Introduction 21 



of the Civil War, has since become a good farming and 

 lumbering section, and the use of commercial fertilizers has 

 attracted buyers of land which was formerly considered 

 almost worthless. 



These differing proportions of white and colored people, 

 and the differing farm opportunities in the geographical 

 belts are marked in Georgia, and their details provide ex- 

 cellent insight into the relation of the Negro agricultural 

 worker to the land. 



The breakdown of plantations, described in Part I, with 

 the attendant rise of a white and colored tenantry, applies to 

 all the area of the old Cotton Belt or Black Belt. For the 

 sake of defmiteness and because the State has previously 

 received the attention of R. P. Brooks and E. M. Banks, 5 

 the facts presented are confined to Georgia. They are al- 

 most exactly paralleled in Alabama and South Carolina. 

 In North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas the 

 plantation system had a less firm hold than in Georgia, and 

 suffered a faster decline. In Louisiana and Mississippi it 

 was more firmly intrenched and has declined more slowly. 

 Shifts in population from the old plantation areas and move- 

 ment to towns, described in Part II, have likewise been in 

 progress all over the Cotton Belt. 6 In describing these, 

 however, attention is again centered largely on Georgia for 

 the sake of definiteness. The effects of population move- 

 ment described in Part II, Chapter IV, are, of course, more 

 or less uniform throughout the South, varying only with 

 the extent to which a locality is affected by migration. 



6 Brooks, R. P., "The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865- 

 1912." University of Wisconsin, 1914, History Series, Vol. 3, 

 No. 3. 



Banks, E. M., "Economics of Land Tenure in Georgia." Col- 

 umbia University, Studies in History Economics and Public Law, 

 1905. 



6 See U. S. Census, Negro Population in U. S., 1790-1915, Chap. 

 VIII. 



