The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

This is the more remarkable because cotton is not the principal product of the South, nor even the major crop of the rural sections; but the size and public handling of the crop carry away men’s imagination. Timber, turpentine, mining, and iron making, taken together, produce a larger annual value than cotton. The total value of all other crops in 1907 was $758,000,000, which was about $90,000,000 more than the value of the cotton crop. The corn alone was over $485,000,000, or over two thirds the value of the cotton. Hay ($92,000,000), wheat, tobacco, oats, and potatoes make up $272,000,000 more. Though the Lower South grew only 9,000,000 bushels of wheat, rice, cultivated on rather a small scale in South Carolina, is a crop of growing importance in Louisiana and Texas. The South raises no sugar beets, little flaxseed, and not a twentieth of the wool; but the sugar and molasses are worth nearly $20,000,000. Trucking or the raising of vegetables, chiefly for the Northern market, is said to employ 700,000 freight cars in the season. The South has also about 15,000,000 cattle, 6,000,000 sheep, and 15,000,000 pigs, all of which are independent of cotton except that to some degree cotton seed is the food for stock.

When all has been said, however, the typical Southern industry is cotton, upon the raising of which certainly nearly half of the population is concentrated, and it constitutes about a fourth of the whole annual product of the South. The field of the cotton industry extends from the foot of the mountains to the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts; and the Southern social problem is to a very large degree the problem of cotton raising under a system by which one race includes practically all the masters, and the other furnishes almost all the laborers for hire.

The history of cotton is in itself romantic. In 1790, about 4,000 bales were raised; in 1800, 150,000; in 1820, 600,000; in 1840, over 2,000,000. In 1860 there was a tremendous crop of nearly 5,000,000 bales, a figure not reached again until 1879. In 1904 the crop was 13,700,000 bales—an amount not equaled since. The price of cotton has of late ruled much lower than in the first half of the century, when it sometimes ran up as high as 30 cents a pound. The 1860 crop brought about 11 cents. In 1898 the average price was about 6 cents, and some cotton sold as low as 3 cents, but the enormous crop of 1904 brought about 12 cents, and it has ruled higher since. In 1908 the slackening of the world’s demand caused the price to drop, but it has risen again to the highest point for thirty years.

The significance of the cotton crop is to be calculated not by the Liverpool market, but by its remarkable effect on the life of the South. One reason for its importance is that it can be grown on a great variety of land. Most of the best American long staple, the Sea Island, comes from a limited area off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in which a seed trust has been formed by the local planters to prevent anybody outside their narrow limits from raising that grade; for if the seed is renewed every few years, the fiber can be profitably raised on land now covered by the piney woods. Another variety of the long staple, the Floradora, is raised inland. The river bottoms and deltas of the numerous streams flowing into the Gulf of Mexico are a rich field for cotton, especially along the Mississippi river; but the Black Belt of the interior of Georgia and Alabama is almost equally productive; and the piney woods district and considerable parts of the uplands may be brought under cotton cultivation.

Northerners do not understand the significance of the fertilizer in cotton culture. George Washington was one of the few planters of his time who urged his people to restore the vitality of their land as fast as they took it out; but rare was the planter up to the Civil War who raised cattle, and the imported guano from the rocky islets of the Gulf and Pacific was little used. Then in the seventies discoveries were made of phosphate rocks in the estuaries of the Carolina rivers; and later, inland deposits in Tennessee. From these, with some admixture of imported materials, are made commercial fertilizers which have become indispensable to a large number of the cotton farmers, so that they are now spending 20 millions a year on that alone, every dollar of which is expected to add at least a dollar and a half to the value of the crop.

The word “plantation” has come to have a special meaning in Northern ears. It brings to the mind the great colonnaded mansion house with trim whitewashed negro quarters grouped about it, the pickaninnies running to open the gate for the four-in-hand bringing the happy guests, while back in the cotton field the overseer rides to and fro cracking his blacksnake whip. That kind of plantation is not altogether a myth. For instance, at Hermitage, just outside of Savannah, you see a brick mansion of a few large rooms, built a hundred years ago, surrounded by attractive sunken gardens, and one of the most superb groves of live oaks in the South; and near it are the original little brick slave cabins of one room and a chimney.

That kind of elaborate place was rare; in most cases the ante-bellum planter’s house was a modest building, and nowadays very few large planters live regularly on the plantation. If the place is profitable enough, the family lives in the nearest town or city; if it is unprofitable, sooner or later the banks get it and the family goes down; even where the old house is preserved, it is likely to be turned over to the manager, or becomes a nest for the colored people. Inasmuch as cotton raising is an industrial enterprise, plantations are apt to change hands, or the owners may put in new managers; so that the ante-bellum feeling of personal relation between the owner and the field hand plays little part in modern cotton making.

The modern plantation can more easily be described than analyzed; the term is elastic; a young man will tell you that he has “bought a plantation” which upon inquiry comes down to a little place of less than a hundred acres with two houses. The distinction between a “farm” and a “plantation” seems to be that the latter term is applied to a place on which there is a body of laborers (almost universally Negroes) managed, with very few exceptions, by white men and devoted principally to one crop.

Individual plantation holdings vary in size from the thirty thousand acres of Bell, the central Alabama planter, down to fifty acres. Many large owners have scattered plantations, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty, each carried on by itself; or two or three adjacent groups under one manager. You are informed that the X brothers “own thirty-three plantations,” which probably means thirty-three different large farms, ranging from two hundred to two thousand acres each. Three to five thousand acres of land under cultivation is as large a body of land as seems advantageous to handle together.

A fair example of the large plantation in the best cotton lands is the estate managed by Mr. Dayton near Jonesville, La., on the Tensas and Little rivers. It is an expanse of that incredibly rich land, of which there are millions of acres in this enormous delta, land which has in many places produced fifty to seventy-five successive crops of cotton without an ounce of fertilizer. Between the rivers, which are fenced off by levees, lie the fields, originally all wooded, but in these old plantations even the roots have disappeared from the open fields, although wherever the plantation is enlarged the woods have to be cleared, and the gaunt and fire-scarred dead trunks mark the progress of cultivation.