With emancipation, however, things began to change. Planters wondered how they would ever make a living growing cotton if their labor force continued to roam the countryside exercising their customary right to game. In 1866, one Virginia newspaper bemoaned the fact that planters “suffer great annoyance and serious pecuniary loss from the trespasses of predacious negroes and low pot hunters, who with dogs and guns, live in the fields … as if the whole country belonged to them.” Slowly, planters called for making private property more private and less open to customary hunting and fishing by commoners. “The right to hunt wild animals is held by the great body of the people, whether landholders or otherwise, as one of their franchises,” lamented the wealthy South Carolina planter and sportsman William Elliott. One observer who toured the South in the 1870s found that blacks “are fond of the same pleasures which their late masters gave them so freely—hunting, fishing, and lounging; pastimes which the superb forests, the noble streams, the charming climate minister to very strongly.”17
Planters eventually pushed for the passage of game laws. Beginning in the 1870s, counties in the Black Belt passed statutes that regulated hunting. In 1875, three Georgia counties made it illegal to “kill or destroy” partridges or deer any time between April and October. The new law also prohibited people from using poison to catch fish. In part, planters supported such laws because they sensed, correctly, the depletion of wildlife in the postbellum South. The decline angered planters who enjoyed a good hunt at least as much as their ex-slaves did. But more likely, planters supported the game laws in order to further control the freedmen and get them back to work in the fields. Alabama’s passage of a game law in 1876 that only applied to 14 Black Belt counties supports such a view. To some extent the laws may have improved the prospect for game: For example, a fawn who lost its mother in the early fall might be too young to survive the winter. But if the game laws were aimed at improving wildlife populations they also prohibited hunting in exactly the season of the year when planters needed agricultural laborers the most.18
Whatever the intentions behind the laws, wildlife in the postbellum South was experiencing a devastating decline. The depletion, however, was not solely the work of freedmen and white farmers. The rise of market and sport hunting also came into play. Wildlife had an incredibly powerful hold on the imagination of late-nineteenth-century Americans. A source of both food and fashion, wild game occupied a place in the hearts of urban consumers and rural folk alike. While trains transported ducks, geese, and pigeons from the Midwest to the tables of New Yorkers, game birds hung from the rafters in such cities as Atlanta, Norfolk, and New Orleans. Women wore feather hats and sometimes even sported entire birds. In the 1880s, the millinery trade spurred on market hunters who brought about the collapse of the heron population south of Tarpon Springs, Florida. In 1896, hunters destroyed 99 percent of the terns nesting on Cape Hatteras.19
The meat and feathers came to market courtesy of the railroads. Controlled by northern capitalists by the 1890s, the railroads also encouraged sport hunters to venture into the region “to visit the South and hunt game where it is more plentiful than in any other section of the United States.” Access to new weapons such as the breech-loading shotgun and to better ammunition, meanwhile, improved the success of hunters. In North Carolina quail country, residents resented the intrusion of northern hunters and responded by passing county legislation in the 1880s that made it illegal for anyone to transport quail or partridge across state lines.20
By the late nineteenth century the southern commons was in turmoil. Market and sport hunters descended in search of game, while cattle and pigs overran it in the quest for forage. Few animals inspired more resentment than the hog, described by one Mississippian, in a fit of anger, as an “old, pirating, fence-breaking, corn-destroying, long-snouted, big boned and leather-bellied” beast. Apart from planters, railroads also suffered from the effects of allowing livestock to roam the range. Under the law, the roads were liable if animals became injured on their tracks. The legal nicety may have driven some stockowners—eager to collect damages—to apply salt to the rails so as to lure the hapless creatures into oncoming trains.21
Egged on by the railroads, southern landlords, merchants, and planters took action against the old fence laws in the 1870s. No longer should the farmer be called on to fence his crops, they cried out, while livestock roamed willy-nilly across the landscape. “Why in the name of common sense,” one planter asked, “am I compelled to maintain 12 or 13 miles of hideous fence around my plantation at an annual cost of upwards of a thousand dollars, in order to prevent the cattle and hogs which my neighbors turn loose … from destroying my crops and robbing my property?” Of course those who favored the open range saw things differently. “Poor man, without a farm of your own; what must become of that cow that gives milk for your prattling babes?” one pro-range advocate from Georgia wondered. “What is to become of the poor widow who is homeless? Freedmen, what is to become of you?”22
Although those opposed to the old fence laws objected on the grounds of principle, other more practical matters also influenced their view. The peculiar design of southern fences required a great deal of wood, an increasingly scarce resource in the postbellum years. The most common fence was the so-called Virginia or zigzag fence. It was favored by southerners because it required much less labor than the post-and-hole fence, it could be easily removed to another location if the soil wore out, and it was strong enough to resist marauding bands of swine. The Virginia fence, however, required a great deal of wood in an environment where timber was becoming less available. The shortage resulted from depredations made during the Civil War (soldiers burned fence rails to make fires), from the rise of industrial lumbering, and from feral hogs feeding on the seedlings of such trees as the longleaf pine. Planters thus found that fencing their crops could be a burden. One of the earliest pieces of legislation seeking an end to the open range in Mississippi bore the suggestive title: “An Act to protect citizens in Hinds County in those sections where the fencing and timber has been destroyed by the late war.”23
ZIGZAG FENCE
Common throughout the South, this type of fence snaked through the land, taking up more room than the straighter post-and-hole variety. (Library of Congress)
Virginia fences, because of their zigzag design, also took up much more land than the straight post-and-hole variety. That was land that could have been used to plant crops, a point not lost on one opponent of the open range. “The old fence rows of Carroll county [Georgia] will make corn enough in three years to pay for all the crops that will grow in the county for the next ten years.” Fencing was clearly no idle matter. Although barbed wire, invented in 1873, could have been substituted for wood as it was in the West, it tended to be expensive and made few inroads, probably because pigs (unlike cattle) were often able to get through it.24
For a variety of reasons, including such factors as reasons of principle and the design of fences, those who favored an end to the open range held sway. By the 1890s, a new set of fence laws, often called stock laws, were on the books in counties across the South (although it would take decades, in some places until the 1970s, before the range was fully closed). The laws required farmers and stockmen to pen in their livestock, making them legally responsible if the animals somehow escaped and caused damage to someone’s property. The stock laws penalized those—poor whites and blacks—who had formerly relied on the unenclosed stretches of land. People with power and money used the law to preserve the sanctity of their property and make it more private. Those who had once counted on such land had to turn to other means of subsistence.
