The cotton plantation South since the Civil War

Abstract

The Cotton Plantation since Civil War. By Charles S. Aiken. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 452. Preface, acknowledgement, maps, charts, photographs, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00.) No institution has been more important in economic of cotton than plantation. While earliest settlers used word without any pejorative connotation, term has become associated with a series of negative images: slavery, sharecropping, poverty, and most of all exploitation. In The Cotton Plantation since Civil War, geographer Charles S. Aiken claims that plantation is among most misunderstood institutions of American history (p. xi). He traces evolution of plantation from Civil War to period of mechanization after World War II. In Aiken's view, cotton plantation not only survived Civil War, but it still exists today in a highly modified form. He focuses on Lower Piedmont of Georgia, Alabama Black Belt, and Yazoo-Mississippi Delta-which for him make up the core of plantation South (p. viii). Aiken wisely concentrates on end of plantation system rather than on its beginning, since post-World War II plantation has received far less attention than antebellum plantation. Aiken's work should be read in conjunction with Pete Daniel's Breaking Land (1985) and Jack Temple Kirby's Rural Worlds Lost (1987), though these works cover different aspects of southern history. As a geographer, Aiken is concerned about how plantation region underwent spatial changes over period from 1865 to 1970. (The word spatial occurs repeatedly in this book.) The antebellum plantation was with slave quarters drawn up around plantation house and other outbuildings. In contrast, transition to sharecropping after Civil War involved a family-based system that resulted in dispersion of tenant cabins, an arrangement that gave tenants more control over their family life and a measure of independence. After World War II, however, demise of sharecropping and mechanization of cotton saw reconsolidation of plantations, reverting them to nucleated form. The Sylls Fork plantation in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, is a popular example used in many textbooks to illustrate these changes (pp. 15, 88-91). Whether term plantation can be used to describe what one finds in modern cotton is another matter. Labor is no longer exploited, and in Arkansas delta most agricultural operations are now called farms. The bulk of Aiken's work is devoted to impact of civil rights on plantation since World War II. The civil rights movement attacked old traditions of segregation and deference that were associated with plantation life. Many, though not all, of signal events of movement occurred in plantation areas-notably, for example, voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, in heart of Alabama Black Belt. …