Southern Agriculture Research Articles

Structural change in the U.S. economy: 1850–1900

Structural change models are potentially ideal for abstracting from a “watershed” event like the U.S. Civil War, in that they seek to explain the transformation of economies from agricultural to industrial on the basis of labor movement and incentives rather than on technical changes. We define the Civil War as a regime shift that necessitated a structural movement of labor from Southern agriculture to Northern manufacturing, and design empirical tests to determine whether this formulation fits the empirical data better than theories, such as the Beard–Hacker thesis, that characterize the U.S. transformation as an abrupt adjustment to technical shocks. We conclude that the data indicate just such a structural movement.

Knowledge, skills, access and usage status of computers, internet and databases in nursing students and some of the related factors

Knowledge, skills, access and usage status of computers, internet and databases in nursing students and some of the related factors

Strapped for Cash. Non-cash Payments on Louisiana Cotton Plantations, 1865-1908

In the late nineteenth century two forms of non-cash payments existed on the Louisiana cotton plantations Lakeview and Theoda: non-cash payments associated with sharecropping, and payments in token money, which could only be redeemed at the company store. Such payments seem to confirm the reputation of the U.S. South as being economically and socially less developed than the Northern states after the American Civil War. The one-crop economy, sharecropping, and token money have been linked to the lack of economic development of Southern agriculture, and to ‘re-enslavement’. This study analyses non-cash payments on Lakeview and Theoda in the same way as similar practices in the Netherlands have been analyzed. It suggests a reinterpretation of the historical economic literature, in which non-cash payments in post-emancipation Southern U.S. agriculture are described as a pre-modern and re-enslaving method. 1 This contribution was created thanks to the Stichting Professor Van Winter Fonds – research project Truck system in transatlantic perspective: Louisiana and the Netherlands, ca. 1865-1920. I would like to thank Karel Davids, Hans Krabbendam, Ronald Kroeze, Jan Lucassen, Damian Pargas, Charles Postel, Wybren Verstegen, Jaco Zuijderduijn, and the referees of this journal for their comments and additions to earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Michael Strange for her language editing. AUP – 156 x 234 – 3B2-APP flow Pag. 0123 123 VOL. 11, NO. 3, 2014

Marketing by Design

The Southern Agricultural Economics Association has made great contributions to our profession. In doing so, it has provided a platform for its members to conduct research, teaching, and Extension education that contributed significantly to the economic growth and success of Southern agriculture and rural communities. I am humbled by the honor received through this Lifetime Achievement Award and want to thank the association and the many colleagues across the profession and in my department at Texas A&M University for their partnership and support over the years. I also want to thankmy wife and family for the contributions they have made to my professional career. Their interest and understanding helped me see through some of the difficult choices and times; and they were there for the celebrations as well. In this article, I have chosen a theme that, to me, has defined much of my professional career. We all have stories or life narratives. This is one of mine.How can farmers engage in, or influence, downstream marketing activities in a way that increases returns for what would otherwise be a simple sale of a commodity at the market price? The idea of design in the context of marketing decisions of farmers evolved in my mind as the result of early experience on the farm and exposure in college to ideas that have influenced my career ever since.

Von Thünen south of the Alps: access to markets and interwar Italian agriculture

This paper sheds new light on the agricultural side of the Italian regional divide from an econ- omic geography perspective, following a Von Thunen approach. The central hypothesis is that the development of the nonagricultural economy in the Northern cities drove the location of agricultural output and inputs during the interwar years. A new database on Italian agriculture around 1930 fully confirms the key role of access to domestic markets in shaping agricultural activity. Thus, the causes of Southern agriculture falling behind are revealed: it is not very surprising that an agricultural divergence joined an already ongoing industrial divergence during a period in which international markets collapsed. It was the growth of Northern industry that led to the growth of Northern agriculture, and not vice versa. This paper takes an economic geography approach to explore the patterns of Italian interwar agriculture and its role in the long-lasting Italian regional divide. After framing the Southern falling behind, I turn to an explanation of the divergence exclusively based on factor accumu- lation, building upon a neoclassical version of the Von Thunen model of land use. Hence, I introduce a new cross sectional database of Italian agriculture around 1930 at a fine geographi- cal level of disaggregation. Using this database, I first estimate the agricultural total factor productivities (TFP) throughout the country, which suggest that efficiency differences did not drive the Southern agricultural failure during the interwar years. Indeed, econometric results indicate that the geographical allocation of factors of production was shaped by the access to domestic nonagricultural markets, which in turn shaped output and land rents, as predicted by the Von Thunen model. Hence, the initial industrial divergence is causally con- nected with the subsequent agricultural one by a simple demand mechanism: it was the growth of Northern industry that led to the growth of Northern agriculture, and not vice versa.

