198 / PARADOXES or FORCED LABOR

southern political leaders. Much attention was paid to this
problem in southern agricultural journals. Many planters
experimented with various types of fertilizers, methods of
plowing, and regimens of crop rotation. Successful experi-
ments were regularly reported. All farmers were urged to
follow such practices. Those who did not were severely
criticized and held up to scorn by agricultural and political
leaders, some of whom overdramatized and exaggerated the
extent of the problem. Olmsted and Caimes completely
misunderstood the nature of the running discussion among
Southerners on this issue. Confusing rhetoric with reality,
they assumed that the agricultural leaders were losing the
battle to maintain land fertility. However, the available evi-
dence on the course of the value of land and improvements
as well as on land yields indicates that they were wrong.

In what sense are the subregional differences in land
quality relevant to an explanation of the interregional
differences in productivity and to the interregional redistri-
bution of the slave population? The soils and climate of
the Various states were not equally advantageous to all
southern crops. The Atlantic Coastal Plain just below the
Mason-Dixon line and the Central Piedmont Plateau were
favorable for raising tobacco and general farming, but could
not support a cotton culture, Rice had its greatest advantage
in the swarnplands along the southeastern coastal flatwoods
of Georgia and South Carolina and in the lower Gulf Coastal
Plain. Sugar production was confined largely to a handful
of parishes in the Mississippi Delta. Cotton could be grown
successfully in a long belt stretching mainly from South
Carolina through Texas. The bounds of this belt were de-
termined largely, but not exclusively, by climatic conditions
since the cotton culture requires a minimum of two hundred
frostless days and ample rainfall. Temperature set the
northern boundary and rainfall the westem boundary. Not
all land within this boundary is equally suitable. The black-
belt lands of Alabama and Texas were more congenial to

 

RELATIVE EFFICIENCY OF SLAVE AGRICULTURE / 199

cotton than the sandy loarns of the Piedmont or the marshes
of the coastal plains, except for long-staple cotton. Perhaps
the best cotton lands of all were the alluvial soils of the
Mississippi flood plain.

Thus, the distribution of southern labor among the states
was in large measure determined by the changing structure
of the demand for southern crops. As long as tobacco and
wheat were the principal crops of the South, as they appear
to have been through the end of the eighteenth century, it
was most efl-icient to concentrate labor and the other re-
sources in regions which bordered on Chesapeake Bay.
But as the demand for cotton grew, relative to other
southern commodities, efficiency dictated a reallocation of
labor and other resources to the lands of Alabama, Missis-
sippi, Louisiana, and later, Texas. In other words, the west-
ward movement of southern farming was due, not to the
depletion of soils, but to the increase in the demand for
products whose relative advantage was on western rather
than on eastern soils. _.‘ V

The westward shift was also stimulated by certain tech-
nological advances which appear to have increased the
relative productivity of western lands. Two of the most
important of these took place in the transponadon sector
rather than within the agricultural sector. One was th
development of the s and its diffusion throughout
the South during the 1820s and 1830s. Steamboats drasti-
cally reduced the cost of transportation into the interior of
the South along rivers which had been too shallow or had
currents too swift to permit their navigation by sailboats.
The accessibility of lands in the interior of various states,

further enhanced by the development of the railroad and its

4/

I

and hence the economic productivity of these lands, was 3

Construction through the South, especially during the decade
of the 1 850s.

the agricultural sector of the South after 1800 was in the

Perhaps the most important technological advance withirfl 5