The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War

The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War

The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War. By Charles S. Aiken. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

For nearly two hundred years the cotton plantation has been a defining feature of the southern landscape, yet remarkably few studies of the institution have focused on its economic, social, and political geography. Charles Aiken's The Cotton Plantation South helps to redress the imbalance. Although not all readers will view the geographer's interpretive lens as the key to perfect vision, few will dispute its sweeping panorama. 

The book identifies three eras in the history of southern cotton plantations-the Old South (from the seventeenth century through the Civil War), the New South (from the Civil War through World War II), and the Modern South (from approximately 1970 to the present). The analysis concentrates primarily on the latter two. Readers with a knowledge of the historical literature will find a familiar cast of characters, including growers large and small, tenants and sharecroppers, merchants and ginners, and state and federal officials. Although other members of the plantation hierarchy, such as owners and managers and their political allies, do not as a group occupy center stage, they assume important individual parts in the narrative. The book's great strengths derive from Aiken's keen eye for landscape, particularly his ability to relate the use of space to human action.

The book's central thesis holds that cotton plantations evolved along two major paths during the twentieth century. The first, best exemplified by the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, headed toward mechanization and continued viability; the second, illustrated by Alabama's Black Belt and Georgia's lower piedmont, led to stagnation or extinction. If at first glance this general explanation appears obvious, the interpretive sparkle lies in the details. Aiken's analysis of changing patterns in the design, construction, and physical location of housing, for instance, demonstrates the social and political roots that lie beneath decisions regarding land use in plantation areas. Likewise, his treatment of the Barrow family's Sylls Fork Plantation in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, builds nicely on the work of earlier commentators and carries the analysis forward to the present.

The middle third of the book explores the relationship between the Civil Rights movement and the broader pattern of change in plantation agriculture during the 1950s and 1960s. Though perceptive in the main, the analysis is a bit long and cluttered by well-known persons and events. Moreover, it is faulty in places, as the treatment of mechanical innovation illustrates. By insisting that "the primary factor that caused agricultural mechanization across Southern, as across Northern and Western, farmlands was economic, not social," Aiken sets up an unnecessary polarity (p. 226). Cutting against the grain of the best recent studies of these developments, which emphasize the complex motives animating the participants and the ultimate uncertainty of the outcome, such a rigid formulation also leaves unexplained why cotton planters resisted mechanical innovation for so long only to adopt it seemingly wholeheartedly overnight.

By the same token, his assertion that "[m]anagement failure was the underlying basis of the decay" in southern agriculture during the twentieth century sacrifices subtlety for interpretive sweep (p. 68). Failure and success, like prosperity and decay, are relative terms. Aiken's formula does not recognize that even during periods of greatest apparent prosperity the successful management of cotton plantations has entailed social impoverishment to one degree or another. His assessment of local white leadership during the heyday of civil rights agitation suggests other dangers associated with overly ambitious generalizations. "Astute" leaders, by his reckoning, were those who wished to avoid embarrassing media coverage and who had a Machiavellian sense of when to abandon segregation and disfranchisement in the larger interest of preserving 11 white domination" (p. 194). Relatively absent from "regions of agricultural demise such as the Alabama Black Belt," such persons, he contends, played significant leadership roles in "the viable agricultural regions such as the Yazoo Delta and the north Mississippi Loess Plains" (p. 194). Even apart from whether or not these characterizations accord with the facts-a point that readers may legitimately dispute-such a notion of astuteness runs roughshod over the complex historical and political contexts in which the movement unfolded. Astute leadership assumed multiple faces among opponents of the status quo no less than among its supporters.

Although the study merits a mixed review, its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. In the end nothing rivals in scope or depth its treatment of the twentieth-century cotton plantation as contested space.