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Introduction“I understand all about the growth of cotton, from the time of preparing the land to receivethe seed, till the wool is jinned and packed. I am a good judge of its quality, too, and knowwhat is the best kind of jin for various sorts. I do not say this for the sake of boasting. Myknowledge has not come naturally to me. I have acquired it in a very hard school, and I wantto turn it to account.”John Brown, edited by Louis Alexis Chamerovzow, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings,and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave in New England. London: W.M. Watts, 1855, 208.John Brown was a slave on a Georgia cotton plantation when he acquired hisknowledge of cotton agriculture. Like countless other slaves across the American South,Brown needed to know the most intimate details of how planters wanted to grow cotton—his life depended upon it. Planters across the cotton South took interest in the details ofplantation agriculture and tried to extract as much cotton as they could from their land andslaves. For many of these men, this meant engaging with the popular agricultural reformmovement that published manuals on cotton planting, journals offering advice on the detailsof running a plantation, and blank record forms to guide cotton planters through thebusiness of planting, cultivating, harvesting, and selling the white fiber. When their masterstook an interest in agricultural reform, slaves often paid the price. Agricultural reform in thecotton South emphasized efficiency, eliminating slack periods in the labor cycle, closelymonitoring slave labor, and adopting new varieties of the cotton plant that produced moreand larger bolls for slaves to pick.My dissertation, “Saving the South: Agricultural Reform in the Southern UnitedStates, 1819-1861” examines how the popular national agricultural reform movement wastranslated to the southern states and how it interacted with the economy of slavery andshort-staple cotton. The dissertation is a study of cotton plantations, agricultural reform, andslave labor in South Carolina and Mississippi. Between 1820 and 1861, the cotton economy1

of the plantation South exploded, expanding the reach of slavery and staple production. Atthe same time, the United States was undergoing a dramatic reshaping of its nationaleconomy in the face of industrialization and changing approaches to labor management.Cotton planters in the South selectively appropriated elements of rational production andagricultural reform in an attempt both to follow trends in the national and transnationalknowledge networks with which they engaged and extract as much as possible from land andslave labor. These reformers saw re-making plantation agriculture as the only way to securethe future of a slave South.The central question that my dissertation explores is how the agricultural reformmovement was used and interpreted by reformers and other planters, including how itchanged the daily lives of slaves on cotton plantations. Drawing on print sources from theagricultural press and manuscript correspondence and plantation journals and work logs, Iexplore the ways that planter elites used agricultural reform to articulate their goals for andanxieties about the future of their plantation society, as well as the unexpected legacy ofreform on the plantation. Focusing on both elites’ agendas and slave labor, I was able to seehow the intellectual history of southern elites can be directly traced to fundamental changesin the lives of planters, overseers, and slaves. Southern agricultural reform was an adaptive,reactive movement that shifted its form to follow the course of plantation slavery in theUnited States. Unlike the national agricultural reform movement, southern reform was notdefined by a specific set of agricultural practices, but rather served the interests of planterreformers who were determined to ensure a prosperous future for slave-based plantationagriculture. These men differed from reformers in other parts of the nation, in that theypossessed the social authority that other reformers aspired to. The major goal of southernagricultural reform was to keep slavery and plantation agriculture profitable and competitive2

with other modes of production. This produced a movement focused on findinginefficiencies in agricultural production, rather than a movement determined to manage soilfertility sustainably. Agricultural reform in the American South was interested in politicaleconomy as much as agronomy.The project differs from most previous work on agricultural reform and change inthe American South in that it does not assume that this movement “failed” in the South.Scholars, and indeed some contemporary historical actors, mistook the intentional limitingof agricultural reform to planters and select experts as failure. Southern agricultural reformwas never meant to extend beyond this small constituency, an intention that had thepractical effect of precluding a sweeping popular movement, such as that of the Northeast.Southern elites saw plantation agriculture as synonymous with southern society andeconomy, making any truly democratic attempt to reform it inherently dangerous. Plantersmade agricultural reform about much more than agriculture; reform was a safe place todiscuss potentially destabilizing issues like education for the lower classes, skilled andmanagerial work for slaves, and the precarious economic and political place of southernstates nationally. In political forums, questioning the class and labor foundations ofplantation society was unthinkable, given the desperate need for stability in a slave society. Iargue that the increasing presence of print on the plantation brought this agricultural reformmovement into the daily lives of slaves across the South.This dissertation breaks from extant definitions of agricultural reform by locating thecore of the movement in a desire to increase the profits of plantation agriculture and tofurther the plantation political economy, rather than in a set of reforms centered on soilfertility and specific agricultural practices. The literature on southern agricultural reform hasimported two assumptions from the standard story of agricultural reform: that agricultural3

