492 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
cultivation. The gradual increase 37 of the cotton production after 1869 was due entirely to white labor in the white counties, the black counties never again reaching their former production, though the population of those counties doubled. Governor Lindsay said in 1871 that the white people of north Alabama, where but little had been produced before the war, were becom- ing prosperous by raising cotton, and at the same time raising supplies that the planter on the rich lands with negro labor had to buy from the West. This prosperity, he thought, had done more than anything else to put an end to Ku Klux dis- turbances. Somers reported in 1871 that the cotton crop in the Tennessee valley was made by white labor, not by black. 38 As long as there was plenty of cheap, poor land to be had, the poor but independent white would not work the rich land belonging to someone else ; and, before and long after the war, there was plenty of practically free land. 38 Therefore the tendency of the whites was to remain on the less fertile land. Dr. E. A. Smith in the Alabama Geological Survey of 1881-82, and the Report on Cot- ton Production in Alabama (1884), shows the relation between race and cotton production, and race location with respect to fertility of soil : ( i ) On the most fertile lands the laboring popu- lation was black; the farmers were shiftless, and no fertilizers were used ; the credit evil was worse ; the yield per acre was less than on the poorest soils cultivated by whites. (2) Where the
- But it was nearly forty years before the entire cotton crop of the state was
again as large as in 1859.
" Southern Magazine, January, 1874; Ku Klux Report, Alabama testimony (Lindsay), pp. 206, 207; Somers, Southern States, p. 117. In 1860 it was esti- mated that of the whole cotton crop 10 to 12 per cent, was produced by white labor ; in 1876 the proportion of whites to blacks in the cotton fields was 30 to 51 ; in 1883 white labor produced 44 per cent, of the cotton crop ; in 1884, 48 per cent. ; in 1885, 50 per cent.; in 1893, 70 per cent. And this was done by the whites on inferior lands. (See W. B. Tillett in Century, Vol. XI, p. 771 ; Hammond, The Cotton Industry, pp. 129, 130, 182.)
- DeBow estimated that the entire acreage of the cotton crop was as
follows: 1836, 2,000,000 acres; 1840, 4,500,000; 1850, 5,000,000; 1860, 6,968,- ooo. The commissioner of agriculture in 1876 estimated that the acreage in 1860 was 13,000,000. Taking this estimate, which, while probably too large^-is more nearly correct, only 4 per cent, of the arable land was planted in cotton the staple crop. (Hammond, The Cotton Industry, p. 74.)
