University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVII
PLANTATION TENDENCIES

EVERY typical settlement in English America was in its
first phase a bit of the frontier. Commerce was rudimentary,
capital scant, and industry primitive. Each
family had to suffice itself in the main with its own direct produce.
No one could afford to specialize his calling, for the versatility
of the individual was wellnigh a necessity of life. This
phase lasted only until some staple of export was found which
permitted the rise of external trade. Then the fruit of such
energy as could be spared from the works of bodily sustenance
was exchanged for the goods of the outer world; and finally in
districts of special favor for staples, the bulk of the community
became absorbed in the special industry and procured most of its
consumption goods from without.

In the hidden coves of the Southern Alleghanies the primitive
régime has proved permanent. In New England where it was
but gradually replaced through the influence first of the fisheries
and then of manufacturing, it survived long enough to leave an
enduring spirit of versatile enterprise, evidenced in the plenitude
of "Yankee notions." In the Southern lowlands and Piedmont,
however, the pristine advantages of self-sufficing industry were
so soon eclipsed by the profits to be had from tobacco, rice, indigo,
sugar or cotton, that in large degree the whole community
adopted a stereotyped economy with staple production as its
cardinal feature. The earnings obtained by the more efficient
producers brought an early accumulation of capital, and at the
same time the peculiar adaptability of all the Southern staples
to production on a large scale by unfree labor prompted the devotion
of most of the capital to the purchase of servants and
slaves. Thus in every district suited to any of these staples,
the growth of an industrial and social system like that of Europe

and the Northern States was cut short and the distinctive Southern
scheme of things developed instead.

This régime was conditioned by its habitat, its products and
the racial quality of its labor supply, as well as by the institution
of slavery and the traditional predilections of the masters. The
climate of the South was generally favorable to one or another
of the staples except in the elevated tracts in and about
the mountain ranges. The soil also was favorable except in the
pine barrens which skirted the seaboard. Everywhere but in
the alluvial districts, however, the land had only a surface fertility,
and all the staples, as well as their great auxiliary Indian
corn, required the fields to be kept clean and exposed to the
weather; and the heavy rainfall of the region was prone to wash
off the soil from the hillsides and to leach the fertile ingredients
through the sands of the plains. But so spacious was the Southern
area that the people never lacked fresh fields when their old
ones were outworn. Hence, while public economy for the long
run might well have suggested a conservation of soil at the expense
of immediate crops, private economy for the time being
dictated the opposite policy; and its dictation prevailed, as it has
done in virtually all countries and all ages. Slaves working in
squads might spread manure and sow soiling crops if so directed,
as well as freemen working individually; and their failure to do
so was fully paralleled by similar neglect at the North in the
same period. New England, indeed, was only less noted than
the South for exhausted fields and abandoned farms. The newness
of the country, the sparseness of population and the cheapness
of land conspired with crops, climate and geological conditions
to promote exploitive methods. The planters were by no
means alone in shaping their program to fit these circumstances.[1]
The heightened speed of the consequences was in a
sense merely an unwelcome proof of their system's efficiency.
Their laborers, by reason of being slaves, must at word of command
set forth on a trek of a hundred or a thousand miles. No

racial inertia could hinder nor local attachments hold them. In
the knowledge of this the masters were even more alert than other
men of the time for advantageous new locations; and they were
accordingly fain to be content with rude houses and flimsy fences
in any place of sojourn, and to let their hills remain studded with
stumps as well as to take the exhaustion of the soil as a matter
of course.[2]

Migration produced a more or less thorough segregation of
types, for planters and farmers respectively tended to enter and
remain in the districts most favorable to them.[3] The monopolization
of the rice and sugar industries by the planters, has been described
in previous chapters. At the other extreme the farming
régime was without a rival throughout the mountain regions, in
the Shenandoah and East Tennessee Valleys and in large parts
of Kentucky and Missouri where the Southern staples would not
flourish, and in great tracts of the pine barrens where the quality
of the soil repelled all but the unambitious. The tobacco and
cotton belts remained as the debatable ground in which the two
systems might compete on more nearly even terms, though in
some cotton districts the planters had always an overwhelming
advantage. In the Mississippi bottoms, for example, the solid
spread of the fields facilitated the supervision of large gangs at
work, and the requirement of building and maintaining great
levees on the river front virtually debarred operations by small
proprietors. The extreme effects of this are illustrated in Issaquena
County, Mississippi, and Concordia Parish, Louisiana,
where in 1860 the slaveholdings averaged thirty and fifty slaves
each, and where except for plantation overseers and their families
there were virtually no non-slaveholders present. The Alabama
prairies, furthermore, showed a plantation predominance
almost as complete. In the six counties of Dallas, Greene,
Lowndes, Macon, Perry, Sumter and Wilcox, for example, the