Total War by Other Means

Total War by Other Means Daniel E. Sutherland (bio) Lisa M. Brady. War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xix + 187 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 (paper). Megan Kate Nelson. Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xvii + 332 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 (paper). Just when it looks as though the Civil War has been done to death, scholars find ways to resuscitate it. Not long ago, “memory” studies became the hot ticket. They now constitute something of a subfield for the war. Environmental historians would like to duplicate that success, and judging from some recent work, they deserve a hearing. The field has interested the general historical community for a good many years. Environmental History, first published in 1996, evolved from the much earlier Environmental Review, which debuted in 1976. Jack Temple Kirby, well known for his work on the rural South, goaded Civil War historians into tackling the environment in 2001, the same year that memory studies first grabbed our attention. Kirby’s thought-provoking essay, “The American Civil War: An Environmental View,” caused only a modest stir at the time, but environmental interpretations of the war have steadily gained traction.1 Going beyond long-standing interest in how the war affected Southern agriculture, this new departure has explored aspects of the weather, ecology, deforestation, geology, wildlife, and disease. Two historians deeply involved in its development are Lisa M. Brady and Kate Megan Nelson. Both have published previously on the environment and the war, and while quite different in their interests and interpretive frameworks, their new books distinguish them as leading authorities in the nascent field. Brady’s work comes closest to what might be called “traditional” Civil War history in that it explores the impact of Union military strategy on the environment. She begins with the well-known scenario of a stalled Union war effort in 1863. The Northern public and politicians were restless; Abraham Lincoln [End Page 97] was worried. The president had already been forced to endorse the radical measure of emancipation, and he had been desperately shuffling generals in and out of his high command since mid-1861. Back then, the Federals had hoped to wage a “civilized” war that spared the South’s civilian population undue suffering and humiliation. By 1863, Lincoln had abandoned that dream. His generals would have to do something more than defeat rebel armies in the field. Victory required that they also crush the economic vitality of the Confederacy and the morale of its citizens. In appraising the new strategy, Brady looks specifically at how Union policy “undermined the region’s most basic relationship to the natural world” (p. 23). This is not to say that there were eco-sensitive Union generals who thought in those terms. They were simply desperate to end the rebellion. As William T. Sherman put it, the North was fighting against “a determined foe and the obstacles of Nature” (p. 67). Consequently, according to Brady, the Federals found ways to “exert control over nature,” to “reshape the environment,” and to conquer “landscapes that had deep meanings for those involved in the conflict” (p. 23). She makes her case by describing three Union military operations: Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign, Philip D. Sheridan’s subjugation of the Shenandoah Valley, and Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas. Nature initially defeated Grant, as one aborted engineering scheme after another failed to put his army in a position to storm the rebel citadel at Vicksburg. Besides that, the climate and swampy terrain, with their attendant illnesses, ravaged his men. When they finally crossed the Mississippi River in May 1863, Grant ordered them to live off the land. They must not abuse women and children, he warned, but everything else was fair game. Grant’s main concern was that, as they confiscated or destroyed food, forage, livestock, farming implements, and other property with potential military value, his men “’cripple the rebellion in every way.’” Their onslaught, as Brady describes it, resulted in “an attack against . . . the...

