But technological change and commodification alone probably would not have led to the pigeon’s demise had not ecology also intervened. The pigeons fed on the nuts produced by beech, oak, and hickory trees and congregated in huge colonies; they were living proof of the dictum that there is safety in numbers, at least against such predators as hawks and raccoons. Such immense numbers of birds ensured that at least some eggs and young birds would always survive. But when market hunters severely thinned out the flocks, the last remaining pigeons may have been unable to stave off their predators.26
Measuring the ecological effects of the pigeon’s decline is difficult to gauge. Pigeon dung may seem like an inconsequential thing. But the immense quantities of it produced by the vast flocks of birds had the power to influence the ecology of entire regions, providing an important source of nutrients in roosting areas. The pigeon’s demise cut off this fertilizer source with potentially far-reaching effects on plant and forest life.
The bird’s extinction may have had an even more profound effect on the relationship Americans had with the land’s natural rhythms.27 We can only imagine how it felt to have spring arrive and look up into the sky at thousands, even millions of birds. When the birds vanished, there was one less natural event to mark the onset of this season, as the passenger pigeons joined the spring migrations of salmon and shad in the annals of extinction. Farmers and urbanites alike became further detached from the cycles of nature as yet another group of animals that had formerly heralded the coming of spring met its end.
Industrial change involved a kind of war waged against seasonal variation. Whether this meant getting water to flow when industrialists, not nature, demanded, or whether it meant building tram roads so that loggers could cut and transport trees all year round and not just in the winter, the result was the same: Seasonal change gave way to the mechanical ticking of the clock.
CONCLUSION
The passenger pigeon’s decline was simply one example of the power of industrial capitalism to systematically rearrange the components of an ecosystem, packaging them up and delivering them to where demand was greatest. In the process, resources such as cotton cloth, pigeon meat, and lumber lost binding ties with their place of origin and the human and natural processes responsible for their existence. When the cotton cloth produced at Lowell found its way into a shirt, who, aside from perhaps a mill agent or disgusted fisherman, would ever think to inquire about the true costs of the energy that went into the item, the water that was literally drained away from farmers in one state and made to flow according to a production schedule dreamed up by industrialists in another? Who would possibly see in a roofing shingle the complex set of processes—the federal government’s land subsidies, the fires that plagued the land—bound up in this small but essential piece of wood?
Conceiving of things as commodities allowed people to reduce all that was complex and unique, whether pigeon meat, lumber, apples, or oranges, to a single common denominator: price. In a world moving toward such a state, where something as elusive as water could be owned and sold, where grain that did not even exist yet could be purchased, where so many aspects of the natural world were being rendered equal before the almighty dollar, it was easy to overlook what separated one thing from another. Commodities have a special ability to hide from view not just the work, the sweat and blood that went into making them, but also the natural capital, the soil, water, and trees, without which they would not exist. Money, to quote nineteenth-century German sociologist Georg Simmel, had become the “frightful leveler,” reducing the uniqueness and incomparability of objects to a state of “unconditional interchangeability.”28
5
KING CLIMATE IN DIXIE
April 15, 1849, was one of the strangest spring days on record in Dixie. To the disbelief of many, it snowed. For three hours a blizzard raged across Marietta, Georgia. From the southeastern coast west to Texas, the storm and subsequent frost killed cotton, corn, and other crops, as winter refused to relinquish its grip on the land. “The damage done by the late frost you can hardly form an idea unless you were here to see,” lamented one South Carolina planter. By all measures, the cold spell was an exceptional event, although it seemed to confirm what James Glen, colonial governor of South Carolina, said about a century before: “Our Climate is various and uncertain, to such an extraordinary Degree, that I fear not to affirm, there are no people on Earth, who, I think, can suffer greater extremes of Heat and Cold.”1
It has long been realized that climate played an important role in southern history.2 Growing such staple crops as tobacco, rice, and cotton would have been impossible were it not for the region’s long growing season, its ample rainfall, and its warm weather pattern. Beyond this obvious and important insight, however, climate is taken for granted, with most students of the South viewing it as a largely stable and unchanging aspect of life in this region. And yet, it bears noting that slavery and the plantation economy emerged during the Little Ice Age, a period of erratic weather conditions. Growing any kind of crop is a chancy enterprise, made even more unpredictable by a volatile weather regime, a point not lost on the antebellum South’s planter class, people who suffered through the 1849 freeze and other cold weather outbreaks, including a devastating one in February 1835, which killed Florida’s entire citrus crop.