average slaveholdings ranged from seventeen to twenty-one each,
and the slaveholding families were from twice to six times as
numerous as the non-slaveholding ones. Even in the more rugged
parts of the cotton belt and in the tobacco zone as well, the
same tendency toward the engrossment of estates prevailed,
though in milder degree and with lesser effects.

This widespread phenomenon did not escape the notice of contemporaries.
Two members of the South Carolina legislature
described it as early as 1805 in substance as follows: "As one
man grows wealthy and thereby increases his stock of negroes,
he wants more land to employ them on; and being fully able, he
bids a large price for his less opulent neighbor's plantation, who
by selling advantageously here can raise money enough to go into
the back country, where he can be more on a level with the most
forehanded, can get lands cheaper, and speculate or grow rich
by industry as he pleases."[4] Some three decades afterward
another South Carolinian spoke sadly "on the incompatibleness
of large plantations with neighboring farms, and their
uniform tendency to destroy the yeoman."[5] Similarly Dr. Basil
Manly,[6] president of the University of Alabama, spoke in 1841 of
the inveterate habit of Southern farmers to buy more land and
slaves and plod on captive to the customs of their ancestors;
and C. C. Clay, Senator from Alabama, said in 1855 of his native
county of Madison, which lay on the Tennessee border: "I
can show you . . . the sad memorials of the artless and exhausting
culture of cotton. Our small planters, after taking the cream
off their lands, unable to restore them by rest, manures or otherwise,
are going further west and south in search of other virgin
lands which they may and will despoil and impoverish in like
manner. Our wealthier planters, with greater means and no
more skill, are buying out their poorer neighbors, extending their
plantations and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few,
who are able to live on smaller profits and to give their blasted

fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many who are merely
independent. . . . In traversing that county one will discover
numerous farm houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent
freemen, now occupied by slaves, or tenantless, deserted
and dilapidated; he will observe fields, once fertile, now unfenced,
abandoned, and covered with those evil harbingers fox-tail and
broomsedge; he will see the moss growing on the mouldering
walls of once thrifty villages; and will find 'one only master
grasps the whole domain' that once furnished happy homes for a
dozen white families. Indeed, a country in its infancy, where
fifty years ago scarce a forest tree had been felled by the axe of
the pioneer, is already exhibiting the painful signs of senility and
decay apparent in Virginia and the Carolinas; the freshness of
its agricultural glory is gone, the vigor of its youth is extinct,
and the spirit of desolation seems brooding over it."[7]

The census returns for Madison County show that in 1830
when the gross population was at its maximum the whites and
slaves were equally numerous, and that by 1860 while the whites
had diminished by a fourth the slaves had increased only by a
twentieth. This suggests that the farmers were drawn, not
driven, away.

The same trend may be better studied in the uplands of eastern
Georgia where earlier settlements gave a longer experience
and where fuller statistics permit a more adequate analysis. In
the county of Oglethorpe, typical of that area, the whites in the
year 1800 were more than twice as many as the slaves, the nonslaveholding
families were to the slaveholders in the ratio of 8
to 5, and slaveholders on the average had but 5 slaves each. In
1820 the county attained its maximum population for the antebellum
period, and competition between the industrial types was
already exerting its full effect. The whites were of the same
number as twenty years before, but the slaves now exceeded
them; the slaveholding families also slightly exceeded those who
had none, and the scale of the average slaveholding had risen to
8.5. Then in the following forty years while the whites diminished
and the number of slaves remained virtually constant, the

scale of the average slaveholding rose to 12.2; the number of
slaveholders shrank by a third and the non-slaveholders by two
thirds.[8] The smaller slaveholders, those we will say with less
than ten slaves each, ought of course to be classed among the
farmers. When this is done the farmers of Oglethorpe appear
to have been twice as many as the planters even in 1860. But
this is properly offset by rating the average plantation there at
four or five times the industrial scale of the average farm, which
makes it clear that the plantation régime had grown dominant.

