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213 chapter nine Southern Beginnings In 1608, while laying the foundations of the first permanent English settlement in North America and seeking to generate some early returns on the investments of underwriters of his colony, Captain John Smith dispatched a cargo of “Cedar wood” to Britain aboard the supply ship Phoenix.1 Although Jamestown was on the edge of a vast forest belt, this initial shipment was something of an anomaly. Virginia’s colonists focused on building an agricultural society—when they were not seeking a quicker road to riches—and before long found in tobacco a crop that came to dominate the colony’s economy to such an extent that James I complained the settlement was “wholly built on smoke.”2 For all their potential, Southern forests would have to wait almost two and a half centuries before becoming the setting for a real lumberman’s frontier. When Smith and other whites arrived in North America, they found a great arc of forest stretching south along the Atlantic seaboard from Virginia to Florida and thence west to eastern Texas.3 Much of this forest belt was too sandy and sterile to support plantation agriculture. William Byrd called the soil of North Carolina’s pineries “near as Sandy as the Desarts of Africca,” and the same could have been said of that of the Gulf South. As an early observer of the latter put it, “perpetual verdure . . . [was] only a cover for sterility, except in those spots which the course of rivers and alluvial deposits had fertilized.”4 The first European settlements were along the Atlantic; thus forest exploitation commenced there well before it did in the Gulf South, and since these settlements were primarily agricultural, they clustered on the richer soils of the coastal plain. Thus—as in Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania—the earliest lumbering was an adjunct of agriculture, not an end in itself. Colonial authorities encouraged sawmills in order to speed local development, plantation owners found woods work a profitable way to use slaves during agriculture’s slack seasons, and settlers in less-favored areas found in forest products a way to earn cash to supplement the limited support provided by herds and farms.5 In locales such as Norfolk, Virginia, and Wilmington, New Bern, and Beaufort, North Carolina, the exportation of forest products assumed a significant level, but this was the sign of a growing, diversified, largely agricultural society in their hinterlands, not of a lumberman’s frontier.6 214 The Lumberman’s Frontier Authorities in London had broader goals. Hoping to free the Royal Navy from dependence on Baltic sources of naval stores, a dependence fraught with danger, they used bounties and other incentives to encourage production in the southern colonies. These programs, had they succeeded, might have resulted in the colonies’ vast forests, so well stocked with resinous pines, becoming valuable in and of themselves, but as with attempts to encourage mast and naval stores production in the northern colonies, success was limited.7 In spite of imperial programs, most Southerners primarily valued the woods for crop and grazing land. Plantation owners in tidewater Virginia and elsewhere acquired vast acreages of forest, not because of the anticipated value of trees but because tobacco, the economic mainstay of their exportbased economy, was extraordinarily hard on the soil. Fresh land was constantly needed as older tracts lost their fertility and were abandoned (or converted to less-profitable grain production).8 In places ill suited for plantation agriculture—such as Virginia’s Southside and much of North Carolina—forests offered a place for hogs and cows to roam, free to graze and grow fat on the mast from oaks and other deciduous trees. Such locales proved attractive to those lacking the money or connections to acquire the large tracts required for successful plantation agriculture; here they could simply squat on land not already taken. In addition to food for livestock, trees on these tracts on the fringes of society offered fuelwood and building materials and met other local needs, but forests per se were no more central to the economy of such areas than they were to the tobacco plantations. The labor shortages that encouraged colonial plantation owners to turn to slavery induced their poorer contemporaries to resort to free-range management of their herds, for it required minimal labor and capital inputs. Although well-to-do observers criticized their techniques as slothful, these settlers lacked the wherewithal to hire laborers to work their lands or...

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