PLANTATION SYSTEM

Plantations dominated southern agriculture from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War. These large farms, employing twenty or more slaves, produced staple crops (cotton, rice, tobacco) for domestic and foreign markets. Planters owned both the means of production—the land and tools—and the labor force. Such a system was not inevitable, however, even in an era before mechanization. Wage laborers, sharecroppers, and family farmers could also grow these staples, as the post-Civil War era clearly attested.

The plantation system, begun in the late seventeenth century (long after its appearance in Brazil and the West Indies), expanded through the coastal and Piedmont South during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With the end of slavery, the system collapsed because former slaves refused to work in gangs or to accept labor discipline; planters therefore divided their land into small sharecropped farms. A new plantation system based upon wage labor, however, briefly appeared in the 1930s and 1940s, when planters consolidated their units to take advantage of New Deal agricultural policies.

Before 1865, staple production, slavery, and the plantation system were intricately intertwined. Using their land as collateral, planters bought slaves in order to increase production. The more slaves a master could work, the larger his output and the greater his profits. By the mid-eighteenth century, the slave population was growing by natural increase, thereby permitting owners to increase their labor force without buying more Africans.

The plantation system originated in the tobacco economy of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake colonies. To meet the exploding European demand for tobacco, planters required more labor than their families could provide. They employed indentured servants, who, in return for transportation from England, agreed to work for a planter for a certain term of years. Since servants were relatively inexpensive, a substantial minority of planters could afford them, thus creating a widespread distribution of relatively small agricultural units. But labor conditions were so oppressive that the flow of servants began to decline, especially after economic conditions began to improve in England in the late seventeenth century.

The growing scarcity of servants led planters to experiment with slave labor. Since men of wealth bought many Africans and enjoyed the consequent increase in production, their plantations grew larger. Although only about a tenth of Chesapeake tobacco cultivators were large planters, by the late eighteenth century close to half the slaves in the area were working on their holdings.

The plantation system spread throughout the South during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By 1720, it had appeared in the rice country of the Carolina and Georgia coasts, where great planters owned most of the slaves. The greatest diffusion of the plantation system occurred, however, between 1790 and 1860. Accelerating demand for cotton in England led wealthy southerners to move to the new Southwest—Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas—where they established cotton plantations. Although many yeomen grew cotton, aided by sons and a slave or two, plantations with many slaves produced most of the cotton grown in America. Wherever the plantation system became entrenched, white farmers who relied on family labor were marginalized and forced from the best land.

The plantation labor system was complex. Slaves planted, weeded, and harvested crops; kept fences and plantation structures in order; built slave cabins; and made products like shoes and barrels for the plantation. In order to achieve high levels of production, planters divided their slaves into specialized gangs and set overseers and slave drivers to compel sustained labor. But such productivity required compromises with slave workers. Slaves demanded the right to form families, create kin networks, and use their spare time in their quarters as they saw fit (visiting, attending religious services, or growing crops in their own plots). Since plantation profits were tied to productivity, discipline of slaves became a crucial issue. Some masters used incentives (money, better jobs) to keep slaves reasonably content; others (especially on rice plantations) permitted slaves to work on their own after their daily tasks were completed. But positive incentives were rarely sufficient; to gain the greatest production, slaves often had to be driven and whipped.

The emancipation of slaves by the federal army, President Abraham Lincoln, and most important, by the actions of slaves themselves, destroyed the plantation system. Freedmen and freedwomen refused to accept plantation discipline, become permanent wage laborers, live in the old slave quarters, or even stay on the plantation. They wanted land of their own, where they could feed their families and perhaps produce small surpluses.

The end result of struggles between the planters (who wanted a docile labor force) and the freedpeople was the creation of a new labor system, one that provided some autonomy to former slaves while turning them into a kind of wage laborer. Planters refused to sell land to ex-slaves; instead they agreed to permit them to farm independent units, paying them a share of the crop at the end of the year. The planter still owned the land, tools, and crops; the share became the equivalent of a wage; moreover, the former slaves usually owed money at the end of the year to planters and local storekeepers, and were thereby kept in a form of debt peonage.

This sharecropping system lasted for about a half century. New Deal agricultural policies, especially payment to owners for not planting cotton, allowed planters to evict sharecroppers, consolidate their holdings, and then hire workers as they needed for wages. Lack of mechanization, especially of the cotton harvest, was long an obstacle to a completely successful wage-labor plantation system, but cotton harvesters, perfected by the late 1940s, resolved that problem. As plantations converted to a mechanized operation, hundreds of thousands of former sharecroppers and wage laborers migrated to cities. But this new, machine-intensive plantation environment lasted barely until 1960 in the old cotton South; it was far more productive to use the machinery in the flat land of the Southwest.

Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (1986).

Allan Kulikoff

See also Agriculture; Chesapeake Colonies; Colonial Economy;Cotton; Slavery; Southern Colonies; Tobacco.