The stock laws had ecological and biological consequences to match their social ones. Animals formerly allowed to run loose in the woods now became true domesticates. Penned up in barnyards and no longer free to roam the land, the animals were either fattened on feed or forced to graze on self-contained pastures, where overuse, especially on hillsides, may have contri
buted to the South’s already intense erosion problem. The closing of the range also helped to limit the spread of the cattle tick, carrier of the parasitic infection babesiosis (eventually named Texas fever by midwesterners who feared the Lone Star state’s infected livestock). In the early twentieth century, the federal government introduced a program for eradicating the tick, now that the animals could no longer roam the landscape and infect one another at will; the move greatly benefited large commercial stock raisers. Tragically, the high capital costs involved in purchasing the technology to eliminate the cattle tick, plus the huge expense of fencing in livestock, combined to further disadvantage southern yeomen who raised just a few cattle for household use. The stock laws, a social development, brought about a biological shift (a less congenial environment for the tick) that led to still more social changes—unfavorable ones, at least from the standpoint of struggling farmers.25
The domestication of people and animals, it would seem, went hand in hand, but with one critical difference: The poor people put out by the enclosure of the commons could protest their woes. The fencing controversy, which ultimately worked its way as far west as Texas, figured prominently in the rise of the late-nineteenth-century agrarian protest movement known as Populism. The Populists formed a third political party, the People’s party, opposed to the business-dominated organizations run by the Democrats and Republicans. But their critique of American society stemmed in part from changes in the land. For it was there that the yeoman farmer’s earlier subsistence lifestyle, resting on corn, some cotton, and the pasturing of hogs in woods and bottomlands, gave way to the single-minded pursuit of cotton alone by the 1880s. Now the logic of distant markets in New York, St. Louis, and Liverpool, not the dietary needs of families, combined with the enclosure of the commons to force such farmers deeper into poverty. Driven from a safer and more ecologically sound form of farming to embrace the monoculture, small farmers became victims of those who sought an end to the open range.26
THE INVASIONS
Next to the closing of the range, the rise of industrial lumbering contributed nearly as much to the dispossession of the poor. Lumber production in the South skyrocketed in the 40 years after 1880, as the South overtook the Great Lakes states, which were well on their way to depletion by the turn of the century. The original forest cover in the southern states declined by an astonishing 40 percent, falling from roughly 300 million acres to just 178 million by 1919, as industrial logging, aided by the increasing penetration of the railroad, emerged to clear-cut the countryside. As one lumberman recalled, “You hardly ever left a tree of any size standing and all the little [ones] was torn down.” Destruction of the woodlands habitat depressed game and plant populations, further undermining those who turned to the forest to hunt and gather as a means of survival. Of course it was becoming even harder to enter the woods in the first place, as logging and coal companies gobbled up the land. By 1930, industrial enterprises, many serving the interests of those who resided outside the region, controlled nearly two-thirds of all the privately owned land in the southern Appalachians.27
The federal government’s land policies played a major role in aiding the logging companies’ quest for control of the South’s timber, much as had happened in the Midwest. In 1866, Congress passed homestead legislation designed to aid the freedmen (as opposed to speculators) that limited the amount of land a person could claim—after settling on it and paying a nominal fee—to 80 acres. But in 1876, southern legislators, emboldened by the end of Reconstruction, obtained repeal of the legislation in an attempt to open up the region’s vast supplies of timber and mineral wealth to outside capital. With the southern lands open to unrestricted sales, the great giveaway began. Railroads ran trains for the expressed purpose of aiding so-called land lookers. Boarding in Chicago, those with money to spend headed south to Mississippi and Louisiana in search of prime timberland. Great Lakes states lumber barons, northern capitalists, and British land moguls all rushed south in the 1880s to cash in on the red-hot land boom. Nearly six million acres of land passed out of the federal domain between 1877 and 1888.28
But this was nothing compared to the tens of millions of acres of state land sold off, sometimes for as little as 25 cents an acre, during this same period. By 1885, an astounding 32 million acres of state land passed into private hands in Texas alone. Combined with the assault on common-use rights, the steep decline in public domain further undermined the efforts of yeoman farmers to survive off the land.29
