Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War?

We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand as the nation moved westward. [1] It is less well-known that the South experienced widespread deterioration of its land during the half-century before the Civil War. Much of the South was planted in large monocultures, first tobacco and then cotton. Growing cotton and tobacco year after year takes the nutrients out of the soil.

What could southerners do? With just one major crop, they could not shift from one crop to another (as was done in the North). Without the cattle and hogs of traditional farms, they had little natural fertilizer to restore the land, and artificial fertilizer was primitive before the Civil War.

As long as land was plentiful, however, southerners could find new soil—usually unfelled forests. Owners of large plantations could grow cotton on just part of their property, letting time restore the rest. One writer called this “the wasteful practice of ‘land rotation'” in place of the more familiar “crop rotation.”[2]

Southern Planters Moved West

Eventually, as new soil became more scarce, southern planters, with their slaves, emigrated west. They left Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and went to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana—and eventually Texas. “By 1850,” writes historian Steven Stoll, “137,400 people had recently left South Carolina.”[3]

Emigration reduced the South’s political power. South Carolina, for example, had nine congressmen in 1840, seven in 1850, and only six in 1860.[4] The political impact was substantial, as a noted authority on soils, Avery Odelle Craven, remarked in 1925:

“Had the original productivity of the lands remained, southern population would have been held at home and the increase would have been equal to that in other parts of the nation. Southern representatives in Congress would have been large enough [sic[ to have checked injurious legislation, such as tariffs, prohibition of slave extension, etc., and the South would have continued to prosper and hold her own in national affairs.”[5]

In other words, if they had restored their soil, southerners could have increased their population and thus their power in Congress. Instead, they fought a war and lost.

In 1942, William Chandler Bagley put some of these ideas into a book, Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War. Without the opportunity to expand geographically, Bagley contended, southerners would have had to reduce their cotton production. “Without new land to exploit, the inevitable exhaustion of the soil which accompanies the use of slaves, would ultimately result in making slaves valueless.” They knew this, he believed. So too did northern abolitionists, who thought that if they could limit slavery geographically, they would destroy it.[6]

The Debate over Soil Exhaustion

When Bagley’s book was published it received mostly pushback. One reviewer cited a 1926 article (not mentioned by Bagley) that claimed slavery could not keep expanding even if it had been legal to do so. Charles Ramsdell had written:

“[B]y 1849–50 . . . the western limits of the cotton-growing region were already approximated; and by the time the new Republican party was formed to check the further expansion of slavery, the westward march of the cotton plantation was evidently slowing down.”[7]

In Ramsdell’s view, southern slavery would have declined, even disappeared, unless southerners found a way to revitalize their soil.

In 1961 Eugene Genovese (at the time a Marxist), echoed many of Bagley’s (and Ramsdell’s) views. “The planters had too much land under cultivation; they lacked the necessary livestock; they could practice crop rotation only with difficulty; and they had to rely on a labor force of poor quality.” [8]

But in 1974, most of these statements were challenged by William Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Nobel Prize-winning economists whose book Time on the Cross overturned many assumptions about slavery.[9] While acknowledging a western migration of planters and slaves, they minimized the importance of poor soil. Instead, their book argues that agricultural production was more efficient and more profitable in the South than in the North.

Fogel and Engerman raised so many other issues that the state of southern soil faded away for awhile. But it has come back as a problem worth understanding. Stanley Trimble’s 1985 paper on soil erosion (cited above) reiterated the importance of antebellum soil conditions. And in 2000, Sarah Phillips said that soil revitalization had failed:

“Many farmers in the South routinely abandoned their exhausted fields and moved further west with their slaves to virgin lands. Each cotton field hand typically wore out 30 to 50 acres during his or her lifetime, and shoddy conservation practices greatly diminished the value of southern agricultural land.” [10]

In  sum, we know that cotton plantations spread west as soil became exhausted. We know that the South was politically  (and economically) weaker than the North and that it was determined to expand slavery if it could.

Does all that make soil exhaustion a cause of the Civil War? You decide.

Notes

[1] That political conflict was punctuated by a long series of actions, such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine to enter as free, and the Compromise of 1850, which brought in California as a free state but protected slavery through the Fugitive Slave Law.

[2] Stanley W. Trimble, “Perspectives on the History of Soil Erosion Control in the Eastern United States,” Agricultural History 59, no. 2 (1985): 162–80, at 175, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3742382.

[3] Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America. (New York: Hill and Wang. 2002).

[4] Stoll, 146.

[5] Avery Odelle Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Maryland and Virginia, 1606­–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1926), 141.

[6] William C. Bagley, Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War (Washington DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), 78. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Soil_Exhaustion_and_the_Civil_War/0ddCAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=soil+exhaustion+and+civil+war&pg=PR7&printsec=frontcover.

[7] Charles W. Ramsdell, “The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 16, no. 2 (Sept. 1929): 151–171, at 153-4, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1902899.

[8] Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave Sout.( New York: Random House, 1966), 99.

[9] Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974).

[10] Sarah T. Phillips, “Antebellum Agricultural Reform, Republican Ideology, and Sectional Tension.” Agricultural History 74, no. 4 (2000): 799–822, at 804-05,  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3745024.

Image of coiton fields image is by Joseph Marin of Pixabay.