The Southern Frontiers 1607 1860

Although many specialized studies have dealt with the colonial and antebellum American South, very little attention has been paid to the Southern agricultural frontiers before 1860. This study focuses on agriculture, the primary economic activity and the single most important factor in shaping the South's colonial and antebellum frontiers. After examining the agricultural economy on the Southern seaboard during colonial times, Otto explains the economic and environmental forces that led to the expansion of upland and lowland agriculturalists across the trans-Appalachian South during the antebellum period. Although many specialized studies have dealt with the colonial and antebellum American South, very little attention has been paid to the Southern agricultural frontiers before 1860. This study focuses on agriculture, the primary economic activity and the single most important factor in shaping the South's colonial and antebellum frontiers. After examining the agricultural economy on the Southern seaboard during colonial times, Otto explains the economic and environmental forces that led to the expansion of upland and lowland agriculturalists across the trans-Appalachian South during the antebellum period. Synthesizing sources drawn from history, geography, anthropology, and folklife, Otto has added an important new dimension to our knowledge of the American South. This book is an appropriate resource for courses or studies in Southern and American history, historical geography, folklife, anthropology, and agricultural history.

"The continuity and changes of the Old World institutions introduced into the distant and isolated environment are carefully considered in discussions of government, economy, land policy, and international wars." Dust jacket.

Table of contents

In The First American Frontier, Wilma Dunaway challenges many assumptions about the development of preindustrial Southern Appalachia's society and economy. Drawing on data from 215 counties in nine states from 1700 to 1860, she argues that capitali

This examination of cultural change challenges the conventional view of the Georgia Pine Belt as an unchanging economic backwater. Its postbellum economy evolves from self-sufficiency to being largely dependent upon cotton. Before the Civil War, the Piney Woods easily supported a population of mostly yeomen farmers and livestock herders. After the war, a variety of external forces, spearheaded by Reconstruction-era New South boosters, invaded the region, permanently altering the social, political, and economic landscape in an attempt to create a South with a diversified economy. The first stage in the transformation -- railroad construction and a revival of steamboating -- led to the second stage: sawmilling and turpentining. The harvest of forest products during the 1870s and 1880s created new economic opportunities but left the area dependent upon a single industry that brought deforestation and the decline of the open-range system within a generation.

An examination of the settlement history of the alluvial bottomlands of the lower Mississippi Valley from 1880 to 1930, this study details how cotton-growers transformed the swamplands of northwestern Mississippi, northeastern Louisiana, northeastern Arkansas, and southern Missouri into cotton fields. Although these alluvial bottomlands contained the richest cotton soils in the American South, cotton-growers in the Southern bottomlands faced a host of environmental problems, including dense forests, seasonal floods, water-logged soils, poor transportation, malarial fevers and insect pests. This interdisciplinary approach uses primary and secondary sources from the fields of history, geography, sociology, agronomy, and ecology to fill an important gap in our knowledge of American environmental history. Requiring laborers to clear and cultivate their lands, cotton-growers recruited black and white workers from the upland areas of the Southern states. Growers also supported the levee districts which built imposing embankments to hold the floodwaters in check. Canals and drainage ditches were constructed to drain the lands, and local railways and graveled railways soon ended the area's isolation. Finally, quinine and patent medicines would offer some relief from the malarial fevers that afflicted bottomland residents, and commercial poisons would combat the local pests that attacked the cotton plants, including the boll weevils which arrived in the early twentieth century.

William Gilmore Simms (1807-1870), the antebellum South's foremost author and cultural critic, was the first advocate of regionalism in the creation of national literature. This collection of essays emphasizes his portrayal of America's westward migration.

Echoes from a Distant Frontier is an edited, annotated selection of the correspondence of Corinna and Ellen Brown, two single women in their twenties, who left a comfortable New England home in 1835 for the Florida frontier. Within a month of their arrival, the frontier erupted in Indian war. The Browns witnessed the terror and carnage firsthand, and their letters paint a vivid picture of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842).