286 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



Civil War. But, at most, this statement could have been true for 

 large plantations only, and the general proposition that slave labor 

 was more profitable than free labor would, therefore, rest on the 

 hypothesis that the system of grande culture was more profitable 

 for cotton than petite culture. Mr. Russell assumed that it was, 

 and as he was logical enough also to hold that the system of grow- 

 ing corn and cotton continuously until the land was so exhausted 

 that it had to be abandoned "to nature for a series of years" 

 was the best system that could be pursued in cotton culture, his 

 assumption based on this premise was doubtless a correct one. 

 But the scientific agriculturists of the South did not agree with 

 Mr. Russell as to the wisdom of the exhaustive system of agricul- 

 ture, although there were apparently few of them who were willing 

 to ascribe this system to the maintenance of slavery. 



Of the free labor which was engaged in the cultivation of cotton, 

 the greater part was of a class which was far from representative 

 of the average intelligence and ability of American agricultural 

 labor. Immigrants were repelled from the South by the stigma 

 cast on labor in a slave region. The majority of the white laborers 

 were of the class of " poor whites," many of them descendants of 

 the " redemptioners," " servants sold for the custom," and " inden- 

 tured servants " sent into the colonies by Great Britain from the 

 London streets and the debtor prisons. Released from their period 

 of bondage, and finding it impossible to enter the social ranks of 

 the property-holding classes, and with their labor despised because 

 of the association which it had with slavery, these people and 

 their descendants had become the parasites of Southern society. 

 Some of them were forced into the mountain region of eastern 

 Tennessee and Kentucky and western North Carolina, and others 

 were left on the abandoned cotton and tobacco lands of the sand- 

 hill region of South Carolina and Georgia. Even in the western 

 states they were always found on the poorer lands. These people 

 obtained a scanty subsistence by raising on their depleted soils 

 small quantities of Indian corn, vegetables and cotton, or quite 

 often by stealing from their wealthier neighbors on the large 

 plantations. In addition to the cotton which they used in their 

 homespun garments, these small farmers usually raised one or two 



