Meanwhile, black farm owners found themselves at a greater disadvantage in an environment where access to credit through government programs was essential. Black farm agents could provide them only minimal assistance in the 1950s for they were busy negotiating a changing civil rights landscape. Questioning the status quo in race relations was grounds for dismissal. Ironically, the integration of the Extension Service after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 greatly decreased the number of black agents. They had always, of course, functioned at a disadvantage. While the white farm agents were often headquartered in the county courthouse where they had access to the sources of power, black agents were housed elsewhere, paid less, and hampered by inferior office equipment and automobiles. They had provided an important service to black farmers, but with the integration of the service in the late 1960s, the black agent’s role diminished, and black farm owners faced the consequences. The Pigford v. Glickman decision by the Supreme Court in 1999 revealed the extent of the damage done to black farmers. The decision resulted from a suit filed by group of black farmers in 1997 alleging that they had been discriminated against in the allocation of federal farm loans and other kinds of assistance between 1981 and 1996. The court agreed and ordered restitution that has run into the billions (Daniel 2013).
Southern agriculture in the period after the Civil War differed significantly from that practiced in other parts of the country at the time, but by the early twenty-first century, there were greater similarities than differences. The change was slow in developing. While southern yeomen farmers were absorbed into the market economy, planters continued to cultivate the same labor-intensive crops they had always grown until developments during the New Deal and World War II freed them from their antebellum origins. By the early twenty-first century, southern agriculturalists, like their counterparts elsewhere in the United States, had embraced modern agricultural practices, and southern farmers were no longer so labor-dependent. African Americans, like rural populations elsewhere, had departed for cities in industrial states, but those who remained faced new environmental concerns. Meanwhile, the southern plantation turned agribusiness did not promote economic development beneficial to the South as a whole. Just as its antebellum counterpart enriched a few but left the South undeveloped, the agribusiness corporations of the twenty-first century make the owners wealthy but leave many citizens impoverished and living in food deserts. The long transformation of southern agriculture failed to serve all the citizens of the region.
Bibliographical Essay
A bibliography of post-Civil War southern agriculture must begin with the failure of federal policy during the Civil War to permanently topple the planter elite and confiscate and redistribute plantations. Although peripheral to reconstruction historiography, the story of the plantation’s survival resides within that tradition. It insured that the major sector of southern agriculture remained tied to monocrop agriculture, a new unfree labor system, and a failure to adopt mechanization. It took more than a half century and a Great Depression to move toward modern agricultural practices.
Willie Lee Rose’s Rehearsal for Reconstruction (1964) laid the historiographical groundwork for understanding the failure of federal policy during the war in terms of its impact on freedmen. Works by Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom (1977) and Jay Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty (1978) added detail but also elaborated more fully on the emergence of the sharecropping system. Harold Woodman’s New South, New Law (1995) detailed the legal strictures that kept freedmen bound to plantations, and Pete Daniel’s Shadow of Slavery (1972) chronicled the rise of debt peonage. William Kiser’s Alternative Slaveries (2016) places the problem of peonage in a larger context by demonstrating that the first peonage law was enacted in New Mexico. In arguing that black sharecroppers were bound to southern plantations, Woodman and Daniel do not go unchallenged as Gavin Wright, Old South, New South (1986) traced considerable movement of plantation sharecroppers from east to west. Wright argues that market forces worked to their advantage. Steven Hahn, however, in A Nation under Our Feet (2003) emphasizes the role African Americans themselves played in the modest gains they made. Kenneth Barnes in Journey of Hope (2004) chronicles the decision by some to seek opportunity in Africa while Debra Reid and Evan P. Bennett in Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule (2012) turn to an understudied phenomenon: the ability of freedmen to purchase land and survive in the postwar period.
A major factor in the movement of plantations toward the West involved unsustainable agricultural practices that survived the Civil War. Erin Mauldin in Unredeemed Land (2018) and Paul Sutter in Now Let Us Praise Famous Gullies (2015) provide analyses of the implications of certain antebellum practices that depleted the soil and how these practices intensified in the postwar period. Mart Stewart in What Nature Suffers to Groe (1996) makes an interesting connection between antebellum era use of slave labor to perform tasks to address the damages associated with rice cultivation and the refusal of sharecroppers to perform these tasks without equitable recompense in the postbellum period.
A different transformation was taking place in non-plantation areas of the South and contributed to the popularity of the Farmers Alliance in the 1880s. Steven Hahn argues in The Roots of Southern Populism (1983) that small farmers were pulled into the market economy after the war and faced a host of problems, including indebtedness to merchants that threatened their very survival. The unwillingness of planter-controlled legislatures to address their needs led them to briefly abandon the Democratic Party. Populism’s popularity in the South is a major preoccupation of historians of the agrarian revolt, but C. Vann Woodward’s analysis in Origins of the New South (1951) remains an excellent source; Robert McMath’s American Populism (1992), a social history of the movement, is very useful in placing it in context; and Connie Lester in Up from the Mudsills of Hell (2006) offers a particularly cogent analysis of Tennessee farmers.
The emergence of an agricultural bureaucracy in the South in terms of the work of land-grant institutions established by the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act and the second Morrill Act of 1890 has been the subject of much discussion in the agricultural literature. The attempts of agricultural scientists to introduce modern agricultural practices and their growing influence has been a subject of much interest and debate. Most surveys of agricultural history are attentive to the subject but some are particularly noteworthy. Roy V. Scott’s The Reluctant Farmer (1970) chronicles the doubts of farmers in early years to 1914. His book stops with the passage of the Smith-Lever Act, an act that established the Cooperative Extension Service and the county agent system. James C. Giesen in Boll Weevil Blues (2011) provides a fascinating study of how the boll weevil threat, which occurred just as the county farm agent system was establishing itself, drove the planters and farm agents together. The success of their cooperative effort depended on the cooptation of African American sharecroppers. Meanwhile, three articles by Earl W. Crosby provide the best treatment of the development of black agricultural extension: “The Roots of Black Agricultural Extension” (1977); “Limited Success and Long Odds” (1983); and “The Struggle for Existence” (1986). In “I Have Been Through the Fire,” Jeannie Whayne examines the difficulties faced by black agricultural extension during the Civil Rights era (Whayne 2003 ).
While farm extension agents struggled to convince agriculturalists to adopt more sustainable practices, they had little to offer in the way of response to natural disasters. A worsening series of floods along the lower Mississippi River Valley contributed to the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 chronicled by Daniel’s Deep’n as it Come (1977) and John Barry’s Rising Tide (1997). Nan Elizabeth Woodruff’s As Rare as Rain covers the devastation of the drought of 1930–1931. Daniel and Woodruff make a fascinating connection between these disasters and the ability of planters to manipulate the situation to maintain their labor supply.
Pete Daniel’s Breaking the Land