Plantations

Plantations were agrarian enterprises that employed large numbers of workers who produced crops for domestic and foreign markets. Before the CIVIL War, plantations primarily relied on the labor of African-American slaves who tended to a wide range of crops, including cotton, rice, and tobacco. After EMANCIPATION, SHARECROPPING and other labor systems replaced slave labor in the South, but plantations remained a part of the region’s agricultural system.

In the 19th century, plantations were not confined to the American South or to slaveholding societies. Spanish

Two cotton pickers painted by William Walker (Hulton/Archive)

And Portuguese colonists ran sugar plantations in their South and Central American colonies, and English colonists used the system in Ireland and in many of their 17th - and 18th-century colonies. The economy of colonial Virginia relied heavily on tobacco plantations, while rice and indigo plantations were particularly widespread in South Carolina and the Georgia low country.

Southern plantations dramatically changed as a result of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. This machine, which appeared in 1793, drastically cut the costs of growing short-staple cotton, making it the most profitable crop available to planters. They subsequently turned to it in great numbers, and it became known as “King Cotton.” The gin allowed planters, who originally grew cotton in the South Carolina and Georgia up-country, to move the crop south and west toward occupied Native American lands. The cotton kingdom further expanded after the forced removal of the southeastern Indians in the 1830s and the 1845 annexation of Texas. Cotton plantations were ultimately concentrated in what became known as the “Cotton Belt,” a stretch of fertile land in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where more than half of the nation’s cotton was grown by the 1830s. South Carolina, which grew 60 percent of the crop in 1800, had fallen to less than 10 percent on the eve of the Civil War. Although cotton was king at the start of the war, Southern planters also grew tobacco, rice, hemp, indigo, and wheat.

Not all Southern farms were plantations, and not all slave owners were planters. Plantations had large labor populations and usually specialized in one agricultural product. In order be considered a planter, one had to own at least 20 slaves and a significant piece of land. In 1860 only about 50,000 of the 400,000 Southern slave owners were classified as planters. Wade Hampton, the largest slaveholder in 1860, owned more than 3,000 slaves who worked his Mississippi and South Carolina plantations.

Throughout the year, male and female slaves performed an endless number of tasks on Southern plantations. Crop cultivation consumed most of their time, with the harvest generally demanding the longest and hardest hours of work. African-American slaves hoed, weeded, picked, watered, reaped, and planted, often from sunup to sundown. They sometimes oversaw the labor of their fellow slaves. In slower months, slaves mended fences, cleared lands, and performed other seasonal tasks. Large plantations contained house slaves who tended to various needs of the plantation’s mansion, or the “big house.” Although not all domestic tasks were reserved for females, slave women frequently served as nursemaids, mammies, seamstresses, laundresses, and cooks for their planter masters and mistresses. In addition to slave quarters, plantations also had smokehouses, stables, barns, sheds, a chapel, and an occasional schoolhouse for white children.

The Civil War physically devastated many Southern plantations. Early in the war the Union blockade limited the South’s ability to export its raw goods. In addition, the Confederate military enlisted many white planters and overseers, leaving white Southern women to run the plantations. Although planters could sometimes avoid military duty under the Twenty-Slave Law, which exempted any white man who had 20 or more slaves under his control, only 4,000-5,000 men claimed exemptions during the war. With most white men serving in the CONFEDERATE ARMY, slaves increasingly resisted their bondage, refusing to work, wandering the countryside, and when possible, running to the safety of Union lines. A more direct devastation of Southern plantations resulted from the various invasions visited upon the South by the UNION ARMY. In particular, Union soldiers on William T. Sherman’s 1864-65 march through Georgia and the Carolinas burned millions of acres of cotton and other crops, destroyed homes, broke fences and farming implements, and otherwise razed plantations in their path.

When the war ended, Southern planters struggled to rebuild. Only 180 of the more than 1,200 sugar plantations in Louisiana, for example, sold any surplus in 1865. Many plantations were sold to pay off debts. By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, however, about half of Southern plantations were once again in the hands of the families who had owned them when the war began. To compensate for the labor lost from emancipation, many postwar planters turned to sharecropping. They contracted former slaves to live on portions of the plantation that had been subdivided into family lots. Owner and sharecropper would presumably share the harvests produced, but this system resulted in a cycle of debt and hard labor for the freedpeople.

See also Sherman’s March through Georgia; slavery.

Further reading: Andrew Frank, Routledge Historical Atlas of the American South (New York: Routledge, 1999); Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy & Society of the Slave South (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989); Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1978).

—Lisa Tendrich Frank