One does not have to accept the inevitability of the slave-based plantation economy to recognize the important role that natural forces played in it. It is the place of nature—climate, soil, and water—in the history of this brutal system of racial and labor exploitation that is our subject in this chapter.
A MATCH MADE IN VIRGINIA
Located at the northern end of a plantation region stretching as far south as Brazil, the southeastern United States was part of a set of tropical and subtropical environments well suited to growing commodities for European consumption. In Virginia the commodity of choice was tobacco.
From the start, a business mentality informed life in the colony. While the New England colonists had lofty religious ambitions in mind as they ventured across the Atlantic, Virginia’s colonists set their sights much lower. Their goal was to create a comfortable rural existence that improved on their more meager prospects back home. New Englanders wrote sermons; Virginians published promotional tracts. They tried to sell their newfound home to those seeking to rise up in the world to the status of gentlemen. To secure a decent standard of living, the southern colonists had to import a variety of foods and finished goods from their homeland. And to generate the money needed to purchase them, they centered their economy on the production of tobacco, a crop of New World origin demanded by smokers in Europe.3
In growing tobacco, southerners, like all good farmers, tried to load the dice as much as possible in their favor, before rolling them and taking their chances with nature. In the first stage of cultivation, they planted many different beds with the crop, often separated by great distances, in order to ensure that pests, disease, or cold weather did not rob them come harvest time. But some important aspects of tobacco cultivation were beyond the planter’s control. In order for the seedlings to be successfully transplanted, for example, a good, soaking rain was needed to permit farmers to uproot the tiny plants without damaging their root structures. In the decision as to when to cut tobacco, planters again gambled with nature. To fail to cut before a frost would lead to the crop’s destruction, yet cutting too early to beat the cold could mean harvesting an unripe crop that might fail to cure properly. Successful tobacco planting thus demanded a great deal of luck, a point not lost on eighteenth-century Virginia planter Landon Carter, who in 1771 lost his tobacco to drought, despite his best efforts to ward off disaster. “Had I not been honestly sensible that no care had been wanting nor diligence neglected,” he wrote in his diary, “I should be uneasy more than I am; but as I have nothing of this sort to accuse myself with, I must and do submit.”4
As crops go, tobacco is extremely demanding of the soil. Even the slightest de
ficiency in a single element—and the crop required substantial nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus—tended to result in small yields. The problem, however, was that although the South offered ample rain and a long growing season, its soils left much to be desired. The region had escaped the most recent glaciation and thus failed to benefit from the minerals pulverized by the large masses of moving ice. In addition, the area’s abundant precipitation tended to cause minerals to leach from the soil. Worse yet, the soil, especially in the Piedmont section (the rolling hills between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic coastal plain), was weathered and extremely susceptible to erosion. The poor soil was no match for the tobacco plant’s tremendous mineral appetite. As one observer put it in 1775, “there is no plant in the world that requires richer land, or more manure than tobacco.” Faced with a crop especially demanding of nutrients, the colonial tobacco planter was “more solicitous for new land than any other people in America,” moving on to fresh soil once the old land became exhausted.5
Tobacco demands much of the soil, but it also asks a lot of those who cultivate it. Few crops are quite as labor-intensive. That was a serious problem in land-rich America, where the price of free labor was high. To deal with this dilemma, planters tried to legally bind laborers to their masters to prevent them from seeking out their own land. White indentured servants, bound by contract, worked to clear the land, using hoes to make small hills for planting tobacco or corn. The soil was used continuously until it became exhausted; then servants went about the laborious task of clearing more land. The system worked reasonably well until the latter part of the seventeenth century, when the price of servants rose while tobacco prices fell. As labor for felling trees became scarcer, the supply of fresh land dwindled. Planters continued to cultivate the same plots of soil. By the last third of the century, the older colonial settlements entered an ecological decline.
