COMPARATIVE SIZE AND VALUE OF NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN FARMS 1850-1910 The movement from landlords to home ownership was checked before completion. In 1881 Henry W. Grady could write: After sixteen years of trial everything is as yet indeter minate. And whether this staple is cultivated in the South to independence or beggary, are matters yet to be settled. Whether its culture shall result in a host of croppers without money or credit, appealing to the granaries of the West against famine, paying toll to usurers at home and mortgaging their crops to speculators abroad even before it is planted— a planting oligarchy of money-lenders, who have usurped the land through foreclosure, and hold it by the ever growing margin between a grasping lender and an enforced borrower —or a prosperous self-respecting race of small farmers culti vating their own lands, living upon their own resources, controlling their crops until they are sold, and independent alike of usurers and provision brokers—which of these shall be the outcome of cotton cultivation the future must de termine." The future has decided. Cotton has definitely become a tenant crop. More than half of the share tenants in the United States are found in the eight following south ern states listed in order: Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee. It was shown in the Census of 1900 51 that of all the farmers to. whom cotton was the chief source of income 67.7 per cent were tenants.
A change that had been taking place in the southern landscape brought to the fore new social types, created new economic interests, and made the cotton farm a specu lation for urban investors. Towns were springing up all over the Cotton Belt, and in these towns had grown up a hustling, urban type—the rising merchants, lawyers, and doctors. The growth of towns had been hindered be fore the War by the factors located in the larger cities who had supplied the wholesale needs of the planters and marketed their cotton. With the passing of the factors there grew up the supply merchant who furnished cotton growers on time and bought their cotton. It was this group which secured the passage of the crop lien laws en abling farmers to mortgage in January their as yet unplanted crops for supplies on which to live. The de preciating value of land and the homestead exemptions usual in southern states made merchants unwilling to ac cept mortgages on land. A conflict of interest ensued between landlord and supply merchant as to whether the crop lien should be used to secure supplies advanced by the merchant or to secure the rent to the landlord. In many cases the landlord settled the problem by taking the crop lien and standing good for the store bill. In other cases the landlord contented himself with taking a second lien on the crop. As they were in a rather risky business the supply merchants tended to sell their sup plies on time at interest rates of approximately 20 per cent. Many of them lost money, no doubt, but it is very
likely that the earliest fortunes to grow up in the South out of the dead level of poverty left by reconstruction were made by men who combined the functions of supply merchant and cotton buyer. Said one observer, "the road to wealth in the South, outside of the cities and apart from manufactures, is merchandising." ' The supply merchant, forced by the nature of his po sition to exercise supervision, assumed a paternalistic at titude toward his tenants. "The merchant who has a lien on the tenant's share of the crop," writes an observer, "pays his taxes, buries his wife or child, buys him a mule if he needs one, and feeds and clothes him and his fam ily." ' The crop lien system opened a way to owner ship for the Negroes who started without land or credit. On the other hand, no doubt many of them were more or less victimized. Says W. E. B. Du Bois: A thrifty Negro in the hands of well-disposed landlords and honest merchants early became an independent land owner. A shiftless, ignorant Negro, in the hands of un scrupulous landlords or Shylocks, became something worse than a slave. The masses of Negroes between the two ex tremes fared as chance and the weather let them." "The Negro," said a southern governor with the waste ful methods of tenant cultivation in mind, "skins the land and the landlord skins the Negro." As planters failed and plantations went on the block the rising urban groups tended to step into the class of the landed gentry. Merchants, lawyers, and doctors bought plantations as speculative investments. As the urban class began to buy farms for investment, the price of land tended to rise beyond reach of the small cotton grower. "There is," wrote Grady, "a sure though gradual rebunching of the smaller farms into large estates and a tendency toward the establishment of a landholding oligarchy." ' Many landlords also moved to town. Ab sentee landlordism, too, brought lower yields, less super vision and contact with tenants, and a lower standard of living for them. Farming became a financial instead of an agricultural interest. Cotton, the money crop, came to be exacted by landlords living in town, and the tenant's interest in diversification and food supplies was disre garded.
The rise in tenancy in the South is not to be denied. The percentage of tenancy for the United States is 38; in the South there are eight states with over 50 per cent tenancy. No figures on tenancy are compiled for the United States before 1880 but since then the percentage has steadily increased for all the cotton states. The states that had 35 to 45 per cent tenancy when Henry W. Grady wrote now have over 60 per cent :