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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer - 1. Southern Agriculture as a Problem
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CHAPTER II
THE SOUTHERN PLANTATION ECONOMY AND THE
NEGRO FARMER
I. Southern Agriculture as a Problem
The main facts of rural Southern poverty and the distress of the rural
Negro people in the South have been well-known for a long time. The
plantation-tenant system is one of America’s ‘^public scandals.”” Even
before the Civil War there were many Southern patriots who saw some of
the detrimental factors working to undermine the welfare of the region.
When Hinton Helper, on the eve of the Civil War, came out with his
blunt exposure of the ante-bellum myth of how efficient and perfectly
balanced the Southern economic system was, he could quote passages in
support of his position like the following by C. C. Clay:
I can show you, with sorrow, in the olden portions of Alabama, and in my native
county of Madison, 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 land, 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. ... In traversing that county [Madison County], one will discover
numerous farm houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent freemen, now
occupied by slaves, or tenantless. . . . Indeed, a county 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.^
At least from the ’eighties, when Henry Grady coined the promising
phrase ‘‘the New South,” the propagation of an agricultural reform pro-
gram has belonged to the established Southern traditions. Like the dedica-
tion “the New South,” this program has in fundamentally unchanged form
been taken over by generation after generation of public-spirited Southern
liberals and is today one of their dearest aims. In fact, the same remedies
of encouraging independent land ownership, crop diversification, and soil
conservation have been recommended through the decades by unanimous
* See Appendix 2 ,
Section 1.
230
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