Trapped by the reality of failing soils, planters eventually exercised their imaginations. Beginning in the 1680s, Chesapeake tobacco planters turned to their Indian predecessors for inspiration, adopting a system of land rotation. Servants cleared a handful of acres in a haphazard manner. They then planted corn or beans (in between the leftover stumps) during the first year of cultivation, followed by two to three successive years of tobacco. After that, corn combined with beans or peas in years four through seven, followed often by a year devoted to wheat. They then abandoned the field for a generation to restore its soil fertility.6
The success of this system—in widespread use throughout the Chesapeake region by the 1740s—depended on the clearing of new tobacco lands every three to four years. A servant might be available to do the initial work, but once his contract expired, planters scrambled to find labor to clear more land. It is perhaps not coincidental that this more ecologically sustainable form of farming arose at roughly the same time that southern planters were replacing their indentured servants with black slaves from Africa. Slavery and shifting cultivation made a perfect match from the planter’s standpoint. The land rotation system required the clearing of new tobacco land every three to four years in perpetuity; slavery offered planters a guaranteed labor supply.7
The ecological virtues of this new way of relating to the land extended beyond its regenerative effect on soil fertility. It also helped to ward off soil erosion. Slowly the landscape evolved into a patchwork—with some land in cultivation, some in various stages of abandonment, and some filling in with grass and eventually pines and other trees. With no large expanses of open fields, the soil did not fall victim to wind erosion. The fields also contained leftover stumps that acted to check erosion. And with field hands using hoes (not plows) to form hills for planting, the uneven surface trapped water before it disappeared with even more soil. In all, this labor-intensive system of land use remained ecologically sound. Eighteenth-century plantations clearly were commercial ventures designed to capitalize on upswings in the price of tobacco, as well as highly exploitative systems organized around indentured servitude and slave labor. But they were also living proof that occasionally business and ecology could go hand in hand.
ORDER ON THE LAND
Although the land rotation system proved a success in the short run, it eventually broke down under the pressure of population growth. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, as population densities increased in the Chesapeake region, planters ran short of land and had to shorten the fallow period. The move hindered the land’s ability to replenish itself. Shifting agriculture would soon give way to a more intensive form of farming that proved considerably less stable from an ecological perspective.
The imbalance between population and land generated a number of responses. Some men migrated. Some deferred marrying until they had amassed enough land to raise a family. Others believed that agricultural reform was the answer. People such as John Taylor of Caroline and Edmund Ruffin urged the adoption of a more modern and enlightened set of farming practices. Put aside hoes and axes, they advised, and replace them with plows. Remove stumps and other debris from fields and give them a clean and ordered appearance. Fertilize those fields with manure and plaster of Paris and use the land continuously rather than abandoning it to fallow. Above all, they called on planters to use the land intensively and to profit from every last ounce of fertility that the soil had to offer.