reform was about specific agrarian practices, usually centered on soil, and that it wasdesigned to have popular appeal to all white landowning agricultural producers. I argue thatthese terms do not apply to the South and they have masked the genuine goals of southernagricultural improvement in the South—a political economic project to make plantationslavery consistent with a changing American economy, protecting the planter class and itsvision of southern society. Agricultural reform influenced Mississippi cotton planters whodid not marl their fields just as it did a Virginia planter who assiduously followed EdmundRuffin’s principles.1 The movement was defined by its commitment to constant adaptation,innovation, and experimentation in all forms towards its ultimate goal of financial success,regardless of the human cost that slaves paid.Agricultural Improvement in the Eighteenth-Century SouthGeorge Washington was at the forefront of an early generation of southernAmerican agricultural improvers. While Washington only traveled once outside of thecolonies that would form the United States, his visit to the West Indian island of Barbadosrepresents an important connection for agricultural reform in the American South. In 1751,when Washington’s brother, Lawrence, was suffering from tuberculosis, the two siblingssailed to the tiny colony in the hopes that the warm weather would help Lawrence’srecovery. During their four-month stay, George spent much of his time (when notrecovering from smallpox) riding around Barbados’ plantation landscape. At the time,planters in Barbados were beginning to embrace the Enlightenment idea of improvement, as1Marl is a mud or stone rich in lime or calcium carbonate. It was commonly found in coastal areas of thesouthern states and planters would have their slaves dig it up and load it onto carts of boats for transport to thefield, where it would be deposited, spread, and sometimes plowed into the soil. Much like lime, marl raises thepH of soils, making them less acidic, and provides calcium to crops. It was the central plank of EdmundRuffin’s platform for southern agricultural reform.4

it applied to their plantations. Some of these planters and their agents began to useplantation record books and work logs to keep track of how and where their slaves wereworking. The books served to monitor their white managers and provide an account ofplantation labor so that planters could quantify the work that slaves were doing.Additionally, since all of the viable plantation land on Barbados had been cultivated,Barbadian plantations were worked much more intensively than Virginian ones, not just interms of the density of cultivated acres but also in terms of the measures used to restorefertility to the land. The plantations were heavily and regularly manured, plant refuse wasplowed back into the ground, and managers closely monitored the soil.When Washington returned to Virginia, he brought back with him a still-ill brother,immunity to smallpox (smallpox immunity), and new ideas about plantation management. Adecade later, in the 1760s, Virginia planters held Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation upas a paragon of improved cultivation. The future president used watches and clocks to studyand monitor the work of his slaves, divided his slave workforce into more flexible “squads”which he carefully deployed around his plantation, and kept detailed work logs to track workand production.2These practices anticipated the adoption of new business practices in much of theSouth by many decades, but they do point to an important, and often overlooked,connection between the South and the Caribbean. While the print culture of southernreform draws very little on Caribbean works, the plantation records and accounts that wouldsweep the South in the 1840s and 1850s were direct descendants of Caribbean recordkeepingpractices. On many of the English sugar islands, absentee plantation owners were the ruleand plantation enterprises often involved massive capital investments that owners wanted toJustin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2013).25

