Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/507

 INDUSTRIAL REORGANIZATION IN ALABAMA 49 1

good cash crop, and the high prices encouraged all to raise it. It was to the interest of the merchant, even when prices were low, to insist upon his debtors raising cotton to the exclusion of food crops, as much of his money was made by selling food supplies to them. Before the war ordy the planter had much credit, and even then a successful one did not make use of the system, but after the war all classes of cotton-raisers had to have advances of supplies. The credit or crop-lien system was good to put an ambitious farmer on the way to independence, but it was no incentive to the shiftless. Cotton became the universal crop under the credit sys- tem, and even when the farmer became independent he seldom planted less of his staple crop or raised supplies at home.

WHITE FARMERS AND NEGRO FARMERS

At the end of the war everything was in favor of the negro cotton-raiser, and everything except the high price of cotton was against the white farmer in the poorer counties. The soil had been used most destructively in the white districts, and it had to be built up before cotton could be raised successfully. 36 The high price of cotton caused the white farmer who had formerly had only small cotton patches to plant large fields, and for several years the negro was hardly a competitor to be considered. The building of railroads through the mineral regions afforded trans- portation for crops and fertilizers an advantage that before this time had been enjoyed only by the Black Belt and improved methods gradually supplanted the wasteful frontier system of

slavery was responsible for the wasteful methods of cultivation that prevailed in the South before the war. That can be true only indirectly, for the soil always received the worst treatment in the white counties. Like frontiersmen everywhere, the Alabama white farmers found it easier to clear new land or to move west than to fertilize worn-out soils. The lack of transportation facilities in the white dis- tricts made it impossible to bring in commercial fertilizers or to transport the crops when made. If there had not been a negro in the state, the frontier methods would have prevailed, as they still do among the farmers in some parts of the West. On the other hand, the rich lands worked by slave labor were kept in good con- dition. Under free negro labor they are in the worst possible condition. Experi- ence, necessity, the disappearance of free land, and the increase of transportation facilities have caused the white-county farmer to employ better methods and to keep up and increase the fertility of his land by using fertilizers.
 * Any stick is good enough to beat slavery with, so it is usually stated that