Migration in the Cotton South: The Geographic Mobility of Alabama Farmers, 1850-1860.

In 1855, in an address before the Chunnenuggee Horticultural Society, Clement C. Clay described the migration of farmers from the Tennessee Valley region of Alabama. The small planters, Clay observed, "after taking the cream off their lands," were going westward in search of new land. Wealthier planters "with greater means and no more skill" bought out their poorer neighbors, extended their plantations, and added to their slaveholdings. As Clay summarized this process, "the wealthy few . . . are thus pushing off the many, who are merely independent." In his own Madison County, Clay saw "numerous farm houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or tenantless, deserted, and delapidated [sic]." The result was, as Clay somberly concluded, an agricultural region where "the freshness of agricultural glory is gone, the vigor of youth is extinct, and the spirit of desolation seems brooding over it.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Year

1981

Author dc:creator

• Inman, Henry Forrest

• Alabama farmers
• Cotton South
• Farmer migration

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/6939

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.library.uab.edu:etd-collection-7931