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less renting of land. Except on the borders, nearly all whites were of the planting class. Their greater wealth had enabled them to outbid the average farmer and secure all the rich lands of the black prairies, canebrake, and river bottoms. The small farmer who secured a foothold in the Black Belt would find himself in a situation not altogether pleasant, and, selling out to the nearest planter, would go to poorer counties in the hills or pine woods, where land was cheaper, and where most of the people were white.
In the Black Belt cotton was largely a surplus money crop, and once the labor was paid for, the planter was a very rich man. 2 In the white counties of the cotton states about the same crops were raised as in the Black Belt, but the land was less fertile and the methods of cultivation were less skilful. In the richer parts of these white counties there was something of the plantation system with some negro labor. But slavery gradually drove white labor to the hills and mountains, and to the sand and pine barrens. No matter how poor a white man was, he was excessively independent in spirit and wanted to work only his own farm. This will account for the lack of renters and hired white laborers in black or in white districts, and also for the fact that the less fertile land was taken up by the whites who desired to be their own employers. Land was cheap, and any man could purchase it.
There was some renting of land in the white counties, and the
2 See J. W. DuBose, in Birmingham Age-Herald, March 31 and April 7, 1901 ; R. H. Edmonds, " The Cotton Crop of To-Day," Review of Reviews, Sep- tember, 1903 ; Ingle, Southern Sidelights, p. 271 ; address of President Thach, of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, before the American Economic Association, New Orleans, December 29, 1903 ; Tillinghast, Negro in Africa and America, pp. 126, 143; Mallard, Plantation Life before Emancipation; Washington, Up from Slavery, and The Future of the American Negro, passim. The immense cost of the slave labor is seen when the value of the slaves is compared with the value of the lands cultivated by their labor. In 1859 the cash value of the lands in Ala- bama was $175,824,622, and that of the slaves was $215,540,000. The larger portion of this land had not a negro on it and was cultivated exclusively by whites. (See the Census of 1860.) The effect of the loss of slaves on the welfare of a planter is shown in the case of William L. Yancey. His slaves were accidentally poisoned and died. The loss ruined him, and he was forced to sell his plantation and practice law. A farmer in a white county employing white labor would have been injured only temporarily by such a loss of labor.
