How did the Civil War and the emancipation of four million slaves
reconfigure the natural landscape in the South and the farming
economy dependent upon it? An innovative reconsideration of the
Civil War's profound impact on southern history, Unredeemed Land
traces the environmental constraints that shaped the rural South's
transition to capitalism during the late nineteenth century.
Dixie's "King Cotton" required extensive land use techniques across
large swaths of acreage, fresh soil, and slave-based agriculture in
order to remain profitable. But wartime destruction and the rise of
the contract labor system closed off those possibilities and
necessitated increasingly intensive methods of cultivation that
worked against the environment. The resulting disconnect between
farmers' use of the land and what the natural environment could
support intensified the economic dislocation of freed people, poor
farmers, and sharecroppers. Erin Stewart Mauldin demonstrates how
the Civil War and emancipation accelerated ongoing ecological
change in ways that hastened the postbellum collapse of the
region's subsistence economy, encouraged the expansion of cotton
production, and ultimately kept cotton farmers trapped in a cycle
of debt and tenancy. The first environmental history to bridge the
antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods, Unredeemed Land
powerfully examines the ways military conflict and emancipation
left enduring ecological legacies.
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