was in a sense merely an unwelcome proof of their system’s efficiency.  Their laborers, by reason of being slaves, must at word of command set forth on a trek of a hundred or a thousand miles.  No racial inertia could hinder nor local attachments hold them.  In the knowledge of this the masters were even more alert than other men of the time for advantageous new locations; and they were accordingly fain to be content with rude houses and flimsy fences in any place of sojourn, and to let their hills remain studded with stumps as well as to take the exhaustion of the soil as a matter of course.[2]

[Footnote 1 Edmund Ruffin, Address on the opposite results of exhausting and fertilizing systems of agriculture.  Read before the South Carolina Institute, November 18, 1852 (Charleston, 1853), pp. 12, 13.]

[Footnote 2 W.L.  Trenholm, “The Southern States, their social and industrial history, conditions and needs,” in the Journal of Social Science, no.  IX (January, 1878).]

Migration produced a more or less thorough segregation of types, for planters and farmers respectively tended to enter and remain in the districts most favorable to them.[3] The monopolization of the rice and sugar industries by the planters, has been described in previous chapters.  At the other extreme the farming regime was without a rival throughout the mountain regions, in the Shenandoah and East Tennessee Valleys and in large parts of Kentucky and Missouri where the Southern staples would not flourish, and in great tracts of the pine barrens where the quality of the soil repelled all but the unambitious.  The tobacco and cotton belts remained as the debatable ground in which the two systems might compete on more nearly even terms, though in some cotton districts the planters had always an overwhelming advantage.  In the Mississippi bottoms, for example, the solid spread of the fields facilitated the supervision of large gangs at work, and the requirement of building and maintaining great levees on the river front virtually debarred operations by small proprietors.  The extreme effects of this are illustrated in Issa-quena County, Mississippi, and Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where in 1860 the slaveholdings averaged thirty and fifty slaves each, and where except for plantation overseers and their families there were virtually no non-slaveholders present.  The Alabama prairies, furthermore, showed a plantation predominance almost as complete.  In the six counties of Dallas, Greene, Lowndes, Macon, Perry, Sumter and Wilcox, for example, the average slaveholdings ranged from seventeen to twenty-one each, and the slaveholding families were from twice to six times as numerous as the non-slaveholding ones.  Even in the more rugged parts of the cotton belt and in the tobacco zone as well, the same tendency toward the engrossment of estates prevailed, though in milder degree and with lesser effects.

[Footnote 3 F.V.  Emerson, “Geographical Influences in American Slavery,” in the American Geographical Society Bulletin, XLIII (1911), 13-26, 106-118, 170-181.]