Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/11

Rh causes and effects, if you ignore the British rules and regulations that restricted colonial commerce, and the foreign fashions and customs that virtually compelled the farmers of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland to raise tobacco for the enrichment of London and Glasgow traders. You cannot relate the essential history of any cotton plantation of North Carolina without an understanding of social and economic conditions that have been transforming the world during the past century,

In the beginning, and for a long time afterwards, each of our states had an agricultural population that fixed the standards of personal, family, and community life. But one does not understand the nature of our agriculture as applied to the problems presented by our local variations of soil and climate, without a study of the history of agriculture and of local communities in Western Europe and especially in Great Britain.

The traditional agriculture upon which we founded our American States was that of the moderate-sized farm, largely self-sufficient as regards its supplies of food and clothing and its various household industries. The landholding farmer, with his own family and perhaps a very few retainers, was the unit. He ruled his acres, and he helped to rule the community that was made up of farms and families of similar character, or at least of like points of view.

How this farmer, whose theory was that of diversified home industry and a self-sufficing life, became the victim of a one-crop system, that depleted soils and greatly disturbed social equilibrium, is a matter that has to be studied until one has a thorough grasp of its cause and its consequences, in order to see what remedies can best be applied.

Thus the study of agriculture and of material resources leads at once and inevitably to a study of the people themselves, and to their relations with people elsewhere. It is impossible to understand the agriculture of North Carolina without a study of market conditions and demands in other parts of the world. One finds that the American farmer was always, consciously, a citizen of the larger world. He was never a sodden peasant, but always a man adventuring in fields of production and trade that embraces all the continents.