Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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There can be no doubt that the desire for the greatest short-term returns
drove plantation agriculture. Land was cheap and abundant. Moving farther
inland every few years, a planter could enjoy the benefits of perpetually
farming virgin ground—as long as there was new ground to be had.
Clearing new fields was cheap compared to carefully plowing, terracing,
and manuring used land. Still, finding virgin land required uprooting and
relocating the family and all its possessions, including slaves, to newly
opened states in the West. Given the high cost of moving—both socially
and financially—what kept such practices alive in the face of overwhelming
evidence they were ruining the land?
For one thing, the large plantations’ owners—those most likely to recognize
the problem of soil exhaustion—did not work their own land. Just
as two thousand years before in ancient Rome, absentee ownership encouraged
soil-wasting practices. Overseers and tenant farmers paid with a percentage
of the crop were more concerned about maximizing each year’s
harvest than protecting the landowner’s investment by maintaining soil
fertility. Time invested in plowing along contours, repairing nascent gullies,
or delivering manure to the fields reduced their immediate income.
Overseers who rarely remained on the same ground for more than a year
skimmed off a farm’s fertility as quickly as possible.
Another fundamental obstacle to agricultural reform was that the institution
of slavery was incompatible with methods for reversing soil degradation.
In a way, the intensity of soil erosion in the antebellum South helped
trigger the Civil War. While we’re all taught that the Civil War was fought
over slavery, what we don’t learn is that the tobacco and cotton monocultures
that characterized the southern economy required slave labor to turn
a profit. More than a cultural convention, slavery was essential to the underpinnings
of southern wealth. It was not simply that the South was agricultural;
much of the North was too. Slavery was critical to the exportoriented,
cash-crop monoculture common throughout the South.
Of course, any comprehensive explanation for the Civil War must
address a complex set of conditions and events that predated the outbreak
of hostilities. The main reasons for the Civil War are usually given as controversy
over tariffs and the establishment of a central bank, abolitionist
agitation both in Congress and the North in general, and passage of fugitive
slave laws. Obviously, efforts to outlaw slavery arose from its ongoing
practice in the South. But the most volatile issue of the period preceding
the Civil War was the question of slavery’s status in the new western states.
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