EVOLUTION OF THE COTTON SYSTEM 35 



justments of the peculiar civilization of the South have 

 been neglected in tracing the history of the abolition of 

 slavery and the legal intricacies of the political and con- 

 stitutional aspects of that struggle. For a realistic yet 

 sympathetic presentation of the human factors involved 

 in the historic development of cotton culture the world 

 of scholarship is peculiarly indebted to the researches of 

 Ulrich B. Phillips, William E. Dodd, and Walter L. 

 Fleming. 1 



Cotton culture found slavery and the plantation or- 

 ganization already existent, but established and extended 

 them. Although cotton cultivation was responsible for the 

 popularization of slavery it was less dependent upon 

 slavery than upon the plantation. For an examination of 

 the development of the present southern social order the 

 viewpoint of Robert E. Park is well taken : 



The history of slavery in America is an incident in the 

 history of the plantation system. . . . Slavery has disap- 

 peared, to be sure, but the plantation system in one form 

 or another, remains, not merely in the South but in many 

 parts of the world. The abolition movement when seen in 

 its proper perspective is merely an episode in the history 

 of a particular type of industrial organization. The slave 



1 The indebtedness of the writer to Phillips' analysis of the eco- 

 nomic and social organization of the plantation, to Dodd's inter- 

 pretation of the alignment of human factors in the Cotton Kingdom, 

 to Fleming's reconstruction studies, and to M. B. Hammond's mono- 

 graph will be noted throughout the chapter. 



It can easily be seen that in the course of one chapter no thor- 

 ough or original historical treatment has been attempted either of 

 cotton as a history maker or of the production of cotton. The 

 attempt has rather been to present the accepted generalizations 

 as to the development and procedure of the plantation as a his- 

 torical background of the cotton system today. 



