260 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



wages system in the same regions where large farms were 

 decreasing and where small farms and tenant farmers were 

 rapidly increasing. These facts seem to bear out the theory 

 that in the Cotton Belt tenancy had increased at the expense 

 of the wage laborers and hence marked a rise in the status 

 of the tillers of the soil. The extent to which this change in 

 name corresponded to a real change in economic status will be 

 considered later. 



Lest there should be a tendency to credit the high percentage 

 of tenancy in the South entirely to the presence of the negro, 

 who so recently started life as a freedman with nothing but his 

 hands, let it be noted that in the Black Prairie of Texas and in 

 the northern parts of the cotton regions of the older cotton 

 states, where the farmers are generally whites, the increase 

 in tenancy has gone on with very great rapidity if not quite as 

 rapidly as in the regions of negro tenants. By comparing the 

 location of slaves in 1860 with the location of negro tenants in 

 1910 it becomes obvious that in the southern states few negro 

 tenants were found in 1910 beyond the regions where they were 

 abundant as slaves in 1860. In the new cotton region of Texas 

 the whites have gone in to occupy the land. The remarkable 

 thing is that they are so generally tenants. 



One hypothesis which may be ventured as an explanation of 

 this common fate of the whites of the new cotton region and the 

 negroes of the old cotton regions, is that while in the old slave 

 regions the wages system gradually gave way to a form of tenant 

 holdings which the census recognized as separate farms, there 

 was a breaking down of great cattle ranches in Texas into 

 small farms and that white immigrants, largely from the older 

 cotton states, went in as tenants of the large proprietors. The 

 two cases had this in common that the land had previously been 

 acquired in large estates. The breaking down of large farms 

 does not imply the breaking down of estates. The change may 

 have been in the landlord's method of operating his land. 



The change from large farms operated by hired laborers to 

 estates of small farms operated by tenants is not a complete 

 explanation of the increase in tenancy. 