track as closely as possible. As a result, they hired local attorneys to watch over theirplantations. These agents often took responsibility for a number of plantations and delegatedthe daily management to white overseers. Beneath the attorneys and overseers was acomplex web of white and slave management, all of which plantation owners wanted tomonitor. The solution, for many, was to have their agents assemble annual books gatheringtogether the daily records of the overseers and other managers. These annual books wouldthen be shipped back to Britain for the owner and his accountants to examine and commenton. As Washington’s case illustrates, southern planters slowly became aware of thesebookkeeping practices and adapted them to their own needs.Washington was not just an early experimenter with industrial discipline, clock work,and plantation accounting, he was also in the first wave of gentlemen Virginia planters toswitch from tobacco, long the staple of the Virginia economy, to wheat and other grains.Grains became a viable crop for planters as tobacco prices declined and prices for the leafdeclined. In making this shift, Washington and other northern Virginia planters of the 1770sand 1780s triggered a series of changes in agricultural practice. Tobacco had been cultivatedintensively on the same fields year after year, depleting the soil and establishing anagricultural calendar with clear periods of more and less intense work for slaves. The grains,however, involved a different system of cultivation, one that drew on the works of earlyVirginia agricultural writers like John Binns and John Taylor of Caroline, advocatingmethods of shifting cultivation, where fields that had been planted in grain one year wouldbe rested the next year, planted only in clover.3 Grain also required new implements andmethods of harvesting and processing. These changes drew in artisans and inventors andmade machinery and improved tools a central element of agricultural improvement.John Binns, A Treatis on Practical Farming (John A. Binns, 1803); John Taylor, Arator: Being a Series of AgriculturalEssays, Practical & Political, in Sixty-One Numbers (J.M. Carter, 1814).36

Influential writers like Taylor also emphasized the importance of keeping the slaveworkforce fully occupied, both for efficiency and safety—idle slaves were thought to be arisk to revolt.Improvement in the Early RepublicIn the decades after the American Revolution, southern agricultural improvementwas most celebrated in Virginia. Nationally, learned elites established agricultural societies inBoston, Philadelphia, Charleston, and other American cities. These societies modeledthemselves after scientific societies that participated in Atlantic networks of knowledge.Much like members of scientific societies in early America, the men in these improvementsocieties wanted to establish their credibility and authority as much as they were interested inchanging the practice of agriculture. Contrary to its own rhetoric, agricultural improvementwas very much an intellectual movement, not a practical one. In 1817, some of the mostprominent agricultural improvers (and Virginians) gathered together to form the AlbemarleAgricultural Society. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and a number of prominentpoliticians lent weight to the organization and John Skinner, who two years later wouldpublish the first major national agricultural journal, the American Farmer, gave intellectualauthority to the society. In the next few years, several significant societies were organized,including the Fredericksburg Agricultural Society in northern Virginia and the RoanokeAgricultural Society in southern Virginia, where tobacco still ruled the fields.4 These societieswere dominated by wealthy planters who were interested in improving the agriculture of thestate through soil management, better implements, and crop selection. The vast majority ofthe agricultural reformers of this period were men who could afford to take significant4Charles W. Turner, “Virginia Agricultural Reform, 1815-1860” Agricultural History 26 (July 1952), 81.7

financial risks and invest considerable capital into uncertain new agricultural projects. Whilemany scholars have argued that southern agriculture was doomed by the refusal of southernfarmers and planters to heed the advice of reformers, sticking to established practice was amuch safer financial strategy. Thomas Jefferson, a wealthy man and ambitious reformer, diedwith his plantations heavily mortgaged. Through the first decade or two of the nineteenthcentury, agricultural reform in the South was the preserve of the established planter elite.The other wealthy and influential group of planters in this period was the rice andSea Island cotton planters of the Carolina and (to a lesser extent) Georgia Lowcountry.These men had different agricultural problems than the Virginia planters who started therenowned agricultural societies. For the South Carolina planter gentry, the major issues wereless the declining fertility of the Lowcountry, which still produced large crops, than thetension between an established rice and Sea Island cotton economy and the emerging shortstaple cotton economy. Rice and Sea Island, or long-staple, cotton were grown almostexclusively in the tidal Lowcountry. When short-staple cotton emerged, planters had alreadyspent over a century forcing their slave workforces to transform swampland into an irrigatedlandscape tenuously maintained b

combining studies of the print and social worlds of reformers, the account books and non-literary print that popularized reform in the Southwest, cotton work, and plantation case studies. This dissertation traces the intellectual history of southern elites to fundamental changes in the lives of planters, overseers, and slaves in the cotton South.