30 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



was able to make as much as $75,000 in present currency in 

 one year growing tobacco on his plantation. 



But if tobacco made some men rich, at the same time it 

 made the soil poor. Since few tobacco farmers understood the 

 use of green manure and organic fertilisers they had to move 

 to new land every few years. This meant that as the colony 

 advanced it left in its wake thousands of acres of worn-out soil. 



In the South the introduction of crops like cotton and indigo 

 in the eighteenth century hastened the development of the 

 large plantations. This was an agricultural economy that re- 

 quired a large number of slaves, a great investment in land, and 

 much money for operating expenses. Southern farmers, like 

 those of New England and the middle states, who had no 

 capital but their time and strength, were pushed back to the 

 Piedmont Plateau, the western frontier of that day. The strug' 

 gle over slavery, in one sense, was a struggle between these 

 two competing types of land use the great slave'worked plan 

 tations and the small freehold farm. 



It was in Pennsylvania that the small farms first flourished. 

 From 1763 to 1766 Pennsylvania exported 618,000 of farm 

 products, nearly 200,000 more than her nearest rival, New 

 York. 12 The greatest part of this sum was made up of grain 

 which came from the rich valley around Lancaster. There the 

 gently rolling hills were checkered with fields of ripening wheat, 

 rye and buckwheat. The great limestone barns were filled at har 

 vest. In the fall there was a steady stream of Conestoga wagons 

 carrying grain to markets down the Lancaster Turnpike. All 

 of this was the first American example of good land use. Land 

 was permanent. And today that land is still an island of fer- 

 tility in the center of many worn-out areas of the East. 



THE WESTWARD MARCH BEGINS 



Unfortunately, this idea of the permanence of land did not 

 become the basis of American agriculture. If a man mined the 



"Faulkner, op. at., p. 116. 