Standing their ground: small farmers in North Carolina since the Civil War

Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina since the Civil War. By Adrienne Monteith Petty. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 281. $74.00, ISBN 978-0-19-993852-0.) In this bold and ambitious book Adrienne Monteith Petty seeks to clarify the history of agriculture in the South since the Civil War by making room for the high ideals and remarkable persistence of small-scale landholders. While Pete Daniel, Gilbert C. Fite, Jack Temple Kirby, and other historians have focused primarily on sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the two most exploited groups in southern agriculture, and other scholars have recently turned attention to either white or African American small-farm owners, Petty the novel approach of studying small farm owners--white, black, and Indian--as a single class (p. 4). The economic disruptions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries notwithstanding, small farm owners, Petty argues, maintained their own discrete social group with its own ideology and aspirations--a subsistence-oriented, cooperative mode of living (p. 10). Over time, however, market forces, technological developments, federal farm programs, and the often violent race relations that precluded solidarity between white and black farm owners undermined aspirations as well as hold on the land. Petty takes a case study approach, focusing on the seven counties--Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, Duplin, Pender, Robeson, and Sampson--that cover the Cape Fear River watershed of southeastern North Carolina. In the immediate post-Civil War years, small landowning families were more likely to harvest turpentine from the region's dense pine forests than plant crops, but with the rising dominance of commercial agriculture between 1880 and 1920, they turned first to truck farming and then to tobacco and cotton. While some longed for the self-sufficiency of the antebellum yeomanry and others exhibited unabashedly capitalist values, both groups continued to reassert an ideology of individualism and self-reliance by devoting valuable acreage to food and feed crops. During the New Deal era, white small farmers, unlike tenants and sharecroppers, at first benefited from the payments they received under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), but by not embracing the black farmers who shared economic class, they weakened position in pushing for an equitable distribution of government benefits (p. …

Land Grabbing as Security Mercantilism in International Relations

International studies routinely consign agri-food relations to the analytical margins, despite the substantive historical impact of the agri-food frontiers and provisioning on the structuring of the interstate system. As a case in point, current restructuring of the food regime and its global political-economic coordinates is expressed through the process of ‘land grabbing’. Here, the crisis of the WTO-centered corporate food regime, which has neoliberalized Southern agriculture while sustaining Northern agro-food subsidies, is manifest in a new form of mercantilism of commandeering offshore land for supplies of food, feed, and fuel. This article examines the content and implications of this new ‘security mercantilism’, which both affirms and contradicts a neoliberal order, anticipating a shift in