THE PLANTATION TODAY That the cotton plantation is a real factor in the pres ent cotton system is well known. As already shown, the change from slave to free labor " involved the substitution of cultivation by tracts or parcels of land instead of cultivation by the whole plantation as in the gang sys tem; it gave the laborer mobility, legal freedom of con tract, and wages, or a share of the crop in return for his work. But the outstanding feature of the old planta tion was supervision, and it remains characteristic of the new. This control, vested in a unified administration, ex tends to choice of crops, distribution of labor, and mar keting. To speak of southern and northern tenant farms in the same terms is an anomaly. Tenant farms in the Middle West are usually as large as owner farms, are operated independently by a farmer who employs hired labor and possesses as high a standard of living as his landlords. The census has failed to show the prevalence of the plantation, for it has counted each tenant's or cropper's holding as a separate farm. The presence of these plantation strips was shown in the census by the contrast between northern and southern farms. In 1910 the improved acreage of the average southern farm was 48.6, its value $2,374; the improved acreage for a north ern farm was 100.3 and its value was $8,182.
The special census of plantations " in 1910 showed the extent of that form of land tenure. There were tabulated 39,073 plantations, containing five or more tenants on 28,296,815 acres of farm land, of which 15,836,363 acres were in crops. These plantations, as suggested in Chapter II, were localized in areas of fertile land suitable for cotton production and coincided with the black belts as localized by slavery. In the Coastal and Piedmont regions of the Atlantic states, twenty-one counties in North Carolina, thirty-five in South Carolina, and ten in Georgia were found to have approximately 15 to 30 per cent of their improved land in plantations. In Alabama forty seven counties mostly in the Black Prairies had around 30 per cent of their improved land in plantations. The
Mississippi River Valley had around 45 per cent of its improved land in plantations in forty-five counties in Mississippi, twenty-three in Arkansas, eleven in southern Tennessee, and twenty-nine in Louisiana. Slavery had car ried the Negro here, and mosquitoes, malaria, and the high cost of the rich river bottom land have kept white farmers out. In and near the Black Prairie of Texas, forty-one counties were found to have about 15 per cent of the lands in • white tenant farms comparable to the plantation system." The average plantation was found to contain 724 acres of which 405 were in improved land. The value of its land and buildings was $17,322. Its acreage thus was more than five times and its value three times as great as those of the average farm in the United States. The average farm retained by the landlord for cultivation was worth $6,564 and contained 330 acres, 26 per cent of which was improved. There were 398,905 tenant tracts which covered 15,367,398 acres of farm land. The aver age tenant farm contained 38.5 acres of which 81 per cent was improved. Although composed of richer and better cleared land the value of land and buildings was less than $1,000.00. The average value of the buildings was $179 per tenant farm. Each plantation averaged over ten tenant farms.' Three types of plantations are discernible in the Cot ton Belt : the small plantation, managed by, the landlord who lives on it and directs to some extent the work ; the large plantation, owned by a well-to-do capitalist or pos sibly a corporation and run by a managerial staff; and the plantation bought as a speculation by one engaged in another business who attempts to operate it as an absentee landlord.' The management of a plantation owned by a corporation is likely to be most efficient ; the smaller plantation on which the landlord lives usually possesses a well-developed social system as well as eco nomic organization. The plantation bought as a specula tive venture and owned by an absentee landlord is likely to be least efficiently managed and to offer its tenants a lower economic status.