SOUTHERN AGRICULTURE, 1790-1860 289 



in the other direction. Cotton culture on large plantations offered 

 great advantages to the slave holder over that of other crops. Such 

 free labor as was to be found in the South was not of a character 

 to push cotton raising on small estates by scientific methods of agri- 

 culture. It was easy to continue the old methods. And a system 

 of agriculture which had no regard for the soil found its greatest 

 profit by working as large a body of laborers and cultivating as 

 many acres as could be successfully superintended by one man. 

 The aim was to keep cost of production to a minimum. 



For a number of years, therefore, the general tendency was to 

 increase the size of the plantations. "' Farms have a tendency to 

 decrease in size more rapidly where the land is poor than where 

 it is rich." In the older states, along the Atlantic coast, as the 

 soil became exhausted, the planters who did not abandon their 

 estates in order to seek out Western lands were forced to reduce 

 the size of their holdings and to begin an intensive system of 

 cultivation. This stage had been reached in the older states a 

 decade before the emancipation of the slaves, and this is evi- 

 denced not only by the increased use of fertilizers and the 

 adoption of a better system of agriculture, but likewise by the 

 diminution in the size of farms. In the new states, however, 

 the tendency towards smaller farms was not revealed previous to 

 the Civil War. Not only do we find a failure to adopt improve- 

 ments in agriculture, but with the exception of the first few 

 years following the settlement of a state, when land speculators 

 were selling out to new arrivals the lands which they had secured, 

 we find the size of farms steadily increasing. 



" Our wealthy planters," said Mr. G. C. Clay, a member of 

 Congress from Alabama, in 1853, "with greater means and no 

 more skill, are buying out their poorer neighbors, extending their 

 plantations, and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few, 

 who are able to live on smaller profits and to give their blasted 

 fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many who are merely 

 independent." Not until 1850 do we have statistical information 

 as to the size of farms in the cotton-growing states. But a com- 

 parison of the figures furnished by the reports of this and the 

 following census shows the truthfulness of the above assertions. 