In such a district virtually everyone was growing cotton to the
top of his ability. When the price of the staple was high, both
planters and farmers prospered in proportion to their scales.
Those whose earnings were greatest would be eager to enlarge
their fields, and would make offers for adjoining lands too tempting
for some farmers to withstand. These would sell out and
move west to resume cotton culture to better advantage than before.
When cotton prices were low, however, the farmers, feeling
the stress most keenly, would be inclined to forsake staple
production. But in such case there was no occasion for them
to continue cultivating lands best fit for cotton. The obvious
policy would be to sell their homesteads to neighboring planters
and move to cheaper fields beyond the range of planters' competition.
Thus the farmers were constantly pioneering in districts
of all sorts, while the plantation régime, whether by the prosperity
and enlargement of the farms or by the immigration of
planters, or both, was constantly replacing the farming scale in
most of the staple areas.

In the oldest districts of all, however, the lowlands about the
Chesapeake, the process went on to a final stage in which the bulk
of the planters, after exhausting the soil for staple purposes, departed
westward and were succeeded in their turn by farmers,
partly native whites and free negroes and partly Northerners
trickling in, who raised melons, peanuts, potatoes, and garden
truck for the Northern city markets.

Throughout the Southern staple areas the plantations waxed

and waned in a territorial progression. The régime was a broad
billow moving irresistibly westward and leaving a trough behind.
At the middle of the nineteenth century it was entering
Texas, its last available province, whose cotton area it would have
duly filled had its career escaped its catastrophic interruption.
What would have occurred after that completion, without the
war, it is interesting to surmise. Probably the crest of the billow
would have subsided through the effect of an undertow setting
eastward again. Belated immigrants, finding the good lands
all engrossed, would have returned to their earlier homes, to hold
their partially exhausted soils in higher esteem than before and
to remedy the depletion by reformed cultivation. That the billow
did not earlier give place to a level flood was partly due to
the shortage of slaves; for the African trade was closed too soon
for the stock to fill the country in these decades. To the same
shortage was owing such opportunity as the white yeomanry had
in staple production. The world offered a market, though not at
high prices, for a greater volume of the crops than the plantation
slaves could furnish; the farmers supplied the deficit.

Free workingmen in general, whether farmers, artisans or unskilled
wage earners, merely filled the interstices in and about the
slave plantations. One year in the eighteen-forties a planter near
New Orleans, attempting to dispense with slave labor, assembled
a force of about a hundred Irish and German immigrants for his
crop routine. Things went smoothly until the midst of the
grinding season, when with one accord the gang struck for double
pay. Rejecting the demand the planter was unable to proceed
with his harvest and lost some ten thousand dollars worth of his
crop.[9] The generality of the planters realized, without such a
demonstration, that each year must bring its crop crisis during
which an overindulgence by the laborers in the privileges of liberty
might bring ruin to the employers. To secure immunity
from this they were the more fully reconciled to the limitations
of their peculiar labor supply. Freemen white or black might be
convenient as auxiliaries, and were indeed employed in many instances

whether on annual contract as blacksmiths and the like or
temporarily as emergency helpers in the fields; but negro slaves
were the standard composition of the gangs. This brought it
about that whithersoever the planters went they carried with
them crowds of negro slaves and all the problems and influences
to which the presence of negroes and the prevalence of slavery
gave rise.

One of the consequences was to keep foreign immigration
small. In the colonial period the trade in indentured servants
recruited the white population, and most of those who came in
that status remained as permanent citizens of the South; but such
Europeans as came during the nineteenth century were free to
follow their own reactions without submitting to a compulsory
adjustment. Many of them found the wage-earning opportunity
scant, for the slaves were given preference by their masters when
steady occupations were to be filled, and odd jobs were often the
only recourse for outsiders. This was an effect of the slavery
system. Still more important, however, was the repugnance which
the newcomers felt at working and living alongside the blacks;
and this was a consequence not of the negroes being slaves so
much as of the slaves being negroes. It was a racial antipathy
which when added to the experience of industrial disadvantage
pressed the bulk of the newcomers northwestward beyond the
confines of the Southern staple belts, and pressed even many of
the native whites in the same direction.

