English 680
September 25, 2000
Critical Digest: This
Land, This South by Albert Cowdrey
What
do you think of when you think of the South?
Most people jump into the set of Gone
with the Wind, with the big plantations, belles and beaus, fields of crops
and cotton, and a whole mess of slaves.
Many of us know the stories of Scarlett O’Hara and Dabney Fairchild:
young women set on an unforgiving earth, forced to struggle with what men and
nature dish out to them. However, we
haven’t heard nature’s side of the story.
The mysterious way the South has kept its face and figure flawless in
the minds of society has remained a well kept secret. Historian Albert Cowdrey admits that he is not going to be the
one to expose the South’s petticoat, but he does want to share the South’s
history, both of humans and of nature.
In his book This Land, This South,
published in 1983, Cowdrey attempts to present a historical survey of the
interrelationship between a new, developing culture and the natural
environment.
In
his introduction, Cowdrey explains how southerners have a special bond with
“their spot of earth” (6). He prepares
the reader for a trip through history, hitting only a few milestones, which
have marked the transformation of the southern environment. Right off, he confesses that his topic is
too broad, but asks the reader to give his survey a chance. Cowdrey also apologizes saying that the
reader may find “too many facts in one place, too much speculation in another,”
but again his primary objective is “to show some of the ways that man and land
have shaped each other in a little corner of the world” (8).
The
book, whose title was taken from a quote by William Faulkner, is organized on
paper by chapters, but reads as a continual timeline showcasing the South’s
high and low points. Chapter 1,
“Isolation and Upheaval,” and chapter 2, “The Problem of Survival,” records the
coming of the European settlers to the New World. Chapter 3, “The Uses of the Wild,” shows how the settlers adapted
to their new environment, finding new foods, landscapes, and animals. “Row-Crop Empire” names chapter 4 and
introduces the advantages and disadvantages of the South’s new agricultural
strategies. Chapters 5 and 6 review the
progression and destruction of the southern soil with the appropriate titles
“Exploitation Limited” and “Exploitation Unlimited,” respectfully. Chapter 7, “Conserve and Develop” explores
how the South began to realize the land’s worth and started conserving its
resources. “The Transformation Begins”
leads the reader into chapter 8 and the twentieth century South, where slavery
is no longer and the advances of new transportation of goods is taking
over. Chapter 9, “South into Sunbelt,”
is technically the last chapter in the book.
Here Cowdrey brings the reader up-to-date with the South: the
development of environmental and conservation societies, new technologies with
waterways and in agriculture, and the South’s present evolving popularity. Chapter 10 is an epilogue where Cowdrey
takes a moment to applaud some of the artists of the South – writer William
Faulkner, historian Charles P. Roland, and painter Walter Inglis Anderson. Due to Cowdrey’s extensiveness, I have
chosen to highlight two of his most important topics, ones that Cowdrey
strongly believes shaped the South and reoccurred throughout all the chapters: the
population’s struggle with diseases and the ecological and agricultural
dilemmas that connected humans, land, and wildlife.
The
biggest enemy of the southern states was disease. Ever since the first settlers came over and landed on the eastern
coasts, disease plagued both the new inhabitants and the ones already living in
America. The settlers discovered the
Native Americans and adapted many of their ways of living: growing crops such
as corn, trading furs and skins, and land burning procedures that encouraged
grass growth, increased nutrients for trees, and decreased potential forest
fires (14). But the spread of disease
soon began to wipe out whole tribes, along with whole colonies. Diseases, such as typhoid and dysentery,
were brought over on British ships; salt poisoning came from wells that were
dug beside tidal water (25). In 1650,
life expectancy for a twenty-year-old colonist was 19-24 more years. With the arrival of black slaves from
Africa, malaria, yellow fever, and small pox helped add more victims to the
death toll. Famine and harsh winter
conditions led to the extinction of colonies, but disease had a tight hold of
the land. In the 1690s to mid-1700s,
Europe started sending over scientists and botanists to study the environment,
hoping to find cures for the illnesses.
