Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem

THIRTEEN: Genteel Erosion: The Ecological Consequences of Agrarian Reform in the Chesapeake, 1730–1840

chapter thirteen Genteel Erosion The Ecological Consequences of Agrarian Reform in the Chesapeake, 1730–1840 carville earle and ronald hoffman The Carroll family of Maryland provides a biography of change in attitude toward land use. Father and son stand on each side of the divide between empirical observation and simple technology in the final third of the eighteenth century and the complex technologies of plows, fertilizers, and “farming by the book” that brought the destructive practices of the next century. An understanding of the Chesapeake and its ecological experience in the colonial and early national eras must begin with its economy. Situated within the trading networks of the Atlantic world, the Chesapeake’s was a regional economy committed to producing staples, chiefly tobacco, for export, and it functioned within the context of the 45- to 60-yearlong cycles or waves associated with capitalistic systems. Each of these waves consists of several distinguishable internal phases, specifically, depression , takeoff, acceleration, and deceleration. Although most often applied to industrial capitalism, this model works equally well in establishing a framework for agricultural growth and production (Earle,1992a; Schumpeter, 1939; Goldstein, 1988; Egnal, 1998). Depression, the most critical and interesting phase of the long wave, produces periods marked not only by great difficulty and hardship but also by creativity, experimentation, and innovation. Because depressions demand solutions, their adversities—falling prices, unemployment, and stagnation—invariably precipitate a range of creative reactions.1 Historically , the creative responses that long-wave agricultural depressions ini- tiate arise from either of two sources: the practical, empirical experience of individuals who might be called “folk capitalists,” and the knowledge derived from theoretical scientific investigations and testimony. The environmental impacts of these agrarian innovations vary from benign to malignant, from constructive to destructive. The terms constructive occupance and its opposite destructive occupance effectively encapsulate these two very different outcomes. Although one of the principal aims of agricultural innovation is environmental improvement in the sense of restoring , maintaining, or improving soil fertility (the other, of course, is profit), the innovator’s dilemma is that these consequences are usually unknowable in advance—that is, the environmental impacts of depression innovation tend to be discoverable only in retrospect. By the time environmental information becomes available, the destructive or constructive effects on the landscape have become virtually unstoppable. In the American South during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the most ecologically sound agrarian innovations came, as the case study in this chapter demonstrates, from the practical advice of planters, while the innovations recommended by the testimony of science produced negative results such as soil exhaustion and accelerated erosion and sedimentation. Specifically, the agricultural innovations adopted during the two long-wave depressions that occurred in the colonial era initially produced innovations that were both profitable and environmentally constructive. However, the recurrence of a worsening economy in the 1780s forced the abandonment of these initiatives in favor of scientific reforms whose destructive practices had devastating environmental consequences. To expand briefly, the steady drop in tobacco prices that began in the 1630s triggered a number of creative innovations such as tobacco topping (cutting off the top of the plant to prevent it from going to seed and to divert nutrients into its leaves) and housing of tobacco, procedures that vastly improved productivity at the expense of sharp increases in the demand for fresh cultivable fields. A half-century later, planters responded to the depression of the 1680s by introducing slavery and tenancy on a substantial scale to augment the labor force required to clear new lands and fallowed fields and by adopting a system of land rotation that combined tobacco with a diversified crop regime of corn, beans, peas, and small grains (Menard, 1980; Main, 1982; McCusker and Menard, 1985; Kulikoff, 1986; Carr, Menard, and Walsh, 1991). This new agricultural system, which proved to be profitable and ecologically efficient, constituted something of an ethnic amalgam—the land-rotation (or shifting 280 Discovering the Chesapeake cultivation) system seems to have been Indian in derivation, the system of bound labor rested primarily on Africans, and the notions of integrating diversified crops and tenancy drew upon English precedents. Although land rotation created an unkempt and scraggly looking landscape as lands were cleared, cultivated, permitted to lie fallow, and, a quarter-century hence,cleared again,the recycling of land provided important benefits that...