Ownership of vast stretches of the southern landscape now rested with a relatively small number of individuals and companies who eyed it mainly for its speculative, timber, or mineral potential. The natural wealth of the countryside, however, was worth little if it could not be transported to markets elsewhere in the nation. To meet this need, railroads crisscrossed the region in a network so vast and all consuming that it almost defies comprehension. The combined amount of track in 13 southern states rose from slightly over 9,000 miles in 1865 to nearly 39,000 miles by 1910. The railroads, one West Virginia historian observed in 1913, “carried into the silence of primeval woods the hum of modern industry.” Some lines left no doubt about the purpose of their mission, with one railway dubbing itself “the great lumber route.”30
The railroads spurred the loggers on as they harvested timber and then turned around and burned what was left. As the southern forests were stripped of their pines (the most commercially valuable stands) and hardwoods, piles of slash sat just waiting for a stray spark from a locomotive to ignite them. According to one estimate, somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million acres of North Carolina woodland erupted in flames in 1891. In 1908, a tenth of West Virginia felt the effects of forest fires.31
Southerners, however, remained largely unmoved by the smoke and flames. In 1898, when fire raged over some three million acres of North Carolina, the episode rated barely a mention in Raleigh newspapers. The nonchalance derived from the historic role that fire played in the lives of those who raised stock on common lands. Burning the woods was an annual ritual in many parts of the South. It kept down the rough—grasses and saplings—allowing stockmen to drive cattle from one place to another and, most important, encouraged the growth of grasses and other vegetation on which cattle fed. As the lumber industry tried to check the spread of fires, it allowed the rough to flourish and contributed, inadvertently, to the spiraling downward of those raising stock.32
Industrial logging contributed more directly to the demise of subsistence practices by altering the habitat. Game such as deer, bears, and turkeys disappeared as the woodlands vanished. Plants such as ginseng, mayapple, and others, which mountaineers had collected and exchanged at stores for cash, met a similar fate.33
The forest and its wealth of plants and animals figured centrally in the lives of southern Appalachian mountaineers, which is why they left so much of their land—in some areas as much as 90 percent—unimproved. When the northerner George Vanderbilt, scion of that famed railroad family, bought 100,000 acres of land in North Carolina in order to pursue hunting and forestry, Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and forester for the estate, said this about those displaced by the purchase: “They regarded this country as their country, their common. And it was not surprising, for they needed everything usable in it—pasture, fish, game—to supplement the very meager living they were able to scratch from the soil.”34
SHELTON FAMILY
Southerners who depended on chestnut trees like this one for their livelihood were severely affected by the blight. (Great Smoky Mountains National Park)
The entry of northerners and industrial loggers alike into the southern forests was not the only incursion that the common people had to endure. Compounding their problems was the spread of an alien invader: the chestnut blight. By 1912, the fungus, brought accidentally to the United States in 1904 in a shipment of Asian chestnut trees, had destroyed all of New York City’s stock. Then the fungus, which starved the chestnut tree by colonizing the food-s
toring cortex cells underneath the bark, worked its way south, carried there on the boots and axes of loggers themselves. By 1913, the blight had entered North Carolina. Some experts describe the chestnut tree’s near total annihilation in North America as one of the most profound changes in plant life ever recorded in human history.35
One of the most important and abundant trees in the eastern forests, the chestnut, once found on some 200 million acres of land, played a far more critical role in the lives of southerners than it did for New Yorkers promenading around Central Park. The poor seeking to survive off of the southern woodlands thus found the blight devastating. Edible chestnuts commonly mounted to a height of four inches on the forest floor, providing a crucial source of food for wild game and grazing livestock both. “The worst thing that ever happened in this country was when the chestnut trees died,” lamented one Tennessee resident. “Turkeys disappeared, and the squirrels were not one-tenth as many as there were before.” Another mountaineer from Virginia recalled that before the blight it “didn’t cost a cent to raise chestnuts or hogs…. It was a very inexpensive way to farm. The people had money and had meat on the table too.” Children also gathered the nuts, supplementing the diet of mountain families. “The chestnut tree was the most important tree we had,” recalled one Kentucky woman. “We needed those chestnuts.”36
If the blight provided yet another threat to the yeoman farmer’s subsistence, it did not stand in the way of the lumber barons. Timber harvesting actually increased in the wake of the epidemic, which eventually infected enough trees to produce some 30 billion board feet of chestnut wood. Meanwhile, the outbreak of World War I only helped to force up lumber production levels, intensifying the pressure on the southern forests. In 1919, one year after the end of the war, the South produced 37 percent of all the nation’s lumber, much as the Great Lakes states had done three decades before.37
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