This intrenched the slave plantations yet more strongly in their
local domination, and by that very fact it hampered industrial
development. Great landed proprietors, it is true, have oftentimes
been essential for making beneficial innovations. Thus the
remodeling of English agriculture which Jethro Tull and Lord
Townsend instituted in the eighteenth century could not have been
set in progress by any who did not possess their combination of
talent and capital[10] In the ante-bellum South, likewise, it was
the planters, and necessarily so, who introduced the new staples
of sea-island cotton and sugar, the new devices of horizontal

plowing and hillside terracing, the new practice of seed selection,
and the new resource of commercial fertilizers. Yet their
constant bondage to the staples debarred the whole community
in large degree from agricultural diversification, and their dependence
upon gangs of negro slaves kept the average of skill and
assiduity at a low level.

The negroes furnished inertly obeying minds and muscles;
slavery provided a police; and the plantation system contributed
the machinery of direction. The assignment of special functions
to slaves of special aptitudes would enhance the general efficiency;
the coördination of tasks would prevent waste of effort; and the
conduct of a steady routine would lessen the mischiefs of irresponsibility.
But in the work of a plantation squad no delicate
implements could be employed, for they would be broken; and
no discriminating care in the handling of crops could be had except
at a cost of supervision which was generally prohibitive.
The whole establishment would work with success only when the
management fully recognized and allowed for the crudity of the
labor.

The planters faced this fact with mingled resolution and resignation.
The sluggishness of the bulk of their slaves they took as
a racial trait to be conquered by discipline, even though their ineptitude
was not to be eradicated; the talents and vigor of their
exceptional negroes and mulattoes, on the other hand, they sought
to foster by special training and rewards. But the prevalence
of slavery which aided them in the one policy hampered them in
the other, for it made the rewards arbitrary instead of automatic
and it restricted the scope of the laborers' employments and of
their ambitions as well. The device of hiring slaves to themselves,
which had an invigorating effect here and there in the
towns, could find little application in the country; and the paternalism
of the planters could provide no fully effective substitute.
Hence the achievements of the exceptional workmen were limited
by the status of slavery as surely as the progress of the generality
was restricted by the fact of their being negroes.

A further influence of the plantation system was to hamper
the growth of towns. This worked in several ways. As for

manufactures, the chronic demand of the planters for means
with which to enlarge their scales of operations absorbed most of
the capital which might otherwise have been available for factory
promotion. A few cotton mills were built in the Piedmont where
water power was abundant, and a few small ironworks and other
industries; but the supremacy of agriculture was nowhere challenged.
As for commerce, the planters plied the bulk of their
trade with distant wholesale dealers, patronizing the local shopkeepers
only for petty articles or in emergencies when transport
could not be awaited; and the slaves for their part, while willing
enough to buy of any merchant within reach, rarely had either
money or credit.

Towns grew, of course, at points on the seaboard where harbors
were good, and where rivers or railways brought commerce
from the interior. Others rose where the fall line marked the
heads of river navigation, and on the occasional bluffs of the
Mississippi, and finally a few more at railroad junctions. All of
these together numbered barely three score, some of which
counted their population by hundreds rather than by thousands;
and in the wide intervals between there was nothing but farms,
plantations and thinly scattered villages. In the Piedmont,
country towns of fairly respectable dimensions rose here and
there, though many a Southern county-seat could boast little more
than a court house and a hitching rack. Even as regards the
seaports, the currents of trade were too thin and divergent to
permit of large urban concentration, for the Appalachian watershed
shut off the Atlantic ports from the commerce of the central
basin; and even the ambitious construction of railroads to the
northwest, fostered by the seaboard cities, merely enabled the
Piedmont planters to get their provisions overland, and barely
affected the volume of the seaboard trade. New Orleans alone
had a location promising commercial greatness; but her prospects
were heavily diminished by the building of the far away Erie
Canal and the Northern trunk line railroads which diverted the
bulk of Northwestern trade from the Gulf outlet.

As conditions were, the slaveholding South could have realized
a metropolitan life only through absentee proprietorships.

