Planters and Plain Folk

Abstract

Abstract By 1850, the Southern cotton culture had spread from the eastern cotton belt, which included the South Carolina Upcountry, southwest into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and to the Texas border. The gray sandy and red clay loam soils of the South Carolina Piedmont were no longer the South’s most fertile cotton lands, but the Upcountry still produced about 5 percent of the South’s cotton-more than North Carolina, Florida, and Texas combined and as much as the entire state of Louisiana. Despite having lost pride of place in the cotton economy to the newer growing regions of Alabama and Mississippi, the Upcountry remained an integral part of the cotton South. Moreover, throughout the antebellum era, the South Carolina Upcountry occupied something of a middle ground between plantation black-belt and family-farm hill country. As a general rule, the expansion of cotton culture transformed the small-farm backcountry of one generation into the plantation-dominated black-belt of the next. Parts of the South Carolina Upcountry evolved in precisely this fashion. The gradual, almost systematic, expansion of cotton production between 1800 and 1850 turned back-country districts where the population was over 80 percent white in 1800 into plantation districts which were well over 50 percent black a half-century later. But the expansion of plantation agriculture into the Upcountry proceeded unevenly and failed altogether in some places; thus the Upcountry remained in perpetual transition, no longer truly backcountry but never entirely a plantation region.