CHAPTER III 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE COTTON SYSTEM 



THE NATURE AND SPREAD OF THE PLANTATION 

 SYSTEM 



THE COTTON system may be defined as the complex 

 organization of financing, growing, and marketing cot- 

 ton. It includes croppers, tenants, small farmers, and 

 planters who comprise the growers, plus the banks, sup- 

 ply merchants, factors, and fertilizer dealers who finance 

 the crop and the cooperatives, local buyers, general buy- 

 ers, shippers, and exporters who assemble and classify 

 cotton for sale to the mills or for export. The cotton 

 system as it exists today is complex and far-reaching. 

 Men who have dealt in cotton for years frankly admit 

 that phases of the business exist which they have not 

 fully explored. The history of the cotton system is di- 

 vided distinctly into two parts by the abolition of slavery. 

 The present cotton system is an adjustment, man to land 

 and race to race, that has been received as a social heri- 

 tage from the past. No one can presume to understand 

 the practices in the production of cotton or its tremen- 

 dous hold on the South without viewing them as an evolu- 

 tion from the days of the Cotton Kingdom and slavery. 

 Until the Civil War the history of cotton production was 

 practically one with the history of the plantation. 



One characteristic feature of the material culture of 

 the South throughout its long course of development has 

 been the plantation system. The economic and social ad- 



