaving planters with too little cash to pay wages. Freed-people, moreover, understandably resented the necessity of working gang labor, which was too reminiscent of slavery. The sharecropping system allowed them to move away from the old slave quarters and onto 25–30-acre parcels. Historians Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch argue that the arrangement might have been beneficial to freed-people but for the emergence of the commissary system (Ransom and Sutch 1977). Sharecroppers, paid only when the crop was harvested, needed to feed and clothe themselves in the period between harvests and thus found it necessary to secure “advances” from a merchant and, increasingly, from plantation commissaries. Southern legislatures enacted a series of laws that circumscribed black mobility by making it illegal to leave the employment of a planter to whom a sharecropper owed money (Daniel 1972; Mandle 1978; Woodman 1995). A system of debt peonage developed and by the early twentieth century the federal government—albeit briefly—pursued prosecutions of some planters for violation of an 1867 law against debt peonage. That law implicitly recognized the insufficiency of the 13th Amendment in New Mexico where debt peonage involving Native Americans and Hispanics continued to exist (Kiser 2016). It is ironic, then, that a law passed in 1867 to free Native Americans and Hispanics of peonage in the territory of New Mexico was not used on behalf of African Americans until the early twentieth century.

      Although debt peonage was a significant problem, African Americans were not fully immobilized by various strategies used by planters to keep them in place (Wright 1986). Despite legislative statutes and extralegal attempts to limit the options of African Americans, certain factors mitigated against fully immobilizing black farm labor: the size of the farm or plantation and the environmental health of the operation. Large operators with a strict managerial system could better dominate their workers than smaller farmers. And planters and farmers on lands that were exhausted by overuse might take lands out of production and lessen their labor needs. In the Georgia piedmont, for example, as land gave way to gullies, plantations and farms reduced cultivated acreage, and sharecroppers there were enticed by agents to the newly opened cotton areas along the Mississippi River Valley. Some found success there, but they were increasingly faced with the same constraints they faced in the southeastern cotton growing areas (Whayne 1996, 2011; Woodruff 2003; Sutter 2015). Some moved further west to Kansas in the hope of homesteading and others “back to Africa” in the late nineteenth century (Barnes 2004).

      Aside from creating another kind of slavery on southern plantations, the survival of the plantation insured that planters would continue to intensively cultivate tobacco, rice, and cotton. Cotton in particular was highly profitable in the late antebellum period and one of the primary reasons plantations spread westward, but new international competitors arose during the war and prices never fully recovered their prewar levels. Lacking 20-20 foresight, planters became locked into the cotton market not only by their belief that better days would return but also by the way they financed the crop. Usually operating on a thin margin of profit—though one that did not inhibit the purchase of luxuries—cotton planters became indebted to cotton factors who, of course, required they grow cotton. Everything worked together to encourage the continuation of this labor-intensive and environmentally destructive practice: federal policy, state legislation, the financial system, and an abundance of black labor.

Falling soil fertility rates and other environmental issues made life for southern farmers and planters difficult in the late nineteenth century. Southern agriculture had long been plagued by over-intensive cultivation, particularly in tobacco and cotton areas. Wartime destruction exacerbated the damage caused by certain unsustainable practices engaged in by those growing staple crops for a global market. Although a small number of antebellum southern agriculturalists promoted crop rotation and careful stewardship of plantation lands, few planters followed their advice, particularly in years when the price of cotton was high. Many planters kept up to a third of their land in reserve with the intention of moving into it once their agricultural acreage was depleted by intensive cultivation. They counted on putting their enslaved laborers to work cutting forests, removing stumps, and breaking new ground when necessary (Mauldin 2018). As Mart Stewart has argued, the abolition of slavery demonstrated the vulnerability of the system of southern plantation agriculture (Stewart 1996; Mauldin 2018).

      Although planters were able to use both violence and legislation to ensure the emergence of another kind of unfree labor system, they found it impossible to coerce sharecroppers into the additional labor necessary to maintain levees in the rice areas or to engage in the laborious and often dangerous work of clearing forested lands elsewhere. Rice fields fell into disuse as levees went unrepaired. The Georgia Piedmont became pockmarked with gullies, a telltale sign of erosion and overfarming (Sutter 2015). In the Old South cotton belt, declining soil fertility led to a mass exodus of freed-people to new lands СКАЧАТЬ