international relations around resource grabbing. Los estudios internacionales destinan periódicamente las relaciones de los productos agroalimentarios a los márgenes analíticos, a pesar del impacto histórico fundamental de las fronteras agroalimentarias y del abastecimiento en la estructuración del sistema interestatal. Como ejemplo, la reestructuración actual del régimen alimentario y sus coordenadas políticas económicas globales, se expresa a través del proceso del ‘acaparamiento de tierras’. Aquí, la crisis del régimen corporativo alimentario centrado en la OMC, el cual ha neoliberalizado la agricultura del sur, mientras sostiene subsidios agroalimentarios en el norte, se manifiesta en una nueva forma de mercantilismo de incautación de alimentos y combustible en tierra extranjera. Este artículo examina el contenido y las implicaciones de esta nueva ‘seguridad mercantilista’, que tanto afirma como contradice un orden neoliberal, anticipando un cambio en las relaciones internacionales alrededor del acaparamiento de recursos. 国际研究通常把农业食品的关系作为分析边际，尽管农业食品新领域的实质历史性影响以及国家间系统结构的设置。一个恰当的例子就是，当前粮食制度的再重构及其全球政治经济协调通过“土地并购”过程体现出来。在这里，以世界贸易组织为中心的粮食企业制度的危机，通过为提供食物、饲料、燃料而征用海外土地的重商主义新形式体现出来，该粮食企业制度使南部农业重新自由化，而对北部持续提供农业补贴。本文仔细研究了这种肯定却又违背了新自由主义秩序的新型 “安全重商主义”的内容与含义，预测围绕资源掠夺的国际关系将会发生一定的转变。 درجت الدراسات الدولية على إزاحة العلاقات الزراعية الغذائية إلى هوامش التحليل، على الرغم من الأثر التاريخي الكبير لها ودورها في تشكيل منظومة الدولة الداخلية. وكمثال على ذلك، فإن إعادة الهيكلة الحالية للنظام الغذائي وتنسيقاتها السياسية الاقتصادية العالمية تتجلى من خلال عملية "الاستيلاء على الأراضي". وهكذا فإن أزمة النظام الغذائي، الذي تتبناه منظمة التجارة العالمية والمتمركز حول مصلحة الشركات وله طابع نظام الزراعة النيوليبرالي في الجنوب بينما يحتفظ ببقايا العلاقات الزراعية الغذائية في الشمال، تظهر في شكل جديد من المنظومة التجارية (المركانتيلية) للتحكم في الأراضي خارج البلد المعني من حيث استخدامها لأغراض غذاء الإنسان والحيوان والوقود الحيوي. وتتحرى هذه الورقة مضمون ونتائج هذه "المركانتيلية الأمنية" الجديدة، والتي تؤكد وتناقض في وقت واحد نظاماً نيوليبرالياً، مما يشير إلى تحوّل في العلاقات الدولية إزاء الاستيلاء على الموارد. 농업-식량의 심각한 역사적 영향과 국가간 체계의 구조화에 미치는 영향에도 불구하고, 국제관계 연구는 농업-식량 관계를 분석에서 주변화시켰다. 문제가 되는 사례로서 현재 이루어지고 있는 식량 레짐의 재구화와 지구적 정치-경제적 조절은 ‘토지 점유’ 과정을 통해서 표출된다. 여기에서 WTO 중심의 기업 식량 레짐의 위기는 식량, 사료와 원료 공급을 위해 해외 토지를 징발하는 새로운 형태의 중상주의로 나타난다. 그리고 WTO 중심의 기업 식량 레짐은 선진국의 농업-식량 보조금 지원을 유지하면서 후진국의 농업을 신자유주의화하고 있다. 이 논문은 자원 점유를 둘러싼 국제 관계의 변화를 기대하면서, 새로운 “안보 중상주의”의 내용과 함의를 다루고, 안보 중산주의가 신자유주의 질서에 부합하면서 동시에 모순적이라는 점을 다룬다. Международные исследования регулярно обрекают сельскохозяйственно-продовольственные отношения на аналитические окраины, несмотря на их существенный исторический вклад в обеспечение и структурирование межгосударственной системы. В качестве примера, текущая реструктуризация продовольственного режима и его глобальных политико-экономических координат выражается через процесс «захвата земли». Здесь, кризис в ВТО - центре корпоративного продовольственного режима, который имеет неолиберальное «южное» сельское хозяйство при сохраненных «северных» продовольственных субсидиях, проявляется в новой форме меркантилизма – присваивании оффшорной земли для поставок продуктов питания, кормов и топлива. В статье рассматривается содержание и значение этого нового «безопасного меркантилизма», который и подтверждает и противоречит неолиберальному порядку, предвосхищая изменения в международных отношениях вокруг захвата ресурсов.

