24 ECONOMICS OF LAND TENURE IN GEORGIA [24 



It thus appears that while the total number of active 

 farms was 53,887, the total number of slave-owners was 

 41,084. Now, since many of the slave-holders with only 

 a slave or two resided in towns and held no farms, it is 

 evident that there must have been in the neighborhood 

 of 15,000 farmers working without the aid of slave labor. 

 It is possible that a few of these were tenants, but it is 

 more than probable that an overwhelming majority of 

 them were relatively small landowners cultivating their 

 own acres. 



If a map of the state is drawn and the counties shaded 

 in which the average number of slaves held per slave- 

 holder is over the average for the state, and then another 

 map is drawn with counties shaded in which the number 

 of farms exceeds the number of slaveholders by one 

 hundred, it is found that the shading overlaps in only a 

 few cases. This shows that the region in which farms 

 worked by their proprietors tended to prevail more than 

 elsewhere was outside the region characterized by large 

 possessions of lands and slaves. Moreover, such farms 

 prevailed in the rugged region of the north and the pine 

 flats of the south, each of which was relatively uninviting 

 from the economic point of view. On the other hand, 

 the region of much land and many slaves embraced the 

 seaboard counties and a belt of counties running 

 through the middle of the state in a southwesterly direc- 

 tion, together with several counties in the southwestern 

 corner of the state. It was, therefore, in the cotton and 

 rice sections that the slavery plantation system predom- 

 inated. Even here, however, it must be remembered, 

 the small farm existed side by side with the large planta- 

 tion. 



There was no sharp line of demarcation between the 

 planters and the farmers of Georgia. As a general thing, 