In the Roman latifundia, which overspread central and southern
Italy after the Hannibalic war, absenteeism was a chronic feature
and a curse. The overseers there were commonly not helpers
in the proprietors' daily routine, but sole managers charged
with a paramount duty of procuring the greatest possible revenues
and transmitting them to meet the urban expenditures of
their patrician employers. The owners, having no more personal
touch with their great gangs of slaves than modern stockholders
have with the operatives in their mills, exploited them
accordingly. Where humanity and profits were incompatible,
business considerations were likely to prevail. Illustrations of
the policy may be drawn from Cato the Elder's treatise on agriculture.
Heavy work by day, he reasoned, would not only increase
the crops but would cause deep slumber by night, valuable as a
safeguard against conspiracy; discord was to be sown instead
of harmony among the slaves, for the same purpose of hindering
plots; capital sentences when imposed by law were to be administered
in the presence of the whole corps for the sake of their
terrorizing effect; while rations for the able-bodied were not to
exceed a fixed rate, those for the sick were to be still more frugally
stinted; and the old and sick slaves were to be sold along
with other superfluities.[11] Now, Cato was a moralist of wide
repute, a stoic it is true, but even so a man who had a strong
sense of duty. If such were his maxims, the oppressions inflicted
by his fellow proprietors and their slave drivers must have been
stringent indeed.

The heartlessness of the Roman latifundiarii was the product
partly of their absenteeism, partly of the cheapness of their
slaves which were poured into the markets by conquests and raids
in all quarters of the Mediterranean world, and partly of the
lack of difference between masters and slaves in racial traits. In
the ante-bellum South all these conditions were reversed: the
planters were commonly resident; the slaves were costly; and the
slaves were negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality

submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of
gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose
very defects invited paternalism rather than repression. Many a
city slave in Rome was the boon companion of his master, sharing
his intellectual pleasures and his revels, while most of those
on the latifundia were driven cattle. It was hard to maintain a
middle adjustment for them. In the South, on the other hand,
the medium course was the obvious thing. The bulk of the
slaves, because they were negroes, because they were costly, and
because they were in personal touch, were pupils and working
wards, while the planters were teachers and guardians as well as
masters and owners. There was plenty of coercion in the South;
but in comparison with the harshness of the Roman system the
American régime was essentially mild.

Every plantation of the standard Southern type was, in fact,
a school constantly training and controlling pupils who were in a
backward state of civilization. Slave youths of special promise,
or when special purposes were in view, might be bound as
apprentices to craftsmen at a distance. Thus James H. Hammond
in 1859 apprenticed a fourteen-year-old mulatto boy, named
Henderson, for four years to Charles Axt, of Crawfordville,
Georgia, that he might be taught vine culture. Axt agreed in the
indenture to feed and clothe the boy, pay for any necessary medical
attention, teach him his trade, and treat him with proper
kindness. Before six months were ended Alexander H. Stephens,
who was a neighbor of Axt and a friend of Hammond,
wrote the latter that Henderson had run away and that Axt was
unfit to have the care of slaves, especially when on hire, and advised
Hammond to take the boy home. Soon afterward Stephens
reported that Henderson had returned and had been whipped,
though not cruelly, by Axt.[12] The further history of this episode
is not ascertainable. Enough of it is on record, however, to
suggest reasons why for the generality of slaves home training
was thought best.

This, rudimentary as it necessarily was, was in fact just what
the bulk of the negroes most needed. They were in an alien

land, in an essentially slow process of transition from barbarism
to civilization. New industrial methods of a simple sort they
might learn from precepts and occasional demonstrations; the
habits and standards of civilized life they could only acquire in
the main through examples reinforced with discipline. These the
plantation régime supplied. Each white family served very
much the function of a modern social settlement, setting patterns
or orderly, well bred conduct which the negroes were encouraged
to emulate; and the planters furthermore were vested with a coercive
power, salutary in the premises, of which settlement workers
are deprived. The very aristocratic nature of the system
permitted a vigor of discipline which democracy cannot possess.
On the whole the plantations were the best schools yet invented
for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people
which the bulk of the American negroes represented. The lack
of any regular provision for the discharge of pupils upon the
completion of their training was, of course, a cardinal shortcoming
which the laws of slavery imposed; but even in view of this,
the slave plantation régime, after having wrought the initial and
irreparable misfortune of causing the negroes to be imported, did
at least as much as any system possible in the period could have
done toward adapting the bulk of them to life in a civilized community