Cowdrey never mentions the main focus of these scientists - to find the
cause or the cure for the diseases.
Around
the early 1800s, southerners began to extend their boundaries across the
Appalachians out toward the Mississippi River plains. However, old diseases followed the settlers into the new land,
and new illnesses sprang up. The Delta
plains had mosquitoes that carried a new form of malaria, and flooding created
polluted water carrying bacteria that caused typhoid and tuberculosis
(67). Diseases like cholera and yellow
fever became water-borne and spread up and down ports linking “many small
settlements into single disease communities” (84). Most of the problem was due to the South’s disregard towards
waste of all kinds: privies were infrequently used, farming was too intensive,
and dead animal carcasses were not properly disposed of (85). State boards of health were set up in the
1870-80s, following the Civil War, but were “ill-funded and possessed limited
powers to investigate and offer advice” (104).
By the early 1900s, an epidemic of hookworm broke out due to the fact
that there still was no change in the South’s waste management.
A new disease popped up, temporarily,
around 1930 called pellagra. The
illness was a “dissembler, manifesting itself primarily in three seemingly
unrelated symptoms: dermatitis, which was often mistaken for sunburn; diarrhea,
which was common from a variety of causes; and insanity” (157). Physicians were uncertain whether pellagra
was caused by moldy vegetables or infectious insects. Scientists extensively researched the disease and found that a
balanced diet along with washed foods would keep the pellagra cases down; by
1945, pellagra had disappeared. The
1940s and 1950s brought disease under control with the availability of indoor
plumbing, medicines, and sterilization of food and liquids such as milk. Suddenly disease began to vanish without any
answers; the deliverance was hard to assess.
Eight southern states, which reported 181,725 cases in 1920, reported no
cases by 1950 (170). Whether the
disappearing act was due to a decrease in the human reservoir, tighter houses,
or the advancement of medicines, disease had finally let the southern states
alone.
Cowdrey
declares the South’s second battle to be between humans and the environment, a
battle that is still being waged today.
The New World promised settlers everything: clean water, an abundance of
food and land, uncharted landscapes, and an unlimited supply of freedom. After the first few months on the new soil,
the colonists established corn as the staple crop, domesticated animals for
field muscle, and discovered the variety of weeds such as sassafras that could
be made into good ointments and healing medicines. Both the Spanish and English brought wheat, cattle, and potatoes
to lay as a foundation for the production of food (23). Tobacco was also discovered, and both it and
wheat were found to be sustainable crops and important exports. In 1617 and 1618, Virginians had to divide
up the unbroken forest for farmers in order to plant more tobacco. Fifty acres of land was rewarded to “anyone
who emigrated or brought in another, bond or free” (30). However, this expansion of tobacco led to
exhaustion of the soil, and most farmers were more interested in growing the
crop for profit than taking care of the land.
The
introduction of slavery in the late seventeenth century gave a factor of
“incalculable importance” to the southern environment (36). With slave labor, more crops could be
produced. The black slaves seemed to be
immune to the white-man diseases, but with this great commodity came more
diseases like yellow fever, roundworm, and hookworm (37-8). When cotton started to dominate the South,
the number of slaves shipped to America increased. This is all that Cowdrey mentions about slavery. Again his primary focus is to look at the
ecology of the South, and slave labor was just a small piece of that puzzle.
On
page 55, Cowdrey states, “The colonial period cannot be termed a classic era of
conservation.” Big understatement! The settlers had believed that their
priorities had to fall in one specific order – survival, profit, and then
fashion (referring to what was popular back in England). By the mid-1600s, the whole idea of freedom
really affected the colonists’ judgement.
