SYSTEM system may be defined as the complex organization of financing, growing, and marketing cot ton. It includes croppers, tenants, small farmers, and planters who comprise the growers, plus the banks, sup ply merchants, factors, and fertilizer dealers who finance the crop and the cooperatives, local buyers, general buy ers, shippers, and exporters who assemble and classify cotton for sale to the mills or for export. The cotton system as it exists today is complex and far-reaching. Men who have dealt in cotton for years frankly admit that phases of the business exist which they have not fully explored. The history of the cotton system is di vided distinctly into two parts by the abolition of slavery. The present cotton system is an adjustment, man to land and race to race, that has been received as a social heri tage from the past. No one can presume to understand the practices in the production of cotton or its tremen dous hold on the South without viewing them as an evolu tion from the days of the Cotton Kingdom and slavery. Until the Civil War the history of cotton production was practically one with the history of the plantation.
One characteristic feature of the material culture of the South throughout its long course of development has been the plantation system. The economic and social ad justments of the peculiar civilization of the South have been neglected in tracing the history of the abolition of slavery and the legal intricacies of the political and con stitutional aspects of that struggle. For a realistic yet sympathetic presentation of the human factors involved in the historic development of cotton culture the world of scholarship is peculiarly indebted to the researches of Ulrich B. Phillips, William E. Dodd, and Walter L. Fleming.' Cotton culture found slavery and the plantation or ganization already existent, but established and extended them. Although cotton cultivation was responsible for the popularization of slavery it was less dependent upon slavery than upon the planLztion. For an examination of the development of the present southern social order the viewpoint of Robert E. Park is well taken : The history of slavery in America is an incident in the history of the plantation system. . . . Slavery has disap peared, to be sure, but the plantation system in one form or another, remains, not merely in the South but in many parts of the world. The abolition movement when seen in its proper perspective is merely an episode in the history of a particular type of industrial organization. The slave was probably predestined to be what he has since very largely become—a peasant farmer.'
Professor Ulrich B. Phillips has advanced this doctrine in its most authentic form: It [the plantation system], indeed, was less dependent upon slavery than slavery was upon it; and the plantation regime has persisted on a considerable scale to the present day in spite of the destruction of slavery a half century since. The plantation system formed, so to speak, the in dustrial and social frame of government in the black belt communities, while slavery was a code of written laws en acted for that The early settlements at Plymouth and Jamestown may be regarded as ventures in capitalistic agriculture on the part of the stockholders. H. U. Faulkner says of the Vir ginia Plantation : From the first arrival until the king had the charter re voked in 1624, the colony was a true plantation. The col onists were servants and employees of the stockholders who resided in England, and the fruits of their labor belonged to the company. For the products of the labor of the settlers the company sent supplies from England of medicines, cloth ing, furniture, tools, arms, and ammunition, all of which were kept in the common storehouses and allotted by the company's agent to the colonists. But the shiploads of lumber and other forest products gathered and sent to England paid only a small fraction of the expenses incurred by the London Com pany in its attempt to found the Virginia Plantation.4 As Phillips has said: This usage of the word in the sense of a colony ended only upon the rise of a new institution to which the original name was applied. The colonies at large came then to be known as provinces or dominions, while the sub-colonies, the pri vately owned village estates which prevailed in the South were alone called plantations.' The system of land grants made the plantation in evitable. Holdings of land were offered to colonizers in proportion to the number of settlers they could bring over. This was the method of arranging for the transpor tation of settlers. It also fitted in with a feudal society's conception of landed estates. One proprietor, Lord Balti more, offered a thousand acres for every five settlers brought over. It was understood that the land was to be rented to the men who were brought over, and the rent was to consist of a part of the produce, usually tobacco. Thus we see that as early as 1636 6 a system of share renting on large holdings had been introduced, and only awaited the advent of slaves to become the plantation system.