open frontiers seemed to do to land; farmers felt no need to maintain fer-
tility in settled places, since there was always fresh land to the west. So
the process of European settlement of the American landscape was one
of exhaustion, migration, exhaustion, migration, and so on. Finally there
was no more frontier, as Turner famously announced in Chicago in .
Now American farmers (and their governments) had to face consequences.
These seemed obvious enough: Improving science or utter ruination and
defenseless dependency on imported food and fiber. Edmund Ruffin and
his enlightened contemporaries became instructive historical voices, cry-
ing from their own exhausted wildernesses—except that Ruffin had actually
demonstrated success in the oldest, most worn-down place in America.
Ruffin himself denied this claim, but Craven and many scholars after
him dismissed the denial. Surely some of Ruffin’s private and public self-
deprecations and complaints must be taken with proverbial grains of salt.
He assumed a cloak of modesty in the face of praise. He was also the de-
pressive crank, tirelessly pronouncing himself a failure as a reformer. When
Ruffin protested that there were precious few practicing marlers in Mary-
land, either Carolina, and even his beloved Virginia, however, he reported
the truth. This is confirmed by a careful British historian (from East Anglia,
of all places), William M. Mathew. Mathew’s relentless search for active dis-
ciples of Ruffin’s agronomy yielded but a few hundred, virtually all of these
with accessible deposits of marl on their properties and sufficient labor
readily to exhume and spread it. Elsewhere—nearly everywhere—marl’s
inaccessibility, its costly weight in shipment, its labor intensiveness in
application, and variabilities in application to specific fields (notwithstand-
ing Ruffin’s repeated updates of instructions) precluded widespread accep-
tance and practice. (A few wealthy planters along James River and else-
where bought barges of lime from New England quarry merchants.) Other
scholars suggest that there was never a ‘‘crisis’’ in late-eighteenth- and early-
nineteenth-century agriculture, anyway. The relative prosperity of Virginia
and Maryland as agricultural states, late in the antebellum era, cannot be
attributed either to Ruffin’s truly important discoveries of acidity and cal-
cium or to guano. Certainly some farmers were careless, feckless, or cynical
and ‘‘exhausted’’ their croplands. Yet somehow, the Chesapeake states and
the rest of the greater South, by , managed not only to feed itself quite
well but to export (to the North and West and overseas) grain and livestock
surpluses as well as fleet-loads of cotton and other commodities.^11 How can
we account, then, for half a century of rhetorical gloom?
Southern farmlands, owing to landscape morphology, forest clearance
avery
(avery)
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