A new “doctrine of free-taking” was established in the sports of hunting
and poaching. Wild turkeys, passenger
pigeons, deer, and beavers were killed for their meat, oils, skins, and furs,
respectively. Soon excessive hunting
decayed both the wildlife and the settlers’ supplies. Improper disposal of animal carcasses increased the wolf
population, which led to bounty hunting on wolf scalps (anything to protect
crops…and make a profit). Trading, with
other colonies and with the natives, turned out to be more marketable than
corn. By 1674, trade became more
popular than tobacco (51). But hunting
and poaching got so excessive that state legislatures had to establish a closed
season on deer, wild hogs, and certain types of fish. Colonists faced a penalty fine of either 500 lbs. of tobacco or
30 lashes to slaves for not adhering to the law (57).
Changes
on the southern forests came with the expansion of colonies. Trees became the universal building
material; they were also used for food, fences, fuel, dyestuff, soap, and
coffins. Much of the lumber that was
cut down was exported to England for their navy; however, most trees were in
the way of land development and were simply destroyed either by burning, being
left to rot, or thrown in streams (54).
With this happening extensively, political figures such as Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, and John Taylor stepped up the idea of soil conservation. They all experimented in crop rotation,
contour planting, and better fertilizers (58).
The Cotton Kingdom rose in the south and the
east around the late 1700s. With the
introduction of Mexican cotton and the development of a gin that separated the
lint and the seeds, cotton soon became a huge staple crop and export (71). Eventually colonists needed more land for
their valuable crop so they pushed back the frontier of the Gulf region. In 1798, the Mississippi Territory was
founded, due to the end of the War of 1812, several Indian removals, and a
postwar boom on cotton. In the
Mississippi Territory, cotton had an estimated value of $700,000 by 1801. Suddenly, the balance of population shifted
massively from the East to the West.
But with this expansion came new environmental problems: erosion
increased in 1800-1860s with the constant stripping of groundcover by early
settlers, poor farming practices, and high amounts of rainfall (76), and the
southern hot temperatures limited milk production in certain breeds of cattle
(77).
With
agriculture looking to prosper, other industries flourished as well. Saw mills for manufacturing lumber took
advantage of the new waterways of the Mississippi Territory. State and local governments provided money
for construction of new roads and canals for better trade business (95). One important advancement was the levee
district of the Mississippi Yazoo basin, which was “a legal construct with
powers to tax and issue bonds to finance levee construction and maintenance”
(97). These levees allowed the Delta
region and much of Texas to invest in planting cotton. Yet with all this progress, southerners
forgot about one essential thing they needed to survive - the wildlife. Many different species became extinct due to
plantation expansion: passenger pigeon, eastern elk, cougar, timber wolf,
bison, whooping crane, and the ivory-billed woodpecker (115).
Success
sprang again from the South with the discovery of oil fields in Texas and most
of the Southwest in 1901. Advances in
mechanical and chemical powers increased agriculture and farmers’ profits, and
by the 1930s, the Mississippi River was slowly getting more and more tame for
loggers and traders to use (144). By
the mid-1900s, the South had the soybean as the top crop, livestock and poultry
thriving, and the forests and wildlife still trying to hang on. All southern state legislatures by the 1950s
set aside land strictly for wildlife in the form of national parks and
lakes. Environmentalists are still
looking at the production, process, and movement of fossil fuels in the South
(186). In the end, Cowdrey says that
the South finally got itself “attuned to the landscape it occupies” (174), but
that now all it needs are “men and women of humility and knowledge” to continue
its progress (193).
As
you can see, Cowdrey’s historical recollection of the South can even get his
readers caught up in all the facts and speculations. Cowdrey does cover a little too much territory in looking at both
southern history and ecology. He also
slides over all of the Civil War period and the freeing of the slaves; maybe to
him this was not important to his study.
Any reader who brings an impression of the South to Cowdrey’s This Land, This South will discover a
whole new layer of soil. His immense
detail in both the human and environmental growth of this region is
intriguing…or is it really just the simple “drawl” of the mysterious South?
~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Cowdrey, Albert E. This Land, This South: An Environmental
History. Lexington: UP
of Kentucky, 1983.