The industrial history of America, like that of all new countries, is to be understood in terms of rich natural resources, scanty capital, and a labor supply totally in adequate for exploitation. It can easily be seen that the developing of tobacco, rice, indigo, sugar, and cotton culture would impress more and more upon the South the demand for labor. The Virginia Colony around Chesa peake Bay had dragged out a most precarious existence until John Rolfe introduced the cultivation of tobacco in 1612. "About the last of August," he wrote in 1619, "came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negroes." Tobacco soon came to be the staple export crop of the new world. Natives of Guinea, "very loyal and obedient servants, without malice," who "never more tried to fly, but rather in time forgot about their own country" had been inducted into the plantation system. These plantations were located on all the fertile river banks so that the tiny ships of colonial days could sail up and take a cargo from each farmer's wharf.' The small grain and fishing culture of New England, as has often been recounted, discouraged slave labor. Later the rise of the urban-industrial culture in the north eastern states, having accumulated capital goods, found its labor supply in "thousands of immigrants who came at their own expense, who worked zealously for wages payable from current earnings, and who possessed all the inventive and progressive potentialities of European peoples." the meantime, the South had capitalized her labor supply in slaves so that she owned both her laborer and his labor. This gave to the free artisan and agricultural laborer such a low social as well as economic status that the new immigrant failed to seek out the South and even the native farmer became restless and in many instances removed to the mountains, pine forests, or further to the west.
The system under which the labor force was appor tioned to production of southern agricultural staples came to be known as the plantation system. The planta tion is an application of the capitalistic system to agri cultural production and possesses the characteristics of American extensive farming. Where lands exceed labor supply large scale capitalistic agricultural production may be found in the frontier cattle ranch with its hired cow-hands. Later in the stage of development wheat farm ing emerges with its use of machinery and casual labor ers. Slavery and the plantation system differ from serfdom and the manor system in that the slave labor supply is more mobile. Not being attached by law and custom to the land the slave was present with his master in the march of the Cotton Kingdom westward.
The elements of the plantation system are four: First in order comes a land supply of large acreage of fertile soil, cheap, level or rolling, and to some extent homo geneous in texture and topography. Prairie lands and river bottoms are suitable for the plantation ; there are no records of its being applied to mountainous regions. For such land a labor supply of low social status, docile, and comparatively cheap is desired. In the third place the management required is social as well as economic supervision. And last, the products must be staples, routine crops easily cultivated by set rules ; cash crops for which no problem of marketing exists.
The South has furnished five such crops, routine in production and staple in demand. "It would be hard to over-estimate the predominance of the special crops in the interest and industry of the southern community. For good or for ill they have shaped its development from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Each character
istic area had its own staple, and those districts which had none were scorned by all typical southern men. The several areas expanded and contracted in response to fluctuations in the relative price of their products." To bacco, indigo, sugar, and cotton are all adapted to gang labor working on time basis under an overseer. Rice, how ever, has been cultivated on a task-work basis with so much assigned to each slave. All these staples fought a losing battle with cotton.
The scarcity and cost of white labor led by degrees to the introduction of slaves. Convicts and indentured serv ants became more and more things of the past. Land was easily acquired ; great plantations "often had a thousand acres under actual tobacco cultivation," many were over five thousand acres in size. "Fifty acres of arable land per Negro were considered necessary for profitable culti vation, and an overseer was too expensive unless he had twenty Negroes under him." 10 Tobacco exhausted the land in three years and forced the use of other crops.
In the coastal Carolinas and the lower South the plan tation system grew up about rice and indigo culture. Rice culture, introduced from Madagascar into the Carolina swamp lands, did not prove profitable until Negroes were introduced to work in the hot wet fields. Charleston be came the export point of a great rice area. Indigo was introduced by Eliza Lucas, daughter of an English army officer, on her father's plantation. A bounty aided in its production, and in 1775 the value of indigo exported was over one million pounds.
In the decade beginning 1783 a widespread depression in the plantation system prevailed. The production of indigo was in its decadence, rice cultivation was changing to the new tide-flow system, prices were low, and each new tract opened to the plantation system meant an old one abandoned." Only sugar had succeeded both with the plantation and the market.
Successful sugar culture first began in the Mississippi Delta below New Orleans when "Etiene de Bore, a promi nent Creole whose estate lay just above the town, bought a supply of seed cane from Silis (who was making sugar with indifferent success as early as 1791), planted a large field with it, engaged a professional sugar maker" —and sold his 1796 crop for some The tri angular district created by the confluence of the Red and Mississippi rivers became, in time, the scene of great sugar plantations stretching out along behind the levees. At the greatest height of the sugar industry in 1849 the plantations numbered 1,536, their slaves over a hundred thousand, and in 1853 they produced 450,000 hogsheads of sugar." A backward glance over southern industrial history serves to convince the student that the South awaited only the advent of cotton to extend the plantation sys tem far and wide. Cotton found the beginnings of the plantation regime established but waning. Tobacco was proving too exhausting to unfertilized soils. Jefferson wrote in 1781 that the culture of tobacco "was fast de clining at the commencement of this war" and "it must continue to decline on the return of peace." 14 The cul ture of indigo and rice were both on the decline. The South itself was lukewarm on the subject of slavery ; all the states except one had abolished the slavery trade; and except for the sugar interest the plantation system was stagnant. It has been suggested by many historians that the abolition of slavery by these states would have been in course of time a natural and an easy process.