CHAPTER III.
Agricultural periods
FIVE PERIODS mark the agricultural history of the United States since the advent of the white man. The first or Colonial period extends to the end of the Revolutionary War and records but slight technical advances in the art of agriculture. It was a period of clearing the forests, breaking the soil, and generally experimenting with crops and cultural methods. On the whole, it was a self-sufficing period; that is, the farmers derived practically their entire living from their own farms and had a small surplus to exchange for a few necessary commodities and services with the merchants and craftsmen in the village. The country, however, did export some wheat from the Middle Colonies, tobacco from all the Southern Colonies, rice and indigo from the Carolinas and Georgia, and a small quantity of cotton from the Sea Islands.
The second period, from 1783 to 1830, saw a rapid spread of the agricultural population across the mountains into the Ohio, Cumberland and Tennessee Valleys and even beyond the Mississippi to the edge of the great plains. A public land policy was adopted by the Federal Government, cotton became the dominant agricultural product of the South and made slavery a paying and therefore a characteristically Southern institution, and the
