cheapness of land conspired with
crops, climate and geological conditions to promote exploitive methods.
The planters were by no means alone in shaping their program to fit these
circumstances.[1] The heightened speed of the consequences was in a sense
merely an unwelcome proof of their system's efficiency. Their laborers, by
reason of being slaves, must at word of command set forth on a trek of
a hundred or a thousand miles. No racial inertia could hinder nor local
attachments hold them. In the knowledge of this the masters were even more
alert than other men of the time for advantageous new locations; and they
were accordingly fain to be content with rude houses and flimsy fences in
any place of sojourn, and to let their hills remain studded with stumps as
well as to take the exhaustion of the soil as a matter of course.[2]

[Footnote 1 Edmund Ruffin, _Address on the opposite results of exhausting
and fertilizing systems of agriculture. Read before the South Carolina
Institute, November 18, 1852_ (Charleston, 1853), pp. 12, 13.]

[Footnote 2 W.L. Trenholm, "The Southern States, their social and
industrial history, conditions and needs," in the _Journal of Social
Science_, no. IX (January, 1878).]

Migration produced a more or less thorough segregation of types, for
planters and farmers respectively tended to enter and remain in the
districts most favorable to them.[3] The monopolization of the rice and
sugar industries by the planters, has been described in previous chapters.
At the other extreme the farming regime was without a rival throughout the
mountain regions, in the Shenandoah and East Tennessee Valleys and in
large parts of Kentucky and Missouri where the Southern staples would not
flourish, and in great tracts of the pine barrens where the quality of
the soil repelled all but the unambitious. The tobacco and cotton belts
remained as the debatable ground in which the two systems might compete on
more nearly even terms, though in some cotton districts the planters had
always an overwhelming advantage. In the Mississippi bottoms, for example,
the solid spread of the fields facilitated the supervision of large gangs
at work, and the requirement of building and maintaining great levees on
the river front virtually debarred operations by small proprietors. The
extreme effects of this are illustrated in Issa-quena County, Mississippi,
and Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where in 1860 the slaveholdings averaged
thirty