Unredeemed Land

An important reconsideration of the Civil War’s role in southern history, Unredeemed Land examines the ways that military conflict and emancipation reconfigured the landscape of the rural South, and uncovers 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, 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 cultivation in ways that worked against the environment. The resulting disconnect between farmers’ use of the land and what the natural environment could support went hand-in-hand with the economic dislocation of freedpeople, poor farmers, and sharecroppers. Drawing on extensive archival and governmental sources and a wealth of interdisciplinary scholarship in the natural sciences, this work demonstrates how the Civil War and emancipation accelerated ongoing ecological change and altered land use 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.