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Essay on Economy for Cash Crops in the Southern Region
For about three centuries, agriculture was the chief occupation of most people of the American South, and the pastoral life was the shared experience that tied together a region that rivals most countries in size. The significant institutions of this agrarian tradition were the plantation and the small farm. The first plantations were established around Jamestown in the Virginia Colony in the early 1600s. The labor of choice was indentured servants imported from England, and the crop of choice was tobacco. Afterward, slaves would replace servants, and still later, sharecroppers would replace slaves. Rice, sugar and "King Cotton," would join tobacco as major plantation crops in the region.
Despite the fact that plantations in due course could be found throughout the South, they were plentiful only in the areas with the richest, most fertile land, areas like the Tidewater of Virginia, the Low Country of South Carolina, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, and the Black Belt of Alabama. Nevertheless, the plantation would dominate the Southern economy and dictate the course of Southern history until technology, migration, industry, and policies implemented by the federal government would finally end the plantation's rule in the decades after World War II.
The great majority of white Southerners before the Civil War were small farmers who owned farms of several hundred acres, worked their land with the help of kin, lived on what they grew and raised on their owns farms, and traded and exchanged for the little extras. Small farmers would survive the Civil War and in fact grow in number, and a new kind of small farming—sharecropping would develop, however, by the late twentieth century, the small farm was on the brink of disappearance. In many ways the plantation and the small farm were in different worlds, but there was also much in common between life...........
