videnced in the plenitude of "Yankee notions." In the Southern lowlands
and Piedmont, however, the pristine advantages of self-sufficing industry
were so soon eclipsed by the profits to be had from tobacco, rice, indigo,
sugar or cotton, that in large degree the whole community adopted a
stereotyped economy with staple production as its cardinal feature.
The earnings obtained by the more efficient producers brought an early
accumulation of capital, and at the same time the peculiar adaptability of
all the Southern staples to production on a large scale by unfree labor
prompted the devotion of most of the capital to the purchase of servants
and slaves. Thus in every district suited to any of these staples, the
growth of an industrial and social system like that of Europe and the
Northern States was cut short and the distinctive Southern scheme of things
developed instead.

This regime was conditioned by its habitat, its products and the racial
quality of its labor supply, as well as by the institution of slavery and
the traditional predilections of the masters. The climate of the South was
generally favorable to one or another of the staples except in the elevated
tracts in and about the mountain ranges. The soil also was favorable except
in the pine barrens which skirted the seaboard. Everywhere but in the
alluvial districts, however, the land had only a surface fertility, and all
the staples, as well as their great auxiliary Indian corn, required the
fields to be kept clean and exposed to the weather; and the heavy rainfall
of the region was prone to wash off the soil from the hillsides and to
leach the fertile ingredients through the sands of the plains. But so
spacious was the Southern area that the people never lacked fresh fields
when their old ones were outworn. Hence, while public economy for the long
run might well have suggested a conservation of soil at the expense of
immediate crops, private economy for the time being dictated the opposite
policy; and its dictation prevailed, as it has done in virtually all
countries and all ages. Slaves working in squads might spread manure and
sow soiling crops if so directed, as well as freemen working individually;
and their failure to do so was fully paralleled by similar neglect at the
North in the same period. New England, indeed, was only less noted than the
South for exhausted fields and abandoned farms. The newness of the country,
the sparseness of population and the