Postwar development in the Italian Mezzogiorno. Analyses and policies

As Manlio Rossi-Doria wrote, in the early postwar years, the Southern Question was primarily an agrarian one. The debate and policies that addressed the Southern Question, however, did not remain confined solely to the agrarian dimension. The transformation of Southern agriculture was inextricably connected to two additional features of the Italian Mezzogiorno: first, the huge demographic expansion, and second, the lack of an industrial sector able to absorb the excessive agrarian population and to lead a process of economic diversification and internationalization. Above all, the solution to the Southern Question was interpreted as a truly national task. The development of the Mezzogiorno was at the basis of the collaboration between Italy and the World Bank throughout the 1950s. That experience became the subject of an intense debate over development policies that went beyond the Italian borders and embraced the question of postwar development worldwide. The Italian experience turned eventually out to be a failure. One feature of that experience remained vital, though, and has been underscored by contemporary scholars: the solution to the Southern Question is to be found at the national level, not just regionally.

Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860 (review)

Reviewed by: Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860 Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch (bio) Keywords South, Markets, Southern economy, Slavery Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860. Edited by Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie, and Louis M. Kyriakoudes. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Pp. 270. Paper $40.00.) In the last decades of the twentieth century, traditional histories of the antebellum South described the region as economically stagnant and [End Page 530] socially backward. More recently, however, new scholarship has brought to light the pervasiveness of market activities in the Old South. Southern Society and Its Transformations builds on this new body of scholarship and makes important contributions of its own. This volume of essays paints a picture of a dynamic South that was constantly evolving and adapting (12). In addition to the preface and editors’ introduction, the book’s nine essays are broken up into four sections that examine race relations, the emergence of the market economy, the rise of a southern middle class, and finance. The essays relocate the origins of regional modernization in the antebellum era and suggest a different timeline and pace for capitalist expansion. The authors depict the ebb and flow of southern economic development that started out slowly in the 1830s, but then rapidly accelerated in the late 1840s and 1850s. Besides these shared contributions, the individual essays in Southern Society and Its Transformations offer three additional assertions that further complicate existing southern historiography. First, antebellum southerners were not only market-oriented, but also willing capitalists. Robert Wright’s essay surveys the economic viability of southern business and argues that southerners were not reluctant entrepreneurs. In fact, Wright demonstrates that southerners adroitly raised needed capital to finance their business ventures. He contends that southerners’ willingness to participate in the market was stifled only by the “negative externality” of slavery (198). Jeff Bremer’s chapter on the evolving consumer economy in Missouri and Gary T. Edwards’s essay on yeomen farmers’ desire to enter into surplus cotton production in western Tennessee further establish southern farmers’ willing engagement in market activities. Elbra David’s chapter on the role of unsecured credit in Natchez illustrates the adaptability of the southern credit system. Like Bremer, David demonstrates the usefulness of examining the whole range of credit relationships, including informal credit transactions that were conducted outside of formal lending channels, because of their importance to regional economic development and in financing southern agriculture. Second, the two essays by Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green trace the creation of a self-conscious middle-class identity among a growing group of educated southern professionals, and they explore the occupational diversification that accompanied economic and social change in antebellum southern life. Wells examines southern professionals’ efforts to differentiate themselves from planters by forming professional societies, clubs, and organizations. Ultimately these organizations [End Page 531] helped the emerging middle class formulate a new future for the South, one that envisioned slavery comfortably coexisting with urban and industrial modernization. Green explores the educational background of antebellum southerners, concluding that graduates of higher schooling overwhelmingly entered into middle-class professional occupations and sought professional, not agricultural, success. These essays demonstrate the growing presence of a middle-class coalition of southerners who helped to redefine southern social mobility and cultivate bourgeois values long before the Civil War. A third group of essays reveals significant tensions among white southerners. As whites increasingly engaged in market activities, their competing economic interests strained both racial solidarity and the traditional framework of the slave system. Specifically, these tensions underscored the need for nonslaveholding whites to participate in the common defense of slavery (which did not always occur). Keri Leigh Merritt’s chapter on the enforcement of vagrancy laws in antebellum Georgia exposes planters’ uncertainty about poor whites’ commitment to slavery. She argues that vagrancy laws were selectively used to punish poor whites whose allegiance they questioned. Michael J. Pfeifer’s essay highlights the surprising prevalence of extralegal lynching in the antebellum era. Like Merritt, Pfeifer uncovers interesting historical moments when the property rights of individual slaveholders were pitted against the larger community’s interest in reinforcing racial solidarity. Moreover, Max L. Grivno’s chapter on rural wage labor in Maryland...

China Economy of Awaiting Urgently Balanced Development: On the Regional Economic Differentiation from the Perspective of Statistical Data

Based on the data of China Statistical Yearbook, this thesis analyzes and compares the economic situation and developmental dynamics of provincial administrative regions. On the basis of the available data, this paper unfolds the national economic situation by the total retail sales of social consuming goods and saving deposits. As the economic situation is largely depends on productivity, the paper further observes the productivity of different regions through local total output value, industrial output value and grain yield. It also observes the production environment from the perspectives of new fixed assets investment on infrastructure, energy consumption, gross import and export commodities, land transportation volume, water transportation volume and passenger cycle. For the convenience of regional comparison, the indicator is acquired by local per capita dividing national per capita. In order to observe the evolution dynamics, all these indicators make use of the data from any available year so as to show the rich information of the systematic regional pattern of the nation's economy. The above 11 indicators form an eleventh dimensional space, which observes the differences in the degree of development between different regions. It also observes the different structures of different economic entities, which shows the main features of China's economy in geographical distribution: Southern agriculture region and northern mining region provide the basic resources and cheap labor forces to support the running of coastal industry;while the products of the coastal industrial zone are exported through coastal port cities.

Peter McCandless . Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry . (Cambridge Studies on the American South.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Pp. xxi, 297. $90.00.

Planting rice and owning slaves became the highway to wealth in eighteenth-century South Carolina, and sickness and death traveled the same road. As Peter McCandless tells it, the story is one of planters' greed, for which southerners slave and free paid the price in suffering and mortality. Older, celebratory histories of southern agriculture would have pointed to “ambition,” not greed, as the driving force, but McCandless sees gross self-interest in how the rising market for rice, the lowcountry's near-perfect agricultural conditions, and investment in slave labor made deadly connection to equally thriving microorganisms. Yellow fever and malaria, two of the feared and lethal diseases, were the result. Dr. Alexander Gardner saw much the same dynamic in 1755, writing to the Royal Society of Arts in London of the “inexpressible avarice” that was the engine of rice cultivation (p. 126). The colony of South Carolina, praised as an Eden in the seventeenth century, appeared to immigrants, free and slave, as a hellish place of suffering by the eighteenth.