Dramatic results ensued as planters acted on this advice. With the soil no longer allowed to rest for 20 years, the amount of land in cultivation increased markedly. Land planted with crops in southern Maryland rose from roughly 2 percent in 1720 to almost 40 percent by the early 1800s. When their lands became exhausted, some planters sold their tidewater plantations and ventured into the Piedmont. There they cleared fresh land and then broke out plows to ready the ground for planting tobacco and corn. But farming the Piedmont, with its steep slopes and soils susceptible to erosion, had significant ecological consequences. Sediment soon sluiced into rivers and streams. During a 1779 flood, one observer described the James River as a “torrent of blood.” Beginning in 1780, the port at Baltimore had to be dredged on a regular basis to combat all the silt. The sediment must have destroyed spawning grounds frequented by migrating fish and, with its high concentrations of phosphorous and nitrogen, probably affected other bottom-dwelling organisms as well.8
Ironically, as agriculture became more rationalized, as fields became tidier and subject to continuous cultivation, the entire farm system became less “rational” from an ecological vantage point. The fertility was literally mined out of the soil, as planters, in the words of one scholar, “bought land as they might buy a wagon—with the expectation of wearing it out.”9 Business farming and ecology had, for the moment, parted ways.
HARNESSING THE TIDES
While the Upper South turned increasingly to plows and continuous cultivation in the years after the American Revolution, planters along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia experimented with other means of making the landscape bear fruit. Beginning in the 1720s, South Carolinians focused their energies on rice, growing the lucrative crop on dry soil and relying on rainfall for moisture. They soon discovered that yields increased dramatically if the rice crop was grown on marshlands near the coast, where it could be irrigated with reservoirs and ponds. Slaves imported into the colonies from West Africa, where the rice had long been grown, played the pivotal role in helping southern planters organize their economy around the grain.
However, rice farming seldom went easily. Floods and droughts in the Low Country upset planters’ designs for water control. Weeds fed off the rich supply of nutrients and water and posed an even more significant threat. By late spring, slaves could be found toiling away in mud knee-deep in an effort to keep the weeds at bay. Slaves commonly ran away to escape the backbreaking work. At times, plantation managers even resorted to bribery to secure the necessary labor, lest their fields be overrun with unwanted vegetation. South Carolina planter Josiah Smith, Jr., found himself forced to offer his slaves the enticemen
ts of beef and rum to keep them from fleeing when “the Grass was very bad.”10
SOWING RICE
Although we tend to associate rice with Uncle Ben, in reality it was African women who played the main role in showing Americans how to plant and raise the crop. (Patience Pennington, A Woman Rice Planter [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961])
Then, in the 1740s, planters tapped the know-how of their West African slaves and discovered a means of recruiting nature to their cause. Huge numbers of blacks skilled in the cultivation of rice in wetland environments came to South Carolina in the 20 years following 1750. Together they reengineered the landscape to make use of the ebb and flow of ocean tides for flooding and draining rice fields. The tidal flow was helpful in at least two ways. First, it was used to kill weeds. Second, it drastically reduced the need to hoe the fields. Tidal irrigation amounted to one huge energy subsidy for rice planters. The energy came courtesy of the gravitational attraction of the sun and moon, and it lowered the workload demanded by rice cultivation. In 1802, one observer wrote, “River swamp plantations, from the command of water, which at high tides can be introduced over the fields, have an undoubted preference to inland plantations; as the crop is more certain, and the work of the negroes less toilsome.”11
Although the technique had been discovered in the mid-eighteenth century, it was not until after the American Revolution that tidal irrigation spread widely over the Low Country. Rivers such as the Ogeechee and the Altamaha in Georgia, with large watersheds and deep enough channels to create the right combination of freshwater and saltwater flow, provided ideal locations. The technique was usually practiced by wealthy planters, mainly because of the huge expense in time and money involved in building the proper water control system. Planters had to attend carefully to the direction and flow of the water since the intrusion of saltwater onto the rice fields would spell disaster for the crop. In the 1790s, a group of South Carolina planters made the mistake of building a canal to connect two rivers and inadvertently caused saltwater to encroach on the rice fields, causing the value of some of this land to plummet to a mere fraction of its original price. To avoid such calamities, planters relied on their slaves to erect elaborate systems of embankments and canals, a costly and labor-intensive process. For those who could afford the expense, however, the dividends were great. While inland rice plantations produced roughly 600 to 1,000 pounds of rice per acre, tidal plantation yields were in the 1,200- to 1,500-pound range.12
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