38 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



until John Rolfe introduced the cultivation of tobacco in 

 1612. "About the last of August," he wrote in 1619, 

 "came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty 

 negroes." Tobacco soon came to be the staple export crop 

 of the new world. Natives of Guinea, "very loyal and 

 obedient servants, without malice," who "never more tried 

 to fly, but rather in time forgot about their own country" 

 had been inducted into the plantation system. These 

 plantations were located on all the fertile river banks so 

 that the tiny ships of colonial days could sail up and 

 take a cargo from each farmer's wharf. 7 



The small grain and fishing culture of New England, 

 as has often been recounted, discouraged slave labor. 

 Later the rise of the urban-industrial culture in the north- 

 eastern states, having accumulated capital goods, found 

 its labor supply in "thousands of immigrants who came 

 at their own expense, who worked zealously for wages 

 payable from current earnings, and who possessed all the 

 inventive and progressive potentialities of European 

 peoples." 8 In the meantime, the South had capitalized 

 her labor supply in slaves so that she owned both her 

 laborer and his labor. This gave to the free artisan and 

 agricultural laborer such a low social as well as economic 

 status that the new immigrant failed to seek out the 

 South and even the native farmer became restless and in 

 many instances removed to the mountains, pine forests, 

 or further to the west. 



The system under which the labor force was appor- 

 tioned to production of southern agricultural staples 

 came to be known as the plantation system. The planta- 

 tion is an application of the capitalistic system to agri- 



7 Faulkner, op. cit., p. 67. 8 Phillips, op. cit., p. 395. 