"The Herald of Prosperity": Tracing the Boll Weevil Myth in Alabama

As scholars and singers have pointed out in monographs and folk songs, the cotton boll weevil was a devastating force on southern farming and rural life. No symbol is more indicative of this destruction than Enterprise, Alabama's boll weevil monument. This essay examines not how the cotton pest destroyed the region's staple crop, but how women and men across race and class lines understood the beetle's threat and used it to their advantage. The statue, like the countless blues and folk songs about the pest, was a cultural statement that shaped the understanding of the bug itself and its supposed transformation of southern agriculture. By examining the local conditions that gave rise to dramatic, albeit short-lived, crop diversification, and in turn the monument's erection, this essay uncovers the ways in which the boll weevil myth was as important a force on southern life as the long-snouted beetle itself.

Sprawling Cities and New Factories: Rethinking the Political Economy of Secession

Sprawling Cities and New Factories:Rethinking the Political Economy of Secession Marc Egnal (bio) John Majewski . Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 256 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, and index. $39.95. Brush aside the Spanish moss. Hold the mint juleps. Forget your image of refined, ineffectual planters like Augustine St. Clare in Uncle Tom's Cabin or Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. According to John Majewski, slaveholders had a "decidedly businesslike mentality" (p. 6). More particularly, he contends that the secessionists sought to build a modern economy marked by "industrial expansion, economic independence, and government activism" and that these goals reflected "southern attitudes established during the antebellum period" (pp. 3, 7). The real St. Clares and Wilkeses, Majewski suggests, dreamed not of leisure but of "sprawling cities and new factories" (p. 152). Modernizing a Slave Economy is an engaging, provocative, valuable book, but ultimately its arguments are unpersuasive. Majewski's analysis has three components. To begin with, he examines Southern agriculture to show that poor soils and climate, not slavery or entrepreneurial failings, lay at the heart of regional underdevelopment. This part of the book is only loosely connected to his larger themes. Next, Majewski discusses how leading southerners in the decades before the Civil War demanded an activist state to promote agricultural reform, railroad construction, and direct trade with Europe. Finally, he analyzes the Confederacy and New South to show that the same emphasis on a modern, urbanized, industrial state marked policies during these years. Throughout, Majewski focuses on programs and leaders in two states: Virginia and South Carolina. The book opens with a detailed, if unconvincing, discussion of why the environment, not the planters' behavior, made the South poorer than the North. This analysis, with its quantitative underpinnings, has the feel of a stand-alone essay, the sort that might appear in the Journal of Economic History. Still it plays a role in the larger presentation: if the book were a trial, this discussion would be a character witness. It shows that we can accept the [End Page 462] planters as "businesslike," the sort of individuals who would seek an activist state to promote development. It refutes the charge, often made at the time and repeated by modern scholars, that slavery was a flawed system of production and responsible for the South's economic problems. While accepting that Southern farmers failed to keep pace with their counterparts in the North, Majewski points to rainfall, disease, and soil conditions as the culprits—not slavery. Climate, he suggests, caused extensive soil erosion: "Simply put, it rained harder in the South" (p. 36). Climate also helped breed ticks and spread Texas cattle fever: hence the scrawniness of Southern livestock. Still more significant were poor soils that led to "shifting cultivation." Southern land was quickly exhausted, then left fallow for long periods as planters moved to new tracts. In the North, richer soils, boosted by fertilizers and crop rotation, allowed fields to remain steadily productive. Using data from the 1994 U.S. General Soil Map, Majewski argues poor farmland forced planters to seek new expanses. Most Southern land, he explains, can be classified either as alfisols, which contained vital nutrients, or less fertile ultisols. "Even a cursory examination of a soil order map . . . ," he writes, "shows that the South is heavily burdened with ultisols" (p. 35). Shifting cultivation, he notes, was a "rational response" to these conditions, adding that, where alfisols predominated, farmers were less likely to engage in wasteful practices (p. 25). To prove the links between soils and cultivation, Majewski offers two sets of data. The first is a list of eight counties (seven in Virginia, one in South Carolina)—districts, he claims, that had better soils and engaged in more intensive cultivation. But the list includes only some of the Virginia counties where a high proportion of the land was farmed and provides no information on soil types. From the map displayed on page 34, it appears some of the selected counties sat on fertile alfisols, while others did not. The appendix provides the second body of supporting evidence: three multivariate regression equations...

