The Southern Plantation (review)

Southeastern Geographer Vol. 23, No. 2, November 1983, pp. 131-136 REVIEWS The Southeastern Geographer reviews selected recently published works in geography and closely allied disciplines on the South. The opinions expressed are those of the reviewers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or of the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers, who assume no responsibility for their contents. [The Southern Plantation]. E. V. Komarek, ed. Proceedings, Tall Timbers Ecology and Management Conference, No. 16. Tallahassee, Florida: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1982. 206 pp., figs., tables. $7.00 paper. (ISSN 0496-7631) Available from the publisher, Route 1, Box 160, Tallahassee, Florida 32312. The lack of a subject title belies the importance of this small book, for it provides a cross-section of the most recent thought by geographers on the Southern plantation. The majority of articles focus on a particular sub-region and plantation type, but a reading of them also reveals convergence on a number of themes common to discussion and debate in the plantation literature. Location of the antebellum plantation and the methods of determining the patterns appropriately receive major emphasis in the first two papers. Fraser Hart again demonstrates his skill and intuition in using census material to determine small-scale patterns by outlining Southern areas with a "plantation tradition" ("The Role ofthe Plantation in Southern Agriculture"). This he does for 1860 by combining data on large slaveholdings and large landholdings. Another pattern, for 1930, is obtained by calculating the percentage of harvested cropland held by black croppers, thus overcoming in good part the problem of plantation underestimation caused by the census reporting farms by operators rather than by owners. Not all plantation areas, though, shifted to sharecropping after the Civil War, and this exception is dealt with by a map of the percentage of cropland harvested held by tenants in 1930. The correlations between these and other maps are subjectively done, and Hart admits that far greater possibilities probably exist given the possibilities of factor analysis. 132Southeastern Geographer James Anderson, in contrast, shows the value of a more restricted areal approach in the determination of plantation location in his paper on "Plantation Agriculture in the Middle Suwannee Basin of Florida, 1825—1850." In this article, his last on Southern agriculture, he combines manuscript records for the censuses of population and agriculture with the records of the General Land Office to determine "plantation" and "semi-plantation" types and to pinpoint their locations. He then compares these distributions with those of soil types and recent land use to gain insights into the land selection process and the major production changes that were to take place later. An even more detailed view of the plantation, at least from the standpoint of landscape morphology, is offered by John Rehder in his article on Louisiana sugar plantations. Although he first describes the beginning and dispersal of this plantation type, he soon focuses on the plantation mansion and plantation settlement patterns. French Creole mansions are differentiated from Anglo mansions, and the latter are subdivided into tidewater and upland types. Two types of settlement patterns are described, block and linear, although agglomeration is shown to be characteristic of both. Two prominent plantation themes pervade the discussions of the remaining contributors, though presented from different perspectives: the nature of plantation change and the plantation as a resource. The most sweeping statement on the first theme comes from Merle Prunty ("Persistence of the Plantation and National Agricultural Production"). In what unfortunately now are his last words on the subject, Prunty extolls the ability of the Southern plantation to adjust to economic and political changes and hence to persist as a "core element" in U.S. agriculture . Moreover, because for him the plantation is essentially a large capitalistic enterprise emphasizing specialization and cash sales, it has now become, through increasing mechanization and farm expansion, a unit that is as much a national as Southern phenomenon. Prunty's view thus parallels an earlier argument of mine for plantations from a worldwide view, and represents a major shift from his much earlier plantation definition in which he made location in some part of the South a leading diagnostic trait. Another kind...