Agriculture and the Confederacy
Agriculture and the Confederacy

Author: R. Douglas Hurt

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-03-02

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1469620014

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In this comprehensive history, R. Douglas Hurt traces the decline and fall of agriculture in the Confederate States of America. The backbone of the southern economy, agriculture was a source of power that southerners believed would ensure their independence. But, season by season and year by year, Hurt convincingly shows how the disintegration of southern agriculture led to the decline of the Confederacy's military, economic, and political power. He examines regional variations in the Eastern and Western Confederacy, linking the fates of individual crops and different modes of farming and planting to the wider story. After a dismal harvest in late 1864, southerners--faced with hunger and privation throughout the region--ransacked farms in the Shenandoah Valley and pillaged plantations in the Carolinas and the Mississippi Delta, they finally realized that their agricultural power, and their government itself, had failed. Hurt shows how this ultimate lost harvest had repercussions that lasted well beyond the end of the Civil War. Assessing agriculture in its economic, political, social, and environmental contexts, Hurt sheds new light on the fate of the Confederacy from the optimism of secession to the reality of collapse.

Battlefield
Battlefield

Author: Peter Svenson

Publisher:

Published: 2017-12

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9781580801867

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With a new Introduction by the Author A finalist for the National Book Award, Battlefield chronicles the author's experiences building a farmhouse on a forty-acre site near Harrisonburg, Virginia, which years before had been the site of the Civil War "Battle of Cross Keys." While reviving his long-neglected farmland, he unearths spent cartridges and artillery shells, and meditates on how best to commemorate the men who fell in battle on his forty acres.

Unredeemed Land
Unredeemed Land

Author: Erin Stewart Mauldin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0197563449

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Unredeemed Land examines the ways the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves reconfigured the South's natural landscape, revealing the environmental constraints that shaped the rural South's transition to capitalism during the late nineteenth century.

Texas Roots
Texas Roots

Author: C. Allan Jones

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1603446028

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The uniquely Texan system that arose from the state's agricultural heritage, a mixture of practices and traditions from New Spain, Mexico, Europe, and the South, was the foundation for Texas' economic strength after the Civil War. In "Texas Roots," Jones brings alive this aspect of the state's history that contributed immeasurably to its identity and prosperity.

The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War
The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War

Author: Charles S. Aiken

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-04-28

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780801873096

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Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors.

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer
The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer

Author: James L. Huston

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2015-05-04

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0807159190

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JAMES L. HUSTON is professor of history at Oklahoma State University and the author of The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War; Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900; Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War ; and Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality.

Up from the Mudsills of Hell
Up from the Mudsills of Hell

Author: Connie L. Lester

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 082032762X

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Up from the Mudsills of Hell analyzes agrarian activism in Tennessee from the 1870s to 1915 within the context of farmers’ lives, community institutions, and familial and communal networks. Locating the origins of the agrarian movements in the state’s late antebellum and post-Civil War farm economy, Connie Lester traces the development of rural reform from the cooperative efforts of the Grange, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Farmers’ Alliance through the insurgency of the People’s Party and the emerging rural bureaucracy of the Cooperative Extension Service and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. Lester ties together a rich and often contradictory history of cooperativism, prohibition, disfranchisement, labor conflicts, and third-party politics to show that Tennessee agrarianism was more complex and threatening to the established political and economic order than previously recognized. As farmers reached across gender, racial, and political boundaries to create a mass movement, they shifted the ground under the monoliths of southern life. Once the Democratic Party had destroyed the insurgency, farmers responded in both traditional and progressive ways. Some turned inward, focusing on a localism that promoted--sometimes through violence--rigid adherence to established social boundaries. Others, however, organized into the Farmers’ Union, whose membership infiltrated the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and the Cooperative Extension Service. Acting through these bureaucracies, Tennessee agrarian leaders exerted an important influence over the development of agricultural legislation for the twentieth century. Up from the Mudsills of Hell not only provides an important reassessment of agrarian reform and radicalism in Tennessee, but also links this Upper South state into the broader sweep of southern and American farm movements emerging in the late nineteenth century.

Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia
Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia

Author: Frederick A. Bode

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008-03-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0820331988

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Historians of the nineteenth-century rural South have long distinguished the antebellum agricultural system of plantations and gang-style slave labor from the family tenancy system that is thought to have developed only after the Civil War. In Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia, however, Frederick Bode and Donald Ginter demonstrate a far greater consistency in economic traditions than many historians have recognized. Through a detailed critical interpretation of the 1860 federal census, Bode and Ginter show that extensive family tenancy, and probably sharecropping, were not the creations of Emancipation and Reconstruction, but instead were widely present before the upheaval of the Civil War. Bode and Ginter's analysis of the 1860 census reveals a complex rural economy of plantation owners, slaves, and yeoman and tenant farmers. Though census agents lacked a category for reporting tenant farmers and therefore often devised their own methods for recording land tenure, Bode and Ginter examine the agricultural and population schedules to reveal coherent regional patterns of tenancy. In older areas of greater cotton cultivation, tenant farmers were relatively scarce; in areas of recently cleared land within the cotton belt, and even more strikingly in the upcountry, tenant farming was pervasive. Bode and Ginter's findings not only demonstrate the presence of antebellum tenant farmers and sharecroppers but also dispel the current conception of yeoman farmers reduced to tenancy on their return from the battlefields of the Civil War. They show, finally, how new regional patterns of tenancy followed the demise of slavery. Probing the shifting relations between races and social classes in the nineteenth-century rural South, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia revises the dominant scholarly view of the region's social and economic history by carefully measuring the true extent of the changes brought by the Civil War.

Lincoln Clears a Path
Lincoln Clears a Path

Author: Peggy Thomas

Publisher: Astra Publishing House

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 50

ISBN-13: 1635923700

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Throughout his life, Abraham Lincoln tried to make life easier for others. Then during the darkest days of the Civil War, when everyone needed hope, President Lincoln cleared a path for all Americans to a better future. As a boy, Abraham Lincoln helped his family break through the wilderness and struggle on a frontier farm. When Lincoln was a young man, friends made it easier for him to get a better education and become a lawyer, so as a politician he paved the way for better schools and roads. President Lincoln cleared a path to better farming, improved transportation, accessible education, and most importantly, freedom. Author Peggy Thomas uncovers Abraham Lincoln's passion for agriculture and his country while illustrator Stacy Innerst cleverly provides a clear look as President Lincoln strives for positive change.

Starving the South
Starving the South

Author: Andrew F. Smith

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2011-04-12

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0312601816

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'From the first shot fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, to the last shot fired at Appomattox, food played a crucial role in the Civil War. In Starving the South, culinary historian Andrew Smith takes a fascinating gastronomical look at the war and its aftermath. At the time, the North mobilized its agricultural resources, fed its civilians and military, and still had massive amounts of food to export to Europe. The South did not; while people starved, the morale of their soldiers waned and desertions from the Army of the Confederacy increased.....' (Book Jacket)