“A Monument to Commercial Isolation”: Merchants and the Economic Decline of Post- Civil War New Orleans

This article describes the rapid economic decline of New Orleans after the Civil War and examines some of the reasons for it. It focuses on the elite merchant community of New Orleans, which had been the Old South’s primary urban commercial and financial center. The article details how complacent attitudes among these long-powerful commodities merchants contributed to a variety of poor decisions and inadequate responses to radically changed postwar conditions. In addition, the wartime devastation of the city’s banking sector, along with broad structural changes to postemancipation southern agriculture and the reorientation of intra- and interregional trade patterns, are all shown to have quickly combined to push the former first-rank American city down onto the dependent lower rungs of the American urban system during the decades immediately following the Civil War.

Cultural Persistence as Behavior Towards Risk: Evidence from the North Carolina Cherokees, 1850-1880

Can economic theory help explain the persistence of a cultural enclave among the Cherokee Indians living in North Carolina during the nineteenth century? To date, Fogelson and Kutsche (1961) and Finger (1984) have identified the continuation of a communal, labor-sharing, agricultural institution called the gadugi as an example of Cherokee agency during a period of substantial upheaval. I contribute to the historiography on ancestral labor traditions by adopting Kimball’s (1988) framework on the function of farming cooperatives to test whether this arrangement sprung up as a form of insurance against the idiosyncratic risk inherent in southern agriculture. Data collected from the 1850-1880 manuscript census returns on North Carolina Cherokee farms are used to compute the variance of household self-sufficiency, which appears substantial enough to warrant a non-market mechanism to pool risk.

Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780–1880 , and: Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (review)

Pharsalia: An Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880. By Lynn A. Nelson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Pp. 295. Cloth, $39.95.)Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. By Anthony E. Kaye. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 376. Cloth, $34.95.)Reviewed by John P. McCarthyThese two books are both about place: specific places of the mind and on the landscape that were in one case the creation of an elite planter family and in the other the creation of enslaved Africans. In the vast enterprise that is the historical analysis of the plantation these volumes offer fresh perspectives and delve into previously underutilized source material. As an archaeologist and architectural historian whose research is nearly always tied to a specific place, I found both to be welcome additions to a literature whose scale of analysis is often difficult to relate to my research.Lynn A. Nelson's Pharsalia: An Biography of a Southern Plantation focuses on a Nelson County, Virginia, plantation named for Lucan's epic poetic history of the Roman civil wars in which Caesar defeated Pompey and doomed the Roman Republic. In this inaugural volume in the University of Georgia Press series Environmental History and the American South, Nelson, associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University, tells the story of the struggle for agrarian independence that characterized the efforts of successive generations of planters on this property in the nineteenth century. In Nelson's view, this foreshadowed the fate of southern agriculture and sheds light on the failures of conservation efforts in the region into the twentieth century. Nelson productively mined the rich trove of papers of the Massie family, the builders and nineteenth-century owners of Pharsalia. While it is widely accepted that ill-considered farming practices were largely responsible for the soil depletion that contributed so heavily to the poverty of the rural Nelson's analysis points to the overpowering challenges facing those who attempted to pursue soilconservation practices.Nelson makes careful use of the plantation's extensive records to situate its agroecology in shifting contexts. He sees the farm as involving not just a landscape or a geographical setting but as a set of ecological relationships that evolve over time as a result of shifting human power and intentions. The political and social dynamics of a republican frontier, antebellum capital markets, the Civil War, and reconstruction of commodity and labor relations each inspired planters to shape land use in an attempt to achieve outcomes consistent with the ideological goals of the contemporary political economy. But in each case, efforts to construct a profitable and sustainable agriculture were defeated by natural and market forces beyond the planter's control.The Republican ideology of agrarian independence and mastery over land and labor supported both migration to new lands in the West and intensified production of previously settled regions. The Massies, owners of Pharsalia, remained in Virginia and adopted farming practices that promised to renew exhausted soils, maximize the labor of their slaves, and maintain the family's independence. Following the latest agriculture advice, the Massies manured fields and rotated crops to restore lost productivity. But these efforts proved unsatisfactory, and by the 1840s the Massies turned to capital investment to import resources to intensify production. Improved seed, imported blooded livestock, and new technology raised yields and increased labor efficiency to the extent that when founding patriarch William Massie died in 1862, he was a wealthy man. His widow continued the intensive farming practices established before the war and adapted the new free-labor system to the plantation's needs. But in the end, pests and weeds and soil depletion could not be conquered, and Pharsalia could not support the aristocratic ambitions of the family. …

Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 65 to lynching by contending that the elimination of intoxicating liquor— often packaged with sexually provocative images of women—would reduce the perceived threat of the “black beast” (p. 166). Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause will appeal to historians of evangelicalism , prohibition movements, and the fin de siècle South. The author’s evidence largely derives from denominational publications, sermons, personal correspondence, and secondary sources. Several historiographical asides might prove tedious for laypersons but helpful to graduate students who are studying significant themes from southern history, such as race, honor, and gender. BARCLAY KEY Western Illinois University Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South. By George B. Ellenberg. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xiii, 219 pp. $42.50. ISBN 978-0-8173-1597-9. Over a period of roughly thirty years (1930–1960), southern agriculture experienced dramatic technological and structural changes. Ellenberg provides a window onto these changes through a detailed accounting of the transition from mule to tractor power and presents a convincing argument that in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth “a special relationship” was formed “between the American South and the mule” (p. 2). The mule is the offspring of a male ass, or jack, and a female horse. The popularity of mules was due to a number of factors, including strength, intelligence, and resilience to disease and mishandling. Oxen may have been stronger and horses quicker, but the mule represented a balance between the two that made it the animal of choice for small farmers. Plantation owners also favored the mule, though many also kept teams of oxen and of course horses for riding and pulling carriages. Smaller farmers did not have the luxury of such diversity and used mules for all purposes. Beyond this observation, Ellenberg devotes relatively little attention to differences between yeoman farmers of the piedmont and plantation owners of the coastal plains, and intersperses observations concerning the role of mules and tractors in the two regions. Thus the author presents mules as a unifying feature in southern agriculture. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, farmers in the cotton states imported mules bred elsewhere, principally Kentucky, Indiana, T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 66 Ohio, and Missouri. Ellenberg explores the trade in mules and the effect of the Civil War on mule (and horse) populations. As the cotton states recovered from war, mules continued to play a central role in the farm economy and efforts were made to encourage local mule breeding. The rise of mechanization, and in particular the farm tractor, affected progress in this direction. Ellenberg notes that the South lagged behind the Midwest in adoption of tractors and associated technologies, but that within ten years of the end of World War II the tractor had effectively supplanted the mule across the region. The final straw was adoption of an effective cotton harvester. Until that development, cotton producers continued to rely on abundant farm labor, and many farmers found little advantage in adopting tractors to prepare the soil more quickly for planting . But when the end came, it came quickly. By 1962, the U.S. Census of Agriculture no longer bothered to count the number of mules, signaling the official end of an era. In the space of a generation, mules went from ubiquitous to rarity, and mule handling became a lost art. Ellenberg characterizes the roles played by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the extension systems as supportive of the transition to mechanized farming. He notes that land grant universities were prime supporters of this technological revolution, but that “the reasons for this have not been fully explored” (p. 77). There is, in fact, a considerable amount of social science literature on this subject developed since the mid-1970s. Ellenberg draws on archival materials, agriculture journals, regional histories, and USDA and extension reports. His focus on technological transformation leaves unanswered a number of questions, some alluded to and others never mentioned. Farm mechanization led to consolidation of farms, resulting in fewer...

I'll Take My Farm: The GI Bill, Agriculture and Veterans in North Carolina

This article examines pivotal components of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 that have largely escaped careful study. The GI Bill of Rights, as the act is familiarly known, established a broad and groundbreaking social safety net of educational and economic benefits and incentives for veterans returning from World War II. Two elements of the legislation – farm loans and on-the-farm training – aimed to advance the nation's agricultural economy, and proved to be especially popular in the South, a region deeply rooted in the agrarian history of the United States. In North Carolina, the wide embrace of the farm aid by veterans is illustrative. It highlighted an abiding desire to own and operate farms, an ambition that had survived the war. Yet, North Carolina's experience ultimately reveals that the agricultural components of the GI Bill contributed more to the capitalist transformation of southern agriculture than to fulfilling landless veterans' hopes for acquiring farms.

Impacts of Expanded Ethanol Production on Southern Agriculture

This study analyzes the potential impacts of expanded ethanol production on southern agriculture. Results of regression analysis suggest that acreage planted for field crops (corn, cotton, soybeans, and wheat) is inelastic with respect to relative prices. The results provide statistical evidence of potential significant acreage shifts favoring corn over cotton, soybeans, and wheat. Simulations indicate that higher corn prices will increase corn acreage, but the South continues to be a deficit corn region. U.S. corn production is capable of supplying domestic demand for ethanol, feed for livestock and poultry, and other uses, while maintaining exports at more than 2 billion bushels annually.